Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 02 - Skeletons of the Atchafalaya (11 page)

Mom and Grandma Ola sat on a couch in the parlor.
Grandma’s dainty feet dangled just above the floor as she
sipped coffee from a demitasse cup and nibbled on dry
toast. She smiled up at me as I approached. “You always
was a fine-looking young man, Tony,” she said, the same
praise every grandmother heaps on every grandson.

“Your genes, Grandma.” I pulled out a small notebook
from my shirt pocket. She eyed it skeptically. “Just notes,”
I said. “I don’t remember too well anymore.”

I learned early that detailed notes can often point out
discrepancies when two or more people relate an event
from their perspective or when they are asked to repeat the
story.

She and Mom both laughed. “Your mother, she tell me
you put lolande with Ozzy and A.D.”

“All we could do, Grandma.”

“They trash. They belong together,” she said sharply.

Mom gasped. “Mrs. Boudreaux. Don’t say that.”

Grandma shook her head. “Don’t you act surprised,
Leota. They family, but they the trashy kind.” A good Catholic, Grandma Ola crossed herself. “I just hope they say
plenty rosaries when they was alive. Nobody gots the
money to say enough masses for them now they dead.”

Mom laughed, and I joined in, but I noticed there was
some restraint in her mirth.

“Was he the cheat everyone always said, Grandma? A.D.
I mean.”

She sipped from her small cup. Her eyes gazed into the
past. “He all they say, cher. He be family, but he no good.
A.D., he….” She struggled for the right word in English.
She snapped her fingers in frustration several times and
looked to Mom for help. “Un trompeur, filou.”

“Mrs. Boudreaux. You don’t mean that.”

Grandma knit her brows. In a demanding voice, she repeated the words. “Un trompeur, filou.”

Mom shrugged. “Deceiver, swindler.”

Grandma Ola nodded enthusiastically. “Oui. Deceiver,
swindler.”

I spoke to Mom. “So he really did cheat Bailey and Iolande like I heard. I mean out of their daddy’s money. But
if he did, why did lolande live with him?”

Grandma Ola held up a knobby finger draped with translucent wrinkled skin covered with brown age spots. “That
boy, he learn from his pa, Louis. Louis be your great-uncle.
He my brother, but he was conniver. Your grand Pere, Moise, never do understand how Louis gots all his money. I
know. Theophile, Patric’s pa, he too dumb to figure for
nothing. That’s how come Louis gots the land Papa Garion
left to Theophile.” She sipped her coffee, tore off a small
piece of toast with her fingers, and popped it in her mouth.

I paused in my note taking and raised an eyebrow to
Mom. “Did you know all that?”

She shrugged. “I hear it. I never worry none. You do
fine. Good education. Smart. The Lord has been good to
us, so me, I don’t worry none.”

Clearing my throat, I laid my hand on Grandma Ola’s.
“Pa couldn’t have killed A.D., could he?”

She didn’t answer for several moments. When she did,
she kept her eyes fixed on the broad stairs descending from
the second floor. “The man I raise could not kill another man. This one here now, I don’t know. He is not the child
I brought into the world.”

I looked from one to the other, noticing just how much
my own mother favored Grandma Ola even though they
were not blood kin. Glancing over my shoulder, I lowered
my voice. “Who do you think did all this?”

Mom and Grandma exchanged looks.

Grandma Ola shrugged her rounded shoulders. “Me, I be
ninety-one next birthday. The truth be that ain’t no man
who can’t kill another. Some do, some don’t. But all can.”

I was getting nowhere, so I tried another angle. “You
and Mom were on the veranda by the front doors yesterday
when I got here. Now, sometime between two and four,
A.D. was killed. I noticed the back stairs are still under
construction, so the only way anyone could have gone up
there and killed Uncle A.D. was by these stairs,” I said,
indicating the broad stairs sweeping up to the second floor.
“Do you remember seeing anyone go upstairs?”

Mom frowned. “What time you say, Tony?”

“Two to four. Beginning just after I saw you and ending
when all the commotion started after they found A.D.”

Mom frowned. “That’s hard to remember, Tony.”

I squeezed her hand. “Try.”

“They was A.D. and John Roney, for sure,” said
Grandma Ola.

“I saw Leroi. And-ah, I think Ezeline, Bailey’s wife,”
Mom said.

Grandma Ola nodded emphatically. “Oui. Ezeline, and
Marie, Walter’s wife. She go up with Ezeline.”

Mom looked at Grandma. “Don’t forget Bailey and lolande. They go up.”

“Slow down. I can’t write that fast.” I was beginning to
wonder if everyone in the whole family hadn’t climbed the
stairs. “What about Uncle Henry or Patric?”

Grandma mulled the question, then shook her head. “No.
Osmond. I see Osmond, and they was a bunch of children running up and down, but, I don’t remember Henry or Patric.”

“What about Giselle or Sally?”

Mom and Grandma studied each other, then shook their
heads. “Never see Sally. Giselle, she go in kitchen after
you and Leroi leave,” Mom replied.

“But not up the stairs.”

She shook her head. “No.”

Grandma Ola looked up at Mom. “That be all I remember. You think of someone else, cher?”

Mom frowned, concentrating. “Marie. Did we say Marie?”

Grandma Ola snorted. “Oui. I say Marie. She go up with
Ezeline.”

“Oh. Then, that must be all.”

Tucking my notebook back in my pocket, I glanced
around the parlor, wondering who else I could ask about
the stairway.

Nanna sat in a wicker chair in the corner, her eyes closed,
her jaws working, her lips moving, her bony fingers stirring
an assortment of stones, dirt, bones, and straw, ingredients
of her gris-gris.

I never gave any credence to voodoo or gris-gris, even
though Nanna, my great-aunt once removed, practiced it.
Of course, when I was growing up, every law officer in our
town carried a gris-gris for protection, and on more than
one occasion I’d heard family members ask Nanna to make
a grin-grin for fortune or a wanga to place a hex on another
individual.

But, as far as I was concerned, it was foolishness. No,
Nanna would not be of any help to me.

But then I remembered the phrase Nanna had uttered the
day before. I studied the old woman, her leathery skin wrinkled as a French accordion. I began to wonder if there
might be something more to that voodoo business than I
thought. Without taking my eyes off her, I asked Grandma Ola and Mom. “What does Its soot dechire ce soir mean?
Nanna said it yesterday.”

Grandma Ola frowned up at me. “Nanna, she say that?”

I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

She pursed her lips and looked up at Mom. “The old
woman, maybe she do see.”

I looked around. “What do you mean, `she do see’?”

With a shrug, she replied. “She say `they be tears tonight.’ “

I had the feeling I’d missed something. “So?”

Grandma Ola shook her head wearily. “Sometime, Tony,
you be dumb as the next Boudreaux man.”

“Okay. So what does it mean?”

“It mean, she see what done happened before it happened.”

I studied Grandma Ola. There was no amused glitter in
her eyes, nor faint smile on her lips. “You’re serious, aren’t
you?”

She nodded. “Oui.”

I spotted Marie Venable and her family around a coffee
table in another corner of the room. I headed her way, but
Nanna stopped me, her eyes still closed. “You, boy. You
be Ola’s grandson.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement
of fact.

“Yes, ma’ma. Tony. Tony Boudreaux. You remember
me?”

Brown spittle gathered at the edge of her lips. She
snorted. ” ‘Course I ‘member. Me, I don’t forget no one.”

For a moment, I studied her. Then I decided to see if
Grandma was right. “What did you mean yesterday when
you said Its soot dechire ce soir?”

She looked up at me through filmy blue eyes. “Me, I
mean what I say. They be tears tonight. Why you ask?”

“How’d you know what was going to happen?”

Her thin bony fingers rubbed lightly over a velvet grisgris. “I know,” she replied simply.

I nodded and started backing away, figuring I could learn
nothing from her and anxious to see what I could find out
from Marie Venable. “That’s good. I’ll talk to you later.
Right now-”

Her eyes drifted shut, and she froze, her fingers stiff and
motionless in the tiny piles of detritus on the table before
her. Slowly, she opened her eyes and looked up at me. She
extended her arm, her fingers offering me a tiny red velvet
bag of grin-grin, protection for me. For a moment, I considered rejecting the bag, but I couldn’t see any sense in
hurting the senile old woman’s feelings. I took the bag as
she said, “You not find what you want. You find what you
do not want.”

I frowned at her. Loony old woman, I told myself. She
was talking in circles. But then, what could you expect
from someone well over a hundred-maybe closer to a
hundred-ten? I brushed her off. “Yes, ma’am. I understand.
Thanks.” But I didn’t understand.

Not that I could have done anything about it.

What had happened, had happened. The wheels of fate
had been set in motion. I didn’t know it at the time, but I
had as much of a chance to stop it as I had of stopping that
hurricane bearing down on us.

I slipped the grin-grin in my pocket.

Marie Venable nodded emphatically. “Yes, I go up to
Ezeline’s room with her. She had a new blouse she got on
sale at Carpenter’s in Eunice.” She spent the next couple
minutes describing the blouse.

“Did you see anyone else upstairs besides you and Aunt
Ezeline?”

She pondered the question. “Well, Leroi, he was coming
down when we were going up. When I come down, Osmond, he go up.” She shook her head. “Maybe some more,
but them, they are the only ones I know for sure.” She
paused, then asked, “Do you know who do all those terrible
things?”

“No.” I held up my pen. “All I’m trying to do is gather
what information I can while it’s fresh on our minds. I’ll
pass it on to the Lafayette Police or state police. I heard
that you discovered A.D.”

Her face blanched. She nodded imperceptibly. “I see
your pa on couch. He got blood on his shoe and hand. I
go up and find A.D. on floor.”

“Then you came back downstairs.”

Before she could reply, the sound of breaking glass and
frantic shouts came from the second floor.

Half a dozen of us raced up the stairs. Leroi was right
on my heels, and I was only a step behind Patric and
George. They turned down the hall and slid to a halt.

Ezeline was standing in the hall, swinging at a black
object protruding through a shuttered window. I blinked,
unable to believe my eyes.

The rotund woman was screaming, flailing away with a
walking cane at the paw of a bear.

“What is that?” Patric shouted.

I grabbed a chair and smashed it over the paw. The bear
jerked back, then slammed the paw through the shutters
and windows again. “What does it look like? A bear! The
bear Uncle Henry saw.” I shoved Aunt Ezeline toward the
stairs. “Over there. Out of the way.”

She stumbled backwards.

Bailey shouted, “I’ll grab a gun.” He spun and headed
for the third floor while we hit at the paw.

Outside, the snarls and growls of the black bear roared
above the clamor of the storm. He smashed at the window
again. We pounded his paw with our frail weapons.

Ezeline stumbled forward. The bear lashed out at her,
but Giselle yanked the frightened woman from harm’s way.

Abruptly, the paw vanished. The growls ceased.

“Where’d he go?” Giselle called out.

“He’s gone,” someone shouted.

I turned to Giselle. “Am I glad to see you. Where’d you
come from?”

She pointed to the stairs. “The stairs. With Uncle Henry.”

Uncle Henry shouted from the corner at the top of the
stairs, “What’s going on?”

Patric jabbed his hand toward the window. “Bear! A
bear! Someone look out there. See where he is.”

“Not on your life,” exclaimed Leroi. “About the time I
stick my head out there, he’ll stick his in.”

Without warning, glass exploded from another window
down the hall. From the stairway, Bailey shouted. “Here I
come. Everybody stand back.”

He slid to a halt in front of the broken window and
emptied the clip. The paw vanished, followed by a roar of
pain.

Quickly, we stuffed blankets in the broken windows.
“It’ll have to do until the eye of the storm gets here,” I
said.

The others nodded, realizing what I meant, dreading the
idea of going out to repair the damage.

“We won’t have long to fix it,” Uncle George said.

As if in response to his remark, another storm shutter
down the hall started banging against the window frame,
ripped loose from its lock by the violent wind.

“Well, then,” Bailey answered, looking in the direction
of the loose shutter. “We’ll just have to do the best we
can.”