Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 02 - Skeletons of the Atchafalaya (24 page)

“What about it, Tony? Where’s the new evidence?”
Leroi stared at me.

I took a deep breath. “Truth is, folks, there isn’t any new
evidence.”

No one spoke for a moment.

Bailey pushed through the crowd, holding the Coleman
lantern over his head. The light was almost blinding.
“Don’t hold out, Tony. If there was new evidence, tell us.
We’re entitled to know who’s responsible.”

“Hey, it’s the truth.” I nodded to Patric. “Ask him. He’ll
tell you. There wasn’t anything in the room.”

Aunt Ezeline grabbed my arm and turned me around to
face her. “If you found something that proves my husband
didn’t do it, then tell me. I’ve got to know.”

Several voices joined in.

“Don’t lie to us, Tony.”

Mom spun Ezeline around. “Now, you just hush, Ezeline
Thibodeaux. If my boy says there’s no evidence, then
there’s no evidence.”

“I’m not lying,” I shouted over the clamoring of voices.
“There’s no evidence. I made it up.”

An impatient feminine voice retorted, “Oh, no? Then
what about the handkerchief in his shirt pocket? What is-”

1 -cut my eyes to the speaker.

Giselle!

Eyes wide in disbelief at the blunder she had made, she
stared at me. Our eyes met.

I knew the truth, and the wild look in her eyes told me
she realized I knew.

I tugged the handkerchief an inch or so from my shirt
pocket. “This handkerchief?”

She didn’t answer. She squinted against the bright light
of the Coleman lantern.

I spoke to the family. “The only one who knew about
this was the one hiding in the stairway yesterday, the one who used the back stairs to move up to the third floor and
kill A.D.” The last deduction was quite a reach, but I had
to gamble.

Giselle’s eyes grew cold. They remained locked on mine.
In a casual tone that belied the fury in her eyes, she replied,
“I told you. I’m not the only one who knows about the
stairway.”

Uncle Walter snorted. “Maybe so, but I never knew they
was here, and I been around this place nigh on fifty years
ever since Marie and me jumped over the broom.”

“Me neither,” Bailey said. “And I just about grew up
here as a kid. I never knew about no secret stairs.”

Keeping my eyes fixed on Giselle, I spoke to Bailey.
“The entrance is in the broom closet behind me. From it,
you can go into either Ozzy’s room or A.D.‘s. That’s how
the killer managed to move around without being seen.”

I slid my hand in my pocket and pulled out the wilted
white flower. I held it up. The flashlights locked on it. “I
found this with the whiskey glasses. It looked familiar, but
I couldn’t place it. Finally, it dawned on me.” I extended
it toward Giselle. “But, you know what this is, don’t you?
Water hemlock. Some call it other names. Some call it locoweed. It’s poison, and it grows here.” I kept my eyes on
her. Her eyes grew icy as I continued. “All you do is wipe
the flower on the inside of the glass. Leaves a thin film,
which the whiskey dissolves. Against the charcoal flavor of
good bourbon, it can’t be tasted.”

“You remember when we were kids, Giselle? Ozzy
started to eat a pod, and you stopped him. Me, I would
have probably eaten one too I was so dumb. But you knew.
Back then you knew.”

A murmur of surprise bubbled through the crowd.

Giselle’s eyes wavered, then locked on mine again. I
nodded to her green tank top. “You’ve worn that shirt since
the first day.”

She shrugged. “So?” She glanced at the faces around her,
looking for support. “I didn’t change. So what?”

“So, you were wearing a red tank top when I got here.
When Leroi and I returned from picking up Janice, you’d
changed to green.”

“I was hot and sweaty. Any crime in that?”

“Then why haven’t you changed since? The one you’re
wearing still has blood on it from that cottonmouth we
found in lolande’s room.”

She laughed, a short, nervous laugh. “I didn’t have any
more. I gave them to your girlfriend.” Sarcasm laced her
words.

Janice blurted out, “Oh, no. You had more. When you
gave me one, I saw two clean ones in there. Besides, the
red one you had wadded up looked like it had bloodstains
on it. That’s what I told Tony.”

I nodded. “Yeah, but it conveniently disappeared.”

Suddenly, I knew where it was. When Janice and I descended the stairs after being in Giselle’s room, I had spotted her coming out of the library. I took a wild guess.
“Where is the shirt, Giselle? In the library? How about in
the clean-out bin under the fireplace hearth where we used
to hide secret messages when we were kids? Did you hide
it there along with the whiskey glass with the dead cockroaches?”

Without warning, Giselle threw herself backward, at the
same time her hand shot under her tank top and pulled out
a dark object. My .38.

She fired one shot into the ceiling. “Back! Everyone get
back!” She ripped the flashlight from Henry’s hand and
shoved him from the kitchen into the dining area. “In there.
Everyone!” Flashlight in one hand and the .38 in the other,
she stood with her back against the doorjamb so she could
watch us in the pantry and make sure the others hurried
into the parlor.

Women screamed. Some of the men cursed. Janice eased
behind me. Leroi sidled toward me. I heard Patric behind
us.

I tried to keep my voice calm and level. “Giselle. Give
it up. You can’t get away with this.”

Her head snapped around. She hissed, “Says who? You,
Mister Know-It-All Detective. Don’t make me laugh. I’m
getting out of here, and you’ll never find me.”

I took a step toward her. “Stop!” She cocked the .38,
and I stopped. “You can’t shoot us all. There’s water all
around. What will you do, where will you go?”

She stepped back into the kitchen. I followed, stopping
next to a chair in front of the table on which sat a halfempty two-liter bottle of water. She gestured behind her.
The full moon shined through the missing wall, bathing us
in its cold light. Beyond, the still waters of the Atchafalaya
Swamp glittered in the light. “There.”

Leroi and Patric came to stand beside me. I felt Leroi’s
arm against my back as he reached for the bottle. “You’ll
never make it, Giselle,” Leroi said.

She snarled. “I’ll make it. In spades.”

I pleaded with her. “Let us help, Giselle. We can work
through all this.”

There was a trace of hysteria in her laughter. “Work
through it? How do you work through a family like this?
Always laughing behind your back, calling you names?
How do you work through a father who never claimed you,
but used you for his own pleasure? No, Tony. We won’t
work through nothing. It’s all planned.”

All planned?

I remembered the reservations at the Paramount Hotel in
New Orleans. I took a wild shot. “Bonn won’t be there to
meet you, Giselle. That was the information I got today
over my cell phone.”

She froze. The shadows cast by the moon hid her face.
She seemed to shake momentarily.

“You’re lying.”

“No.” I shook my head and drew a deep breath as I made
up the biggest lie in my life. “The call was from Lafayette police. Bonni’s dead. Car accident. Her and her new husband,” I added for good measure.

For a moment, Giselle gaped at me, stunned. “Husband?”

“Now,” I shouted, kicking the chair at her and throwing
Janice aside.

Leroi shouted and hurled the water bottle just as she
pulled the trigger. With a grunt, he staggered back. I leaped
for Giselle, catching her around the legs.

She slammed the muzzle of the .38 against the back of
my head and squirmed free of my weakening grip.

I blinked up at the moon in time to see her leap from
the kitchen to the ground. Behind me, Patric held Leroi.
“Get her, Tony,” he shouted. “Don’t you be letting that one
get away.”

Janice reached me. “Tony, Tony, Tony. Are you all
right? Did she hurt you?”

At that moment, two gunshots exploded from the generator shed. We peered into the darkness. A shadowy figure
appeared, dragging a pirogue to the water.

“Let me through, people,” shouted Bailey, barging into
the kitchen with A.D.‘s deer rifle, the same one he had used
on the bear two days earlier. He shouted. “Where is that
she-witch?”

Patric pointed to the swamp. “Out there.”

Bailey stopped at the splintered edge of the floor and
squinted into the night. I struggled to my feet beside him,
leaning on Janice.

“There she is.” He growled.

The black profile of a figure in a pirogue slid across the
silvery path laid down by the full moon.

Bailey threw the rifle butt to his shoulder and squinted
through the scope.

I hesitated, then whispered, “She’s family, Uncle Bailey.
She’s family.”

For several seconds, he remained motionless as the dark
silhouette passed in front of the moon and disappeared into
the darkness of the swamp, bound for a nearby island.

For several minutes afterward, we stared into the night,
each with his own thoughts.

Bailey mumbled, “Nowhere but Louisiana, huh, Tony?”

I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Nowhere but Louisiana,
Uncle Bailey.”

For the first time I could remember, he didn’t laugh.

We turned back to the living room. I heard what sounded
like a distant gunshot, but I couldn’t be sure. I strained to
listen for something more, but all I heard were the sounds
of the night.

We were awakened next morning by the whup-whupwhup of a helicopter touching down on the lawn outside
the mansion. The water had drained, leaving ankle-deep
mud. The snakes and nutria had forsaken the veranda. The
bobcats, possums, and raccoons had retreated to their trees.
The bear was nowhere to be seen, but no one ventured
under the house to see if he was there. In fact, no one would
dare go into the rooms under the house for a few more
days.

Plans were made to move us from the island to a convenience store on the interstate where transportation would
be available to take us to a motel in Lafayette after the state
police finished with us. From the motel, we would find our
ways home.

Leroi was recovering from a neat little hole in his shoulder, Pa was sober, and a general festive mood prevailed
throughout the house even as the three deceased family
members were carried to waiting helicopters and whisked
away to the coroner’s office.

“What I want to know, Cuz,” Leroi said, lying on the
couch, “is how you knew it was her, and not one of us?”

I grinned sheepishly at Janice, who returned my grin.
“Truth is, I didn’t know for sure. She claimed to have gone into the kitchen to slice ham that first day, but thirty
minutes earlier, I’d built myself a ham sandwich. And the
hams were already sliced. She used that as an excuse to go
up the stairs, slip into A.D.‘s room, and kill him.”

“What about Ezeline?”

“She was another good candidate. She said she hadn’t
been in A.D.‘s room, but I found a sales slip that proved
she had.”

“Then what?”

“Ezeline admitted this morning that she had gone into
the room and seen the bodies. She was afraid she’d be
blamed, so she lied.”

Patric grinned crookedly. “Can’t say I much blame her.”

“No. Don’t suppose so. But then there you were. You’d
gone upstairs. You had the opportunity. I can imagine what
I might do to someone who threatened to take over part of
the business I had worked twenty years to build.”

“What about Bailey?” Sally asked. “The money clip, the
money itself?”

“We’ll never know for sure. I’m guessing Giselle did it
to throw blame on Bailey. His wife believed he was guilty.
That’s why she pitched such a fit when we were going
upstairs.”

“It’s a shame about Bonni,” Sally said. “I always liked
her.”

“She isn’t dead,” I replied, grinning like the proverbial
possum. “I had to push Giselle into some sort of reaction.
That seemed the best way.”

Leroi chuckled. “Maybe you will make a good detective
after all.”

Janice looped her arm through mine. “As long as it’s
back in Austin.”

We all laughed. “By the way, Leroi. Did you tell Giselle
about me contacting Eddie Dyson on the computer?”

He frowned. “Yeah. Why?”

I shook my head. That explained the missing computer
battery. “Just trying to fill in a couple blanks, that’s all.”

“What puzzles me,” Sally said. “Is why Giselle moved
the snake. Why’d she go to all that trouble?”

“I don’t know. The only answer that makes sense to me
is she was playing mind games to create some confusion.
As you witnessed, some of our twenty-first-century family
still believes in voodoo.” I shrugged. “And maybe not.”

I hoped they asked no more questions, especially about
Bonni. Enough family skeletons had been dragged from the
closet and cast out in the open for all to see.

Throughout the day, family members were whisked away
with promises of a reunion the following year instead of
waiting four or five.