Whispers of the Bayou (35 page)

Lisa offered to help but I wouldn’t let her, afraid that too aggressive of a hand would cause irreparable damage to the paintings. She stayed for a while anyway as I worked, keeping me company and listening to what I had learned about Colline d’Or, and describing her own fruitless adventures asking around about Jimmy Smith. We both agreed that we weren’t quite sure what tactic to try next, though secretly I hoped that this painting might give us some direction. Finally, she went on to bed, saying that she was tired and she’d see me in the morning.

By midnight, I had managed to get the enamel paint off of one third of one wall while causing only minimal damage to the artwork underneath. Feeling exhausted and vaguely nauseous, I thought it might be a good time to stop for the night. Before I did, though, I wanted to take a step back and observe in its full scope what I had managed to reveal. I walked across the room, turned, and took it all in.

My grandmother was a talented lady, that was for certain. Her painting
style was quite charming, though I hadn’t uncovered enough of the scene for it to make much sense. Mostly, it looked like a quaint little countryside filled with wood-and-thatch houses, fields in the distance, and thus far no living creatures except for the two dogs.

Though I loved the picture itself, in a way, I was disappointed. After hearing Deena’s story about Willy getting so upset, I had hoped perhaps my grandmother had been up here painting out the secrets of the myth of the angelus or something. If that were indeed the case, I had a lot of work left to do before it would make much sense.

I gathered my tools and put them in the cabinet, deciding to clean up the chips of paint that littered the floor in the morning. I didn’t feel very well, and as I got ready for bed I was mad at myself for working too long and too hard on an evening when I should have forced myself to take it easy, considering the bump on my head. In the bathroom, after brushing my teeth, I studied the lump on my head in the mirror, glad at least that the swelling was almost gone, though the bruise had taken on a mottled blue tinge around the edges.

I climbed into the bed and turned out the light, only then thinking about how far away I was from anyone else in this big old house. As the wind blew outside I could hear all sorts of creaks and moans, and as I was falling asleep I could almost swear I had heard someone walking around on the floor above me. My nerves on edge, I didn’t sleep well, and around two a.m. I sat up, my heart pounding. I had to throw up.

There wasn’t time to make it to the bathroom, so I ran for the trash can instead, violently emptying the contents of my stomach. The episode repeated itself several times over the next hour, until there was nothing left to bring up and I merely heaved.

By that point, I was genuinely frightened. Deena’s doctor had said to watch for nausea as one of the signs of a concussion. This was far beyond mere nausea, thus I could only conclude that this was far beyond a normal concussion. I was angry at the doctor for not being more aggressive in his suggestions. My biggest concern at this point was being able to get down the stairs and to the back of the house to ask Lisa to take me to the hospital.

I didn’t even bother to get dressed but simply pulled on my robe and slipped into my shoes. Borrowing an empty trashcan from the room next door, I carried it with me as I went down, just in case I felt another episode coming on.

By the time I reached Lisa’s room, my legs were wobbly and I was sweating profusely. I started to knock on her door when I realized that it was half open. Peeking inside, I could see that her bed was empty. That’s when I heard her in the bathroom, running the water. I waited but she didn’t come out, so finally I wobbled my way up the hall and knocked on the bathroom door. When it opened, my nostrils were assaulted by the smell of vomit, her vomit.

She and I just looked at each other, and I realized that she was as sick as I was. Though I was comforted by the thought that this obviously wasn’t the result of a concussion, that left me to conclude that either we had some horrible stomach bug or we were suffering from food poisoning.

Suddenly, I pictured Deena as she had been this morning, cleaning out the refrigerator and determined to cook up all the food so it wouldn’t go to waste. Apparently, she had cooked up
all
the food, even that which should have gone straight into the trash.

“I knew there was something wrong with that goulash,” Lisa said.

“Yeah, me too,” I agreed.

I explained about my mistaken assumption of the concussion.

“Since I obviously don’t need the hospital,” I said, “I’m going back to bed and try to get some sleep.”

It was a long night, however, and sleep was in short supply.

Mostly, I dozed on the floor next to the trash can, waking every hour or so to go through dry heaves. I tried to drink water, but anything more than a sip would set me off again. I was miserable.

By morning I was at least able to climb back into the bed. There, I slept fitfully, the stomach spasms lessening to once every several hours rather than every hour. I knew I would never make it to Willy’s viewing that evening, and I hoped that Lisa was faring better than I was. When I had seen her last, she’d been lucky to make it to the bathroom, much less to the funeral home.

I awoke in the late morning hearing sounds in the room next to mine. Feeling wobbly, I made my way to the door and looked inside to see Lisa slowly making the bed there.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She looked at me with the wan face and messy hair that said her night had been as bad as mine was.

“Deena refuses to believe it’s food poisoning. She thinks we’ve got the flu. Made me move out of the downstairs so I don’t give her my germs.”

“I don’t blame her,” I said. “If I had done this to someone I wouldn’t want to take responsibility, either.”

Back in bed, I slept until noon, at least when I wasn’t throwing up again. At one point, I considered whether I should call my uncle and ask him to pray for me. Somebody needed to because I felt pretty sure that at any moment I was going to die.

My first period of normalcy came after two p.m., when I awoke without the need to vomit. I felt shaky and weak and dehydrated, in need of more than just water, but I knew I was in no condition to go downstairs to the kitchen to get something to drink. I did think I’d give a trip to the bathroom a try, but as I walked out of my room I saw a tray at the top of the stairs. On it was a thermos, a pack of crackers, two bowls and spoons, and two cans of ginger ale. Obviously, Deena had made us some lunch. Judging by the soup in the thermos, it looked like Campbell’s from a can, so I decided to risk it. I shared our bounty with Lisa, who managed to keep hers down about as long as I did. At four p.m., I wondered just how much one person should have to suffer before they were simply allowed to die. I didn’t think I could take much more—that is, until the police detective came up the stairs and told us that the death of Willy Pedreaux had not been from natural causes.

Willy had been murdered.

Nodding and mocking along the wall, with gestures fantastic,
Darted his own huge shadow, and vanished away into darkness.

At first, I thought maybe I was asleep and had been dreaming. But this guy didn’t leave and soon he was joined by another. They needed to interview each of us, they said, though neither man ventured much farther into our rooms than a few feet. Even when Lisa told them it was more than likely food poisoning and not a stomach virus, they still kept their distance.

When it was my turn to be interviewed, they asked me to describe my entire day on Saturday. I was just glad they let me do it from a prone position on the bed. Closing my eyes, I retraced all of my steps, beginning with the arrival of our limo at the house and ending with the sight of Willy lying dead in his bed. They interrupted a lot with questions, trying to pinpoint the comings and goings of all the people in and out of Willy’s room. Only when I finished my story did it occur to me to ask how on earth he had been murdered.

“We were all there when he died,” I said. “We watched it happen—and Lisa did everything she could to stop it.”

“There were some irregularities in the autopsy,” one of the cops replied. “Questions with the lungs and such.”

“But I saw him die of natural causes with my own eyes.”

“Well, it seems that someone helped those natural causes along. He was given an inhalant.”

“An inhalant?” I demanded. “The only thing Willy inhaled that day was oxygen.”

The men looked at each other.

“Was it the oxygen?” I asked, my mind racing. “Did someone tamper with it or change out the tank?”

The detective seemed to be considering his words.

“The coroner believes that a chemical was added to the humidifier connected to the oxygen tank. Unfortunately, though the tank and tubing are still here, the small plastic tank that holds the water for the humidifier is missing.”

I thought about that, remembering how absolutely purple Willy had turned when Lisa had put the mask on his face there at the end. I went back and described how all of that had gone—how his body had responded so well to the oxygen the first time and not at all well the second time. They didn’t seem surprised by what I was saying, and I had a feeling that Lisa had told them the same thing.

“Wouldn’t that mean,” I asked, trying to clear my head despite my illness, “that someone had to have added the chemical between uses? Like, at some point in the hour or so between when he used it once and when he used it again?”

I was just thinking out loud, but the cops looked at each other and said yes, that was why they needed to take a DNA sample from me.

“Wait a minute,
I’m
your suspect?” I asked, sitting up and then, as the room began to spin, thinking better of it and lying back down. “Are you kidding me?”

“It’s not just you, ma’am,” the cop replied. “We’ve taken samples from the other two ladies, Mr. Benochet, and his driver. Everyone who was on the premises when Mr. Pedreaux died, with the exception of your little girl.”

“Why DNA?” I asked. “What can that prove?”

“There was…evidence. That’s all we can say at this time.”

They called a technician to come upstairs, who pulled on a pair of
rubber gloves and used a long cotton swab to roughly go around the inside of my mouth.

“Can you tell us what you had for dinner last night?” one of the detectives asked when the tech was done.

“Excuse me?”

“Your sick friend seems to think the two of you might have been intentionally poisoned by Miz Pedreaux.”

I was about to object, but then I remembered Deena’s strange behavior last night, as she pushed her food around on her plate but never really ate any herself. Could she have done this horrible thing to us on purpose? If so, were we going to die too?

Describing the food that had more than likely made us sick, I felt a new surge of nausea. I had a feeling they were going to confiscate what was left and whisk it off to their lab. I asked if they thought we should go to the hospital.

“I’d call a doctor, at least. Better safe than sorry.”

I laid my head back and looked up at the ceiling, trying to wrap my mind around the idea that we may have been poisoned.

“There’s just one more thing,” the detective said, pulling on a pair of gloves himself as his partner brandished a flashlight and a camera.

“What?”

“We need to examine your head.”

“My head? Where I bumped it?”

The men looked at each other and back at me.

“You bumped your head?” one of them asked suspiciously. “How?”

I explained that I was upstairs earlier today and that I passed out and fell down, banging my forehead onto the floor. I couldn’t imagine what that had to do with anything, but the next thing I knew these guys were both inspecting the bump on my head.

“I don’t see any broken skin,” one of them said to the other, his breath reeking of coffee.

“Check the rest,” the other guy said.

“Ma’am, could you please take your hair down so we can examine your scalp?”