Whispers of the Bayou (45 page)

Unable to stop myself, I stepped forward with fists raised, trying to pound at him in my fury. As AJ stood nearby, yelling at me to stop, Richard caught me by the arms and held me off. In the struggle he had to turn his face away so that I couldn’t scratch at his cheek, and in that position, his head bowed, I saw the cut on his scalp, a distinctly fresh scab right at the top of the back of his head.

As, when the air is serene in the sultry solstice of summer,
Suddenly gathers a storm, and the deadly sling of the hailstones
Beats down the farmer’s corn in the field and shatters his windows,
Hiding the sun, and strewing the ground with thatch from the house-roofs,
Bellowing fly the herds, and seek to break their inclosures;
So on the hearts of the people descended the words of the speaker.

“Help! Miranda! Help!”

Before I could react to the sight of the cut on my father’s head, I heard Lisa’s voice, coming from somewhere beyond the garage. I stopped struggling and we all turned to look in the direction it had come from.

“Please! Help me!”

I didn’t know what was going on or why Lisa was calling for me, but I didn’t think she was just being a drama queen now. Richard, AJ, and I all took off after the voice, my mind spinning with the implications of the cut on my father’s head. As we ran I was afraid we would find Lisa at the bottom of a well or bitten by a snake or half eaten by an alligator. Instead, as we rounded the corner of the canning shed, it was to find her being held at gunpoint there by Jimmy Smith, who had one arm clutched around her neck, the other with a gun barrel pressing against her head.

“There you are,” he said to me, smiling eerily, the caterpillar on his lip glistening with sweat. “Took you long enough.”

At that, two more men stepped out from the shadows of the building behind us, also with guns, essentially cutting off all escape routes and making us their prisoners.

“Who
are
you, Jimmy Smith?” I demanded. “What do you want?”

I glanced at the two men who stood behind us, guns raised, and with a shiver I knew they were the ones who had attacked me in the alley, looking for my tattoo.

“What do you think I want? The bell. Tell me where I can find it. ”

I looked at AJ, who was stricken and pale, and Richard, who was merely confused. Then I looked back at Jimmy Smith, whose eyes were black and cold as onyx.

“Trust me. I would if I could. But I don’t know where it is.”

“Try, Miranda,” Lisa whimpered. “Just last night you remembered something. You remembered seeing Willy outside with a shovel in the middle of the night.”

“I don’t know if I did or not,” I said. “Besides, it was just a shred of a memory, just a trace of something bigger that made no sense at all.”

Jimmy repositioned the gun against Lisa’s face and pressed harder as tears filled her dark eyes.

“I think it’s time for you to find that memory,” he said. “Or the little spitfire here gets shot.”

“No!” Lisa sobbed, her hands clutching powerlessly at his arm.

“Okay, okay,” I said, my mind racing. “I’ll try.”

Richard was angry and frightened, demanding to know what was going on here. As AJ gave him an abbreviated version, I moved several feet away and closed my eyes, hands to my ears. I simply needed to think, to clear my brain and maybe, just maybe, bring back the memory that had almost resurfaced last night.

At first in my mind I listed the things that I had remembered: I had that feeling that I was up high but I wanted to go even higher, that the stairs had no backs and were frightening. I kept trying to imagine the view of this yard from the house upstairs, but it didn’t work—until I realized that
I hadn’t been looking down at this yard from the house, I’d been looking down from somewhere else, somewhere close by and just as tall.

“The building beside the water,” I said suddenly. “That’s where I was when I saw him, not the house.”

I could see myself running there in the night, running across the lawn in my nightgown, my bare feet getting wet in the dewy grass.

“The tallest one?” Lisa asked.

When I nodded, her captor barked, “Then let’s go there now.”

We crossed the yard as a group. Jimmy dragging Lisa in front, AJ and Richard and I following behind being herded at gunpoint by the two goons. As we neared the building by the water, the one that towered over this part of the yard at three stories tall, I again felt that rush of danger and attraction. I knew that even if this quest did not lead us to the bell, it was still of some importance to my mind, to my past.

The door to the building wasn’t locked, and it squeaked open on its hinges, the sound echoing against the walls inside. We stepped inside, and with a gasp I saw that the stairs from the first floor to the second were indeed metal stairs with no backs, the kind that you could see through to the ground while climbing.

“Move.”

Prodded onward, we stepped inside, and though I know AJ was probably concerned about rats and Richard was no doubt looking for some way that he could get free and run, I was focused on the stairs that I knew I had taken at some point in my youth. Why would I have been out here in the middle of the night, just a little girl all by myself?

I began to lead the way, weaving past the refuse of this old agricultural building to get to the steps.

“It wasn’t like this here,” I said, looking around at the mess. “There were machines, all sorts of machines.”

“My father sold off the equipment from this building years ago,” Richard replied.

“How do we know the stairs are strong enough to hold?” AJ asked. “They’re so old.”

“I been living out here all week,” Jimmy replied. “They’re fine. Now go.”

I climbed the steep stairs, stunned at the thought of this man being here all along, so close to where we were. Had he been watching us? Watching me? Coming out at night to peek in the windows of the house?

“The light!” I said suddenly, remembering the view from the upstairs window. “A light shining through the trees! That was you?”

“Yeah. Whatever. Hurry up.”

When I reached the top of the stairs, I tried to look around not as a grown woman, but as a little girl in her nightgown in the middle of the night. Why hadn’t I been scared? Why had I done this? Was this a good place or bad? I just didn’t know.

The others reached the floor behind me as I strode quickly across the room to the front window, which was cracked but still intact. Our main gunman, though he held Lisa as leverage, was really interested only in me. With a strong hold on Lisa, he watched me and waited.

“Not high enough,” I whispered as I stood at this window, looking out above the crack. “I couldn’t see from here. I had to go higher that night.”

From this floor to the next were not stairs but a ladder that led to what looked like a loft. The equipment was gone from up here too, leaving the sides of the loft completely unprotected. As I reached the top, I wanted to run across the room to the window to see out, but the floor was littered with limbs and leaves and pine straw, which I was afraid might also hide snakes or rats or raccoons. Looking up at the dark ceiling, I had no doubt bats were there as well.

“Keep going,” Jimmy prodded.

Deciding I’d rather take my chances with a snake than a gun—though both could be fatal—I carefully picked my way through the rubble to the opening where the window used to be. There I stood and looked out over the yard, trying to imagine the scene by moonlight rather than sunlight.

Something wasn’t right about the way things were laid out. Some buildings were missing, and others were in all the wrong places. Still, imagining the dark, moonlit landscape from this perspective, I suddenly knew without question that I had seen Willy Pedreaux digging in the ground directly below and in front of this window, right in the middle of the green, grassy lawn.

“Right there,” I said, pointing. “About twenty feet back from that magnolia tree. That’s where he was. That’s where he dug that night.”

As I made that statement, my mind was filled with an incredible sense of relief, which was followed immediately by regret and self-recrimination. I shouldn’t have been so quick to tell them! Now we were all expendable, not to mention that now they would be able to find the angelus and steal it away while we were being held prisoner up here.

“Out in the middle of the yard?” Jimmy asked, seeming not only skeptical but angry as well.

“I thought you said he buried it under the canning shed,” one of the goons blurted.

“Well, there ain’t no canning shed right there, now is there?” Jimmy screamed in return.

“There used to be.”

We all turned to look at Richard. “The canning shed used to be right there,” he continued. “It got blown over there by Katrina. Nobody ever bothered to have it moved back.”

That seemed to be what Jimmy wanted to hear.

“That’s been our mistake!” he said, the rage on his face turning to joy. “We had the correct building, all right, we just didn’t know the building got moved. You, start digging. You, tie them up first.”

One man left while the other forced us to sit on the floor in the middle of the room. He pulled out a roll of duct tape and used it bind our wrists and ankles together, first Richard, then AJ, then me. When he was finished, he headed down the ladder to join the other in the digging outside.

I glanced up at Jimmy, who was pointing the gun at Lisa but watching out the window at the activity below. I tried to make eye contact with Lisa, but she looked nearly out of it, her eyes cast down toward the ground. My hope was that if the men outside actually struck gold, so to speak, the surprise of the moment would distract Jimmy enough that somehow we could take advantage of the moment and get ourselves free. Still, there was no play at my hands or ankles with this duct tape. Unless we had a knife or something else sharp to work with, we would never be able to get loose.

“What on earth could Willy have buried that was worth all of this?” Richard demanded suddenly. “He was just a poor Cajun caretaker.”

I looked at AJ, but before we could think of an answer, Jimmy told us to be quiet.

Suddenly, from outside came a cheer and I knew they had found what they were looking for. A walkie-talkie crackled to life at Jimmy’s waist.

“Yeah? Over.”

“We’ve struck something. Over.”

“Is it what we’re looking for? Over.”

“Give us a few. Still digging. Over.”

My mind raced, wondering how we could ever turn the tide here before it was too late.

“Well?” Richard demanded, looking at me. “What on earth did Willy have that he buried in our yard?”

In a flash, I remembered the cut on my father’s head, the one I had seen just a while ago near the house. It had disturbed me, but it wasn’t until now, with him talking about Willy, that I realized why: According to the police, Willy’s killer had cut his head on the barbeque grill when grabbing the lighter fluid!

Had Richard killed Willy?

He hadn’t even been on the list of suspects, hadn’t even been tested for DNA—because he hadn’t arrived until after Willy was dead. Or at least that was how he had made things appear. In truth, who knew when he had flown in—or what he had been doing before we ever saw him here?

Could the man I had always thought was my father actually have killed someone?

Yes,
I heard my own mind say.
He has killed before.

I closed my eyes as the memories, old memories, chose to come flooding back.

I thought of my twin sister, Cass, so brave, too brave.

Brave enough to try and stop our parents from fighting again.

We were both crying, but she was the one who ran into the hall, begging them to stop. She was the one who was tugging on Mommy’s robe, crying for them to quit it.

She was the one who got in the way when Daddy hit Mommy.

She was the one who fell—fell down the stairs.

The one whose neck broke when she hit the bottom.

I didn’t tell. I never told anyone I saw. I just got back in my bed and waited for morning, when Cass would come back to our room and everything would be okay. Only she didn’t come back.