Whispers of the Bayou (46 page)

It wasn’t okay.

My eyes opened wide, staring at the man I had always thought of as my father.

He killed my sister! It may have been an accident, but it had happened in anger, as he struck at the woman I thought was my mother and hit my twin sister instead.

Could a man who killed once accidentally kill again on purpose?

Suddenly, I knew what I had been doing out here that night so long ago.

It wasn’t much later, maybe three days, maybe a week. Again, my parents were fighting, but this time Cass wasn’t around to try and make them stop. I was too scared to try, so I waited in my room, listening and hiding.

Then finally the fight ended and there was movement. I heard them leaving, heard both of my parents going down the stairs, leaving me there alone.

I was scared to be there alone without Cass to protect me.

So I followed.

Down the stairs, through the house, out to the yard, my mother so weak she could barely stand, my father strongly supporting her the whole way.

They kept walking into the night and I wanted to follow but I was scared, so scared that they would get mad at me if they saw me, scared my father would hit me the way he hit Cass and I would fall down dead too.

So I went to the big building instead, the sugar house. I loved it there, loved to look at the machinery, loved to see the fine powder of sugar on the floors. I raced up the scary stairs to the second floor window, where I could see them as they walked toward the garden. But they had disappeared behind the shed.

Quickly, I had climbed up the ladder to the third floor, raced to the big window, and looked out at the yard in the moonlight. From there, from so high, I could see better, I could see nearly everything: my parents behind the shed, still walking toward the garden. Then I saw Willy, who was digging with a shovel nearby, on the ground next to a blue tarp, in the place where a building was just about to be built. Why was he digging in the middle of the night?

He must have been doing something wrong, I thought, because when he saw my parents coming, he dropped that shovel and hid behind a tree. Soon, I couldn’t see my parents anymore. Only Willy, still hiding. I waited, trying to decide what to do, when finally my father came back.

He came back alone.

He went to the house and I came down the ladder and then the stairs, not sure which way to go. Check on my mom? Follow my dad? Finally, I heard crying, so I went that way. The crying sound was coming from Willy. He was looking up at Mom, who was hanging from a tree. She wasn’t moving.

She was dead.

I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I went back to the house.

I went to my room.

I crawled into my bed.

I pretended I hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard, hadn’t hurt.

I pretended so hard that soon I forgot completely.

Multitudinous echoes awoke and died in the distance,
Over the watery floor, and beneath the reverberant branches;
But not a voice replied; no answer came from the darkness;
And when the echoes had ceased, like a sense of pain was the silence.

I looked over at Richard, who was sweating profusely, chafing against the tape that bound his hands and wrists. Jimmy had dragged Lisa to the front window, where he stood watching the action on the ground far below.

“You killed Cass,” I whispered incredulously. “I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes!”

AJ gasped, spinning to look at Richard in horror.

“You went to hit my mother,” I said, my eyes on him but my mind vividly in the past, “and instead ended up knocking Cass down the stairs by mistake. You killed her. I saw you do it.”

The man who was so handsome for his age, so tall and commanding, looked back at me, his expression one of exaggerated disdain.

“You’re nuts, do you know that? No one would believe a ridiculous story like that.”

Across the room, Jimmy’s walkie-talkie crackled at his waist.

“All right. We got a good look. Over.”

“Is it the bell? Over.”

“Not even close. Looks like…”

“Looks like what? Over.”

“Bones. Looks like old bones. A human skeleton. Over.”

Bones! Just like the bone Tess found nearby, the one that we turned into the police. My stomach clenched in terror. Could someone who had lived here in the past have been some sort of serial killer? Were bodies buried everywhere out there? Or was there just one body, whoever it was, and the bone we found had come from the same source?

Again, the voice crackled to life.

“Looks like they were in a wooden box at some point, but the box is all busted up. Wait, there’s something carved in the lid.”

We waited and then the voice came through again.

“It’s not carved exactly. It’s like a handmade sign. The letters are burned in—you know, like with a woodburning kit?”

“Woodburning? Like they do in cub scouts? Over.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t never no cub scout. Over.”

Jimmy rolled his eyes.

“What’s it say? Over.”

“Hold on. It says, ‘Let us bury him here by the sea…when a happier season brings us again to our homes from the unknown land of our exile… then shall his sacred dust be piously laid in the churchyard.’ What’s that mean? Over.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment, but my mind was racing. I knew that quote. It was from something I had read just recently, maybe
Evangeline,
the fictional poem set against the true backdrop of Cajun history. I tried to remember where it had come in the story and what it meant.

“Keep digging,” Jimmy said finally. “Get those bones out of there and dig deeper. See if there’s anything underneath. Over.”

We all waited for what felt like an eternity until the voice crackled through again.

“Sorry, boss. Nothing under all those bones except dirt. Over.”

Jimmy cursed loudly, kicking at some of the refuse for emphasis and
sending several giant roaches scampering for cover. Still dragging Lisa, he marched furiously over to us and pointed the gun at my head.

“You lied,” he hissed.

“I didn’t lie. I said I had a memory of Willy digging in the middle of the night. I never said I saw him burying the bell.”

He seemed to consider my words as the walkie-talkie crackled again at his waist.

“What do we do now, boss? Over.”

Jimmy was silent for a moment, thinking, then he lifted it to his mouth, pushed the button, and spoke.

“Go get the equipment. We’ll rip up the whole yard if we have to until we find it. Over.”

I was hoping Jimmy would leave us to ourselves for a while as they embarked on the next part of their search. If he did, we just might be able to escape. Amid all of this rubble, surely there was something sharp we could use to cut ourselves free if we had some time unobserved.

“Liars have to die,” Jimmy said, still holding the gun to my head.

AJ moaned and whimpered beside me, begging him to spare my life, but I wasn’t going to beg. I wasn’t going to cry. All these years of feeling disconnected and separate from everyone else in the world had prepared me for this moment. I looked up at him, oddly numb, and tried to reason with him instead.

“What makes you think it’s buried here at all? Willy could have hidden that thing almost anywhere.”

“Oh, it’s here somewhere,” he said. “That’s why he got a life estate from your grandmother—so he could protect the angelus for as long as he lived.”

“Fine, then,” I replied, wondering how he knew that, “even if it’s here somewhere, how do you know it’s in the yard and not in the house? How do you know it’s not behind the walls of this building or buried under the garage or bricked into a fireplace? There are too many places to look. You’d have to burn the whole house and every surrounding building down to find it—but you wouldn’t dare, because a fire like that could damage the bell as well.”

“Sorry,” Jimmy replied smugly, “but I know some things you don’t. Your tattoo has a code. Every
guardien
wears a tattoo in case something happens to them and the next
guardien
needs to find the bell. Just by where they placed it on your body, we know that the bell is buried underground, not hidden above. From the curve on the bottom of the bell, we know it’s underneath some structure, not buried somewhere out in the open. And from the whirls of the cross, we even have an approximate latitude and longitude. Trust me, we’re very close to getting our hands on it. ”

All of that information—and I had been carrying it around on my head since I was a little girl? Unbelievable!

“We’ve got a backhoe waiting up the road. My guys will have it back here in fifteen or twenty minutes and start digging in every single place where each of these buildings used to stand. The bell had to have been buried underneath one of them. Eventually it’ll turn up. In the meantime, I’m sorry to say, you’re of no more use to us. Sadly, the world will learn tomorrow how you and your aunt were accidentally trapped up here in the sugar house when an old gasoline can ignited downstairs. How tragic that you both burned to death.”

I glanced at Richard, wondering what fate Jimmy had in mind for him.

“You, however, might get a little reprieve,” Jimmy added, poking a foot at Richard. “If I untie your legs and take you downstairs, can you show me every spot where a building used to stand before Katrina came and messed things all up?”

Richard looked at AJ and me and then back up at our captor.

“Yes, I remember where they all were. I’ll show you if you promise to let me go.”

“Of course,” Jimmy replied, though I couldn’t imagine that anyone there believed him.

Releasing the traumatized Lisa from his grasp, Jimmy handed her a pocketknife, instructing her to use it to cut Richard’s feet free. She did as he instructed, her hands shaking so badly that I was afraid any moment she might accidentally cut into his skin too. I kept trying to catch her eye, to let her know somehow that as long as she was holding a knife, she had a chance to overpower Jimmy and help us all break free.

“I can’t go down the ladder with my hands taped,” Richard said, and reluctantly Jimmy had to admit that was true.

“Go ahead, Lisa. Cut his hands free too. But if you try anything stupid, mister, I will not hesitate to shoot you.”

“I believe you.”

I wasn’t sure what it was about that moment that caused the situation to reframe itself in front of my eyes. Maybe it was the way Jimmy said Lisa’s name, or the glance she gave him, or the simple mathematics of how many were going to die here and how many were supposed to live. What of Lisa? I understood why Jimmy was sparing Richard for now, but why wasn’t Lisa going to be a victim of the same “accidental” fire that he intended to use to kill me and AJ? Lisa wasn’t going to die, I suddenly realized, because Lisa was in on this with Jimmy.

Lisa, the actress.

Lisa, the girl who had grown up in Cajun country and had probably been hearing that particular myth her whole life.

Lisa, who took a job here with Willy and somehow found out that the myth was true—and that he was the
gardien.

Lisa, the voice of the woman who called the museum to learn more about the myth of the angelus.

Lisa, the one who had managed to find out a lot but still hadn’t quite found that hiding place.

At the moment that Richard’s hands were free, I knew I had to do something.

“Grab Lisa!” I yelled to him. “She’s in on it with him!”

Fortunately, Richard moved fast, reacting almost instantly to my words. He had probably been planning to make some sort of move as soon as his hands were loose anyway, but the news I supplied allowed him to make that move count. In one strong swoop, he managed to twist Lisa’s arm behind her back, grab the knife from her hand, and point it at her throat.

It was a standoff, Jimmy with the gun and Richard with the knife held at Lisa. Neither man would budge, and so finally Jimmy pointed his gun at my head.

“If you hurt her, I’ll shoot Miranda.”

What Jimmy didn’t realize was that by shooting me, he’d actually be doing Richard a favor! My mind raced as I considered the situation. Next to me, AJ had found a small stick in the rubble, and she was trying to use it to cut the tape that bound her hands behind her back. I wasn’t sure if her efforts could work, but I needed to provide a distraction, just in case.