Whispers of the Bayou (48 page)

“No, but I have a theory. I’ve been listening to all of this, thinking
you people are so convinced that the angelus is a bell. I’m thinking maybe the angelus was a person. Willy buried a person under the canning shed. This Jimmy or Junior or whoever he is who came here today to find some big valuable treasure, but he didn’t realize that he’d already found what he’d been looking for. Only the angelus wasn’t a bell, it was a body.”

Could that be true? Could the angelus be someone’s remains? If so, at least that would explain what Willy had been doing out there that night. Maybe the bones dated back several centuries and they were the treasure that I had sworn an oath to protect. It made a certain amount of sense, until I remembered my grandmother’s mural that I had uncovered upstairs. In that mural, there had clearly been a bell—forged from gold, carried out in the expulsion, kept safely hidden ever since.

“You’re probably right,” I said, now aware that nothing could be gained from telling him he was way off base. “But even so those bones might be valuable. With my training, I could help you excavate them, get them evaluated, and maybe even find a buyer. Depending on who or what they are, they could be worth a fortune. If people have been guarding them since the mid-seventeen hundreds, they could even be the secret remains of Columbus or Pocahontas or something.”

I couldn’t chance another glance at AJ’s hands, but from the subtle movements of her shoulders, I had a feeling she was close to breaking free.

“Yeah, or maybe Amelia Earhart or Al Capone. Whatever. I don’t need to bother with all that. I’m about to inherit a great big house along with a nice stretch of bayou-front property. Besides, you can’t help me out with that anyway because you’ll be dead.”

With that, he raised the gun and pointed it straight at me. Refusing to cower, I jutted out my chin and stared back at him defiantly.

“If you shoot me,” I said, “the police will know for a fact this was murder. Shouldn’t you try to make it look like an accident?”

“Oh, I am,” Richard replied, surprising me by lowering the gun and then tucking it into his waistband. Then he crossed to the ladder and climbed on, pausing before he headed down. “Funny, isn’t it Miranda?
You saw everything that happened that night, but then you got all wacky on us and forgot about it anyway.”

“Lucky for me,” I replied, “or else you’d have killed me long before now.”

His only response was to give us a final smirk and climb down the ladder. My hope was that either Jimmy or Lisa had managed to survive their fall and were waiting at the bottom to ambush him. There were no sounds of a struggle, however, just the echo of Richard reaching the bottom and then wrenching the ladder loose from its rusty moorings.

“That’s just to slow you down in case that ridiculous earring trick actually works and you manage to cut yourselves free,” he called up to us.

AJ and I looked at each other and then I looked down at her bindings, which were nearly severed in half. She worked more quickly, continuing to saw away with the silver as we tried to figure out what Richard was doing down below. From the sound of things, he had continued on down the stairs to the first floor, though he hadn’t yet left the building.

When she finally got herself free, AJ frantically went to work on the tape around my wrists. This time it went much faster, of course, and soon she handed over the earring so I could cut my feet loose while she took out the other earring to do the same for herself. We were half finished when the smell finally reached us, the strong, distinct odor of gasoline.

“He’s going to burn the place down,” I hissed.

We kept working, and once we were both completely free, we crawled to the edge of the loft and looked over the side. To her credit, AJ didn’t gasp, though I knew we both wanted to. Jimmy was the only one still alive, but he was terribly injured. It looked as though he was crying, one hand touching his wife’s lifeless face. The other hand was grasping at his chest, and then I realized that he was trying to remove something from his front shirt pocket.

Through the open stairwell, we could see Richard on the bottom floor, still sprinkling gas from a can onto the trash and leaves and papers that were spread around down there. Before he was finished, Jimmy managed to roll over and with one big push slide himself toward the stairs. Then before we could stop him, he held out the item he had retrieved from his pocket: a pack of matches, which he lit and tossed down at Richard.

In an instant and intense explosion, Richard was gone. Directly below us, Jimmy simply rolled onto his back and closed his eyes, ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of avenging his beloved wife’s death.

I wasn’t ready to sacrifice either myself or AJ. Unable to do anything to help out below, I ran toward the open window, hoping to find handholds that we could use to climb down outside. There was nothing of the kind anywhere in sight.

Frantic, I returned to the place in the railing where the ladder had been. Empty now, there was no way to get ourselves down to the next floor even if we wanted to descend toward the fire, nothing that we could climb or slide down at all. Even up here on the third floor, the heat from the fire below was astonishing, the smoke burning our eyes and clouding our vision.

“We’re going to have to jump,” AJ said, eyeing the distance between us and the grassy ground below. “We have no choice.”

“That’ll kill us, AJ. It’s just too far.”

“What if we tied our clothes together and climbed down them like a rope?”

“There’s not enough. We’d still be badly hurt when we hit bottom.”

I caught sight of a movement in the distance, and after a moment I realized I was seeing a big truck pulling up the driveway. Hope filled my heart for only an instant, until it got closer and I saw that the truck held a large piece of construction equipment; it was Jimmy’s two goons, finally returning with the backhoe.

They didn’t stick around for long. Obviously spotting the burning building, they used the front loop around the fountain to make a U-turn, rumbling away much more quickly than they had come.

We really were alone.

We really were going to die. “If only there were an opening on the other side of the building,” AJ cried. “If we could jump out that way, we’d land in the water.”

I inhaled deeply, looking at her.

“There is, AJ,” I gasped. “I know there is.”

Running across the hot floor, the heat of the encroaching fire licking
at our heels, I raised my hands in front of me, remembering what it was that my sister and I had loved about this building. Our grandfather had let us come up here with him sometimes, whenever the loft storage had been newly emptied of its bounty. As he supervised the workmen sweeping up the last traces of sugar from the floor, he would let us peek down the long loading tube that hung out over the bayou, the one that the sugar was poured through for filling the containers on the boats. If he was in a really good mood, he would even have let us bring up handfuls of pecans gathered from the ground outside, and we would take turns rolling the pecans down the tube and listening as they splashed into the water far below.

“It’s here,” I cried, running my hands over the irregular surface of the wood-and-steel outer wall. “I
know
it is. Look for a door.”

The ground under my feet was hot, so hot that I knew any moment it was going to burst into flame and swallow us down whole. As it was, the fire was now raging so fiercely underneath us that I couldn’t understand why the entire structure hadn’t begun to buckle.

“There!” AJ yelled, spotting a handle alongside a beam.

Together we gripped it and pulled, and with a mighty creaking groan the metal covering swung open to reveal the loading tube. Like a giant blow drier, a burst of hot air shot from the tube and slammed into our faces.

Ignoring the heat, I looked down the tube to where it ended, the bayou sparkling in the distance below.

The tube might not be sturdy after all these years. Even if it was, the flames might catch up to us when we were halfway down. Even if we made it to the water without the tube collapsing or burning, the bayou might be so shallow that we would break both of our necks on impact.

Still, we had no other choice.

“Just a second,” AJ said and before I could stop her she turned and ran through the thick smoke to the edge of the loft and looked over. She ran back to me twice as fast, her face reflecting the horror she had just seen, saying “Go, go, go! It’s too late. They’re all dead.”

As if to punctuate her words, the wooden edge of the loft sprung up into glorious orange flames. Now we
really
had no choice.

At least the tube was wide enough for us to go down it together. We climbed in and wrapped our arms around each other and pushed off, leaving our stomachs behind as our bodies plummeted in a steep angle toward the water. We both screamed all the way down, locked together in a death grip, eyes shut tight, awaiting the jolt of either death or life.

Finally, we felt the tubing disappear from under us and then we were airborne, flying through the sky in slow motion until we crashed into the black bayou, its deep waters sucking us in and pulling us down to the muddy bottom. With a mighty push, it released us again, popping us both toward the surface, our eyes wide open now, our lungs screaming for air, our hands still clenched together.

We had made it.

We had survived, my mother and I.

Whither my heart has gone, there follows my hand, and not elsewhere.
For when the heart goes before, like a lamp, and illumines the pathway,
Many things are made clear, that else lie hidden in darkness.

As always, AJ processed herself through the aftermath of the trauma differently than I did. When I went looking for her the next morning, I found her sitting on the front porch swing, staring out across the green, shady lawn and weeping into a lace handkerchief. She’d been so brave as we managed to escape the burning building, float down the bayou to the beach at Little Tara next door, and climb out to get help. But even as Livvy and Big Daddy and Melanie and Scarlett had buzzed around us with towels and blankets and hot tea and kind words while we waited for the police and fire departments to arrive, AJ had finally broken down and sobbed.

She continued to cry all through her statement to the police. She did manage to pull herself together at the hospital where we were both treated for smoke inhalation, minor abrasions, lacerations, and, for her, a sprained wrist acquired during our ride down the tube. At Livvy’s insistence, we spent the night at Little Tara, where we had been lovingly pampered and made to feel safe. But this morning, when AJ and I had returned to Twin Oaks, she had burst into fresh tears the moment she caught sight of the smoldering building by the water. The estate had still been crawling with
authorities as well as reporters, so I had ushered AJ into the house where she could deal with her emotions in private and I could go upstairs to be by myself for a while.

Now here she was just two hours later, sitting on the porch and crying again. At least the reporters that remained were all around back and hadn’t realized we were out here. Personally, I hadn’t even felt the urge to shed a single tear. As usual, my emotions had receded somewhere deep inside, though this time I was determined not to let them disappear in there completely.

“Coffee?” I asked, handing her a cup fixed just the way she liked it.

She took it from me with a sad smile, motioning for me to sit next to her. I did, grateful for the comfort of her presence, even if it did include a little waterworks. There were details to discuss, so many details, but for now we just sat there, side by side, and rocked. I asked if she had heard from Holt, and she said no.

Last night he and Charles had stopped by Little Tara just to update us on the police activity at Twin Oaks and to make sure we were both okay. That visit had been brief and strained, with Holt speaking almost exclusively to me, unwilling even to look AJ in the eye. As soon as they left, she had gone up to bed, and I had to wonder at this point if her tears were less about processing the general trauma of what had happened to us and more about the pain of lost love, not to mention the guilt of what she had done to him by withholding the truth for so many years.