Before he crossed the state line. This shed a whole new light on the situation. Trainor didn’t want him back in the state. Was willing to pay big money to keep him out. Why? What possible harm could he, Anatole Dupré, bring a man who’d been governor for ten years? What harm? What was Trainor afraid of?
The dance wasn’t half over when an idea struck Brett. And it was so abhorrent it brought chills to his arms, even here in the damp muggy bayou. He grabbed Pierre by the arm as soon as the big man came off the dance floor.
“I know where to find the answers.”
Pierre blinked to focus on the meaning of the cryptic statement.
“I know where to begin searching for the murderer. First thing tomorrow, I’m setting out.”
Chapter Sixteen
Delta had never seen anything like the bayou in her life, had never imagined such a place, not even in her nightmares. It was wild and eerie, and although it teemed with so much life she thought it might explode, she found it somehow peaceful—as though she had left the violent world of murderers and bounty hunters and government agents far behind.
She hadn’t, of course, and so she sat tensed in the pirogue, while Gabriel poled them along the twisting canals. Sunlight filtered through a canopy of cypress branches, glistening in iridescent splendor on the oily water surrounding their enormous gnarled trunks. Streamers of gray moss shot through with sunbeams hung from the broad tree limbs, giving the entire area a party atmosphere, as though paper decorations had been strung from all the trees. The moss reminded her of a story Hollis told about the time he had ventured into an underground cavern where rock formations hung in profusion from the ceiling, glistening when light touched them. Like a giant cave, the bayou seemed isolated from the real world.
The dark water looked thick and heavy, earth-steeped, as though it would stain her fingers if she dared dip them into its deceptively still surface. Which she didn’t since the water fairly simmered with the life in and upon it—catfish and gar, bullfrogs and crawfish, shrimp and terrapins. And alligators. Their knobby backs protruded here and there above the murky surface of the water. Occasionally she spied a lengthy snout resting on the bank. She had yet to encounter the whole body of one of these fearsome creatures, or even an open mouth.
To either side of the canal, on what she took for solid ground, the soil bubbled with the life beneath its surface. She doubted such land would support a person’s weight. She certainly wouldn’t want to attempt to walk on it.
Overhead and around them the entire forest resounded with a symphonic concert of caws and chirps and a distant tap-tap-tapping.
“Ivory-billed woodpecker,” Gabriel responded to her question. She smiled at the thought of something familiar in this alien world, envisioning the bird M’sieur Audubon had left stuffed at Camelliawood. But the woodpecker’s tap-tap-tapping sounded so much like an army of troopers marching through the bayou that she expressed her worries aloud.
“If there were intruders in the bayou,” Gabriel assured her, “the birds, they would tell us. Their songs would not welcome, non. They would sing a warning.”
She gazed around, awed by a sense of timelessness. A menagerie of birds went about their cheery business high in the overlapping branches of cypress trees. “They aren’t afraid of us?”
“We belong.”
We belong? Perhaps Gabriel, but certainly not she herself. She relaxed a bit after that, however, imagining the cacophony above and beyond and to either side of them as sentries—watching, waiting, ready to warn of danger.
Gabriel stood at the back of the hand-hewn boat they had bought from a fisherman upon reaching the bayou. He plied the long pole, pushing it against the bottom of the stream, propelling them lazily along, keeping to the main canal for the most part, occasionally turning this way or that into one of the many fingers that trailed off in any and all directions. She tried to concentrate on the trip, striving without success to determine what he used for markers.
Gabriel had proved to be a proficient guide. Leaving Baton Rouge they had stopped some distance before reaching the ferry, turning the horses loose to find their way back to the livery. Using gold coins, which she feared neither of them looked prosperous enough to possess without raising questions, he had encouraged the ferryman to take them across the Mississippi without waiting for more passengers. Afterwards he led them across the acres and acres of sugar cane fields without encountering a soul.
Time and again she recalled his cryptic response that he had learned his skills by watching his backside, and each time she thought of it, she wondered what kind of fool she was.
But they had arrived at the bayou without mishap, and he procured the pirogue using the same approach as with the ferryman, except the pirogue hadn’t cost them as much gold.
He talked little, responding to her requests in the terse manner she had come to expect. He was uneasy around her; she knew that without him saying so. She wondered whether he was uncomfortable around all women or whether it was their particular circumstances that made him so now.
She thought she might feel better if she knew the source of his uneasiness, but realized all too well that wasn’t necessarily the case. It would do her no good to inquire, she knew, since he either rebuffed or responded with the briefest explanation to her every inquiry, as when she had finally managed to find the courage to ask him about Brett.
“Is he Anatole Dupré?”
To which Gabriel had shrugged. “Me, I’m taking you to him, m’moiselle. He is the one to answer your questions, sure.”
But his reticence only served to heighten her fears and her fears began to smother her from the inside, as the thick, sultry air of the bayou seemed bent on smothering her from without.
She fanned her loose shirt against her chest. “How do you determine where to turn from one canal to another?” she asked, suddenly needing human conversation to strengthen her tenuous grip on reality.
“Depends,” he replied. Finally when she had almost given up on a conversation, he added, “For truth, the bayou changes quickly. The big river, he rearranges the map ever’ spring with floods and silt from above. An’ loggers, they dredge new canals to float out cypress trees. Since I’ve been gone nothin’ looks the same, non.”
“Then how are you navigating?”
“By feel—an’ direction. Me, I might take ourselves up a dead-end canal before we get where we’re headed.”
Delta chose to ignore the consequences of such a development. Surely Gabriel would know how to get them out of a dead-end canal. “Where are we headed?”
“To my family, first. Can’t chance goin’ straight to Crazy Mary’s.”
“Won’t the troopers know to watch your family, too?”
He grunted. “The troopers, they don’ like the bayou. They won’ find enough brave men to do more’n stake out Crazy Mary’s place, sure.”
“Will they harm her?”
He chuckled “Non. They’re afraid of her powers, certainement. That’s the reason Trainor wants to run the Voodoos out of the state. He don’ want to share power with them.”
She thought of a dozen additional questions to ask him, but before she could decide which topic might be most fruitful with this close-mouthed man, he nosed the pirogue onto a bank that looked fairly solid.
“Step easy,” he cautioned, offering her a hand after he jumped to the bank. “For truth, it isn’t as solid as it looks.”
For the next hour or so she followed him through the forest, putting each foot exactly where he told her. And here in the deep woods, Gabriel came alive. Gripping her hand firmly, he pulled her in and out, this way and that, reminding her of the way he danced around the docks playing his fiddle.
Not until he had named all the trees they passed, “Water hickory, locust, tupelo,” and many of the plants, “palmettos, salt cane, oyster grass, cattails,” did she realize what he was doing. What she had taken to be a recitation of local fauna for her sake, was in fact a homecoming ritual. Gabriel ha
d come home, and his joy was plain to see.
“How long were you in Canada with Brett?” she called to him.
“Five years.”
Five years. Brett had been away ten. How she prayed he made it back to his beloved bayou country.
By the time they reached higher ground, the forest had changed to pine trees, tall and majestic. Then they left the forest behind all together, emerging onto a prairie.
She paused to look back. “It’s beautiful.”
“Oui,” he agreed, adding, “bayou folk think so. Anglais, they usually don’t see it that way.”
She came up even with him, matching his stride. Ahead of them beyond a plowed field she saw a row of houses. She looked back at the forest again. “It felt as if we were the only two people in the world, like we were traveling through the Garden of Eden.”
“Oui.” This time he studied her with a mixture of curiosity and warmth, bringing a sudden rush of tears to her eyes.
And the tears reminded her of Brett—of her nightmare. In the distance children rode a horse, a woman hung clothes on a line. Was it her tears that called the nightmare to mind with more clarity than in two days? Or was it the return to civilization that signaled the resumption of her mission? And intensified her fears for Brett.
After their first stunned reaction, Gabriel’s family fell into welcoming him with such enthusiasm that Delta began to fear they wouldn’t let him leave to complete the journey. And they welcomed her, too, after he explained who she was and why he had brought a femme anglaise into the bayou.
Their hesitancy to accept an English woman when they thought she might be involved with Gabriel would have worried her, had she not had weightier things on her mind. Would Brett’s family see her as an outsider, an Anglaise? Surely, after they worked everything else out, they wouldn’t be faced with his family’s rejection of her because she was English.
As the evening wore on, she began to wonder whether Brett’s family was as large as Gabriel’s—twelve brothers, five sisters, all married with children. And they all lived close by, along with uncountable numbers of uncles, aunts, cousins, godparents.
Causerie, or nightly visiting, Delta soon learned, was a time-honored custom along the bayou.
“Every night except Monday,” Gabriel explained. “Visiting on Monday is sure to bring yourself enemies.”
This particular evening everyone from up and down the bayou chose to visit the home of Gustave and Verina LeBlanc, Gabriel’s parents, to welcome Gabriel home to the bayou—and to gape at the Anglaise he brought with him, she decided, from the curious glances she received all evening.
They sat on the galerie, which was like a deep and wide front porch with an overhanging roof and stairs leading to the second floor grenier, a sleeping room for the bachelor boys in the family. The galerie fronted the bayou, so visitors, if they did not live close enough to walk, poled up in their pirogues.
Mountains of food filled the table—jambalaya, crawfish prepared several different ways, étouffée, a huge pot of filé gumbo, and gallons of black coffee—café, it was called.
The food was delicious, if spicy, and it reminded her of the night Brett flirted with her at the captain’s table, asking if she liked spicy things. That had been the first meal they ever shared, the time he learned she was a journalist. Now she understood why he had seen her as a threat.
Since the conversation around her was carried on in French, which she didn’t understand, her mind was left free to wander, and wander it did.
For the first time in days she thought about her own family—Ginny and Hollis back in St. Louis, waiting to hear that her trip had rid her of those debilitating nightmares. She hoped they never learned the extent to which those dreams had developed. With luck she would be able to find Brett and travel to New Orleans before anyone became too worried about her. She thought about the children, especially the twins, Jimmy and Joey, and her promise to find them a pirate.
A pirate. Brett Reall. A tremor of fear coursed down her spine, and she clasped her hands about her arms. A pirate. She prayed that was all he was and nothing more—nothing worse.
When she thought about Brett, her mind stopped wandering and became mired as in bayou mud. Where was he tonight? What was he eating tonight? Was he still free?
Still alive?
She finally gave up and went to bed on a pallet in a back room she would share with three of Gabriel’s sisters. Earlier in the day they had taken her in hand, fixing her a bath and providing her with a loose-fitting cotton dress, of the kind they wore. She hadn’t seen a single corset or bonnet since she arrived. With nothing else to sleep in, she lay down in the dress, smoothing the material beneath her to minimize wrinkling.
“Me, I’ll wake you early,” Gabriel had told her after translating the sleeping arrangements from his mother’s French.
Delta had nodded. Then her eyes sought his. “Do you think he’s all right?”
Gabriel had shrugged, then grinned. “Ah, Delta, you are the dreamer. Go to sleep and dream sweet dreams of him, sure.”
Lying alone now in the back room that smelled sweetly of cypress, sounds of the family reunion drifted to her—Gabriel’s voice and his fiddle, an accordion played by someone else. She visualized again the warmth in Gabriel’s eyes and heard his teasing good night wish. Delta, he had called her. Dream sweet dreams, he had said.
After days of silence or terse replies, he had suddenly called her by name and wished her sweet dreams. She tried to imagine what could have changed his opinion of her, finally deciding it must have been when she called the forest beautiful. He was a strange man, a private man, like Brett. Did Brett have the same deep feelings for this country? For his family? If so, how had he been able to stay away ten long years? Only something truly terrible—heinous he had called it—would have kept him from such a family, from this land he loved.
Her body ached from the unaccustomed walking they’d done the last two days, and before she realized it, she was drifting off to sleep. Then Gabriel’s voice came from the porch. He spoke in French, so she didn’t understand his words.
Except for the name he spoke.
Anatole Dupré.
Brady Jarrett lived in a two-story townhouse on Toulouse Street one block from his Chartres Street Tavern. The house was designed with an upstairs galerie rimmed with fancy iron grillwork and a central courtyard with fountain and a myriad of blooming flowers.
Ellie and Aurelia Jarrett sat in the courtyard enjoying the warm spring afternoon, while their husbands Kale and Carson tried their hand at mixing proper Southern-style mint juleps.
“Brady told you not to add so much sugar.” Carson reached across his brother Kale, grabbed a handful of mint leaves and began tearing them apart.
“That’s not the way Brady said to do it,” Kale objected.
From the table their wives looked on in amusement. Even though Aurelia still spoke little English, she and Ellie had become instant friends and their journey to New Orleans from Summer Valley, where Ellie and Kale lived, had solidified their relationship.
“Here comes Cousin Brady, now,” Ellie told the men. “You can ask him yourselves.”
But one look at the ashen-faced Brady Jarrett and both women jumped from their chairs and ran to help him. Unlike most of the Jarretts, Brady was neither very tall nor very trim. Perhaps his years running an eating establishment, had resulted in his portly figure.
“Cousin Brady,” Ellie questioned, taking his arm to lead him to a chair at the wrought iron table, “are you ill?”
Aurelia gripped Brady’s other arm. While Ellie seated the man in one of his own iron chairs, the bolder Aurelia loosened his silk tie and began to unbutton his starched collar.
“Are you—?” Aurelia looked helplessly to Carson, then back to the stricken man. “Are you choking on food?” she asked in hesitant English.
Brady smiled at her successful attempt. “No, my dear.” Shifting in the chair, he inhaled a deep breath that stressed the bu
ttons on his already tight vest. He lifted a hand, fluttering a telegram from his pudgy fist.
Kale and Carson had by now joined the group at the table, and Kale took the paper.
“It just arrived,” Brady explained as though he were out of breath.
Kale pursed his lips as he read. The group watched his jaws clench. His face turned pale. The telegram trembled in his fingers. “Sonofabitch.” The word whispered through his lips.
Ellie rushed to Kale’s side. “What is it?”
“Delta—”
“Delta what?” Carson took the telegram from Kale’s limp fingers, while Kale found his voice and told the ladies the spirit of the message.
“It’s from Cameron. Delta’s turned up missing from that showboat. She may have been … kidnapped.”
While he spoke. Aurelia had busied herself pouring Brady a glass of lemonade, which she now handed him. “Drink,” she instructed.
Ellie gasped at Kale’s words. Her eyes held his. “Delta?” she questioned. “Our dear Delta?” Clasping her husband about the waist, she buried her face in his chest. His arms trembled when they came around her. In her mind Ellie saw Delta as she had last seen her, laughing and enjoying herself at the ranch. She saw Delta’s blue eyes, the same blue as Kale’s. Perhaps because of all the Jarrett children they alone had blue eyes, Kale and Delta had been even closer than the others.
Carson tossed the telegram to the table and Aurelia moved to his side, slipping a comforting arm around him. For a moment the only sound in the courtyard was of the slight breeze rustling the leaves of the crape myrtle trees and water gently splashing in the fountain.
Brady found his voice and related the rest of the message to the women. “Cameron’s agent in Baton Rouge reported it. Seems no one is sure exactly what happened. She may have gone off on her own or she may have been kidnapped. Either way the man involved is a criminal.”
Tears fell silently from Ellie’s eyes.
Sunrise Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Three Page 28
