The Buck Stops Here

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Thirty-Six

  Our journey brought us full circle, and we arrived back in familiar territory by sunset without my ever realizing that we had turned around. The swamp was a confusing place, but Armand seemed to know every cypress stump and millet field as if they were road signs. By the end of the day I had counted 15 alligator sightings, along with 12 snakes and a multitude of snapping turtles. The swamp was beautiful, but it was also wild. Armand was sorry that we did not spot any bears or deer. According to him, the swamps were full of all kinds of animals, especially wild boar.

  Back at his dock, I was surprised to see a celebration going on, and Armand explained that he had asked his aunt to put together a “crawfish boil and fais do-do,” a sort of dance party, in my honor. I was a bit humbled until he added that they were always looking for an excuse to party—and that the last one had been a mere ten days ago to celebrate the running of the brown shrimp.

  Back on shore I was introduced to Armand’s friends and relatives, most of them Cajun. Tables had been set up on the back lawn and topped with newspapers, and there was a gigantic pot boiling on an outdoor cooking fire, filled to the brim with crawfish. Truly, I felt as if I were in a foreign land, since just about everyone over the age of 30 was speaking not English but Cajun French. Three of the people were playing music—one on an accordion, one on a fiddle, and one wearing a sort of washboard which he ran up and down with metal spoons. Armand said the washboard was a frottior, which was a common instrument in zydeco. I didn’t know much about that. I just knew I loved it.

  As it turned out, Armand’s aunt, whom he introduced as Ton Ton, was the woman I had seen him talking with on the dock earlier. At first glance I thought she was in her sixties, but once we were face-to-face, I realized that she was merely weathered and probably only in her forties. Her skin was deeply tanned and wrinkled, her hands red and gnarled. She treated me oddly, as if she were suspicious of me, and I had to wonder if she was being territorial about her nephew. Certainly, the two of them were close, and as the evening wore on, I learned that she had raised him herself, serving as a mother to her sister’s child. According to Armand’s godmother, Big Nanan, Armand was their pride and joy. Between his looks, brains, and charm, I didn’t find that surprising at all.

  Armand eventually rescued me from his family and swept me into a dance. After that I had a series of dance partners, all of them friendly, many of them accidentally stomping on my toes as I tried to learn the Cajun Two-Step.

  As I danced I kept thinking about what I had seen that morning, when Armand’s aunt had gone into that little shed at the back of her property so suspiciously. Once it was dark, I thought I might be able to slip away from the crowd and take a peek in the shed for myself. People were so wrapped up in the dancing and the conversation that, finally, I seized the opportunity to slip away by pretending I had to get something out of my car.

  I walked around the front of the house and opened the car door. Though it was too warm for a sweater, I pulled one on anyway, mostly for the dark coverage it gave my arms. I shut the car door and looked around, but I seemed to be alone and unobserved at the moment.

  I quietly backed away from the house, toward the road, until I was well hidden by the darkness. Then I walked as quickly as I could to the far side of the property, skirting along the brush line to get to Ton Ton’s backyard.

  It was dark—really dark.

  Without a full moon I didn’t have much to go on, and my terror was that I would walk straight into a snake or an alligator. I could hear all sorts of small rustlings in the bushes, but I kept my eye on the shed’s roofline, which was just sticking out from the edge of the brush.

  I reached the little building undetected. Once there, I didn’t dare go inside, just in case it housed a big alligator or something. Instead, I pressed my face to the window in the door. With the sound of my heart pounding between my ears, I waited for my eyes to adjust. There was something big in there, something metal that just barely glinted in the small amount of light that came in from a hole in the ceiling. I squinted, trying to make out the familiar shape. In a flash I realized what it was, and I almost laughed out loud. It was a still—an old-fashioned, straight out of Prohibition-era, whiskey-making still!

  I felt like an idiot.

  I hurried silently out of there, retracing my steps across the back lawn and up the road to Armand’s driveway. I rejoined the party, ditching the sweater as soon as I got there because of the heat.

  After a while I had to admit that I was really enjoying myself. Everyone was so carefree and happy that it put me into a good mood too, despite all that had been going on in the past week. When the crawfish were ready, the people used metal colanders to scoop them out of the water and dump them in giant, steaming heaps on the tables. Once they had cooled a bit, the dancing and the music stopped and everyone dug in, grabbed a pile for themselves, and began to peel and eat.

  Armand led me to a spot at one of the tables but then immediately abandoned me to help bring out more drinks. Left to my own devices, I watched how everyone else peeled the crawfish and then tried my best to emulate them. The results were less than impressive, though no one seemed to notice except me. As I struggled with the delectable creatures, I chatted with the man across from me, a grizzled old fellow with no front teeth who delighted in telling me horror stories about past hurricanes. I knew he was exaggerating, but when he claimed to have straddled a tree trunk like a horse and ridden it all the way to Mississippi, even the others began catcalling him.

  Eventually, the person sitting next to me got up and left, and Ton Ton slid closer so we could chat. Mostly she talked about Armand, which was good, since the more I could learn about him, the better for my investigation.

  “That boy was the smartest thing to ever come out of these swamps,” she told me as she peeled a crawfish and popped the meat in her mouth. “He was so bright, nobody knew what to do with him.”

  She talked about his profound intelligence, saying that his repeated wins in the state science fair during his high school years led to a scholarship at LSU. Once he was there, he completed a double major in only three years—and finished graduate school in another two.

  Armand’s story sounded similar to James Sparks’, that of a child prodigy raised in poverty, his brains carrying him places that others in his situation could only dream of going. The difference between Sparks and Armand, though, was that while Sparks never let go of his desire for great wealth, Armand seemed oblivious to money. That he had eventually given up his career in programming and returned to his roots to fight for the swamp made him an intriguing fellow indeed.

  Eventually, Ton Ton seemed to warm up to me, though that could have had more to do with the vast quantity of beer she was consuming rather than my sparkling personality. She saw the difficulty I was having and finally, patiently, taught me how to peel a crawfish. Then she began to regale me with swamp tales of her own—mostly the lessons she had learned at the knee of her grandmother, a Houma Indian and renowned traiteur, or healer.

  “You got migraines, cher? ” she asked me. “I can cure dat, me. I can cure most anyting.”

  I would have been impressed with her homegrown swamp medicine, except that as she talked, I realized that many of her cures involved lighting candles and burning clippings of hair. It sounded like a lot of hocus-pocus to me, and the longer we talked, the more I realized she was as full of baloney as the guy with the hurricane stories. I was relieved when the music started up again and Armand finally pulled me into another dance. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but still I was surprised when the song ended and he suddenly put his hands on each side of my face and planted a kiss right on my lips. At least we were over to one side, in the shadows, where I doubt anyone had seen. Still, my heart raced and not with passion. I was upset.

  “Come on, Armand,” I said. “That was out of line. I told you this wasn’t a date.”

  “I don’t see a ring on your finger, cher. No ring, I figure a l
ady is up for grabs.”

  Despite the current problems between me and Tom, I wasn’t “up for grabs” and doubted I ever would be!

  “I have a boyfriend,” I said, wondering if, technically, that was still true.

  “Oh, come on,” he said, stepping closer, “what sort of ‘boyfriend’ would let you run around down here in the swamps all alone with a fellow that finds you so very beautiful?”

  There was a sexy lilt to his voice—and I could imagine this was how he worked his magic with the ladies—but I certainly wasn’t interested. I took a step back.

  “What sort of boyfriend?” I asked. “You know him, actually.”

  That stopped him.

  “I know him?”

  “Tom Bennett,” I said, studying his face.

  The news seemed to hit him like a bucket of cold water. First, a look of shock crossed his face. Then, much to my surprise, he threw back his head and laughed out loud.

  “It figures!” he cried. “It jus’ figures. Me and Tom been going for the same girls ever since the day we met.”

  “You have?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sometimes ’cause we was genuinely interested. Other times, just for the competition of it.”

  “Well, there’s no competition here,” I said. “I love Tom. I’m not looking for anyone else.”

  He nodded, running a hand through his hair.

  “Okay, I respect that,” he said, grinning. “Tom Bennett. How do you like that?”

  He seemed to work the concept through in his brain, finally looking at me again and nodding.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he said, reaching for my elbow. “You can catch me up on ol’ Tom and how he’s doing.”

  I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the crowd and glad for a break—and another chance to talk. To get away from the noise, we ended up strolling along the dark road in front of his house. This time the walking was a bit easier because Armand had grabbed a flashlight from his car and shined it on the ground in front of us. We made our way toward the end of the peninsula. As we walked, I told him a few current facts about Tom, that he was living and working in California and that we had met through my job with a foundation. My hope was that eventually I might be able to steer the conversation to the past, to Armand’s view of the Cipher Five.

  “How did you and Tom meet?” I asked him. “I’ve heard about the Cipher Five, so I know you worked together at one time.”

  “Tom gave me my first real job out of grad school,” he said. “It was fun, for a while. After the company folded, I did some other computer work, but my heart wasn’t in it. I finally gave up programming completely, except for my computer modeling stuff.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “My work to save the swamp is more important.”

  “But you’re so smart, Armand, so gifted in that area. Don’t you ever wish things had turned out differently?”

  We walked along with shells crunching beneath our feet. In the distance, I could hear the spirited strains of the zydeco band in Armand’s backyard.

  “Yeah,” he said softly, “sometimes I do wish things had turned out differently. It’s a long, bumpy road from idealistic kid to world-weary adult. Older and wiser ain’t always the best way to be.”

  “What about your friends,” I asked, “the other members of the Cipher Five? I know you see Beth and Phillip now and then. How about James Sparks?”

  I could sense Armand’s muscles tighten as he walked beside me. We reached the end of the road, where it petered out in somebody’s yard, so we turned around and headed back.

  “James was one messed up man,” he said finally. “I don’t know how much Tom told you, but in the end James stabbed us all in the back. I don’t like to think about it now. Too many ramifications that are out of our control.”

  I knew he was talking about the sale of their encryption program to terrorists, and I realized that maybe Tom wasn’t the only one who felt guilty about that.

  “Hey, cher, take a look,” he said, changing the subject. He pointed his light toward the brush on the side of the road—and two pairs of eyes glowed back at us.

  “What is that?” I asked, sudden panic showing through in my voice.

  “Well, they’re not gators, and they’re not frogs.”

  He stepped closer with the light so that we could see the creatures’ bodies—only to reveal two cute racoons.

  “Hey, that’s the stinkin’ little night bandits that get into my garbage,” he said. “If I had my gun with me, I’d shoot ’em.” Instead, he picked up a rock and tossed it at them. They ran away into the night, their striped tails disappearing into the weeds.

  When we reached his driveway, I decided it was a good point to call it a night. Though his yard was still full of people, most of them had come on foot or by boat, so my car wasn’t blocked in. I mused aloud whether I should go around back and thank his aunt personally for pulling the party together.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Knowing her, she’s face down in the Tabasco by now.”

  “Face down in the Tabasco?” I laughed.

  “Drunk. She likes to party, her.”

  I didn’t tell him that I figured that out myself as soon as I spotted her whiskey still.

  I thanked him for the day, for everything he had done to share this beautiful, amazing part of the world with me. To his credit Armand did not make another pass at me. He simply tipped his imaginary cap and thanked me for the pleasure of my company out in the swamp today. As I climbed into my car, he said that he hoped to see me at Friday night’s ball—and that if he did, he would appreciate the pleasure of a dance. With a smile, I told him that was fine, as long as it wasn’t a slow dance.

  “I don’t blame you, cher,” he said, grinning. “One slow dance wit’ me, and you’d never think about Tom Bennett again.”

  Laughing, I drove away into the black night. As I went, the sounds of zydeco fading into the background, I couldn’t help feeling that I was leaving some foreign land where they spoke other tongues and ate other foods and danced to a music that was very much their own.

  Thirty-Seven

  Back at the hotel, I was just slipping under the covers when my cell phone rang from across the room. I jumped up and grabbed it, wondering who could be ringing me at this hour. As it turned out, it was my PI friend Gordo Koski calling from Albany, Georgia.

  “Sorry to call so late,” he said, “but you said you wanted to hear from me as soon as I learned anything.”

  I assured him that it wasn’t too late, that I was glad he had called. Bringing the phone back to the bed, I piled up my pillows and sat against them.

  “So guess who’s my new best friend?” Gordo said.

  “Les Watts, the prison guard?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Gordo, I know you’re good at what you do, but it’s only Tuesday. What are you, some kind of miracle worker?”

  He just laughed.

  “This guy’s pretty friendly, so it hasn’t been all that hard. You wanna know what I learned?”

  “Please.”

  “Well, you guessed correctly. Watts is a guard at the prison, but he’s also working for someone on the side, someone who isn’t local.”

  “Okay.”

  “Right now, he’s in a bad way. He’s in big trouble with his boss, whoever that is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because on Friday afternoon he was supposed to be home waiting on a package, and instead he was off drinking at a local bar. The package either never came or it disappeared once it did, ’cause Federal Express says they delivered it. This has caused a big ruckus. He’s really sweating it out.”

  My heart raced. That was the package I had stolen! Suddenly, I wondered if my simple act of theft might end up costing a man his life.

  “Do you think he’s in physical danger?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know, but he’s pretty worried. I’m not sure what was supposed to be in the package, but I get the feeling h
e’s some sort of liaison. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say there’s blackmail going on.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “That’s just a shot in the dark. But Watts is your go-between, whatever’s going on.”

  Blackmail.

  If that were the case, then who was Watts a go-between for—and on which end of the transaction was James Sparks? Though I wasn’t sure, I had a feeling that he was the one doing the blackmailing.

  “Did he say what was supposed to be in the package?”

  “Nope. I didn’t push it. But he invited me over to his house tomorrow night after work to watch the baseball game. I’ll get into it more then.”

  “Can you look for phone bills while you’re there?” I asked. “I’m trying to find out who he’s in contact with here in New Orleans.”

  “I can try,” he replied. “I’ll call you once I have something more.”

  We hung up and I fell asleep after that, dreaming of the swamp. In my dream, I was in a canoe without a paddle, just holding onto the sides and letting the current sweep me along. The sky was full of twinkling stars, and then, suddenly, the stars flew down from the sky and began hovering all around me, glowing like eyes in the night.

  Thirty-Eight

  The next morning I was back at the Family HEARTS office, where Veronica gave me all of the paperwork I had been waiting for. I needed space to work in, so she offered me a desk in the empty computer room. Once there, I opened my laptop and then began entering some of the information she had given me into my database.

  Family HEARTS was looking good. I faxed their audits to Harriet, who was cool to me over the phone but professional enough to do her job anyway. The sad thing was, I knew that even when all of this was over, I could never explain any of it to her. Tom’s secrets were my secrets now, and it would always have to be that way.

  While Harriet worked on the audits on her end, I crossed off several more criteria myself. The salaries and benefits for employees were right in line with what they should be. I also liked their spending in other areas. I had to get the final determination from Harriet, but as far as I was concerned, the money that flowed through Family HEARTS was being handled responsibly. In fact, the quantity and quality of volunteerism within the organization was so impressive that I made a note to ask Veronica how she did it. A lot of money that other nonprofits spent on personnel, Family HEARTS was managing to save by using so many volunteers.