Under the Cajun Moon

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Boom boom!” the old woman cried gleefully.

  “Okay, honey,” Josie said to the old woman, shaking her head as she scooped another spoonful from the bowl. “She’s been saying that all week. Between heidi ho and boom boom I’m about to lose my mind.”

  “Boom boom!”

  “Are you related to all of these people?” Travis asked.

  Josie replied that her only relative here was Ben, but that she took in the others so that she could afford to stay home and care for him.

  “Your father is a very lucky man,” Travis said, giving her an encouraging smile. “Your hands must really be full.”

  “That’s an understatement.” We got an idea how full as she began to describe her days, an endless series of diapers and meals, medications and baths, living in a house with four other people, not one of whom understood a word she said. Still, she continued, she loved her father very much and was willing to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to keep him at home and be there with him. “I didn’t mean to go on and on like that. Y’all caught me on a bad day. A bad week, actually. My relief worker usually comes in twice a week for a couple hours, but she quit recently, so now I’m stuck without any help at all.”

  “Doesn’t the tribe offer support in a situation like this?” Travis asked.

  “He’s already in their elder care program. They do so much, bringing meals and performing health screenings and things like that. I just can’t ask for more—especially because the other three who live here aren’t even tribe members. They’re just local folks who needed help and couldn’t afford a nursing home.”

  Travis and I looked at each other, and the thought that kept going through my mind was that this woman couldn’t have had anything to do with my father’s shooting. Still, there had to be some reason my father referred to her in his message.

  When she finished feeding the old woman, Josie wiped her face clean, patted her arm, and told her to sit tight as she was just going to see to the others, and once everyone had their dinner, she would get her bath.

  “Bath! Heidi ho!”

  Josie invited us to follow her into the next room down the hall, and I was touched to see that Travis offered to feed the man who was lying in the bed there so that Josie could focus on his wife.

  “Sure, thanks. He manages pretty well, don’t you, Colonel? Just sit him up and help him with the spoon to get him started.”

  As each of them tended to their patients, I suddenly felt like a third wheel. Travis tended to the old man so tenderly, I had to wonder if he had experienced caring for the elderly before.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and asked Josie some more questions, still trying to figure out if she might be able to think of anything that could help us. About the only thing that was accomplished in the next fifteen minutes, however, was the feeding of the two old folks. Otherwise, our conversation was mostly fruitless, revealing only that Julian Ledet had come by only once or twice in the past few years, both times when he was in the area and wanted to stop in to see Ben and bring him a little treat.

  “He brought my father a tray of his favorite sweets each time,” Josie said, “ones he made himself. I guess it never dawned on him that my dad no longer has the teeth now to eat anything with nuts and caramel.” Other than that, she said the two men had no real interaction. When asked, she said she didn’t know anything about a quantity of filé, and that she’d never heard or seen something like that among her father’s papers.

  Eventually, I had to admit this visit was a dead end. I was ready to get out of there, but Travis was still helping the man with his spoon and didn’t seem to be picking up my signals. We could hear the old woman in the front room calling out more booms and heidi hos.

  “She sounds like a parrot in there,” Travis said to Josie, smiling.

  “The heidi ho’s I can take,” she replied, “it’s this new boom boom stuff that’s driving me crazy.”

  “When did that start?” Travis asked, and again I tried to catch his eye to tell him we needed to go.

  “I don’t know. Monday afternoon, I guess.”

  Travis looked to me and then back to Josie.

  “Do you know what started it?”

  Josie said she assumed it was something the old woman had heard on TV. I stepped forward, my mind racing.

  “She’s been hollering out ‘boom boom’ since Monday? What time Monday?”

  Josie looked at me, obviously startled by my sudden interest.

  “I’m not sure. Why?”

  “Because my father was shot on Monday,” I replied. “Monday at noon.”

  “Around here?”

  I asked Travis where we were in relation to Paradise and he said that it was due east. Looking from Josie to me, he explained in more detail, saying that Paradise was about ten miles away as the crow flies, maybe fifteen minutes by car, but at least twenty or maybe even twenty-five minutes by water. Because there had been blood on the property, we had assumed that was where my father was when he got shot. But now I had to wonder if maybe the shooting had been in a different location, and that the blood had somehow gotten to Paradise later.

  “Josie, did you hear anything unusual around here on Monday? Any kind of loud noise, something that would make her start saying ‘boom’?”

  Josie sat back, thinking, but as I waited for her reply, I observed a strange look coming across her features, a sort of comprehension combined with fear. I hoped for a moment we were on to something. Then she simply shook her head and avoided our eyes and told us that she had been around there all day every day for almost two weeks and in that entire time she had not heard a sound.

  Clearly, she was lying.

  Josie got rid of us almost immediately after that, and I found myself wishing suddenly that Travis and I had some sort of high-tech equipment, the kind they used in detective shows on TV. There was no doubt in my mind that once we were gone she was going to be contacting someone who was somehow related to all the questions we’d been asking her.

  Lacking anything more sophisticated than a pair of ears, I did the next best thing. When Travis and I reached the dock, I told him that I was going to sneak back up to the house and try to listen in at a window because I had a funny feeling she might call somebody and have an important conversation. Travis wouldn’t hear of it. He agreed that her behavior had turned very suspicious there at the end, but he said that if we really had scared her in some way, it would be a mistake to stick around now.

  “What do you mean? This might be the big break we need.”

  “Yeah, and sometimes to catch a gator, you gotta stick a pole in its nest. That doesn’t mean you stand around with your ear hanging out, waiting for him to bite it off!”

  “Come on, Travis! We’re wasting time.”

  “Fine,” he said, pulling off his hat, smoothing back his hair, and putting the hat on again. “But if we’re going to listen in, it’s going to be me at the window, not you.”

  With that, he was off and running, ducking into the bushes and carefully making his way back toward the house. Half of me was offended at the chauvinistic basis for his behavior. The other half was flattered.

  The first half won, of course, and soon I was in the bushes myself, trying to get up to the house from the other side. The windows were open, and I could hear conversation coming from inside. I crept behind a big wisteria bush that was right under the window, not realizing until I was in the thick of it that a sticker bush was hidden there as well. Trying not to cry out at the sharp pinpricks of the bush against my leg, I stepped the rest of the way over it and crouched there, straining to listen. From what I could tell, it didn’t sound like an urgent phone call. Instead it was Josie, speaking in a singsong voice to the old woman in the front room.

  “Honey, did you hear a big boom?”

  “Boom boom!”

  “Listen to me, sweetie, you can have your bath now, but you have to stop saying boom. Can you do that, can you not say those words anymore? No boom boo
m.” Both women were silent for a moment, and then Josie spoke again. “Do you understand? No more boom boom. That’s our little secret, okay?”

  “No boom.”

  “That’s right. No boom. You want your bath now?”

  “Bath! Bath!”

  The scrape of the chair followed by footsteps told me that Josie had left the room. More than anything, I knew we needed to call the police and get them out here right away.

  Otherwise, I was afraid that this bath might be the old woman’s last.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Despite the sticker bush behind me, I needed to disentangle myself from the wisteria as quickly as possible without being heard or observed. Looking around, I figured out my plan of escape. Inching forward behind the brush, I made it past the window and stood to step over an old black garden hose. At least I thought it was a garden hose. As I was about to move across it, however, suddenly it reared its ugly head, and I realized that it was a snake.

  A long, dark, nasty-looking snake.

  I froze. Just as the snake darted in for the kill, with a swish and a ping suddenly that snake was in two parts, both of them wriggling for a long moment before slowly growing still. My heart pounding furiously, I backed away, trying to catch my breath, and looked up to see Travis crouched nearby, a rusty old hoe in his hand.

  He had saved my life, cutting that snake into two with the hoe.

  We made it back to the boat in silence, though once we were there, I could see how furious he was. As for me, the adrenaline was kicking in, and I had to sit down in the boat fast, before my knees started buckling. Without a word, Travis started up the boat and drove us away from there, going a few minutes downriver until he finally turned up into an empty cove and cut the engine so we could talk.

  “I know you’re mad,” I said before he had the chance to say anything, “but it’s her, Travis. I heard her. She was telling the old lady not to say ‘boom’ any more that it was their little secret.”

  “Do you know what kind of snake that was?” he replied loudly. “It was a water moccasin, cher. One bite, and you would have been dead!”

  “I know, but—”

  “I don’t think you do know, Chloe. Didn’t I just teach you that you never, ever go up into any kind of brush in Louisiana without tapping a stick in it first to scare away snakes?”

  “You did, but—”

  “Snake like that, he was just minding his own business until you came along and scared him. He was responding the only way he knew how, by striking out. You should be dead now. If I hadn’t gone around to that side of the house looking for a better place to listen from, you would be dead now.”

  I realized Travis was so angry at me that he couldn’t hear the more important part of what was going on here. I apologized for stupidly putting myself in danger, and when he had calmed down a bit I added that in the end it had been a good thing that I did. I told him that not only was I afraid Ben’s daughter was the one who shot my father, but that I had a feeling she might do something to the old woman too, just to keep her quiet.

  “Did you see the way she took care of them in there?” Travis asked me, shaking his head. “She’s not capable of murder.”

  “I heard what I heard, Travis. She was talking to the old woman, telling her she couldn’t have a bath unless she stopped saying ‘boom.’ ”

  “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “You didn’t hear her tone of voice. She was threatening her.”

  “Fine, then. Maybe she did shoot your father, but I guarantee you she wouldn’t harm any of those old folks in there.”

  Regardless of what Travis said, I knew the old woman might be in danger. We needed to call the police and have them come right out. We just had to do it in the right way, so they wouldn’t end up arresting me instead of her.

  Travis came up with a plan that would buy us a little time. He called his grandmother and asked her if she knew Ben Runner’ daughter, Josie.

  “Good, good,” he said, giving me a thumbs-up. “Then I need you to do me a favor. Can you call her house and just act like you’re looking for me? Start chatting. I need you to keep her on the phone for a while…Uhhuh…I’ll explain later…Okay…just talk with her on the phone ten or fifteen minutes, okay? Thanks, Grandmere.” Travis hung up the phone and to me said, “Asking my grandmere to chat on the phone for ten minutes, that’s like asking a marathon runner to jog around the block.” Sliding the phone in his pocket, Travis laid out his intentions, saying that Josie wouldn’t do anything stupid as long as there was someone else on the other end of the telephone line. In the meantime he and I could remain hidden here in this private location, call the police, and tell them what we had seen and heard. That way, whether they ended up arresting her or not, at least they wouldn’t find us. I agreed that that sounded like the most prudent course of action.

  Still, I was afraid the police wouldn’t believe me, given that it was just my word against hers—and I was an accused murderer while she was an upstanding citizen who lovingly tended to a house filled with the elderly. I decided I might be better off calling my friend on the inside, Wade Henkins. He could relay the information to the local police, and the fact that he was a cop himself, albeit one who worked in New Orleans and not down here, would give it much more weight.

  “You said for me to call you if I needed help. I need help,” I told him once he answered my call.

  Wade listened as I explained to him what I had seen and heard, and how Josie was clearly lying. I repeated the words that she had said to the old woman, and Wade agreed that it was very suspicious indeed. “Even if she’s not the one who pulled the trigger, it sounds like she obviously knows more than she was letting on.”

  Wade seemed to understand my desire to avoid the police for the time being. He said that he would call them for me and then get back to me.

  “Are you somewhere safe in the meantime?” he asked. “You don’t need to tell me where you are. I just want to know that you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay for now, but I’ll feel better once the police have a chance to talk to Josie Runner and see for themselves what I’m talking about.”

  After we hung up, Travis asked me if I was sure that Wade himself could be trusted. He was the last person to see my father before he was shot, after all, Travis reminded me. And as a cop, he also carried a gun. In reply, I told Travis that I was just so grateful to the man for helping to move up my bail hearing that I hadn’t given his guilt or innocence much thought after that.

  “I guess we’ll know for sure soon,” I added, “depending on whether or not the police go to Josie’s. If they do, then Wade’s likely on the up-and-up. If they don’t, then that means he’s probably getting in his car in New Orleans right now, heading down here himself to come after us.”

  We waited there in tense silence until Travis’ phone rang about ten minutes later. He answered and had a brief conversation, finally disconnecting the call and returning the phone to his pocket.

  “Well, c’est ca. That was Minette, wanting to know why, in the middle of a conversation with her friend Josie, the police came knocking on the woman’s door.”

  I couldn’t help but smile, glad to know that I wasn’t wrong about Wade.

  “It would be bad manners for me to say I told you so, so I won’t say it. That I told you so.”

  “Sorry, but you can’t blame a Naquin for not trusting a Henkins. Our families have been feuding for years.”

  “Feuding? You mean like the Hatfields and the McCoys?”

  “Not exactly. Wade’s father and his father before him were not nice men. But I guess Wade himself is fine.”

  While Travis started our engine again, I thought about Wade’s story of how his father died and my father and Alphonse stepped into his life, kind of like big brothers. Between that and the anonymous gift of the college scholarship to Ben, at least this whole experience had given me a different picture of my dad. He could still be a jerk, but at least I knew now he could
also be a pretty nice guy sometimes too.

  “So where do we go next?” I asked.

  “I think we need to lay low until we find out what happens at Josie’s. In fact, we should probably put a little more distance between ourselves and her place, just in case the cops decide to come after us once she tells them that we got there by boat.”

  “Good idea.”

  Travis started up the engine and I put on my floppy hat again, even though the sun had already set and the darkness was fast approaching. Before we took off, he unhooked a big flashlight from under the seat, handed it to me, and told me to be ready to shine it out in front of us like a headlight once we needed it.

  Driving back down the river away from Josie’s, I thought about how badly I wanted to clear my name, to learn that the charges against me had been dropped. Beyond that, I wanted to know the details, the who and why and how of what had really gone on down here the day my father was shot and after that as well.

  As long as I was letting myself think of the things I wanted, I wanted to get out of this ridiculous getup and into some decent clothes, and I wanted to get back to New Orleans and go to the hospital. My mother and I had a lot of things to discuss, and I was not looking forward to that, but it would be worth putting up with her just to be able to finally see my father. I couldn’t believe that I had landed in New Orleans on Monday night, and here it was Wednesday evening and I still hadn’t seen him. After all I had been through in just two short days, I couldn’t believe that there was a good chance that all of this was finally coming to an end.

  From behind me, I heard Travis whistle, and I turned to see what he wanted.

  “Regardez!” he said, smiling and pointing toward the shoreline.

  I looked in the direction he indicated, to see a flock of huge white birds taking to the sky. As I watched them soar and dip in the encroaching darkness, I couldn’t help thinking about the one downside of this whole thing coming to an end: That would also mean an end of my time with Travis.