The Unknown Woman

by Laurie Paige

“I do mourn Patti, but not in an acute way—more like for an old friend from years ago. I can’t change anything that happened in her life, so I’ll remember only that she was kind to me, a stranger in town who felt a little lost that first day. This may sound odd, but in a way she’s given purpose to this trip, which I’d thought was a waste of time, although I couldn’t tell my sister and friends that.”

  “But you don’t feel that way anymore?”

  Emotions too fleeting to be identified flashed through her. “No, not anymore.” Her voice was unexpectedly shaky.

  “I’m glad we met, even in these circumstances,” he told her. He flicked her a glance. “Very glad.”

  She nodded.

  Matt drove west on the interstate, then turned south on a road that would take them to New Iberia, the heart of Cajun country. A lot of the land southwest of New Orleans was salt marsh. At times the route was on a raised causeway surrounded by reeds that grew thick in shallow basins of water.

  The ravages of the terrible hurricane season the year before last were still visible in uprooted trees and houses crushed by the wind and water. Many residents had obviously decided not to return.

  “Look, in that tree.” She whispered, although the beautiful white birds couldn’t hear her.

  “Cranes,” he said.

  Other long-legged birds stood in the water, dipping to grab a tempting morsel every now and then. Wispy clouds floated overhead.

  “The clouds are thicker than when we first set out,” she said.

  “The weatherman said there would be no rain this week.”

  “Yeah, and in Minnesota he forecast possible snow flurries and those flurries are now over a foot deep.”

  They laughed together, and the conversation remained lighthearted until they reached St. Martinville. Matt slowed, then pulled into a parking space. “There’s something here I thought you might like to see.”

  She followed him without question, something she wouldn’t normally have done. She would have wanted to know why they’d stopped and what they were going to see.

  Trust, she thought as he took her hand and led her down the street. She trusted this man. The insight caused a warm glow inside her.

  “Oh,” she said when he stopped in front of a lovely statue of a woman, seated, a long cloak draping her shoulders and back. The base the statue sat upon was a crypt, Kerry realized, an above-ground vault like those at the cemetery in New Orleans.

  “Evangeline,” she said, reading the statue’s inscription.

  “She was immortalized in Longfellow’s poem as the symbol of a love that never faltered,” Matt murmured.

  “And was never fulfilled,” she whispered. “When she found Gabriel after years of searching, he’d married someone else and gone on with his life.”

  She stared up at Matt, anguish clutching her heart. What if she’d never met this man? What if they parted next week and never saw each other again?

  A worried frown lined his brow. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought you here. You and your tender heart,” he added, his eyes filled with…tenderness? concern? regret? Did he regret meeting her?

  She swallowed hard. “No, no. It was thoughtful of you. I would have been disappointed if I’d realized we were so close and I’d missed it.”

  He glanced at his watch. “It’s after twelve. Shall we go?”

  They returned to the car and soon arrived at a small bayou town called Indigo.

  “Indigo is a plant, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes. It was grown commercially in the area for blue dye. I don’t know if it still is.”

  The town was built on a graceful curve of road that followed the bayou, which Kerry could see beyond the town “square,” which was really a lawn.

  Matt surprised her with a picnic lunch packed by the Hotel Marchand. Another indication of his thoughtfulness, she noted. They ate on the grassy grounds of the town square.

  “How did you know picnics were one of my favorite things?” she demanded, opening a covered plastic plate that was filled with roasted chicken bites, mandarin orange slices and crisp noodles on a bed of mixed greens.

  He handed her a container of dressing and a napkin and fork, then opened the bottle of sparkling rosé that was included. “Because I like them, too,” he said, giving her a quick perusal that made her head feel as if she’d already had a couple of glasses of wine. “I’ve noticed we like a lot of the same things.”

  She nodded and wondered if her eyes were as sparkly as she felt inside. “Look at that building at the head of the square,” she said, to distract her disquieting thoughts. “It’s pretty fancy.”

  “We’ll go over after we eat and check it out.”

  Forty minutes later they strolled across the lawn and paused in front of the ornate building. It was an antique shop, but a brochure explained that it had once been an opera house, a gift from a local plantation owner to his wife.

  “That was wonderful of him.”

  Matt ruffled her bangs. “Yeah. Men like to do things for the women they love.”

  A warm, happy glow spread over Kerry, but ever cautious, she tamped it down. “We’d better go if we expect to get back to the city before dark.”

  “What happens then?” Matt questioned wryly. “Do we turn into vampires?”

  “Or werewolves,” Kerry said crisply. She got into the rental vehicle without waiting for his help and had her seat belt fastened by the time he was inside.

  She was, she felt, in danger of wearing her heart on her sleeve. The statue, then the opera house, touched her in ways she couldn’t explain, except that both represented a deep, abiding love. And then there was Matt’s thoughtfulness. It made her want to wrap herself around him and never let go.

  Taking a deep breath, she vowed not to embarrass either of them by assuming too much. Instead she commented on the old buildings and the charm of the countryside, plus the pleasure of being in Cajun country, which she’d read about before leaving White Bear Lake.

  Matt, she noticed, had a note in his hand. He checked it, then made a turn onto a dusty road so narrow she hoped they didn’t meet another car. He took a left when the road split, then another later on.

  “Hmm, see if you can figure out our next turn,” he said, passing the directions to her.

  “Who told you how to get here?”

  “Jason Pichante. I saw him yesterday. I got the name of the town from him and directions to the plantation from the parish maps.”

  “Good work.” She hesitated. “There seemed to be so much anger in Jason when we met him at the warehouse.”

  “There still is. I think it’s directed as much at himself as his father.”

  “Because he abandoned Patti? I think he was the date she was with, don’t you?”

  Matt shrugged. “Maybe. We seem to have reached a dead end. Did I miss a turn?”

  She read over the directions. “No, we did everything written here. Maybe we turned too soon at some point.”

  “Or too late,” Matt added with a frown.

  “There’s a house up that lane. I can see it through the trees. That may be the place.”

  Matt backed up and turned into a weed-choked lane. A small house sat in the middle of a tidy, flower-strewn yard. “Not exactly a plantation,” he said.

  A woman came outside and observed them as they climbed out and walked up a brick path to the front porch. The small home was built high off the damp ground.

  Matt introduced Kerry and himself and explained that they were lost. “Cordon Rouge is…was the name of the place we’re looking for,” he finished. “It’s part of a preserve now, I understand.”

  “It’s difficult to get to,” the woman said. “The road has not been maintained.”

  Tall and thin, she had skin the color of coffee laced with cream. Her eyes were light green, like those of a kitten Kerry’s grandmother had raised. She wore a long black skirt with a starched and ironed long-sleeved white blouse.

  Like the old voodoo queen, h
er age was indeterminate. Kerry guessed she must be in her eighties or nineties.

  “Why do you wish to go there?” she asked.

  Matt and Kerry glanced at each other before he said, “It’s a favor for a friend.”

  “A young woman?” she asked.

  The hair stirred on Kerry’s neck as Matt nodded.

  “Come,” she now said, “and sit. You’ve had a long trip and will need something refreshing.” She disappeared inside the house.

  Kerry glanced up at Matt. He shrugged and took her arm, guiding her to a swing attached to the rafters of the porch. When the woman reappeared, he got to his feet and opened the screened door for her.

  She served them tall glasses of iced tea with sprigs of mint on top and passed a plate of pecan cookies. After setting the tray on a low table and taking a seat in a cane-bottomed rocking chair, she studied them with those all-seeing eyes.

  “What has happened to Patti?” the woman asked quietly.

  Kerry actually gasped aloud.

  Matt bowed his head slightly in acknowledgement of the woman’s insight. “She died.”

  “What was the cause?”

  Matt explained about the reaction to the love potion.

  The woman said nothing, and the silence seemed electric with tension. Kerry shivered although the day was warm. At last the old woman made the sign of the cross, her gaze on the horizon as if she saw things they couldn’t. “Then she didn’t take her own life. I thank the good Lord.”

  “You knew her personally?” Matt asked.

  “She and her father and grandfather. I am Atta. I was the housekeeper when Patrick Ruoui committed suicide. After setting fire to the house and barn, he stood by the bayou and shot himself in the head. I have never understood how he could be so selfish.”

  “Selfish?” Kerry questioned.

  “Selfish,” Atta stated, “to leave a grieving child behind. Patti’s mother had died the year before. The girl needed him more than ever. The shame of it,” she added sternly.

  “He was losing the plantation,” Matt said.

  The wisdom of the ages seemed to reside in Atta’s eyes as she gazed at him. “There was no plantation.”

  “Patti said Cordon Rouge was her home,” Kerry told her.

  “No, no. That was the old place. I was born there. It was taken by the state for back taxes and became a nature preserve some seventy years ago, all but this bit of land and my house. Patti’s great-grandfather deeded this to my mother. Patti and her parents had another, smaller place near here, land that had once bordered the original plantation. It was bought and deeded to Patrick’s father before the grandfather lost the plantation.”

  Kerry realized that the image she’d had of Patti living in a grand, but time-worn plantation in genteel poverty was totally wrong. “So it was a lie,” she murmured, “the plantation and the life….”

  “Perhaps,” Atta said. “Who knows what is in the mind of another?” She gestured toward the charm bracelet. “You wear the three bones. Do you not know what they mean?”

  “No.”

  “They represent three worlds, or manifestations. The material world—” she indicated everything they could see with a sweeping embrace of her arms “—the world we each create in our own minds and the spiritual world of which we know little.”

  Kerry thought of Patti’s spirit. Where should she put Patti’s ashes so that her troubled soul would find peace? “Can you tell us how to find Patti’s home, the place she lived before her parents died?”

  Atta nodded. “It was a cotton farm. On good bottom land, too. But Patrick wasn’t a farmer or a businessman, either. He had dreams of returning to the glory of the old days. He put those dreams into Patti. It was never to be.”

  The finality of the statement dropped like a heavy rock within Kerry. She felt a sharp tug of sorrow. How must Patti have felt when her father shot himself?

  “What happened after the death of Patrick Ruoui?” Matt asked.

  Atta turned her probing gaze from Kerry to Matt. “After the house was closed, I went to work at the aunt’s home—”

  “Patti’s aunt? The one she lived with?”

  “Yes.” The old woman glanced back at her. “It was a hard time for the girl. She wasn’t wanted.”

  Kerry nodded, unable to look away from the anger in Atta’s eyes. She touched her bracelet, found the cross that had been blessed and held on to it.

  “The aunt was weak and the uncle was cruel,” Atta said. Her voice became fierce. “That fine, rich house was no place for a child of any kind.”

  Kerry felt Matt’s hand on hers, comforting and re assuring.

  “But Patti was special,” Atta told them, her voice softening. “She had a good soul, an old one. She survived. When she left for New Orleans and the college, I knew she would never return.”

  “And she didn’t,” Kerry concluded.

  “Tell me of her death,” the old woman commanded. Her voice was quieter now, like the sound of the wind through the moss that draped the trees.

  Matt told her of finding Patti in his room on Twelfth Night, of the healing ceremony and the old voodoo queen.

  Atta closed her eyes and rocked slowly back and forth. “It will change your lives, this tragedy,” she finally said.

  Follow the shining path…

  The words hummed through Kerry as she clung to Matt’s hand. Her very soul felt in tumult, and the sensation spread through her, urgent and almost frightening in its intensity.

  “Kerry and I did the cleansing rite,” Matt said. “A cremation. We want to put her ashes in a place where she was once happy. That’s why we were looking for the plantation.”

  “The marsh has reclaimed it.”

  “Perhaps we should go to the other place, the cotton farm,” he said.

  Atta stared at them, obviously troubled. She finally nodded. “I wouldn’t have thought so, but perhaps you are right. You have been entrusted by the spirits with this deed, so only you can know for certain. But be sure before you spread the ashes. The ritual must be performed correctly for her spirit to find its rest.” She looked at Kerry. “You must do it. You will know…”

  Her voice trailed off but her gaze remained fixed on Kerry. The old woman nodded again, as if satisfied that Kerry was the chosen one for this task.

  Almost without realizing it, Kerry nodded, accepting the quest as hers. “How do we find this other place?”

  Atta gave them directions that would take them back to the gravel road and farther down the track. They were told that no one went there anymore, so the road would be overgrown by weeds, but they could get through.

  They thanked Atta and started down the steps. “By the way,” Matt said, “if we wanted to find Cordon Rouge or whatever is left of it, where would we look?”

  “You can find the ruins,” Atta said, “if you follow the carriage road to the house.”

  She indicated the lane they’d arrived on. Kerry realized it continued past the cottage and into the cypress bog beyond…to Cordon Rouge.

  MATT KEPT AN EYE on the sky as he carefully navigated the long-unused road to the old cotton farm. The white-layered clouds of the morning had built into dark thunderheads.

  He was thankful the farmhouse where Patti was born was no more than a mile from the cottage, but it took twenty minutes to get there. Weeds hit the front grill of the rental car with a steady thump. In places the road was so boggy, he’d driven as close to an old fence as possible to keep from getting stuck.

  “Here it is,” he announced as they came to the end of the road. When he got out of the car, he rotated his shoulders, trying to relieve the tension that had collected between his shoulder blades.

  Glancing at Kerry’s pale face, he decided it had been a mistake to bring her here. But if he hadn’t, he knew she would have somehow made it here on her own. He exhaled a deep breath and took her arm as they met in front of the vehicle.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, “but also wild and lonely.”
>
  He studied the burnt remains of the house. It had been a rather modest two-story with chimneys bracketing each end. Those and the foundation were all that could be identified. Vines had grown over everything else.

  She gestured toward the backyard. “There would have been a garden, don’t you think?”

  Following Kerry, he helped search for signs of a garden or something recognizable from the farm.

  Nothing.

  An eerie sensation slid along his neck. The place felt lifeless, as if its soul had long departed.

  He shook his head slightly, negating the notion. He was letting all this voodoo business get to him.

  Beyond the house, the ruins of a barn and some tumbledown fences, the land had reverted to nature. Wild rice grew along the bayou, and the cypress trees were draped in Spanish moss. Waist-high weeds discouraged wandering about.

  “Watch those thistles,” he cautioned, pulling Kerry a bit closer with an arm around her shoulders.

  “They look vicious.” She leaned her head against him as they stopped at the end of a broken brick path. There was no gate, but a fence indicated the area had once been enclosed.

  “Perhaps this was a garden once,” he told her.

  She nodded. Glancing back at the house, then over the backyard again, she sighed. “This isn’t the place. I can’t leave Patti…her ashes…here. It isn’t her spiritual home.”

  Matt refrained from questioning her, knowing that logic didn’t apply in this case, only Kerry’s instincts. “Then we’ll find another place.”

  She looked up at him, her face solemn. “Thank you, Matt, for accepting something that I don’t really understand. It’s just that I feel this isn’t the right place.”

  “I know.” His voice resonated with the desire to caress and comfort her.

  He’d been close to his sister—growing up, they’d had only each other in many ways—but he’d never been so in tune with another person. He seemed to know instinctively what Kerry was feeling, as if their spirits were joined.

  “Kerry,” he murmured. “Sweetheart.”

  He kissed her then, and she wound her arms around his neck, returning the embrace with equal passion. When he lifted her off her feet, she swung her legs around his hips, making a snug fit against him. He groaned as the kiss became more intense, wilder, almost savage as their bodies demanded more.