Louisiana Longshot

by Jana DeLeon

  I was beginning to see the wisdom of Marie hiding out there. No one in their right mind would want to set foot on the place.

  I dipped my finger in the Mentholatum again, this time pulling up a wad of the gel, and shoved the entire thing into my nostrils. I sniffed again to test, then drove my entire nose into the bottle.

  “It isn't usually this bad,” Gertie said.

  “Why is it this bad now?”

  “Because it's summer. Heat tends to ripen the aroma. No one comes here much until cooler weather. The speckled trout are huge.”

  “I don't care if the fish are covered in gold. I wouldn't come here ever.”

  “If you'd been to one of our all-night fish fries after a day on Number Two, you'd change your mind,” Gertie said.

  “Not unless you had a mind-numbing amount of beer, I wouldn't.”

  Ida Belle snorted. “Of course there's beer. Who has a fish fry without beer?”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “Southern Baptists?”

  Ida Belle waved a hand in dismissal. “That's only in front of other people. The Sinful Ladies don't count.”

  Gertie nodded and smiled. “Do you know why you always take two Baptists fishing?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Because if you take only one, he'll drink all the beer.” She laughed so hard, she doubled over on the bench.

  Ida Belle rolled her eyes. “That joke is as old as Gertie, but it never ceases to tickle her.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “You have all these religious rules, like no drinking, but you only observe them in front of other people?”

  “Yeah, that pretty much sums it up,” Ida Belle said.

  “But doesn't God see it?”

  “Oh hell,” Ida Belle said. “God doesn't care about drinking beer. All those rules were made up by people trying to prevent you from doing something really wrong. Drunks make stupid decisions. If you don't drink, there’s less chance of doing something stupid.”

  I saw her point in a very broad way, but as I'd managed to do plenty of stupid things completely sober—this exact moment being one of them—I decided to let the whole thing drop. Religion was by and large constructed by men, and I had yet to find a man who was logical. Deconstructing religious rules would definitely be a journey into madness.

  “Almost there,” Ida Belle said. “Fortune, grab that pylon at the dock and pull us alongside where the ladder is.”

  I turned around and almost got a face full of wood. If I hadn’t had the reflexes of a trained killer, that’s exactly what would have happened. Instead, I threw my hands up in front of my face and pressed them against the pylon. When the boat came to a stop, I reached for the rope and tied the boat off to the dock.

  “Good job.” Ida Belle nodded approvingly.

  “A little more notice would have been nice,” I replied.

  “Bah. I’m keeping you on your toes. You never know when you might have to move fast out here. Doesn’t do any good to get complacent.”

  “Trust me, I plan on moving at the speed of light out here.” I started up the ladder and got the top of my hip waders caught on a loose board. Ida Belle and Gertie just stood there, watching me struggle with the rubbery material and the piece of rotten wood until I finally wrenched the entire piece from the dock.

  “Okay, maybe the speed of sound,” I said as I climbed onto the dock.

  “Maybe we should have told her there was a bowl of banana pudding on the other side of the island,” Gertie said.

  I reached down to grab the shotgun Gertie handed me, not even bothering to argue. I hadn’t run down Main Street yesterday for banana pudding. Until yesterday, I didn’t even know what real banana pudding was. I’d run down Main Street because I couldn’t stand walking away from a challenge. All I cared about was finishing first. The pudding had turned out to be the icing on top, but it wasn’t the reason I’d carried tennis shoes into church.

  I put the shotgun on the deck and went to extend my hand to Gertie, but found she was already stepping onto the deck, with Ida Belle close behind. Apparently, they were schooled in the fine art of hip-wader climbing. I consoled myself by thinking I’d probably made it easier for them by removing that rotten piece of wood.

  Before I could make a move for the shotgun, Gertie swiped it up and gave me a look that said she wasn’t going to part with it easily. I wasn’t about to get in a wrestling match with an old woman carrying a loaded weapon, especially on an island of dung. With my luck, she’d shoot a hole in the boat and we’d be stuck here.

  “Where to now?” I asked.

  Ida Belle pointed off to the left. “That way. The camp’s right on the water…well, when there’s water. We can follow the bank right up to the front door.”

  I nodded and stepped off the deck and into the same inky goo that was in the bayou behind my house. I yanked my leg out of the goo and plodded up to more firm ground. Ida Belle trudged through the sludge and stepped past me down the left bank. I waited for Gertie to fall in line behind her and then picked up the tail.

  “So, what happens if Marie doesn’t want to leave?” I asked as we walked.

  “That’s not an option,” Ida Belle said, the tone of her voice leaving no doubt in my mind just how serious she was.

  “What if she’s not here?”

  “Where else would she be? Harvey’s boat is gone. I seriously doubt she’s gone offshore fishing, especially as she doesn’t even eat fish.”

  “You didn’t tell me Harvey’s boat was gone.”

  “We didn’t think to check until after Carter barged into your house this morning. Gertie called one of the Sinful Ladies, and she checked while you were getting ready to leave your house.”

  “So, if Marie took the boat and came here, then why wasn’t it at the dock?”

  “She probably drove it around the other side of the island where the brush is denser and hid it close to the bank.”

  “That sounds pretty sharp for a doormat housewife.”

  “We might have taught her a few things over the years,” Gertie said. “Just in case.”

  “In case she murdered her husband and needed to hide?”

  “No! Lord, the things you come up with. In case he was being particularly mean and she needed to get away for a while. Harvey was too stupid and lazy to have looked for a hidden boat. He would have checked the dock and assumed she wasn’t there. The only thing the man ever put energy into was chasing other women.”

  “So why didn’t Marie leave him?”

  “The money, of course. Marie didn’t have what you’d call marketable skills, and her own parents had been poor as church mice. The prenuptial Harvey’s family had her sign was airtight. If she left, it would be with the clothes on her back and that was it.”

  “But surely you guys would have helped her.”

  “Of course, and don’t think we didn’t offer a million times, some of us more stringently than others. But Marie wouldn’t hear of it because of Charlie.”

  “Who’s Charlie?”

  “Her brother,” Gertie piped in. “He was a surprise baby for her mother, so much younger than Marie. Back when I was a girl, we would have called Charlie ‘slow.’ Of course we know now that he’s got autism. He’s fairly high functioning after training, but until Marie got him into therapy and the group home where specialists worked with him, he had a pretty meager existence.”

  I frowned, beginning to get the picture. “And Marie was footing the bill for Charlie’s therapy and living expenses.”

  “Of course. Marie loves that boy more than anything in the world. Can’t blame her, really. He’s just as sweet as he can be. But all those doctors aren’t cheap, and none of us could afford to keep up with his care. We’re comfortable, but we’re not millionaires like Harvey.”

  I blew out a breath. If Marie was convicted of murdering Harvey, the courts would probably award the inheritance to his nearest living relatives.

  I’d felt bad enough for Marie just
knowing her husband abused her, but knowing she didn’t have another option—not a financially viable one anyway—cranked up my empathy to a place it had never been. She’d stayed all those years with a butthole to take care of her autistic brother. That was the kind of thing made-for-TV movies focused on.

  The woman was a hero, not a villain. From here on out, I’d stop complaining about helping Ida Belle and Gertie, who clearly had their hearts in the right place. If it meant Marie didn’t go to prison, it would be worth the hassle and definitely a more worthwhile project than packing up the belongings of a dead woman whom I was supposed to be related to.

  I glanced down at my watch. Almost fifteen minutes had passed. We had to be close. And just as that thought left my mind, we rounded a corner and there was the camp.

  It looked rather fancy for a camp, based on my experience in the desert, but I supposed it was too run down and slapped together to rate calling it a lake house. “Shack from a horror movie” was the best description I could come up with. The wood sides were weathered and warped in some places. The tin roof had holes rusted completely through in several areas. Good thing there hadn’t been a storm or Marie would have been swimming in there.

  We walked to the front door, which was constructed - badly - from a sheet of plywood. Although no sound came from inside, and I was fairly certain that Marie was not a bad person, my hand still hovered over my waistband as Ida Belle pushed open the door.

  “It’s empty,” she said, sounding defeated.

  Instantly, I relaxed my arm and dropped it at my side. Ida Belle stepped into the camp with me and Gertie in tow. The inside was just as run-down as the outside. A lopsided, wooden table stood in one corner, covered with chipped dishes and a Coleman stove. A cot piled high with rumpled blankets stood in the corner opposite the table. Makeshift shelves on the wall above the table contained boxes of dry food and cans of beans and corn. The floor was a mixture of dirt and trash.

  “It looks abandoned,” I said.

  “It pretty much has been,” Ida Belle said. “Marie never liked fishing.”

  “You guys just leave food sitting out at these places year-round?”

  “Most people leave some staples. Things that won't spoil.”

  “What about animals? This shack is hardly secure. Don't animals get in and eat things?”

  Ida Belle shook her head. “There aren't any animals on Number Two. Even birds don't land here.”

  I held in a sigh. Typical human shortsightedness. Animals wouldn't come near the place, so people thought it would be a good place to set up shop.

  “Well, ladies,” I said. “It looks like this was a bust. Clearly, Marie's not here.”

  “Ida Belle frowned. "No, but she was recently.”

  I spun around to look at her. “How do you know that?”

  “Because those blankets aren't filthy like everything else in here.”

  I lifted one of the blankets from the cot and smelled it. Sure enough, I got a nose full of fabric softener and Mentholatum.

  “Would she have gone anywhere else on the island?”

  “It’s not like it’s Hawaii or something,” Ida Belle said. “There’s nothing more out here than what’s right here—rundown camps, mud and cypress trees.”

  “Maybe she heard us coming and ran,” Gertie suggested.

  I stepped back outside and cased the outside of the shack. “The only prints I see are the ones we made getting here. So unless Marie can fly, she left long enough ago for the mud to fill in her tracks.”

  Ida Belle nodded. “Which means before high tide. The last would have been about eight hours ago.”

  “Well, I don’t think she would have left in the middle of the night,” I said, “so it’s probably safe to say she left before last night.”

  “Probably so,” Ida Belle agreed.

  “Then where is she now? The two of you have got to have more ideas than this stretch of stinking mud.”

  Gertie turned up her hands. “We don’t have a clue.”

  “None of you? All that strength and power you keep claiming the Sinful Ladies Society has, and not a one of you has an idea where Marie is?”

  Gertie shook her head. “We already told you that we didn’t fill the other ladies in on this. We were trying to keep it quiet.”

  I narrowed my eyes at them. “So I’m supposed to believe you were knitting at that Saturday-night meeting—just like you claimed to be on Sunday after church.”

  “We were knitting on Sunday,” Gertie said.

  “But not on Saturday night?”

  The guilty expression gave Gertie away completely. Ida Belle shot one look at Gertie and sighed.

  “Don’t ever commit a murder,” Ida Belle said to Gertie. “Everyone would know it was you in a heartbeat.”

  “I knew it. You’re weren’t knitting on Saturday night.”

  “No.” Ida Belle said.

  “So, what were you doing that was such a secret?”

  “Making moonshine.”

  I stared. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope.”

  “Moonshine? As in rednecks and brown jugs and prohibition?”

  Ida Belle drew herself up straight. “It hasn’t been illegal in quite some time. We’re hardly rednecks, and we put all of our moonshine into pretty pink cough syrup bottles.”

  My mind flashed back to Gertie chugging cough syrup before service on Sunday.

  “You were stoned at church?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Gertie said. “You only have a little cough syrup before church to take the edge off Pastor Don’s boring sermons and that choir that manages to sing everything off-key. It’s not like we’re on the toot.”

  “And what exactly does the pastor think about you drinking cough syrup at church?”

  “He thinks it keeps us from coughing, I guess.” Ida Belle narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you really think all those women in western days had all those cramps and headaches and such? But they all carried around laudanum. You know why—because the menfolk didn’t think anything of it.”

  “But none of you are married.”

  Gertie brightened up. “Oh, we sell it every year at the church bazaar. Probably every woman in Sinful has a case or two. It’s made the most money of all the offerings ten years running. Even more than Francine’s banana pudding.”

  Ida Belle nodded. “The rate of divorce in Sinful dropped twenty percent when we started selling the cough syrup.”

  I took a final look at the shack and shook my head. “Maybe you should have given Marie a double dose.”

  Chapter Nine

  The walk back to the dock seemed twice as long as the walk to the shack. Granted, the stench was growing worse with every degree that the temperature increased, but I don’t think that was what made it drag.

  Gertie and Ida Belle were worried. Seriously worried. They’d tried to hide it in stories about moonshine, probably figuring it would distract me from the anxious glances and fidgeting that had gone on in the shack, but I’d noticed. I noticed everything people did. It was a hazard of my profession.

  Things were looking worse and worse for Marie, and at this point, I didn’t have a single idea to offer up.

  We were walking single file back to the dock, except this time I was walking up front, while Gertie and Ida Belle lagged behind. I could hear their low whispers as I trudged along the bank, but I didn’t even try to listen. This whole situation was shaping up to a murder trial, and the last thing I needed was to be in the middle of that fiasco. It was probably better if my knowledge of the situation ended here.

  I rounded the last corner and started across the remaining twenty yards to the dock. When I stepped up on the dock, I turned around to offer a hand to help up Gertie and Ida Belle. They were about twenty feet behind me, Ida Belle frowning and Gertie looking so worried it made me feel bad all over again about the entire mess.

  I’d barely tuned in to the faint rustle of marsh grass on the far side of the clearing wh
en the alligator rushed out of the brush behind Ida Belle and Gertie, moving faster than I would have believed possible. I yelled and reached for my weapon, but before I could even wrangle it out of my waders, Ida Belle shoved Gertie out of the path of the charging monster, spun away from him, pulled her pistol, and fired, planting a bullet right in that quarter-sized kill spot on the back of his head.

  The ten-foot beast slumped to the ground, his jaws still open.

  “Holy shit!” I cried and ran over to help a dazed Gertie up from the ground.

  I looked over at Ida Belle, who was calmly holstering the pistol at her waist. “If I hadn’t seen that, I wouldn’t believe it.”

  Ida Belle shrugged. “You plan on tromping through the bayou your whole life, there’s certain skills you need to develop.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’ve met s—um, big game hunters that couldn’t make that shot.” I held in a sigh of relief that I’d managed to catch myself before saying “snipers.” Likely, beauty queen-librarians didn’t meet many snipers, at least, not that they were aware of.

  I looked over at Gertie, trying to figure out if Ida Belle was joking with me. Maybe she was in shock. Maybe she’d been afraid they were going to die, had pulled off the luckiest shot in the world, but didn’t want to scare Gertie by saying it.

  “Is she serious?” I muttered to Gertie.

  Ida Belle walked past me, all nonchalant, stepped on the dock, and untied the boat. “My daddy taught me to shoot,” she said. “He was a harsh taskmaster.”

  I felt a sharp pain in my chest. “Yeah, I get that.”

  “I thought your father died when you were a kid?” Gertie asked.

  “He did, but his disapproval still lingers on.”

  Gertie shot a look at Ida Belle, who had jumped in the boat and was messing with the motor, studiously avoiding the entire conversation. “Ida Belle’s father was a hard man. He wanted sons, you see, but Ida Belle’s mother had complications when giving birth to her and couldn’t have more children.”