Whispers of the Bayou

by Mindy Starns Clark

Again, the reporters went nuts, but at least this time the cops let go of my arms.

  All I could think of was my poor sister, who had been buried in an unmarked grave in the middle of the yard. My mind filled with the words of Psalm 141: As one plows and breaks up the earth, so our bones have been scattered at the mouth of the grave.

  “I know where it is,” I said softly. Then again, much louder, I repeated myself. “I know where it is.”

  “Where what is?” AJ called to me across the crowd, her expression distraught.

  “The angelus,” I said, my heart pounding, my eyes moving from her to Charles to Nathan. “I know where Willy hid it. I know what he needed me to forgive.”

  FORTY-ONE

  All was ended now, the hope, and the fear, and the sorrow,

  All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing,

  All the dull, deep pain, and constant anguish of patience!

  Ten Days Later

  Despite the somber setting of the cemetery, the mood was light. The judge had not granted our petition to prevent the press or the general public from attending this event, though we had been allowed to keep them outside of the family cemetery gates. The small cemetery was still packed with invited guests, but the turnout beyond the gates had been incredible, with news vans and cars lining the road and the near-constant whir and snap of cameras going behind us. I could only hope that when we reconvened here tomorrow for Cass’s private re-interment ceremony that the hoopla would have died down so that we could lay my sister’s bones to rest in peace.

  I couldn’t believe it had taken almost ten days to clear up the legalities of opening this grave. In that amount of time, as Charles worked our various petitions through the Louisiana courts, the story had continued to splash all over the media, putting Nathan and me in the amusing position of having to hire a publicist just to keep from being tailed by paparazzi. To appease the press, we had already appeared on several talk shows, but when Oprah ask me to show the back of my head to the camera, a trend was born: Now all over the country, people were shaving small squares in their hair and having their scalps tattooed.

  With the wheels turning on many fronts, Nathan and I had made a number of important decisions and arrangements about the angelus, depending on what might happen here. Regardless of today’s outcome, however, we had also taken care of some personal matters as well. With regards to Twin Oaks, as much as we loved it, we simply couldn’t afford to keep the estate for ourselves, as the maintenance costs alone would be prohibitive. We had, however, decided to parcel off and retain several waterfront acres on which we would be building a modest vacation home perfect for long visits to Louisiana.

  The rest of Twin Oaks would be sold intact, and judging by the offers that were already coming in, our windfall was going to be significant. Before Twin Oaks could be sold, however, there was an important task to be performed, one that was already underway, the careful extraction of the walls that held my grandmother’s paintings. The mural was being removed intact and would be reconstructed in its entirety at the Louisiana Museum of Art and Culture—an acquisition for which Livvy West Kroft was receiving an enormous amount of acclaim in all the right circles. Today, if the angelus really was hidden inside my sister’s grave as we suspected, then it would become a part of the exhibit as well, a priceless artifact that now belonged, as it always had, to the Cajun descendants of the Nova Scotian village of Colline d’Or. As the sole living gardien of the angelus, I was fulfilling the duty I had sworn to uphold—to guard it with my life and keep it safe from harm—by handing it over on a permanent loan to the Louisiana Department of Antiquities, who was going to work with the museum to create a state-of-the-art security system for its display.

  Most of the experts we had consulted agreed that the safest place to keep the bell would be in plain-but-well-guarded sight under the auspices of state and local authorities, combined with several well-heeled private interests and an advisory board made up of various officials, representatives of the Cajun community, myself, and whatever descendant of Colline d’Or that I chose to become the second gardien to replace Lisa. Eventually, the exhibit would tour, as the display was wanted by museums across the country and throughout Nova Scotia and France. As its official protector, I hoped to be involved with that tour on many levels—something I should be able to do now that I had resigned from my full-time job as a senior preparator at the museum and was converting my position to that of a part-time restoration consultant.

  I would also be free to spend more time focusing on my husband and daughter, not to mention any new little Millers that might come along now that we had decided it was time to try and give Tess a sibling. Someday I might choose to return to full-time museum work, but for now this was the right choice for us. The day I finally made the decision to do so, I felt a great peace about it and I knew deep in my heart that it was God’s will.

  In fact, God’s plan for me was something I was learning about daily. Though the church in Connecticut that Nathan helped design was too far away from Manhattan for us to attend regularly, the preacher there had hooked us up with a dynamic guy who pastored a church in the city, and we were already enrolled in “new Christian” classes there. Though we had both been Christians less than two weeks, we were already seeing the change in almost every area of our lives, from how we ordered our priorities to how we conducted our affairs to how we related to each other. I couldn’t believe that this life—this fulfilled, peaceful, forgiven life—had been available to me all along, and all I had had to do to receive it was ask.

  Nathan and I were excited that Tess seemed to love her new Sunday school class, and already, AJ had agreed to go to services with us as well. Lately I had begun to sense in her the same hunger that had led me to fall on my knees late at night one week ago in the presence of God and my sweet husband and ask Jesus to come into my heart.

  My heart had been renewed and restored, not just by the love of Christ that now filled it, but by the entire experience of facing my hidden past and unearthing every secret there. For the very first time in my life, I felt true peace and purpose.

  The only question that now remained was whether Willy Pedreaux really had done as I suspected. My theory was that Willy and Ya Ya had been planning to bury the bell in the yard underneath the exact place where a small building, the canning shed, was about to be erected under Willy’s supervision. Though that would have made a perfectly good hiding place for the bell, he wanted to follow his oath to the letter and find some place that was more accessible. When Cassandra died unexpectedly, Willy had seized the opportunity to house the bell in a location that was completely hidden but also very accessible: her above-ground tomb. As I saw it, the night after the funeral, Willy had come here to the cemetery and removed my sister’s tiny body from her casket, putting in its place the angelus. Then he had laid Cass to rest in a simple pine box, one whose top he had etched with a verse from Evangeline, simply to proclaim that this was but a temporary resting place. That night he had buried the box in the exact spot where he told Ya Ya he was burying the bell. That was the secret that Willy said she and my grandfather would have learned in heaven, that her fellow gardien had desecrated their granddaughter’s grave in order to better fulfill the dictates of Le Serment and protect the angelus. No wonder he wanted forgiveness.

  “Looks like they’re ready,” Nathan said, taking me by the elbow as we moved forward.

  Surrounding Nathan and AJ and me were a handful of state and museum officials, my father, Holt, and several delightful Louisiana cousins that I was just starting to get to know, Charles Benochet and his wife, and Livvy West Kroft and her husband, Big Daddy. There were also as many descendants of Colline d’Or that could make it on such short notice, including the mother of the Guidry boys who had died in Katrina and the old man who had warned me to be careful at the festival and then had given me the Bible verse that had helped lead me to this place. Deena had declined our invitation to come, saying that she was just getti
ng settled in a retirement home in Florida with her sister, but she wished us all the best. Nathan and I had opted to leave Tess back at the house with Melanie and Scarlett gladly serving as her babysitters.

  Now, with the soft whir of a special drill, two workmen removed the bolts from the end of the tomb as we all watched in somber anticipation. As they took off the end cap and pulled out the casket to the rough scraping sound of cement against stone, I thought of poor misguided Lisa, who had let greed get in the way of a much more important calling. I remembered the words of the psalm, Let the wicked fall into their own nets, while I pass by in safety, and I knew that that was what she and her husband and Richard had done. They had fallen into their own nets.

  “Ms. Greene, Ms. Miller,” the official said, addressing AJ and me, “we’re going to open the casket now. As Cassandra’s mother and sister, you may want to avert your eyes, just in case.”

  “Holt too—he’s the father,” AJ said, looking longingly toward the man who had kept himself slightly apart and was watching the proceedings from his wheelchair at the end of the row. Holt did not respond but continued to stare at the tomb, so finally AJ braced herself for this moment without him, turning her face against Nathan’s strong shoulder. I, on the other hand, was not afraid to see what waited inside. I knew what was in there. As they slowly raised the lid, I saw that I was right.

  It was a bell, solid and heavy, dented and dirty, and made of pure, sparkling gold—the same gold that had been forged by the citizens of Colline d’Or in 1755 into the shape of a bell, so that they could carry it out of their small Nova Scotian village right under the noses of their British captors.

  The scene around us erupted into pandemonium, and in the midst of the confusion, the throng of reporters moved closer, jostling for attention just outside the cemetery gates. They kept calling out our names, shouting questions, but I tuned them all out the moment AJ gripped me fiercely by the hand.

  “He waved for me to come over there. Come with me,” AJ whispered.

  Together, she and I extracted ourselves from the throng that was crowding around the casket and walked toward Holt. For the first time since we had all sat in the living room and listened to AJ’s revelations about what she had done, Holt was actually looking her in the eye. As we reached him, AJ released my hand and knelt down so that the two of them were on the same level. Not wanting to intrude, I stepped back a bit and placed a comforting hand on my father’s shoulder.

  “Will you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?” AJ asked him, tears streaming from her eyes.

  “Only if you forgive me too,” he replied.

  With a gasp, AJ put a hand to her mouth and simply looked at him.

  “I’m sorry I put you through so much in the last ten days,” Holt said. “I just had to work this through, to think and to pray. I do forgive you, Janet. I also…I, uh, I still love you.”

  “Oh, Holt.” Smiling through her tears, Janet reached up one hand to stroke his weathered cheek. “Do you think we could have another chance? That we could start over?”

  “Does that mean you love me too?”

  “Yes, Holt. Yes. I never stopped loving you.”

  As they hugged and then kissed, I stepped away to give them some privacy, searching the crowd for my own true love. Nathan was watching and waiting from a distance, and when he saw my face he came and took my hand.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  We braved the gauntlet of reporters, ignoring their shouted questions until one of them stepped directly in front of us, blocking our way.

  “What will you do now about your sister’s bones?” she demanded, thrusting her microphone at my face.

  Irritated at her insensitivity, Nathan answered the question for me, saying that soon we would be having a small, private ceremony, so that Cassandra Lynn Fairmont could be laid to rest in her rightful burial place in the family cemetery.

  “What will the two of you do next?” the reporter prodded. “Will you be going home to New York?”

  Nathan looked at me, and I turned to take it all in: The friends and family that surrounded us, the buried ancestors who had come before us, the incredible beauty of the green earth, the moss-laden trees, and the black, life-giving water of the bayou.

  The water that flowed through my veins.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. “We’ll go home. But this place will always be home for us too.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Whispers of the Bayou is Mindy’s ninth novel for Harvest House Publishers. Previous books include the Million Dollar Mysteries and The Smart Chick Mystery series, which includes The Trouble with Tulip, Blind Dates Can Be Murder, and Elementary, My Dear Watkins.

  She is also the author of the nonfiction guide The House That Cleans Itself as well as numerous plays and musicals. A popular speaker and former stand-up comedian, Mindy lives with her husband and two daughters near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

  In any story, where facts are used to mold and shape fiction, sometimes it becomes hard for readers to tell the two apart, particularly when learning about a history or culture that isn’t overly familiar. For more information and to find out which elements of this story are fictional and which are based on fact, visit Mindy’s website at:

  www.mindystarnsclark.com.

  Discover the Smart Chick Mysteries

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