“Look there,” Phillip cried.
The figure on the grass had begun to twitch. First it was her legs and then her arms. Soon her whole body was shaking.
“She’s havin’ a seizure,” Broussard yelled, grabbing one of the chief’s heavy gloves. He dropped to his knees and tried to force the woman’s mouth open, but it was clamped tight. Helplessly, they watched convulsions rack her body until her eyes popped open and she stiffened in a last paroxysm. Saliva bubbled from between her lips and she stopped moving.
Broussard put two fingers against her neck. “She’s dead.”
The chief’s mouth was hanging open.
“You said you hit her. Was her mask off when all this happened?” Broussard asked, getting to his feet.
“It shouldn’t have been, but it was. Musta been something wrong with it.”
“Was she in any smoke when it started?”
The fireman thought a moment. “Now that you mention it, a small eddy did blow over them, but it only lasted a few seconds, then it broke up and disappeared.
Broussard looked at Kit. “Unless I’m gettin’ senile, this warehouse was full of toxin that would have ended up in the buildin’ on Rampart Street if Vogel hadn’t been spooked.”
“That explains the dead cows I saw in the meadow as I drove in,” she replied.
“You saying that little bit of smoke killed this woman?” the chief said.
Broussard nodded and the fireman turned and surveyed the hazy specter that clogged the meadow. The wind had changed slightly and the cloud now lay in a long narrow band about half a football field from the highway. The fire was nearly out and a breeze that was causing the flag near the entrance to flap and snap sharply had opened up a small clear zone between the smoke and the remains of the warehouse as it pushed the sluggish cloud slowly toward the city. “If what you say is true,” the fireman said, “we’ve got a helluva problem on our hands. That cloud looks like it’s not going to disperse anytime soon and we’ve got people at risk in whatever direction it moves. East, and there’s Oak Glen, five, maybe six thousand people; north, there’s the city; south, Cypress Springs, another five thousand people; and then there’s that crowd out on the highway. We’ve got to get that traffic moving before the wind changes.”
“There’s a big truck with a heavy load of steel broken down in the only passable lane about a mile down the road,” Kit volunteered.
“Not the best time for the road to be under construction,” Phil Gatlin observed, shaking his head. “The median has them trapped on one side and the shoulder is so soft, it’d never hold a car.”
“Look, you folks shouldn’t be hanging around here,” the chief said. “If that wind shifts this way…”
At the warning, Bert Weston backed away, but Phil Gatlin grabbed him by the arm. “You stick around awhile. We may need your help. And even if we don’t, I’d like a few words with you.”
“I don’t know anything about what’s in that warehouse,” Weston whined. “I was just following orders. Let the professionals handle this. They’re experienced in these things.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” the chief said. “Wish I had an idea to back it up.”
“Maybe we could get the road crew to cut an openin’ in the median so those cars out there could turn around,” Broussard said.
Phillip shook his head. “You haven’t got that much time. It’d take two hours to get through the cement and another hour for the rebars.”
The flag, which had been flapping steadily in a northerly breeze, grew quiet. Everyone looked at it in apprehension.
“Any other ideas?” the chief asked, looking from face to face.
“How about sending your men down the road, explaining things, and have everyone back up here to where they can turn around,” Broussard suggested.
“It’ll be slow going, but I can’t see a better answer,” the chief said.
“We’ll help,” Phillip said.
“You, maybe, but not the others. If anything happened to them, I’d never be able to explain why I put them at risk.”
They heard the yodel of a siren, and an ambulance hurried down the drive.
The chief checked the remaining pressure on Ben Eaves’s respirator, then strapped Phillip into it and screwed the ribbed hose from the face mask into the regulator. He took Phillip’s hand and pulled it around to the compressed-air bottle. “That’s the valve where you turn it on,” he said. “If you hear a bell go off, it means you’ve only got about five minutes of air left and should move to safety.”
The flag ropes began to bang against the pole and the flag briefly fluttered feebly in a westerly direction, then fell motionless.
“We’d better move our tails,” the chief said. “That wind looks like its getting ready to change.”
He whistled through his fingers and waved his crew around him. After explaining the plan and the danger, he had them shed their heavy parkas, and sent them on the run toward the highway. Unnoticed, Bert Weston slinked to his car.
CHAPTER 21
The chief watched his men carefully until he was satisfied that they were spreading themselves out properly among the threatened commuters. Behind him, ambulance attendants gathered up the dead and injured. He went to the pumper and pulled a spare respirator from the rack. “If you two are gonna stick around, you better be in one of these,” he said, holding it out to Kit with the harness open. “Doc, there’s one over there for you, too.”
The wind freshened and the sound of the flagpole being whipped by ropes and pulleys drifted over the grounds. Using a small tree as a point of reference, Kit watched the toxic cloud advance toward the road. Within a few seconds, the tree was completely enveloped. The cloud now lay barely thirty yards from the highway. “They’re not going to make it,” she said into her mask.
But then the wind ceased and the cloud stalled. It lay still now, quiet death biding its time… waiting.
As he watched the grim scene unfold before him, Broussard realized that clearing the traffic jam would do nothing to solve the primary problem. The cloud would still exist and would simply continue to move until it threatened others. The ropes on the flagpole signaled that the wind was starting up again, and he looked fearfully at the flag. It was pointing toward the road.
The first tendrils of silent death wrapped themselves around the wooden posts of the wire fence that lined the road ten yards from the new lane. In another few minutes, the haze would reach the cars themselves.
As the wind continued its steady push to the west, the ugly clouds that had been spreading across the sky blotted out the sun. The landscape took on a somber pallor and it became impossible to see into the creeping haze.
Out on the highway, Phil Gatlin knocked on the window of a car driven by an old lady whose eyes barely cleared the top of the steering wheel. The cars behind her had all backed up to the cut in the median and it was her turn.
Phillip made a sign for her to roll her window down. Instead of doing so, she locked the door and sat in stony resolve with her eyes on the back of the car ahead. Phillip leaned over the fender and tapped on the windshield. He pointed at his mask, then at the approaching haze. He jabbed the air in the direction he wanted her to go, but she acted as though he didn’t exist.
Through the windshield, he saw that the door on the passenger side was unlocked. He made a dash for it, intending to pull the old girl from the car and move it himself. Before he got there, she had locked that door, too. The result of all this was that the right lane was completely blocked. Progress had also been slow on the left lane and there was still an achingly long line of cars to be evacuated.
The first ghostly fingers made contact with the old lady’s car and with many others in her lane. Immediately in front of where Phil Gatlin stood, Broussard could see a station wagon full of children, going off to school probably, their faces pressed against the windows on the side of the approaching cloud. He was too far away to see their expressions but could picture inn
ocent eyes, mouths agape with excitement. Here it comes. Hooray, we’ll soon be in it.
Broussard’s heart grew heavy with the same despair that led him to put his fist through the bathroom door at the Hollins fire and weep when he buried his old cat. Overhead, the black clouds merged and separated, collided and boiled.
The image of bodies stacked like firewood floated in Broussard’s brain. Vogel was gonna have the last word. He turned away.
Two snowy egrets, approaching from the north, heard the sound begin and changed course to avoid the area. Initially as soft as a woman’s sigh, the sound grew in intensity. The tip of a black funnel emerged from the angry clouds and telescoped downward, the sigh now a shriek. Broussard turned and saw the tip of the swirling funnel enter the haze over the meadow. He covered his ears to shut out the sound of the screaming wind. His hair flew into his eyes and pieces of flying grit stung the back of his neck as he struggled to stay on his feet. Kit and the chief sought refuge behind the pumper.
When it touched the ground, the whirling mass howled down the meadow, sucking up everything within reach. Small trees were pulled out by the roots. Large ones were stripped of every leaf. Held rigid by the wind’s fury, bits of dried grass were driven like nails deep into the trunks of trees still standing.
On the highway, windshield wipers stood straight up and cars rocked on their tires. Phillip and the firemen pressed themselves against the lee side of whatever vehicle they were near to keep from being pulled from the road. Sheets of newspaper and Styrofoam cups flew by. In the meadow, the bodies of dead cows were lifted as if they were stuffed animals and they, too, disappeared into the gluttonous vortex.
Then as abruptly as it had appeared, the funnel receded into the cloud that had spawned it, leaving behind no trace of the toxic smoke.
Broussard pulled off his mask and took a deep breath. The air now held something disturbingly familiar. In the pocket of the pants he had hastily pulled on before bolting from the house, he felt Grandma Oustellette’s drawstring bag against his leg. What had she said when she gave it to him? “… It will protect you and all you care for.” He took another deep breath to verify the first and again detected in the air the unmistakable scent of gardenias.
Epilogue
The press conference to warn Escadrille owners of the danger took place at noon that day in the hospital auditorium, and no one doubted a word of their story. Afterward, under a now cloudless sky, Broussard took Kit and Phillip to the Court of Two Sisters for lunch.
“You’re convinced, then, that Weston was not involved?” Kit said, spearing a tender crawfish tail with her fork.
Phillip generously buttered his bran muffin. “He was pretty much a toady when it came to those drums. Vogel was the boss and who was Weston to stick his nose in the boss’s business. Sure, he thought it was odd that Vogel kept him in the dark, but he was willing to play along to keep his job.”
The couple at the next table got up to leave and a flock of sparrows dropped from one of the courtyard’s giant wisterias and began to peck at the bread crumbs on the white tablecloth.
“Still can’t get over that funnel cloud,” Kit said, attacking the mound of rice in the middle of her plate. “… came out of nowhere, sucked up the smoke from the fire, and left, like it had been sent just for that purpose.”
Broussard cleaned the sweet meat from the last oyster on his plate and said nothing. In the last few days, he had come to see that there were forces and principles in the world that are not described in any textbooks but have to be learned through experience. Kit and Phillip would have to discover this on their own.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Kit said.
“There’s at least one piece of the puzzle still missin’,” Broussard replied.
“Motive,” Phillip interjected. “Yeah, I don’t get that, either. Where’s the gain in what he did?”
Broussard patted his mouth with his starched napkin. “Could be, we’ll never know.”
*
After lunch, Kit set out to complete some unfinished business. Kicking the gun out of Vogel’s hand had renewed her self-confidence and with that confidence came the answer to Minnie Mrocheck’s situation—a solution that would resolve another dilemma as well. Minnie’s primary problem was that she was alone. There was no one to share her life, no one who needed her. Then there was Lucky, still waiting at the vet for someone to claim him, needing someone to love him, needing Minnie. It was perfect. Each could fill a void in the other’s life. Lucky could be a mascot for the home. Everyone could help take care of him, and Minnie could delegate the duties and take primary responsibility. It would give them all something to think about besides themselves.
It took five minutes of her most eloquent oratory to convince Ida Swenson to go along with the idea. When she finally agreed, Kit set out for the hospital. Outside Minnie’s room, she knocked lightly.
“Come in.”
It was a strong voice that spoke, probably a nurse, Kit thought, pushing on the heavy green door. But it was Minnie herself and she was not flat on her back with tubes in her nose as Kit had expected, but was sitting up, with color in her cheeks.
“Aren’t you looking fit,” Kit said.
“Dr. Franklyn, how nice of you to come and see me.” Minnie’s eyes shone as they never had at the home.
“Minnie, I have a problem that I think you could help me with. I found the cutest little dog, about this big, with huge brown eyes and the sweetest personality you could imagine. I can’t find the owner and my landlord doesn’t allow pets, so I was wondering…”
Minnie made a sour face. “I hate dogs,” she said. “Always trying to lick you and stick their nose between your legs. Brrrrr.” She shivered in disgust.
“But I thought…”
The door opened and a voice said, “I’m back, Min.”
It was Shindleman with a copy of Time in one hand. “Dr. Franklyn,” he said. “Shame on you for canceling your last visit to the home.” He put the magazine on Minnie’s lap and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Actually, I didn’t mind. I’ve got Minnie to talk to now.”
“We’re leaving the home,” Minnie said. “We found a nice little apartment that together we can afford.”
“And it’s on the first floor, so Min won’t have to climb the stairs,” Shindleman added.
“Then you’re eating again?”
Shindleman chuckled. “Never seen such a woman for pancakes. How many did you have this morning, Hon?” Minnie shyly held up four fingers. “And they weren’t those dinky kind either,” Shindleman said.
“Does this mean I can stop worrying about you trying to…”
“Yes, dear,” Minnie said. “It was loneliness, that’s all. And Abraham has taken care of that.”
*
Walking back to her car, Kit reflected on what an unlikely pair they were. But it was undeniably going to be good for both of them. As she drove back to her office, events of the past three weeks whirled through her head.
Shindleman and Minnie, Lucky, David, Vogel; she thought of them all. Gradually she began to see how independence could be overdone. Reaching the office, she went directly to the telephone. When David answered, she said, “You’ve been wanting the patter of little feet around the house, how about I bring Lucky with me when I move in?”
David cheered.
*
In the morgue, Broussard put a fresh autopsy form on his clipboard. Across the room, Vogel’s body, covered with a green cloth, lay on a stainless-steel table, a porcelain pot holding the head up so Broussard could get at the skull with a bone saw.
Before he could put his rubber gloves on, the phone rang. It was Phillip.
“I want to read you something,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A little history lesson.”
“A very little one, I hope.”
“You’ll want to be sitting down for this. Ready?” He started to read. “Among the early settlers that came to New Orleans was a sma
ll group of Germans sick of the constant strife in their own country. As they disembarked from the ship that brought them, they were registered by French officials who spoke no German. The result was that most German names were changed to French equivalents. For example: Kamper became Cambre, Schoen became Chaigne, and Vogel became Fauquel!’ There’s your motive. Vogel was a descendant of the guy who was hanged. I guess when he saw what he would have inherited had his ancestor not lost that land, he snapped.”
Albair Fauquel… Al Vogel! Of course, Broussard thought, mentally kicking himself. It was so damned obvious now.
“I’m sure with some more checking I could lay my hands on the records showing when he changed his name back to the original, but it’s probably not worth the effort.”
A little jealous of Phillip’s coup, Broussard said, “What put you on to this?”
“Does Woolworth tell Kmart?”
Phillip was still laughing when Broussard hung up on him.
Turning back to the autopsy, Broussard slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled the sheet down to the body’s knees. Returning to the head, his shaggy brows arched in surprise and his mind took him back, back to 1738 and the hanging of Albair Fauquel. He saw the crowd jeer when Fauquel threatened to reach from the grave for revenge, and he saw the trapdoor drop. He saw Fauquel’s eyes bulge and his tongue force his lips apart. He saw the slightly swinging body come to a stop. And clearest of all, he saw under the rope that broke Fauquel’s neck, how it had cruelly bruised and raked his flesh, leaving a mark not unlike the angry red ring encircling the neck of the corpse in front of him.
Cajun Nights Page 23
