Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  “The detective was here again,” the girl said, staring absently at the rising moon. “He says Uncle Hebert hadn’t been dead long when…when I found him. He isn’t saying much—and why would he be expected to say anything to a kid like me?—but the grapevine works pretty good around here. Everybody says that the cops haven’t got any solid suspects, but they’ve been talking to a lot of people who were just as scummy as my uncle. If that’s even possible. I’ve heard that Uncle Hebert had been in three bars between the time he got up yesterday morning and the time he was killed, and that he’d tried to pick a fight with somebody in every one of them. He wasn’t a nice man.”

  “But he was your uncle,” Faye said, “even if he wasn’t a nice man.”

  “I didn’t know him. Not at all. Grandmère never even told me he existed.”

  Well, that was a stinging indictment. When your own mother never mentioned your name, then you had officially hit rock-bottom. Faye was guessing there were no baby pictures of Hebert decorating the houseboat.

  Faye settled herself on the bench beside Amande and dandled Michael on one scrawny knee. In about six months, he was going to be too big for this. “You don’t look like somebody who doesn’t care about the dead uncle she never knew.”

  Amande looked down at her. Goodness, the girl was tall, even sitting down. “I look that bad? Well, I don’t get a good hard look at dead bodies every day, but that’s not the worst part. It’s my poor grandmother.”

  “I can’t imagine losing a son.” Faye’s mouth went dry as she said it. She pulled Michael’s shirt down over his round belly.

  “She doesn’t even look different. You’ve seen my grandmother. The woman doesn’t know how to smile.” A bitter smile of her own threatened to twist Amande’s mouth out of shape. “I just know she’s suffering, because she’s family and we live in the same house. I mean…we live on the same boat. I can hear it in her footsteps when she walks through the kitchen. She breathes different. She stands all wrong. She spends a lot of time sitting at her altar, staring at her voodoo gods and just watching a candle burn. She’s suffering.”

  “I can see her when you talk. And I can feel her, because you describe her so perfectly. Have you ever thought of being a writer, Amande? Come to think of it, have you ever considered being a shrink?”

  That made Amande smile, which had been Faye’s goal. She felt almost like a shrink herself.

  “A social worker came to talk to me today. Maybe the detective sent her to help me deal with the shock of seeing a dead man floating outside my home. I think she’s kind of a low-rent shrink. No, I don’t want to do her job. I’d hate it. I’d want to tell all my clients to stop whining about their problems and do something to fix them. ‘Suck it up, people!’, I’d say.”

  Faye snickered. “Me too, actually.”

  “But a writer? Oh, yeah. I’ve been hearing stories and telling stories and writing stories all my life.”

  Michael had gone to sleep, so Faye shifted him on her lap, cradling his head under her chin. Boat sounds surrounded them, as moored vessels shifted with the moving water and a sailboat’s lines clinked against a metal mast. If Faye ignored the music seeping out of the marina’s bar, she could pretend she was at home on Joyeuse, sitting on her own dock and looking out at water that, at a far distance, touched this water.

  Faye was glad she’d left a moment of silence between them, because Amande finally let go of the thing that was really bothering her.

  “I heard Grandmère on the phone with her lawyer today. She was asking questions about inheritance laws…questions I didn’t understand. What could she possibly inherit from Uncle Hebert? He wasn’t the kind of man who owned anything that he couldn’t carry around in his pockets to buy beer with.”

  Faye tended to agree with her, but she said, “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time somebody living in poverty died and left a fortune under a mattress.”

  Amande raised an eyebrow so high that she didn’t even have to complete the teenager’s routine of rolling her eyes and sighing, “Yeah, right.”

  “Or not,” Faye said. It had been a long time since she felt this lame, and the girl had accomplished it with a single eyebrow.

  “Grandmère didn’t sound like somebody who was going to inherit the fortune under her worthless son’s mattress. She sounded scared. One thing she said scared me, too. It scared me bad.”

  Faye waited.

  “She kept asking her lawyer, ‘But can we keep the boat? Are you sure?’”

  No wonder the girl’s voice was shaking. Faye flashed back to the years when she had held on to Joyeuse by her fingernails. She knew precisely how it felt to fear losing her home, her history…everything. And she’d been a grown woman at the time.

  When Faye had been as young as Amande, she’d felt utterly secure. Their suburban Tallahassee house hadn’t been anything special, but her mother’s salary and her grandmother’s pension had never once faltered. When Faye went to school every day, she knew that her home would still be hers when the final bell rang.

  “It never occurred to me that Grandmère didn’t own the boat. She’s lived in it since she married my grandfather, so that was before Didi was born. That’s plenty long enough to pay off a boat, it seems to me.”

  Faye knew enough about second mortgages and loan sharks to wonder.

  “I’ve been crawling around the Internet, trying to figure out why Grandmère was worried about inheritance laws. I didn’t find anything to explain her questions. The houseboat was my grandfather’s when they got married. I know that for a fact. Uncle Hebert wasn’t any kin to my grandfather, so he shouldn’t have any claim on it at all. I understood that much of what I read. After that, the details got fuzzy. I only figured out one thing for sure.”

  Faye decided to risk speaking and showing herself to be lame. “And what was that?”

  “Louisiana inheritance law is the squirreliest thing I’ve ever seen. Our laws are different from everybody else’s. After I spent last night reading about all that weirdness, if you walked up to me and said, ‘Hi, I’m Faye. I just inherited your home, so you need to take a hike,’ I’d probably believe you. Maybe Uncle Hebert’s death has triggered something legal that I don’t understand.”

  Faye felt like she needed to do something, even if it was wrong. She shifted Michael’s head, so that he could drool on a different part of her chest, and she reached out a hand in Amande’s direction. She just rested it on the girl’s back, between her shoulder blades, and hoped that was right.

  Amande didn’t shrug it away. She just kept talking. “I’ve been working on a plan.”

  Faye suspected that Amande always had a plan. Faye knew this because she herself always had a plan.

  “If Grandmère loses the boat, I think I can get a job working offshore. Around here, there’s noplace else to earn enough money to support us both and still save money for school. Maybe I’ll have to be eighteen first, though. Not sure. The oil patch was my fallback plan if I didn’t save enough money to go to college by the time I turned eighteen, but that’s almost two years away. So I also have a Plan B.”

  Faye noticed that the girl wasn’t daunted by the danger out in the oil fields, despite the fact that eleven people had just lost their lives out there. And she wasn’t much concerned about whether or not she could even land one of those sought-after jobs. Amande was used to making a plan and then carrying it out, with or without the cooperation of the world at large. Faye liked that.

  “What’s your Plan B?”

  Faye was not prepared for Amande to fix a supplicant’s gaze on her face and plead, “Will you take me out into the islands? Maybe we can find where I got the silver coins. Maybe finding that spot will help you in your work. And maybe I can find some more, enough to send me to school.”

  Surely Amande knew that this plan was as unlikely as a sixteen-year-old finding work offshore. She was an intensely reasonable girl. The fact that she was banking her future on an unattainable job or an unlikely
treasure hunt showed that she’d rejected all reasonable alternatives. Amande was desperate.

  Faye’s hand was still on Amande’s back and she patted it awkwardly. “I can’t take you out without your grandmother’s permission, but I’ll ask her. And I’ll help you apply for school money. You should have seen the pile of scholarships and grants that landed on Joe after I filled out his paperwork for him.”

  “You did? Lucky man.”

  “Generally, I’d tell any woman planning to do a man’s dirty work for him that she was nuts. So don’t do what I did…unless you meet a man like Joe someday. He does what he does very well. There will always be food on our table, because he can shoot, trap, fish, and cook. He’s a way better archaeologist than he realizes—detail-oriented, thorough, patient, thoughtful. He can keep the company books perfectly well, as long as I handle any interaction with scary folks like the IRS. In return, I figure I can be the buffer between Joe and bureaucracy, if he needs me to be. In any relationship, you just have to work things out. Right now, I’d say it was your relationship with your grandmother that needed tending.”

  Amande just nodded.

  Faye rose, hefting Michael onto her hip. Her hand was still on Amande’s back, so the girl stood with her. “Even if she doesn’t want to talk about losing her son, you should probably be there for her.”

  As they approached the houseboat, Faye smelled the odor of incense drifting through its open windows. Miranda was preparing to remember her son’s life in the special ways only a mambo knows.

  Episode 2 of “The Podcast I Never Intend to Broadcast,” Part 1

  by Amande Marie Landreneau

  Gola George didn’t get religion after he escaped slavery. He also didn’t decide to do something nice for the world out of gratitude to God or his African gods or fate or luck.

  No. According to my Grandmère, he put all the slavers’ African prisoners ashore on a deserted island, except for a handpicked crew selected from men who were willing to turn pirate. Now, I’m not sure what his options were, since dropping the Africans off at a seaport would have meant they went into slavery. And taking them back to Africa wasn’t gonna happen, not without food and supplies. Still, based on the things Grandmère told me about Gola George, I’m thinking he didn’t really care what happened to all those women and their children, and he certainly didn’t care what happened to the weakling men who weren’t good pirate material.

  People said Gola George was seven feet tall. Or maybe he was just one of those men who could make you believe he was seven feet tall. Either way, he was a most excellent pirate. He grew his hair long and dyed it red. He tied finger bones in his curls, like Christmas tree ornaments. They clanked when he shook his head, which happened a lot when he was slicing people open and running them through.

  He always wore a flowing white silk shirt, and he kept a plain white silk scarf wrapped around his head, but they didn’t stay white long. Gola George made sure there was always a spot of blood showing on the white silk, but just one. That single spot of horror distracted his victims. They couldn’t look away from George and his trademark bloodspots.

  It occurs to me that George had been stolen from Africa, so he’d probably never been on a sailing ship before being taken as a slave. How did he even know what a pirate was? That question is just one of the things that makes me think that Henry the Mutineer was no innocent pawn, trapped into helping George because his only other choice was death. Grandmère’s judgment was always a little murky where Henry was concerned because, you see, she always said she was supposed to be descended from him.

  Myself, I think Grandmère’s people are descended from Gola George himself. There have been times when I looked at Grandmère, stomping around our little kitchen and chopping squash with a big sharp knife and mumbling to herself in French, and I thought, “Yes. A pirate.”

  But there have been other times when I was the one mumbling angry threats. I was the one looking out at the water and wondering whether the engine on this old houseboat could take us somewhere. Anywhere. And I’m not any kin to Grandmère and her ancestor Gola George.

  Maybe there’s a little bit of pirate in all of us.

  Chapter Eight

  Another marked car circled through the marina parking lot, and Joe wondered whether he should pack up his little family and move. So he asked Faye what she thought. “Do you think it’s a good idea to stay here? With the murder and all? We’re gonna need to move, sooner or later. This new scope of work is too big for us to handle it all from here without driving all day. We could go on down to Venice and get a place for a while. Then we could go to Grand Isle. It’s gonna take us several days to do all that work over there.”

  She’d said pretty much what he’d expected.

  “This place is cheap and clean. The food at the marina is great. And did I already say that it’s cheap? I heard that prices have gone through the roof in Venice since the media people came down to cover the oil spill. I think we should just get cracking on the job and not waste time with a move we don’t have to make. There’s time enough to get down to Venice.”

  Joe glanced out the window of their cabin at a lonely girl perched once again atop a picnic table near the home she might soon lose. He elected not to point out the real reason Faye was willing to stay in a place where the police prowled day and night. He wasn’t too keen on leaving Amande alone in a place where a killer was running loose, either, and he thought that leaving her with that loopy grandmother might be as bad as leaving her alone. Or worse.

  He took his cell phone outside where the reception was better. Michael had slept late, so Faye was simultaneously working on her notes and wolfing down a bowl of cereal. It seemed like a good time for Joe to inhale his own cereal and make some calls.

  The client’s project manager was in the Eastern Time Zone, so he was at work by seven o’clock, Louisiana time. By playing the time zones, Joe and Faye could add another hour to their workdays, and it was way better to bill nine hours a day instead of eight. Multiply that extra hour by the two of them, and the accountant in him was even happier, especially since they were working seven days a week.

  It occurred to Joe that they should just take a project managed by someone in Japan. They could do their fieldwork while the sun shone, write it up at dusk, talk to the client as the stars came out, then spend a couple of nighttime hours dealing with client-generated hassles. He figured this would let them bill twelve or fifteen hours a day, easy. They might work themselves into early graves, but at least the company would be solvent.

  There wasn’t a lot of noise around the marina. People just weren’t in the mood to fish when they knew that the oil could arrive at any time. Once the patrol car turned out of the parking lot and onto the highway, there was no sound but the lapping water and no motion but boats moving with that water.

  This silence meant that the angry voices disturbed the peace as thoroughly as an angry flock of crows would have. Joe was on his feet as soon as the barrage of croaking, unintelligible words hit his sensitive ears. Miranda could naturally make a lot of noise and, when angry, it seemed that she preferred to make that noise in French.

  Somebody else was making noise in English, and his voice was getting louder with every word. “It’s legal. Every word of it. See the signature? Don’t you raise your hand to me, you crazy old bitch!”

  More croaking. More French. Joe could see Miranda now, and she was hefting a cast-iron skillet. She could no doubt do some damage with it, but Joe didn’t care to see her tangle with the stranger in front of her. Even from this distance, Joe could see that he was six feet or so and built like a bouncer. Frizzy blond hair to his shoulders didn’t hide the thick neck nor the belligerent set to his jaw.

  Faye stuck her head out the door to see what the fuss was about, but Joe put out a hand that said, “Stay.” He knew she had good enough sense to call 911, so he started running without a word. No way was Joe going to let an old lady go toe-to-toe with this man, not even when th
at old lady was Miranda.

  A noise behind him said that his charming bride did indeed have enough sense to call 911, but that she was stupid enough to do so while running toward the very danger that prompted the call. She was falling behind, because her legs were way shorter than his, but she was matching him step for step.

  Joe bellowed the only two words he knew that would make her go back. “The baby!”

  Her stride did falter. She looked at him, looked over her shoulder, then fastened her gaze on Amande. The girl had risen from her seat at the picnic table and paused, momentarily unsure, but she would regain her wits in seconds. When that happened, she’d be at her grandmother’s side.

  Joe did not want that girl in the same county as the man hollering at Miranda. He needed to get to Amande before she moved, then he needed to do something about the man harassing her grandmother.

  The look on Faye’s face said that she’d made a decision, and that decision was to keep going. She ran twenty more yards in the wrong direction, away from their baby, hooked an arm around Amande’s waist, and started back to the cabin before the girl even knew what had happened.

  It almost worked. Amande was going with Faye, but still looking over her shoulder for her grandmother. Suddenly, Joe saw her dig in her heels. The girl was a full foot taller than Faye, and more than fifty pounds heavier. When she decided to stop running, there was nothing little bitty Faye could do about it. The two of them jerked to a halt.

  “My grandmother. I’m going back for her.”

  Joe stopped and turned, balanced on the balls of his feet. He was not constitutionally suited to deal with three women in jeopardy, let alone a baby left alone in an empty cabin. Who should he help?

  Fortunately, Faye was dealing with only one person.

  “No!” she said to Amande. “Just no.”

  Amande was still pulling her arm away from Faye’s grasp. Faye kept talking. “Let Joe take care of your grandmother. Michael needs me, and I have to go back. You need to come with me.”