Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1)

by Susannah Sandlin

  Where the hell was Harvey, the manager? Surely even the lounge at the Opry Shed Motel, a fleabag operation on the outskirts of downtown Nashville, had a few standards. Although the fact that Harvey had insisted she wear a short skirt (“The customers like seeing some leg”) and play only well-known songs (“The customers don’t like that hippie Cajun crap”) should’ve erased any expectations of quality. The fact he considered “hippie Cajun crap” a musical genre should’ve told her a lot.

  Seeing no sign of Harvey, Ceelie broke into a favorite moldy oldie, one of the classics she didn’t mind singing. “Walkin’ After Midnight” fit her contralto voice and her mood most days. She’d done her share of late-night walking, lonesome and searching for something. She’d thought it was stardom; now, she’d settle for a little respect.

  She’d left Houma, Louisiana, ten years ago with a half-empty suitcase, a guitar, a head filled with dreams and unwritten songs, and a promise to her late father. She’d sworn on his deathbed that she’d follow his greatest wish: as soon as he died she’d shake off the mud of Terrebonne Parish and never, ever look back.

  She hadn’t expected to meet others just like her on every Nashville street corner, all competing to see whose dreams would get crushed first. To see how long it would take for each of them to crawl back to his or her respective backwoods town, grateful for a job at Walmart or the Piggly Wiggly. To see which ones would stick it out here and keep beating their heads against closed doors.

  She’d beat her head against so many doors she should have brain damage. Maybe she did. It would explain a lot.

  By the time Ceelie reached the last chord of “Midnight,” the drunk guy had managed to roll onto the stage and attract more enthusiasm from the audience than her music had. In fact, every eye was on him except those of her friend Sonia, who’d gotten her this gig out of pity. A part-time bartender, Sonia met Ceelie’s gaze and shrugged as if to say, What do you expect from a dump like this?

  Well, by God, if nobody was listening anyway, she’d try out her new song and screw the old country favorites. It was the first thing that had come to her after a creative drought that had lasted six months, maybe longer. Deep inside, she’d feared something so awful she hadn’t wanted to verbalize it: that her ability to write had left her.

  A few soft strums in an A-minor chord led her into the tune that had awakened her in the middle of the night last week, propelled her from a deep sleep to work on it until time for her to make the morning waitressing shift at Music City Pancakes. She couldn’t get it out of her head and didn’t want to—it marked the return of her muse. At least, she hoped so. It wasn’t finished, but she could try out a part of it.

  Its dying call is weak but clear

  Yet it’s a plaintive voice I don’t want to hear.

  I won’t go back,

  I won’t go home,

  ’Cause next time, Whiskey Bayou won’t let me go.

  Ceelie’s voice, rich and strong and smoky, was the thing she’d always thought would set her apart. It cut through the bar noise, and first one woman, then a trickle of faces, turned away from the drunk guy sitting on the edge of the stage and riveted onto her. She sang to them, poured her heart into words she believed about a place she’d abandoned at the first opportunity and yet couldn’t seem to forget.

  The adrenaline shot through her as more people turned to listen. This was it. This was what she’d dreamed about. Not that the Opry Shed Motel lounge was the kind of place where talent agents or record producers hung out, but it was a start. People were actually listening.

  Someone at a front table broke into a smile, and soon everyone began laughing.

  “Whiskey Bayou” was not a happy song. What was she doing wrong?

  From the corner of her eye, Ceelie registered movement a split second before the drunk guy reached her. He’d done a turtle crawl across the stage while she’d been wrapped up in her daydreams and now stood on his knees, holding out his arms to her.

  Enough. Before she could talk herself out of it, Ceelie planted a solid boot to his shoulder and shoved.

  The world flipped as the man fell backward, pulling her with him by one beefy hand wrapped around her knee. She screamed but no one could hear; the place had erupted into a thunder of laughter and applause.

  Her guitar. Where had it gone? That vintage Gibson was the one thing of value she owned, and Ceelie scrambled to her feet in search of it, pushing the drooling letch away from her and expelling a breath of relief when she spotted it, intact, a few feet away on the stage.

  She and the Gibson were getting the heck out of here.

  The crowd continued to applaud as her unwanted co-entertainer climbed to his feet and took drunken bows at center stage. Good for him. His antics allowed her to exit without anyone taking notice.

  Or so she thought. She spotted the missing manager before she’d cleared the backstage stairs and made it into the hallway to the dressing room, which was a fancy name for a converted closet. The only things crammed in it were a small table, a peeling mirror, and a gunmetal-gray folding chair.

  “Honey, that was genius!” Harvey threw an arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug. He might have reached five-five in his shiny black platform shoes, which gave him a couple of inches’ height advantage over Ceelie. Plus he smelled as if he’d fallen into a vat of cheap aftershave. “If you’d told me you were willing to do comedy, I coulda pulled in a bigger crowd. Who’s your partner?”

  Ceelie wrested herself from his grasp and gawked. What an idiot. “Seriously? You think that was planned? I should sue you for letting that letch onstage.”

  The glee drained from Harvey’s expression, replaced by dead brown eyes and a downturn of thin lips topped by a wisp of hair he probably considered a moustache. “You mean that crap you were singing was supposed to be music?”

  Ceelie thinned her own lips in response.

  “Let’s put it this way, sweetheart. If you and your buddy out there want to make this a regular act, I’ll sign you on for a two-week run. You want to go onstage and sing that depressing shit, you’re fired.”

  Ceelie considered the offer for a few seconds, then chided herself for being so desperate. She’d take an extra shift serving waffles to tourists in shiny snakeskin cowboy boots before stooping that low. After all, she’d practically been raised by the most independent woman in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, who always told her she was strong enough to follow her own mind and deal with the consequences.

  “Pay me for tonight and you’ll never see me again.”

  Harvey pointed toward the dressing-room closet. “Get your stuff and take a hike. You didn’t finish a set. No set, no pay. I ain’t running no charity here.”

  “Fine.” She clutched the Gibson closer and stalked toward the dressing room. “And by the way, screw you and the pig you rode in on.” Pity the pig.

  “You wish, sweetheart.”

  It took Ceelie mere seconds to snatch up her makeup bag, purse, and jacket. When she stomped back out, intending to stop by the bar and let Sonia know what happened, Harvey stood blocking the hallway.

  “I been thinking. You ain’t half–bad looking with that dark skin and funny eyes—like a blue-eyed Injun. You want to get paid for tonight, I know another way you could make up for not finishing your set.”

  Ceelie ground her teeth but held her tongue long enough to give Harvey a slow, sexy-eyed once-over, from the grease in his dyed-black hair to the silver neck bling visible beneath the half-buttoned shirt; from the tight pants that promised way too little all the way to the pointy tips of his shiny platform shoes.

  She looked him in the eye. “Eh, no thanks. I’d die first.”

  Turning on her heel, she headed for the back door at a fast clip, unsure if she’d slapped at a gnat or poked a grizzly and not wanting to find out which one old Harvey would turn out to be. He called her a few choice names but didn’t follow.

  Definitely a gnat.

  The night air in Nashville had fallen in
to the low seventies with a promise of autumn, so Ceelie decided to forego the cab she’d have taken had it been either hotter or later. The neighborhood between here and her domino-sized studio apartment was well lit, and people tended to be mobile on Friday nights in Nashville. Plus, she needed fresh air and time to think.

  She’d hit rock bottom. That’s all there was to it. She didn’t make enough money off tips at the pancake house to pay the rent and utilities, but that early waitressing shift left her afternoons and evenings free to write songs, knock on doors, and pick up a stray performing gig. Not that she had anything new in the songwriting department except a half-finished tune that was, as Harvey had pointed out, depressing shit. Cajun hippie depressing shit at that.

  She’d been fooling herself; tonight had rubbed in that message loud and clear. Nashville thrived off the hard work and substandard wages of idiots like Ceelie Savoie, willing to do anything for the privilege of sustaining their dreams.

  Her phone vibrated in the bag she’d slung over her shoulder, but she ignored it. Ceelie wasn’t ready to talk to Sonia, who’d probably figured out by now that she was gone. The smartphone had been the one luxury she’d allowed herself, based on the conviction that any day now, the dream agent could call, or the guy who’d been in the back of fill-in-the-blank lounge had been touched by her music and wanted to talk contracts.

  The acknowledgment that those dreams had begun to die brought with it other hard truths. She was bone tired, for one thing. Weary of the constant swim against the current, the struggle for money, the worry about when she’d catch a break, or if she’d break first. Her feet hurt, and not just because the soles of her boots had worn thin. Her heart hurt. When she’d left Louisiana with what little she had left from the sale of her dad’s house, she’d never dreamed that a decade later she might be worse off.

  Feeling more like sixty-eight than twenty-eight, Ceelie huffed to the third-floor studio apartment with her usual prayer—that the locks hadn’t been changed while she was out. She’d already gotten the eviction notice. The key clicked home, however, and the deadbolt turned.

  Inside, slid underneath the door, she found a note in the tall, looping handwriting of the building manager:

  Sorry doll, but you gotta be out by Monday morning. You can store stuff with me if you need to. —J

  Juanita was a good soul, even if her building was a firetrap and the absentee landlord made her do his dirty work. Like evicting deadbeat tenants.

  Ceelie collapsed onto the only real piece of furniture in the place besides the futon she used as a bed, an overstuffed brown armchair she and Sonia had found at a yard sale for ten bucks and hauled up the steps themselves. Forty-eight hours and she’d officially be homeless.

  Rock. Bottom.

  Her options were limited. Sonia would put her up, but Ceelie’s friend had a studio apartment not much bigger than this one, plus her own set of dreams. She tended bar at the Opry Shed, did odd jobs around town to help pay her way through the local community college, and hoped to earn a transfer scholarship to study art at Vanderbilt.

  They’d joked about their futures: Sonia would buy her own art gallery, and Ceelie would take time off her third world tour to play at its grand opening.

  Sonia would make it, but Ceelie’s gut told her it was time for a do-over on her part. She could write songs, sing, and cook. Period. Since she’d proven incapable of supporting herself with the first two, maybe she could find a job in a restaurant kitchen and work her way up. Music would become a hobby, not a vocation. If she could accept that once and for all, the rest might work itself out.

  Accepting that the thing she loved most was going to fail her, or that she had failed it? Gut-wrenching.

  The phone vibrated again, and Ceelie dug it out of her bag with a sigh. Might as well break the news to Sonia that she would have an uninvited visitor, at least for a few days. She had nowhere else to live until she could find another job or go full time at the pancake house.

  Ceelie frowned at the number on the screen, recognizing the 985 area code all too well. She’d used it her whole life, at least until she’d left Louisiana behind. Her mom had taken off when she was a kid, and her dad died from cancer at age forty-six after too many years working shifts at the gas plant. That was a fact of life and death in South Louisiana, which is why he’d practically ordered her to leave the first chance she got, before she got trapped there like he had been.

  Bottom line: she had nobody in Houma anymore. Her “hello” was more than a little hesitant.

  The caller, speaking in the heavy accent that sent an unexpected wave of homesickness across Ceelie’s chest, identified himself as a deputy with the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office. “We been tryin’ to reach Celestine Savoie, formerly of Houma.”

  Ceelie had shaken off her full first name along with the bayou mud, and the sound of it pulled her into a time warp. “I don’t go by Celestine anymore, but I guess that’s me.”

  “I got some news about one of your family members, Ms. Savoie, and I’m afraid it’s bad.”

  Ceelie shifted the phone to her left hand and rubbed her temple with her right. “Sorry, but you must have the wrong person after all. I don’t have any family left in Houma.”

  The deputy paused, and the rustle of papers sounded through the phone. “We have you down as being the great-niece of Eva Savoie, who lived out on Whiskey Bayou south of Montegut. Is that correct?”

  Tante Eva. The name brought back a rush of memories, good and bad, but mostly good. Ceelie had spent a lot of time with her great-aunt as a kid. “What do you mean lived?”

  Past tense.

  Twenty minutes later, after a long series of questions and answers with the deputy, Ceelie’s mind spun with horrifying facts and half-remembered snatches of detail from visiting Whiskey Bayou throughout her childhood and early teens. He’d finally convinced her that she was, indeed, the old woman’s next of kin, although only after confirming the death dates of every other possible relative Ceelie could remember.

  “Other than the real old-timers, not many folks round here knew Miss Eva or knew anything about her other than some, uh, unusual stories.” The deputy sounded as if he found the whole conversation more awkward than Ceelie, which might not be possible.

  “You must not have been in the parish that long, or you’d know the unusual stories weren’t that far off base.” Ceelie’s voice held dry humor. “Anytime a boy came near me in school, the mean girls would tell him to be careful because I’d hex him the same way my Tante Eva the voodoo queen taught me. I knew she was a practitioner.”

  Throw the bones, ma petite fille. Let them tell you what’s to come. The bones, they never lie.

  The deputy cleared his throat and rustled more papers, pulling Ceelie out of her memories. He clearly had no answer for voodoo confessions. “You’ll need to contact Carreux Funeral Home up in Houma; once the autopsy is concluded, that’s where she’ll be taken. The parish can help with burial costs if you’re unable to afford them.”

  God, what did a funeral cost these days? “What happens with her cabin?”

  “I’m not really qualified to talk about that, Ms. Savoie. As her next of kin, you should be able to claim any possible inheritance, but you’ll need to talk to a succession attorney or the probate office.”

  Right. Because Ceelie was loaded with cash for lawyers as well as funerals and travel.

  She did have enough for a bus ticket, but . . . Wait. “Inheritance? I can’t imagine Eva had anything of value other than the cabin itself.”

  In fact, the deputy had told her the biggest mystery surrounding her great-aunt’s murder was what the killer could possibly have wanted. No one could figure it out. “Wouldn’t the killer have stolen anything worth stealing?”

  “Not really.” The deputy waited half a heartbeat before continuing. “He seemed to be looking for something specific. There was a small amount of cash left in the cabin.”

  Earlier, the man had said there were no clues
as to the murderer’s identity. “You say ‘he’—that means you do have some information about who the killer might be?”

  “Ah . . .” The deputy’s voice grew muffled as he spoke to someone in the background, then returned. “We can fill you in when you get here. As for what your aunt had, I couldn’t really tell you that. There’s the cabin and its contents. There’s an old pickup truck. Some land. Again, I’m not the one to assess that, however, and you’ll have to talk to someone else about what your aunt owned, and any encumbrances on her property.”

  She might suddenly be a Terrebonne Parish landowner? Ceelie almost laughed at the irony. But land meant she had a place to go and regroup, didn’t it? Selling it to a developer for fishing camps—the Louisiana term for a rustic waterfront spot for weekend anglers—could bring in enough money for her to return to Nashville or even go on to Los Angeles or New York or Chicago.

  In the meantime, she could stay in the cabin, although for the life of her she couldn’t remember if it had plumbing. “Is the house habitable?”

  The deputy’s pause spoke volumes. “It’s, uh, rustic. And what the killer didn’t mess up, the forensics team did. You’ll want to stay somewhere else.”

  Yeah, well, she had nowhere else to stay, and cleaning up a mess would keep her from drowning in self-pity.

  Then she remembered something. “Wait—what about Eva’s husband, LeRoy? I realize he’s gone, and I doubt he’s still alive since he was older than my aunt. He ran out on her about twenty years ago. But he had a son or a nephew or something.” What was that boy’s name who’d spent part of one summer out there when she was a kid?

  The crackle of turning pages sounded through the phone. “No, I’m pretty sure . . . Wait.” More page-turning. “Yep, here we go. Some of the older folks mentioned a man named LeRoy Breaux who used to live with Ms. Savoie, but your great-aunt was never married to him, so even if he has survivors they’d have no claim on her estate unless there’s a will somewhere—again, you’ll need to talk to probate.”