by Sandra Hill
“Was there a compliment in there somewhere?”
She glanced at him, and smiled again.
Which caused his little ol’ heart to go all fluttery. Jeesh! “I’m still angry at you, and I’m still gonna make you pay, and you’re gonna wish you never met me.”
“Actually, that would never happen, John.” Her face was all serious and misty-eyed now. “Because if I’d never met you, there would never have been an Etienne, and, like your aunt said, he’s a gift.”
He hated to admit it to himself, but John was touched. With a cough to clear his throat, he said, “I think our gift is stirring.”
Chapter 19
They could all become pirates . . . or not! . . .
After dinner, Celine sat at the table talking with all the adults, while Etienne played a video game on a minuscule black-and-white TV set over in the corner. Everyone was pretending to ignore the glaring tension between her and John.
“Exactly how much gold have we recovered so far?” Ronnie asked Adam.
“Roughly a thousand gold coins, an equal amount of silver, and a half dozen items of jewelry,”
Adam answered. “Mostly Spanish doubloons, but some silver reales, and coins from a few other countries. Dutch, French, Portuguese.”
“A cursory search on the Internet,” piped in Celine, who had been able to put her computer geek skills to good use, “estimates the value in the range of two to three million.”
“It’ll be even higher if we can establish the provenance to Lafitte through one of those unusual necklaces,” Caleb pointed out.
“I have a jewelry expert friend of mine working on that right now,” Adam said.
“Celine, some of us have been talking,” Jake began, “and we don’t think you should run your story
’til there’s a verdict in the trial and the bad guys are in jail.” She was about to object . . . that could take weeks, but Jake continued, “You gotta know that once we announce this treasure and where it was located, reporters and every looney bird Harrison Ford wannabe is gonna flock to Bayou Black. The Mafia thugs might deduce, just by proximity to René LeDeux’s cabin, that John has been hiding out here.”
“Won’t there always be that threat to John?” she asked, not looking at him, suddenly realizing that she had ammunition against his custody threats. She and Etienne would always be at risk, just by association with him.
“No, there won’t,” John insisted. “No more than a lawyer who prosecutes a criminal, or a stockbroker who loses a pigload of money for a client through no fault of his own, or a newspaper reporter who offends just about every breathing body in the universe.” He cast her a “So there!” smirk.
Celine wasn’t convinced of his logic, but she would save that argument for later.
“We’ve come to trust you, Celine,” Ronnie added. “Therefore, I see no reason why you can’t return to your home, provided that you assure us there will be no story ’til we give the go-ahead . . . and, of course, don’t mention John’s involvement. John’s boss called a little bit ago and gave his okay, reluctantly.”
She nodded, although she wasn’t sure her editor would agree to the delay. In fact, she could lose her job over the issue.
“René is gonna have a bird tryin’ to keep them amateur treasure hunters from trampin’ around his precious bayou,” John pointed out.
“We’ll try our best not to be specific about the discovery site, and we’ll alert the state to set up ‘No Trespassing’ signs all along Bayou Black,” Ronnie said. “That won’t eliminate the problem, but it should alleviate it.”
“I think we should have a big party, Cajun style, to announce the Pirate Project treasures,” Tante Lulu interjected, changing the subject, as usual. “A reg’lar fais do-do, a party down on the bayou.” She was walking around the table, refilling glasses of lemonade, sweet tea, or rhubarb wine.
“If it’s anything like the one we did for the cave pearl project, we can work it to our advantage.
Great press for Jinx, Inc., and control of how the story is presented to the media.” Caleb glanced sheepishly at Celine. “In fact, maybe our resident newshound could help us with that.”
“Maybe,” she hedged. She’d already crossed the line between objectivity and bias long ago on this story.
“Hey, I have a great idea,” Angel said. “I have some Hells Angels pals—”
“Angel is big into motorcycles,” Grace interjected, as if Angel needed her backup.
“Some of these bikers are heavily involved in pirate crap. I mean, they have their own reenactment events, and Web sites on how to talk pirate and how to hook up with other pirates. This whole phenomenon is called pirattitude,” Angel explained. “They probably figure that bikers are modern-day pirates.”
“It could be great fun.” Tante Lulu was practically dancing with glee. “In fact, we could all dress up like pirates.”
There were some groans around the table, Adam and Caleb both demurring on their actually donning such hokey costumes . . . although Tante Lulu would probably talk them into it.
“And you could get an exclusive,” Ronnie told her, the message being, you rub our back, we rub yours.
Just then the bleeping of the video game stopped and Etienne sidled up to Angel, apparently having heard the word pirate. “Do you know Johnny Depp?”
Angel laughed and said, “No.”
Finding Angel no longer interesting, he walked over to Celine and climbed up onto her lap. In one of the brief silences, Etienne announced, “John was makin’ googly eyes at my mom t’day when she wasn’t lookin’. Pete says boys and girls make googly eyes when they wanna make babies.” He made loud kissing noises for those who didn’t get the whole picture, which was no one.
Laughter erupted around the table.
Encouraged by this show of appreciation, Etienne elaborated, “Girls give boys cooties when they kiss.”
“This from Pete again, I suppose,” John said.
“Yep. Did you ever get cooties?” the bundle of bigmouth joy in her lap asked John.
“Lots of times.”
“Eeeh! My mom never kissed a boy.”
“Is that a fact?” John remarked, glancing her way.
“Uh-huh. She tol’ me.”
She sat there, her face turning five shades of red, she suspected.
Everyone was laughing, which made Etienne think he had done something wonderful. He grinned from ear to ear. “John tol’ me that boys kin—” he started to say.
She slapped a hand against his mouth.
Now John was blushing. She could only imagine what he’d told Etienne.
Tante Lulu pretty well summed up the situation: “Tee-John, this is payback fer all the years ya did jist the same thing ta yer brothers and Charmaine. Remember the time ya asked Luc about penile rings, right out in public?”
Into the stunned silence, Etienne asked, “What’s a pee-nail ring?”
And the thunder rolled . . .
John had been at René’s cabin by himself for five days, waiting for a verdict. Everyone else had left.
He cleaned up the work site, packed tents, folded tables and chairs, stored pirogues, and, throughout it all, was generally thinking, thinking, thinking. It was lonely here, but not bad lonely. He needed solitary time to consider everything that had happened and what he wanted for the future.
It was a life-defining moment, and not to be taken lightly. His head needed to be on straight before he made any final decisions.
At one moment, the burning rage would take over, and he vowed to fight Celine in court for full custody of Etienne. He’d even talked it over several times with Luc, who kept trying to discourage such drastic action. It didn’t seem drastic to him. Drastic was keeping a father ignorant of his son’s existence for five years.
In saner moments, he admitted to himself that he was incapable at the present time of caring for a kid. First of all, he had to work, sometimes up to eighty hours a week. It would be unfair to leave Etienne al
one all that time, even if his family would help out. Still, it rankled that Celine would win, and that’s how it felt. A juvenile opinion, he knew, but there it was.
Then, too, having a kid forced a man to become responsible . . . mature even. And John resisted growing up. Yeah, at twenty-eight he should be past all the wildness, but that choice should have been his, dammit.
Then that insane fury would return, and he didn’t care about the consequences. He wanted his son, and he would have him, no matter the collateral damage.
He was trying to catch some crawfish for his dinner, using a green leafy branch and a long-handled net, when he heard the sound of an engine. Soon Remy’s hydroplane had landed in the stream, churning up the waters, thus putting an end to his crawfishing for the day.
“Surprise!” someone yelled.
And his entire friggin’ family converged on his alone time.
Luc, Sylvie, Remy, Rachel, René, Val, Charmaine, Rusty, and Tante Lulu. The only saving grace was that they’d left their kids behind.
“We come ta give ya an intervention,” Tante Lulu said right off.
“For what?” Horrified, he took the bag she handed him and her purse that felt as if she was carting around a dozen bricks.
“Yer wild ways. Bein’ a good daddy. Fightin’ the thunderbolt. Lookin’ fer love in all the wrong places. Marryin’ up with yer baby’s mother. Take yer pick.” Tante Lulu was already huffing and puffing toward the porch.
He looked at his brothers for help. They just shrugged, as they, too, lugged bags of what he assumed were groceries. Were they planning an extended stay?
“We just wanna give you advice, sugah,” Charmaine said. Her husband Rusty was having a good time watching her ass, which had been poured into a pair of skintight white jeans, as she walked up the incline in a pair of red cowboy boots. Typical Charmaine!
It was also typical of Rusty to be so obsessed with his wife.
“What kind of advice?” John rushed after her.
“Luuuvvve advice,” René said, catching up and waggling his eyebrows at him.
“I am not in love. Celine is not in love. Forget the frickin’ love.”
“You made love, John, and you made a child.” Sylvie, Luc’s wife, leaned over to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Everything would be a lot easier if you could fall in love with Celine. In fact, I have a jelly bean I could give you.”
“Don’t you dare give me any dumbass love potion jelly bean. Whatever I decide to do, it will be about Etienne and what’s best for him, not his lying mother.”
“Couples don’t get together or stay together for the sake of a child today,” Val, ever the feminist lawyer, said to Sylvie, then advised him, “Don’t let anyone guilt you into hasty action . . . even if I do think a merger between you and Celine would be a good idea.”
“Mer-merger?” he sputtered out. “Mon Dieu!”
“Court should be a last resort, as I’ve told you at least a dozen times this week,” Luc addressed him. To the others, Luc explained, “Tee-John has a skull as thick as a hundred-year-old bayou turtle.”
“I want to get to know my son; I have five years to make up for. And I can’t do that on the occasional weekend or a few weeks of summer vacation. Celine won’t agree. So, I sue her butt off. End of story.”
“I hope you didn’t tell her like that,” Rachel said.
His face heated up.
“He did!” Sylvie hooted.
“No wonder she’s stopped talking to him,” Val remarked.
“Dumber ’n dirt,” Tante Lulu proclaimed. “Thass what men are when it comes ta wooin’ a woman.”
“Hey, I’m a good wooer. Not that I’m wooin’ Celine.”
“You need another St. Jude statue,” Tante Lulu concluded.
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t you think you guys are takin’ a risk comin’ here en masse like this?
What if you’re bein’ followed?”
“Hah! You wouldn’t believe the maze Luc made us follow to get to Remy’s plane in Lafayette,”
René complained. “We all had to go separately. Then we set up these sort of dummy figures in each of our houses to appear as if we’re home. All for you, bro.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
An hour later they were sitting at the newspaper- covered table expertly devouring crawfish; he’d added the two dozen he caught to the bushel they’d brought. In between, they ate buttered sweet corn on the cob, and thick slices of garden tomatoes covered with olive oil and vinegar and liberally dusted with salt and pepper. All of it washed down with Dixie beer. Another Cajun feast.
“Okay, we gotta come up with a plan,” Charmaine said, licking the butter off her fingers, while Rusty watched, fascinated. When a southern belle caught a man, she caught him good, John observed silently. “A Tee-John Plan.”
“Huh?” He choked on a mixture of beer and crawfish spices. By the time he cleared his throat, the gang was going full guns ahead.
“I don’t think we can do the usual Village People routine,” Sylvie said. In the past, his family had pulled off these hokey Village People entertainment events, dressed as sexy cowboys, construction workers, Indians, and, yes, cops, all to convince either one of their own, or their love-to-be, that it was a match made in heaven . . . Cajun heaven.
John had participated in every single one of them, enjoying immensely the target of their song/dance revues. He would not enjoy being the target. Before he could say so, not that it would deter anyone, Tante Lulu mused, “Well, Celine is a newspaper reporter . . . like that Lois Lane gal, and—”
Everyone, except him, got all excited as ideas popped into their dingy heads.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Once he got them quieted down, he said, “Listen, I think it’s time we retired the Village People nutcase spectacles.”
“Says he who instigated many of them,” Remy remarked.
He ignored Remy. “Seriously, we LeDeuxs have a reputation now for being flaming goofballs.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” Charmaine demanded to know.
“Especially after the last one . . . the secret wedding for René.”
“Now ya gone too far, Tee-John,” Tante Lulu said, smacking him on the arm with a wooden spoon.
“That was one of my best St. Jude plans.”
“I liked it,” Val said in a soft voice. She and René exchanged one of those I-love-you-baby looks.
“You didn’t at the time,” John pointed out.
“Back to Lois Lane,” Charmaine said. “I think it has possibilities.”
“If you think for one damn minute that I’m gonna wear tights and a Superman cape, you’ve got another thing comin’. Jeesh! Next you’ll be askin’ me to jump off some tall New Orleans building.”
“Mebbe jist a small buildin’, sweetie.” Tante Lulu was now patting the same arm she’d just whacked with her spoon.
“You could probably get Etienne to play Robin,” Luc offered.
Traitor! he mouthed at him.
Luc just smirked.
“Well, I get to be Catwoman.” This from Charmaine, of course.
“Hey, I wanted to be Catwoman,” Rachel whined.
“How about we’re all Catwomen,” Sylvie said.
“Me, too,” Tante Lulu said.
Everyone looked at her. It boggled the mind to picture their elderly aunt in a catwoman outfit.
“What?” She looked offended. “I kin allus wear those fake butt cheeks in my panties and the falsies in my bra. Remember, Charmaine, ya gave them ta me fer my ninetieth birthday?”
They all had to smile.
He kept protesting and protesting and protesting after that, but no one paid him a bit of attention.
They just barreled ahead, discussing him and his future as if he had no say.
Later, when they were climbing back into Remy’s hydroplane for the return trip, he told Tante Lulu, “I know you want to see me settled down, Auntie, but it’s not gonna happen the way you want. I am not in love
with Celine Arseneaux.”
“You will be,” his aunt said with her usual overconfidence. “I give ya two weeks ta be fallin’ over dizzy with love.”
He gaped at her and blurted out with the worst choice of words, “That would take a miracle.”
She gave him one of those little Mona Lisa I-know-something-you-don’t smiles.
In his head, he thought he heard a voice say, “You called?”
And off in the distance, there was the faint sound of . . . yep, thunder.
Whaddaya think of men in tights, honey? . . .
“I want that treasure hunting story, and I want it now.”
“Can’t give it to you now,” Celine told her boss as she sat in front of his desk. Bruce had been on vacation when she’d returned to work; so, this was their first face-to-face since she’d left on the Pirate Project assignment.
“Did they discover a treasure?”
“Yes.”
“What? Is it worth a lot?”
“Yes, it’s worth a lot, and I can’t tell you what . . . yet.”
“Why?”
“Security reasons.”
“Whose security?” His face went beet red.
“Look, I’ll have the story for you soon. It will be a great story . . . a stupendous story. And it will be a scoop. No one will get the story before me.”
“You’ve thrown a hell of a lot of promises out there. Sure you can fulfill them?”
“Yes.” I’m pretty sure.
“Since when is it our responsibility to protect the security of the entire friggin’ world?”
“I’m not going to argue with you, Bruce. I’m not giving you the story yet.”
“That’s some line in the sand you’re drawing, Celine.”
“This doesn’t have to be a fight. I’ve continued to give you good stories on the trial.”
“That’s another thing. Who’s your source?”
“You know better than to ask me that.”
A knock on the door interrupted what was probably going to be a volley of swear words from her boss. Bruce’s secretary stuck her head inside. “There’s a Louise Rivard here to see you, Celine.”
