FEVER DREAMS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery

by April Campbell Jones

  He stood still, looking intently at the green grid, moving the phone in a slow arc before him. “Right…around here…somewhere...”

  I shuddered with impatience.

  Jimmy took a couple of uncertain steps forward. Stopped. Backed up. Stepped forward again in a slightly altered direction.

  Come on, come on!

  Stepped. Stopped. Moved the phone before him.

  “Guys?”

  I looked over at Katie. The sun was rising somewhere, thinning the fog to spidery tendrils, but I still couldn’t make out her features clearly without stepping closer. “What is it?”

  Katie was turning in small circles. “Where’s the cat?”

  I heard a splash beside me, jumped. Gator!

  A gator got Garbanzo!

  “It’s just a bluegill or bream,” Jimmy mumbled, studying his phone. Then he looked up, squinted to his left. Pointed. “That way…”

  We splashed after him through ankle-deep water back to the shoreline.

  Jimmy held the phone out, slowly swung it around…around…

  “There!”

  He brought up the Maglite.

  The cat was about twenty feet away, sitting down now, back still to us. He looked carved from stone, not a whisker twitching.

  I started toward him. “Garbanzo--?”

  “Hold it, Mr. Bledsoe!”

  I froze at the tautness in Jimmy’s voice.

  In a moment he was squishing up beside me, phone still held out before him. He looked around, found Katie, and motioned her over. “You two just wait here a moment…”

  Katie and I looked at each other.

  Then we looked out past the phone at the rapidly thinning mist.

  An enormous log lay directly ahead of us about twenty feet from the edge of the muddy shore.

  Warm shafts of overhead light widened. The mist dispersed rapidly near the bank…and the log wasn’t a log anymore.

  I’d forgotten just how incredibly huge Big Louis was.

  He lay perfectly still on his huge stomach about thirty feet ahead of the statue that was Garbanzo. The enormous croc’s mouth was agape, eyes closed, plated back soaking up the morning sun. He looked like he was smiling pleasurably, drinking in the fast-expanding shafts of sunlight.

  “Oh, God…oh God,” I croaked.

  “No...” Katie whispered, “ …please, no!”

  Olson moved hurriedly toward but at an angle to the big reptile. “You two stay where you are. No sudden moves! Don’t talk for a minute!”

  Phone before him, Olson began to move in a wide but determined arc about the big croc, an arc that soon revealed itself as a cautious circumnavigation of the giant reptile. The amazing thing was the way Olson moved; with practiced, nearly soundless precision. Even through the tall, wet saw grass and sometimes sucking mud, his boots made only the barest noise. Katie and I, I suddenly realized, trudged clumsily through the swamp; Olson became the swamp. I was suddenly keenly aware how fortunate we were to have him.

  We stood there with our hearts in our throats, eyes riveted to the wide stretched, pink mouth, rows of studded teeth. I tried to conjure a picture them slamming together around my frail human form—around Rita’s flailing body--but my mind kept censoring it, refusing to go there.

  When the deputy had completed half his circle, I saw the cat’s tail twitch once. That was all. He went back to being stone. I felt myself go light-headed, slowly weightless…like I was rising above the whole absurd scene, gazing down on it with voyeuristic disbelief. How in the name of all that is holy had my life come to this…to this place, these people, these two women, that stupid cat, and the leathery thing before me the size of a small dinosaur?

  Jimmy made several quick, uncertain stops along the way, eyes narrowed to the green grid, brightly pulsing red dot, then came on around until he’d completed his respectful circle and was standing again beside Katie and me.

  “Well--?” I whispered thickly.

  The deputy stared down at the phone but I could tell he wasn’t really observing the pulsing dot any longer, I could see it in his eyes.

  “Jimmy--?”

  He finally breathed in, lowered the phone, looked up at me. “It’s inside. The signal’s coming from inside the croc, Mr. Bledsoe.”

  I couldn’t seem to get my mouth to work for a moment and when it finally did I sounded so incredibly pathetically childlike. “M-Maybe it’s a…a different signal, a different phone—“

  Olson pocketed his phone sympathetically. “Elliot. It’s your fiancée’s, it’s her number. I’m sorry.”

  I turned to Katie.

  Her eyes were brimming. “Elliot…”

  I held up both hands as if to ward off talk or touch. “I’m, I’m, I…”

  “Elliot…”

  “…I n-need to be alone for…just a moment. I need for you to let me be alone, is that okay?”

  And I was backing up slowly as if terrified of the big croc, only I wasn’t terrified, not of him, I was terrified of the scarlet-and-white images and soundless female screams my sensory-blasted, betraying mind now chose to form, and without effort. “…need to be alone…just for a second…”

  And I turned stumbling on someone else’s legs and found I’d somehow backed all the way to the swamp again, the water covering my shoe tops. I gazed down without comprehension at the dark wavelets shifting the shore. My shoes are soaked, I thought stupidly, completely soaked and I paid a fortune for them at Dillards…

  I heard the button-snap on the holster somewhere behind me, turned to see Olson facing the enormous pink mouth, the deputy’s big .45 out of its cradle and looking insignificant before the gaping maw…saw him lift the heavy muzzle as if it weighed a ton, lift it up straight-armed, finger curled within the trigger guard.

  Yes, I thought stupidly, that’s a good idea! Then we can make new shoes! Alligator shoes from genuine alligator leather! What a good idea, colossally sensible idea…

  I saw Jimmy’s thumb pull back the dark hammer…

  “Wait!”

  I blinked.

  “No, wait!” from a suddenly breathless Katie. “Look! There!”

  She was staring somewhere past me at the swamp.

  I turned and spied the child moving silently toward me out of the vanishing wreath of mist, a delicately featured child with yellowish glow of haze about her. She came deliberately and completely at ease, a damp swath of tangled hair plastered to her face.

  The marsh began to list before me..

  Not now…don’t you dare faint now…

  “Amy--?” my voice shockingly clear, almost youthful.

  She emerged from the last remnant of fog, short legs--finding higher ground--becoming long legs, willowy and finely shaped; a woman’s legs.

  Most of Rita’s dress was missing--a swampy mermaid—and I’d never seen that look in her eyes before…in anyone’s eyes before: like a lost child, dazed with curiosity and incomprehension.

  “Rita!”

  She didn’t seem to hear me.

  Then, in the moment after she did, didn’t seem to recognize me at all…

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Dr. Scow stuck his penlight in Rita’s eyes and ran it around her pupil, one thumbed-back lid at a time.

  “Um-hm.”

  He was a short, middle-aged, slightly frumpy man in bad K-Mart slacks and rumpled, slightly dingy medical jacket hanging on bone-fine shoulders and barely concealing a potbelly, round and perfect as porcelain. A Norman Rockwell figurine.

  He had bad, balding hair (just shave it already!), bad teeth and antique granny glasses. I thought him appropriately named: he looked more like someone who’d work on Dean Robichou’s river scow than command a small, single floor clinic outside Manchac, Louisiana.

  He took Rita’s pulse, her blood pressure and checked her heart but that’s about all he did before turning to me in the little white clinic room. “Vitals are all good. No bumps or contusions, lesions or bruises. No apparent blows to the head.”

&
nbsp; Great! Then why doesn’t she know me?

  “Then why doesn’t she know me?” I said to the little man, imagining a major city hospital with a major staff and major x-ray and monitoring equipment.

  “Where did you say you found her?”

  “In the swamp, doc,” Cormac said over by the door, sleeves rolled up to show his muscular forearms folded over his broad chest as he leaned Errol Flynn-like against the jamb.

  Dr. Scow nodded noncommittally. “What was she doing in there?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Katie sighed beside me.

  Scow turned and stuck his light in Rita’s milky eyes again. “Well, the pupils are expanded…”

  “I noticed,” I said under my breath.

  “…I’d like to run some blood tests, would that be all right?”

  “Can you do that?” I said.

  Scow looked at me dreamily. “What’s that?”

  “Can you do it here, I mean, at the clinic? Or will you have to send away to a lab?”

  Scow turned back to Rita sitting on her steel table in her underwear, staring into space. Katie had made an attempt to comb the rats out of her hair but she still looked pretty disheveled, pretty zoned. “Depends on what we find here first. I’d plan on her being here overnight if I were you.”

  I thought about it with reluctance, glanced at Katie, who looked equally dubious.

  “Might be a good idea,” from Cormac from his stance against the door, “nearest major hospital is down in Orleans and their Emergency is always packed. Probably get better attention up here, Elliot.”

  “Your choice, Mr. Bledsoe. I’d like to get an I.V. in her, there’s a touch of dehydration.”

  I shuffled it around, finally nodded. “All right, I guess. For one night.”

  Scow signaled a fat nurse, who dragged an I.V. stand over and began setting it up. She bent close to Rita’s vacuous eyes a moment and sniggered softly. “Shrooms, man!”

  “That’ll do, Nurse Samuels.”

  I looked from the abruptly huffy nurse to Rita’s empty expression. “’Shrooms’? Mushrooms, you mean? Hallucinogens?”

  Nurse Samuels shrugged huge shoulders, glanced askance at Scow. “I ain’t the doctor, mister.”

  Scow gave her a hooded look before turning to me. “We’ll know more when the first tests come back. Why don’t you folks wait outside in the hall now until we get Miss Blaine settled here?”

  Cormac pushed from the jamb, stuck on his service cap, opened the door. He was grinning.

  In the hallway he lit a cigarette next to a NO SMOKING sign on the wall behind him.

  “I saw that smile, Sheriff.”

  He raised innocent brows to me, exhaled blue threads of smoke. “Smile?”

  “Come on,” from Katie.

  Cormac gave her his usual barely veiled once-over. “Your wife ever use recreational drugs, Elliot?”

  “She’s my fiancée and no!”

  “Not even in college?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  Cormac jammed his thumbs in his belt, cap tilted back rakishly, cigarette dangling loose like a cowboy’s. “No offense—personal, I mean--lots of city folks into that sort of thing.”

  “Well, Rita isn’t one of them.”

  Cormac let his ash drop on the hospital floor. “Whatever you say.”

  “And what do you say, Sheriff Cormac?” Katie wanted to know.

  The sheriff jerked his shoulders once. “Doesn’t matter what I say, only the doc.”

  “How about we hear it anyway?” Katie pushed.

  Cormac’s left eye narrowed lasciviously at her, or maybe it was only from the thread of smoke. “All righty. Since you asked. What I say is Rita and Elliot here got into a ruckus over something at the motel. Whatever it was, Miss Blaine was miffed enough to leave town in a huff, a very quick huff. One of the locals said he’d never heard rubber burn like that.”

  “What local was that?” I said, face beginning to burn slightly.

  “Just…somebody. Anyway, appears to me your fiancée got herself worked up enough there all alone in her shiny Lexus she took it upon herself to, well…partake! Little somethin’ from her purse, I imagine, harmless doobie, probably to calm herself down.”

  “You should get into investigative law enforcement,” Katie said drily.

  “After that I think she got herself lost somewheres out of town, not a hard thing to do around these swamp roads.”

  “With only one major highway?” I countered, trying to keep it down.

  Cormac widened his grin. “Got to get on the highway first! Anyways, then I think Miss Blaine made a wrong turn in the sticks somewhere, got herself even more lost, maybe had another little doobie to calm herself further. Then what—? She maybe hit a tree or just ran out of gas out there on some lonesome road. Pure speculation on my part, of course.”

  “Of course,” Katie agreed.

  “Why didn’t she use her cellphone if she were lost?” I said.

  “Probably did. But you must know the cell towers round here by now, not worth the metal it took to build ‘em. So. What’s your fiancée going to do?”

  “Have another doobie?” from Katie.

  “Got out of the car, I imagine, started walking.”

  “And not being in the best state of mind got further lost,” from Katie.

  Cormac stepped on the butt. “Possibly. Person not from the area can walk in circles for hours before they realize it.”

  “What then?” from me.

  “Then it got dark.”

  “And she stumbled into the swamp,” Katie finished for him.

  Cormac looked at her. “Well, she stumbled somewhere, Miss Bracken.”

  “Then I guess we better find it,” I said.

  “What’s that?” from Cormac.

  “Her Lexus.”

  Cormac grinned wide, winked. “Already got Deputy Olson on it, Mr. Bledsoe! Plus a couple of deputized local boys!” He straightened from the wall, reset his cap. “Y’all should go back and get some sleep now, been at it all night! Don’t you worry none,’ bout Miz Bracken, we’ll find her!”

  Like you found Amy Robichou? I thought.

  * * *

  “This is kind of silly, isn’t it?” Katie sat behind the T-Bird’s shiny black wheel, having deduced that I was in no shape to drive.

  “Silly?”

  “Well, not silly, but we’re nearly as apt to get lost on these quagmire swamp roads as Rita. Cormac and Jimmy, on the other hand, know them like the backs of their hands. Maybe you should have stayed at the clinic with your fiancée.”

  I had my cellphone to my ear next to her. “Why? She doesn’t know me, and I wasn’t accomplishing anything watching her stare into space like the cat. Maybe leaving Garbanzo with her will help bring out of…wherever she is—hello? Detective Banes? Elliot Bledsoe here. No, I’m in Manchac. Right. Just wondering about…Oh? Uh-huh. I see. And he’s there now? I see. All right, then. Thanks.”

  Katie glanced over as I put the phone away. “The New Orleans Police Department has determined that Angel’s prints were found on the broken water glass at the French Quarter hotel. They’ve arraigned her on second degree murder.”

  Katie brightened. “That makes her eligible for bail, yes?”

  “Dean left the Police building an hour ago to arrange for the money.”

  Katie frowned. I was already frowning. “What does ‘arrange’ mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Detective Banes didn’t amplify in any way?”

  “Only that Dean apparently told the bondsman he couldn’t write a check for his wife’s bail. Doesn’t have a bank account. Never has had one.”

  “No bank account! How the hell does he—“

  “Hard cash, I guess. Under the mattress, maybe? Who knows? He told the bondsman he’d have the money to them by this afternoon.”

  Katie was silent behind the wheel; we were both thinking the same thing.

  “…I-I suppose we could drop
by his house and see him.”

  I looked at her.

  She made an exasperated face. “Elliot, we never found any money in the crypt.”

  “We didn’t find the trapdoor in the roof without the help of the cat.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, listening to the hum of the bird’s big V-8, the bounce of the Michelins over hard country roads.

  Katie glanced down at the wheel. “Too bad they didn’t have power steering in 1957…”

  “Well, which is it? The house or the cemetery?”

  She gave me an indecisive glance, bit her lip. “Still got the key?”

  I reached into my pocket, held up the brass key to the mausoleum door, felt a tug of dread.

  “So how’s Dean going to get in?”

  “Maybe he’s standing before that heavy crypt door right now, searching through his pockets and wondering the same thing…”

  Katie eased on the brake, turned the car around.

  Pointed us toward the road and wrought iron fence of the Robichou family cemetery.

  * * *

  Dean Robichou was not standing before the door to the family crypt.

  But his truck was.

  I grabbed at Katie’s arm as the vehicle came into view. “Slow down! There’s his truck!”

  She pulled to the side of the road evenly, put the Ford in neutral. “I don’t see Dean.”

  “No. But his truck looks empty.”

  “What about the door to the crypt? Does it look closed to you?”

  “It does from here…”

  “So--?”

  I dragged in breath. “So, I guess we better go see. Damn, I wish it weren’t night.”

  Katie cut the engine, glanced around the looming stones and somber statuary. “Me too.”

  We left the car and approached the crypt cautiously, making as little noise as possible.

  “I don’t have a good feeling about this, Elliot…”

  “That’s what you said last time.”

  “Well, I didn’t have a good feeling about it then.”

  I held up the brass door key. “Either the door is locked or he’s broken it down somehow.”

  “Or he knows about the roof entrance.”

  Our footsteps seemed inordinately loud under the dry leaves.