by C. L. Bevill
Caraby immediately became rigid. He didn’t like questions asked of him. He was the police officer, an investigator, the man in control. He would ask the questions, or there would be no conversation. His voice was positively frigid as he responded. “It would be preferable if you stay available for questioning.”
Mignon almost choked at the barely veiled order. “You mean you don’t want me to leave town?” She added, “I’m sure John Henry can arrange to keep me locked up in the basement.”
Caraby didn’t miss a beat. “The sheriff doesn’t have a basement.” Then he turned away.
The fact that John Henry didn’t have a basement wouldn’t prevent him from keeping Mignon in the parish if he so desired. She watched Caraby converse quietly with John Henry for another moment. He pointed toward the bayou once, and then John Henry looked at Mignon again. She didn’t like that. John Henry wasn’t looking at her the way a lover would. He looked at her the way a sheriff would, in the same way he had months before when he suspected that she was a criminal and up to stuff that was going to land her in jail. In fact, the narrowed-eyed gaze made her distinctly nervous as if he could read her mind, as if he knew she was considering actions that would displease him.
Mignon flattened her lips into a grim line. Past the pair, the medical examiner had finished his preliminary inspection. He removed a very large thermometer from the girl’s body. As the man solicitously pulled the edges of her shirt back together, Mignon shuddered as she realized the thermometer had been inserted into her liver. Then the investigator put on plastic gloves and made his own examination. A pair of paramedics was waiting patiently nearby with a body bag and a gurney. A few minutes later, she watched as they carefully put the young woman into the bag, and the loud zipping noise seemed to be the only thing audible. The sound ran down her spine like the fingernail of a mischievous ghost.
Abruptly, John Henry was standing beside the door. He regarded her solemnly. In the time they’d spent there, he’d managed to compose himself. Buttons were re-done correctly. His shirt was properly tucked into his pants. And other than a day-old growth of beard on his face, he resembled the man he was supposed to be, the much-respected sheriff of St. Germaine Parish. “Move over,” he instructed brusquely. “I’ll drive you back to your car, and you can go home. Unless you want a deputy to drive you home.”
“I can drive,” she said. Again she was amazed at her calmness. She shifted to the passenger’s seat and absently pulled the seat belt across her lap. “I’m getting mud all over your Bronco,” she added vaguely.
John Henry shot her a look, pausing in the act of climbing into the parish vehicle. “It doesn’t matter. Mignon, are you all right?”
She looked at her mud-covered hands and tried not to think of how they had gotten that way. Dreams of blood that haunted her nights had passed, but Mignon prayed they wouldn’t be replaced with dreams about floating in a bayou with reptilian creatures nibbling at her helpless limbs. “Yes, John Henry, I am all right,” she said, a little more forcefully than she had meant to say. Then she added quickly, “What’s Blessed Heart?”
John Henry’s hand froze on the ignition. He didn’t look at her this time. That muscle in his jaw began to leap like an elusive jackrabbit. “Be careful, Mignon. This isn’t your concern. As a matter of fact, you’ve got no business even thinking about it.”
Mignon’s mouth opened and then shut again. She waited until he started the engine, and then she said, “I’m going to find out one way or the other. I heard something about a girl’s school. Is that what Blessed Heart is? A school for good little Catholic girls?”
An explicit word came shooting out of John Henry’s mouth. Then he snorted. “I forget sometimes that you’re smarter than I am.” He let the engine idle while he stared forward into bayous filled with shadows caused by the morning sun. “I figure if we took an IQ test, you’d whip me on it by a good twenty points.” He turned toward her. “Yes, it’s a Catholic school,” he admitted. “But not for good little Catholic girls.”
“What does that mean?”
“Figure it out yourself,” he said. John Henry turned in the seat and carefully backed the Bronco down the twin ruts. The bayou lapped at the edges of the road on both sides, and there was no way of turning the vehicle around without going for a swim.
As they reversed, Mignon saw the paramedics put the body bag on the gurney. They would carry the girl out. “Do you know who she is?”
“No, I don’t. But I suspect we will rather quickly.” John Henry sighed. “Is there anything else, Detective Thibeaux.”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she snapped. “It’s natural to be curious, even concerned. Good God, she looks like she’s about sixteen years old. Where are her parents?”
“Girls who go to Blessed Heart don’t usually have the kind of parents who give a good goddamn where their daughters are at in the middle of the night.”
“Blessed Heart,” she muttered. “I’ve heard that before somewhere.”
“I’m not surprised,” John Henry replied. He reached a point where he could turn the Bronco around and he did, carefully negotiating the edges of the swamp. He didn’t want to get stuck. “Deputies end up escorting girls out there. Some of the judges stick children there when an adequate foster home isn’t available. You did happen to notice that most of the occupants of the parish tend to live under the poverty level.”
Mignon ignored his sarcasm. He was irritated at her for her curiosity, remnants of her belligerent need to discover what had happened to her mother at any cost, and the inescapable knowledge that, then, she hadn’t dared to trust John Henry. She slept with him, but she hadn’t trusted him. He had said that he had forgiven her, that he had understood why she had done what she had done, but it still rankled him. “You mean it’s a home for girls that no one wants.”
He nodded and steered the Bronco around a parked ambulance. The ambulance had reached a point on the dirt road where it was no longer safe to continue. The paramedics and the medical examiner had walked the rest of the way. Two reporters had cottoned to the police-scanner news and were waiting by the deputy to get some information for their stories. Mignon sunk into the seat so that only her eyes peered over the side door.
John Henry snorted again. “Don’t worry, I think they probably already know about you.”
Then his police radio came to life. The operator came on and reported an urgent call. John Henry listened to the police jargon and responded promptly. Mignon only understood one phrase, “Blessed Heart.” He returned the mike to the unit and pulled up to the Ford Explorer parked along the side of the main road.
With a stern expression, John Henry said, “Did you even bring your Beretta?”
“It’s in the trunk?” Mignon returned weakly, knowing full well there wasn’t a trunk on the Explorer. “Did that mean that there’s a report from the same school?”
This time she could hear his teeth grinding on each other and she winced. “Your hands are shaking, Mignon,” he said, ignoring her question. “I don’t think you should drive.”
“Then I’ll go with you to the school and wait for you to finish,” Mignon announced. She looked at her hands. Muscles and tendons leaped there of their own volition. They are shaking.
Teeth ground again. “You shouldn’t do that, John Henry,” she advised. “You’ll ruin your teeth.”
“I only seem to do it around you,” he stated grimly. “Why do I have the worst possible feeling about this?”
“I think you’re suspicious of me,” Mignon said. “You don’t trust me. Maybe it’s because I didn’t trust you before. Maybe it’s because I’m a little too interested in a murdered girl than you care for.” She brightened. “You could be afraid that I’m going to get in some kind of trouble because of that interest.”
His long fingers tapped the edge of the steering wheel. John Henry considered that carefully. “Why would you possibly be interested in this one girl? I can see that she’s affected you. I understand th
at it hasn’t been that long since you found your mother’s body and since Jourdain…” Instead of a muscle leaping in his cheek, a vein in his head began to ominously pop out. Mignon frowned. John Henry stopped for a moment and then started again, “It hasn’t been long since that experience for you. But girls like this one, there’s a reason she was killed and dumped in the swamp. It wasn’t to cover any complicated conspiracy of murder and money. It was some shithead who couldn’t think of a better way to deal with what he perceived as a threat. And Caraby’s really good at finding shitheads. He’ll find the right one, and there won’t be a lot of questions about it.”
“Fine,” Mignon said shortly.
John Henry nodded and glanced over his shoulder as he pulled out into the road. Five minutes later, he turned onto another dirt road that intersected the secondary highway. Off to one side of the road, a little wooden sign was almost hidden by a wealth of ivy that curled around it. Words were carved into it and then painted red. She saw only “…ssed Heart.” Then below that was “…ool for Girls.” It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the complete phrase was, “Blessed Heart, School for Girls.”
The dirt road didn’t look like anything that would lead to a school, but on the other hand, it didn’t look like the little-used dirt ruts that Mignon had followed into the bayou. It looked like a road to someone’s house, like many of the houses on bayou property. One was likely to run into a place sitting on stilts or even a trailer home that had been lifted up as high as it could to avoid the inevitable damage of seasonal flooding.
Instead, the road began a gentle climb. The owners of the land had chosen a hill that would provide some refuge from the waters that could ruin all in its path. The road curled upward around thick trees that had been in this forest since time began. John Henry seemingly took the pace leisurely, but there was a reason for it. As soon as he rounded the last curve a dozen girls halted a game they had been playing on the road and spread out, so the vehicle could pass.
Mignon stared out at a dozen pairs of eyes that stared back. They came in every size and color and their ages ranged from six years to eighteen. They were all wearing the same clothing. Their shirts were white and businesslike with a broad collar and two front pockets. A girlish black tie adorned the collar. Knee-length, dusty black skirts showed that they had been playing on a dirt road. The girls also wore knee-high white socks and had practical black flats on their feet. One older girl held onto a red rubber ball and scanned with discerning eyes as the Bronco slowly passed.
John Henry waved at the girls, but only the littlest one waved back.
Mignon tried to smile, but she discovered she couldn’t force herself to make her lips curve in the right way. So she joked instead, hating the way her voice cracked. “Looks like these girls know you real well, John Henry.”
John Henry said, “I’ve taken a lot of them here. Or sometimes I’ve taken their parents to jail. I wouldn’t be surprised if we come out and one of the tires is flat. But the father is strict with the girls and won’t put up with nonsense.”
“This really is a Catholic school for girls,” Mignon said. They left the girls behind them and parked behind a large van that was almost certainly transportation for the children. Beyond the van was a Spanish-style courtyard with wooden gates. The walls were thick, and the gates were simple wood with brass hinges. They were spread wide open and more children played inside near a fountain. Mignon could see the building beyond, an adobe-style construction, which must have been used for its effectiveness in preserving indoor temperatures during the extremes of winter and summer. “A foster home?”
“Yes,” he said. He pulled the Bronco behind the van and set the parking brake. Then John Henry continued patiently as if he were talking to one of the students of Blessed Heart. “Father William is a Catholic priest. He uses grant monies for the school and does some very good things with the girls. I know of two who got scholarships to Tulane and the state university in Baton Rouge. All of that was based on their grades. They have a few volunteers and a tiny paid staff, but when children need a safe home, this is a good place for them to come.”
“Why,” Mignon said just as slowly and patiently, “are you speaking to me like that?”
“You seem shaken,” he answered and took one of her hands in between his own. “I can feel you trembling.” He rubbed her flesh briskly and said, “I’m going in to speak with the father. I don’t want to leave you like this, but a girl is missing.”
“It’s the same girl,” Mignon interrupted. “Why even pretend?”
“Probably is,” John Henry agreed. “But you know about making assumptions.”
“Yeah, you get everyone’s ass in a sling.” Mignon found a weak laugh somewhere and let it go. It had the opposite intended effect, and John Henry’s face dissolved into a fierce frown. “Go on, big macho sheriff. The big-name artist from New York can handle a little by-herself time. I won’t melt into a puddle of tears and paint thinner.”
John Henry sighed and rubbed her hand again. Then he brought her fingers up to his mouth and pressed gentle lips to them. He reluctantly let her go, and she stopped him with a breathless, “You’ve got dirt on your face now.”
He brushed it away and got out, disappearing into the courtyard.
Mignon wasn’t sure how to tell him what was bothering her. It wasn’t simply the murdered girl, although that was enough by itself. It was the experience of being in such a place again that brought memories to the forefront of her mind.
Mignon was eight years old again, and her father was drunkenly telling her that they were going on a bus trip. They would be traveling to Alabama to meet a distant cousin who had a job for him. Mignon would wait for Ruff while he purchased the tickets, even while she wondered where he’d gotten the money for tickets when he hadn’t any money for breakfast. She stood in a corner of the crowded Dallas station and waited for her father to return. Chilled to the bone by reasons a young girl didn’t understand, she wrapped her arms tightly around her skinny body and ignored grown-ups who looked at her oddly. Long minutes later, she began to scan the crowd for her father and couldn’t find him. It hadn’t been the first time Ruff had left her in a place all alone. She had been left in shelters with people she barely knew while he had gone begging for money for cheap liquor.
But this time it was different. Ruff hadn’t been so drunk that the reasonable look had faded from his formerly shrewd brown eyes. He had looked at her so differently that little Mignon had known something was awry. After an hour had passed, she had realized that Ruff didn’t mean to come back. She determined that she would go and look for him, but one of the station attendants recognized that the girl had been abandoned and called the police. Two hours after that, Mignon had been standing at the door of her first foster home: a group home in a large suburban house, she found that the foster family and the other foster children were callously avaricious and not interested in the child in any way except in what they could steal from her or what she could provide to them in the form of a monthly stipend.
It was the beginning of many new lessons for Mignon. The thought of children in a place like that first home made her shiver. It had been a place where a grown-up would pinch her arm just behind the shoulder so the bruise couldn’t be seen by the social workers who periodically came to check the standards. It had been a place where the other children would take her blankets and pillows and forced her to sleep on the floor until she had fought back. It was a place where Mignon had learned about things more evil than the sheriff and judge who had forced her and her father to flee from Louisiana.
A light tap on the passenger window made Mignon start. She looked down and saw one of the girls staring in at her. She was about eight years old and had long brown hair and blue eyes. Mignon rolled the window down and said, “Yes?”
The girl stared at Mignon for a moment. Mignon took the opportunity to look back. The child didn’t look malnourished or abused. Her hair was in a neat braid that
swung down her back, and her skin looked healthy and clean. She had a fresh-apple smell about her that drifted into the Bronco’s cab. Nothing about her suggested neglect or abandonment.
“You here about Dara?” said the girl in a heavy Louisiana accent.
“Dara?” Mignon repeated carefully.
“Dara done gone missing last night. But no one reported her gone ‘til this morning.” The girl scrunched her face up in a frown. “Ain’t the first time Dara done been gone. She go out half the time and stay out all night long.”
“Mary!” called another girl. “Father said we cain’t talk to strangers.”
Mary stuck her tongue out at the other girl. “She’s not a stranger. She be the police.” Her chin went up defiantly.
“I’m not the police,” Mignon said reluctantly. “I just needed a ride from the sheriff.”
“Oh,” Mary said with a shrug. “Well, come watch us jump rope. I’m the best. But Alicia is pretty good, too. We make up our own rhymes. We done placed in last year’s parish championship.”
Mignon climbed out of the Bronco and went into the courtyard. The group of girls gave her a variety of looks from suspicious to curious but accepted her presence within moments. Two girls spread out with two sets of jump ropes and began to expertly twirl them. Mignon was amazed at their skills. Each arm whirled inward, and the jump ropes narrowly missed each other. The little girl she now knew as Mary adroitly leaped into the quickly twirling ropes. Her feet were a blur as they went up and down, and the twirling girls laughed as they tried to get Mary to trip up.
Then Mary started to call a rhyme, and the rest of the girls quickly joined in. “Old Mister Henry is as black as night. He never comes out in the full sunlight. He married a girl with pale, pale skin. They had sixteen pairs of twins. One set was brown. One set was pink. One set was round. One set was the color of fresh-raised mink. How many children did they have? One, two, three…” The counting was a signal for the twirling girls to increase their speed until Mary tripped over a rope at thirty-five. She panted to a stop and took her place at one of the ends.
