Crimson Bayou

by C. L. Bevill

  There was an even darker scenario that John Henry didn’t want to consider, but he forced himself to think about it. If Robert had been responsible for Dara’s death, and Mignon was asking too many uncomfortable questions about the deed, then it was possible that someone had thought that an accidental death might result in deterring both her and the man she was seeing at the time, the sheriff, the one ultimately responsible for finding Dara’s killer.

  John Henry’s jaws clenched together, and the men who watched him only saw the flickering muscle in one cheek as he stared stonily into the bayous. Right now, he thought, I have to trust these people. They’re not all bad. They don’t condone the murder of one of their own. Only one bad apple might be present, but the rest will search for Mignon until they drop.

  Robert began speaking to the others in a low voice. A young girl came up to him and tugged on the tail of his shirt. John Henry turned in time to see him slouch down to the little girl’s height and say, “Oui chère?”

  The girl, with dark brown pig’s tails streaming down her back, tied off with scarlet ribbons, leaned into him and whispered into his ear. After thirty seconds, Robert pulled away with a startled, “You sure, Genie?”

  The little girl glanced at John Henry and nodded firmly. Robert turned the little girl, who was about ten years old, toward the lines of houses on their sturdy stilts. “Go on home.”

  Genie sped off, springing into a girlish lope.

  Robert came off his haunches slowly and turned to John Henry with a dark expression on his face. “She said she saw a black man here last night.”

  John Henry didn’t say anything.

  “A man with dark skin is what she meant, although that ain’t exactly what she said.”

  “I don’t like that word,” John Henry said warningly.

  “I don’t either. But folks still use it ‘round here. I reckon you’ve heard it many times before and will again. But she said she saw him down by the Porta-Potties, waiting off in the bayou in a pirogue. When she ran back to tell her mam, she thought the girl was fooling her. Some story about Half-Man looking for the other half of his soul or mebe Jean Lafitte’s ghost come back to find his missing treasure.” Robert scratched at a gnat flying around his face. “Once Genie’s mam heard about Mignon, well, she sent her girl right down to tell us.”

  “This man she saw, did she know who it was?” John Henry asked. He briefly looked in the direction that Genie had taken. The thought of questioning the child himself loomed in his mind. He didn’t think the mother would allow it, but the probability of the child clamming up in the face of the local law enforcement was higher than that.

  “No, she ain’t never seen him before,” Robert said. “But it means Mignon probably didn’t drown in the bayou. And a gator probably didn’t et her up neither.”

  “Tomas Clovis?” John Henry muttered. There was only one dark man who might be interested in Mignon. His grave stare went back to the bayous. Why would Clovis want to take Mignon? Or had he taken her at all? It was possible that Mignon had gone with him willingly. She had indicated that she believed in his innocence, albeit for the most trivial of reasons. But Mignon was one to go with her instincts.

  They had failed her before. John Henry hoped that they hadn’t failed her again.

  •

  The place where Tomas had brought Mignon was more than a long-forgotten, waterlogged cemetery. Once there had been a church, as well. Its simple stone walls remained. However, the doors had vanished, revealing that the interior had a dirt floor, and the wooden planks had been taken away or had dissolved with the passage of time. The farthest wall was sinking into the sludge of the bayou, tilting over dangerously. One day a strong wind would blow and the stones would tumble into the debris at the bottom of the waters below and vanish forever.

  But what remained was a solitary window in the highest part of the wall. Mignon realized it must have been part of a bell tower once. Part of a beveled-glass window remained. Stained with various colors, half the glass had fallen away, leaving a crimson band that the sun shone through and caused a stream of red light to fall across the desolate scene.

  A place where the light bent, Mignon realized. Shining through the antique glass, the light was distorted by the color and the beveled edges. It was stunningly beautiful, and at the same time, it was achingly alone. No one would ever worship here again and those who had passed were left here. Only the wind-shorn stones remained to show that they had ever lived and died in this inaccessible location.

  “Once it was a town here,” Tomas broke the silence. “I don’t recollect what it was called. Catholics, I know. Slaves, too. You can read some of the names on the stones. Some of ‘em you can only trace faintly with your fingers. They came here on account of they couldn’t be free no other place.” He looked slowly around them. “Just the wind and the cry of the cranes here. They lived off what they could catch from the bayous. Turtles and such.” One of his large hands indicated the scarlet glass of the lonesome window. “I don’t know what they had to pay for that. But I reckon it was plenty dear. Miz Prudhomme once told me that glass was powerful expensive in the 19th century.”

  “You were taught by Miz Prudhomme,” Mignon said slowly.

  Tomas nodded. “Sure. Most of the kids in the bayou got taught history by her. Good teacher and a Creole. Shows what a person can do.” His eyes closed. “Dara was like that.”

  Mignon cradled the coke in one arm and propped herself up with the other. She didn’t want to lean against the gravestone. It was so weathered and thin that it might fall apart if she touched it. The spot between her eyes throbbed anew, but as she got used to the position, it began to dwindle into a bearable status quo. “Dara was like Miz Prudhomme?”

  Considering his answer, Tomas shook his head. “She was ambitious. She wanted things for us. She wanted things for our child.”

  Her mouth opened with shock. “She was pregnant?”

  Tomas nodded. “We were going to leave here.” Then he laughed shortly. “Leave this wonderful place where someone felt like it was the right thing to do to strangle her and dump her in the water.” His laughter twisted into something bitter. “Ain’t no place for a child no how. People here don’t just judge on the color of your skin. They judge you on the color of your mama’s skin.”

  The image of Dara’s creamy brown flesh shot into Mignon’s mind. The shade had been so golden, so perfect, that she immediately thought of being a teenager wanting to lose that ghostly paleness she’d inherited. When she had first seen the dead girl, her thoughts hadn’t been on the color of her skin or who her mother had been, only that she had been murdered and left to rot in the bayou like something inconsequential.

  “You were going to run away with Dara,” Mignon said slowly, “because she was pregnant, because you both hated this place?”

  “Better places in the world. Places where it don’t matter about things like that.” Tomas’s face distorted inconsolably. “Don’t matter now. Dara’s dead. The baby’s dead. It’s all gone.”

  Mignon had experienced loss before. The loss of her mother had been shocking enough. The loss of her father had been just as traumatic in its own way. But by the time Ruff had actually died, it was anticlimactic. She didn’t know what to say to the young man with that agonized expression on his face. If only John Henry could see Tomas’s face now…

  But John Henry was going to be angry. Livid at Mignon’s disappearance and furious that Tomas had taken her in the middle of the night to an isolated place. His wrath, due to the fact that her limbs had been restrained, and she had been forced to smell gasoline because of the rag over her head, would be immense. John Henry wouldn’t stop to question why Tomas had done it, what motivated him to take such an extreme action. He would merely react.

  I’ve made him so irritated with me, Mignon pondered. He might say I brought this on myself. She thought about it. No, John Henry wouldn’t do that. Her attention came back to Tomas. “Why bring me here, Tomas? You coul
d have told me all this over the phone?”

  “Over the phone?” he repeated. “Phone won’t do me no good. You cain’t see my face. You cain’t tell what I be saying is real.” Tomas studied her attentively. “You listening to me now. You taking me real serious-like, because I brought you here, to this place where Dara and I spent time together.” His gaze flickered to the crimson beveled window above. “She liked it here. Said it was like us. Isolated. Alone. Rundown but proud.”

  Mignon glanced slowly around her, and she could see what he was saying was what Dara had said to him. He was repeating the words like a mantra. This place had been special to the pair. In fact, it was probably the very spot where their child had been conceived.

  She realized abruptly why John Henry and Caraby were so dead set on Tomas as their perpetrator. They probably knew that he was the father, regardless of the fact that he’d run away when he’d been arrested. “Do you know that Dara’s parents probably would have had you arrested for statutory rape?”

  Tomas made an indistinct noise. “Dara smarter than that. She had an angle. There weren’t gonna be no arrest. We be free and clear and off to some other where. Some place where it didn’t matter that we Creoles.”

  “Tomas,” Mignon said sadly. “Bigotry is everywhere. There is no Shangri-La.”

  “There is a place,” he insisted doggedly, and she could see that he was just a child in his heart of hearts. “Dara said there is and if that ain’t true—” his face crumpled into a rictus of agony— “then that means she wasn’t real.”

  Again, Mignon was at a loss for words. A wind was blowing along the highest branches of the trees above; the gentle howl caused a series of goose bumps to ripple along the flesh of her forearms. How could she take away the last positive memories of a murdered girl? Mignon knew she couldn’t do that. And she wouldn’t.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Saturday, March 15th

  Two little bayou birds sitting on the wall.

  One named Peter, one named Paul.

  Fly away, Peter, fly away Paul!

  Don’t you come back ‘til your birthday’s called.

  January, February, March…

  Now fly away, fly away, fly away all!

  - Children’s jump rope rhyme

  “You wanted me to know about Dara,” Mignon said after a long while.

  Tomas nodded. “She not like the other girls. She better than them. Like you, I reckon. They talk about what you done. Find those people what done your mama wrong. You started asking questions about Dara. I figured since you found her, you felt responsible. And somehow, someway, you knew I didn’t do this awful thing. You knew,” he repeated in a harsh voice that revealed the pain stoking the fires of his soul.

  “I do know,” Mignon said. She sat forward and wiped her mouth. The smell of gasoline was still overpowering in her nostrils, and she wished it would leave her before she embarrassed herself. But it was so important to listen to what Tomas was trying to tell her. She forced herself to finish drinking the coke. “I never thought you had killed Dara.”

  “Then who?” Tomas demanded. “Who do you think did it? You go to the school. I’ve seen you there. You go there after her death. You teach the girls, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? You suspect something, or someone.”

  Tomas is watching the school? Robert’s handsome face popped into her mind. It was followed by Sister Helena and then Father William’s image. But it was Robert who was the most compelling. He had been in love with Dara like Tomas, but he had lost out to the other man. Another man had even slept with the pretty young Creole. “I’m not sure who murdered Dara,” she said softly, truthfully.

  Tomas looked at the ground. His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, and for a solitary moment, Mignon felt threatened. But his anger was directed elsewhere. “But you’ll find out, won’t you? You be one of us. You know if they decide that I be the one, there’ll be no justice for Dara. Ain’t no one will go looking for the murderer of a little Creole girl.”

  “John Henry,” Mignon began and blinked when Tomas’s head shot up and fixed her with such a look of intense fury that she almost scuttled backwards, despite the fragile gravestone behind her. But she finished, in spite of his expression. “John Henry won’t let anyone get railroaded. I know. He’s a good man. He cares about what he does. I think you know it, too.”

  The extreme expression on his face began to fade. “I know,” he gritted. “But it’s that man, Caraby, who be the investigator. He was one of us, too. But he turned his back on the Creoles. He’s one of the light ones. I don’t reckon he’ll see the Gullahs as part of his heritage. Not enough to make sure he’s got the right fella rotting in a cell in Angola.”

  There was a faint noise that caused both of them to lift their heads. Tomas looked toward the south, and after a moment, he said, “Helicopter. They’re looking for you.”

  Mignon heard the faint chop-chop-chop of the helicopter’s rotors and knew that Tomas was correct. “They’ll find you,” she said.

  A cagey look passed over his façade. “Ain’t no one gonna find me, unlessin’ I let them. A boy could disappear into these backwoods for a hundred years, and ain’t no one gonna see hide nor hair of him.” He stepped forward and with a deceptively easy motion yanked Mignon to her feet. “I got something for you. Then I’ll take you to a road where you can walk out.”

  “I won’t…” Mignon started to say that she wouldn’t turn him in, but she didn’t want to make a promise that she might have to break at a later point in time.

  Tomas laughed again, and it wasn’t a nice laugh, tugging her along in his wake. “You won’t what? Tell ‘em where I’m at? Don’t you fret none. You don’t know where you be at, much less me. Tell your precious John Henry whatever you need to.”

  They reached the old walls of the ancient church, and Tomas stopped abruptly. He found a loose stone with his free hand and pulled it out with his fingers. It dropped to the ground. Then he stuck his hand inside and pulled out a large plastic bag. He shoved the bag into Mignon’s stomach, forcing her free arm to come up and grab it to keep it from falling.

  “This,” he said forcibly, “was Dara’s. Her personal stuff. I ain’t gonna read it myself. But you can. You can use it. She might have left something there that will help you. Then you can give it to the sheriff. Not Caraby. You got that straight?”

  Mignon’s eyes connected with Tomas’s darker ones. The pain in his eyes was slowly being replaced by something else. She couldn’t identify it, but the word slithered unwanted through her mind. Vengeful. His was the face of retribution to come.

  His hand directed her again, tugging her along with him. On the far side of the little island, he had concealed a little pirogue in some thick brush. This one was just big enough for two people but unpainted like the colorful ones she’d seen and used. It was simple varnished wood, aged and battered with use. Tomas let her go to pull the boat out but quickly put her into it once it was floating, seemingly without effort as his great frame made the motions.

  “I may not find out anything,” she warned him from the front of the pirogue. She didn’t even look over her shoulder at the young man behind her. The boat shifted as he climbed in, but there was hardly a ripple in the water.

  “Maybe not,” he said finally. Wood scraped against wood as he brought out the paddle. “But you won’t hide it either.”

  Mignon looked at the bag in her arms. Through the slightly translucent bag she could see that photographs were included and had to restrain herself from shuffling through the contents right then and there. This was what Linda had talked about. Dara had taken things from people for the meager hold that she could obtain on them. Then she had hidden them, here in the desolate remains of what once was a thriving place with living, breathing people.

  As the pirogue worked its way in a direction away from the distant helicopter, she looked back and once more glimpsed the relics of the church and the graveyard. The solitary window glinted crimson
-like in the light of a climbing sun.

  An hour later, Tomas lifted her out of the pirogue onto a little levee and pointed. “That way,” he said. “There’s a dirt road that leads to highway 119. You won’t have a problem finding someone to take you down the road.”

  “And what will you do, Tomas?” Mignon asked. An hour in the fresh air had pretty much cleared the headache and lingering effects of the gasoline inhalation from her body. She could still smell it but knew a long bath would take care of it.

  Tomas settled into the stern of the pirogue and pushed away from the levee with the paddle. His dark gaze skimmed over her. He heard her, but he didn’t answer. She watched until he had disappeared into the thick vegetation of the bayous and climbed up the side of the levee. It was as if he hadn’t been there at all.

  Following in the direction Tomas had indicated, Mignon had no problem finding the road. Several cars passed by her until a parish vehicle screeched to a halt behind her. She looked over her shoulder and saw an open-mouthed Elvis Brandt staring at her through his windshield. The deputy was frozen in position for long seconds. He finally moved, opening the door to clumsily exit, looking at her as if she would up and vanish again.

  Mignon took a deep breath and thought about how good it was going to feel to get into her bathtub. But first she was going to have to persuade Elvis to drive her home so that John Henry wouldn’t see the bag in her hands and immediately demand to know where she’d gotten it from and what was inside. Later, she’d give it to him.

  •

  Mignon climbed into the passenger side, and Elvis courteously closed the door behind her. The first words out of her mouth had been to ask him not to call the sheriff. Elvis’s eyes had got as large as the diameter of the moon, and he said with great astonishment, “I can’t do that. John Henry would skin me alive.”