Crimson Bayou

by C. L. Bevill

  - Children’s ball-bouncing rhyme

  Mignon spent late Wednesday afternoon visiting Miner Poteet. She talked about things not contentious to either of them and enjoyed herself immensely. He didn’t bring up Dara’s murder or the fact that Mignon’s house had been broken into, and she didn’t bring up the issue of the Creoles. On Wednesday night she continued cleaning up her house. Dishes were the worst casualty. Her anonymous visitor had simply dumped the contents of her cupboards in an effort to locate something and hadn’t cared what happened when things met the floor.

  When she was done straightening and restoring as best she could, Mignon went through the contents of Dara’s plastic bag again. Try as she might, she couldn’t find any new clues that would tell her something she desperately needed to know. All she could think of was the gold Altima she’d seen out at the communal dock. Holding the photograph of a much younger Sister Helena and her youthful lover, long-since dead, Mignon wondered if Sister Helena had decided to flatten her tires in order to search for the photo herself. All Sister Helena had to trust was Mignon’s word that she would hand over the incriminating evidence, once the matter was settled and the real culprit arrested. The sister couldn’t know that Mignon was deadly serious about it.

  Sister Helena had access to the Altima, knew exactly where the communal dock was located and was well acquainted with the rest of the area. If she didn’t trust Mignon, then she could have easily waited for her at the dock’s parking area, slit her tires after Mignon had paddled off, and went straight to the farmhouse to search for the photo. However, when Sister Helena had spoken to her, it was as if all had been forgiven, and all was normal once again. There had been no fleeting expression of distrust or frustration or anger over Mignon’s intrusive inquisitiveness.

  Well, this isn’t as easy as they make it look on TV, she thought idly, and put everything away in the Ben Franklin stove again. But Mignon held back five of the rhymes, folding them carefully and putting them inside her purse. Then she shut the stove’s door and thought about showing the rhymes to Sister Helena and Father William to see what they thought of them. Perhaps they could give her some kind of indication of why Dara had such a dual personality. What, if anything, did her bigotry have to do with her murder?

  A deep voice said, “You going to build a fire?”

  Mignon jumped. Her head spun, and she saw the bane of her existence. At least he was the bane for the time being. The man who wanted her in his bed but at the same time didn’t trust her to take care of herself. He was a man who was full of contradictions. “John Henry,” she said feebly. “I know you’re the sheriff of the parish, but cough or something before you come in.”

  John Henry was dressed in his khaki uniform. Despite the lateness of the day, it appeared as if it had been freshly pressed and emphasized his well-built body from the breadth of his shoulders to his narrow waist and hips. Sherry-colored eyes in a handsome face searched her face as if seeking out the crimes that she might have committed. “A fire?” he prompted her.

  Mignon glanced at the Ben Franklin stove again. He’d seen her close the door but probably nothing else or he would be jumping on it. John Henry was anything but brainless. “No, I was just wondering if I should clean it out.” Pathetic. Very, very puny, she thought.

  The expression on his face was both probing and observant. But he didn’t say anything.

  “You want something to drink?” she asked politely. “Robert brought me a six-pack of some kind of beer yesterday. Said he would have brought wine, but that he wasn’t a wine-bringing kind of guy.”

  “Proper etiquette to bring a gift when one’s visiting,” he said slowly with a hint of amusement. His gaze went around the room. “My mama always told me that.” His hands went wide open as if he was a little ill at ease that he hadn’t followed his mother’s instruction. Then he said, “This cleaned up fast. I came over earlier but you were gone. Thought to help you out.”

  “There wasn’t much damage,” she said. Crossing her arms protectively over her chest, Mignon rose up and avoided looking at him. “Just dishes that I got at a secondhand shop.”

  “I didn’t know you shopped at secondhand shops,” John Henry said with a note of inquisitiveness. “After all, it’s not like you can’t afford Saks Fifth Avenue.”

  “I liked the dishes,” she gritted. Mignon raised her head slightly and glared at him from under hooded eyes. “And there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  John Henry took that in with interest. He didn’t move from his position near the tiny kitchen table she’d stripped and re-finished herself. “I’m beginning to think that’s very true.”

  “Why are you here, John Henry?” she said suddenly, bringing her head up to stare straight into his eyes. “Did I do something else wrong?”

  His large body was still as he regarded her in turn. “I don’t know,” he told her quietly. “I’m trying to figure it out. You forgot to mention the other night why you were out at the Honores’, and I was so pissed off that I forgot to ask you.”

  “W-well,” she sputtered the word out and then found some fresh steam. “I feel somewhat responsible because I found Dara’s body.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m getting a beer,” she announced. “You want one?”

  “Sure.” He took a step back and let her pass him as she went into the kitchen. The Old Brown Dog Ales were chilling in the fridge, and she took two bottles out. She handed one to him without looking him in the eye and heard him mutter, “Now that’s a beer.”

  Mignon pulled a chair out from the little kitchen table and said sternly, “All right then, John Henry. You’re ready to have that talk you said we’d have at Dara’s funeral. I think you said something about me not wiggling out of it.”

  John Henry pulled another chair out and turned it away from him. He straddled it and sat down, leaning forward against the chair. He deftly twisted off the bottle cap of the beer and kept looking steadily at Mignon. “I didn’t for one moment think that you really would wiggle out of it,” he said with inordinate calmness.

  “You want me to butt out of Dara’s murder investigation,” she stated. When put on the defensive, she did what she always did. Her chin went up.

  Taking a long drink of the beer, John Henry made a sound of enjoyment. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Good stuff, that. And yes, I do.”

  There was a moment of indecision for her. Not telling John Henry about the bag of Dara’s possessions in the Ben Franklin stove went against what she had learned about him in the previous months. Not trusting him to do the right thing would hurt him. There had been a time when she hadn’t dared to trust him. It might have meant her life but not only her life, the lives of some of her closest friends. What she had done at the time had alienated John Henry, but he’d managed to come to terms with her actions, judging it against the lengths he would have undergone if his only child had been the one missing for so many years.

  Not only that, but it would hurt their relationship. She still marveled at that. He’d called it a relationship without any prompting on her part. “I didn’t mean to cause problems,” she said.

  “I know that, Mignon,” he replied softly. “But you do. Your interference might ruin any case we develop.”

  “Against who? Tomas? You already changed your mind about him.”

  “He’s not eliminated as a suspect,” John Henry said gravely. “Not yet.”

  “And if I hadn’t kicked, yelled, and screamed, you wouldn’t even be at that point.”

  With a heavy sigh, he said, “That’s not true. Simon’s a good investigator. He digs until he has all the facts. And because he’s so thorough, he’s considered ruthless. It’s why the Creoles don’t like him. He’s put too many away when they think he shouldn’t.”

  “They think Caraby is railroading Tomas,” she said grimly. The unsaid part was that she agreed with the sentiment. Nailing Tomas Clovis was the easy way to go. But from what Mignon understood, the
evidence really was all circumstantial.

  “This isn’t the talk I wanted to have,” he replied somberly.

  That shut Mignon up. She tried to understand exactly what John Henry had wanted to discuss. The only thing that she could think of was they were too different to be together. She tended to rile him. He couldn’t or wouldn’t fathom her motives in what she did. The first time had been her “gimme.” The second time was the part where he cut her off at the knees.

  “You haven’t opened your beer,” he told her.

  Mignon glanced at the beer bottle sitting on the table in front of her. “I’m not really in the mood for beer after all.”

  “Mignon,” he said her name softly. “Look at me.”

  Her brown eyes shot upwards. Warm, passionate eyes, John Henry thought. Eyes that a man could drown in. A complicated woman all wrapped up in an intricate package. He didn’t sigh out loud, but he wanted to do so. Oh Lord. “What are you doing to me?”

  Staring back at him, Mignon flattened her lips into a grim line. “Is this the part where you say we can still be friends but really we can’t?”

  “Huh?”

  “I think we can skip over this,” she declared. “I don’t want to rake over the coals because you want a post-mortem to—”

  “Mignon, shut up.” A series of expressions flitted over John Henry’s face varying from anger to comprehension to tolerance.

  Mignon shut up. She leaned back in the chair and waited for the other shoe to drop. Big fat shoe. Never been dumped like this. I have been dumped. I remember a kid in the tenth grade who wanted to go out with the cheerleader with the double D breasts so he…

  Fiddling with the bottle of beer, John Henry cleared his throat loudly and interrupted her rambling train of thought. She froze in place and waited for it. “Go ahead,” she said finally, unable to bear the tension. “Put me out of my misery.”

  “Put you out of your misery?” he repeated like a mynah bird.

  “Yes, just go ahead and break it off!” Mignon suddenly yelled. “I’m a bad girl. I don’t listen to reason. I stick my nose into everything. I’m going to get myself killed, and you’re the heap-big-chief of little ol’ La Valle who doesn’t need any more rumors circulating about him. I’m probably the cause of more of your problems than the ones committing the felonies.”

  John Henry stared at her.

  “So,” Mignon added weakly, “there it is.”

  “There it is,” he agreed, and his voice sounded odd.

  Mignon looked down at the beer again and wondered if getting drunk would solve any of her problems. Then she speculated that half the attraction of being in La Valle was that it was where a man named John Henry Roque lived and breathed and existed. “Yep,” she said for emphasis and wished she hadn’t said anything else. There was an uncomfortable silence between them, and John Henry wasn’t moving or speaking, which made it worse.

  An eternity later he said, “I was trying to figure out how to tell you something, and then you go and say something like that.” He frowned for a moment. “I know we’re not the same. It’s part of the appeal. A little part of it. But there’s more than that.” His hand shot over the table, and Mignon blinked at the speed. He brought it to her cheek and stopped there lightning quick. She could feel the heat of his fingers so close to her skin but not touching her. “No, it’s something else I wanted to tell you. Ever since you asked me how I felt about your ancestry.”

  Again, their eyes collided. Mignon couldn’t possibly fathom what he had wanted to say.

  “There have been three women in my life,” he said.

  “But…”

  “Three women that I’ve cared about,” he explained. “My ex-wife, Ruth, a lieutenant named Kim Elijah while I was in the Army, and you.” His fingers touched her cheek gently, caressed her skin lovingly, and then his hand retracted to his side.

  Only three women? Mignon privately marveled at that. John Henry was stubborn, but his attributes outweighed the possibility of females actively shunning him. Except that he was choosy about whom he was with.

  “I still care about Ruth. She’s the mother of my child. You know we have a decent relationship for exes. Kim was another story altogether. She was a good woman. Strong and ambitious.”

  “She was,” Mignon repeated with cold dread.

  “She died over there. There was a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.” John Henry’s voice was calm with acceptance. He had dealt with the loss years before, but it still affected him.

  “I’m sorry, John Henry,” Mignon whispered.

  He nodded. “That’s not why I’m telling you. I’ve experienced loss before. The kind of loss that makes the strongest man fall to his knees.” John Henry leaned forward and made the little kitchen chair tilt. “But that feeling doesn’t compare to how I would feel if I lost you.”

  The silence was deafening. Mignon tried to swallow to clear the lump out of her throat, but she couldn’t make it work. Is he actually saying what I think he’s saying? Then she amended it. I have no idea what I think that he’s saying.

  “Since your mother’s funeral, things have been on an even keel,” John Henry said carefully. “We go out. We enjoy each other. We make love. Ruby makes suggestive comments about us marrying and having twenty little rug rats that will tromp all over the sheriff’s department. But then you found Dara’s body, and your cousin found you. Now things have changed. If you actually think that the blood running in your veins could make a difference about how I feel about you, then you’re a fool, Mignon.”

  “No more even keel,” she said softly.

  “No,” he agreed. “But no relationship is without strife. I don’t like you doing what you’ve been doing. You have no idea how close I’ve come to throwing you in the jail just so you’ll be protected.” There was a brief pause full of anticipatory sensation. “I’ve come to the conclusion that you wouldn’t be you if you settled for simple acceptance of something you feel so passionately about.”

  “You mean Tomas Clovis,” she interpreted.

  John Henry nodded again. “That and other things.”

  “I’m not sure if I understand,” Mignon said tiredly. The emotional roller coaster wasn’t the best ride she’d ever been on. It was a trying situation, trying to guess what John Henry was attempting to convey to her.

  “I’m not sure if I understand,” John Henry retorted.

  “What do you want, John Henry?” Mignon’s face was grim. “This extended piece of illumination is like pure torture.”

  “I want you to be safe. I want you to stay out of things that aren’t your concern.” His hand waved around the little farmhouse, indicating that someone who had been threatened by her had just been in her house searching through her possessions, and they didn’t care if she knew or not. “I want you to realize that you aren’t invulnerable. Your door wasn’t even locked, goddammit.”

  “And if I don’t,” Mignon ventured carefully.

  John Henry put the beer down on the table and pushed it away from him. “I’m not issuing ultimatums, Mignon.” He stood up. “I’m not dumping you. I hope you’re not dumping me. But we have to come to some kind of compromise here.”

  A frown made lines form in Mignon’s forehead. “Compromise,” she said. “Like what kind of compromise? I don’t do things you don’t like and then you’ll be happy with me?”

  “That’s not a compromise,” he said severely. He turned the kitchen chair around and tucked it back under the table. “Think about it, Mignon. I’m sorry I don’t want to finish the beer. I’ve got to drive tonight.” He walked around and leaned down. One large hand held the side of her face, and he gently kissed her forehead as if she were his daughter. Then he walked out the door.

  Mignon hesitated and rushed into the living room. She opened the Ben Franklin stove and retrieved the bag with a disgusted groan. It took her two seconds to retrieve the photograph of Sister Helena and replace it in the stove. Five more seconds and she was out on the porch, hold
ing the bag up in the air, and hoping that John Henry hadn’t been in a furious hurry to get away from her.

  He hadn’t been. The driver’s side door was open, and he was climbing in. The porch light made him seem as dark as a devil, and his face was rooted in shadows. The instant John Henry saw the bag, he became utterly still.

  Mignon groaned again, this time in abrupt understanding that this wasn’t the best time to admit to him what she’d done or hadn’t done with physical evidence of an ongoing homicide investigation. She stepped carefully down the porch stairs and went to meet him. He didn’t move because she thought that he was most likely too furious to make any conciliatory actions. She recognized instantly from the rigid bent of his frame that he knew exactly what she had in her hand. Stopping a few steps away, she said unnecessarily, “This is Dara’s private collection. It includes photos, jump rope rhymes, and letters.”

  John Henry didn’t immediately take the bag but stared at her, his features masked in murky black shapes cast by the dim light. “How much did you touch it?”

  “The bag a lot. But the inside I touched only the edges,” she said truthfully, damning herself with honesty. Mignon was hoping that John Henry wouldn’t immediately remember what she had said was inside that Dara had been planning to use against people, for example the photo that revealed a youthful indiscretion, the same photo that was no longer in the bag.

  There was a sound that indicated that John Henry was grinding his teeth again. He reached out and took the bag, alternating looking at her and the bag. “How long have you had this?”

  “You know how long,” she said wearily.

  “You should have given it to me yesterday,” he stated fiercely.

  “I promised Tomas I wouldn’t give it to Caraby.” The words burst out of her in an effort to make him understand that her promises meant something to her. “We couldn’t know that he could be trusted. The insurance card was too telling.”

  “And of course, you didn’t look inside the bag,” John Henry said scathingly.