by Jimmy Fox
Nick told him that he’d noticed black smoke at first, and later, when he and Holly got nearer, gray and brown smoke.
Higbee nodded his big head. “Gasoline or kerosene, like I said. ’Course gasoline’s common as dirt, and around here lots of folks use kerosene for heating; foresters use it for prescribed burns. Shoot, you can get all you want at Miss Luevie’s store anytime.”
“Doesn’t exactly narrow down our suspects.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Big John agreed. “Well, I best be talking to a few people, and trying to keep my chief of detectives from making any dumb mistakes. I have a bad feeling all he did at that Miami forensics seminar was sit on the beach and drink beer and try to get him some fur, if you know what I mean. Nice sweater, by the way.”
Nick had found a sweater in Holly’s van, a pink cardigan that would have been too small even without the new elastic wrapping that held his right arm immobilized across his stomach.
Now Big John worked with his uniformed deputies and plainclothes detectives, who were methodically scooping samples into evidence bags, taking photos, and dusting for prints. Sooty firemen from Armageddon and every nearby rural volunteer station collected their gear. A utility-company fire investigation team of two men and a woman hovered around the gas meter, hoping, Nick supposed, that the fire wasn’t their company’s fault. A man from the North Louisiana Criminalistics Laboratory in Shreveport removed duffel bags from his Explorer.
Would all this forensic firepower be enough to stop angry tribal spirits?
That question, Nick was certain, haunted the minds of the assembled Katogoula. Faces grim, they listening intently to Luevenia Silsby. There seemed to be much somber agreement with what Luevenia was saying; her voice didn’t carry to Nick’s ears. More tribe members drove up each minute.
Nick walked to one of the ambulances in the parking lot, beside a car from the state Fire Marshal’s Office. The paramedics had determined that Holly was all right, nothing a few butterfly bandages wouldn’t fix. He’d aggravated his injuries in the rescue attempt; the preliminary word was that he would be fitted with even more restrictive implements of medical torture at the hospital.
Holly was sitting up on a bed inside the cluttered treatment compartment of the ambulance, a blanket draped over her shoulders, her legs dangling over the side. She swatted away an EMT’s hands when he tried to put the oxygen mask back on her. She continued cutting her hair with surgical scissors, using a mirror mounted on the opposite wall. Her singed hair fell on white bedding paper spread on the floor. Not as much as Nick had feared would be necessary.
Even with brown antiseptic painted on her face, she made something flutter in his solar plexus. A cork seemed to have come off the bottle of his emotions. Probably the tragedy, he thought. He wished he could put the cork back in. Caring this much for someone distressed him.
“It was murder,” Holly said, snipping too much from one side of her new shorter hairdo. Suppressed fury made her hands shake as she corrected her error and handed the scissors to the EMT. He smiled and winked reassuringly at Nick. “Jason here heard the investigators talking. The office door was tied shut with rope, probably from one of the exhibits. Grace and Irton didn’t have time to . . .”—tears slid down the brown antiseptic—“Nick, they were my friends.”
Jason the EMT offered a box of tissues and climbed down from the truck, allowing them a measure of privacy.
Nick sat on the ledge of the compartment. “I’m really sorry, kid. We almost didn’t make it ourselves.”
“Who’s doing this? What a monster!”
Nick hoped that only her emotions were speaking, and not a crisis-born clairvoyance.
Holly wiped away the last vestiges of outward sorrow. “Why them and not us? We were an easy target all day—especially at a certain moment.” She managed a naughty half-smile.
Nick was relieved to see anger and humor returning. “The killer wasn’t after us,” he said. Not today, at any rate. “Carl was a unique repository of tribal knowledge. Now the museum’s gone, too. Do you see an MO emerging?”
“Yeah, it’s like the killer’s chipping away at the history and spirit of the tribe, one bit at a time. Why are you still alive?”
“You sound disappointed,” Nick said, sulking for effect.
“Oh, give me a break.” She kissed him.
It hurt to turn his head, but he didn’t mind. Her warm, vital mouth was an antidote to the taste of death on Grace’s lips.
“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “Did the killer screw up, or don’t you fit the pattern?”
“This killer doesn’t make mistakes, I’m afraid. The events leading up to the murders were perfectly stage-managed. And the victims were all Katogoula. That’s the common element. I’m just the schmo helping them get their family trees organized.”
“Schmoes have to be careful, too.”
He reached for her hand. “The attack on me meant something, I just don’t know what. But we’re both still in danger, that I do know. The killer may decide to expand the menu.”
“So, if someone’s hunting tribe members, does that rule out the Katogoula as suspects?”
Nick studied the Katogoula gathered near the museum, still listening to Luevenia holding forth. “Otherwise it’s a strange form of suicide.”
“‘Strange’ is right.” Doors slammed and Holly looked beyond Nick to a newly arrived car. “There’s the Channel 6 news crew from Armageddon. The reporter’s one of my old newsroom buddies. He’s handling the tape I dropped off.”
The tape showing the suspicious flashing on the shore of Lake Katogoula the morning of Carl Shawe’s murder.
She hopped out of the ambulance. “I’ll go see if there’s any progress.” She jogged over to the Channel 6 car.
Nick didn’t try to stop her. She wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t rest. He shared her sense of urgency. Someone was systematically attacking the body and the soul of the tribe. Holly’s work of chronicling Katogoula cultural identity and his own efforts to establish the genealogical record were more important than ever now. He had saved the Twins-Raccoon Bowl from the fire; now the two of them had a new, vitally important responsibility: building a new museum of memories before a stealthy, rampant malice targeted more of their raw material, and perhaps them.
Sheriff Higbee couldn’t have chosen a better time to conduct interviews among the Katogoula. Almost everyone was here, to mourn the loss of two friends and of so much tangible history. Nick made special note of a few faces he hadn’t seen at the Three Sisters Pantry meeting. He’d always heard that some killers needed to feast on the pain they created, to reinforce their sense of power by silently taunting law enforcement and victims. Nick had a feeling that the sheriff would be similarly observant.
The assembled Katogoula stood in a tight circle around the bowl Nick had rescued; a few other shattered relics had been thrown out in the fire-fighting action, and they too had been reverently placed within the tribal circle. Tommy and Brianne were absent; the news that the twins had been injured—one seriously—cast a further pall on the mood of the gathering.
Nooj Chenerie wasn’t there, either; he’d driven the twins to the hospital in Armageddon. After Sam had captured his horse, he rode to Nooj’s fire tower, broke a window to get in, and used a recharging two-way radio to summon the absent game warden for help.
The sheriff wouldn’t let anyone venture into the still-smoldering museum, but Nick understood from the hushed talk and anxious expressions that there was an ardent desire to collect what was left. And something else was going on, too.
Holly joined him. She held up two black tape cases: the original tape and the digital enhancement. “There’s someone walking in the woods, all right,” she said in a lowered voice. “But you can’t tell who it is. Just a gray human form. Looks human, anyway. The flash comes from the chest area.”
“Male or female?”
“Can’t tell,” she answered. “They showed me the enhanced section in the car. No
t much to go on, I’m afraid. You want some coffee?”
Indeed he did. She went off in search of some, as he moved closer to the Katogoula.
In the parking lot beyond the emergency vehicles, Nooj Chenerie got out of his official green GMC pickup and strode to the ruins of the museum. He spoke briefly with the sheriff and the chief detective, and soon walked over to stand slightly apart from the circle of fellow tribe members. All heads turned toward him.
“The twins’ll be fine,” he said.
Relief rippled through the group.
“Sam believes he saw something. Swears up and down the Sacred Cougar attacked them.”
The Katogoula let out a collective murmur of shock.
“Now hold on,” Nooj said. “He’s just a scared boy, so it’s hard to say what really happened. But one thing’s for sure: them two Tadbull mares been gentle all their lives. Must have been something bad to spook ’em like that.”
Holly returned and handed Nick a plastic cup of steaming black coffee. He wanted to hug her in thanks for that gift to his nervous system.
With head held high, Luevenia Silsby marched the few feet over to Nick and Holly. The little woman had just won some sort of victory. Nick could see confirmed in her dark eyes the truth of his belief that strength of personality is often inversely related to physical size.
She thrust up a thick stack of small-denomination bills at him. “Two thousand dollars. Count it if you want. Now go. You, too, Holly. We don’t owe you nothing. Just go and let us alone.”
“Shouldn’t you discuss this with Tommy first?” Nick said. “After all, you elected him tribal leader.”
“He’s just been un-elected. I’m in charge now.”
“Let me talk to them,” Holly said. “They’ve known me for a long time.” She waded into the assembly of tribe members, trying to engage several in conversation; they shied away from her as if they were of different polarity.
“Take the money, Nick,” Luevenia insisted. “We don’t need a genealogist to tell us what we already know: we are the tribe. The spirits of our ancestors have always been with us; now we’re straying and they’re sending us a sign. The gambling and the casino and that shopping mall and stuff are all wrong. We don’t want new members or outsiders here. Been some hard times for my people; we made it through those, with no help. We got to do what we believe in, stick together, just like we always done, or we won’t make it through this.” She directed a stern gaze at the wildlife agent, who still remained a few feet from the main tribal body. “Well, Nooj?”
He took a deep breath that inflated his wrestler’s chest; then he stepped over to stand with the others.
Luevenia closed her eyes behind her steel glasses in triumph.
Nick had seen this happen before in other genealogical projects where a lot was at stake, financially or psychologically or both. The unknown can ambush the known, and vanquish it. The past, newly discovered, exerts a shaping influence on those who rarely gave it serious thought. The Katogoula were undergoing such a dangerous metamorphosis. Now they were more Indian than they’d ever been able to claim; and suddenly they were emerging from a Westernized cocoon, believing in and acting on their ancient traditions as never before.
Nick had a feeling the Catholic bishop of the area wasn’t going to be a happy man when he heard about the new spiritual competition manifesting itself among his Katogoula flock.
“I didn’t cause any of these tragedies,” Nick said. “I’m on your side.”
Luevenia Silsby eyed him, weighing his words, interested but unconvinced. “Well then, how come they all started about the time you showed up?”
“I’d like to answer a lot of questions, but I can’t yet. We all need to help the sheriff. With your knowledge of Katogoula ways . . .”
Still grasping the money like a cross before her to ward off a vampire, she held up her empty left hand to silence Nick.
Those beautiful hands! The courthouse stairwell. Remarkable hands on the railing, seconds before the garbage can came hurtling at me! . . . Maybe this image wasn’t just a phantom in the mist of his memory. Could this plucky little woman have attacked him? Was she the murderer?
Luevenia must have noticed his distracted attention. The hands crept stealthily behind her. “Since you got involved with us,” she said venomously, “all these bad things been happening in twos, or they got something to do with the twins of the tribe. First there was Carl Shawe, then there was Grace and Irton, and now Tommy’s twins been hurt. There’s talk of a big cat that don’t act like any regular animal. The Sacred Cougar—that’s what we all think.” Caught up in the ardor of her sermon, she nodded vigorously. “The Sacred Cougar is trying to purge the evil from us! But like in the Story of the Twins of the Forest, the evil one’s tricky. Oh, yes, he is! Could even be you.”
The tribe members mumbled ominously. Nick had been accused of being a plagiarist before—perhaps slightly worse things, as well—but never a witch. Seventeenth-century New England suddenly seemed alive and kicking in the piney woods of twentieth-first century Louisiana.
“Hey,” he said in his defense, “aren’t you forgetting that somebody tried to kill me?”
“That’s what you say,” Luevenia countered. “What if you’re the bringer of evil disguised as a man. You might have done that to yourself, so maybe you could trick us into letting you stay around here and do more evil. Who walks out of the fire with the Twins-Raccoon Bowl? That’s no human thing to do.”
The crowd grumbled assent.
Luevenia now spoke with stony control, like a judge issuing a death sentence: “The evil raccoon can even trick the gods, make them strike at the innocent. And then, the tribe and the chief must strike back.”
“You don’t really believe I’m an evil spirit, do you?” he wanted to mention the pink sweater as exculpatory evidence, but decided against it.
“She’s right,” Nooj said, taking up the case against Nick. “This all started when your name first came up. Tommy went to talk to Chief Claude at the Chitiko-Tiloasha casino, and we ain’t had a day’s peace since then.”
“Look, Miss Luevie,” Nick said, rubbing his throat where he felt a phantom constriction, “I respect the Katogoula traditions. You can’t be a genealogist for long by not taking a client’s beliefs seriously. But I work with facts, with evidence, in many ways just like the police. The old stories may be involved in these tragedies, but I think the actors are human beings. That’s where the answers are, in human motivations. With our help, the sheriff is going to figure it all out.”
She wavered a moment. Her eyes flicked away. But her resolution returned, and again she thrust her right hand at him with the stack of bills.
“We want the wasps back in their nest. Go home to New Orleans, while you still can.”
A tidy sum, Nick was thinking, his gaze drawn to the cash. Take it. They don’t want you here; and you can’t make much progress without their cooperation. Hawty would certainly like to see a bit of cash flow her way.
“Sorry,” he said, finally. “Can’t do that.”
Her tensed lips and chin showed her quaking anger. She turned her back on him without a word. Then she motioned to the other tribe members. They again encircled her and the Twins-Raccoon Bowl, where Luevenia had placed the money she’d offered to Nick. Each contributor retrieved the appropriate amount, as if dipping for sacred water from an ancient well.
Nick felt Holly tugging on his sweater sleeve. “Look!” she whispered in his ear. “His badge!”
Nick didn’t understand at first, but then realized she meant Nooj Chenerie. He attempted a nonchalant glance at the state-shaped LDWF badge on Nooj’s chest; it winked brightly in the sunlight. Then he moved his gaze up to Nooj’s eyes, which stared directly back at him. Nick waved affably at the unsmiling man.
CHAPTER 22
The Greensheaves Court Motel was as depressing as ever. After several rings, Nick answered Daniel Boone’s obsolete phone.
“I have something
interesting,” Hawty said over the line from New Orleans.
After a day that had included a tragic fire, two murders, a nearly fatal assault on the Shawe twins, and the loss of a golden opportunity to have sex with Holly, whatever it was had better be very interesting to justify invading his peace and quiet.
“Why didn’t you answer your cell phone?” Hawty said, not allowing him a chance to defend himself. “You let the battery run down again, didn’t you?”
Nick was afraid to tell her that he wasn’t sure where the phone was, and didn’t really give a damn. He hated it as part of the giant tech-wing conspiracy, as the most visible incarnation of the Almighty Gizmo, the god of the technological religion that was making us less and less human every day, turning each of us into a mere marionette twitching on digital strings. It was set to silent mode in his glove compartment, or a coat pocket, or maybe—
“Remember that journal of the clerk in Mézières’s diplomatic mission?” Hawty asked with ill-disguised excitement.
“Seventeen sixty-eight,” Nick grumbled. He drew in a deep breath and massaged his pillow-creased face. The telephone had ended a wonderful nap. But that’s no excuse for being a jerk to Hawty. She counts on you to be her mentor—as they say in business-speak. Teach her to doubt and examine, herself and others; prepare her for all the dragons of deception that will assail her with flaming lies; arm her with a sword of skepticism to thrust at her own untested hypotheses and to shred the fallacies of others. “If this journal even existed,” he added, goading her. “I also remember a certain young female student during World War II—”
“From California, who was in Professor Bolton’s class and who wrote a thesis citing the journal wherein the clerk mentions the big intertribal war—”
