Bayou Blue

by Raquel Byrnes

  “You feel dizzy or disoriented?”

  “Does irritated count?”

  “He’s fine,” Girard said dryly. He pulled a chemical ice pack from his paramedic’s bag, cracked it against his leg, and handed it to Jake. “You won’t come in for an x-ray?”

  Jake scowled at his feet, feeling stupid and angry.

  Girard shrugged and started packing up his stuff.

  Jake got up, pressed the icepack to his head and motioned for Toughie to follow him. They walked down the porch stairs to the patch of saw grass nearest the water.

  “You see inside?”

  Toughie nodded, his grey eyes narrowing at Jake. “Yeah.”

  “What do you think?”

  Born to a boat-racing family, he got his name from the many crashes he’d survived and still went back. Toughie stood a foot shorter and twenty pounds heavier than Jake. Once a meaty guy, he’d gone wobbly with age. At fifty, he was the oldest deputy who worked for Jake, and the smartest.

  “Could be two things, either he tried to kill himself and panicked at the last moment or someone tried to hang him and he got out from under them.” He scratched at the notepad in his hands with a chewed up pen.

  Jake nodded. “Sounds right. The scene could play both ways. He could have flailed around trying to get free of the rope, or he could have been fighting them off. The shower curtain was bent, but that could be just from his weight.”

  “Saw the notebooks, too. Looks like Dauby was into some complicated math,” Toughie said with sarcasm. “The posters in the closet? They were blueprints. Can’t tell what kind, but it doesn’t look like plans for a deck to me.” He pushed the pen through the notepad’s wire spiral and tucked them both in the chest pocket of his uniform.

  “The notebooks had the kind of math they use in engineering.” Jake shook his head. “Randy was an engineer. I don’t know, Toughie. Things are getting tangled.”

  Toughie took a pack of nicotine gum out and shoved a piece in his mouth. “Dauby could barely add. He had that…reading thing, where you see letters backwards?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Jake watched his deputies on the porch. They were good people, honest, but inexperienced. Whether this was an attempt to fake a suicide, or something else, whoever attacked him was something his deputies never encountered here in La Foudre before.

  “I sent Rick over to the egret nest. Someone threw a pipe over there, probably to distract you.”

  “It worked.” Jake pulled the icepack away and looked down at it in his hand, squishing it. “Anything over the hill?”

  “Nah, you know these swamps. More than a dozen ways in here by boat; could be anywhere.”

  “We just missed them, Toughie. Maybe by minutes.”

  “Ye-ah,” Toughie said. He looked at Jake with tired eyes. “Bad luck.”

  “Minutes,” Jake muttered.

  Toughie hooked his thumbs on his gun belt. “Now what?” He shot a glance over to the canopy boat and his grey mustache twitched, but he didn’t mention Riley.

  “We hand the crime scene over to the Staties for now,” Jake said. He blew a breath out slowly, thinking. “We’ll need their forensics for this, and they’ll keep us in the loop. We don’t need to run around behind them gathering up the same information.”

  “If those notebooks have anything to do with the plant explosion, then we’re in trouble. You said you saw two people out there, the one you were chasing and the one who hit you. If you count Randy and now, Dauby, that makes four people in this mess. Now there’s no guarantee that whoever attacked you also killed Dauby, but it’s a good bet. No other reason to be lurking around Dauby’s place like that. Nothing to steal.” Toughie fiddled with the foil pack of gum in his hands and then shoved it in his pocket. “We’re liable to have the FBI and reporters swarming out here again by week’s end.”

  “Tell everyone here to keep their mouths shut. Pilkey and his mama probably don’t know about the notebooks. They didn’t see the schematics either, I’m betting. See if we can keep a lid on things long enough to ask around.”

  “People are gonna notice Feds skulking around here again.” Toughie spit his gum into the water. “You know what else won’t go unnoticed?”

  Jake looked at Toughie, a headache already spreading across his forehead. “That all this started up again the minute Riley showed up here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wasn’t her.” Jake glanced over at the canopy boat. “She was scared, I saw it. Besides, she was floating out there the whole time.”

  “But it would help her family out if it turned out this whole thing wasn’t just her brother.”

  “Well, that is what it’s looking like, Toughie. I didn’t beat myself up.” Jake shook his head and it caused a wave of nausea to well up. “We need to find out what’s really in all the stuff in Dauby’s closet and we need to find out where he disappeared to for almost a month.”

  “We weren’t invited to the table the last time the FBI got involved. What makes you think it’ll be different if they show up again?”

  “We’ll run our own investigation, a parallel one. They have all the science, but we know this place and the people in it. And there was a guy last time, an Agent Anderson, who might be easier to work with than the others. But I don’t want this getting away from us, not this time.”

  “OK, then,” Toughie said and nodded. “You sure?”

  Jake glanced over at Pilkey and Ida. They stood under a bare tree huddled close together with the blank stare of shock on both of their faces. He nodded to Toughie. “We run them down ourselves, whoever did this.”

  Toughie looked over to the water, but he spoke to Jake. “Whoever?”

  Jake nodded. “We stop ‘em.”

  11

  Citrine met us by the floating dock, her pouty lips drawn into a frown as we pulled alongside the grass embankment. She helped Jake out of the boat and hung on to his arm, led him away as he turned towards me. She was in tears, her voice quaking.

  “Is this true, Jacob? Are you injured badly?”

  Jake looked back at me, embarrassed, and I waved him away.

  I didn’t need any assistance to get off a boat.

  They walked to the Lightning Bug.

  Citrine cooed over his stitches and rubbed his back. Jake told her he was fine.

  “First, I get a call that Michelle is not at school, and then this? You two will kill me with this worry. Both of you so much the same.” The furrowed brow was more worried than angry.

  I decided not to follow inside, to give them some space. I stood halfway between the water and the house trying to calm my nerves. A cool breeze shook the trees overhead and rained down dry leaves and poufy things. I looked up, surprised at how dark it was.

  Slate clouds covered the sun and the once hot afternoon felt cold against my wet-soaked clothes. Used to the year-round balmy weather of southern California, this struck me as ominous, almost threatening.

  A few minutes later, I sat in the empty bathtub in my room and peeled off mud-caked jeans. I managed to get the slimy crud on every inch when I had run to the boat. It was in my shoes, down my socks. I took off my shirt and stared at the back. I didn’t remember falling on my back.

  I replayed the last few hours and an involuntary shudder rocked me.

  Dauby’s eyes staring at me, his mouth open in a final gasp.

  My stomach churned. I had to stop thinking about it.

  I tossed the dirty clothes in the sink, turned on the shower, and let the water beat down on the top of my head. I felt something scratching and pulled a leaf from my hair. I was a mess; both physically and emotionally.

  I didn’t understand, but there was definitely something going on.

  Unless Dauby was into drafting, which I doubted, Randy had been in that shack before he died. The compass, slide rule, and drafting pens I’d seen in the kitchen drawer were expensive. Not the things a dock worker would need or have. But an engineer, they used all of those things.<
br />
  Swallowing back the lump in my throat, I shuddered. So tired of being on the verge of tears every minute of every day, I was exhausted.

  Lord, I feel like what I’m doing; this need to seek out the truth, I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do, but…I tilted my face up to the warm water, let it wash my tears away. I don’t think I can do this on my own anymore. I’m in over my head—

  I froze on my last thought. Randy wrote the same thing in his letter. This whole situation seemed to be spiraling out of control.

  Dauby didn’t try to commit suicide by hanging himself on his shower rod. The man was almost two hundred pounds. No way he would’ve thought that would work. Besides, why not shoot yourself? It’s faster and painless. At least, I thought it was. But to slowly strangle with clothesline when you’ve got a shotgun?

  I thought about the shotgun I saw while walking through Dauby’s place. It was leaning casually in the corner by his front door. Who kept a shotgun out unless they were afraid? And if he was afraid for his life, would he try to kill himself?

  I toweled off and got into clean clothes. Didn’t make sense. That and the wrecked bathroom pointed to a staged suicide, but why? And more importantly, who would have the stomach to do that?

  I thought about Ida and Pilkey’s faces, the haggard look of grief, and I burst into tears. Jake’s face flashed behind my eyes, his battered body. He wouldn’t talk to me after. Busy with the crime scene and dealing with the deputies, he’d banished me to the boat to wait. Then he drove back while talking on the cell phone to his deputies.

  I needed to talk to him. To tell him I took pictures at Dauby’s house; that I saw drafting tools, but everything happened so fast I didn’t have the chance. I needed to let him hear Randy’s MP3 player, also.

  I looked at my purse splayed open on the bed. My journalist’s notepad was still open to the place where I’d jotted down numbers from the chalkboard by Dauby’s phone. I wrinkled my nose, remembering the sketches in the kitchen drawer. I took a picture with my phone before Jake walked in. I wondered how it turned out.

  Normally I couldn’t keep from poring over evidence. This time, I felt guilty for not letting Jake know. We were supposed to be partners in this investigation. After all, we played for the same team. So why did I still feel reluctant to show all my cards?

  I sat on the bed and combed through my hair with my fingers, thinking.

  We’d only heard about Dauby minutes before, from Verona, so her telling us couldn’t be related to his death, could it? Had someone there heard?

  My stomach flopped. Had my questions gotten Dauby killed? That quickly? It could be possible there was a shorter route to that spot.

  A knock startled me and I opened the door to the brooding scowl of Citrine’s daughter, Michelle.

  She folded her arms and let out an exaggerated sigh. She looked different, more ragged somehow. Her preppy clothes were replaced with ripped jeans and a faded t-shirt. She’d even traded the gold bracelet I’d seen on that first night with a twisted leather rope band. A tiny bee carved out of wood dangled from it.

  “My mother made me come up here and tell you she made lunch.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Is there a problem?” I took in her openly hostile demeanor and knew that I was the problem.

  Her gaze flicked to my silver quill necklace and she frowned, but didn’t say anything more.

  “I, uh, thank you,” I said again.

  Michelle turned and strode away without another word.

  I decided it might be best to keep out of the main parts of the house. Grabbing my notebook, Randy’s sketches, and a pen, I left the house via the back stairs and wandered out into the garden. I needed to think and being in that room made me feel suffocated.

  I used to look at old paintings of southern gardens with their gazebos and festoons of hanging wisteria and wondered if the scenes were actually possible. Yet, as I strolled along the cobbled path leading to the garden behind the Lightning Bug, I realized those pictures didn’t do the real thing justice.

  Although the early touch of fall crinkled the corners of the leaves and flowers along the path, the garden seemed otherwise untouched by the approaching season change. Bright waves of flowers shifted softly in the breeze; orange and yellow mums, lavender as tall as my waist, and fat rosemary bushes replete with tiny purple blossoms. The shrouded sun cast a muted glow over the wind-swept landscape. Burning wood, a far off scent, wafted past as I settled on the gazebo’s steps. It was starting to feel like autumn. A hot, sticky, fall was on its way to the bayou.

  I flipped through Randy’s sketches, my mind on Dauby’s poor prone figure.

  I rubbed my hand on the pages absentmindedly while I stared across the swaying bushes to the water beyond.

  Something scratched my palm, and I looked down at the sketchbook. The swirling charcoal lifted up at the bottom corner. I scraped at it with my finger and a flap of paper pulled away from the drawing. I turned the page, looking at the back side and realized that the page was thicker than the others; it was two pages glued together. I pried the two pages apart.

  A postcard slipped out. On its face was Tulane University, Randy’s alma mater. It was the kind of postcard sold in the student gift shop on campus. On the back, a woman’s handwriting invited Randy to a rally later in the week. There was no postmark, no name signed at the bottom, only clear tape on all four corners now folded onto the back, like the postcard had been taped to a wall or a door. I rubbed my thumb on the tiny pen drawing of a heart and key in the corner, thinking.

  “Whatcha got there?” Jake’s deep voice startled me.

  I stifled the urge to hide the postcard. Instead I held it up for him to take.

  He glanced at the front and then flipped it and read the back as he settled on the steps.

  I studied him as he read, taking in the angry red welts on his forehead. I’d been afraid back at Dauby’s. Afraid of Jake getting hurt. Afraid of losing…what?

  I shook the thoughts from my mind.

  “Huh,” Jake turned the postcard over. “Girlfriend maybe?” He pointed to the drawing. “Key to my heart?”

  “If Randy was dating someone, I never knew about it.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time a guy hid he was dating someone.” Jake said and the edge to his voice seemed out of place.

  “Do you have a headache?”

  “More like a skin ache.” He rubbed the gauze taped over his stiches. “What about you?”

  I tried to hold back the sudden ache. I shrugged, but I think I just looked quivery.

  “That wasn’t the first time I’ve seen a body. I shouldn’t be acting all girly about it.” I wanted to be a tough investigative reporter, but seeing Dauby– things that never bothered me before now weighed heavy on my heart. What was happening to me? “He was so young and he looked battered.”

  Jake nodded and let out a slow breath as he took a lock of my hair between his fingers, tugging gently and letting it slip out of his grasp. He did it again, silently, his head tilted towards mine like we were sharing intimate secrets. His closeness, his familiarity, as if we always talked this way, made me breathless, and I didn’t want to move.

  “You know, it’s OK to be upset over someone passing, Riley. Especially in the manner that Dauby went. Violence should always be jolting. It means you believe that people are worth something and that’s nothing to feel guilty about. Now, if that makes you girly, then maybe there’s a reason you all are often called better halves.”

  I let out a soft laugh at the last part.

  Jake tilted my chin up, his gaze flooding me with heat. “Don’t lose that part of you; the part that still cares. It’s what I l—”

  “Jake!” Michelle yelled from the porch. “You got a call from Toughie, he said it’s urgent.”

  Jake’s head whipped to her and he leaned away, like a teenager whose parent caught him with a girl.

  I ground my jaw. Was I a dirty
secret to keep hidden? I stood and gathered my things, my heart still bounding from his closeness. I chided myself for falling under his charm. I’d seen him flirt. He knew how to turn a phrase, all right.

  “Why didn’t he call my cell?” Jake watched me as he stood and fished his cell from his pocket. He made a face and held up his dead phone. “Never mind. No batteries.”

  I muttered my need to get back to work and left him standing in the field of flowers.

  In the Lightning Bug’s kitchen, Citrine was doing the lunch dishes. She glanced over her shoulder and then back without a word. I stood in the doorway feeling unwelcome. I’d heard her sniffles as I walked up and felt powerless to ease her sadness.

  “I’m sorry about Dauby,” I said, finally. “He…it – it’s tragic to lose someone…”

  I felt awkward and without words. The irony that I was paid for my ability to communicate effectively was not lost on me.

  She stopped moving, her body going rigid, and then she sighed and started scrubbing the plate again. “He was a good boy,” She said with a sniffle. “A simple boy, but a good heart, you understand?”

  I nodded. I didn’t know Dauby, but I knew the type. Sweet, means well, doesn’t ever quite pull things off. The image of his blank eyes staring up from that dirty bathroom floor sent shudders through me. I hugged myself in the middle of the kitchen, lost.

  Citrine glanced back. “I fixed you a plate. If you want it, it’s in the refrigerator.”

  “Thanks.” I retrieved it. At the large kitchen table, I leaned my cheek against one palm and picked at the sandwich. “So Toughie called here for Jake?”

  I knew I was being a passive pansy. I should just ask if she and Jake had something going on, but then again, why did I care? Jake had simply wanted to know how I was doing after a shocking situation.

  Citrine turned to me, arched an eyebrow, and reached for the dishtowel to dry her hands. “You’re falling for him, yes?”

  “Wha—?” I blinked crazily and looked around as if that was the most preposterous thing I’d ever heard. “I was asking about Toughie, that’s all. I mean, we just left a crime scene, Citrine.” I grimaced. “That’s…Why would you even ask that?”