by Tami Hoag
The Corvette was extricated from the edge of the swamp with minimal fuss and towed away to Meyette's garage. Laurel watched the proceedings from the passenger's seat of Jack's Jeep with Huey the Hound sitting in Jack's spot behind the wheel. The rain had stopped, leaving everything dripping and glistening. The clouds had cleared a path for a melted bronze sunset that cast the swamp in silhouette. The air was fresh and cool, but the dark underlayment of the bayou lingered as always. Laurel shivered in her damp clothes as her attention drifted from the tow truck to the dense wilderness that lay around them. Without thinking, she raised a hand to nibble at her thumbnail.
She had grown up here on the edge of the Atchafalaya, but she had never felt a party to its secrets. The swamp was a world unto itself, ancient, mysterious, primal. She had always thought of it as an entity, not just an ecosystem. Something with a mind and eyes and a dark, shadowed soul. That impression closed in on her as Alphonse Meyette's tow truck rumbled off toward Bayou Breaux and quiet descended. The expectant, hushed silence of the swamp.
Thoughts of murder came, seeping into her like cold, and she shivered again and rubbed her hands over her arms as an image flashed through her head. A young woman lying out here, alone, dead, the swamp watching, knowing, keeping its secrets . . .
“Hey, ugly, outta my seat.”
Jack's voice snapped the terrible vision, and she jumped. Huey grumbled a protest and clambered between the seats to the back, where he curled up in a ball with his back to them.
“Not your dog.” Laurel rolled her eyes.
Jack grinned as he climbed behind the wheel, teeth flashing bright in the gloom. “I can't help it if he finds my personality irresistible.” He tossed a dirty denim jacket across her lap. “Put that on. I charmed Nipper out of it on your behalf.”
Laurel wasn't sure whether she should thank him or not. The jacket reeked of male sweat, cigarette smoke, and gasoline, but the Jeep was open, and the ride back was likely to be a chilly one, considering her damp state. She wrinkled her nose and shrugged into the coat. The sleeves hung past her fingertips.
“You okay?”
She glanced up from rolling the cuffs back.
“You looked a little peaked there a minute ago.”
“I was just thinking . . . about that girl they found . . .” And what it would be like to die out here with no one to see, no one to hear but the swamp. She kept that part of her thoughts to herself. She had too vivid an imagination, put herself too easily in the place of others. Not a good trait for someone who had to deal with the victims of violent crimes. It was that inability to draw the line between sympathy and empathy that made her vulnerable.
“Bad business, that,” Jack said softly, his hand on the key, his eyes scanning the darkening swamp.
A barred owl called four round notes, then lifted off from the branches of a nearby cypress tree, its wide wings beating the air, barely making a sound. Laurel pulled the smelly jacket tighter around her.
“Did you know any of them?”
He shot her a hard glance. “Are you questioning me, counselor? Should I have a lawyer present?”
Laurel pushed past the question of whether his tone held sarcasm or defensiveness, not sure she wanted to know the answer. “I'm asking an innocent question. Self-professed lady's man that you are, it wouldn't seem too unreasonable that you would have known one of the victims.”
“I didn't. None of them were from here.”
Four bodies. Four parishes in Acadiana, but not Partout. No victims from Partout Parish, no victims found here. Laurel couldn't help wondering if that was by chance or by design. If Partout Parish might be next on the killer's list. She looked at the wilderness around them and thought again about the terrible loneliness of dying out here.
The swamp was an unforgiving place. Beautiful, brutal bitch. Steamy and seductive and secretive. Death here was commonplace, a part of the cycle. Trees died, fell, decayed, became a part of the fertile ground so more trees could grow from it. Mayflies were eaten by frogs, frogs by snakes, snakes by alligators. No death would find sympathy here. It was a place of predators.
She glanced at Jack. Jack, who had teased her out of her mood at Beauvoir. Jack, with his devil's grin. He wasn't grinning now. That mask had fallen away to reveal the intensity that she suspected was the core of him. Hard. Hot. Shadowed.
“The only place I kill people is on paper, sugar,” he said. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, dangled it from his lip.
The word “liar” rang in his head as he swung the Jeep around in a U-turn and headed for town.
Savannah stood outside the French doors of Coop's study, hiding among the overgrown lilac bushes beside the comfortable old house, watching as he worked. He sat at his desk, hunched over his notebook, a cigar smoldering in the ashtray, a snifter of brandy sitting besdie it. The desk lamp was the only light on in the house, creating an oasis of soft, buttery light around him. Through the glass he seemed like a dream, a warm, golden dream she would never be able to grasp and hold on to. Always held at bay by an invisible barrier. Her past. His devotion to his wife.
Damn Astor Cooper. Why couldn't she just die and be done with it? What a cruel bitch she was, hanging on to him with her invisible threads when she was nothing more than a shell. She may have been a lovely woman in her time. Savannah imagined her as being sweet and demure and gracious. Everything she wasn't. Respectable, the perfect wife, the perfect hostess. But Coop's wife was nothing now, and she could give him nothing but heartache. Her mind was gone. Only her body lived on, functioning automatically, tended by nurses.
I could give him something. I could give him everything, Savannah thought, absently smoothing her hands down her wrinkled silk tank.
Like she had given Ronnie Peltier everything?
She tightened her jaw at the bitter inner voice, tightened her hold on the lilac branch. She'd had sex with Ronnie because she had wanted to, needed to. There was nothing to feel guilty about. Not the way she had offered herself, not the way she had given herself, not the greedy, insatiable way she had taken him.
“It's what you were made for, Savannah. . . . You always want it, Savannah. . . .”
That was the truth. The truth that had been burned into her brain night after night. She was a born seductress, built for sin. There was no use fighting her true nature.
She hadn't fought it tonight. The scents of sex and Ronnie's Aqua Velva aftershave lingered on her in testimony to the fact. They hadn't even made it to his trailer house before succumbing to their passions. Savannah had made him pull his truck in around back of the old lumber yard and climbed on him right there on the bench seat of his Ford Ranger. Ronnie made no protest, asked for no explanations. That was what she liked about young men—they were uncomplicated. There were no moral millstones weighing down Ronnie Peltier. He was perfectly willing to drop his Levi's and just go at it for the sheer fun of it.
Arousal and shame grappled for control within her, twisting, struggling against each other, and tears rose in her eyes, blurring her vision of Coop as he sat writing.
“Damn you, Conroy Cooper,” she mumbled, hating the feelings writhing inside her, and directing that hate at Coop. It was his fault. If she hadn't fallen in love with him, if he weren't so damn noble . . . He was the one who made her feel like a whore.
No. She was a whore. She had been born a whore and trained to perfection. Cooper made her ashamed of it.
Crying silently, she pushed herself away from the lilac bush and sidled along the house like a thief. She pressed herself against the clapboard siding and crept along to the edge of the French doors, where she pressed her face against the glass.
Cooper straightened his back slowly, wincing as he set his pen aside. His brain felt numb and empty, like a sponge that had been wrung out by merciless hands. The analogy struck him as one last drop of inspiration, and he started to reach for his pen again to scribble it down when a movement at the French doors caught his peripheral vision.
> “Savannah?” He mumbled her name to himself, straining his eyes against the darkness that cloaked her features. Of course it was. She would come to him now in contrition, as she always did after one of her little blowups. And he would take her back and comfort her. They had gone through this cycle before. Savannah was a creature of habit. He frowned at the thought that her habits included self-inflicted torment and degradation.
She fell into his arms the second he opened the doors, sobbing like a child. Cooper folded his arms around her and rocked her and murmured to her, his lips brushing softly against her wild mane.
“I'm sorry!” she cried, grabbing handfuls of his shirt in her fists. “I'm so, so sorry!”
“Hush,” he whispered, his voice low and smooth and soothing. “Don't cry so, darlin', you're breaking my heart.”
“You break my heart,” Savannah said, aching so, she felt completely raw inside. “All the time.”
“No,” he murmured. “I love you.”
“Love me.” She drew a shuddering breath and whispered the words again and again as scalding tears squeezed through the barrier of her tightly closed eyelids. “Love me. Love me.”
Wasn't that all she had ever wanted? To be loved. To be cherished. And yet she gave herself away time and again to men who would never love her. Confusion boiled and swelled inside her, and she cried it out against Cooper's solid chest, wrapping herself in his warmth, anchoring herself against his strength. She felt so lost. She wanted to be strong, but she wasn't. She wanted to be good, but she couldn't. The only thing she was good at was sex, and that wasn't enough to make Coop forsake his vows.
“Hush, hush,” he whispered, rocking her.
She smelled of sex and cheap cologne. She'd been with another man. He was neither surprised nor dismayed for his own sake. He didn't expect fidelity from Savannah. She was, by her own definition, a harlot. It saddened him, though, in a deeply fundamental way. Savannah was in many ways the embodiment of the South, he thought. Beautiful, wanton, stubborn, victimized . . .
“. . . Cooper?”
Savannah leaned back and looked up into his face, her fists still wound into the fabric of his shirt. He blinked at her, his thick blond lashes sweeping down behind his spectacles, clearing the glaze from his too-blue eyes.
“Damn you,” she snarled, pushing herself away. “You're not even listening to me! You're off with her in your mind, aren't you? Off with Lady Astor. Pure, chaste Lady Astor.”
“I wasn't,” he said calmly. He went to the desk, dismissing her, and went about the business of putting his notebook and pen away, tamping out the last of a good cigar that had gone to waste.
“You'd rather she were here,” Savannah said bitterly. “She wasn't off fucking Ronnie Peltier eight ways from Sunday tonight. No, she's sitting over at St. Joseph's, pretty as an orchid, dumb as a post—”
“Stop it!” Cooper's voice tore like thunder through the air. He wheeled and grabbed her by the arms and gave her a rough shake. He caught himself before he could shake her again and reined his temper in with an effort that made him tremble.
“Damn you, Savannah, why do you do this?” he demanded, his voice harsh, his fingers biting into the flesh of her arms. “You beg for my love, then you make me want to hate you. Why can't you just take what I can give you and be happy with that?”
“Happy?” she whispered bleakly, looking up at him, her heart in her eyes. “I don't know what that is.”
Cooper closed his eyes against a hot wave of emotion and pulled her against him, holding her tight.
“Don't hate me, Coop,” she said softly, sliding her arms around his waist. “I do enough of that for both of us.”
“Shhh . . . Hush . . .” He brushed her hair back from her cheek and pressed a kiss to her temple, then to her mouth. “I love you,” he said, the words barely more than a breath as his lips brushed against hers. “I love you.”
“Show me.”
The hall clock ticked away the seconds of the night. Savannah listened to it in the stillness as she lay curled against Cooper's side. He was asleep, breathing deeply, one arm still holding her close. He looked older sleeping. With his vitality turned off, his athletic energy refueling, there was nothing left but the face that had weathered fifty-eight years of life.
For just a moment she imagined he was her father lying there, alive, holding her next to him. Jeff Chandler would have been fifty-eight if he had lived. And for a moment she allowed herself to wonder what her life would have been like. How different she might have been. She might have been the famous one of the Chandler sisters. She might have been an actress or a fashion designer. And Laurel . . . Laurel might not have needed to fight so hard for justice.
Poor Baby. Guilt nipped her as she thought of the way she'd left Laurel at Frenchie's. She really should have been home now, seeing to it that Laurel was getting some rest. Seeing to her sister's recuperation was her job now. But she had needed this time with Coop. Time without fighting, without words, with nothing but love between them.
There was never anything less than gentleness in his lovemaking. He was always so careful with her. No hurry. No frantic grappling. No rough urgency. Tenderness. Reverence. As if every time was her first time.
No, she thought, her mouth twisting into a parody of a smile. Her first time had been nothing like that.
“You want me, Savannah. I've seen the way you look at me.”
“I don't know what you mean—”
“Liar. You're a little tease, that's what you are.”
“I'm not—”
“Well, I'm going to give you what you're asking for, little girl.”
“No! I don't want you to touch me. I don't like that.”
“Yes, you do. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to yourself. This is what you were made for, Savannah. . . .”
And she had closed her eyes against the first burning pain and damned Ross Leighton to eternal hell.
Lady-killer . . . Killer . . . “The only place I kill people is on paper.” . . . Liar . . . You're a liar, Jack. . . .
He paced the halls of L'Amour, oblivious of the wallpaper that was peeling off the walls, oblivious of the dust, the dank odor of mildew and neglect, oblivious of everything but his own inner torment. It snarled and snaked inside him like a caged beast, and there was nothing he could do about it but stalk the dark halls of the house. He couldn't set the beast loose because it terrified him to think what he might do—go mad, kill himself.
Kill himself. The idea had crossed his mind more than once. But he dismissed it. He didn't deserve the freedom death would offer. It was his punishment to live, knowing he was worthless, knowing he had killed the one person who had seen good in him.
Evie. Her face floated before his mind's eye, soft, pretty, her dark eyes wide and trusting. Trust—that cut at him like a razor. She had trusted him. She was as fragile as fine blown glass, and she had trusted him not to break her. In the end he had destroyed her, shattered her. Killed her.
A wild, indistinguishable cry tore up from the depths of him, and he turned and slammed his fist against the wall, the sounds of agony and impact echoing through the empty house. Empty, like his heart, like his soul, like the bottle of Wild Turkey dangling from the fingers of his left hand. The beast lunged at its barriers, and he whirled and flung the bottle and listened to it smash against a door down the hall.
“Worthless, useless, rotten . . .”
The image of Blackie Boudreaux rose up from one of the dark corners of his mind to taunt, and he stumbled from the hall, through a dark room, and out onto the upper gallery to escape it.
“Bon à rien, tu, bon à rien . . .”
The memory came after him like a demon, painfully sharp and so bright, he squeezed his eyes closed against it. He pressed his back against the brick wall, braced himself, held himself rigid until every muscle quivered with the effort, but nothing stopped the memory from coming.
His mother stood doubled over by the kitchen sink, blood running from h
er nose and lip. Tears swam in her eyes and streamed down her cheeks, but she didn't cry aloud. She knew better. Blackie didn't want to hear caterwauling; it made him meaner. Le bon Dieu knew he was mean enough in the best of times.
Jack clutched at her skirt, frightened, angry, ten years old. Too small to do anything. Worthless, useless, good for nothing. Good for hating. He figured he was an expert at that. He hated his father with every cell of his body, and that hate launched him away from his mother's trembling legs and into Blackie's path as he advanced, arm drawn back for another blow.
A high-pitched scream pierced the air as Marie came running in. Jack didn't glance at his little sister, but yelled for her to get out as he flung himself at their father. He wished he were bigger, stronger, big enough to hit Blackie as hard as Blackie hit Maman, but he wasn't. He was just a puny runt kid, just like Papa always told him.
That didn't mean he wouldn't try.
He balled his fists, meaning to pound his old man as best he could, but Blackie had other ideas. He swung the arm he had pulled back to strike his wife with, instead backhanding Jack across the face, knocking him aside like a doll.
Jack hit the floor, his head spinning and throbbing, tears clouding his vision, hate burning through him like acid.
Then suddenly he wasn't ten anymore. He was a teenager, and he got to his feet and grabbed the iron skillet off the stove and swung it with both hands as hard as he could. . . .
He jerked as his mind slammed the door on the memory.
“The only place I kill people is on paper, sugar. . . .”
From where he stood in the deep shadows of the gallery he could see Belle Rivière. He could see across the darkened courtyard to the back door, where the outside light was still burning. All the windows were dark. Sane people were in bed at this hour. Laurel was in bed.
