Billy Whistler

by Bill Thompson

  That this story featured a rival station was immaterial; this was a sensational human-interest piece. What was the ghost hunter working on this time? Vigilantes had murdered several men and torched the town in 1880 — were the graves of the long-dead going to give up secrets at last? Was the legend about werewolves — the rougarou — true? What about Mollie Manning, the girl whose mutilated body was found at Asher in 2010?

  Landry and Ted welcomed the leak because it was great publicity for Channel Nine and the Bayou Hauntings series. If the matter came before a judge, the request would become public information. Attorneys would even try to find the current representative of the owner, SOJ Land Company. The cult might find out what Landry was up to, but it didn’t matter. It was a decision a judge would make if things went well.

  The first step didn’t go as Landry had hoped. Calling the matter a parish issue, the state AG declined to consider it. Next the lawyers delivered the request to the district attorney for Acadia, Lafayette and Vermilion Parishes. Landry wasn’t worried about being treated fairly; the DA was known to be an honest, decent man. But Junior Conreco seemed hell-bent on Landry’s downfall. Would he try to influence the district attorney?

  Soon after the sheriff saw the news report, he got a call from Joel Morin that ticked him off. It seemed to Junior that the richer people got, the less tact they had with people who weren’t like themselves.

  “Nip this Landry Drake thing in the bud,” the leader of the Conclave had snapped. “Go to the DA, tell him this is a frivolous request by a man making a TV show, and make sure it goes no further.”

  How stupid are you? Junior wondered as he listened to Joel rant. The DA would say he was interfering. No matter that Joel knew nothing about how politics and justice worked in the parish. He could order other people around, but there was only one sheriff here, and Junior would handle things his own way.

  And there was that nagging doubt he was having more and more often now, that niggling thing in his mind that said Landry had every right to know more.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The two parish officials sat at a corner table in The French Press across from the park in downtown Lafayette. The district attorney was a man in his fifties and spent his career as a prosecutor. He’d won his last election by a wide margin and had an excellent conviction rate. The criminals didn’t think much of him, but most of the law-abiding citizenry supported him.

  Thinking a face-to-face meeting was best, Junior had arranged the meeting and made the half-hour drive from Abbeville that morning. Over bacon, eggs and grits, they chatted about Vermilion Parish’s improving crime rate and how well things were going overall. Then the DA apologized for his busy morning and asked what Junior wanted to talk about.

  Far less eloquent and educated than the DA, Junior had practiced his speech to ensure he didn’t miss anything. He explained that Landry Drake had trespassed on private land several times. He ignored orders to leave the parish, and now he was trying to get graves opened. He must be stopped, Junior said, and you can do it.

  After Junior made his case, the DA said he didn’t see the problem. What issues was the investigative reporter creating? Who ordered him to leave and why, and why did Junior want to stop the exhumations?

  “I just don’t get it, Sheriff. There’s no downside to this request. I hear the landowners — the members of some cult — have been gone for ages. The brief says there are recent burials at Asher, but no one knows who they are or who buried them. The request sounds reasonable to me. Open up the graves, see if there’s been foul play, and perhaps learn some answers. Convince me why I shouldn’t ask a judge to grant it.”

  Dammit, the DA was right, and the only reason Junior had come was because Joel ordered it. He had no convincing argument, only the truth, and revealing that would have meant the end of Junior’s career in law enforcement. The massive cover-up had begun a hundred and forty years ago, and the secrets in those graves would blow things wide open.

  Junior tried again. “Having our parish featured that way on a TV show isn’t good for us.”

  “What way, Junior? Is there something about the graves you aren’t telling me?”

  “No. Nothing at all, as far as I’m concerned. Who cares about Asher anyway? Been gone over a hundred years, right?” He caught himself talking too fast, and he paused for a breath. “No, everything’s good. I just don’t want our sleepy little town all filled up with amateur ghost hunters. I hear that’s what happens every time Landry Drake does a story.”

  The DA smiled and said, “Did you see that Bayou Hauntings show about the abandoned insane asylum over in Iberia Parish? That was a good one, and it took place in a ghost town called Victory. Remember the show? I don’t think the ghost hunters are flocking to see the ruins of that place, any more than I think exhuming the bodies would cause tourists to descend upon Asher.

  “I get your idea about not wanting to create a fuss for no reason, but I have to admit that after reading Mr. Drake’s brief, I’m interested myself. I’d like to learn more about the old cemetery in Asher just like he would. I’m hoping he does an episode on our parish.” He looked at his watch. “I have to run. Is there anything else?”

  As he drove back to Abbeville, Junior wondered what to do next. He’d blown this assignment, but if he was lucky, the judge would deny the request. If he didn’t, then Junior must stop Landry himself.

  The judge was inclined to allow the exhumations, but no one had heard from the landowners in years. Landry explained about Em, who said they lived in New Asher, but no one knew where it was. Em had run away but didn’t know how to get back. Landry might have been able to find the cult if he tried, but he had no incentive to do so. If Elder Johnson found out, he’d oppose the request.

  The judge ruled that public notices would run in newspapers in Vermilion and surrounding parishes for a week. The notices were printed, and no one appeared on behalf of the landowner.

  Two weeks later the judge granted the motion, stipulating that they must complete the exhumations and reburials in thirty days. Time would be precious since no one knew how many graves there were, but Landry had anticipated a win, and he was ready to go immediately.

  At daybreak on the morning after the judge’s ruling, a light barge went downriver to Asher and offloaded the parish medical examiner, six laborers and a foreman, hand tools, folding tables and chairs, and large coolers with food and beverages they’d bring back and forth each day.

  Landry and his cameraman Phil Vandegriff, who’d been a part of other Bayou Hauntings episodes, hired the crawfish farmer to bring them and their equipment up on the airboat. Ted Carpenter came along too. This all began with the voicemail, and Ted was excited to see Landry in the field for the first time.

  One last boat pulled in, this one carrying Father Paul and Em. Another friend of the priest’s, a guide who lived in Bancker Grotto, had picked them up in Perry and brought them to Asher.

  Once everyone arrived and Phil’s equipment was set up, Landry met with the diggers. He laid out the plans while Phil shot video. He would film everything since no one was sure what to expect. If a story developed, there’d be plenty of editing once the deadline passed.

  Just before work started at eight, Junior Conreco and a deputy strode into the clearing. He announced that one of his men would be on site every day while Landry and his crew exhumed the bodies. Landry said he’d give the deputy the next day’s schedule every evening before they left. That concession cost him nothing, and if it placated the sheriff, so much the better.

  And, he thought to himself, the sheriff seemed less arrogant and dictatorial this morning. It would be nice if it lasted, but he doubted it would.

  They spent the first morning mapping and plotting. After marking what they believed were the boundaries of the cemetery, they used stakes and strings to create a grid of forty-nine four-by-four-foot squares, some of which contained graves, and some that did not. In all, there were seven horizontal rows of seven squares each.<
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  Landry drew squares on a piece of butcher paper that matched the grid. They would number and record each grave and what it contained. He told the crew to begin at one corner and work down a row before moving to the next. Landry reminded them to be careful with the digging, because these were human beings who deserved respect and a proper reburial. Not only was that part of the judge’s order, it was the decent thing to do.

  At noon the crew broke for lunch. Em and the priest handled food prep and set up tables and chairs near the shoreline. Everyone dug into po’boy sandwiches, fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, and bottles of soda and water. The two-man barge crew and the boatmen joined them, and Phil’s camera caught the camaraderie as everyone ate, talked with their mouths full, and joked with each other. Even the deputy joined in; he knew most of the workers and chatted with them. The men jostled each other to get more food until what had seemed an abundance was gone.

  Next came a thirty-minute siesta. Everyone lounged in the shade of huge oak trees. Some smoked cigarettes or cigars or chewed tobacco. Others found the buzzing of insects and the light breeze blowing off the river too tempting to resist, and they fell asleep.

  After their break, the real work began. Landry was most interested in the disturbed grave Em had said was Billy Whistler’s, but it had to wait. It was in square 3/4, nearly halfway down the grid.

  The men used hand-held entrenching tools, working slowly to avoid damage. They didn’t know if every mound was a grave, how deep the bodies were buried, and whether they were in caskets.

  In square 1/1 they removed a rectangular stone with marks that might have once been an inscription but now were indecipherable. The foreman put a colored sticky ID tag on it and laid it to one side. They dug in the hard-packed ground, and at a depth of twenty inches they hit wooden planks so old they crumbled when the spades bit into them. The men swept dirt from the boards and discovered a six-by-two-foot wooden box underneath. They had found their first coffin.

  Two men stepped into the hole, removed the rotten planks and swept away more packed soil. Underneath, a twisted body lay on its side, contorted into a fetal position instead of lying straight. Most of the flesh was gone; tufts of hair remained on the grinning skull that looked up at them. The person wore work pants, a cotton shirt and heavy leather boots, all remarkably well preserved after what must have been years underground.

  At the medical examiner’s direction, the workers donned surgical masks and rubber gloves and carefully removed the body from its grave. They carried it to a nearby area where the ME had set up his workstation. He pinned an ID tag on the corpse’s shirt, the same color and number as the one they’d put on the stone.

  The work could proceed only as fast as the ME could process the findings, because Landry wanted every disinterred body back in its place before they left at the end of each day. The examinations took time, a lot of notes and photos, and once they had several bodies, they could establish a routine for the exhumations.

  Using his phone to record notes, the ME examined the first body while the others searched square 1/1 for more clues. Then they moved to the square marked 1/2, which turned out to be just a grassy space with no stone and, as they found after a little digging, no coffin either.

  On their earlier visit, Landry and Em had seen the next two. The stones said JAMES SAVARY MARCH 2009 and K SAVARY JAN 2007.

  The crew continued digging. Landry asked Em if she minded seeing a dead body, and she said it was no problem. She’d seen a lot because the cult’s custom when someone died was for others to come to a public viewing.

  He took her to the doctor’s tent, where the first body lay on a table.

  “Did you know that man?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s been dead so long I can’t recognize him.”

  “Is he what you call a Strange One?”

  “Yep, but they’re usually women. Not so many men. See how twisted up he is? Bet he has a hump on his back.”

  The ME nodded. “Severely deformed. The way his body was contorted in the coffin, I suspected he might have been buried alive, but now I see what happened. His torso was so convoluted they stuffed him in sideways.”

  Earlier, Em had said K Savary was a Strange One too, and once they exhumed the body, she turned out to be correct. Although the husband’s corpse lay stretched in the coffin to his full six feet, the woman’s body was warped and bent like the first one. The Savarys’ cadavers and clothing were in much better condition due, the ME said, to their more recent burials.

  Around three the ME stopped the exhumations, saying it would take the rest of the day to finish up and rebury the only three bodies they’d found in their first day of effort.

  Another deputy arrived at the cemetery as the others were leaving. Junior had sent him to stand guard throughout the night, and Landry appreciated the sheriff’s gesture.

  There was still plenty of daylight left when everyone boarded the boats and left Asher. The first day was interesting because of the Strange Ones. Nothing else turned up, but they’d finished three graves out of what might end up being a hundred.

  The day-shift deputy called Junior, reported on the rather mundane day’s activities, and said he’d be back with the others tomorrow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The next morning two people didn’t come. Yesterday had been stressful for Em. She and Father Paul stayed in Abbeville, saying they’d come when Landry needed her.

  The medical examiner told Landry the first body they’d exhumed was around a hundred years old. The other two had died in 2007 and 2009, and he said the conditions of the bodies bore out those dates.

  He took photos and samples of exposed skin, hair and nails. When he finished, two workers laid the bodies back in their coffins, reassembled the wooden slats as best they could, and filled the holes. Others moved ahead with disinterments, and by two in the afternoon, the ME had four more bodies and called a halt to the work. It would take the rest of the afternoon to complete his work.

  Since the crew was idle, Landry asked them to work on Billy Whistler’s grave. He considered the whole Billy Whistler story a legend created and perpetuated by the cult. The stone read 1883, three years after Asher, and if the grave was empty, there must be a logical reason.

  A deformed man had kidnapped Em, but Landry thought it was one of the so-called Strange Ones, sent by Elder Johnson to reclaim the wayward child.

  The loose dirt in the grave made digging much easier. Once again they found planks from a top and a four-sided box filled with packed soil. If someone had been buried, there was no body now, just as Em predicted.

  They would locate more grid squares devoid of graves, and more graves without stone markers, but this was the only empty grave they would find.

  Seventeen days later the crew had finished forty-one of the forty-nine grid squares. They had exhumed fifty-six bodies. Thirty-nine of them, or seventy percent, were so-called Strange Ones. The dates on the stones ranged from 1849 to 2018, and the oldest corpses were so decomposed that the men couldn’t remove them. Instead, the ME crawled into the open graves to examine the remains.

  As the boats pulled away for the night, a tall man dressed in black stepped out of the trees and walked to the cemetery. He watched them desecrate the graves for several hours, staying far enough into the woods to remain hidden but close enough to hear every comment.

  It surprised him that M Savary was helping. After she ran away, he held out hope she was dead. Now that he knew the truth, he considered how to deal with the traitorous girl. He would punish her for her sins, and she would beg for the release of death before it was over.

  The man heard an outboard motor, and he walked down the path to Asher to see who had arrived. He stood in the shadows and watched the sheriff pull his boat up to the deputy’s, tie it off, and walk through Asher and into the woods.

  The sheriff’s arrival puzzled him for a moment, but then he understood. Junior wanted to see what progress had been made, how many graves remaine
d closed, and if they’d found anything significant.

  They haven’t gotten to the important ones yet, the man said to himself.

  The sheriff called out to his deputy and said he’d come to make sure Landry was following the court order and not doing things he shouldn’t be. He examined the grid system and counted the yet-unopened graves. As he knelt beside the last graves, the tall man nodded. They were the reason the sheriff came, and he could see that they would be opened tomorrow.

  The man wondered if Junior would do anything to stop Landry from learning the secrets.

  Junior left as the night guard sat in a folding chair and opened his iPad. The deepening shadows overtook the forest and brought the night, and the tall man moved silently through the woods on little-used trails others would have missed. He knew the area so well he could have done it blindfolded. Tomorrow he’d be back to watch the desecrators dig up the last bodies, including the ones that brought the sheriff to Asher.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The project was almost over, and Landry felt lost and confused. Three long weeks and a huge amount of Triboro Media’s money had perhaps been wasted. He’d worked hunches before, and some didn’t pan out, but this had been his most ambitious venture. A handful of grid squares remained to be examined, and he had nothing to show for the effort.

  Ted went back to work days ago. Excited at first, he gave up after the grave openings became routine. Except for Strange Ones, the cemetery seemed just like any other, and nothing unusual turned up. Father Paul and Em came every few days, but even she had no role to play when every grave resembled the others.

  Film crews from Lafayette, Baton Rouge and Lake Charles came at first, shooting footage and offering enticing ideas about what spooky things the ghost hunter sought. They didn’t stay long, and even Landry’s station had stopped the nightly updates, because there was nothing happening.

  As the crew worked on the few remaining graves, he walked to the shoreline. He needed time to reflect, and perhaps the serenity of the Vermilion River would help sort things in his mind.