Chapter
34
* * *
When I had finished reading the coroner’s report, I put on my sweats and running shoes and did about four miles on Riverfront Park, back and forth past the crowds lining up to take a trip on the Natchez paddle steamer, the sound of its wheezing calliope sending tunes like messengers across the Mississippi. I was thick with sweat when I was done, and my knees ached. Even three years ago, four miles wouldn’t have troubled me to such a degree. I was getting old. Soon, I’d be looking at wheelchairs and feeling impending rain in my joints.
Back at the Flaisance, Rachel Wolfe had left a message to say that she would be flying in later that evening. The flight number and the arrival time were listed at the bottom of the message slip. I thought about Joe Bones and decided then that Rachel Wolfe might like some company on the flight down to New Orleans.
I called Angel and Louis.
? ? ?
The Aguillard family collected the bodies of Tante Marie, Tee Jean, and Florence later that day. A firm of Lafayette undertakers placed Tante Marie’s coffin into a wide–back hearse. Tee Jean and Florence lay side by side in a second.
The Aguillards, led by the eldest son, Raymond, and accompanied by a small group of family friends, followed the hearses in a trio of pickup trucks, dark–skinned men and women seated on pieces of sackcloth amid machine parts and farm tools. I stayed behind them as they slipped from the highway and made their way down the rutted track, past Tante Marie’s, where the police tape fluttered lightly in the breeze, and on to the house of Raymond Aguillard.
He was a tall, large–boned man in his late forties or early fifties, running to fat now but still an imposing figure. He wore a dark cotton suit, a white shirt, and a slim black tie. His eyes were red rimmed from crying. I had seen him briefly at Tante Marie’s the night the bodies were found, a strong man trying to hold his family together in the face of violent loss.
He spotted me as the coffins were unloaded and carried toward the house, a small group of men struggling with Tante Marie. I stood out, since I was the only white face in the crowd. A woman, probably one of Tante Marie’s daughters, shot me a cold look as she passed by, a pair of older women at each shoulder. When the bodies had been carried into the house, a raised, slatted–wood building not unlike the home of Tante Marie herself, Raymond kissed a small cross around his neck and walked slowly toward me.
“I know who you are,” he said, as I extended my hand. He paused for a moment before taking it in a short, firm grip.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “sorry about it all.”
He nodded. “I know that.” He walked on, past the white fence at the boundary of the house, and stood by the side of the road, staring out at the empty stretch of track. A pair of mallards flew overhead, their wing beats slowing as they approached the water below. Raymond watched them with a kind of envy, the envy that a man deeply grieving feels for anything untouched by his sorrow.
“Some of my sisters, they think maybe you brought this man with you. They think you got no right to be here.”
“Is that what you think?”
He didn’t answer. Then: “She felt him comin’. Maybe that’s why she sent Florence to the party, to get her away from him. And that’s why she sent for you: she felt him comin’ and I think she knowed who he was. Deep down, I think she knowed.” His voice sounded thick in his throat.
He fingered the cross gently, rubbing his thumb back and forth along its length. I could see that it had originally been ornately carved — it was still possible to discern some details of spirals at its edges — but for the most part it had been rubbed smooth by the action of this man’s hand over many years.
“I don’t blame you for what happened to my momma and my brother and sister. My momma, she always done what she believed was right. She wanted to find that girl and to stop the man that killed her. And that Tee Jean …” He smiled sadly. “The policeman said that he’d been hit three, maybe four times from behind, and there were still bruises on his knuckles where he tried to fight this man.”
Raymond coughed and then breathed deeply through his mouth, his head tipped back slightly like a man who has run a great distance in pain.
“He took your woman, your child?” he said. It was as much a statement as a question, but I answered it anyway.
“Yes, he took them. Like you said, Tante Marie believed that he took another girl too.”
He dug the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into the corners of his eyes and blinked out a tear.
“I know. I seen her.”
The world around me seemed to grow silent as I shut out the noise of the birds, the wind in the trees, the distant sound of water splashing on the banks. All I wanted to hear was Raymond Aguillard’s voice.
“You saw the girl?”
“That’s what I said. Down by a slough in Honey Island, three nights ago. Night before my momma died. Seen her other times too. My sister’s husband, he got hisself some traps down there.” He shrugged. Honey Island was a nature reserve. “You a superstitious man, Mista Parker?”
“I’m getting there,” I replied. “You think that’s where she is, down in Honey Island?”
“Could be. My momma’d say she didn’t know where she was, just that she was. She knew the girl was out there somewhere. I just don’t know how, Mista Parker. I never did understand my momma’s gift. But then I seen her, a figure out by a cypress grove and a kinda darkness over her face, like a hand was coverin’ it, and I knowed it was her.”
He looked down and, with the toe of his shoe, began picking at a stone embedded in the dirt. When he eventually freed it, sending it skidding into the grass, tiny black ants scurried and crawled from the hole, the entrance to their nest now fully exposed.
“Other people seen her too, I hear, folks out fishin’ or checking the hooch they got distillin’ in a shack somewheres.” He watched as the ants swarmed around his foot, some of them climbing onto the rim of his sole. Gently, he lifted his foot, shook it, and moved it away.
There were seventy thousand acres of Honey Island, Raymond explained. It was the second–biggest swamp in Louisiana, forty miles long and eight miles wide. It was part of the floodplain of the Pearl River, which acts as a boundary line between Louisiana and Mississippi. Honey Island was better preserved than the Florida Everglades: there was no dredging allowed, no draining or timber farming, no development and no dams, and parts of Honey Island weren’t even navigable. Half of it was state owned; some was the responsibility of the Nature Conservancy. If someone was trying to dump a body in a place where it was unlikely to be discovered, then, tourist boats apart, Honey Island sounded like a good place to do it.
Raymond gave me directions to the slough and drew a rough map on the back of an opened–out Marlboro pack.
“Mista Parker, I know you’re a good man and that you’re sorry for what happened, but I’d be grateful to you if you didn’t come out here no more.” He spoke softly, but there was no mistaking the force in his voice. “And maybe you’d be kind enough not to turn up at the burial. My family, it’s gonna take us a long time to get over this.”
Then he lit the last cigarette from the pack, nodded a good–bye, and walked back to his house trailing smoke behind him.
I watched him as he walked away. A woman with steel–gray hair came out to the porch and placed her arm around his waist when he reached her. He put a big arm around her shoulders and held her to him as they walked into the house, the screen door closing gently behind them. And I thought of Honey Island and the secrets that it held beneath its green waters as I drove away from the Aguillard house, the dust rising behind me.
As I drove, the swamp was already preparing to reveal its secrets. Honey Island would yield a body within twenty–four hours, but it would not be the body of a girl.