Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (8 page)

Dauphine saw Faye looking at her. She disengaged a hand from Michael’s tiny leg and gestured out at the water. “It’s coming,” she said. “The oil, I mean. I feel it, like a thundercloud rolling in.”

Faye walked up the side of the mound toward Dauphine. “I know. I don’t feel it, but I know it in my head. It’s huge, and it’s coming, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Nothing except do our jobs. We can tell people what this mound is like now, before the oil gets here and spoils it forever.”

Dauphine nodded, but she made no move. It was as if the strength had gone out of her during the hours she spent with Miranda. Faye knew that mambos considered contact with corpses to be powerfully bad magic. Discovering Amande’s Uncle Hebert floating dead in the water had weirded Faye out, and it could only have affected Dauphine more. Faye’s mambo friend was suffering from the aftereffects of a very, very bad day.

Faye couldn’t get Dauphine to talk about it, and she’d spent the day getting nowhere with feeble jokes like, “If Miranda cursed you, can’t you curse her right back, only worse?”

In answer, Dauphine would finger the vial at her neck or the hidden talisman in her pocket, saying only, “Such spells are beyond me.”

Faye wasn’t ready to say she believed in voodoo. And she wasn’t ready to say she didn’t. She’d seen some strange things one dark night when the scent of Dauphine’s herb magic had hung in the air and clouded her mind. Still, Faye was at heart a rational person, and she wished desperately that Dauphine would snap out of it…or that she would come up with a miraculous counter-hex. Either would do, and as Dauphine’s employer, Faye didn’t care which it was.

At least the fact that they had found the mound quickly put a positive spin on this day. It was a welcome change from days spent poking through mud for historical objects that had left no trace. Joe was sketching the site while Faye took pictures, when she heard a dull thud that just couldn’t be good.

The good news was that Michael was fine. Dauphine, being who she was, had clung to him with both arms rather than extending an arm to break her fall. The bad news was that Dauphine had paid a price for protecting Faye’s son.

Dauphine had been picking her way down the side of the old mound, wading through the shrubby vegetation that covered it. The mound’s builders had made it from a pile of oyster shells, many centuries before, so it had taken no voodoo hex to make her lose her footing on the uneven ground. She was on the hefty side, so no curse had been necessary to break off an inch-thick sapling when she landed on it. The fact that its broken trunk had stabbed deep into her right hamstring when she fell was completely explainable by simple physics. Nevertheless, Faye did not intend to argue with a heavily bleeding voodoo mambo who believed that another mambo had given her the evil eye. She just let Dauphine rave about Miranda’s evil act, when the poor old woman was in all likelihood completely innocent. Faye knew she needed to focus on getting Dauphine to a doctor before she bled to death.

With Michael in his car seat and Joe in the backseat using Dauphine’s own shawl to apply pressure to the blood gushing out of her wound, Faye dialed 911 while she made tracks for the main highway. They were so far out in the woods that it seemed worthwhile to meet the ambulance halfway.

Faye’s mind was on her driving. She needed to push her luck just far enough and no more. How fast could she cross those raggedy little causeways? How fast did she dare make each turn? If she missed a turn, how soft was that shoulder, anyway? A hair-raising moment spent waiting for her right front tire to stop spinning and grab the ground told her that the shoulder was way softer than she wanted it to be.

Dauphine’s head scarf was coming unwrapped, and a dangling end must have dragged through the blood, because it was red and dripping. Michael had settled into a pattern of rhythmic screams, as he clutched at Dauphine and she inexplicably didn’t hug him back. She just threw her head against the seat back and chanted something in a language Faye didn’t understand.

Dauphine might be convinced that Miranda was the stronger mambo, but Faye wasn’t. She didn’t know what Dauphine was saying, but she didn’t like the sound of it.

Chapter Seven

The paramedics were working diligently, but Faye stood close-by and monitored their work, nonetheless. One of them had opened his mouth to suggest that Faye might have overreacted in calling an ambulance for something short of a bullet wound. Faye had silenced him by pulling back Dauphine’s bloody shawl to display an injury that looked an awful lot like the work of a gun. Embedded pieces of bark and exposed fatty tissue made Dauphine’s wound even more visually dramatic.

“She’s a diabetic,” Faye announced. “She can’t wait to get that wound cleaned, not if she wants to keep her leg.” The doubtful paramedic saw her point and loaded Faye’s friend on the ambulance.

Many stitches, several bandages, and one prescription for antibiotics later, they escaped the hospital.

They did this slowly, because Dauphine was on crutches. Her badly damaged muscle and tendon were going to need some time to heal, but they would heal. This news was good, but Faye was now embarking on a consulting contract that was far too big to accomplish with just two people…and she was suddenly without a babysitter. Dauphine’s doctor had ordered her back home to New Orleans for the foreseeable future.

Faye wondered if maybe Miranda had hexed her, instead of Dauphine.

***

The full moon was rising when Faye, Joe, and Michael reached the marina after taking Dauphine home to New Orleans. Amande was sitting alone at a picnic table outside the bar and grill, one idle hand toying with a curl of her hair.

Faye already knew enough about the girl to know that idleness was unusual. She took Michael by the hand so that Joe could unpack their gear in peace, and she walked over to talk to Amande.

“The detective was here again,” the girl said, staring absently at the rising moon. “He says Uncle Hebert hadn’t been dead long when…when I found him. He isn’t saying much—and why would he be expected to say anything to a kid like me?—but the grapevine works pretty good around here. Everybody says that the cops haven’t got any solid suspects, but they’ve been talking to a lot of people who were just as scummy as my uncle. If that’s even possible. I’ve heard that Uncle Hebert had been in three bars between the time he got up yesterday morning and the time he was killed, and that he’d tried to pick a fight with somebody in every one of them. He wasn’t a nice man.”

“But he was your uncle,” Faye said, “even if he wasn’t a nice man.”

“I didn’t know him. Not at all. Grandmère never even told me he existed.”

Well, that was a stinging indictment. When your own mother never mentioned your name, then you had officially hit rock-bottom. Faye was guessing there were no baby pictures of Hebert decorating the houseboat.

Faye settled herself on the bench beside Amande and dandled Michael on one scrawny knee. In about six months, he was going to be too big for this. “You don’t look like somebody who doesn’t care about the dead uncle she never knew.”

Amande looked down at her. Goodness, the girl was tall, even sitting down. “I look that bad? Well, I don’t get a good hard look at dead bodies every day, but that’s not the worst part. It’s my poor grandmother.”

“I can’t imagine losing a son.” Faye’s mouth went dry as she said it. She pulled Michael’s shirt down over his round belly.

“She doesn’t even look different. You’ve seen my grandmother. The woman doesn’t know how to smile.” A bitter smile of her own threatened to twist Amande’s mouth out of shape. “I just
know
she’s suffering, because she’s family and we live in the same house. I mean…we live on the same boat. I can hear it in her footsteps when she walks through the kitchen. She breathes different. She stands all wrong. She spends a lot of time sitting at her altar, staring at her voodoo gods and just watching a candle burn. She’s suffering.”

“I can see her when you talk. And I can feel her, because you describe her so perfectly. Have you ever thought of being a writer, Amande? Come to think of it, have you ever considered being a shrink?”

That made Amande smile, which had been Faye’s goal. She felt almost like a shrink herself.

“A social worker came to talk to me today. Maybe the detective sent her to help me deal with the shock of seeing a dead man floating outside my home. I think she’s kind of a low-rent shrink. No, I don’t want to do her job. I’d hate it. I’d want to tell all my clients to stop whining about their problems and do something to fix them. ‘Suck it up, people!’, I’d say.”

Faye snickered. “Me too, actually.”

“But a writer? Oh, yeah. I’ve been hearing stories and telling stories and writing stories all my life.”

Michael had gone to sleep, so Faye shifted him on her lap, cradling his head under her chin. Boat sounds surrounded them, as moored vessels shifted with the moving water and a sailboat’s lines clinked against a metal mast. If Faye ignored the music seeping out of the marina’s bar, she could pretend she was at home on Joyeuse, sitting on her own dock and looking out at water that, at a far distance, touched this water.

Faye was glad she’d left a moment of silence between them, because Amande finally let go of the thing that was really bothering her.

“I heard Grandmère on the phone with her lawyer today. She was asking questions about inheritance laws…questions I didn’t understand. What could she possibly inherit from Uncle Hebert? He wasn’t the kind of man who owned anything that he couldn’t carry around in his pockets to buy beer with.”

Faye tended to agree with her, but she said, “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time somebody living in poverty died and left a fortune under a mattress.”

Amande raised an eyebrow so high that she didn’t even have to complete the teenager’s routine of rolling her eyes and sighing, “Yeah, right.”

“Or not,” Faye said. It had been a long time since she felt this lame, and the girl had accomplished it with a single eyebrow.

“Grandmère didn’t sound like somebody who was going to inherit the fortune under her worthless son’s mattress. She sounded scared. One thing she said scared me, too. It scared me bad.”

Faye waited.

“She kept asking her lawyer, ‘But can we keep the boat? Are you sure?’”

No wonder the girl’s voice was shaking. Faye flashed back to the years when she had held on to Joyeuse by her fingernails. She knew precisely how it felt to fear losing her home, her history…everything. And she’d been a grown woman at the time.

When Faye had been as young as Amande, she’d felt utterly secure. Their suburban Tallahassee house hadn’t been anything special, but her mother’s salary and her grandmother’s pension had never once faltered. When Faye went to school every day, she knew that her home would still be hers when the final bell rang.

“It never occurred to me that Grandmère didn’t own the boat. She’s lived in it since she married my grandfather, so that was before Didi was born. That’s plenty long enough to pay off a boat, it seems to me.”

Faye knew enough about second mortgages and loan sharks to wonder.

“I’ve been crawling around the Internet, trying to figure out why Grandmère was worried about inheritance laws. I didn’t find anything to explain her questions. The houseboat was my grandfather’s when they got married. I know that for a fact. Uncle Hebert wasn’t any kin to my grandfather, so he shouldn’t have any claim on it at all. I understood that much of what I read. After that, the details got fuzzy. I only figured out one thing for sure.”

Faye decided to risk speaking and showing herself to be lame. “And what was that?”

“Louisiana inheritance law is the squirreliest thing I’ve ever seen. Our laws are different from everybody else’s. After I spent last night reading about all that weirdness, if you walked up to me and said, ‘Hi, I’m Faye. I just inherited your home, so you need to take a hike,’ I’d probably believe you. Maybe Uncle Hebert’s death has triggered something legal that I don’t understand.”

Faye felt like she needed to do something, even if it was wrong. She shifted Michael’s head, so that he could drool on a different part of her chest, and she reached out a hand in Amande’s direction. She just rested it on the girl’s back, between her shoulder blades, and hoped that was right.

Amande didn’t shrug it away. She just kept talking. “I’ve been working on a plan.”

Faye suspected that Amande always had a plan. Faye knew this because she herself always had a plan.