then fixed his gaze on me, his smirk once again crawling across his cheek, his fear in check.
“There’s something else Kermit mentioned,” he said. “Alafair is your adopted daughter, not your real daughter. Which is probably how you justified your visits into her bedroom when she was thirteen and just getting her menses. According to Kermit, Daddy helped her into her womanhood and kept helping her all the way through high school. Daddy is quite a guy.”
I took a stick of gum out of my shirt pocket and peeled the foil off and fed it into my mouth. “Everybody gets to the barn,” I said.
“Oh, really? What’s the profound implication there, Detective Robicheaux?”
“When I check out, I’m going to make sure you’re on board,” I said. “Kind of like a Viking funeral, know what I mean? A dead dog at the foot of the corpse. Welcome to the bow-wow club, podjo.”
THAT NIGHT I couldn’t sleep. The air was like wet cotton, the moon down, the clouds flaring with pools of yellow lightning that gave no sound. Also, I was haunted by the words of Jewel Laveau. Was she prescient or just superstitious and grandiose, melodramatically laying claim to the powers of her ancestor, an iconic voodoo priestess who today is entombed in an oven off Basin Street? Don’t let anyone tell you that age purchases you freedom from fear of death. As Clete Purcel once said in describing his experience in a battalion aid station in the Central Highlands, it’s a sonofabitch. Men cry out for their mothers; they grip your hands with an intensity that can break bones; their breath covers your face like damp cobwebs and tries to draw you inside them. As George Orwell suggested long ago, if you can choose the manner of your death, let it be in hot blood and not in bed.
I got up at two in the morning and sat in the kitchen in the dark and listened to the wind in the trees and the clink of Tripod’s chain attached to a wire I had strung between two live oaks. The windows were open, and I could smell the heavy odor of the bayou and bream spawning under the clusters of lily pads along the bank. I heard an alligator flop in the water and the drawbridge opening upstream, the great cogged wheels clanking together, a boat with a deep draft laboring against the incoming tide.
I saw the night-light go on in our bedroom, then Molly’s silhouette emerge from the hallway. She stood behind me and placed one hand on my shoulder, her hip touching my back. She was wearing a pink bathrobe and fluffy slippers, and I could feel a level of heat and solidity in her presence that seemed to exist separately from her body. “Something bothering you, troop?” she said.
“I get wired up sometimes. You know how it is,” I replied. I put my arm across the broadness of her rump.
“You were talking in your sleep,” she said.
“That kind of talk doesn’t mean anything.”
“You said, ‘I’m not ready.’ Then you asked where Alafair was. You called her Alf.”
“I shouldn’t call her that. It makes her mad.”
“Dave, do you have a medical problem you’re not telling me about?”
“No, I’m fine. Did Alafair go somewhere tonight?”
“She’s asleep. She went to sleep before you did. You don’t remember?”
“I had a dream, that’s all.”
“About what?”
“You and she were on a dock. Tripod was there. I was watching you from across the water. You were saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear you.”
“Come back to bed.”
“I think I’ll sit here for a while. I’ll be along directly.”
“I’ll sit with you.”
“Molly-”
“Tell me.”
“Sometimes we have to adjust and go on.”
“What are you saying?”
“The bridge is making all kinds of noise. It must be broken. Speak up,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
She felt my forehead, then my cheek. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”
“I’m not drunk anymore. That’s all that counts. I’m going to check on Alf.”
“You can’t leave me with this kind of uncertainty. You tell me what it is.”
You know, I thought. You know, you know, you know.
Through the oaks I could see the clouds lighting and flashing and disappearing into blackness again. In the illumination through the windows, Molly’s face had the hollow-eyed starkness of someone staring down a long corridor in which all the side exits were chain-locked. I looked in on Alafair then closed the door so she couldn’t hear our voices. “Don’t pay attention to me,” I said to Molly. “Guys like us always do okay. We’re believers. We’ve never been afraid.”
Molly stood on the tops of my feet with her slippers and put her arms around my middle and pressed her head against my chest, as though the beating of my heart were a stay against all the nameless forces churning around us.
TUESDAY MORNING ALAFAIR called me at the office. “I think I got a breakthrough on the seven arpents of land Bernadette Latiolais owned in Jeff Davis Parish,” she said.
“What are you doing, Alf?”
“Don’t call me that name.”
“What are you doing?” I repeated.
“Jewel Laveau told you Bernadette Latiolais was giving her land to a conservation group of some kind. I talked with a lawyer in New Orleans who does work for the Nature Conservancy. He said Bernadette Latiolais was going to have a covenant built into her deed so that the land could never be used for industrial purposes and would remain a wildlife habitat.”
“You found this on your own?”
“Yeah, after I made a few calls. Why?”
“We need to put you on the payroll. But I don’t want you at risk, Alafair. The Abelards and their minions have no bottom.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Dave. Here’s the rest of it. Lawyers for the estate of Layton Blanchet are trying to get Bernadette’s donation to the Nature Conservancy nullified. At the time of her death, she was only seventeen and not of legal age. Layton Blanchet was backing a group that was going to build a giant processing plant that would convert sugarcane into ethanol. If Timothy Abelard was a player, he was a minor one.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“Dave, I think Carolyn Blanchet is at the center of all this.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think. You have to stay out of it. For once in your life, will you listen to me?” I shut my eyes at the thought of what I had just said. I wanted to hit myself with the phone receiver.
“I thought you’d want the information,” she said.
“I do.”
“You have a peculiar way of showing it.”
“Where are you?”
“In my car. What difference does it make?”
“There’s little that I understand about this investigation. Timothy Abelard is surrounded by people who seem more connected with his past than his present. I’m talking about Caribbean dictators and paramilitary thugs. Mr. Abelard is a neocolonial and happens to live here rather than on the edge of an empire. But I’m convinced he’s ruthless and perhaps perverse. Why else would he abide a man like Robert Weingart?”
“It’s because of Kermit, Dave. Kermit is weak and dependent and probably can’t deal with the fact that he’s gay. That doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.”
“Don’t buy into that.”
“You’re unteachable, but I love you anyway.”
“Don’t hang up.”
Too late.
