He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around and led her to the door. “Get some coffee down the road. Don’t tell me where you’re going. Never contact me again, not for any reason. You find my name on anything in your possession, destroy it. I hope things work out for you, but I think you did the big flush on yourself a long time ago. Adios, babe.”
Her face seemed to recede in the darkness and rain, the disbelief and injury in her expression shaping and reshaping itself in the overhead light. He closed the door and bolted it behind her.
He heard thunder in the south and through his side window saw a sheet of rain sweep across the water and slap the trees against the roof of his cottage. He watched her drive out of the motor court, her car leaking oil smoke, one taillight burned out, and he wondered if he had developed a capacity for cruelty that, in the past, he had only feigned. Then he realized the phone on his nightstand was ringing.
I LOOKED AT my watch. It was 8:10 when Clete picked up. Rain was drumming on our tin roof, so hard I almost had to yell into the telephone to be understood. “Alafair left a message at six-twenty. She said she was in Broussard and was stopping to talk with someone she met. I haven’t heard from her since.”
“She doesn’t answer her cell?” Clete asked.
“She turned it off. I talked to the cops in Broussard. They haven’t seen a car that looks like hers. I called the state police. Same thing.”
“Why would she turn off her cell?”
“She didn’t want to be bothered while she was talking to somebody I probably don’t like.”
“Not necessarily. It could be a girlfriend or somebody who needs some help. Look, right before you called, Emma Poche was here, pretty soused, wanting to own up to planting my pen in Stanga’s swimming pool.”
“How’s that relate to Alafair?”
“She said she didn’t know who killed Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot. I believed her. So I let her go.”
“So?”
“I thought I should tell you. Maybe I should have sweated her. I let her get her hooks into me. I don’t think I have any judgment anymore.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.
“I just thought I should.”
“No, you think whoever killed the girls has Alafair.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. Turn on the TV. This storm is tearing up Lafayette. Maybe she pulled off the road. Maybe she can’t get a signal.”
“I think Robert Weingart killed Timothy Abelard and the Nicaraguan. I think he tried to put it on you and, by extension, on me. I think he’s probably convinced Kermit Abelard we’re responsible for his grandfather’s death.”
“Who cares? Kermit Abelard is a fop. Stay where you are. I’m coming over.”
I couldn’t think straight. Before I could say anything else, he had broken the connection. I called the sheriff in St. Mary Parish and hit another dead end. He said he didn’t know where either Kermit Abelard or Robert Weingart was, then added, “Frankly, I don’t care.”
“Say again?”
“Because they’re not the problem,” he said.
“Who is, sir? My daughter?”
“Don’t you be laying off your anger on me, Dave.”
“Don’t call me by my first name again,” I said, and hung up.
But getting angry at a functionary in St. Mary Parish was of no help. I tried to clear my head, to think in a sequential fashion, to revisit mentally all the evidence we’d uncovered in the murder of the two girls. The video of the subterranean room we had found in Herman Stanga’s DVD player contained a detail that I couldn’t get out of my mind, one that indicated a story larger than itself. But what was it?
The stones in the walls. They had reminded me of bread loaves, smooth and heavy and rounded on the ends, not given to flaking. Emma Poche had looked at the still photos made from the video and had said they resembled pineapples. Why would she say pineapples? Because of the shape? Was her statement one of those linguistic leaps from an image to an idea based on an association in the subconscious? Did something about them call to mind breadfruit, the food that nineteenth-century plantation owners grew and fed to their slaves in the tropics?
Clete came through the back door without knocking. His slicker was dripping water, his face beaded with it. “Let’s go to Broussard,” he said. “We start talking to everybody we can along Highway Ninety and the old two- lane.”
I had already thought about it. The two-lane was a possibility. It was within the town of Broussard itself, with few places where Alafair could pull off to talk to someone. But the city cops had not seen her car, nor had anyone along the two-lane reported a scuffle or an abduction or anything unusual occurring that evening. The four-lane, also known as Highway 90, was far more problematic. It went for miles and was congested with service stations, fast-food restaurants, bars, convenience stores, and motels, plus any number of business properties where she could simply pull in to a parking lot.
Regardless, one way or another, we had to get off the dime. “We’ll each take a vehicle and divide it up,” I said.
The phone rang. Molly picked it up in the bedroom before I could reach the kitchen counter. “Dave, it’s the state police,” she said.
My heart was beating hard when I picked up. I didn’t know the trooper who had called. He said he was on a farm road not far off the interstate west of Lafayette. “We’ve got a Honda registered in the name of Alafair Suzanne Robicheaux. It’s been involved in an accident,” he said. “I saw the ATL on it earlier. Am I talking to the right party?”
“Yeah, this is Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I’m Alafair’s father. Who’s in the vehicle?”
“We’re not sure. It’s upside down in a coulee. We’re waiting on the Jaws of Life. We had to get them from Opelousas. The vehicle is wedged, so we can’t flip it over.”
I had to close my eyes to control my frustration. “How many people are in there? Are we talking about a man or woman? Can you be specific?”
“I can see one man. I don’t know if anybody is in there with him or not. I hope he’s the only one. I sure as hell do.”
“Explain that.”
He paused. “The guy I can see has space to breathe. Most every other area of the vehicle is crushed tight as tinfoil.”
“Give me your twenty again,” I said.
After he gave me directions, I pressed down the button on the phone cradle and looked at Molly, the receiver still in my hand. “It’s Alafair’s car. There’s an injured man inside. The trooper can’t be sure if anybody else is in the car.”
“Oh, Dave,” she said.
“Clete and I are headed there now.” Before she could speak, I raised my hand. “You have to stay here in case somebody calls. Maybe it was a carjacking, maybe an abduction. Alafair would have fought. She wouldn’t have just submitted to some guy who drove off with her.”
There were other scenarios that were much less optimistic. But there was no point in reviewing them. “Weingart is behind this, isn’t he?” Molly said.
“That’s my guess. But I don’t know.”
I saw Clete look at me and tap on the dial of his watch. I called the department and asked that a cruiser be stationed in front of our house. Then Clete and I headed for Interstate 10, the emergency flasher clamped on the roof of my new Toyota truck, the rain dividing in the headlights, the highway unwinding behind us like a long black snake.
