“Bastarache owns a strip club in Moncton off Highway 106. Le Chat Rouge. Shifted his base there in 2001. But I understand he’s spending a lot of time in Quebec City these days. Has a bar there called Le Passage Noir.”
“Why the relocation?”
“Got caught nailing a stripper. Turned out the kid was sixteen. Bastarache decided it was in his interest to leave Tracadie.”
“Christ.” My voice dripped with disgust.
Hippo pulled a folded paper from his pocket. When I reached out, he pressed it to the tabletop.
“My sources say Bastarache doesn’t payroll choirboys.” Hippo’s eyes locked onto mine. “Word on the street is his enforcers play very rough.”
“Real stud,” I snorted. “Cheating on his wife with a bubble-gummer.”
“Let me share a story. Guy named Thibault sold Bastarache a car back in ninety-seven. Bastarache complained the crankshaft was bad. Guy blew him off. Three days later, a body turned up under the Little Tracadie River Bridge No. 15. Had a crankshaft protruding from his rib cage.”
“Was Bastarache charged?”
“There was nothing to link him and no one would roll.”
“Could be coincidence.”
“Could be I’ll get drafted to play fullback for the Alouettes. Look, what I’m saying is, Bastarache is nuts, he’s mean, and he runs a rough crew. That’s a bad combination.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
But why would Obeline have married such a loser? And why had
Hippo’s eyes dropped. Scooping up the folded paper, he began rotating it from corner to corner, tapping the tabletop.
“I got another story.”
I started to interrupt.
“Concerns your friend.”
The change in Hippo’s voice chilled me.
“Plot’s not original. Fighting. Husband getting liberal with the fists. Anonymous calls to the cops. Wife refusing to press charges. Finally, him breaking her arm. She’s in a cast, he’s slipping it to a pole dancer.”
“Obeline?”
Hippo nodded. “Unclear how she got him out of the house. May have threatened to prosecute this time if he didn’t leave. Two weeks later there’s a fire.”
I swallowed.
“Third-degree burns over twenty percent of her body. Spent time in rehab. Came away pretty scarred.”
I pictured a peach-skinned toddler with chestnut curls laughing and chasing gulls in the Carolina surf.
On the medial surface of the mammalian brain, right beneath the cortex, there’s a nexus of neurons called the limbic system. This little hunk of gray matter cranks our emotions in and out of gear: wrath, fright, passion, love, hate, joy, sadness.
A limbic switch flipped, and white hotness seared my endocranium. I didn’t let my anger show. That’s not how I am. When that circuit trips, and true fury blasts the inside of my skull, I don’t scream or lash out.
“Arson?” My voice was a monotone.
“Cops suspected the fire was deliberately set.”
“Bastarache?”
“Everyone thought the turd did it, but there was nothing to nail him and no one would talk. Guy’s goons have everyone scared shitless.”
I held out a palm.
Hippo kept the paper clamped in his hand. “I know you like to do things your own way, doc. But I want you to steer clear of this guy.”
I curled my fingers in a “give it to me” gesture.
Reluctantly, Hippo slid the folded sheet across the tabletop.
Flattening the page, I read the number and address.
The room receded. The humming fluorescents. The skeleton. Hippo’s luau shirt. I was on a porch on a Lowcountry summer night. A transistor radio was playing “Ode to Billie Joe.” Evangeline and I were lying with arms crooked behind our heads, knees up, singing along.
Was it really so simple? Dial these digits and Obeline would answer? Perhaps solve the mystery that had troubled me all these years? Perhaps lead me to Evangeline?
“You OK?”
I nodded, barely aware of Hippo’s question.
