Stanton didn’t move a muscle. Then he looked over Katy to Louis, meeting his eyes. Louis had the weirdest feeling suddenly, like the man could almost read his thoughts. Like he could almost sense that the missing panther wasn’t important to Louis, that it was just a means to an end. Louis forced himself to hold Moses’s Stanton’s eyes.
“Moses,” Katy said, “you know everything that goes on here. I need you to tell me if anyone has been acting strangely. Has anyone moved away and taken a home in the swamps? Have you caught anyone stealing supplies or drugs from the clinic?”
Moses finally broke his stare with Louis and crossed his arms. “I know no one who would interfere with the panthers. And I am not sure I would tell if I did.”
“Moses,” Katy said softly. “You know what they mean to me.”
For the first time Louis detected a crack in the man’s façade.
Stanton looked away toward the knot of kids kicking a soccer ball. “All right, Katy Letka,” he said quietly. “I will help you. I will conduct my own investigation and if I find you are right, I will let you know so you can find the panther and take her back where she belongs.”
He looked back to her. “But I will give you no names and you will not walk through these streets looking behind doors. If I find someone here is involved in this, we will deal with it ourselves.”
Katy said nothing but Louis could tell from the sudden sag of her shoulders that she knew she would get nothing else. She said a brisk goodbye and started back to the Bronco. Louis hurried to catch up with her. Moses Stanton stayed in front of the tribal headquarters doors watching them.
Katy remained silent as she drove around the corner and down a street, pulling up in front of a small stucco house with a concrete porch cluttered with folding chairs. There had once been flowers in the window boxes but they were wilted now, victims of the searing summer sun and neglect.
The front door was open. There were three women on the porch and three men standing in the sparse shade of a tree smoking cigarettes. The women were dressed in cotton blouses and skirts and wore their hair in long braids. The men had lined weathered faces and dusty clothes. But what struck Louis was that another one of his assumptions about Indians was proving wrong. Every man he could see had short hair.
“I won’t be long,” Katy said, eyeing the women on the porch. “I’ll leave the engine going so you can have some air.”
“Thanks.”
Katy started toward Aunt Betty’s house. The few people outside turned their attention from the SUV to Katy herself. Louis watched closely, curious about the reception she’d get.
Katy paused under the tree and spoke briefly to the men. When they didn’t step back to let her on the porch, she steeled herself and slipped between them, disappearing into the house. For a moment, the men looked back at the SUV then went back to talking among themselves.
Louis sank back into the seat. Partly to be less obvious, but mostly because he was groggy. His aching ribs had kept him up most the night and about four in the morning he had finally relented and popped a pain pill. He laid his head against the window and idly watched the parade of people in front of the house.
One woman caught his eye. She wore a bright yellow sun dress and was coming down the street carrying a casserole dish covered with aluminum foil. A second woman followed her, slightly younger, carrying a basket of neatly folded laundry. The men parted to let them inside the house.
Suddenly Louis was somewhere else.
In Bessie’s old boarding house in Blackpool, Mississippi. A stranger in his own town of birth, sitting vigil by the bedside of a dying woman he could barely remember — his mother. Women had come then, too. Black women carrying clean linens for his mother and casseroles and cookies for him.
He remembered none of their names but he remembered their voices. Soft and soothing as they gathered by Lila’s bed, the sound carrying across the hall to his room where he took refuge when he could.
And then, after Lila died, came the sound of their voices raised joyously in song, drifting up from the parlor downstairs. He didn’t understand why they were happy, these strange women, because his mother had lived a short ugly life, given away her children, given him away, and then she had suffered a painful death. It made him angry to hear their voices.
Bessie had been the one to explain it to him.
Death was a relief from agony. Death was a return to Jesus. Death was a going home.
Louis looked back to the house. The men had wandered off and the porch was empty. There was no one on the street but a couple of kids on bicycles.
Then the house screen door slapped open and two young men exited. One was thin and wore a black t-shirt and jeans. The second was shorter and more tightly muscled, like a football running back. He wore a loose fitting plain white shirt with an odd heavy silver necklace, like a scythe blade on a chain. Both men had long black hair pulled back in pony tails.
The men took a long look at the SUV then lit up cigarettes.
Louis sat up straighter. The stocky kid was still staring his way and Louis knew the kid could see his face behind the glass. The kid tapped the other guy on the shoulder, said something in his ear, and both started away from the house.
Louis got out of the SUV.
The men were heading down the street at a quick clip. Louis had made enough traffic stops and interviewed enough suspects to sense fear. A shift of the body to avoid calling attention to the weight of a gun in a pocket. A twist of the shoulders to release tension. A suddenly quickened pace.
He knew he shouldn’t be doing this.
He was nosing around in Katy’s territory and she was going to be pissed. But something told him to stay with them, just for a block or two.
At the corner, the thinner guy broke off. The stocky one took one last look back at Louis before turning down a side street.
Louis followed, about thirty feet behind. The guy was walking fast and stiff, his head swiveling back at Louis every few feet. Finally, he reached a yellow house with a yard full of toys and a plastic wading pool. He cut across the grass and quickly slipped inside. Then, despite the heat, he slammed the heavy door.
Louis jogged back to the SUV. Katy was in the driver’s seat, both hands resting on the wheel.
As he got in she wiped her face quickly.
“You okay?” he asked.
She shrugged but he could see she was struggling to not cry.
“Where’d you go?” she asked.
“I followed someone,” he said. “A guy in his twenties, stocky.”
“Why?”
“He was acting hinky.”
“Hinky?”
“He went into a yellow house over on the next street.”
Katy frowned. “That might be Hachi or one of his friends.”
“You know him?”
She shook her head slowly. “Not really.”
“He didn’t like me following him.”
“A black guy gets out of a FWC vehicle and follows you. What young guy here would like that, Louis?”
“Fair enough. But I’m going to run a check on him. What’s his last name?”
She hesitated. “Keno.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t get you in trouble with Moses.”
She stared at him for a long time then with a final look back at Betty’s house, she jammed the SUV into gear and pulled slowly away.
They were out on Alligator Alley heading west into the setting sun before Katy spoke again.
“She’s dead,” she said softly.
For a second Louis thought she meant her great aunt Betty but then realized she was talking about Grace.
Katy flipped down the visor to retrieve her sunglasses and slipped them on, but not before Louis saw her eyes well with tears.
“You don’t know that,” Louis said.
She looked left, to the huge empty expanse of the Everglades. “We’ve increased our search flights, we’ve got every officer out there looking and all the hunters on alert,” she said. “There’s no sign of her. She’s gone, Louis, Grace is gone.”