The pirogue slid in beside a weathered dock with gnarled pilings and pitted planks. Serena didn't even wait for the boat to settle. She clambered out of it, awkward in her haste as she pulled herself up onto the rickety wharf. The pirogue scooted away as she pushed off from it and she slipped and hit her shin but managed to keep from falling back into the muddy shallows. Dirty, disheveled, with blood seeping into the previously immaculate white cotton of her pant leg and her hair tumbling in disarray around her shoulders, she stormed for shore, limping.
«Dammit, Gifford, what the hell do you think you're doing? Shooting at people! My God!»
Gifford scowled at her. «Jesus Christ. What the hell kind of language is that for a lady to use?»
«The kind I learned from you!» Serena shot back. She planted herself in front of him, her hands on her hips, staring up at him with as much defiance as she could muster.
«Well, hell,» Gifford muttered. There wasn't any way around that one. He cracked the shotgun open and extracted a shell, which he slipped into the breast pocket of his faded chambray workshirt. «I'll bet you don't use that kind of language up in Charleston.»
«I'm not up in Charleston.»
«For once,» he said with a snort. «What are you doing out here?» he asked, frowning down at Serena again. «I sure as hell never expected to see you riding around the swamp in a pirogue.»
«Believe me, it's not my idea of fun,» Serena said, shooting a glare Lucky's way. «I can think of a lot better things to do with my free time and much more pleasant company to do them with.»
«She takes exception to my temperament,» Lucky said with a sardonic smile as he approached, an onion bag of crawfish swinging from his fist.
«Among other things,» Serena muttered.
Lucky stopped beside her, dropped the bag at his feet, and lit the cigarette dangling from his lip, his eyes on Serena the whole time.
He tilted his head back and blew a thin stream of smoke into the air. «Guess I'm gonna have to go back to charm school for a refresher course,» he drawled laconically.
«Don't you believe him, Miz 'Rena,» Pepper Fontenot said with a gravelly chuckle as he ambled toward them from his lawn chair. Pepper was a thin, wiry man with the same pitch-dark skin and light eyes as his sister, the formidable Odille. He had somehow managed to sustain a very merry personality despite having lived with Odille his entire life, and wore his wide smile as comfortably as he wore his faded old coveralls. He slapped Lucky on the shoulder. «He charm the hide off a gator, dis one, if he be of a mind to.»
Serena arched a brow at Lucky. «He must not have been of a mind, then.»
«Mebbe it was the company,» Lucky said through his teeth.
Quelling the juvenile urge to stick her tongue out at him, Serena turned back toward her grandfather. «You might tell me you're glad to see me,» she said, not quite able to hide her hurt at his cool reception.
«I might say it once I find out what you're doing here.»
«What I'm doing here!» she exclaimed, splaying a hand across her chest. «I'm here because you took off without a word of explanation to anybody. I come down for a visit and the first thing I'm told is that you moved yourself out here two weeks ago and haven't been heard from since. What was I supposed to do? Say, 'Oh, gee, too bad I missed him' and just go on with my vacation? My God, Gifford, you could have been dead for all we knew!»
«Well, I'm not,» he snapped. «If that's all you came to find out, you can go on home now. You aren't going to inherit for a while yet if I can help it.»
«What kind of a rotten thing is that to say?»
«It's the kind of thing a man starts saying when he's nigh onto eighty with a bum ticker and a couple of ungrateful granddaughters.»
He snapped the shotgun closed with a decisive click, turned, and walked away.
Serena stood there, dumbfounded, watching him walk up the slight incline toward the cabin. Every time she saw Gifford in the flesh she was stunned by how badly she wanted his love and approval and how badly it hurt when he didn't offer them freely. It was as if the instant she encountered him, the child in her revived itself.
She was tired and frustrated, hungry and dirty. All she wanted to do was snuggle into her grandfather's embrace and let go of the determination that had gotten her this far. She wanted to be able to tremble and have Giff soothe her fears away as he had when she'd been a little girl, but that wasn't an option. She wasn't a child anymore, and Gifford hadn't been sympathetic to her fear of the swamp for a long, long time.
When she hadn't gotten over it after what he thought was a reasonable amount of time, his understanding had metamorphosed into a subtle disapproval and disappointment that had colored their relationship ever since. He thought she was a coward. Watching him walk away, she wished he could have realized how much courage it had taken her to get this far.
«Yeah, there's just nothin' quite so heartwarmin' as a family reunion,» Lucky muttered, his eyes also on Gifford's back as the old man walked away.
Serena glared at him. «Butt out, Doucet.» She stomped after her grandfather, her espadrilles squishing in the damp, spongy dirt that constituted the front yard.
The cabin was a simple rectangular structure covered with tan asphalt shingles. It was set up a few feet off the ground on sturdy cypress stilts to save it from the inevitable spring flooding. The roof was made of corrugated tin striped with rust. A stovepipe stuck up through it at a jaunty angle. The front door was painted a shade of aqua that hurt the eyes. There were no curtains at the two small front windows.
The cabin had never contained any amenities, certainly nothing that could have been considered «decorating» unless one included mounted racks of antlers. Serena doubted that had changed since the last time she'd been out here. The hunting lodge was one of those male bastions where anything aesthetically pleasing was frowned on as unmanly. Gifford undoubtedly still used the same old tacky, tattered furniture that hadn't been good enough for the Salvation Army store twenty years earlier. The floor of the two-room structure was probably still covered with the same hideous gray linoleum, the kind of indestructable stuff that promises to last forever and unfortunately does.
Serena wasn't going to find out immediately. Gifford didn't go to the door of the cabin. He climbed partway up the stairs, then turned around and plunked himself down with his gun across his lap as if he meant to block the way. Serena's step faltered just long enough so that the two old blue tick hounds that had jogged out from behind the woodshed could jump up on her and add their paw prints to the front of her shirt. She groaned and shooed them away, scolding them.
«You used to love them dogs,» Gifford grumbled, scowling at her disapprovingly. «I suppose they don't allow hounds like that up in Charleston.»
Serena shook a finger at him as she came to stand at the foot of the steps. «Don't you start that with me, Gifford. Don't you start in on how Charleston has changed me.»
«Well, it has, goddammit.»
«That's not what I came out here to discuss with you.»
Gifford swore long and colorfully. «A man can't get a scrap of peace these days,» he said, addressing the world at large. «I came out here to get away from people, not to form some pansy-ass discussion group.»
Serena ignored his protest and pressed on. «It's not like you to just take off, especially this time of year. There's too much work to be done around the plantation.»
He rolled his big shoulders and looked down at his feet. «That's what I've got Arnaud for. He's the manager, hell, let him manage. Tired old men like me are supposed to take off and go fishing.»