“She had no family, Cody,” Elva said. “None other than us. Her parents were killed in a house fire three years ago. She had no brothers, sisters, grandparents — perhaps a distant cousin or two. We’ll have to find that out.” She slipped quietly toward the kitchen to look for Reba and Clyde.
George started to barrage me with questions, but driveway gravel showered outside and we heard a car door slam.
As we reached the front door, Keith burst upon the porch. The aristocratic cut of his lean face was all hard, flat planes. His blue eyes had darkened almost to black.
He jerked to a halt, looking from one to the other. “You— You’ve heard.”
“Yes,” George said, “Cody just now came with the news.”
Keith let go a breath. “Then I’m not the messenger. Was certain I’d have to be. The news came across the mainframe printout, from our unit interfaced in the press room at headquarters. I got Dufarge on the wire, but as yet there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of follow-up detail.”
His movement was taut, uncomfortable. He pressed his buttocks against the banister, half sitting, and brooded briefly. “Apparently another mugging in the gloom of the parking garage. Frigging city out to sell it. Private owners would up the rate but provide security the city can’t with its stretched-out manpower. Fatal mugging this time...” His thin lips tightened to disappearance. “And I might have stopped this one.”
George glanced from Keith to me. My eyes were on Keith. “How?”
“Lissa called from New Orleans late in the morning. The call was relayed to my car during a parks inspection. She said she wanted to see Max Dufarge and me as soon as she got back, and she was calling from the northern end of the parish, already out of the city proper.”
“Did she say what it was about?”
Keith scathed me with a bitter look. “What would be the first thing a newspaperman would ask? She said I might possibly be bidding on a Valentine story. She’d been spare-timing a thing for a long time, and had the gist of it in place — except for the final identity. She’d eliminated a final false lead in New Orleans and said the answer was here in Wickens. She said it was time now to holler for help.”
“Did she elaborate?”
“Not on the phone. She said Max and I would get it up to this point, all she had, before the day was out. She said she had enough to convince us it wasn’t smoke and vapor, and we would move. Sounded a bit scary. But Lissa couldn’t resist center stage; it was the trait that breathed fire into her most mundane story.” An involuntary shiver went through him, delayed reaction. He looked a little sick, but pushed himself up. “How is Val?”
“Taking it,” I said.
“Can I do anything?”
“Can anyone?” George asked.
“Have we got a shot of Jack Daniel’s around the place?” Keith asked.
“We could all use a drink,” George said, and led the way inside. He poured at the dining room sideboard and we went aimlessly into the living room, George carrying the bottle. We heard a door close in the back of the house. George tossed his drink, set the glass and bottle on the coffee table. “That will be Elva.” He hurried out.
Keith sank into an overstuffed chair, pulled up again. “I could use another.” He poured a second finger. “No ticket back for Lissa.” He raised his eyes, saw my confused frown, and added, “Of course the statement is meaningless to you, Cody. But there was a ticket back in my case.”
“Excuse me?”
He threw the drink down his throat. “Car accident. Terrible concussion... trauma... heart stopped... dead as last year’s rose. A great medical team and that electric gadget they use to bang the old ticker started me up again. But for a minute or two, the reading of my will could have proceeded legally.”
He looked at the shot glass, decided against a third, and eased the glass onto the table.
“I’ve tried to remember — but I couldn’t at the time and the mists of eight years haven’t helped — how it felt to die. You’ve heard the stories of people who cross over and are snatched back. A lot of them report a marvelous experience, a golden light, a feeling of joy and peace, a feeling of not wanting to be brought back, but to have the golden freedom of the light.”
“How was it with you, Keith?”
“No golden light. I really have never been able to remember. I think it was dark, cold, a feeling of terrible anxiety because I was dying, dead. Maybe my linen was soiled when I got over there... Poor Lissa — I hope she got over there with her linen clean.”
After the local evening newscast, the telephone began to ring. It wouldn’t stop. Elva kept answering, hearing the sympathetic expressions, consoling the shocked caller, answering the same questions. Finally she took the obvious measure and left the phone off the hook.
We talked to Homicide Detective Max Dufarge, who came accompanied by one of his men. We told him everything we knew.
We sat about the table. Food was on it. Perhaps we ate.
It was St. Valentine’s Eve and all the plans for the party had to be cancelled, the caterer told by phone to send his bill but not himself, likewise the booking agent in New Orleans who handled Dixieland jazz groups.
Lissa Aubunelli was stretched out in a funeral home downtown, and we, finally, in our beds.
A moon milked palely in the darkness. The night was not quiet: the scratching of a night creature scurrying across the roof; the faraway striking of the grandfather clock in the lower hall; a skirl of night wind, creak of a house timber, a whisper of movement. Here in the house? Someone up, needing an aspirin? I rose to an elbow, listening. Nothing. I eased back and gradually my senses slipped into a halfway house of nonsleep.
The colors came in a single glimpse of tangled mangrove, saw grass, heat-blasted pines weeping dead, gray moss tendrils.
A narrow, rutted road with crushed-shell surface wormed painfully through the jungle. In a clearing off the road was a tumbledown clapboard shack. Beside the road were the ruins of a mailbox. Jagged holes had rusted through. The remains hung crookedly on a weather-eaten chain from a weather-eaten stanchion creatively fashioned from the iron tire of an old wagon wheel.
Zap!
The darkness was a wall.
I jerked on my pants and shoes. Across the hallway I hesitated for a beat of a second. Then I gripped the doorknob, flung the panel open, and I saw what I was afraid of seeing: an empty bed, sheet thrown back.
“Valentina!” My shout shattered through the house. I looked back and forth wildly in the hallway, ran down the stairs, two, three at a time.
“Valentina! Val!”
I was outside, seeing the vacancy of the porch, the land, the emptiness of the whole earth.
I ran back in. The house was awakening, lights flashing on, questioning voices rising.
George was charging down the stairs, in the direction of my voice.
Just inside the front door, I grabbed his arm. “Don’t ask me anything! Just tell me— You’ve known this swamp country for years. Do you know a deserted shack with a mailbox mounted on a wagon-wheel iron rim?”
“Cody, what in the hell—”
“Damn you! Answer my question!”
“Of course I know. It’s the old LeMoines place. Belonged to Keith Vereen’s grandpappy. Hunters, fishermen still use it now and then, not that it’s much shelter when a storm blows in. Now you answer a question for me. What’s going on?”
“It’s about Valentina, you long-winded bastard! She got up during the night. I know now that it wasn’t my imagination or nerves. She slipped downstairs, and he was there, where he’d told her he would be, to talk to her about Lissa, a private thing, something Lissa had meant for her ears alone. What the filthy hell does it matter how he arranged it, the bait he used? He’s got her. Nothing else matters. She’s with him, George, the final one. The Louchard descendant. And I must get to the LeMoines place.”