The rain fell like drops of lead on the tin roof and the bayou. From the hall closet, I removed an old sweat-stained Stetson that had belonged to my father. I put it on and walked down to the bayou, the brim wilting with rain.
I told myself I didn’t know why I was standing on the bank of a tidal stream in rain that was coming down harder by the second. That wasn’t true. For me, the rain has always been the conduit between the visible and the unseen worlds. Years ago my murdered wife, Annie, spoke to me in the rain, and dead members of my platoon called me on the phone during electrical storms, their voices hardly audible in the static, and my father who died in an offshore blowout appeared in the surf during a squall, still wearing his hard hat and strap overalls and steel-toed boots, giving me a thumbs-up while the waves slid across his knees, the oil rig that killed him stenciled against the sky.
The rain was about death. It defined it. It was an old friend, and I welcomed its presence. I knew its smell when I walked past a storm drain in cold weather, or sat down to rest in an Oregon rain forest filled with lichen-covered boulders that never saw sunlight, or saw a spectral figure on the St. Charles streetcar, his head hooded, his face like gray rubber, his lips curled whimsically in a lopsided figure eight, as though he were saying Whenever you’re ready, sport.
I heard leaves thrashing and looked upward into the live oak. Mon Tee Coon had just slipped on a branch and crashed on top of the limb below. Looking down at him was a smaller raccoon, her tail hanging off the branch.
“Comment la vie?” I said. “Bienvenu, mon raton laveur et votre tee amis, aussi.”
Both of them stared down at me, their coats slick with rain.
“How about a celebratory can of sardines?” I said.
They looked at each other, then at me.
“C’est ce que je pensais,” I said. “Allons-allez.”
I walked back to the house, opened the can over the sink, and emptied it on the steps. Mon Tee Coon and his lady came running.
I thought about calling Clete and telling him that Mon Tee Coon had come home. But I didn’t. Clete was Clete, and no power on earth would ever change his mind about anything. I was also tired of trying to protect people like Axel Devereaux. Or maybe I was just tired of everything. Acceptance of death, or at least its presence, is that way sometimes and not the canker on the soul it’s made out to be.
I had never worn my father’s battered Stetson, and it felt strange. The rain had turned to mist and was blowing through the screens. For some reason, in my mind’s eye, I saw a mesa that resembled a tombstone, one that had been placed in the foreground of a wasteland that seemed to dip into infinity.
The phone rang on the kitchen counter. I looked at the caller ID and picked up. “What’s goin’ on, Baby Squanto?”
“Don’t call me those stupid names,” Alafair said. “Is everything all right there?”
“Of course.”
“It’s raining here. It never rains so hard this time of year. I’m looking out at the desert and thinking of you. I don’t know why.”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? I have this terrible feeling.”
“You shouldn’t. Mon Tee Coon just came home.”
“That’s wonderful. But don’t come here.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Through my window, I can see a huge mesa in the rain. For some reason I felt you were coming here. Maybe because you worry about me.”
“Wrong.”
“I have to go. Flowerpots and earthen jars are breaking on the patio.”
“I’ll talk with you later, kid.”
“Dave, I have an awful feeling. It’s about death. I don’t know why I feel this way.”
“It’ll pass.”
“What will?”
“Fear of death.”
“My thoughts are about you. Not me.”
“I understand. But your worries are misplaced. Hello?”
The line had gone dead.
I sat down and stared through the window at the rain. A bolt of lightning split the gray sky and trembled on the iron flagpole in City Park, like an aberration in the elements that refused to die.
Chapter Twelve
On Sunday, Alafair called me from the airport in Dallas. She had taken a commercial flight and was on her way back home.
“You quit?” I said.
“No, Desmond and Lou had to take care of some union trouble in Los Angeles and New Orleans. I wasn’t getting anything done, so I decided to work from home.”
“Was that all right with them?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
I picked her up in Lafayette. We had slipped into Indian summer without being aware of it. The sky was as hard and blue as porcelain, the oak leaves red and gold and clicking like crickets when they rolled across the lawn in the wind. I knew somehow that better days lay ahead.
I fixed dinner for us when we got home, and later, we fed Snuggs on the kitchen floor and Mon Tee Coon and his girlfriend on top of Tripod’s hutch. That night we slept with the windows open, and I could smell the camellias and the dense lemony fragrance of our late-blooming magnolia in the side yard. As I drifted off to sleep, I resolved to capture and protect each spoonful of sunshine allotted me for the rest of my life, and not go with the season or lend myself to doomed causes.
I woke at six-fifteen to the sounds of rain and the phone ringing. I picked up the phone and went into the kitchen so as not to awake Alafair. It was Sean McClain. “I’m in front of Axel Devereaux’s place by the drawbridge on Loreauville Road. I need a witness here.”
“What for?”
“There’s something wrong in that house. People know I don’t get along with Devereaux or his buddies. I don’t want to be busting in on my own.”
“What happened?”
“I was passing his house a half hour ago. All the lights were on and the shades down. A black SUV was in the yard. I saw a woman come running out the back door and thought I heard glass breaking.”
“Go on.”
“I slowed down but didn’t stop.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t want to mix in his personal business.”
He had already made two mistakes: He had ignored a battery situation in progress, and he hadn’t called it in. I didn’t want to think about what was coming next.
“What made you change your mind?” I said.
“I go off at oh-seven-hundred. I thought I’d make one more pass. The SUV was bagging down the road. I didn’t get a tag. The lights were off in the house, and a front window was broken and the shade and screen hanging outside. Devereaux’s truck was in the shed. This time I knocked on the door. No answer.”
“Where are you now?”
“In the front yard.”
“Try again.”
“I pert’ near shook it off the blocks already.”
“You tried the back?”
“Yes, sir. I hit on the bedroom wall.”
“Give me a few minutes.”
I brushed my teeth and washed my face and took a small bottle of orange juice and a cinnamon roll out of the icebox and headed up Loreauville Road. The rain had quit and the sky was an ink wash, as though the sun had refused to rise. A blanket of white fog was rolling off the bayou when I turned onto Axel Devereaux’s property. Sean was waiting on the gallery. An empty whiskey bottle wet with dew glittered in the yard. I walked up the steps.
“You know Axel’s a juicer, don’t you?” I said.
“If that’s the problem, he must have tied on a whammeroo.”
I pounded with the flat of my fist on the door. “It’s Dave Robicheaux and Sean McClain! Open up, Devereaux!”