“For what?”
“Well, they’ll have to test the blood, I’m sure. See if it was Troy’s, right?”
“You know more about that kind of stuff than I do.”
“Why’d you call me, Nova?” The question comes out more stridently than he means it to. But Nova Thomas is not usually this sullen and evasive, and her behavior is leaving him genuinely confused. And a little bit frustrated.
“Let’s go see Daddy,” she says, and then she’s walking past him out the front door, Diet Coke in hand; she’s avoiding his eyes now like someone trying to work up her nerve.
11
They walk in silence along the cane field belonging to the neighboring farm.
It is dusk and the tall, rustling stalks have rivers of deep orange snaking around their bases. When the plantation house and gardens come into view, it is the first time Blake has seen the place in half a year, and the nostalgia he feels in response startles and then overwhelms him, like a sharp poke in the side followed quickly by a passionate embrace from someone you’ve always lusted after.
There’s the gazebo where he and Caitlin pricked their fingers and smeared the wounds together so they could become brother and sister for real. There’s the grand oak tree, its heavy branches kissing the soil on all sides of its massive trunk, the same tree Caitlin’s father hung a tire swing from for the two of them to play on as children. The idea that one of the tree’s low-hanging branches might have been used to lasso slaves for the whip didn’t occur to him until he was a junior in high school, and he wonders if it occurs to Nova now.
The house itself had been a ruin for the first six years after Alexander Chaisson bought it, and the children were forbidden to go inside, lest they crash through rotten floorboards or get crushed by a falling section of the roof. So the sprawling grounds outside became their private kingdom, and the gazebo their temple. Now there are flagstone paths and manicured gardens covering the expanse where decaying cane stalks once stood like the last timbers of a war-ravaged village. And the gazebo, which once seemed to be composed of as much lichen as wood, is a clean white shock against a canopy of banana trees.
“Are they starting up tours again?” Blake asks.
“Not for a week, Daddy says. Till all this dies down. You see any news crews on the way in?”
“Nope. Just some cop cars.”
“They’re searching an area close by for him. Least they were this morning. They think he might have stumbled a ways after she whacked him or something.”
“But there’s no blood inside the shed?”
He asks this again because he doesn’t believe her, and apparently his tone makes that clear because she stops walking and glares at him over one shoulder.
She hasn’t just stopped to stare, though, Blake realizes. She wants him to notice what she’s standing beside. The fountain next to her is just a broad copper basin, one of the old sugar kettles that were part of the refining process. But the spigot has stopped running, and the basin is tipped so far to one side it’s emptied all of its water onto the flagstone path. Blake tries to imagine someone lifting it. But the job would be too much for just one man. It would be too much for several men, especially if they were drunk, which most of the guests last night most assuredly were.
“Did the police do this?”
“Nope,” Nova answers. “They didn’t do that either.”
She points to a spot where a planter has spit several of its bricks onto the flagstones. And spit is the best word he can think of for it. His first guess is that the earth underneath shifted and settled; what was this land all around them but glorified swamp? But it can’t explain the force that propelled the bricks out onto the path. A few seconds of blinking, and Blake realizes the only probable explanation is some sudden upward pressure. A heaving of some sort from below, and that’s just…
“Nova, run to my truck, see if my shovel’s—”
Willie Thomas has just emerged from the shed, when he sees who is standing beside his daughter in the lengthening shadow of the main house. And in an instant Blake watches Willie transform from a harried, overworked yardman to a smiling, happy servant whose every reaction to a white person is stained by a childhood of forced integration. As always, it is a transformation that makes Willie’s only daughter bristle with a combination of anger and shame. Out come the huge, solicitous smile and the too-eager handshake, which Blake accepts because no matter how hard he tries to treat Willie Thomas as a peer, the man is determined to greet Blake from behind this protective mask of inauthentic good cheer.
“How you doing, Mister Blake?”
“I’m all right, Mister Willie. How you doing?”
“Oh, we jes tryin’ to put things back together again, that’s all. Miss Caitlin went back to N’Awlins, so—”
“I told him,” Nova says.
“Well, that’s fine,” Willie says, but his emphatic nod can’t distract from the icy look he’s just given his only daughter. “This whole thing”—it takes some effort, but Willie puts the smile back on and focuses his attention on Blake—“this some misunderstandin’, that’s all. Mister Troy, he gonna come back soon. Five years married. I mean, they work through this. You see. They’s jes no sense in everybody gettin’ so worked up—”
“He’s dead, Daddy.”
Willie’s eyes flash with anger; he’s clearly been having this conversation with his daughter all day, and Blake wonders if the man agrees with her more than he’s letting on.
“He’s dead,” Nova says again. “And we have no idea what killed him.”
Before Blake can respond, Nova takes him by the arm and guides him toward the shed. “Come on,” she says.
“Nova!” Willie calls after them. But his daughter is undeterred, and by the time she’s pushed open the door to the shed, Blake feels Willie right behind them, breathless with anxiety.
Despite what Nova has told him, Blake is expecting a slaughterhouse inside. And so he is astonished by the cleanliness and orderliness before him. The only thing strange he sees is the set of indentations in the dirt floor. It helps that Nova has walked right up to them and has positioned the toe of her right sneaker next to the largest one. They have the appearance of rat holes, but the little dirt and debris piles you’d expect to find next to them are gone (although they were probably swept away by Willie’s broom).
“Mower did that, Nova!” Willie cries.
“Lawn mower’s been at our place for weeks. It was leaking gas all over, and Caitlin said she could smell it from the house.”
“Something else then. I don’t know.”
“Rats?” Blake asks. He’s standing right next to Nova now, and they are both studying the holes in the floor. There are five of them in all, and there doesn’t seem to be a pattern or order to their spacing. And the dirt here is drier than most other parts of the property, which is why Willie chose this spot for the shed, so there should be some cracking or other evidence of the violence it would have taken to punch these holes. But there isn’t.
“No evidence of digging,” Nova says.
“You didn’t sweep it away?” Blake asks Willie.
The man shakes his head and throws up his hands. “Mister Troy and that woman, they had some kinda crazy fight, and he stumbled outta here drunk as a skunk. Reason they can’t find him is ’cause he’s not dead. Now y’all come on outta here so I can—”
“That woman had so much blood on her it looked like she’d stuck a pig. And she would have cut you down with that axe if I hadn’t stopped her.”