Bayou Moon Read online

  Mignon looked at him once and returned to studying the painting in front of her. John Henry was naturally curious. She had made more money off her paintings in a single year than he would see in ten years of work. It must be something special, he reckoned. To be able to do something like that.

  John Henry was required to possess a certain perspicacity in his work. Mignon was at least as smart as he was, if not more. Furthermore, she was hiding something he would very much like to know. However, buying a house near La Valle, the very house she was born in, wasn’t a method for getting revenge on the St. Michels. Living near them wouldn’t particularly annoy them. No, he knew she had another motive. She had said she didn’t want to rake up the coals, but she was doing just that, simply by her continued presence.

  Conversely, there were the St. Michels. Eleanor wouldn’t have invited the woman to dinner if she hadn’t desired to do just that. The matriarch of the St. Michels had her own motives, and John Henry wondered how Mignon fit into the larger scheme.

  In the meantime, Mignon had attained a cult status around La Valle, a woman who had been born poor and succeeded. There were those around this area who were proud to have her back here, and implied in many conversations that she and her father had received a raw deal from the St. Michels.

  But did Mignon think that?

  John Henry turned off the Bronco and got out, placing his Stetson on his head.

  Mignon watched him out of the corner of her eye. She put her brush down in a cup filled with turpentine, casting a last critical eye over the painting. Her muse had fled, leaving an empty well of creativity. Nothing more would be accomplished on this work today. She flipped a cover over the painting.

  John Henry approached the patio. “Morning, Mignon,” he called.

  Mignon began to clean her brushes with turpentine and cheesecloth. After a few moments she turned toward him. “Come to threaten me again, John Henry? It doesn’t go over as well in the daylight. Maybe you should come back at night.” When I’m at the bed and breakfast, sugar, in another parish. Out of gun range.

  He stood at the base of the wooden steps leading up to the porch, waiting for her sarcasm to fade, an enigmatic expression gracing his fine features. He studied her carefully. She was dressed in worn jeans and an old T-shirt that read “Ancient Oriental Proverb” on the top and had some Chinese characters on the bottom. John Henry almost shook himself. It would have been nice if she didn’t look as good in old baggy clothing as she did in that figure-hugging black sheath that showed every inch of her flesh to its best advantage. But the truth was that it really didn’t matter what she was wearing.

  “I wasn’t threatening you,” he said, not able to remove his eyes from the curved slopes that tantalized him underneath her loose T-shirt and jeans. He put a booted foot on the bottom step and rested his hands on top of his knee.

  “Come on, John Henry,” she said. “A graveyard at one in the morning? What’s that about? Some strange Louisianan welcome wagon that we Yankees don’t know about? What’s next, a cross burning on my front lawn? Right after I got the damned thing cleared off, too? But hey, I forgot, I’m not doing anything to threaten the Ku Klux Klan. Yet, anyway.”

  “Technically, you’re not a Yankee, Mignon. And on reflection, maybe I shouldn’t have picked that graveyard.” John Henry sighed. “I was sure that you had pulled a fast one on Eleanor St. Michel.”

  “And you’re not now,” Mignon asked carefully.

  “Your hands were like ice, you were shaking like a leaf, and damned if I know what happened to the table. My foot was on yours. All I can think is that two of the other people at the table did it. Two people who were sitting together.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen some strange things in my life, but that one, well, I’ve never seen something like that.”

  Mignon sighed, as well. “It’s never happened to me before. Leya said I was sensitive. Maybe it’s just because I was a little nervous being in the boogey man’s house.” She had pulled a fast one, though. A fast bit of chicanery combined with quick thinking. And that unnameable sense of something else that had been there.

  Words died away, leaving only the sound of leaves moving softly around them. John Henry finally said, “I don’t get it.”

  Mignon saw that he was staring at her chest. She resisted the impulse to glance down at her breasts and then understood that he was referring to her shirt. She took it in her hands and turned it to the side, so that the vaguely Asian words became obvious. Although the words resembled unreadable Chinese characters viewed from the front, turned on their side they were simply a Chinese-style font that read in English, “Fuck this shit.” She shrugged apologetically. “My friend gave it to me. For when things are a little crazy.”

  He smiled. It transformed his face in a way that left Mignon a little in awe. He asked, “Can I look at your painting?”

  Mignon took a step backward with a little look of surprise on her face. “Why? You like art?”

  John Henry took that to be a challenge. “Let’s see. When my daughter was younger, she used to draw horses that were mostly lines and she called it art. I like a little of this and that. St. Germaine isn’t the height of cosmopolitan culture, however.” He wasn’t about to admit that he had gone to Barnes & Noble to buy a copy of her book to see what she was capable of doing. He found the watercolors almost as entrancing as he found her. There was a lot to be said about her character in those works that transfixed his eyes as he had turned each page. There was a wealth of color and detail that he didn’t know a watercolor painting could possess. Perhaps he couldn’t say exactly why he had liked her work, but he wouldn’t mind having one on his wall where he could look at it every day. Not any more than he would mind having her in his bed where he could wake up to her every morning. “Other than what I see sometimes in Natchitoches, I don’t know much about art in general.”

  She took another step backward and mutely invited him onto the porch. With her right hand she uncovered the work. John Henry stepped up to look at it. Immediately, he thought it didn’t look like the works in her book. It was a scene of the forest just past the curve of the driveway, a primeval forest with the primordial growth springing forth, threatening to obscure all in its path. The colors were jewellike but darker, and the piece conveyed a savage lack of enlightenment and luminance. Unlike her watercolors, this one relied on vague shapes to impart its message of blackened forest, a stunted forest that refused to grow. He found himself staring at it and losing himself in the shapes that covered the canvas. It said volumes more than Mignon ever could about pain and torment. He couldn’t even begin to describe what he felt when he looked at the canvas; the only thing that popped into his mind sounded lame and anemic, but he uttered it anyway. “Impressionistic, right?”

  “Right,” she confirmed, flipping the cover back. “You know more than you let on.”

  “Not really. Not about art.”

  Tilting her head, Mignon studied his face and he looked back at her. She asked, “What do you know about snakes?”

  John Henry’s expression didn’t waver. He knew about the cottonmouth in her room on Sunday. “I know not to step on ’em.”

  “Do you know sometimes they crawl into the damnedest places?”

  “Like your room?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question.

  Mignon nodded. “Just like my room.”

  “Natchitoches police chief told me about that yesterday. He didn’t know I was interested in … your well-being.”

  There was a certain heat between them. Mignon suddenly became uncomfortable and stepped backward, breaking the spell. “Does he now?”

  “Naw, just telling me about something peculiar that happened to a famous artist who happens to be staying in Natchitoches. She came about this close”—he spread his index finger and his thumb about an inch apart—“from being snake bit.”

  She lowered her head. “Actually, it was a little closer than that.”

  “Had me a deputy who got nailed by one o
f those year before last,” said John Henry. “Turned his hand black. Man ended up taking disability because his hand will never be the same. Every year we get several people bit around here. Every few years someone dies. Usually a child or an older person. But they die all the same.”

  Mignon wasn’t sure what exactly to say to that. That snake had come so close to her head that she had felt the breeze caused by the rush of his strike. The animal control officer had said that he hadn’t seen such a monster for years, and didn’t have a clue how it had wandered into Mignon’s room.

  She had a clue.

  “It seems to me like you’re biding your time here,” John Henry said.

  “Biding my time in lieu of what?”

  “That’s the part I’m not sure of. Either you’re just a little gal curious about where she’s from, or you know something you’re not letting on.” He adjusted the Stetson on his head so his sherry brown eyes could better see hers. “Wish I could figure out what.”

  “I think you can figure it out, if you’re as honest and true-blue as you seem to want me to believe.” Mignon wiped her hands on the sides of her jeans, removing the remainder of the paint from her fingers and palms. “Maybe you should be thinking about Luc St. Michel and Garlande Thibeaux instead of worrying about this ‘little old Yankee.’”

  John Henry crossed his arms over his chest, glancing around him. He knew very well that he wasn’t a Boy Scout, not with the thoughts that lately had obscured his mind. He had been thinking about Luc St. Michel and Garlande Thibeaux a lot. He had searched the state database for a criminal record for both individuals and found nothing. There were no warrants for either person. There were no records for the State of Louisiana. He’d requested a Social Security work history and received it that very morning. Neither individual had a work history since 1975. Finally, neither Luc or Garlande had a Louisiana driver’s license, which didn’t mean that they didn’t have a driver’s license from another state or even in another country. But both people had effectively vanished in a world where records were increasingly easier to access. “You’ll give me a call if you have a problem with snakes?”

  “I think I can take care of snakes, if I happen to run into one.” She paused. “It’s the bigger critters I have to worry about.”

  John Henry left without further ado, carefully turning his Bronco around in her little parking area, and returning up the dirt road.

  As he drove he thought about what she had suggested. There was an inherent challenge in her words that he couldn’t resist, so he returned to his headquarters just outside of La Valle. Nothing much was going on in the sheriff’s department. There was a man in the lockup on a DUI, and another awaiting transportation to Shreveport, where he was wanted on a manslaughter charge. Three deputies were patrolling the parish, and two were working in a large open area in the back. None of the deputies had been in St. Germaine Parish as long as he had, and three of them weren’t even from the area originally. No one was familiar with the old scandal except the receptionist, who overheard him asking about Luc and Garlande.

  Ruby Wingo had been a fixture of the St. Germaine Parish Sheriff’s Department for more years than anyone could recall. She knew where all the bodies were buried. She knew all of its dirty secrets. She was also the ugliest woman John Henry had ever seen in his life.

  She stood five-foot-nothing in her bare feet, but she wore five-inch heels to the office every day. In her fifties now, she dyed her hair jet black and wore more makeup than Tammy Faye Bakker. There was a wart the size of a pencil eraser on her cheek that had a huge hair growing out of it, and she was a chubby little woman with a chip on her shoulder the size of Texas. No one crossed her. No one said boo to her. Her husband of about thirty years, or it might have been forty, was Percival Wingo. She had married very young and her grandchildren were about to enter high school. In any case, Percival was strongly protective of his much beloved wife and came into the station periodically to make sure all the other employees were treating her right, which only added to her menacing reputation.

  John Henry thought it was all amusing because Ruby Wingo was one of the best receptionists he’d ever seen. She could handle just about anyone who came into the station with one hand tied behind her back. She could have arrested a gang of burly bikers single-handedly if she had been so inclined. As a matter of fact, he was a little afraid of her himself.

  “That woman sure is stirring up a mess of yellow jackets, ain’t she?” she said to him.

  “Beg pardon?”

  Ruby balanced herself carefully on her spiked black heels. Her pursed lips were covered with sparkly fuchsia lipstick, and she stared at the sheriff with one hand on her plump hip. “I’ve never heard so many people talk about Luc St. Michel and Garlande Thibeaux since 1975. And it was kind of a secret then.”

  John Henry smiled. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee, Ruby.”

  “Why John Henry, what would Percival say?”

  A vision of the six-foot-six, three-hundred-pound Percival Wingo popped into John Henry’s head. Percival was a big, mean man who had not one whit of humor about him. “Well, we won’t tell him, will we?”

  Ruby giggled with one hand over her mouth, and John Henry cringed.

  After Ruby had spilled all the beans she could, John Henry wasn’t much more informed than he had been before. Ruby’s was just a slightly watered-down version of what he’d heard already. Luc had run off with his mistress, Garlande. Garlande was Mignon’s mother. Mignon’s father had been forced out of the parish by the then sheriff, Ruelle Fanchon. Which explains why she isn’t enamored of the present sheriff.

  Ruff Thibeaux had taken his daughter over to Texas and ended up dying there. Mignon Thibeaux had disappeared into the system. Suddenly she was back, and not only that, but she was relatively famous as an artist. However, since she used her first name only and watercolors weren’t the first thing people rose to speak about in La Valle, her success had been virtually unheard of until she returned. And she happened to be the spitting image of her mother. The only addition to the story was that Luc had been seeing Garlande for years, and it was even rumored that Mignon was Luc’s child.

  “But that just ain’t so,” added Ruby. “I knew her mama pretty well. For a few years she was right happy with Ruff. Until he started drinking more and more. Then she done hooked up with Luc and off they went to only God knows where.”

  Mignon had hinted that all wasn’t right with those scenarios. John Henry sat at his desk in his office, staring at the wall. She was looking for her mother, and she had thought that her mother might have come back to this place. But Garlande never had.

  Neither had Luc St. Michel. That wasn’t surprising considering the gargoyle he had for a wife. Eleanor would give Ruby and Percival a run for their money. But money was involved. The St. Michels were multimillionaires. Geraud dabbled in some small business ventures, a chain of stores that competed with Pier I, offering a line of foreign knickknacks, candles, and metal ware. The rest of the St. Michels simply lived a social life, like the dinner last Saturday with Eleanor and Leya mucking around in the world of psychics. That certainly hadn’t been the first seance he’d been to out there. But it had been the most interesting.

  Why wouldn’t Luc St. Michel want any of his money?

  There wasn’t an obvious answer to that. He started a search for John and Jane Does from 1975, cold cases in which the bodies hadn’t been identified. He was going to start with Louisiana and then follow up with Texas, since the Texas state border was less than twenty miles away.

  Finally, he was going to have to start asking questions of people he didn’t want to ask questions of: Eleanor St. Michel, Jourdain Gastineau, Gabriel Laurier, and Ruelle Fanchon. All of them had been involved.

  But the one thing that bothered him most was the snake in Mignon’s room. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to catch a cottonmouth and put it in her room. On the off chance that it would bite her? On the off chance that it would kill her?
Not hardly. But certainly to scare her off. She wasn’t the type to be scared off, and consequently whoever had been responsible for the snake was going to become more agitated the longer she stayed.

  John Henry shook his head. No, he didn’t like any of this at all. Not one damned bit.

  Chapter Eleven

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17

  Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

  Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

  ORANGES AND LEMONS

  “SAY, MIZ THIBEAUX,” ONE of the workmen called out to Mignon about an hour before they finished for the day. “Miz” was the southern equivalent of Ma’am, Mignon had rediscovered, rather than the equivalent of Ms. She found the idiom antiquated, but sort of charming all the same. “Miz Thibeaux?” came the workman’s voice again.

  “Just a second,” Mignon called back, covering the canvas on the easel in front of her again. Despite the interruption by the sheriff, she had managed to find some more creative energy from somewhere deep inside of her. In fact, she had been pleased to focus on her painting again.

  The darkness inside the house always surprised her, regardless of the uncovered windows and the door propped open by a rock. She knew white walls and bright colored furnishings would cure that ailment soon enough.

  The workman who had called her over was named Horace Seay, pronounced “Say.” He was an older man in his early fifties and the same one who had been inspecting her section of woods for possible illegal deer-hunting excursions. He had finished with the outhouse’s pit and had come inside to help tear out the old wooden floor, gruffly instructing the two younger workmen with short, concise phrases that sounded odd to Mignon’s ears. She had realized that he was truly Cajun, a man who originally came from the southern part of Louisiana, and spoke with more than a hint of colorful Acadian French in his accent.