Bayou Moon Read online

  “What does that mean?” Mignon suspected she knew what it meant, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear it from his mouth, the same mouth that had been used so expertly to enhance their mutual pleasure—not to mention that she knew she hadn’t been completely honest with him, either, and had little intention of doing so at this point in time.

  “There are a couple things. One is that I didn’t discount you completely. I looked into your mother’s and Luc’s … disappearances. I found pretty much the same things your ex-FBI agent did. Although there are a few more reports due back to me that will take some time.” He turned and glanced at her again. Mignon was stunned, but he went on. “I couldn’t find anything that indicated they are still alive.” She started to say something, but he interrupted. “But I couldn’t find anything to indicate they’re dead, either. There’s no proof of anything.”

  “Of course they’re dead,” she almost shouted. “People like Luc don’t just disappear. He was a millionaire. He left everything behind. Do you really think he would do that? Do you really think my mother would have simply abandoned me?”

  John Henry would have held her then, but she shifted away, angry that his disbelief was coloring the conversation so completely. “I don’t know that she would have,” he muttered. “But neither do you. You were only five years old.”

  “I know.” She stared at him. “I know it. Because somebody wants me to leave. And why else would they be trying so damned hard?”

  John Henry stared at the woman before him and knew that everything she said had already gone through his mind, things he had ruminated over for days. “There is something else,” he admitted.

  Mignon locked her green eyes on him.

  “The old sheriff. He was crooked, like a lot of Louisiana politicians. Once he retired down to Baton Rouge, he managed to get himself into a bit of trouble. Drugs, I’ve heard. The IRS is still ripping his income tax returns apart. If anyone knows where a body is buried, he would.” John Henry sighed.

  “So?” Mignon’s voice was skeptical. She remembered the old sheriff’s cruel face as he told her father to get out of LaValle and never come back. She remembered it in her nightmares because she had felt like a criminal back then, all because she was the daughter of the wrong woman. She also remembered what Geraud had said about his chauffeur. The servant had seen Jourdain with the old sheriff a few weeks earlier. Why? Because Ruelle Fanchon can use the help of a state Supreme Court justice right now, more than ever, and boy does he have some dirt on His Honor. “Why would he tell you anything?”

  John Henry smiled grimly. “He has motivation now. Drug sentences are harsh, especially for law enforcement. And I don’t think he wants to spend a lot of time up to Angola, where he’s personally acquainted with half the fellas there. No, I don’t think he’d like that much.”

  “You’re going to talk to him.”

  He nodded. “I’m going to do just that.”

  “What about his connection to … powerful people in the area?”

  With a stare that would have shaken another woman, he looked at her, attempting to follow her train of thought. “You mean, Eleanor St. Michel, maybe? Or Jourdain Gastineau? Eleanor wouldn’t help him, and Jourdain’s got too much to lose.”

  She thought, I wouldn’t bet on that, and knew that she couldn’t tell him what she knew without compromising herself and her friends in the bargain.

  When Mignon smiled at him, John Henry almost forgot that she had a reason to be angry with him. He smiled back, and as his arms went around her he felt as though she was the thing that had been missing from his life. How could this woman be guilty of anything but wanting to know about her mother? “I need to go. Will you call me at work so I can tell you how to find my place?” John Henry didn’t tell her that he had also checked on Madam Terentia Jones and the young man, Faust, last name unknown. Nada. No record on either of them. At least there were no current outstanding warrants. What he needed was their fingerprints and not their nom de plumes, or rather their nom de connes. He wasn’t going to do anything unless a crime was committed, and as yet nothing had revealed itself except a lot of supposition and rumormongering, neither of which was illegal.

  “Hey, you can drive me up the road to my car,” Mignon suggested, linking her arm in his. “Then I don’t need to go tripping through the mud.”

  Neither one of them saw the figure who watched them from the dark woods. The figure had watched them for the last hour, seeing their shapes in the windows and then nothing for a long time. This person watched and waited patiently for an opportunity.

  WHEN MIGNON RETURNED to her room at the bed and breakfast, she found she had another visitor.

  He was reading her mother’s diary while laying across her bed. A tall man in his early sixties with white hair and blue-gray eyes, he was dressed in blue trousers; his jacket hung over a chair in the corner of the room. He looked up when she unlocked the door, then went back to reading the diary without saying a word.

  Mignon gasped and backed out of the room.

  “There’s no need to do that,” the man said.

  Mignon glanced around, then she entered the room and closed the door. She stared at her intruder. “What the hell are you doing here?” Her voice was all outrage and indignation.

  The man flipped a page in the diary. He pointed with a long index finger. “This is interesting stuff. She was having an affair with Luc St. Michel for years. For a womanizer like he was, that’s an eternity. Do you think he really meant to take her away with him?”

  Mignon put her purse with the Beretta inside it on the table by the door. She glared at the man. “How dare you read that?”

  “Well, you didn’t hide it very well, my dear,” he commented. “And my God, is this a scene out of Green Acres or Petticoat Junction?” He waved at the room around them with a finely shaped hand. “This is decorated like a bored hausfrau lost her mind with a sewing needle and a heart motif. I’ve never seen so much gingham and raffia in my life.”

  “It’s supposed to be rustic,” she said, not understanding why she was defending the bed and breakfast owner’s taste in decor.

  “Rustic,” he repeated, considering carefully. “I wouldn’t have called it that, no.”

  Mignon continued to glare at her visitor.

  “I like your eyes, but it is an odd color,” he said. “Do you suppose anyone’s noticed that you wear contacts?”

  “Lots of people wear contacts,” she replied. “What are you doing here? I thought we agreed that—”

  “I wouldn’t come unless you needed a little extra support,” he finished for her. “How about I wouldn’t come unless you were about to blow it.”

  “This isn’t about the usual stuff,” she said. “You knew that when you agreed to help me, Nehemiah.”

  “Call me Dad, sweetie.”

  Mignon finally grinned. “You old fart. Did the B-and-B owner see you come in here?”

  “Of course not. Did I tell you your locks here are made of cheesecake?”

  “I’m aware of that already. And I didn’t call you because I didn’t want to listen to you whine about how I’m messing things up.” Mignon stepped forward. “Buying the house wasn’t part of the plan. Getting into the mansion so quickly wasn’t part of the plan. But you have to admit that I needed to find some way to get into the house, and that was a golden opportunity. So was Saturday night, for that matter.”

  Nehemiah flipped another page in the diary. “It was a golden opportunity,” he admitted. “With a little assistance.”

  Mignon stared at him. “Oh God, Nehemiah, did you have to open the sluice gates while it was raining?”

  “More like I pried them apart. You wouldn’t believe the size of the locks they put on those things.”

  “Nehemiah, people’s homes were flooded.”

  “Posh. Land was flooded, my dear, and you got to search the house. No one was hurt. And if you’ve any guilt about that, you can sell another one of your paintings to pay
them off.”

  She continued to stare at him, although she was seeing an image of herself, almost lost in the riotous water. Her adopted father didn’t have the same kind of scruples that she did, except when it came to immediate family. He didn’t know about the break-in, or the snake, and she was damned sure not going to let him know about the shove into the water. If he knew about any of that, he’d pull the plug on her so fast her head would spin.

  Mignon sat in the chair where his jacket was hung. If people had been hurt by the rising water he would have told her, because she would have found out herself anyway. “And I suppose the electricity was your handiwork, as well. I would have paid out of my own pocket to do a great many things now.”

  “But darling,” protested Nehemiah in his crisp, accentless voice. It was pure California, close to what one might hear on any news station. “That would be no fun at all. After all, one never knows what might happen in a situation like this. The killer could clam up and never admit anything. Is there another invitation on hand?”

  “No, but there will be,” she said. “You know why, and for God’s sake no more messing with sluice gates. The sheriff had an idea that I was down there in my designer dress forcing open the gate with a crowbar in my little hands.”

  “My dear, you had to have a chance to search the mansion.” His voice was serious. “Let’s talk about what you’re doing now.”

  Mignon sighed. “I knew you would do this. You want to pick every nuance apart and plan for every type of equation.”

  Putting his palms face up in the air, Nehemiah asked, “What? A man can’t be prepared?”

  “What do you think I’m doing wrong?”

  “The sheriff, darling,” Nehemiah began. “For one thing.”

  Mignon didn’t say anything. She stared at her adopted father and thought about the first time she had ever seen him. At sixteen, Mignon had all but lived on the streets of Los Angeles, having hopscotched through the West in orphanages and foster homes. Prostitution hadn’t claimed her yet, but it was knocking on her door. Her foster family didn’t care if she lived in, but they cared if the monthly maintenance check arrived. So she spent time drawing pictures on Hollywood Boulevard. She did quick portraits on cheap sketch pads for fifteen dollars a head. The price went up for a pastel drawing. On slow days, sometimes she would reproduce a drawing of the Mona Lisa on the sidewalk, leaving a hat or a jar beside it for donations. The cops thought she was funny and cute and left her alone. The owner of the building she chose to draw in front of didn’t care if she marked up the sidewalk with chalk.

  One day Nehemiah Trent had walked by while she was reproducing the famous painting. When he stopped and deposited a five-dollar bill in her jar, Mignon had looked up and thanked him. Five dollars made a big difference in her day; it meant she would be inside. Spending the night outside in late November meant that she would be cold, because the winds had been blowing inward from the sea that day. He had asked her, “Can you paint, as well?”

  Mignon had admitted that she could do many things in various media. She could draw, paint, sculpt, and carve wood. She had taught herself everything she could while she passed from foster home to foster home. Art had been a way of escaping, and changing media had been necessary sometimes because of material availability. The older man had requested to see her portfolio and she said she didn’t have one. Then he asked if she would like a bed for the night, no strings attached. He was an art dealer and was always interested in new young artists, ones with talent such as hers.

  Laughing, Mignon had refused. She wasn’t stupid. She had thought the older man a lecher, and at best someone who would slip into bed with her at three in the morning to fondle her breasts. She had refused without a thought. But Nehemiah had kept coming back to her corner, viewing each of her pictures as she drew them. Eventually she had learned to trust him, and he had never let her down.

  After a lawyer had finalized their legal relationship, Mignon had attended the best art schools in New York and Europe to develop her talent.

  “The sheriff is just an amusement, Nehemiah,” she lied, unwilling to admit her attraction to the man. “An afternoon snack. And I get to keep an eye on him. He’s very suspicious. It’s in his nature.”

  Nehemiah regarded her with amusement. Sometimes he wished that Mignon was his real daughter. His real daughters wouldn’t work with him in his chosen business, but Mignon was the next best thing, as close to family as could be. He loved her like any father would love his daughter, and they were just as close. He could tell she was lying and that was part of the problem. He had never felt so alive as he did now, attempting to expose a murderer by the most devious means possible. But he didn’t care to see her rotting in a rustic jail in rural Louisiana because she’d trusted the wrong man. “Well, then, about this farmhouse. Do you think you’ll rile someone up too soon, before you’re ready?”

  “Everything is a risk, Nehemiah,” Mignon said, happy to repeat words that he had thrown at her time and again. “Everything. If I’m caught, only I will suffer. No one else. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “No one is worried that you’ll expose us,” Nehemiah protested. She knew it was true. “That’s silly, darling. But your landlady, who, by the way, is quite talkative, mentioned a problem with a snake.” His eyes narrowed. “A poisonous snake in your room. One that had no business being out of a swamp.”

  Mignon examined her fingernails with great interest. Finally, she said, “What am I supposed to say? Someone tried to scare me, Nehemiah. It means I’m getting close.”

  “Close to a murderer!” he thundered. “It’s all well and good for Kate and Terri, who are well concealed. But you—you’ve become a great walking target for some mad idiot who’s afraid of what you’re going to dig up.”

  “It’s already done. The sheriff is investigating. He might even find out what I can’t possibly get from them. Like where their bodies are.” She uttered the words before she had a chance to think about what she was saying.

  Nehemiah closed the diary with a loud thump and pushed himself off the bed. “I don’t want you to vanish like your mother, Mignon.”

  “I have the gun,” she murmured. “I have the pepper spray. And I’ll get some more ammo when I go to get another mini-mag.”

  “Another …? Never mind,” Nehemiah sighed. “I don’t want to know. You must realize that you’re in a great deal of danger, my dear. And I can’t allow—”

  “You have to, Nehemiah,” she insisted. “You have to give me a chance to finish. Terri planted the egg full of blood and Eleanor was so horrified, she would have agreed to just about anything. We’re so close.”

  He looked at her seriously. “I know the sheriff is a very handsome man, but you must remember he’s one of them.” Nehemiah shook a warning finger at his daughter. “And he cannot be completely trusted.”

  She pointed at the diary. “Did you read it all?”

  “I skimmed through it, dear.” Nehemiah appeared a little sad as he said it. “All these reminders of your mother and your father. It must be difficult. She wasn’t like you, was she? She was, forgive me, a little naïve, but oh, how she loved you.” He saw that his words had affected her and moved on to another subject. “You found it in the old house?”

  “Under the floorboards in the bedroom,” she said. She wasn’t offended by what Nehemiah had said about her mother. She knew him much better than she had ever known her mother, and knew very well that he meant no offense. Backhanded compliments were his forte, and he used double-talk and witticisms endlessly. “With the gold necklace in the box.”

  “Yes, it has the most interesting initials on it.”

  “You know, I think Luc was going to go away with her,” Mignon whispered. “That was probably what precipitated the whole event.”

  “And their bodies?”

  “In the bayou? In the forest, in shallow graves? Well, probably deep graves.” She lost herself in morbid thoughts about their resting places.
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  Nehemiah examined his daughter closely. She could never hide anything from him. She was good at concealing her emotions from other people, but he knew her giveaways, a cheek muscle twitching, fidgeting hands, darting eyes. “This is a little too trying for you,” he stated definitively. “This is too much. I think you should leave, and leave now.”

  “No!” Mignon cried. She grasped Nehemiah’s arm and turned him toward her. “No, it’s not. It’s hard. I’ll admit that. We all knew it would be. But we’re close. I’m close. I can find out what I want to know. I have to.”

  “You’re going to blow it. You’re going to endanger yourself.”

  “Then I’ll be the one taking the consequences. No one else.”

  “But we’re not talking about jail. We’re talking about someone doing to you what they did to Luc and your mother.”

  They both digested that information with biting silence. Then Mignon said, “But the seance, Nehemiah. There was something so very odd about the seance.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t … follow the plan. I didn’t move the bell and the watch fob. The last thing I remember is the lights going out for the second time, and then there was a bitter cold.”

  Nehemiah stared at Mignon, his mouth a grim, set line.

  “Terri said the bell rang and the fob moved and that I was moaning. But Nehemiah, it wasn’t me. So if this is what Eleanor wants, then she might very well be getting it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21

  Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?

  I’ve been to London to look at the queen.

  Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you there?

  I frightened a little mouse under the chair.

  PUSSY CAT

  THE WITCH-WOMAN LED ELEANOR into her neat little shack once more and smiled broadly. It had been a fine month for her. She thought maybe she had enough money from the wealthy woman to buy a new set of dentures; the old ones didn’t fit so well any more. She had visited three times this month alone, and the woman was often generous with tips. After all, it was she who had told the wealthy woman to invite the young artist to the house to soothe the specter-ridden mansion.