Bayou Moon Read online

  Eleanor laughed. “No, nothing like that. Madam Jones has informed me that a supernatural cleansing is the best route to take in order to scour the influence of evil spirits from the house.”

  Mary from Shreveport was aghast. “Eleanor, surely you don’t believe in these psychics? They’re all fakes.” Mignon’s eyebrow went up as she listened earnestly.

  Jourdain chuckled, knowing that Eleanor’s response would be perennial and relentless.

  “My dear, you haven’t seen what I’ve seen.” Eleanor’s voice was full of pride and authority. “Madam Jones comes with the highest references from acquaintances in New York. She’s been a participant in discernments all over the United States and abroad. If a cleansing is what is required then it cannot hurt to follow through with it.”

  “But I merely meant—”

  Mignon interrupted. “I didn’t believe either, but there have been some odd things happening at the mansion.”

  Eugenie added, “If you could see what happens there, you might believe, too.” Her tone was benign and matter-of-fact. “Ghosts walk the house of St. Michel and it shall be cleansed of its darkness.”

  The couple from Shreveport was not convinced. Joseph said, “Eleanor, I’m sure you’ll do whatever is necessary to reclaim your house. No ghost would dare oppose you.”

  There was a round of laughter.

  Mignon lifted her glass of Chardonnay to her lips in a carefully calculated movement. The bracelet slid back as far as it would go on her wrist, glittering in the muted light of the chandelier.

  There was a gasp, but she didn’t see whose lips it came from. Eugenie got up suddenly and excused herself. David appeared irritated, finished his glass of wine with a restrained gulp, and followed her without a word.

  Eleanor gave a slight frown, but no one said anything.

  Jourdain watched the bracelet move sinuously as Mignon turned her wrist ever so slightly. It reflected the light and all eyes were on its glinting brightness as it slid delicately down her arm. She couldn’t help the tiny smile that curved over her lips.

  Chapter Twenty

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22–FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24

  There was a man in our town,

  And he was wondrous wise;

  He jumped into a bramble bush

  And scratched out both his eyes.

  THERE WAS A MAN IN OUR TOWN

  ON WEDNESDAY MIGNON SPENT some of the day with the workmen at the house. Horace Seay was particularly morose, and didn’t speak much. He didn’t ask about the rusted metal box, and he didn’t speak about anything at all, except the occasional monosyllabic grunt directed at his employees. He and the workmen were finishing up removing the wood flooring in the bedroom, and all three men had seen what looked like blackened stains from years past soaked into the sides and bottoms of the boards. Knowing what the stains must be, Horace crossed himself and motioned for the others to continue on with their work.

  Even Mignon picked up one of the discarded planks in her hands and examined the sides. She was wondering if tests could be done on the boards, and how she could ask John Henry about them without being as obvious as the sun suddenly falling from the sky. But in the end she put the board back in the pile with the others and returned to her painting on the porch.

  The dark image had become more apparent on the canvas and she was disturbed by the way it was coming along.

  When the three men left for lunch so did she, and none of them ever saw the figure in the woods who watched them so carefully.

  ON WEDNESDAY EVENING Mignon gave her framed painting to John Henry and he hung it in his living room while she watched. He marveled at what she had done, and said, “No one ever gave me something like this.” She noticed that he had purchased her book of paintings, but assumed that she wasn’t supposed to know, because the book was on his bedroom dresser, mostly hidden under a book by Stephen King.

  As they stood in his plain little living room looking at the painting, she said, “If you don’t like it, you can take it down and I won’t be offended.”

  John Henry smiled at her. “I do like it. I’m not one to put something on my walls if I don’t.”

  “I should have known that. Some people say they like your work, then turn around and tear you up in a review on the arts page in the Times.” Mignon’s smile was a bit forced. “I don’t think you would understand that. I would much rather hear ‘I think that sucks,’ than have someone lie to me about it. After all, what difference does it make to me? I’m not going back and change it for them.”

  One large hand brushed a strand of hair off her forehead, gentle strong fingers skimming across soft flesh. “It doesn’t sound like a very nice business.” The sound of his voice was a rough murmur. He wondered how he could have been so captivated by a woman in such a short time. She didn’t back down from an argument. She was committed to herself and to what she believed in. He had never seen anyone like her before, and he doubted he would again.

  “It can be. There are some very not nice people there.”

  “As there are in mine.”

  A sense of sadness almost overwhelmed Mignon. She knew this brief relationship would come to a close very fast. If John Henry hadn’t heard about the “cleansing” ceremony on Saturday, then it was only a matter of time before someone spilled the beans. Eleanor had mentioned what it involved, and even Mignon thought it sounded distinctly fishy. John Henry would find it decidedly so, as it was an elemental part of him to be logically inquisitive.

  A note from Eleanor had been hand-delivered by her chauffeur, pleading that Mignon attend the cleansing ceremony because the spirits seemed so manifestly drawn to her, and Mignon was perversely pleased that Eleanor was so certain about the outcome.

  As if I would miss that, Mignon had thought to herself after reading the elegant script on creamy parchment with a large monogrammed E on top. She had immediately fixated on that E because it was the same style of letter used on the bracelet that she was still wearing around her wrist. Isn’t that coincidental?

  “So John Henry, tell me, how long can you do a Luminol test on blood?”

  John Henry had been studying his latest acquisition on the wall; his eyes narrowed and he turned to stare at her. “I never know exactly what you’re going to say next, do I?”

  “I mean how long can blood be lying around before you can’t do such a test?”

  “Lying around? I’ve seen a case where the test was performed on a room in which a murder occurred—a violent murder, mind you—about five years after the fact.” He continued to study her face much the way he had studied the painting. Her heart began to beat a little faster, as if he could read her mind. He continued, “I’ve heard of longer in some cases. Blood begins to degrade immediately because it’s organic. When the chemicals in blood come in contact with other things, such as a wall or a mattress, it causes a reaction. I forget the exact chemical compounds. But the gist of it is that this reaction sticks around for a long, long time, and even if the blood is washed away, the pattern is still visible under a certain kind of light.”

  Mignon nodded. “So you don’t know if a positive result would occur in a place where a murder took place, say, a decade before.”

  “You’re about as subtle as a sledgehammer,” he said. “I think you’d do somewhat better if you told me what you’re thinking about. Maybe a specific place you have in mind.”

  “John Henry, I was simply trying to ask you a question about your work. I don’t know anything about police work.” Mignon smiled innocently. Except for when I was arrested that one time. And except for everything that Nehemiah has told me about police procedure. But that certainly didn’t include a lesson in forensic chemistry. And it’s not like I can go up to the police department and ask point-blank.

  “I should grab you and kiss you instead,” he complained. “But I have to go back to the office and keep going over some of those damn files. You know, if it’s not one thing it’s something else. Blood lying around.” He s
norted under his breath.

  “Something else happen?” Mignon asked.

  “Some newspaper reporters digging around about Ruelle Fanchon,” he said.

  “He won’t be happy in prison, will he?” she asked, turning away to study her painting on the wall.

  “He’ll be segregated from the regular prison population because he was a sheriff.” John Henry analyzed the line of her back. It was a wondrous back, sleek and long, something for a man to run his fingers along underneath the creamy silk shirt she was wearing. “You’re not mad because I didn’t tell you about him before, are you?”

  “Why? He didn’t have anything to do with me,” she lied. She was glad that the former sheriff was going away. If not for what he had done to her, then for all the other people in St. Germaine Parish that he had terrorized for years. For people like Miner Poteet, whose only crime was compassion toward his neighbors. For people like her father, who had only been married to a straying woman, and for people like herself, who had been five years old and forced into a living hell for something she had no control over. “So what the reporter is trying to say is that the whole department is corrupt and still is? That must aggravate the hell out of you.”

  There was silence behind her. She could feel his eyes burning into her back. He said, “That’s what the reporter is trying to dig up. Proof of collusion, proof of corruption. If they talked to you, they would have your eyewitness testimony, wouldn’t they? You were there when the sheriff and the judge told your father that he had to leave or else. That was a little collusion, wasn’t it?”

  “I was there, but I didn’t hear everything,” she said. “And I have no intention of talking to any reporters.” But a cold chill ran through her blood. She knew that Ruelle had met with Jourdain recently because he wanted protection in exchange for keeping his mouth shut. John Henry wasn’t going to get anything out of the old sheriff, but she had to admire him for trying.

  His hands wrapped around her shoulders, gently squeezing, fingers kneading the flesh under her shirt. His throaty voice whispered in her ear, “No, you wouldn’t, would you?”

  She suppressed a laugh. “Now why would you say that, John Henry?”

  “Just a feeling.” He nudged the seashell shape of her ear with his lips, and murmured, “I’m trying to break away to talk to him this week. As soon as I can.”

  Mignon ended up spending the night there, and she wasn’t completely unhappy about the way things turned out. Quite the contrary.

  JOHN HENRY LEFT the house before Mignon woke up, and drove to the old farmhouse. He knew perfectly well why she had been asking questions about old blood and Luminol. She would have been better off not asking, or at least not asking him. There was only one place where old blood could lie around for years, and he knew exactly where that was.

  The early morning light shone down strong and bright as John Henry drove the Bronco up to the farmhouse. He stayed in the vehicle for a moment and contemplated the situation. Had a murder taken place here twenty-five years ago that the former sheriff covered up? Wasn’t that exactly what Mignon was hinting at? And if it was not Fanchon, who else would’ve been dirty enough to do that?

  John Henry had known Ruelle Fanchon for about two years before the older man had retired from the sheriff’s department. He had headed up the committee that had hired John Henry. But John Henry knew when to keep his mouth shut, and he’d been partnered with a man who knew how to walk a fine line between corruption and piety, so he’d survived Fanchon’s reign. By that point in time Fanchon had grown cautious. The sheriff’s department was a place that people watched with an eagle eye. The world had changed and video cameras were rampant. Too many people were too anxious to report that a sheriff had shaken them down for a bribe when they had been driving through the parish. Too many people didn’t feel the fear they had a quarter century before that. So the old sheriff had mellowed, and although John Henry had a strong suspicion that he was crooked, he hadn’t witnessed anything personally.

  When finally he stepped out of his car, he took his time looking around. Before long he came across the discarded piles of wood planks and he found the stains Mignon had inadvertently told him about. He took out his pocketknife and shaved away some of the once-sodden wood. When he was done, he was fairly certain that there had been a tremendous pool of blood on the flooring piled before him. He went inside and saw that the tainted wood had come from the main bedroom.

  John Henry sighed and knew that he was going to have to speak with Ruelle Fanchon much sooner than he had planned. He took some of the wood and put it in plastic evidence bags that he kept in the back of the Bronco. He marked their location in black marker and initialed the bags, wishing that Mignon had simply told him that she thought there was once a pool of blood in the old house. In the back of his mind he admitted that the house had been empty for almost three decades, and men jacked deer through here all the time. A hunter, wary of the law and Miner Poteet, might drag his kill inside to gut it. He was going to have to talk to a criminal forensics guy he knew in Shreveport to find out about the duration of the blood chemical that activated Luminol, but first he was going to have the board tested to see if it was, in fact, stained with human blood. Then he was going to have to drive down to Baton Rouge to speak to a cantankerous old man who had bullied his way around the parish as sheriff for far too long.

  Before any of that, he was going to have to convince Mignon to stop renovating the house until he could find out if he needed a criminal forensics unit to go over it.

  Mignon took the news with a grain of salt. She was a little miffed that he had gone behind her back, but she accepted it and promised to keep the interior as it was.

  LATE THURSDAY AFTERNOON John Henry drove though a middle-class section of Baton Rouge. The houses dated from World War II, situated on avenues lined with dogwood. It was a pleasant neighborhood; people kept their yards trimmed, and jasmine and ivy curled protectively around the verandas. He was surprised at the neighborhood and stopped to ask himself why.

  John Henry had always thought of Ruelle Fanchon as a white trash sort of man. While he’d been a deputy he could do his job, count on most of the others to do theirs in a professional manner, and forget that the sheriff was sometimes a shady individual with a shaky past. But he’d always known it in the back of his mind. It had been the cost of doing business in a place near where his ex-wife and daughter lived. He’d been willing to pay it then, but he wasn’t so sure about it now. This place didn’t fit in with his mental image of Fanchon. It didn’t work.

  A minute later he parked his car in Ruelle’s driveway, got out, and rang the doorbell. John Henry had looked over the paperwork dealing with Fanchon’s arrest and concluded that if the man hadn’t been a law enforcement official of some standing for decades, he’d be rotting in the local jail awaiting his trial instead of living in the comfort of his middle-class home. Mignon had been correct about him having friends in high places. Fanchon’s lawyer was a well-known criminal defense specialist who happened to belong to Jourdain’s exclusive club in Baton Rouge.

  A young woman barely out of her teens opened the door and John Henry stared at her. She was blonde haired and blue eyed and appeared a little dazed. He knew very well that Ruelle didn’t have any children and suspected this young lady was just another in a long line of women who danced through his home. Perhaps, he judged by her dilated pupils and her stuporous demeanor, she was a fan of the former sheriff because of the drugs he could get for her.

  Dangerous, John Henry thought. Ruelle had only been out of jail for a month and already a stoned woman was answering his door. Her eyes dipped toward John Henry’s badge and she shrugged. “Ruelle’s out back,” she said, with a heavy Louisianian accent. “On the porch with a beer.”

  John Henry took that to mean he could go on through, and he did just that. As he let himself onto the enclosed back porch, he took a moment to study the older man. Ruelle was just as tall, just as broad as he was, but with gray hair
and faded blue eyes. John Henry thought Ruelle would have suffered in jail, enduring a lack of sleep because of the close proximity of men who would cheerfully thrust a shiv between the old sheriff’s ribs in exchange for a carton of Marlboros. He might have thought that the stress of an upcoming trial would have put circles under Ruelle’s eyes, but oddly enough, Ruelle looked well rested. In fact, he looked like a strong and vital sixty-year-old man with easily another decade or two in him.

  Ruelle grinned broadly at John Henry. Under his congenial facade was the real man, the one who took kickbacks from local businesses, the one who set up speed traps in the most likely spots, the one who let those same offenders off for a gratuity to the local policeman’s benevolent fund, and the one who had worked as an enforcer for some of the most powerful families in the area. “Well, well, well,” he said in his smooth Louisianian accent. “I never thought I’d see one of my own men come to visit. I’m like a pariah of late. No one wants to take me to the ball no more.”

  “You look good, Ruelle,” said John Henry. His tone was neutral. He had never liked the man; he hadn’t been surprised to hear of his arrest, nor was he particularly amazed that the old boy had possibly been involved in a cover-up that involved the richest family in the parish. There had been a multitude of rumors that Luc St. Michel had used Fanchon to “cure” the labor problems at his paper mills—violent confrontations that resulted in broken bones and men who refused to say who had burst their skulls open. But those things had happened well before John Henry’s time, and he had never given them credence until much later.

  “And you look like you still the sheriff, boy,” replied Ruelle amicably. “I never did like that boy who run up against you. He would have shot the first man he arrested, and then where would the parish be?”