Bayou Moon Read online

  Mignon knew it. She knew it as well as she knew the back of her hand. Eugenie had heard the argument between her parents. She had heard what Luc was going to do. She had been to the old farmhouse in the woods many times, playing with Mignon or by herself, while her father amused himself with his mistress. It was less than a mile away. A ten-year-old girl could have gone there. A ten-year-old girl might have grabbed a kitchen knife and threatened Garlande, who was waiting for Luc to wrap up any last-minute business and join her. Garlande might not have taken the little girl seriously.

  A low moan of pain emitted from Mignon’s lips.

  Eleanor asked, “What’s wrong, Mignon?”

  Mignon had a sudden splitting headache, as if her mind had comprehended something she didn’t want to remember, something that she hadn’t dared to remember for twenty-five years. She had been there. She had seen everything. She knew what had happened all along. “Do you know what happened to Luc, Eleanor? To my mother?” she demanded.

  Eleanor’s eyes were as big as saucers. She stared up at Mignon like a small child. “Of course not. We were never able to track him down. I always presumed that he started another life with your mother somewhere out of my reach. And that sometime in the recent past he’d died. As your mother must have. They must have felt your pain. They must have known what had happened to you and that it was my fault. Why else would they be haunting this place.”

  “So you don’t know …”

  “Know what?” Eleanor stood up quickly as Mignon reached for the bracelet. She grabbed it and ran out of the house. She got into her car, started it, and left without another word. In the rearview mirror, she could see Eleanor running after her, screaming, “Know what? My God, what is it that you know? Tell me what you know!”

  Mignon didn’t stop. In fact, she never wanted to see another St. Michel in her life.

  Mignon was so lost in her own thoughts, she didn’t realize that someone had hidden in the backseat of her car, crouching down in the foot space. As soon as she drove through the gate and rounded the curve of the road, a man popped up and wrapped a wiry forearm around her throat. A gun was placed at her forehead, and there was a whisper in her ear. “I think you know where we’re going, don’t you?”

  He wasn’t visible in the rearview mirror, but Mignon knew who it was all the same. She didn’t say anything. She simply drove the car. The forearm cut into her throat and she began to choke. “Do as I say, or I’ll shoot you right here. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  There was a hint of insanity in his voice, a suggestion that he would do exactly as he said he would. Here was the person who had gone through her room. Here was the person who was responsible for the snake. Here was the person who followed her out into the night and shoved her into the canal hoping she’d drown. Here was the person who wanted her desperately out of the way before she remembered her secret, or before she uncovered something she wasn’t supposed to see. And here was the person who had covered up Eugenie’s crime to prevent Eleanor from being hurt. “Where is the bracelet?” the person demanded hoarsely.

  As the car turned down the dirt road that led to the farmhouse, the light from the late morning sun shifted and the person behind her moved toward the middle of the backseat. The rearview mirror showed the nondescript features of Jourdain Gastineau.

  “I have to say,” Mignon said carefully, “that you’re not acting like a court justice right now.”

  Jourdain shrugged. “It was nice of you to leave your gun in your car,” he said. “How could you know that the police wouldn’t search it?”

  “They did,” answered Mignon. “John Henry already knew about the gun. He’s got a thing for me, and I suppose he was willing to let that little offense go by.”

  “Ah, the lure of a seductive yet mysterious woman.” Jourdain laughed suddenly.

  “Just like Luc St. Michel fell for,” Mignon suggested. She slowed the car down to accommodate the ever-present bumps and holes in the road. Please let Horace and his workmen be there. Then she remembered it was Sunday. No one would be at the old house—no one but her and Jourdain.

  Then she remembered the little canister of pepper spray in her purse, which was strung over her neck and shoulder. She thought she might be able to reach it in time.

  “Just like Luc,” he said. “You don’t seem very surprised to see me, my dear. Why is that?” He prodded her neck with the gun.

  Mignon flinched with the pressure. “Eugenie murdered my mother. And her father. Right in that house.” She pulled the car in front of the little farmhouse and stopped. Then she put the gear in “park” and waited. “She was only ten years old. Since Eleanor didn’t have a clue, someone else had to have cleaned up after Eugenie. And by the way, I gave the bracelet to Eleanor.” She added the lie cheerfully, hoping to prolong the situation. The bracelet was concealed in her hand.

  “Clever girl. Bet you thought it was Eleanor all along.” He shifted in the seat behind her, apparently not in any particular hurry to kill her. “Eugenie was a budding sociopath or psychopath, I forget what’s politically correct these days. She caught your mother alone, slaughtered her with a knife. It looked like about a hundred stab wounds. I’ll never understand how a ten-year-old girl could do that. Then she waited for her father, and when he came through the door, she managed to cut his throat. Luc didn’t even get stabbed once. It was your mother Eugenie was angry with. However, you must have been around, splattered by the blood. Perhaps frozen in place. Eugenie wouldn’t say anything about the murder herself. It was as though she never did it, but I’ll wager you recall it.”

  Her head dropped a little. A rush of memories flowed into her like an inexorable tidal wave that threatened to flood every one of her senses. As though it were happening all over again, her mind replayed the scene she had witnessed and repressed, the reason for her dreams, and the memories that had tried to burst through her mental barriers.

  Mignon had come home from school after the bus let her off. She was allowed to walk down the road by herself, and if she was so much as five minutes late, her mother would come looking for her. Whenever she got to walk down the narrow road by herself she felt as big as any grown-up. She ran, she walked, and she hopped all the way down the green corridor. That day she was skipping happily because it was the nicest September day imaginable, and her mother was waiting inside.

  Garlande was packing not only her own clothing but Mignon’s, as well, and it stopped the little girl in place. Were they going on a trip? she’d asked her mother, and her mother was glowing in the afternoon warmth. Mama said, “Yes, chère. A most wonderful trip. And you get to go, and we’ll all have a good time. We’re going to an island in the Caribbean. Can you say that, darling one?”

  Without knocking, Eugenie had walked in, entering the bedroom almost soundlessly, and almost as tall as Garlande, despite her tender age of ten years. Then the screaming began. Eugenie was shrieking at Mama not to take her beloved papa away. Mama went to hug Eugenie, to comfort the ten-year-old, but when her arms enclosed the skinny figure she suddenly made a choking noise. She fell away from Eugenie onto the bedroom floor, abruptly clutching at an ever-expanding red splotch at her stomach. She threw her hands up to protect herself, but Eugenie was savage with the knife she had found in Mama’s kitchen.

  Little Mignon threw herself at Eugenie, trying to wrest the bigger girl away from her mother’s body. But Eugenie was wild with anger and tossed her away. Mignon’s white pinafore was almost instantly covered with blood, and she was left grasping Eugenie’s bracelet in one hand as she gazed in utter shock at the scene before her.

  Eugenie stared at what she had done as Mignon got up off the bedroom floor and wandered out. Her mind had blurred then, and all she could think of was that Mrs. Poteet often made cookies this time of day and how good they would taste.

  “I never saw her kill her father,” murmured Mignon, snapping to the present. “The shock was too much. All I remember is that Mrs. Poteet scrubbed my flesh so hard that
it burned, when she washed the blood off me. They burned the little white dress, out back in a barrel Miner used for burning trash.”

  “The judge and the sheriff came to find Luc, to talk some sense into him,” said Jourdain. “Instead they found Eugenie, soaked in blood, playing in between their bodies. It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. And she went off to some kind of lunatic asylum for children the very next day. Her mother, God forgive me, never knew. But you know that, too.”

  “I know it now,” Mignon said.

  “I wouldn’t have guessed that you were there, except for that bracelet. We searched high and low for that bracelet for days because it was so unique. Eleanor paid a small fortune for that silly little gift. Eugenie wouldn’t have parted with it. Finally, we decided it wouldn’t matter if someone found it. Because without a witness or proof, what could it matter? And who would ever believe that Eugenie murdered her own father and her father’s mistress?”

  “Who would believe,” she repeated dully. No one now. I came back to find this. Who would believe, indeed? Not me, she thought. Eugenie murdered my mother in an angry fit. But who would believe that she snuck up on her father and cut his throat? That smacked of sneakiness. It smacked of premeditation, of control and deception. Her eyes focused on Jourdain’s in the rearview mirror. “You killed Luc,” she stated. ‘It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.’ But he hadn’t been there. It was only the judge and the sheriff, because he was otherwise occupied. Cleaning up. After he’d gotten rid of the bodies.

  Jourdain was surprised. He had repeated the lie so often over the past two decades that he had almost convinced himself. If he hadn’t been there, then how could he have said that he had seen Garlande Thibeaux’s body, the “most horrible thing” he’d ever seen. He saw Mignon’s perception of his verbal mistake and nodded. “Yes, I killed Luc. He wasn’t going to leave Eleanor with anything. He was a selfish man. He wanted your mother and he wanted his money. Not Eleanor, not his children. He didn’t even care about his ancestral home. He was taking everything. And by God, he would have done it, too. I found Eugenie with Garlande, leaning over the body, patting your mother’s hair. Then Luc came in, and I just picked up the knife. Before I realized what I’d done, he was dead.” He stopped for a moment. “It’s easy to lie to one’s self. I realized exactly what I was doing. I was doing Eleanor a favor.”

  Jourdain’s voice had gone as cold as the chilliest New York winter Mignon had ever experienced. He was lost in the past himself. “I would do anything for Eleanor,” he added softly. “I would have left my wife, but Eleanor was far too good a woman to have me. She mourned the loss of her husband. I still love her. And if you were to disappear, then all of this would go away. Then your friend, John Henry. He needs to disappear, as well. He’s been far too inquisitive. Poking into our affairs, threatening to drag the bayous, harassing Ruelle Fanchon to roll over after I promised him that I would take care of him …”

  Mignon unfastened her seat belt and slowly let it up so that it wouldn’t alarm Jourdain. As soon as he took the gun away from her neck she was going to run. She was going to run because it was the only chance she was going to get. Screw getting all the answers, she thought. I have more than enough. Time for fight or flight.

  “Get out,” he ordered. There wasn’t an opportunity to run because he moved an arm around her neck and opened the door himself. He never let her go as she moved carefully out of the car, shifting his arms around the car’s frame to maintain his grip on her.

  Instead of going into the house, Jourdain directed her around to the back. She could see that the outhouse pit had been filled in. The outhouse itself lay in a pile of pieces along with most of the flooring from the inside of the house. There was the tree in the back with her initials on it. There was her whole life, in the backyard.

  Suddenly Eugenie emerged from the darkness of the forest. She appeared primeval and menacing, far more than she had as a child. Her hair was a silvery-blonde explosion that moved with the slight wind. She was dressed simply in blue trousers and a silk shirt, and her feet were bare, as if she had been running through the woods like a jungle boy. Her skin was whiter than snow on a crow’s back, and she held an enormous carving knife in one hand.

  Mignon saw her first. If she had been scared before, then the vision of Eugenie St. Michel slowly walking toward them with a knife was downright terrifying. She forgot about the pepper spray in her purse. She forgot about fleeing.

  Jourdain saw Eugenie a moment later and almost let Mignon go. His fingers loosened just a bit, then regained their control. “Eugenie,” he called. “This doesn’t need to involve you.”

  “But Jourdain,” she said. “It does involve me, doesn’t it? She came here for me, didn’t she?”

  She kept walking towards them and Jourdain abruptly jerked Mignon around in front of him like a shield. He doesn’t trust her, thought Mignon. Oh my God, I’m going to get killed by one or the other.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Eugenie?” he snarled.

  “Garlande,” she answered, her voice as light as the air. The knife slashed through the late morning sunshine once and twice. “Garlande,” she said directly to Mignon. “I knew it was you. I knew all along. And you came back for me, didn’t you? Because I murdered you.”

  Mignon’s mouth opened and closed. She was completely terrified. There was no way to win this game. Damned by the woman in front of her and damned by the man behind her.

  Eugenie’s breath came and went deeply. She was about fifteen feet away. “Don’t worry, Garlande. I won’t let you die this time. I tried to save you, after I stabbed you. But it was too late. I won’t let it happen to you again. And then you can forgive me.”

  “I forgive you, Eugenie.” The words came suddenly from Mignon’s mouth. She wasn’t sure where she found the energy to imitate her mother’s throaty voice and Southern accent, but the Louisiana drawl came out as if she had lived her entire life here. “I forgive you.”

  “Shut up,” muttered Jourdain. “Just shut up.”

  “But Jourdain doesn’t want my forgiveness,” Mignon went on breathlessly.

  He shoved the pistol into her neck. “I told you to shut up!”

  In the second when Jourdain transferred his attention to Mignon, Eugenie launched herself forward, lifting the blade high into the air. Her shoulder arched into the sunlight, ready to thrust downward toward the struggling pair in front of her. The light reflected off the metal, a bright ricochet of luminance, and Jourdain looked back. He gasped and shifted the barrel of the Beretta.

  He shot Eugenie St. Michel. Then he pushed Mignon away from him and shot her, too.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

  One flew east, one flew west,

  One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

  ONE FLEW EAST

  THE DARKNESS WAS ALL encompassing when Mignon woke up. She wasn’t sure if she had opened her eyes or not until she felt herself blink. But it was utter blackness, as black as the bottom of a deep pit. She moved gingerly and it became apparent that she was lying on some damp, muddy surface. She could feel the grit under her hands and the mud clinging to her fingers. And the smell. Oh, God, what is that? It reeked of decay, the way something smelled after it has been dead for a long time.

  She moved again and she realized that she had been shot. She had been shot by Jourdain and had lost consciousness. But Mignon didn’t feel as though she were dying. There was a dull ache in her side that bloomed into full-fledged pain when she turned her body in any direction, but that was all. She gently pushed her hand against the wound and felt warm liquid billow up in tiny swells between her fingers. She gathered material from her flowing outfit and wadded it up, pressing it firmly against the wound. It was painful but it didn’t seem life-threatening. If she could stop the bleeding, then she could probably walk away from this.

  But here was the $64,000 dollar question. Where is this?

  There was no so
und. She couldn’t feel anything with her free hand. There was only the odor of decay and a sense that there was a void around her. The faint sounds of her movements seemed to echo back at her as if she were in a cave. Her shoulder hurt as though someone had punched her hard.

  She suddenly remembered something that might help. Her tiny clutch purse had been strung over a shoulder when she had gotten into her car, and again when she had gotten out. She felt for the gold string that had been draped over her head, and found one end. It had been broken, but somehow remained lying across her body.

  Carefully tugging on the end, Mignon pulled the bag to her. Her hand trembled as she opened the purse and found her new mini-mag, right next to the little canister of pepper spray. Her finger pressed at the button and nothing happened.

  Dammit. Dammit. Work, damn you. The thoughts rumbled frantically through her mind and Mignon bit back hysterical laughter. The flashlight finally came on and she briefly closed her eyes in thankfulness.

  When she opened them again she was staring at the body of Eugenie St. Michel. Her eyes were open and staring back. Mignon took a deep breath and managed to sit up, slowly inching her way toward the other woman. Pressing her index and her middle fingers to Eugenie’s neck, she confirmed that she was dead. After all, Jourdain had shot her right in the center of her chest, undoubtedly hitting the heart. She must have died instantly.

  Poor Eugenie, Mignon thought. God have mercy on your soul. There was pity there. Not only had Mignon discovered that she had some naivete left, but she also had pity for the irrational, wretched little girl who had murdered Garlande in a psychotic childish rage.

  The flashlight made its way around the place where she sat, awkwardly clutching her side. Mignon made two determinations. The first was that Jourdain had rediscovered the cistern behind the old farmhouse. This was the same cistern that Mignon’s father had warned her about, the same one that she had planned to have filled.