Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 02 - Skeletons of the Atchafalaya (10 page)

Herpetologists will tell you that most snakes, even some
of the poisonous species, are not aggressive unless you step
directly on them. They will also hastily caution you that
the cottonmouth is not one of that group.

Short-tempered and ill-mannered, he’s in a class all by
himself. Carrying a chip on his shoulder the size of a loblolly pine, he’ll come after you just because he thinks the
world belongs to him. And he won’t waste any time.

Just as I didn’t waste any time shouting at the top of my
lungs and backpedaling, at the same time throwing out my
arms to force Janice and Giselle backward.

Propelled by a fat black body with reddish-brown rings,
the copper-burnished head shot toward me, its cottony
mouth wide open and its curved fangs glittering in the light
from the overhead fixture.

I shouted, “Back, back. Out of here! Cottonmouth!” I
kicked a chair in front of the attacking water moccasin, at
the same time cursing myself for leaving my .38 downstairs.

Janice stumbled backward into the hallway, but Giselle
slid off to the left, along the wall. I grabbed the halogen
floor lamp and jammed the lighted end at the oncoming
serpent.

The heat and bright light caused the cottonmouth to pull
up into a defensive coil. I was too busy keeping my eyes
on the snake to pay attention to Giselle, but in the next
moment, she pinned the cottonmouth’s head to the floor
with the head of a plastic broom.

Before I could say thanks, look out, or be careful, she
grabbed the neck behind the head with her left hand and
the tail with the right. She turned to the middle of the room
and released the neck at the same time, whirling the snake
over her head.

“Stay back,” she yelled over her shoulder.

We stayed.

Like a whip, she whirled it twice more over her head,
then with a sharp flick of her wrist, popped it at the wall.
In the blink of an eye, the snake’s head snapped off and
struck the wall just below the family portrait of lolande and
her parents. Giselle tossed the headless body on the floor
beside the twitching head. For a few moments the body
spasmed.

“Don’t get close to it.”

That was one warning she did not need to give.

Both segments continued to writhe and squirm for a few
moments. Then they ceased all movement.

Giselle stayed us with her hand. “Let me check first.”
She probed at the motionless shape with the broom. “All
right. He’s dead.” She turned back to us and nodded to the
blood on the floor. “Watch the mess. Probably some venom
in there. Don’t get it on your skin, especially an open sore
or something.” One side of her green blouse was speckled
with body fluids from the cottonmouth.

I hurried to lolande. The base of her neck and about half
of her left shoulder were swollen and black from hemorrhage. In the middle of the swollen area around the carotid
were two dark holes from which a bloody serum still oozed,
running down her back. I laid my hand on her neck. She
was dead, but her flesh still retained some heat. I guessed
she had died within the last few hours.

We just stood there and stared down at her. Janice
clutched my arm. Her voice trembled. “Tony, for heaven’s
sake, what’s going here? Is someone trying to kill everybody?”

The question might as well have been rhetorical, for I
had no answer. I laid my hand on hers. “I don’t know
what’s going on. First A.D., then Ozzy, now lolande.”
Without taking my eyes off the stiffening body of Aunt
lolande, I spoke to Giselle. “What do you think? Accident?”

She whistled softly. “I’m just a church secretary. I don’t
know anything about this sort of thing.”

I looked at Janice.

The only sound was the wind and rain blasting against
the house.

With Iolande’s death, some of the family threw up a wall
of denial. Too much had happened too fast to be true.

Giselle sighed deeply. “Poor lolande.” She shook her
head. “So, now what?”

I frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

She nodded upstairs. “lolande? What are we going to do
about her?”

Before I could reply, I felt eyes on the back of my neck.
I looked across the room.

Nanna stared at me, her pale fingers slowly massaging a
velvet wanga.

On the other side of the parlor, Uncle Bailey had sobered
enough to accuse Henry and George of not securing the
house. He bellowed, “That snake had to come in some
crack you missed.” His words were slurred. Pa nodded, a
blank look on his face.

“That ain’t so,” Henry said. “We checked everythingPatric, me, Walter, and George after the shutters was up.
We poked sheets and towels under the doors, especially the
two going downstairs to the storage rooms.” He gestured
toward Nanna. “That snake had to have already been in the house, unless you want to think some of that old woman’s
voodoo done it all.”

Uncle George nodded somberly. “Them snakes, they do
the work of the devil.” He glanced at Nanna.

Patric snorted in disgust, his face almost black with anger. “It ain’t no voodoo. Henry’s right. We clogged up
every hole. I’ll take an oath on that.” He glared at Bailey.
Lifelong animosity bubbled to the surface. “Anyone says
different will have to deal with me.” He paused, then
added, “At least nobody found A.D.‘s money clip in my
suitcase.”

Bailey smashed his beer on the floor. “You got manure
for brains. ‘Course that don’t surprise me none about some
idiot that goes out and marries a nig-”

With a roar of rage, Patric leaped on Bailey, slamming
the big man back on the couch and knocking it over, spilling Pa and them on the floor. Before we could pull Patric
off, he got half a dozen punches in on Bailey who was
squealing like a cut pig.

Patric struggled against us, but we managed to pull him
off. “Nobody talks about my family like that,” he sputtered
at Bailey. “Nobody, cousin or not. You hear?”

We managed to get Bailey into the living room and Patric into the library.

After Patric calmed down, we went into the kitchen for
some coffee. Sally and Giselle followed us. Giselle whistled. “I don’t know about you guys, but I think I’d rather
get out and face the storm than stay in here with all these
nutcases.”

I glanced uncomfortably at Leroi.

Giselle winced when she realized what she had said. A
light blush touched her cheeks. “Sorry, Leroi.”

He slipped his arm around his wife and hugged her to
him. “Hey, I feel the same way.”

I agreed.

Giselle glanced up at the third floor. “What about lolande?”

Before I could reply, a voice called from the parlor.
“Here’s the next hurricane report.”

We gathered around the radio. The eye was moving inland back west of us, the worse possible side.

Giselle muttered a soft oath. “I hope it takes a sharp cut
back to the east.”

Janice, who had never before experienced a hurricane,
frowned. “Why? A storm is a storm, isn’t it?”

Staring at the radio, Giselle shook her head. “Not hurricanes. They rotate counterclockwise. The strongest winds
are on the east side of the eye. They come in off the Gulf
with nothing to slow them down.”

“Yeah,” Leroi volunteered. “When the winds come
ashore, they hit land, houses, trees, levees-all that helps
break up the wind so that by the time it gets around to the
west, it’s lost about half of its strength.”

I added my two cents. “If we’re east of the eye, we catch
the strong winds. If the eye goes east of us, that puts us on
the west side where we don’t catch nearly as much wind
or storm surge.”

Janice turned to Giselle. “That’s why you want it to cut
east.”

Grimly, Giselle nodded. “Yeah.”

Uncle Henry had been listening to us. He cleared his
throat. “I figure we got six, maybe eight hours before the
eye passes.”

I nodded. That was what I had figured.

A ray of hope glimmered in Janice’s eyes. “Then it’s
over, huh?”

“No.” I shook my head. “It’s half over. The wind
switches from east to west.”

Her shoulders sagged.

Before she had a chance to reply, a loud crack cut
through the roar of the storm, and then the entire house
shuddered as an ancient oak uprooted by the howling winds
and torrential rains smashed down on the structure. Without warning, the sound of shattering glass and snapping wood
sounded from the living room.

A foot-thick limb protruded through a window almost
ten feet into the living room. Rain gushed through the hole.
Uncle Henry’s voice cut through the roar of the wind,
“Poke blankets in the window.”

Uncle George barked orders to his family, “Grab the axes
and saws. Let’s get this thing cut up.”

Two children screamed, “Snake!”

Four snakes fell from a tangle of branches where they
had taken refuge from the deadly storm.

Others took up the cry.

“Somebody kill ‘em,” shouted Henry, helping stuff the
broken window with blankets.

Grabbing chairs and floor lamps, three or four of the
young boys gleefully took up the chore of dispatching the
snakes, completely oblivious to the fact they were smashing
expensive furniture and hammering chunks out of the specially designed center-cut pine floor Uncle A.D. had paid
a tidy sum to lay.

Uncle Henry yelped and jumped back from the broken
window.

I jerked around. “What?”

His face had paled. He shook his head. “I ain’t sure, but
I’d swear I saw a bear out on the veranda.” He eyed us
sheepishly. “It was just a blur.”

George Miller grunted. “Probably a bush or something
the wind blew past.”

Rolling my eyes, I grabbed one of the sheets and stuffed
it in the broken window. “Whatever. Let’s just close this
up.” A bear! Snakes first, now a bear. What next? The
storm was getting to us.

After the limb was cut and the window covered as well
as we could manage, Giselle cleared her throat. “Like I said
before all of this started. What about lolande?”

We were in the kitchen with Mom and Uncle Patric. I threw up my hands. “I don’t know. You all pitched a fit
when I suggested putting Ozzy with A.D.”

Janice eyed me warily. “What are you saying?”

I studied each of them. “Look, I have all the respect in
the world for them, all three, even A.D. But I think we still
have room in the freezer for Aunt lolande.”

Janice gasped. “Tony!”

Giselle shook her head. “Not lolande.”

I held up my hands. “Now hear me out. When they’re
autopsied, we want them to be as close to their physiological condition as they were when we discovered them.
A.D., I don’t figure, is as critical, but I’m guessing the
venom in Aunt lolande will continue to deteriorate the tissue. I don’t know much about snakebites, but maybe if we
can stop it now, there might be something left to help the
forensic boys.” I added, “And maybe there won’t, but I say
we have to give it a try. Same thing with Ozzy.”

“I agree with Tony,” Leroi said. “My only concern is if
we have room in the … ah, the freezer?” His last two
words faded to a whisper.

“I think so. lolande isn’t a large woman. Even if the lid
won’t close completely, we can drape some heavy blankets
over it and turn the temperature colder.” Even as we spoke,
I couldn’t believe we were having such a bizarre discussion.

For several seconds, no one said a word.

Sally broke the silence. “We aren’t doing anything bad
to them. I think it would be worse if we left them out for
the natural deterioration process to continue.”

Leroi eyed us sheepishly.

“What?” I demanded.

His grin widened. “Don’t forget the smell.”

Giselle gagged. Sally slapped his shoulder. “Leroi.
That’s horrible.”

He held his hands out to his side in a gesture of helplessness. “Maybe so, but it’s the truth. I’ll never forget once when I saw them working on a body at the funeral home.
He’d been dead a long time, and he sure smelled.”

Giselle cleared her throat. “Maybe you’re right. You
think we should ask Bailey? He’s her brother.”

Janice looked up at me, questioning.

“She never married,” I whispered. “Some say she
was….” I fluttered my hand.

Giselle interrupted. “Tony! Don’t say such a thing about
her. That’s terrible.”

“No,” Patric replied. “Don’t ask Bailey. You saw him.
Drunker’ n a skunk. lolande, she was my cousin. I say we
do like Tony, he say.”

Fifteen minutes later, we had completed the task. The lid
did not close completely, so we draped heavy blankets over
the it and down the sides to help hold in the chill.

Mom had more coffee ready, so afterward, we sat around
the kitchen table.

Over the last several hours, I had more or less laid out
a plan of sorts for my investigation. To tell the truth, I felt
awkward thinking of it as an investigation because it dealt
with my family. On the other hand, there was a killer loose
somewhere among the eight or nine families.

I told myself to approach this investigation just as I had
the last few I had conducted. Forget it was family. Just
ferret out the evidence, then let it speak for itself.

I chuckled to myself. It was easy to say, but a heck of
a lot more difficult to carry out.

Bouncing around in my almost empty skull was a tentative list of suspects, but before I started really digging, I
wanted to talk to Mom and Grandma Ola.

Alone.