Under the Cajun Moon (28 page)

The necessary arrangements ended up taking at least another hour. When someone finally came for Jacques and led him to the stables, there was practically a caravan waiting there for him. The best that Jacques could tell, that caravan included three carriages, two guards, and five officials from the guild, including the royal goldsmith himself. Jacques was told to sit up front with the driver of the first carriage to direct them where to go.

As they finally headed out, moving ever so slowly through the busy streets of Paris, all Jacques could do was pray that his papa would still be alive when they finally arrived.

Travis started up the boat at that moment, and I was glad because I could not have come up with a reply to save my life. My mother had been an exotic dancer? Lola Ledet, the most beautiful, elegant woman I had ever known, had gone by the stage name Fifi LaFlame? Conrad might as well have told me that the moon was made of cheese and babies came out of cabbage patches.

At least Travis was busy guiding the boat back down the channel, so we didn’t have to converse. Moving past the same camps on the way out that we’d seen on the way in, I could barely bring myself to focus long enough to return their friendly waves.

“It’s getting late,” Travis said to me finally, “but I say we keep going all the way to Charenton.”

“How far away is it?”

“’Bout forty miles west of here. I can cut across Lake Palourde and Flat Lake to get us to the Atchafalaya River, and then we’ll be able to take that most of the way.”

“Go for it. I don’t think we have much choice at this point.”

Using my phone, I went online and searched for an address.

Sure enough, a Ben Runner was listed in Charenton. I gave that address to Travis, and he plugged it into the GPS unit. After a few minutes, he made a sharp turn that brought us from the narrow channel into
the wide expanse of Lake Palourde. He pushed down the throttle all the way, and soon we were soaring across the greenish brown water as fast as the boat would take us.

We only had a few hours of daylight left, but at least Travis seemed to know where he was going. All I could do was sit there in the boat, look out at the beautiful scenery, and try to calm the desperate swirling of my mind. I had been through so much already, but at this point it felt as though the shocks and surprises were never going to end. My mother’s secret past surely had nothing to do with what was going on now, so I would have to find some way to put it out of my mind and focus on things at hand.

That was going to be easier said than done, though. Now that I had this knowledge about my mother, I tried to fit it into the puzzle that my life had been. I always thought I was drawn to rules on my own, that maybe I had taken after my mother in that regard a bit, but that primarily it was just a part of who I was, a refuge from the chaos and neglect I suffered at home. After what Conrad had told me, I realized it was more complicated than that. Who I was hinged in part on who my parents were, so if they weren’t who I thought they were, who was I?

No wonder I had a headache!

The engine began to sputter, and I looked at Travis, but he just gave me a shrug and kept going. Eventually, we managed to make it across the lake, under a highway bridge, and into the next lake. Going slower there, the engine began sputtering again, and this time Travis told me that we should probably switch to a different boat if we could. He called a cousin with a camp not too far from where we were and made the necessary arrangements. Soon, we had worked our way up a narrow bayou to that camp. This time, the dock was on my side, so I stood and leaned out of the boat to grab a rusty pole mounted there and guide us into place. Travis cut the engine and quickly began to close things up. With my help, we had the boat zipped and sealed and tied up within minutes.

Climbing from the boat, I realized this wasn’t really a camp at all, just a plot of land with a covered boat garage on it. Both of the open bays were full, and I wondered which of the two big boats we were changing to. Both of them were very nice but also quite big, and I couldn’t
imagine the amount of effort it was going to take to get one of them into the water.

I needn’t have worried, because as it turned out we were taking neither. Instead, Travis led us to another one I hadn’t noticed, a small aluminum fishing boat that was propped up on cinderblocks near a tangle of bushes.

“Might be a good idea to be in a different boat now anyway,” Travis told me as he reached down and grabbed a large limb from the ground. “If Conrad tipped off the police that we’re out riding in a Sea Ray Bowrider, then that’s what the cops will be looking for, not this little aluminum fishing boat.”

Travis approached that boat now and, much to my surprise, began whacking the ground all around it with the big stick.

“What are you doing?”

“Jus’ scaring off any snakes that might be hiding here,
cher.
In Louisiana, you don’t ever go near tangled brush like this without giving it a few good whacks first.”

“Oh, great.”

Between the two of us, we managed to get the boat into the water, but I was stunned to see how very low it rode compared to the nice boat we’d just gotten out of. These waterways were filled with snakes and alligators, I felt sure, though I hadn’t yet seen any today. Given that, our little boat was far too close to the water for my comfort.

“Come on,
cher
. Time’s a passin’.”

Reluctantly, I climbed aboard and soon we were on our way again. This time, Travis had to sit in the back, steering the outboard motor via the handle that was attached to it. I sat across a wide metal slat closer to the front, taking care to keep my hands and fingers fully inside the boat lest they be snatched off by a roving reptile.

This ride was much bumpier as well, and as I was knocked and jolted along the waterway, I could only hope we didn’t have much farther to go. At one point, Travis veered into a side channel, and though I hoped that meant we were almost there, instead he soon slowed down and told me that since we were so close to Paradise he thought I might want to detour past it.

“Past Paradise? Where is it?”

“This is it. Starts right here. Nobody lives here year-round anymore, of course, but my grandparents still own the land.”

Travis gestured to our left, toward a vast expanse of shoreline that was mostly overgrown with thick trees and brush, punctuated by a small, rickety dock. I knew it went on for a while, because I could remember my one and only visit there when I was a young teenager. The place had been impressively huge to me then, a mix of cleared and developed land and undisturbed forest. From what I could recall, the Naquins’ house sat somewhere in the middle and was surrounded with a rolling, shaded lawn, a fenced-in garden, and a network of woodsy paths and trails.

I remembered being skeptical of their claim that just by taking a ten-minute walk on the property, one could pick an entire fruit salad. To prove it, Travis’ grandmother had taken me to do exactly that, starting with strawberries in the lush garden the Naquins had planted there, then moving to the various fruit trees in the yard and then finally venturing up a wooded path to get the wild berries.

That had been fun, but otherwise my trip to Paradise had been a major disappointment. Though I had begged my father to bring me along with him for once, he had ended up sticking me at the house with the women while he headed off with the guys and their shotguns into the woods. Between the noisy family that never stopped jabbering with each other in a language I didn’t understand, the mosquitoes that left massive welts on my arms and legs, and the humidity that frizzed my blond hair into steel wool, I was mostly just miserable. Making things much worse, of course, was that I had wanted to go there so I could have some time with my dad, but as it turned out I barely saw him from the moment we arrived until it was time to load up and leave. In the end, I didn’t understand the attraction the place held for him, not at all. And I sure didn’t see how it had earned its name. Paradise, indeed.

“That leads up to the house,” Travis said, pointing to the dock and the walkway beyond. “It’s just used as a cabin now. Nobody lives there anymore.”

“Is that the dock where my father was shot?”

“I don’t know. We already passed one dock, back there, and there’s another one around on the river side. Had to be one of those three, but I don’t know which one.”

As we puttered past, I studied the dock and nearby terrain for signs of blood or even police tape but didn’t see anything. I did catch a glimpse of the lawn and the old white picket fence that delineated the garden. From what I could see, the fence was in disrepair, the slats faded to brown, the lawn and garden both overgrown with weeds. Remembering what a busy, well-tended place it had once been, looking at it now felt kind of sad.

Continuing along the banks of Paradise, I noticed that the property was hilly, in the same way that that retreat center had been hilly. I asked Travis how that happened, how hills could suddenly be a part of terrain that was elsewhere completely flat.

“Salt.”

“Excuse me?”

“Wherever there’s an underground salt dome, you can get hills like this. Haven’t you ever been out to Avery Island, the place where they make Tabasco sauce? That whole island is one giant salt dome.” He went on to explain that coastal Louisiana was full of underground salt, and that in many cases a single salt dome might extend two or three miles out—and up to eight or nine miles down, whether it was obvious at the surface or not. “I think Avery is supposed to have something like a hundred and fifty billion tons of salt. It’s really amazing when you think about it.”

As he talked about the geology of salt and how it had been left by evaporated ocean waters thousands of years ago and then pushed underground by the shifting of alluvial sediment, all I could think of was my father and his famous Secret Salt.

“Is there a salt mine here at Paradise, Travis?”

“There used to be, back in the early nineteen hundreds, I think. It’s all sealed up now, but there are still a couple of good ponds here, where the salt from inside the earth leaches out into the water to create brine. That’s where I learned to track animals, because they’re always coming there, licking the salt where it crusts around the sides.”

I studied the wooded shore, several puzzle pieces suddenly clicking
together in my brain. My whole life, my father had been coming down to Paradise on a regular basis to hunt and fish. Sometimes he’d be gone for a week or two, yet he almost never came home with much more to show for his adventures than a few fish and maybe a rabbit or a duck. On one occasion my father had returned from just such a trip bearing his meager bounty and our new maid had actually laughed, saying that her husband could go off hunting for a single afternoon and come back with ten times that much.

The maid was summarily fired, of course, but later I got up the nerve to ask my father why he never brought back venison or buckets of catfish or ice chests filled with crawfish like the maid had described. He had brushed me off, saying that for some men—especially men who slaved over a hot stove day after day at work—the expression “hunting and fishing” often meant mostly “relaxing and resting.” Later, my mother had scolded me for even asking him, saying that my father couldn’t help it if he was a bad shot with a rifle and a rotten fisherman, and that I wasn’t to embarrass him like that ever again.

Now, looking out at Paradise, I finally understood what had really been going on. The expression “hunting and fishing” had been a euphemism, all right, not for “relaxing and resting” but for “mining salt.” My father had been coming here for years, going down into the old mine, and coming out with a bounty of pink salt. The south Louisiana company that packaged and shipped Chef Julian’s Secret Salt was likely not just a packaging and fulfillment plant but also a salt cleaning and processing facility. No wonder he kept coming here after the Naquins moved away, and even after he and Alphonse had had a parting of the ways. My father had to keep coming here if he wanted to continue to acquire the central ingredient in Chef Julian’s Secret Salt.