Under the Cajun Moon (30 page)

Travis and I moved farther into the room even as we heard the old woman calling from the living room.

“Y’all excuse me,” Ben’s daughter said. “I was just about to give her her dinner when you knocked. My name is Josie, by the way. Holler if you need me.”

With that, she left us alone with her father.

Though Travis sat directly across from the man and spoke to him, there seemed to be no recognition or response. As he did that, I wandered around the room, looking at the many cards and photos that had been taped to the wall. Obviously, the man had a full life, filled with people who loved him.

There was a sign hanging near the photos, one that was obviously written in another language, more than likely Chitimacha. It said
Caqaad kaskec nama qaxt xahyte.
I made a mental note to ask Josie what it meant. If we were lucky, it was Ben’s measurement of filé for the recipe.

Travis paused in his talking to Ben to whisper that I should poke around a little more thoroughly. I felt creepy doing it, but it didn’t seem as though Ben would notice or care. Tiptoeing to the doorway, I listened for Josie, and when I heard her talking in the living room, I summoned my nerve and began rifling through the drawers.

By about the fifth drawer, running my hand under a stack of boxer shorts and T-shirts, I couldn’t help but think how very low I had sunk. Sliding it softly shut, I told Travis that was enough, there wasn’t anything here that would point us to the treasure or the killer.

Bidding the old man goodbye, we went back up the hallway and emerged into the living room to see Ben’s daughter sitting there across
from the old woman who had greeted us earlier. Josie was holding a bowl of what looked like creamed corn and urging her to take a bite.

“Heidi ho!” the woman cried again eagerly.

“Heidi ho!” Travis replied, crossing to sit on the couch and give the old woman’s hand a squeeze. “Got yourself some macque choux there, huh
cher
? That smells good.” The old woman didn’t reply, though she stared at Travis with sparkling eyes.

Though it seemed rude to simply insinuate ourselves into the room this way, we didn’t really have much choice. After a moment’s hesitation I joined Travis on the couch. Josie apologized for the mess, saying she didn’t have enough time to get to everything. I wanted to reply that the place didn’t seem too messy to me, just in need of repairs. Instead, I simply asked her about her father’s condition. She said he’d had a stroke a few years ago and had been like that ever since.

“I noticed an interesting sign in his room. I’m guessing it’s in Chitimacha?”

“‘
Caqaad kaskec nama qaxt xahyte
’? Yes, it means ‘Welcome to the village by the bend in the river.’” She went on to explain that the Chitimacha language had actually become extinct back in the forties, once “Miz Delphine,” the last living speaker of it, had died. Lately, however, the language was being revived, thanks to a grant that was allowing the tribe to access old recordings of the language and create for the first time a written version of it. The children were learning it in school, and all of the tribe members were encouraged to use it whenever possible. She had bought the plaque for her father, hoping it might stir some memories of the language he had heard spoken in his own childhood, even if he never had seen it written out.

In reply, I brought up the subject of my father, who was also incapacitated at the moment. I told her I was the daughter of her father’s old friend Julian Ledet and asked if she had heard about his accident. She replied that she hadn’t, saying that with caring for four elderly patients around the clock, she barely had time to breathe, much less watch the news. I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or not, but I acted as if I believed her.

As she spooned more corn mush into the old woman’s mouth, I
explained that my father had been shot on Monday, and that after he was shot he had left a phone message for my mother at their house, one that referred to “Ben” and “Ben’s daughter.”

“Referred to us in what way?”

“Well, that’s the thing. He was calling from up in the swamps, and the message is pretty garbled. He’s in a coma now, and so we’re trying to figure out what he said and what that has to do with him getting shot.”

“Boom boom!” the old woman cried gleefully.

“Okay, honey,” Josie said to the old woman, shaking her head as she scooped another spoonful from the bowl. “She’s been saying that all week. Between heidi ho and boom boom I’m about to lose my mind.”

“Boom boom!”

“Are you related to all of these people?” Travis asked.

Josie replied that her only relative here was Ben, but that she took in the others so that she could afford to stay home and care for him.

“Your father is a very lucky man,” Travis said, giving her an encouraging smile. “Your hands must really be full.”

“That’s an understatement.” We got an idea how full as she began to describe her days, an endless series of diapers and meals, medications and baths, living in a house with four other people, not one of whom understood a word she said. Still, she continued, she loved her father very much and was willing to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to keep him at home and be there with him. “I didn’t mean to go on and on like that. Y’all caught me on a bad day. A bad week, actually. My relief worker usually comes in twice a week for a couple hours, but she quit recently, so now I’m stuck without any help at all.”

“Doesn’t the tribe offer support in a situation like this?” Travis asked.

“He’s already in their elder care program. They do so much, bringing meals and performing health screenings and things like that. I just can’t ask for more—especially because the other three who live here aren’t even tribe members. They’re just local folks who needed help and couldn’t afford a nursing home.”

Travis and I looked at each other, and the thought that kept going through my mind was that this woman couldn’t have had anything to
do with my father’s shooting. Still, there had to be some reason my father referred to her in his message.

When she finished feeding the old woman, Josie wiped her face clean, patted her arm, and told her to sit tight as she was just going to see to the others, and once everyone had their dinner, she would get her bath.

“Bath! Heidi ho!”

Josie invited us to follow her into the next room down the hall, and I was touched to see that Travis offered to feed the man who was lying in the bed there so that Josie could focus on his wife.

“Sure, thanks. He manages pretty well, don’t you, Colonel? Just sit him up and help him with the spoon to get him started.”

As each of them tended to their patients, I suddenly felt like a third wheel. Travis tended to the old man so tenderly, I had to wonder if he had experienced caring for the elderly before.

I sat on the edge of the bed and asked Josie some more questions, still trying to figure out if she might be able to think of anything that could help us. About the only thing that was accomplished in the next fifteen minutes, however, was the feeding of the two old folks. Otherwise, our conversation was mostly fruitless, revealing only that Julian Ledet had come by only once or twice in the past few years, both times when he was in the area and wanted to stop in to see Ben and bring him a little treat.

“He brought my father a tray of his favorite sweets each time,” Josie said, “ones he made himself. I guess it never dawned on him that my dad no longer has the teeth now to eat anything with nuts and caramel.” Other than that, she said the two men had no real interaction. When asked, she said she didn’t know anything about a quantity of filé, and that she’d never heard or seen something like that among her father’s papers.

Eventually, I had to admit this visit was a dead end. I was ready to get out of there, but Travis was still helping the man with his spoon and didn’t seem to be picking up my signals. We could hear the old woman in the front room calling out more booms and heidi hos.

“She sounds like a parrot in there,” Travis said to Josie, smiling.

“The heidi ho’s I can take,” she replied, “it’s this new boom boom stuff that’s driving me crazy.”

“When did that start?” Travis asked, and again I tried to catch his eye to tell him we needed to go.

“I don’t know. Monday afternoon, I guess.”

Travis looked to me and then back to Josie.

“Do you know what started it?”

Josie said she assumed it was something the old woman had heard on TV. I stepped forward, my mind racing.

“She’s been hollering out ‘boom boom’ since Monday? What time Monday?”

Josie looked at me, obviously startled by my sudden interest.

“I’m not sure. Why?”

“Because my father was shot on Monday,” I replied. “Monday at noon.”

“Around here?”

I asked Travis where we were in relation to Paradise and he said that it was due east. Looking from Josie to me, he explained in more detail, saying that Paradise was about ten miles away as the crow flies, maybe fifteen minutes by car, but at least twenty or maybe even twenty-five minutes by water. Because there had been blood on the property, we had assumed that was where my father was when he got shot. But now I had to wonder if maybe the shooting had been in a different location, and that the blood had somehow gotten to Paradise later.

“Josie, did you hear anything unusual around here on Monday? Any kind of loud noise, something that would make her start saying ‘boom’?”

Josie sat back, thinking, but as I waited for her reply, I observed a strange look coming across her features, a sort of comprehension combined with fear. I hoped for a moment we were on to something. Then she simply shook her head and avoided our eyes and told us that she had been around there all day every day for almost two weeks and in that entire time she had not heard a sound.

Clearly, she was lying.

Josie got rid of us almost immediately after that, and I found myself wishing suddenly that Travis and I had some sort of high-tech equipment, the kind they used in detective shows on TV. There was no doubt in my
mind that once we were gone she was going to be contacting someone who was somehow related to all the questions we’d been asking her.

Lacking anything more sophisticated than a pair of ears, I did the next best thing. When Travis and I reached the dock, I told him that I was going to sneak back up to the house and try to listen in at a window because I had a funny feeling she might call somebody and have an important conversation. Travis wouldn’t hear of it. He agreed that her behavior had turned very suspicious there at the end, but he said that if we really had scared her in some way, it would be a mistake to stick around now.

“What do you mean? This might be the big break we need.”

“Yeah, and sometimes to catch a gator, you gotta stick a pole in its nest. That doesn’t mean you stand around with your ear hanging out, waiting for him to bite it off!”

“Come on, Travis! We’re wasting time.”

“Fine,” he said, pulling off his hat, smoothing back his hair, and putting the hat on again. “But if we’re going to listen in, it’s going to be me at the window, not you.”

With that, he was off and running, ducking into the bushes and carefully making his way back toward the house. Half of me was offended at the chauvinistic basis for his behavior. The other half was flattered.

The first half won, of course, and soon I was in the bushes myself, trying to get up to the house from the other side. The windows were open, and I could hear conversation coming from inside. I crept behind a big wisteria bush that was right under the window, not realizing until I was in the thick of it that a sticker bush was hidden there as well. Trying not to cry out at the sharp pinpricks of the bush against my leg, I stepped the rest of the way over it and crouched there, straining to listen. From what I could tell, it didn’t sound like an urgent phone call. Instead it was Josie, speaking in a singsong voice to the old woman in the front room.

“Honey, did you hear a big boom?”

“Boom boom!”

“Listen to me, sweetie, you can have your bath now, but you have to stop saying boom. Can you do that, can you not say those words anymore? No boom boom.” Both women were silent for a moment, and then Josie
spoke again. “Do you understand? No more boom boom. That’s our little secret, okay?”

“No boom.”

“That’s right. No boom. You want your bath now?”

“Bath! Bath!”

The scrape of the chair followed by footsteps told me that Josie had left the room. More than anything, I knew we needed to call the police and get them out here right away.

Otherwise, I was afraid that this bath might be the old woman’s last.

Despite the sticker bush behind me, I needed to disentangle myself from the wisteria as quickly as possible without being heard or observed. Looking around, I figured out my plan of escape. Inching forward behind the brush, I made it past the window and stood to step over an old black garden hose. At least I thought it was a garden hose. As I was about to move across it, however, suddenly it reared its ugly head, and I realized that it was a snake.