Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (15 page)

“—now that I’m homeschooling, I could go out at dawn every day of the week. That’s when you’re
supposed
to fish. I don’t know why Grandmère got so weird on me all of a sudden. I mean…she took my
boat
. And she
sold
it.”

Amande sank into a funk for a moment, but Michael kept poking his fingers in her mouth until she gave up pouting.

“I guess I
was
spending a lot on gas, but she should’ve said something. I could’ve gotten a job. Or I could’ve saved gas by going out a little less. I really think she just didn’t want me to go anywhere. Her kids are all gone, and they don’t pay her any attention, none of them. When I leave, she’ll be really lonely. But I have to go. I can’t live on that houseboat and make dolls for the rest of my life. Can I?”

Amande had been boatless now for three months, with no end in sight. Faye foresaw an adolescent rebellion on the horizon. More than that. An adolescent explosion. Maybe getting her off the houseboat for the day had delayed that explosion for a while.

Once at the marina, Amande helped Faye and Joe unload the boat. Faye enjoyed watching the way Amande kept casting sidewise glances at the handsome young blond expertly piloting a boat loaded with scuba gear into its slip for the night. Further away, Faye saw Steve Daigle fueling the strangest looking boat she’d ever laid eyes on. Actually, the boat itself was nothing more than a johnboat painted in the dappled tans and greens of a duck hunter’s camouflage, but the motor wasn’t like anything she’d ever seen. A shaft as long as Faye extended diagonally from it, meaning that the propeller was several feet behind the boat’s stern.

Joe saw where she was looking. “It’s made for shallow water—really shallow water with a muddy bottom. That means it has to be air-cooled. If it was water-cooled like other motors, it’d be sucking mud all the time, which ain’t good for moving metal parts. You can run it in an inch of water, if the bottom’s soft, but it’ll tear that bottom right up. I don’t think that’s good for the fish, personally. They hang out down there, and they gotta lay their eggs someplace.”

Faye took this to mean that Joe wasn’t going to be wanting to trade the perfectly serviceable motor on his johnboat for a fish-egg-destroying beast like Steve’s. She was glad, because she thought it was ugly, and she was enough of a girl to want her boats to be sleek and pretty.

Michael toddled along between Faye and Amande all the way back to the cabin, while Joe stayed at the marina to talk to Manny about renewing the rental for another week.

“I’d better check in with Grandmère. It’s almost dark. Thank you
so
much for taking me out to my island.”

Faye’s hands were full and Michael was on the cabin floor in full tantrum mode, so Faye just nodded and said, “Go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

***

Later, Faye would try not to beat herself up for being slow to respond to Amande’s call. At the time, she’d been crooning tunelessly to Michael, who had finally gotten tired of screaming for no reason. Her ears were ringing from those screams. Those ears had been bombarded all day by boat noise and wind noise and water noise. And those ears were forty-one years old.

She would never know how many times Amande cried, “Faye! Faye, please come!” When she finally heard it, she snatched Michael off the floor and ran. Joe had been further away, but his ears were abnormally good. He was also a lot younger. He reached Amande on the deck of the houseboat a second before Faye did

“Grandmère wasn’t here when I got home. She’s always here. I checked the marina store, even though she hardly ever even goes that far. If I were old enough to buy her rum, she’d never have any reason to leave the boat at all. I’m the only one that ever goes over there. I shop for the groceries and everything else we need. She just doesn’t ever
go
anywhere.” As if to emphasize her grandmother’s everpresence, she repeated herself. “She’s always here.”

Faye moved toward the door and Amande said, “I told you, she’s not there.”

A faint shake in her young voice, as lovely in its way as a trilling bird’s song, told Faye everything. The girl had marched, chin-up, through a childhood that would have leveled most kids. She had only recently looked a corpse in the face with more composure than most adults could muster. And her mother was freshly dead. Amande was an extraordinary young woman. Her grandmother had to share some of the credit for that victory.

Miranda was remote. Truth told, Miranda was strange. Nevertheless, she had provided Amande with a home, when she wasn’t even the girl’s natural grandmother. She had scraped together the money to raise a child who didn’t appear to have ever gone hungry or been without shoes that fit. She had filled that most basic of parental roles: she was always there.

Until now.

Chapter Thirteen

It doesn’t take long to search a houseboat, and it doesn’t take two people. Three people and a toddler would have just tripped over each other, so Faye had left Joe on deck with Amande and Michael. She knew first-person how comforting Joe’s brand of silent caring could be.

Built for economy of space, rooms on a houseboat are small. Furniture is swapped out for built-in drawers that lock, so that their contents don’t spill out when seas are rough. Beds are bolted down, and the space underneath is filled with more drawers. There is no place to hide.

Faye took longer to search the boat than she needed, because she wanted so badly to find something that would reassure Amande. Maybe, somewhere, there was a note saying, “We needed tea and the marina was out. I’m walking to the grocery store.” Or maybe even, “Walking to the liquor store because the voodoo gods and I need some rum.”

Even if the note said something awful like, “Having chest pains. Called 911,” it would be better than this emptiness.

Few things were out of place. The drawers in Miranda’s room had been pushed closed yet not locked, which wasn’t expected behavior for someone who had lived aboard a boat for many years. Faye didn’t like their look.

What if she
was
looking at evidence of a thief? Had that thief simply left after stealing from a widow and a child? What if the intruder had been interrupted at work? Faye swallowed hard when she thought about what this might mean for an elderly woman caught unaware.

Faye’s heart sank when she entered Amande’s room. Several of her artifact drawers also stood open and unlocked, and Faye just didn’t think Amande would leave her treasures vulnerable to dust. She was afraid to touch anything, lest she destroy fingerprints, but she knew that any thief would have had the brains to walk away with Amande’s silver American money. That part of the girl’s treasure was surely gone. She prayed that this thief was too unsophisticated to recognize the old Spanish coins for what they were, but she didn’t check to see if they were still there, for fear of disturbing a crime scene.

Other than the open drawers, Faye saw no disarray in Amande’s room, other than discarded girl clothes, just as Faye would have expected of a teenager who’d been ecstatic that morning over the day’s trip to her island. When Faye was sixteen, she would probably have tried on four pairs of shorts before deciding which ones to wear, too.

Delayed reactions are not uncommon when a person is caught unaware. When Faye remembered the scene later, she wasn’t surprised that it had taken her a few moments to realize that she should call the police. The mind naturally takes some time to shift gears from, “I wonder where Miranda is. I’ll look for her,” to, “Something is wrong here, and I’m afraid for Miranda. I’ll call the police.” It wasn’t surprising that archaeology-obsessed Faye’s mind first registered that she needed to report a crime when she saw that Amande’s artifacts had been disturbed.

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and backed out of the room, but it made no sense to close her eyes. She could continue looking around her, cataloging details that could help in any crime investigation that might be forthcoming. As her fingers felt for the 911 buttons, she heard her own thoughts.

Eyes…

She could continue looking around…

Of course, she could continue looking around. Because she had eyes in her pocket.

Before dialing 911, Faye took a few seconds to snap photos of Amande’s and Miranda’s rooms with her phone. Backing out of the houseboat’s front door, she snapped the kitchen and living quarters, as well as the bathroom, where she noticed a pile of male clothes and an ashtray full of cigarettes.

Faye stopped short. Where were Didi and Tebo? On second thought, maybe the clothes piled in Amande’s normally neat room weren’t hers at all. Didi seemed like the kind of woman who left a trail of discarded things behind her, never looking back.

Faye was drawn back to Miranda’s room, as if its neat contents could tell her something about its mistress’ whereabouts. The doll’s heads still swung undisturbed from their ceiling hooks. Miranda’s workbench in the corner was still festooned with straw for weaving and laden with tools to shape that straw. Her altar was still spread with pretty silk cloths, though the liquor had been drunk and the candles had been snuffed. Crumpled sheets of paper tossed onto the silk tablecloth caught Faye’s eye. Some of them bore handwriting.

Faye was so curious that she reached out a finger and touched one of the pieces of paper, but she drew it back as if she’d touched a firebrand. Evidence. She needed to preserve this evidence. It was time to get out of there before she really screwed up, but Faye thumbed 911 into her phone
after
she took a photo of those slips of paper.

“I need to report a missing person and a burglary.”

The operator asked her the right questions and she answered them, all the while uncrumpling those papers with her eyes and wishing she could touch them. Perhaps it was just as well that she couldn’t, since she was probably risking a serious hex by disturbing a mambo’s sacred space.

“I’m at the Lafitte Marina. I don’t know the slip number, but it’s Miranda Landreneau’s houseboat. Somebody in the marina store can get you here.”

The operator’s tone said that she herself knew exactly where Miranda Landreneau lived, because everybody knew Miranda, but she was too professional and well-trained to let it show. Nevertheless, there was a note of concern in her voice when she said, “I’ll have someone out there to you right away.”

The papers on Miranda’s altar bothered Faye. They hadn’t been there before. Faye was certain of it. She remembered the altar as…pretty. Yes, pretty. It had been designed to look pleasing to the gods, yet now there was trash piled atop the silk. At least a dozen torn scraps of paper had been crumpled up and scattered over the altar.

Faye realized that she was risking a hexing, but she squatted down to get a good angle on one of those wadded-up scraps. In an old woman’s spidery handwriting, it bore a single name, with a line drawn through it:

Steve Daigle

She took a picture while squatting, to document Steve Daigle’s hexing. Now that she’d read the name in its entirety, she could read bits of Steve’s name on each of the others. Faye was certain that they were all the same.

One of the candlesticks adorning the altar attracted her attention. Its base was a pewter skull so small and understated that she hadn’t noticed it until this minute. Under it was another scrap of paper. Faye could read the last four letters of a name, written in the same spidery script:

igle

Steve Daigle, again. Justine’s widower. In the short span of time since Faye was last in this room, Steve had been the focus of Miranda’s voodoo-soaked brain.

Remembering Steve’s behavior when he first met his stepmother-in-law, Faye would say that Miranda had possessed several good reasons to hex the man. As she looked over the altar again quickly, before going outside to wait for help, she brushed at her eye, which was prickling strangely. Big mistake.

Touching the rim of her right eyelid with her right forefinger made that eye stop prickling and commence burning. She rushing to the kitchen sink to wash out her eye, but remembered at the last minute that she shouldn’t even touch the sink. Damn. Instead, she squinched the eye shut and pressed her left palm into it, while she studied her right hand with her good eye. A red powder smudged the pads of its fingers.

Its familiar look, coupled with the burning in her eye, prompted her to lick her index finger, which in retrospect seemed rather foolish. That hand could’ve been covered with graveyard dust or ground-up cadaver bones or something else awful out of the voodoo priestess’ apothecary, but not this time. The red powder was nothing more than cayenne pepper.