The Evidence Room: A Mystery (27 page)

“What makes you say that?”

“Wade.”

Something softened in Ash’s tone when she spoke Aurora’s father’s name.

“You knew him?”

Ash smiled. “It was so long ago,” she said. “I was a young politician’s wife, still naive enough to think that I could be happy with Davis. This was before he put me out to pasture and took up with some waitress from Kervick County. Back then, I made it my mission to be the picture of a Southern lady.”

“It seems to me that you are,” Aurora said before she could stop herself.

Ash chuckled. “It does seem that way, doesn’t it. But there was only one thing that fulfilled me, one thing that could take me away from planting flowers and organizing luncheons. I found it at St. Simeon’s.”

“Christ?”

“Oh, Lord mercy, no.” Ash’s eyes gleamed. “It was men. The pastor at St. Simeon’s was always trying to better the men of the community. He gave them jobs, put together men’s groups where they could talk about their problems. Rooms full of men, shrimpers with their tan muscles, sitting around talking about their problems.” She laughed again.

Aurora wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the end of the story. “And that’s where you met my dad?”

“Yes. But he wasn’t there to flirt with me, Aurora. Your dad was trying to turn his life around. He had made mistakes, but he was fixing them. He had big plans to get you and your family a better life.”

“What do you think happened?”

Her face darkened. “I don’t know. I think he was involved in something bad, something he couldn’t get away from.”

“Do you think your husband was involved in any way?”

To Aurora’s surprise, Ash did not flinch at the question. “I thought about it,” she said quietly. “Davis is the kind of man who won’t let anything stand in his way. I just can’t imagine what your daddy would be standing in the way of.”

“I know.” A politician and a shrimper. How had their paths crossed? It was the part of the story she could not seem to uncover.

“Miss Ash?” Esma appeared in the doorway. “I’m so sorry to interrupt. The
Bayou Living
photographer is here.”

“I forgot that was today! Thank you, Esma.”

Ash sprang up and grasped Aurora’s hands. “I don’t know what I’d do without Esma keeping all my appointments. When Davis and I got divorced, I told Royce Beaumont, who handled the whole mess, Esma has to come with me. Anyway, Aurora, I hope you’ll come by again. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

“No, no. Thank you for seeing me. You have a beautiful home.”

“Thank you.” Ash appeared genuinely touched by the compliment. Together they stood at the top of the steps. For the first time, Aurora saw a smaller structure, tucked far behind the house on the lip of the river.

Ash followed her gaze. “Yellow fever,” she said. “My great-great-great-grandfather built a house for the family doctor after his daughter died of yellow fever. For protection, you know. To keep his other daughter safe from disease. But then she ended up drowning farther down the bayou.”

“That’s so tragic.”

“I guess the world finds all of us,” Ash said. “I hope you’ll enjoy the rest of your visit in Cooper’s Bayou, Aurora. I’m so glad you came to Amaranth.”

“I am too.” And she was.

To hear someone speak kindly about Wade had rejuvenated her. They were on the right track. He had been trying to improve his life. He was innocent.

Aurora pulled the car back onto the oak-lined drive. The drive to see Ash had been longer than she thought; the afternoon was fading into twilight and had begun to wrap the road in darkness.

She reached for her cell phone. No service. Of course, she was in the middle of nowhere. Telling Josh and Samba about Ash Gentry would have to wait. She fiddled with the radio until the lumbering drawl of a country song filled the car.
The world finds all of us
, Ash Gentry had said, something despondent in her tone, as though she had tried to hide from something in the ruined hulk of her family plantation.

High-beam headlights illuminated the interior of the car. Someone was behind her. A truck, one of those ones with the custom wheels that lifted them far off the ground. Aurora smiled. She and Josh would laugh about it. She slowed down to let the truck pass, but it moved closer behind her so that it was right on her bumper. All she could see was that it was a dark color; and then she saw the front plate.

A Confederate flag.

The truck from Amaranth.

Had he been watching her the whole time he was at Ash Gentry’s? Aurora pressed the gas pedal, and the rental car stuttered, then shot forward, the truck close behind. Aurora felt the adrenaline rising in her throat. From his vantage point, he could see into the car. He could see she was alone. The turnoff for Cooper’s Bayou wasn’t for miles. She peered into the growing darkness. The only houses around here were miles from the road, behind gates. There was no time. She was going to have to outrun him.

The first hit to her bumper jolted her. She kept her hands firmly on the wheel, praying that the rental would hold the road. In the rearview mirror, half-blinded by the lights, he was just a featureless shadow behind the wheel. He was just trying to scare her, but after what she’d seen in Cooper’s Bayou, she didn’t scare that easy.

Aurora floored it at the same time he hit the bumper again. The rental car skidded and then she felt the wheels leaving the road for the soft earth of the marsh, the headlights illuminating the trees all around her, until the car finally came to a stop in a thicket of reeds.

She pushed open the door and stepped into ankle-deep brown water. Above her, the pickup idled at the edge of the road. She could not see the driver.

“Hey,” she shouted, the adrenaline coursing through her, an uncharacteristic boldness in her voice. Let this man, whoever he was, come at her face-to-face, not hiding in his truck. She was not going to run.

Behind her, another truck appeared around the bend and began to slow. The driver had probably seen the lights, seen Aurora’s car in the ditch. The driver of the green pickup revved the engine one last time and sped away into the darkness.

“Is anyone down there? Hello? Do you need some help?”

An imposing man in a checkered shirt began to shuffle down the hillside towards her, his flashlight finding her where she leaned against the half-sunk car, the bayou glowing incandescent all around her in the headlights.

“Ma’am? Are you okay?”

Aurora held up her hands. Someone was trying to hurt her, or worse, but she felt strangely alive, how she imagined Josh might feel when he was on the verge of solving a case, as though everything was right at her fingertips.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just need a ride home.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Aurora was in danger. Maybe Wade Atchison wasn’t pulling the strings.

But somebody was.

Josh sat at the center table of the evidence room, elbow deep in Aurora’s case file. The dust-furred lights above had sizzled and burned out one by one, so that only two remained, casting a patchwork luminescence on the space where he and Samba worked across from each other. He struggled to focus on the file; instead, Aurora’s description of the previous evening’s events played over and over in his mind. He imagined the person following her, her car leaving the road, the bayou below waiting to swallow them. She had stopped the car, he reminded himself. She wasn’t hurt. Someone had happened upon the scene. She had gotten lucky. But whoever was in the truck wasn’t giving up.

Samba had not questioned Josh’s absence the past two days or his sudden reappearance, and had swooped down on
The Bayou Bumblebee
the second it was delivered to their doorstep, almost quickly enough for Josh to avoid seeing the headline,
Bayou John Doe ID’d as Jesse Hudson: Tragedy of Henry Lee Cates’s Third Victim.
He never thought about the Shadow Man by name, because a name implied that he was a person, had once been a baby that somebody loved, had feelings and friends and internal organs. These things could not possibly be true of the man who had killed his brother. He wondered if somewhere Liana was reading the headline, if the identification of Jesse’s body would draw her out somehow.

“Well, Josh? You wanna know the good thing about criminals?”

Samba’s hovering catapulted Josh back into the present. “Absolutely,” he said. “Please tell me the good thing about criminals.”

“They’re human.”

“Okay.” Josh wasn’t sure where this was going, but he was willing to give Samba as much leeway as he needed.

“See, the thing about us humans is, we think we control everything. We plan things to go a certain way, and they never do, because we can never account for everything.” His eyes glittered with the excitement of a charismatic preacher midsermon. “So, we just have to find out what Raylene’s—or Wade’s—killer didn’t account for. It’s got to be in here. The truth isn’t out there, in what people are saying. It’s in here, it’s in something that was left behind.”

Josh agreed. Detectives were supposed to talk to people, solve fresh cases by hoofing it out on the street, tracking down leads. But cold cases were a different animal altogether. Wade Atchison had no remaining relatives, other than Aurora; Pearline Suggs was in the wind. Everyone else was dead or had left town. This case was cold for a reason. There was a moment on the cases he’d worked before when everything slid into place, but in Josh’s head, the images from this case swam together with those of his own; Jesse’s bones beside Raylene on the shores of the bayou; the Shadow Man accelerating towards Aurora in a green pickup.

Aurora appeared in the doorway. She smiled, but there was something drawn in her expression. Josh felt a dull pang in his chest. He hadn’t kept her safe. Doc was right; she shouldn’t have gone to Ash Gentry’s alone.

“Hey! Josh told me what happened.” Samba ushered her to a chair. “You okay?”

She pulled out a chair between them. “I’m fine. I just wish I’d gotten his license plate. I asked Roger, but—”

“Roger?” Josh asked.

“He’s a plumber from Hambone,” Aurora explained. “He’s the guy who pulled over when he saw my car go off the road.”

“And what do we know about him?” Josh pulled out his laptop. “What’s his last name?”

Aurora put a hand on his shoulder. “He just stopped to help,” she said. “There’s still good people in the world, Josh.”

“Sure.” He wished it were true. He would look up Roger’s name later.

“What do you remember about the truck?” Samba leaned towards Aurora. “I know it was dark, but did you notice anything about him?”

Aurora shook her head. “He was just a shadow.” The word reverberated in Josh’s memory. “The truck was green, had a Confederate flag on the front plates. Older model.”

Samba raised an eyebrow. “Crumplers have a vehicle like that, Josh? I can’t recall.”

“Probably. Them and every other redneck in this county.” He wasn’t sure which possibility was more frightening, the Crumplers or someone else. They had contacts in other counties; who knew how far this case went?

“You think Ash Gentry sent someone after you?” Samba frowned.

“I don’t know, but I don’t think so,” Aurora said. “Why would she agree to see me at all, then? And she didn’t give me much, but she told me flat out she doesn’t think my father is responsible. And she definitely doesn’t trust her ex-husband.”

“She knows something,” Josh said. “There’s got to be a connection here; we’re just not seeing it.” There was some dark link between all of them: the Crumplers, the Gentrys, Wade and Raylene. The case was more complex than they had imagined, more dangerous than they had feared. It wasn’t just a feud with the Crumplers; it went deeper than that.

The train that’s comin’ for you, boy? You got no idea.

Samba broke the silence. “I think you’re right, Josh. Check out what I was looking at this morning. He set a box on the table with a resounding crash. “Fish and Wildlife records. Didn’t even know we had them, but there was a flood in the county records department a few years back, and they moved their files here and never got ’em back. I was thinking there’s probably some information on Gentry in here.”

“That’s a good find, Samba,” Josh said. He peeled open the first box, embossed with the state Fish and Wildlife emblem, a rendering of a bird, a deer, and a fish, swirled in a circle. Something was missing from the picture. And then it clicked.

“Alligators,” she said. “It’s the connection between Gentry, my dad, and the Crumplers. This has to be the answer. Something about these files.”

“It’s too bad your grandpa isn’t here,” Samba said. “This hunting stuff, I don’t know too much about this area of the law. The alligator man, now, he’s the one to ask about this stuff.”

“What if there was a way we still could?” There was something triumphant in Aurora’s face. “I’ve got all his notes, his journals, in my car. I went through them, but maybe I was looking for the wrong thing. The caretaker told me—the answers are in the house. Maybe he was right.”

For the next couple of hours, the three of them pored over Hunter Broussard’s logbooks and notes. He had taken his appointment as the alligator nuisance man seriously; the ledger listed every call he’d gone on. As per state law, he’d relocated any gators less than four feet long and only killed the larger ones for meat. The animals had been protected under the law until 1988, when alligator hunting was made legal after the gators began showing up in backyards and playgrounds, a sign that their numbers were flourishing.

“What year was Davis Gentry appointed to the Fish and Wildlife Commission?” Josh looked up from the book.

“The year of the murder. Eighty-nine.”

“Listen to this.” Josh read from the journal. “‘
State is instituting a lottery for hunting tags. No idea how the Crumplers are getting away with this, but Wade says he’s gathering enough information to turn them in, it’s just a matter of time. I’m afraid they know someone with the state. Secured the property, warned Raylene about going out after dark with the baby. Wade says the law will protect us.
’”

“So my dad was turning the Crumplers in, and Gentry knew about it.” Something in Aurora’s face flickered open.