The Evidence Room: A Mystery (9 page)

The sound of someone approaching snapped Aurora to attention. Had it been half an hour already? She drew her hand across the carved letters, resolving to return, and made her way back towards the bayou, with one glance back at the grave.

“Better not do that,” a voice said.

Aurora turned around so quickly she almost lost her footing. The owner of the voice was a woman, lounging against a tomb. She took a swig from a murky bottle of Bacardi and tipped in Aurora’s direction. She wore a blue knitted skullcap ringed with dangling seashells, improbably paired with blue jeans and a satin Bucs jacket missing most of its snaps.

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t look back when you’re leaving a graveyard,” the woman said. She patted the tomb she sat on. “Or they gonna follow you.”

“Thanks for the warning. I’m just waiting for my ride.”

The woman shrugged. There was something unsettling about her manner. Aurora turned back towards the bayou. When she turned back, the woman was pouring the rum on the ground in a careful line, murmuring under her breath. She caught Aurora watching.

“You don’t believe in this,” the woman said, her tone accusatory.

“Believe in what?”

“
Voudon,
” the woman said. She removed a tiny bag of what appeared to be bird bones from her jacket pocket and sprinkled them on the marshy ground.

“I guess I never thought about it,” Aurora ventured, trying to be polite. Everybody mourns in a different way. She wondered whose grave this woman was here to visit.

“Ha!” The woman giggled. “Your
grandp
è
re,
he thought about it.”

“You knew my grandfather?” There was something disconcerting about the familiar way the woman spoke. It was a small town, she told herself. Everyone knows everyone else. Her arrival must have been more newsworthy than she imagined, and this woman had heard about it. That was all.

“Everybody knew him. The alligator man.” The woman unzipped a dusty backpack and closed it over the rum bottle. Something hanging from the zipper glinted in the sunlight, catching Aurora’s eye. A bag tied with string, like the ones in Papa’s house. It was good luck, Luna had said. She wasn’t sure why, in this woman’s hands, it seemed to be something more ominous.

“Gris-gris, right? It’s a good luck charm?” Aurora pointed to it.

The woman’s lips curled back, half smirk and half sneer. “This ain’t no good luck charm, beb.” She lifted her chin. “It’s protection.”

Ernest stepped out of the reeds behind her. “You ready to go, Aurora?” He tugged his baseball cap down low, and his lips tightened. “Is Charlsie here giving you a problem?”

“
Mais non,
” the woman said in a singsong tone. “You need something from me, Ernest?”

“I’m a God-fearing man,” Ernest replied. “I don’t need none of that crap.”

The woman laughed again, as though this were the funniest joke in the world. “Sooner or later, you’ll be wanting something done,” she said. “Just like the alligator man.”

Ernest scoffed. “Hunter Broussard wanted nothing to do with you. Don’t you be talking of a dead man that way.”

“I know what I know,” she said, her eyes moving from Ernest to Aurora. She zipped the backpack and swung it over one shoulder, retreating deeper into the graveyard.

Ernest shook his head and reached for Aurora’s arm, guiding her over the sodden ground towards the skiff. “Don’t listen to that crazy old bat,” he said. “She makes her money selling spells to poor souls down the bayou who don’t know any better. She never knew your grandfather.”

Aurora nodded, but the woman’s voice haunted her.
I know what I know
. Had Papa gone to that woman for advice? There were at least a hundred of those tiny bags in the house. If they were for protection, what was he afraid of? He had convinced her that her father was no longer out there, that he could not hurt her. But what if that wasn’t true?

Ernest drew the oars through the trembling surface of the water, steering them away from the graveyard.

Aurora made sure to look back.

CHAPTER TWELVE

There was a surplus of death in Cooper’s Bayou this summer, just like the one twenty years ago. Long after the remains from the duffel bag had been packaged up and sent to the lab, James had stood in his office and thought about it.
We’ll get to the bottom of it, Doc
, Rush had said at the scene, but a lingering uneasiness had followed him ever since, a sense that this was not the end of the story, but the beginning.

James prided himself on avoiding seeing patterns or relying on intuition. There was no place for it in his line of work. Life was terrifyingly random, and he acknowledged this while finding refuge in the clear confines of science. But there was something about this summer that he couldn’t ignore, something about heading to these death scenes that felt like walking into a stiff wind. James rarely thought about his previous patients when he was working a case—you couldn’t let the past cloud your judgment of the present—but now they clicked through his brain in a doomed catalogue, the same two people always pushing their way to the front of the line.

Soon the light would be gone, the nickel-colored sky above the bayou succumbing to inky darkness. A single flashlight ringed by insects flickered inside the wheelhouse of the twenty-eight-foot Lafitte skiff he rode on. There were places out here the bayou claimed for its own, places the morgue van couldn’t reach, so he’d hitched a ride with Ernest Authement, one of the local shrimpers.

“You want me to take you right on up to the dock at Tee Tim’s?” Ernest hollered from the back of the boat, and beneath his cigarette-stained fingertips, the wheel twisted to the left.

James felt a stab of mild annoyance. If there were a way to drive the boat himself while working, he would have done it. There was a certain amount of focus and almost a kind of reverence required at death scenes, especially death scenes out here. It was something that was difficult for those outside of his line of work to understand.

“No,” James called back to him in what he hoped was a curt tone that would discourage any further conversation. “Cut the engine and turn on the floodlight. They said they saw her floating right up around this next curve. She might be a couple hundred yards down by now.”

“Yes, sir.” Ernest gave him a salute from the brim of his filthy baseball cap. Ernest was from a family of shrimpers like James, but there was an uneasiness in their interaction. In Cooper’s Bayou, there were people who lived up the bayou and people who lived down it, and those from up the bayou made sure you never forgot the distinction. The contrast between James’s upbringing and his current profession placed him squarely in the borderland between the two groups, a unique and socially insurmountable situation that meant the men rode in silence, which was fine with James.

James gripped the railing and felt the spray across his knuckles. The rust-spattered boat was the same as the
Jeanerette
, the boat he had grown up on with his father. Over his mother’s protestations, his father had tied James to the winch as a toddler so he would be safe while the nets were being hauled. The memory of it stung and warmed him at the same time in the way that only grief could, both comforting and boundless. They had pulled Coleman Mason’s boat intact from the bayou’s depths the summer that James turned thirteen, his father’s keys still in the ignition, the plastic googly-eyed shrimp charm James had given him for his birthday still on the keychain. How could these mundane things have survived while his father had not? The thought was incomprehensible, even now.

Ernest cut the engine, and the boat shimmied in the water, the copper-colored waves nudging it towards the shoreline choked with pitcher plants. The drowning had been reported an hour ago; a high school junior named Madison Leo had fallen overboard off a boat full of kids on Bayou Triste, out for a night of partying. Nobody had noticed her missing until it was too late. James had sent Glenn to handle the death investigation, the drunk kids, the devastated family. The living made James far more squeamish than the dead. He could not stand there and answer the family’s questions the way Dr. Boudet had answered his mother’s questions all those years ago.
How
, she’d asked then. Now James knew some of the answers, the ones he’d learned in medical school. He’d seen shooting victims, patients ravaged by disease, but drowning was still the worst kind of death that James could imagine.

Around the next curve, the aging knee of a bald cypress dripping with Spanish moss partially blocked their path, and James realized why his father had not been the sole occupant of his consciousness. This was the place where he had first met Raylene Atchison.

And not far from the place she had died.

“A little to the right, you can make it clear around,” James instructed. All these years, and his eyes were still good, acclimating fast to the darkness. There was still life in the old man yet. Something moved in the shallows, and a line of obsidian-colored scales broke the surface, like a tiny mountain range, before submerging again, the water closing above it in a perfect seam. The gators were still in this spot, where Raylene had helped him. Of course they were. They’d been around for more than a hundred million years. Twenty-five years would be nothing to them, the blink of an eye.

James would always remember the case. It was back in the mid-eighties. An unexpected summer storm had come up strong and capsized a pontoon full of garden club members from Kervick County, its scattered contents drifting through the labyrinth of sloughs in the flooded forest. All but one of the passengers had swum safely to shore. The police chief had advised him to call the alligator nuisance man to help navigate the boat and accompany him for the body recovery of the one missing woman. James had resisted at first, but then dialed Hunter Broussard. When he’d arrived at the scene, he’d been met instead by the sight of a pregnant woman huddled inside an enormous jacket standing on the bow of an ancient-looking skiff.

“Mating season,” Raylene had said by way of greeting and explanation. There had been a rash of gator-related incidents all across the county, and Hunter had sent his daughter out on this call. James remembered averting his eyes from her belly, her thundercloud of white-blond hair, and her wild, unabashed grin. He was used to being around women like his mother; soft-spoken in their strength, quiet in their manner. Raylene Broussard was neither of these things.

They’d navigated the waterways together. James could still remember that evening, the hush that fell over the bayou, so calm that the only evidence of the storm floated on its violet surface. They wound their way through the tangle of passages, he and Raylene, the alligators appearing every once in a while to remind him of their purpose for being together. He had never been a religious man—not then, and not now—but something about it felt supernatural, as though at just the right moment, his father’s boat might come gliding across the water towards them, no time having passed at all.

Raylene talked to him nonstop, mistook his awkwardness for reticence, coaxed responses from him. A woman twenty years his junior, and yet she seemed more attuned to the bayou than most old people he’d met while keeping the sense of wonder that blesses only the very young. Raylene talked about being pregnant as though this were an incredible piece of good fortune visited upon her by a loving universe, not the result of a dalliance with Wade Atchison, the most talked-about petty criminal in town. Raylene asked him about being a doctor. Someday, she told him, she would be a nurse. She’d be great at it, he’d told her; she was strong and capable and had a good way with people. She’d grinned at him, genuinely touched at the compliment.

The two of them had skimmed the water’s surface until they’d found Marie Guidry floating face up, her yellow raincoat folded around her face like damp petals.
See?
Raylene had told him proudly, her face shining.
The gators left her alone
.
They know
.

And even though James had seen many bodies before, there was something about this one that gripped him. There was something different, he told Raylene, about seeing a body at the scene instead of in the morgue, about realizing that she had so recently been in this world and now she was gone. It reminded him of his first cadaver in medical school. It wasn’t that the person on the table had had green-gray skin or open eyes; it was that the cadaver had been wearing fingernail polish. It was the tiniest details that could blind you, overwhelm you, level you.

Raylene had nodded and agreed with him. She’d heard the ragged edges of his voice and understood. They’d pulled Marie aboard and for the entire way home, she’d told him about alligators. A group of them was called a congregation. They were naturally fearful of people. They could hold their breath for two hours.

He had clung to the bow of the boat and put his face in the wind and let these facts wash over him. By the time they’d reached the spot where his boat was tied up, he was able to handle it all again. That was the gift she’d given him, and the worst part was, all these years had gone by, and he still wasn’t sure if he’d thanked her or not.

And a few years later, she was on his table, finger-shaped bruises around her neck. He’d owed it to her to do the best autopsy he could, to bring her justice—and then he had been robbed of that opportunity. This unsatisfying, unacceptable end to her story was all he had to offer her daughter.

“Up here. Up ahead.” The sight of a raincoat jolted James back into the present. It was caught on a cypress branch, snapping in the wind.

“Got ’em,” Ernest said.

James leaned out of the boat and reached for the other sleeve of the coat, which was still attached to its owner.

“Hang on, Madison,” he told her. Ernest probably thought he was turning into a batty old man, but he didn’t care. Doctors talked to patients who could not hear them all the time. He motioned Ernest over, and together they coaxed her body into the boat and fitted the nylon body bag around her, tucking her swollen limbs inside.