Whispers of the Bayou (29 page)

“What are you doing?”

“I’m checking for rot. You got a pretty nasty leak upstairs, and I’m trying to figure out how far down the damage goes. But look, I’ll come back. I can do this later.”

He was halfway down the ladder before I spoke.

“Aaron, wait. Just because I keep unintentionally flashing you is no reason to run away. I’m fine. We can pretend that this, too, didn’t happen. I’d rather you keep working.”

“You don’t, like, go around completely naked at any point, do you? A man can only be a gentleman for so long.”

I laughed.

“I promise, from now on, only turtlenecks and burlap sacks.” Smiling, I shut the door. A few minutes later, as I pulled on jeans and a comfortable shirt, the hammering finally stopped. By the time I had the bed made and the letters returned to their box and tucked away beside my suitcase, I opened the door to see that Aaron and his ladder were gone from the hallway. Relieved, I walked down to the bathroom with my toiletries and makeup, where I showered and got ready for the day. With my damp hair in a ponytail rather than a fancy twist or a bun, the first item on my agenda, after grabbing some breakfast, was to make several very difficult telephone calls.

Deena was in the kitchen cleaning out the refrigerator. She greeted me with a grunt, waving toward a plate of bacon and eggs that was sitting on the counter, covered with a paper towel.

“Didn’t know you were gonna sleep half the day away,” she grumbled, and I glanced at the clock on the stove to see that it was only nine thirty. I wondered what she would make of some of my friends back home, who would sleep until two or three in the afternoon whenever they had the chance. “You’ll have to heat that up.”

I thanked her for the breakfast as I ran it in the microwave. I realized I would either need to visit a store soon or give her some cash to cover the cost of having me here. No doubt she had already added the two eggs and
two strips of bacon to my tab alongside the Benadryl and paper towels. She suggested I make myself some toast as well, which I did, mostly so that I could assemble a breakfast sandwich with the eggs and bacon and carry it outside to eat while I made my calls.

“Deena, I need to ask you a favor,” I said as I waited for the toast to pop out. “I wonder if you might be willing to walk through the rest of the house with me later and tell me how it used to be laid out when I was a child. I would like to know whose room was where and so forth.”

“Why on earth do you want to know that?” she demanded, emerging from deep in the fridge with a questionable pack of meat in one hand and some wilted lettuce in the other.

“Because I’m curious,” I replied, removing the toast from the toaster and putting together my sandwich. “The only other person around here who might know that is my Uncle Holt, but with him in a wheelchair he wouldn’t be able to get up there anyway.”

She snorted. “Sure,” she said. “Just tell me when. I’ll be around, packing all day. Packing and cooking. I hate to see this food go to waste.”

I reached for the salt and pepper, asking her about the strange light I had seen last night from the upstairs window. She had no idea what I was talking about, so I quickly changed the subject and asked how well she knew my Uncle Holt.

“Well enough. Why?”

“I just wondered about the wheelchair. What’s the story there?”

“Same as a lot of boys his age. Went to Vietnam as a handsome young soldier, came back lucky he was in a chair and not a box.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised I hadn’t calculated his age and thought of that myself. I wrapped my sandwich in a paper towel and set the plate in the sink. “So how come he went to war but my father didn’t?”

Deena huffed.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably because your father used every bit of his parents’ influence to pull some strings and keep himself stateside. I seem to recall that when Holt was drafted he gave in to the inevitable without as much of a fight.”

“I see.”

I thanked her for the food and excused myself to go outside, thinking about the two brothers, Richard and Holt, as I walked. Judging by what AJ had written in her letters, they had both been spoiled and indulged by their parents while growing up. Ultimately, I realized, one of the brothers had ended up emotionally handicapped but physically whole, while the other was physically handicapped but emotionally whole, at least as far as I could tell. I wondered what had made the difference, why my father had remained so immature and unevolved while Holt had managed to grow up and become a man of character. Facing his responsibilities as a soldier had probably been a good start.

With my breakfast in one hand and my cell phone in the other, I made my way down to the bench at the trailhead so that I could look out at the bayou as I ate and made my calls.

When I turned on my phone, a message was waiting from Nathan, sent earlier this morning. I dialed into voice mail and took a bite of my sandwich as I listened. He was sorry we hadn’t been able to talk last night, but he was glad I had called and maybe we could connect tonight. He went into more detail this time about the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the church yesterday morning, but I could tell from his voice that there was something he wasn’t saying. He warned me that the next three days were going to be crazy busy for him as he and the engineer worked to close out the project completely, but that I could call whenever I needed, even if I needed him to come down here.

I erased his message and called back to leave one for him, telling him to focus on his job and not worry about me, though I appreciated his concern. After hanging up, I thought about calling AJ, but I wasn’t up to that conversation just yet. Instead, I dialed in to my boss at the museum and explained that I had gone out of town this weekend to visit an old family friend who was dying, but that the friend had died while I was here, so I was going to stick around for the funeral and might not be back in this week. I rarely missed a day of work, but suddenly my job there felt a million miles away and not nearly as important as I had always felt it to be.

After disconnecting I realized I had lost my appetite and tore up the
rest of my breakfast into tiny bits and tossed them toward the water, hoping the heron would return.

“Better be careful. You might draw alligators that way.”

I turned around to see Aaron West, smiling at me from a few steps behind.

“Are there really alligators in there?” I asked.

“I imagine so,” he replied, “but I wouldn’t worry about it. I don’t know of any that hang out around this part of the bayou.”

“That’s good. I hope.”

He moved forward, his eyes on my face.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I just have a quick question.”

“What’s that?”

“I finally figured out the problem with the attic. The reason I couldn’t figure out where to get up into it was because there’s another whole floor, a third story, and then the attic is on top of that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, twisting around to look at the house in the distance.

“You can tell from out here that there’s something up there just by looking at those dormers,” he said, pointing to the highest, smallest windows of the house that ran just below the roof line. “I had figured those dormers were a part of the attic, not more living space, but I was wrong. They’re a part of the third story rooms. I guess the attic is pretty small and doesn’t have any windows.”

I was stunned.

“You’re telling me this house has a third floor of living space?” I asked, heart pounding. “How do you get to it?”

“Apparently there’s a flight of stairs from the second floor.”

“I never saw one,” I said, certain that I had peeked inside every door and closet up there and had come across nothing of the kind.

“I know, me neither. But Miss Deena told me where they are. She said that her husband put up some Sheetrock to hide them a long time ago. She said he had to do it to keep your grandmother from wandering up there after she began to show signs of senility. They were afraid she
might fall back down. So he walled them off and after a while she forgot they had been there.”

I could just picture it, this poor, senile old woman insisting that she be able to go up and down at will, testing the limits of her caregivers. No wonder they had walled it off. I could only imagine her confusion after that, no longer being able to find something that she felt sure had been there before.

“Anyway,” Aaron continued, “I need to get up to the attic, but that means I’ll have to take down that Sheetrock to get up to the third floor first. I asked Miss Deena if that was okay, but she sent me out here to check with you.”

“This Sheetrock you want to take down,” I said, my spine tingling, “is it along the back hall, near the bathroom?”

I was thinking of when I had been up there last night, of the place that for some reason just hadn’t looked right to me.

“Yeah, exactly. The stairs are there, behind that wall.”

As he said it, I could picture it, but as I did I felt vaguely unsettled, as if taking down that wall would take away a layer of safety as well. A big part of me wanted to go with Aaron right now and watch him break through. But a bigger part said I needed to proceed more slowly, that another panic attack like the one on the plane might be waiting right behind that wall.

Still, that didn’t mean he shouldn’t prepare the way for the moment when I would feel ready to take a look. I felt a surge of excitement, knowing that there was a chance my grandmother’s paintings could be up there.

“Yes, please,” I said resolutely. “Tear it down. While you’re at it, would you please go through the whole house and take down every board and every plank off of every single window and door? It’s time to throw this place wide open.”

Judging by his expression, I think he didn’t know whether to be amused by my fervor or alarmed by it.

“Sure,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

He started to walk away but I called after him.

“I don’t suppose you could recommend a good local cleaning service,
could you? I’m not just ready to bring in the light, I want to get rid of the dust and dirt too.”

“No, but my sister will. I was about to call her anyway, so I’ll ask and let you know.”

With that, he headed back to the house as he pulled a phone from his pocket, leaving me there beside the water to contemplate the call I needed to make next.

It was time to talk to AJ, to tell her that I had flown down here Saturday morning without even telling her. She was going to be concerned about me, of course, but she was also going to feel very betrayed. Last night, when I had been so furious with her, I had felt betrayed as well. But after reading all of the letters and having some time to digest them, my emotions regarding AJ were now in an entirely different place. I felt a lot of things toward her, a little angry, yes, but also embarrassed that she knew me even better than I knew myself. Most of all, I felt indebted. Indebted that she had given up her life for mine, that she had taken me in and loved me like a mother would have and never flinched in carrying out this obligation to her dead sister. How could I repay something like that? It took reading all of those letters before I began to see the full scope of what she’d done for me. In light of all that, this was not a call I wanted to make. It was simply too hard to face her right now with all of these thoughts and emotions rolling around in my mind.

For at least ten minutes, I thought about what I might say, and then finally I dialed her office and was deeply relieved when her secretary said she was in a meeting and wouldn’t be out for at least an hour. I hated to be a big chicken, but I knew that gave me the perfect excuse for not dealing with all of this directly right now. I asked the secretary to tell her that I was in Louisiana and for her to call me back on my cell phone when she had time to talk. I hung up after that, ignoring my guilt, thinking that this way AJ could absorb that news first and then we could discuss it later.

I was just standing up to go back to the house when I heard a woman’s voice calling to me from off to the right.

“Yoo hoo!”

Startled, I looked up the path to see Livvy marching my way, a great
big tote bag hanging from her shoulder and a thick book tucked under one arm. She was followed by a young woman carrying a casserole.

“Aaron said you were out here,” Livvy told me. “I’m glad I caught you. I’ve got some fun surprises.”

I had so much to do that I wasn’t really in the mood for a visit, but Southern hospitality being what it was, I knew I needed to make her feel welcome even if I had to give her the bum’s rush to get her back out of there.

“Hi, Livvy. How are you?”

She gave me an air kiss and then nodded toward her companion.

“Surprise number one. This is Sissy. She’s here to clean your house.”

My eyes widened.

“That was fast.”

“It’s your lucky day. Sissy always does my place on Mondays, but Melanie’s home sick today with her allergies all flared up. Between the cleaning chemicals and the vacuum cleaner and the dusting, I think all that might make Melanie ever sicker. I was just about to send Sissy home when Aaron called and said you needed somebody. Voila, here we are.”

I thanked them both, so relieved to have someone here so quickly that I didn’t even ask what it was going to cost me.

“Sissy, you go on ahead and bring that casserole to Miss Deena and ask her where she keeps the cleaning supplies” Livvy directed.

“Yes, ma’am.”

As she walked away, Livvy opened the tote bag and showed me the contents. Inside was what looked like a framed canvas, carefully protected by a Mylar sleeve.

“This is one of the paintings that got damaged. I really just need an opinion. Please let me know what you think it would take to have it restored, or if it’s even possible.”

“Sure.”

Next to the painting was something small and black that looked like an elongated flashlight.

“I also threw in a portable UV light I borrowed from the museum. I thought it might be helpful. They need it back by tomorrow, though.”

“Great.”

“Finally,” she said, “the biggest surprise of all. I’ve only got a second and then I have to run, but I just couldn’t wait to show you.”