Whispers of the Bayou (42 page)

“I guess I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “I’m so tired, and it’s been a tough night.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah,” she replied, pulling off her watch and rings and earrings. “Sorry for ruining your dinner party.”

I assured her that she had done nothing of the kind, that I was just sad she hadn’t been there to see everyone enjoying her delicious food.

“We all ate way too much.”

Lisa kicked off her shoes.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you, I talked to Mike. So far, everything he’s tested for has come back negative. Looks like it really was plain old food poisoning.”

“Does that mean you and Deena can make up and be friends again?” I asked, watching as she bent down to pick up her shoes.

“Were we ever really friends?” she asked, holding them wearily over her shoulder. “Housemates, yes. Sharing in the care of Willy, yes. Friends, not really.”

With that, she headed off to bed and I went back to work. Lost in a haze of thought, I kept at it for hours.

By three a.m., my hands were throbbing and my arms were so tired I could barely lift them. Except for a few large, difficult patches that I’d had to leave alone for now, I had managed to remove the enamel paint from
all four walls of this room. Tomorrow, I would tackle the hallway and the other rooms, but for now, this was the most I could do. Gathering my tools, I placed them in the cabinet and then brushed off my pants, crossed the room, and turned, to take in all that I had revealed.

The mural was not a continuous, circular one, despite the fact that it went all the way around the room. Instead, I could tell from the elaborate gold-colored scrollwork that periodically separated the scenes, this painting had a beginning and progressed along from there, telling a story as it went, almost like a big, gorgeous comic strip.

That first panel, to the right of the door, showed a group of people in colonial-type dress, gathered in what looked like a town hall, listening as a man wearing similar clothing stood at the center and spoke. Around the fringes of the scene, several women were crying and one man stood with his head somberly bowed.

In the next panel, the same people were in the streets of a quaint little town, the buildings there hewn from rough logs. Two men were carrying a large white sack, and the townspeople were running toward that sack, tossing in a variety of items, each of them gold: gold candlesticks, gold necklaces, gold nuggets. At the end of the street, in the direction that the men were going, was a store with an anvil out front, no doubt the blacksmith shop. In the background, further down the road behind them, was a church, a tall building with a wooden bell tower and a cross on top.

Pulse surging, I moved on to the next wall, and as I looked at it my skin raised up in goose bumps: Inside the blacksmith shop, as several of the townsfolk looked on, two muscular, sweating men poured what looked like molten gold into a black mold.

In the next panel, covering the third wall, those same men were doing something else in the shop. Part of that picture was covered by one of the stubborn areas of enamel, so I grabbed the sandpaper from the cabinet and risked harming the tableau as I carefully sanded down to the acrylic underneath. Brushing the dust away, I could see that the men were holding paintbrushes, applying gray paint to the shiny gold, curved surface of what I simply knew must be a bell. With a gasp I understood: They had forged a bell from pure gold and were camouflaging it!

The next scene, on the fourth wall, was particularly heartbreaking, a line of people being marched from their village by red-coated British soldiers on horseback. Off to the right, near the switch plate, were the two dogs that I had uncovered when I first began. At the very center of the wall, at the head of their procession, was a priest wearing a white robe and carrying a scepter on top of which was a cross—the same cross of my tattoo. Behind the priest, four men shouldered the load of a heavy wooden box affixed with carrying poles. That box, just about the size and shape to hold a large bell, was obviously made of wood, and its lid had been carved with the now-familiar image of the cross inside a bell.

My mind raced, remembering what I had read about Colline d’Or, that it was the only village where no one had tried to escape. Now I knew why. Pretending to be pious by claiming peace and nonviolence, they must have convinced the soldiers to let them cart off their most precious religious memento, what they had claimed was the simple iron bell from their church’s bell tower. Sure enough, far behind the marching group, sat the church, its tower now empty, its eaves on fire.

Off to the left, two young men were emerging from the woods to join the procession. Behind them, further down the path from which they had come, was a newly disturbed mound of dirt, obviously the burial place of the real church bell, the one made not of gold but simply of iron.

The citizens of Colline d’Or had managed to smuggle out their most valuable possession—their gold—right under the noses of the British soldiers. Judging by the tattoos on the boys’ feet and the oath that had now been revealed in full, I had to guess that when the citizens of that village made the choice to pool their gold, they decided to stick together and use that gold as their insurance policy for their future. Once they finally settled in Louisiana and the years continued to pass, the two appointed guardians of the bell had been charged with making sure that it remained hidden and protected but ready at a moment’s notice, just in case they had to use it, as the oath said, “to serve as our protection and to guarantee that we will never again be forced to leave our homeland.”

Fortunately for them, that fear had never come to pass. Louisiana had been sincere in its welcome, the region safe, the land bountiful. In the
generations since, the descendants of this village had scattered far and wide, many of them not even aware that the legend their grandparents and great-grandparents told of the golden bell wasn’t legend at all—as so many other Cajun tales were—but was in fact true.

I closed my eyes, picturing Willy before he died, exclaiming in French about the story of the bell: “
L’angelus!”
he had cried from his bed. “Is not a
chucotement de bayou
at all! Is
la vérité!
And I am the last surviving
gardien.”
The bell was not a myth at all, he had said, it was true. And he was the last surviving guardian.

The duty of hiding and guarding the bell had been passed down through the generations of the descendants of Colline d’Or, ultimately to Willy and my grandmother, finally landing squarely at the feet of Lisa and me.

She and I were the new guardians of the angelus.

My mind reeling, I simply paced around the room, taking that in. No wonder Willy and Portia had tattooed my head. They must have done it when they knew for sure that I would be moving away for good, as insurance that one day I would return when summoned. A tattoo to the head would have hurt a lot, so I had a feeling that they had either drugged me and done it as I slept or simply taken advantage of my wordless, traumatized stupor and done it while I was awake. I sincerely hoped it was not the latter. I couldn’t imagine that two adults would be that cruel, even if their motives were noble. No doubt, most other
gardiens
in the past had gotten their tattoo voluntarily and after the fact, once they were an adult and understood the responsibility, not before.

Willy’s summoning of me all these years later was finally understandable in its full magnitude. With Portia dead and her replacement dead—the stubborn fellow who had been killed on his boat during Katrina—the only surviving person who knew that the myth was true, and more importantly knew where the bell was hidden, was Willy. He was determined not to die until he gave us the oath and then revealed the hiding place. Someone else, however, had had other plans.

Willy’s life had been cut short before he finished saying all that he had to say. Obviously someone else knew where the bell was—or at least knew
that it existed—and they were willing to kill in order to keep that secret for themselves. I wondered what that bell would be worth today. More than likely, its value as a historical artifact would be even greater than its value as a big honkin’ load of gold: In short, it would be priceless.

Already, one man had been killed for it.

Who else could the killer be but Jimmy Smith? Obviously, he knew something, why else would he have come into my office under false pretenses just to show me the symbol and gauge my reaction? No wonder he had rushed off, saying he’d come back later: He was hoping that in the meantime I might remember where I had seen that symbol before. He must have thought that I knew more than I did. Having already placed a bug in my telephone a few days before, he probably hoped to catch me discussing it on the phone and steal that information for himself.

I didn’t even look at my watch as I headed toward Lisa’s room. Regardless of the hour, I needed to wake her up, to tell her all that I had discovered. I tapped on her door softly, not wanting to also wake my father who was slumbering overhead. Tapping again, I pushed the door open to see the bed, but the bed was empty.

“Lisa?” I whispered, the sounds of rustling coming from further inside.

Pushing the door open more, I saw that Lisa was awake and out of bed, though still in her nightgown. She was standing at the open door to the balcony, her hands clawing violently against Jimmy Smith.

He in turn was facing her, his white hands wrapped tightly around her dark brown throat.

A secret,
Subtile sense crept in of pain and indefinite terror,
As the cold, poisonous snake creeps into the nest of the swallow.
It was no earthly fear. A breath from the region of spirits
Seemed to float in the air of night

I screamed.

I screamed so loudly they probably heard me all the way to Little Tara. In an instant, my father was pounding down the stairs, Jimmy Smith was gone, and Lisa was collapsing onto the bed, gasping for air.

I ran to the open door and looked out to see the intruder now running away in the moonlight across the lawn and then straight down the driveway toward the road. Lisa was making so much noise that I hesitated, but then AJ was there to take care of Lisa so I moved on outside.

Out at the balcony railing, I dashed around the perimeter and finally spotted what I was looking for: a climbing rope with a hook on the top and thick knots all the way down about every two feet. My father burst onto the balcony as well, and when I showed it to him and told him what happened, he immediately went to the phone and called the police.

While we waited for them to arrive, I asked my father to go downstairs and be ready to greet the cops at the door. Once he left, I whispered to
AJ that I needed her to go down there too and make sure he wasn’t eavesdropping, because Lisa and I had to talk about what we could and could not tell the police about the intruder—a conversation that I absolutely didn’t want my father listening in on. AJ readily agreed. As she turned to go, I noticed that her eyes were puffy, as if she had cried herself to sleep.

Once we were alone, Lisa repeated what she’d been saying since she found her voice and could talk. According to her, had I not come into her room when I did, she would be dead now. She said that she had been awakened only moments before by a knock at that outside door. Since the last person to knock on that door was me, in her half-asleep state, she had just assumed it was me again.

“I know it was so stupid,” Lisa cried, her face in her hands, “but I didn’t even look outside! I just opened the door and there he was and the next thing I knew, he was choking me.”

I didn’t say “I told you so” for her nonchalance in the face of danger. I was just glad I had gotten there when I did—and I hoped she had finally learned her lesson and would be more cautious in the future.

The hardest part for both of us, I told her as she tried to calm down, was going to be finding a way to answer the police’s questions without revealing anything about the myth of the angelus or the symbol of the bell—for that was obviously what had brought this man here in the first place. I didn’t know why he wanted Lisa to die, but I knew we couldn’t tell the cops everything right now. In the end, we agreed to stick with a limited version of the truth.