Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) (5 page)

“No. Why is the table important, Ms. Savoie—Ceelie?”

She shook her head. “I just thought it was weird that the table hadn’t been disturbed when everything else in the room had been dumped out or torn apart. Seemed like my aunt’s murderer was afraid of it, maybe, which means he knew what it was and had enough respect for it—or fear—not to touch it.”

Gentry looked back at Ceelie. Smart woman. He hadn’t thought about it, but she was right. It was the only thing to explain that table being undisturbed. All it really meant, though, was that the killer knew the local culture, which didn’t narrow things down much.

Would Lang have been afraid to disturb the table? Could he have committed the awful crime that had taken place here? God forgive him, but Gentry hoped not. He’d rather his brother stay dead and at peace than be alive and capable of such cruelty.

Ceelie caught his gaze and smiled, a sight that jerked his thoughts away from the crime and sent them toward places they didn’t need to go. Then her expression turned thoughtful. “You look familiar, Agent Broussard. Have we met somewhere?”

“Call me Gentry.” Hell no, he would never have forgotten that voice, those eyes. “I don’t think so, but I grew up in Dulac. Maybe you’ve seen me around.”

“Maybe, but I haven’t been back in the parish in a decade.” She kept staring and it made him twitchy. “It’ll come to me. Anyway, don’t guess you knew LeRoy Breaux when you were growing up in Dulac, did you?”

Probably a quarter of the people in Terrebonne Parish were named Breaux; another quarter were Broussards. “No, sorry. Is he important to the case?”

Ceelie shrugged. “He lived with my aunt for a while when I was a kid, and I just wondered what happened to him—not that he’d have killed her. I mean, he was older than her, as near as I can remember. I always thought they were married, since I grew up calling him Nonc LeRoy.”

Gentry hadn’t heard anything about a man in Eva Savoie’s life. “So this LeRoy Breaux lived with your aunt? What happened to him?”

Ceelie walked to the window, blew out the citronella candle, and squeezed the wick between her fingers to make sure it was out. “He ditched Tante Eva when I was a kid. I think it runs in the family; my mom did the same thing to my dad.”

Gentry blinked and gave Jena a helpless look. What did one say to that?

“Is there anything else you wanted to ask us about your aunt?” Jena gave him a
you’re-hopeless
head shake. “I got here later than Gentry, but if there’s anything else . . .”

Ceelie turned and squared her shoulders. “No, I just needed to hear all that. Thank you.”

She followed them to the door and onto the porch. The air outside was hot and sticky, but unlike the air inside the cabin, at least it was moving.

Gentry turned back, leaving Jena to continue to the truck. “By the way, I know a guy over in Chauvin who rehabs used AC units. We’ve still got at least six weeks of hot weather. Want me to see if he’s got something that would work for you?”

“Thanks, but unless he’s giving them away, I’ll just sweat it out.” Ceelie smiled again, and it looked good on her. Too good. “I’m calling it my swamp diet. Every step’s a sweaty workout.”

Gentry bit his tongue before he could offer up his opinion that there wasn’t a thing on her that needed work. Instead, he slid his sunglasses out of their resting place—hanging by one arm out of his shirt pocket—and stuck them on his face. Better put them on now in case his pupils had dilated with lust or something else humiliating that she didn’t need to see. She was a short-timer, a woman who’d rejected this place he’d loved his whole life. She’d made it clear she was leaving Terrebonne behind as soon as she got Eva’s estate settled. Plus, agents didn’t ogle crime victims.

“You got a card?” Ceelie asked. “You know, in case I have any other questions. Would it be okay to call you? Agent Sinclair gave me her card when you got here.”

Yeah, and if he hadn’t had his head so far up his backside, he’d have done the same. It was standard protocol. He obviously needed sleep. Preferably without the nightmares.

“Let me know if you change your mind about the air conditioner.” He fished a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her. “And call me anytime. My cell number’s on the card.”

He found Jena waiting around the corner, obviously eavesdropping. She wore a smirk but kept her mouth shut until they climbed in the truck and got back on the highway.

“Call me Gentry,” she purred. “Call me anytime. My cell number’s on the card.”

He turned the AC fan on high and tugged down the bill of his cap, slumping in the seat and closing his eyes. “Shut the hell up, Red.”

CHAPTER 6

Ceelie stuck her head around the corner, watching Gentry Broussard follow his partner to a dusty black monster of a pickup truck.
Nice ass.

Then again, there was something about a guy in a uniform most women found irresistible. Ceelie and Sonia had pondered this peculiar phenomenon over late-night glasses of moscato back in Nashville. They’d decided it had to be the belt and all the equipment that dangled from it when the guys walked, which not only was phallic but probably released extra sex pheromones into the air and turned women into nectar-seeking honeybees.

Which was exactly why it was dangerous for her to stay too long in Terrebonne Parish. It felt too comfortable. In fact, it felt damned good. It felt like home in a way Nashville never had. Staying would be too easy, and one day she’d wake up and realize she hadn’t left Terrebonne Parish in ten years, or twenty.

Plus, the men here were one of two types: either total losers or sexy and overburdened with testosterone. Too many of them, like Gentry Broussard, had a confident, unconscious sexuality that would bulldoze a woman into a single-wide with a half-dozen kids before she knew what hit her.

And a dog. A guy like that probably had at least one or two hunting dogs, and not cute little beagles, either. Big dogs.

Ceelie preferred cats and small dogs, although they tended to be eaten by alligators around here, as she recalled. Munchability wasn’t a desirable trait in a pet. She also didn’t like trailers, and she was pretty sure she didn’t want kids. Between having been abandoned by her mom and bullied by small-town mean girls, her own childhood had sucked; she wouldn’t have her own child subjected to it.

So yeah, a guy like Gentry Broussard left her feeling restless and needy and defiant, all at the same time. She was annoyed that she’d checked out his left hand for the wedding ring and had been pleased there hadn’t been one.

Weapon-belt pheromones. Had to be.

He did look familiar, but she couldn’t figure out why. She’d been gone ten years, so if she’d seen him before, they’d both been a lot younger. If she’d recently seen that curly hair, those melted-dark-chocolate eyes and for-God’s-sake dimples, she would remember.

Other than awakening her libido, which she’d now have to beat back into submission, the visit hadn’t accomplished much. She wasn’t sure what she expected the game wardens to tell her that she didn’t already know, but it had been worth a try. And Gentry had confirmed her suspicion that nothing on Tante Eva’s throwing table had been touched.

Ceelie hadn’t touched it either, and she wasn’t sure she was ready. So first, she filled another bucket with water, mixed in some bleach, and got on her hands and knees with a sponge, scrubbing at bloodstains for at least the sixth or seventh time. The light coming through the open windows and door at different hours of the day kept revealing blotches she’d missed earlier.

After the bleach, she retraced her steps using the pine cleaner until the place reeked. At least it reeked of clean things and not death.

Finally, she couldn’t stand it any longer; that shrine beneath the window whispered to her like some kind of dark siren. She stashed the cleaning supplies in the cramped cabinet under the sink, then approached the throwing table. Tante Eva had called it that when Ceelie came out on weekends and, during the summer, for whole weeks or two at a time. That had been in the years after her mom left, until she’d turned sixteen and her dad forbade her to visit anymore.

Forbade her because of what she’d learned at this table and had been stupid enough to let him catch her doing.

Those had been bittersweet years. At the time, she’d thought her dad sent her here so often because she loved Tante Eva so much. Looking back as an adult, she thought maybe Dad had simply been overwhelmed that the woman he loved had packed her bags and taken a bus out of town in the middle of his afternoon shift at the gas plant. All while their eight-year-old daughter was trying to learn multiplication tables in her third-grade class.

Now? She thought he’d sent Ceelie to stay with his Tante Eva not only to give his daughter a mother figure but to give himself private time to mourn the life he’d lost. He’d have struggled to make sense of it, would have wanted to figure out how he’d misjudged the character of his wife so badly. Would have needed to vent his anger where his daughter wouldn’t see him.

The day her mom ran off to Texas or California or wherever she’d ended up—not running
toward
anything but simply away from them—Ceelie had come home from school to find a silent house and, on the kitchen counter, a white sealed envelope she’d instinctively known was not hers to read. Unsure of what else to do, she had taken her favorite teddy bear and crawled in her parents’ bed to wait for Daddy to come home. Afraid he wouldn’t. Afraid she’d be alone.

Dad had been trapped in a dead-end, dangerous job that eventually served up a cancer cocktail, and he had gotten stuck with a confused, lost daughter to raise by himself. No wonder he’d made her promise to leave Houma the first chance she got.

Now, here she was, back on Whiskey Bayou, which made Houma look like New York City.

Humming that damned song she couldn’t finish but couldn’t get out of her head, Ceelie dragged over one of the kitchenette chairs and sat in front of the throwing table. The memories in this cabin were visceral, palpable things, and maybe seeing this table explained why they were pummeling her with such force. She rarely thought of her mom’s cut-and-run anymore, but the ghosts had paraded past her like Mardi Gras floats since she’d gotten off the bus in Houma and found a driver willing to bring her down here—
down da baya
, as the old-timers said.

Ceelie moved the candles to the northeast and southwest positions before realizing what she’d done. Even through the
eau de Pine-Sol
, they smelled sweet, like the water lilies she remembered from being here as a kid. Most likely, Tante Eva had poured these candles herself. Ceelie remembered rows of new candles hanging at the end of the side porch, waiting for Tante Eva to bless them before she’d bring them into the house and light them.

A fine lot of good those blessings had done. Ceelie wrapped the candles in a paper towel and placed them in the middle of the drawer, then took the fragile, yellowed chicken bones and settled them one by one into the satin-lined carved wooden box Tante Eva kept for them.

“Bones gotta have a special place of respect,” she’d told Ceelie more times than she could count. “You treat them right and they’ll always speak true.”

“The bones never lie,” Ceelie whispered, placing the last one—a tiny skull—into the box and closing the lid.

She settled the box in the drawer along with the rolled-up square of leather that Tante Eva had told her was a gift from the greatest mystic in the parish. Ceelie didn’t remember his name, only that he’d lived even farther down the bayou.

Ceelie splashed some water on her face and neck before picking up her guitar and going back to the porch. She’d forgotten how quiet it could be out here during the heat of the day, even with the occasional buzz of an outboard wafting across the water as the gator hunters did their thing.

At night, as she had relearned, the bayou came to noisy life, filled with croaks, growls, hisses, and splashes. The first night, still surrounded by blood and chaos, she’d jolted awake at each noise. Now, the sounds were comforting proof of nature’s resilience no matter how hard humans tried to destroy it.

She strummed the notes of the song, picking it out in different keys until she hit the one that felt right today. Tomorrow, it might be different. Until a song told you it was done, it remained a moving, growing thing.

I won’t go back, I won’t go home,

’Cause in this place, the dead still roam.

In this old house lies a pile of bones.

Throw them down once,

Throw them easy,

Throw them slow.

’Cause Whiskey Bayou, she won’t let me go . . .

A distinctive, guttural hiss interrupted Ceelie’s song, and she watched, mesmerized, as a dark-brown bird with at least a five-foot wingspan made a wobbly circle overhead before coming to rest on a cypress knee rising from the water a few feet from the front of the cabin. It hissed again and turned its bright-red head, a black glittering eye, and its sharply hooked beak toward Ceelie.

“Carencro,”
she whispered.
“Mauvaises choses.”

A vulture, Tante Eva always said, was a sign of impending danger and sorrow. Despite temperatures in the midnineties and a hundred percent humidity, a line of chill bumps rose on Ceelie’s arms and shoulders as she and the turkey vulture, the ugliest of the
carencro
, stared at each other.

She set her guitar aside and went in the house to hunt down the salt, finding an almost-empty box on the kitchen counter. The bird watched as if in disdain as she sprinkled a line of white granules around the perimeter of the porch, with a double line at the threshold of the door and the bottoms of the window casings.

With a final hiss as if to tell her the low regard in which it held her rudimentary ritual to ward off evil, the vulture flapped its enormous wings and took off with a clumsy leap. For a moment, she thought it might fall in the water—hoped it would—but it rose, circling over the cabin a couple of times before disappearing. It wasn’t completely gone, though; it had left behind the stench of its latest rotten-meat meal and fine particles of something foul that wafted behind in its wake.

Now there was only silence, ominous where earlier it had sounded clean and pure. The buzzard might be gone, but something else watched her. She felt it.

Forget the heat. Ceelie took her guitar inside, closed and locked the door and the two front windows. She crawled onto the bed, wedged into an alcove beneath the small side window, and closed and locked that one, too. She coated the door threshold and all the windowsills with what was left of the salt.

You’re being an idiot, Celestine
. And she was going to have heatstroke in this house with no air moving, but between the memories and the buzzard, she was too jittery to open things up again. Tomorrow, if she hadn’t been baked alive overnight, she’d call Gentry Broussard and ask about the guy with the cheap air conditioners.