Bayou Blue Page 8

  Port Vert was a shipping port. It also housed maintenance and supply boats for the oil rigs in the gulf. It was hard work, back breaking, with long hours of unloading and loading supplies.

  I thought of Randy’s slight build and pasty skin from years inside engineering labs. He wasn’t the type to suddenly crave the outdoors. He wasn’t the type people asked to open pickle jars. Not Randy.

  “So, Verona, did my brother ever behave strange to you?”

  Verona stopped smiling, a beignet two inches from her mouth. “No, why do you ask that?”

  “Just…covering the bases, V.” Jake chimed in.

  I raised my eyebrow. “I just wanted to know. He seemed…off in the days before the explosion.”

  “You mean the days before he exploded the plant?” Verona corrected me.

  “I – I, yes. That’s what I mean.” I slumped my shoulders. “Was Randy acting strange in the days before he blew up the plant?”

  “Not especially, to be truthful. I didn’t spend much time with him, but he wasn’t spouting crazy monologues about the evils of chemical plants, if that’s what you mean.”

  I looked at Jake pointedly. “That is what I mean.”

  “But you didn’t know him that well. You didn’t talk with him at length, right?” Jake cut in.

  Verona looked at him, and then back at me. “If you two can have this conversation by yourselves, then why are you bothering me?”

  Jake sat back against the bench seat and sighed. “Go on, then.”

  I picked up a beignet, twirled it in my hands and took bite. “This Dauby, where is he?”

  “No idea,” Verona said quickly and started to rise.

  Jake stopped her. “V?”

  “Didn’t you just hear me say he had,” she said, making air quotes. “Disappeared?”

  “Verona Benoit,” Jake warned. “I am not playing with you.”

  “Please, you are talking to the woman who carried you home after you broke your leg at Ander’s lake.”

  “We were kids, V. And as I recall, you were the one who dared me to jump.”

  Verona swished his comment aside with a flick of her wrist. “I didn’t think you’d do it.”

  Jake let go of her arm, leaned back, and smiled. “I need your help, V. That’s why I’m here.” He looked up at her and winked. “I’ll owe you.”

  He knew how to flirt, that was evident. He worked that face and build to get what he wanted.

  I’d have to remember that.

  She arched a single eyebrow at him, and then let out an exaggerated sigh. “Fine, Jake.” She looked at me. “He’s at his cousin’s place. Been there for almost two days, now.”

  “Did you hear anything about where Dauby went?” I asked. “When he disappeared?”

  “I heard he was working a rig down in the gulf using his other cousin’s I.D. and social. That’s why no one could find him. Not that anyone knew to look.”

  “And he’s back?” Jake asked.

  Verona put her hand on his shoulder, and nodded. “Yes, but be careful if you go out there. You know those LaRoche boys…”

  Jake nodded. “I’ll take care.”

  “Why didn’t anyone say anything about this before?” I asked with exasperation. “Why is this the first time Dauby is even mentioned?”

  Verona’s brows furrowed over her dark eyes. “Cause ain’t no one going to admit a local boy was tangled up with your brother. No way.”

  Jake stood up. “Merci, V, this was nice, real nice.”

  “Yeah, well…don’t let it get out that I helped your honey here. I don’t want to lose any customers.” Verona looked at me, but smiled. “You’re wading into dangerous waters, Red. You sure you want to do that?”

  “I have to do this.”

  “Have to do this,” she repeated and looked at Jake. “She sounds like you.” She swatted at me with the towel. “You two have a lot in common, you know that?”

  “OK, we’re leaving,” Jake said with a tight face.

  I tried to ask what she meant, but Jake had his hand at the small of my back, propelling me towards the door. He was suddenly in a real hurry.

  “What is she talking about?”

  “Nothing,” Jake said through a clenched jaw.

  Verona called out the answer after us. “Dead brothers.”

  9

  “You better fill me in on what you have,” Jake said from the dock. He untied the boat and tossed the rope onto the deck.

  I watched him from the make-shift passenger’s seat. “What did Verona mean when she said dead brothers?”

  “Nothing.” He veered away from the dock and we continued down the snaking waterway further into the swamp forest. “It’s not important.”

  “Well, she thought it was.”

  Jake didn’t answer.

  I tried another tack. “You two go back quite a ways, I take it?”

  “Our mothers were best friends.” Jake kept his eyes out in front. “Verona is older by about eight years, but she and my brother played together and they let me tag along.”

  “Your brother?”

  The entire time we searched for Randy, not once did Jake share that.

  Then I remembered Verona’s words. She’d said, dead brothers. I wondered what had happened and why Jake would never mention it to someone who’d lost their own brother.

  Jake looked over at me. “Don’t be a reporter.”

  “I’m not.” I felt insulted.

  “You’re pumping me for information I don’t want to give.”

  “Fine.” I studied his guarded look and decided not to push it, for now anyway. “Where are we going?” I asked instead.

  “We’re going to find Dauby.” Jake looked at me. “That’s what you wanted, right?”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t expected to move so quickly on Verona’s information. “Yeah.”

  “His aunt’s place is few miles up the bayou. Fill me in on what you know.”

  I reached into my purse and pulled out all my notes about Randy. “I don’t know where to start, actually.”

  “Just start with when you thought something was wrong. You said when you first came looking for Randy that he’d been acting strange?”

  “No, not strange.” A flash lit up the sky behind him and I flinched. “Did you see that? It must have been a mile long.”

  The rumble came almost a half a minute later. I looked up at the overhanging tree boughs. Wispy Spanish moss swayed with the warm wind rustling through the swamp. At almost eleven in the morning, the fall weather was sticky. The waterway flowed under the canopy of trees and darkened as it went. I frowned, but kept my concern to myself.

  “Seems weird to have a rainstorm with it so hot out.”

  “Lightning storms are common this time of year.” He relaxed a bit and smiled. “Don’t worry, you won’t get rained on just yet. The storm’s still off over the ocean.”

  He’d misjudged my fear, but his crooked grin sent a twitter through me and I nodded, finding my line of thoughts. I put a hand over my cheek as if that would hide the swell of heat there.

  “Well, like I said, Randy wasn’t acting strange, but he was different. He and I used to talk at least once a week, you know, catch up either on the phone or on his social website. But then he just became unreachable. My calls went to voicemail, my emails remained unanswered. I tried to chalk it up to his studies, he was in his senior year at Tulane, but given his history of depression I started to worry.”

  “And your family?” Jake clipped his last word. “Same thing?”

  I nodded. “My parents, my older brother, Raymond, all of us couldn’t get a response. My parents were out at sea at the time with my brother. He’s a marine biologist and wanted them to consult on a project of his.”

  “So you were it as far as who could have come to check on Randy.” Jake slowed to navigate a turn in the waterway.

  We brushed some low hanging branches with the canopy and pepper berries tittered down onto the deck. “So what
got you on the phone to your family? Was it his posts? Were they like the drawings in his sketchbook?”

  “Uh, no nothing that…disturbing.” I licked my lips. “They were cryptic messages. Like he and someone shared inside jokes and they were referencing funny occasions or something. He’d mention places, restaurants, or other locations and a person’s name. But no one ever commented on the post.”

  “Maybe they were meetings?” Jake offered. “Like a meet-me-here type of thing?”

  “That’s what I thought next, that he was posting meetings for his classes or a club, but when I talked to the dean of his school on the phone, he said he couldn’t find any record of Randy joining anything official. And none of the meeting places were what campus clubs used.”

  Jake nodded silently. “Then what?”

  “And then the posts just stopped. Everything stopped.”

  “When was this?”

  I flipped through my notebook. “A week before I came out here the first time.”

  “OK, so what happened in that week to get you on a plane?”

  I rubbed my fingers at my temple, at the headache brewing there. “I’ve already told you all of this, Jake.”

  “Just…this is how I do things, Riley. I want the whole snapshot from your point of view, OK?”

  We rode deeper into the swamp and the trees grew more dense; some were even in the middle of the water way. Jake navigated past huge tangles of roots under bare trees that blocked the path. Our boat passed old homes, and then low shacks with slumping roofs. All the places butted up against rotting docks.

  Over us, the canopy of trees became so thick that I could only see patches of sky every now and then. I felt like I was entering a tunnel into another world, another time. The dark crept along the water, onto the boat, and finally brooded over me, making me shudder. I hugged myself and opened my eyes as wide as I could to see.

  Jake glanced at me, and then flicked on the boat’s running lights. White Christmas lights strung along the canopy’s perimeter blinked to life. Suddenly illuminated in the twinkling glow, the water sparkled as it flowed past us. I could make out brightly colored flowers and deep green plants as we skimmed along on the current.

  This would be romantic, were we not doing what we were doing. I turned back to my notes.

  “You have to understand Randy. He was brilliant. He was so smart he skipped a grade even in the academically rigorous private school we went to. He was absolutely in love with engineering and his studies. He wouldn’t just drop out a semester from graduation, not without warning signs. His professors were dumbfounded. He wasn’t failing, he just stopped turning in his work, stopped showing up.”

  “So you thought he was maybe struggling with depression again?” Jake tipped his hat as we passed a woman standing on the shore.

  I nodded, biting the inside of my cheek as I thought about a phone call I had with one of Randy’s advisors. “Randy stopped going to classes. He stopped talking to his friends there. By the time I called Tulane, the dean said he dropped out a month before…before the explosion.”

  “I know, but…” Jake looked at me, confused. “So what is different, now? What made you come back here so convinced he’d been framed? Why did none of this occur to you the first time you were out here, when we thought he was missing? ”

  Anxiety churned my stomach. “I don’t know. Maybe hearing all of the news accounts. They all call him crazy, a disturbed young man, but that’s not what I remember.”

  “Riley,” Jake looked at me from under the brim of his hat. “You loved him. Maybe you don’t want to see it.”

  I shook my head vehemently. “I’m not in denial.”

  “The sketchbook you showed me. That doesn’t seem like Randy was in trouble?”

  “Look, I don’t know what to make of the sketches. They don’t look like anything Randy ever did. I mean, nothing like his work.”

  Jake took his hat off, tossed it on the seat behind him. “But they were in his room, Riley.”

  I nodded, biting back the tears of frustration. “I never told you about something. The last time, what sent me out here last month, was a letter. Randy sent me a letter. That’s how I knew he was in Bayou La Foudre and not Tulane, from the post mark. I got it three days before the explosion.”

  He’d made me flustered and now I just blurted out what I planned to reveal in a less guilty-of-hiding-evidence sort of way.

  Exasperation pulled at his features and he turned to me. “A letter? Is that what you’ve been hiding in your pocket since you got here yesterday?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah.” I watched him, hoping for something other than anger at what I’d hid from him and the investigators, but he only looked disappointed.

  I should’ve told him.

  He took his hand off the wheel and extended it to me, palm up. “And the FBI?”

  Pulling the envelope from my purse, I shook my head. “They don’t know about this, yet.” I pulled out Randy’s letter, opened it and handed it to Jake.

  While he read it, I stared out at the water remembering the slow dread that crept up on me as the days passed with no word from Randy. The hollow knowing in my gut that something was wrong.

  A lone bird call warbled through air and strange bumps appeared in the water’s surface off to my right. Alligator eyes.

  “This is nonsense, Riley,” Jake said quietly. “This…it’s a tirade about the environment. It makes him look more guilty, not less.”

  “Yeah, but he says he’s in trouble, Jake. That he’s in over his head and doesn’t know how to stop it. That’s very clear. Something was going very wrong with whatever he was into.”

  “But then he starts speaking gibberish.” Jake countered. “He goes from saying he needs your help to just…what is this?”

  “It’s in Latin, some of it, anyway.” I took the letter from him. “He used to use it to leave me notes our parents couldn’t read.”

  “Latin?” Jake looked at me askance.

  “We had to learn it in school. Raymond, my older brother, didn’t go to our school and my parents don’t know it, either, so Latin was our secret language sort of.” I heard the forlorn quality to my voice and cleared my throat. “Anyway, it says that, ‘Sorrow follows after him.’”

  “Could be depression,” Jake offered. “What else does it say?”

  I hesitated, drew in a deep breath, and then translated Randy’s message. “Sorrow follows me. In my right hand is lightning, in my left hand death. We are dominion. We are protectors. Understand our message.”

  Jake looked at me, his face exasperated. “That’s it? You have me running around with you for this?” He swore in French. That much I knew.

  The Christmas lights on the boat blinked his expression in and out of shadow.

  “It’s not nothing, Jake.” I jumped to my feet and shook the letter. “Latin is very specific.” I pointed to Randy’s script. “These words, lorem, it means, we. Not the royal we, but more than one person. And this, notstris, it means our. A group.”

  “So?”

  “So, Randy doesn’t say anything about other people in the rest of the letter except for the part in Latin. He was trying to hide this information.”

  “Riley,” Jake’s expression changed, his voice quiet, almost gentle. “You’re operating under the assumption that Randy was coherent when he wrote this. You said yourself, you got this only days before he blew up the plant.”

  “Randy had a history of depression, not hallucinations, or whatever they’re saying pushed him over the edge.” I heard my voice crack and pursed my lips. I felt helpless to explain what was going on because I didn’t know myself. I took in a slow breath. “Look, I can’t tell you I know what happened, or how Randy was involved or not in the plant explosion. I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m here. What I do know is that he was scared and he reached out for help. You don’t do that if you’re insane and intent on setting the world on f
ire.”

  Jake slowed the boat, looked at me with concerned eyes. “This letter only proves he was upset, not that he was upset about something real.”

  “Jake,” I steadied my voice, trying for credibility over plaintive begging. “I would have seen him breaking apart. I remember the last time it happened, when he struggled with depression as a teenager. His behavior, his state of dress, it all screamed trouble.”

  I didn’t have the answers Jake needed to believe Randy didn’t act alone. I just knew in my gut that something happened to my brother out here. Something terrifying that he couldn’t escape.

  “You know the FBI will chalk that letter up to a moment of clarity on Randy’s part. That he scratched it out in between batches of whatever he used to blow up the plant.”

  “But the date, Jake, the date on the letter is a month before the postmark.” I held the envelope in front of me. “Randy wrote this letter to me over a month ago, but it only got mailed days before the explosion.”

  “So what? So he wrote it and mailed it later.”

  “Or, he wrote it out of fear that something might happen to him, as a sort of insurance policy in case he couldn’t contact me himself.”

  Jake stood silent for a beat, thinking. He stared out over the bow of the boat. Finally, he looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “You think someone else sent it to you.”

  I didn’t know what I thought. I shrugged. “I think that if something was going terribly wrong in my life, I’d try to let my family know somehow. I might give someone a letter with instructions to mail it if something happened to me.”

  “But it got to you before something happened.”

  “I—I don’t have an explanation for that part, yet, but I’m sure I’ll find one.”

  Jake slowed the boat and we coasted next to the banks. “He could have picked up a phone.”

  “No…not really. He wouldn’t trust electronics, phones, or mail. At least that’s what I’m thinking.”