“Not a single thing different,” muttered Vangie to herself.
She bent over the cricket box to wrinkle her nose at the remembered acrid smell. She straightened, belatedly went back for her attaché case, wandered down the aisle toward the rear where the voice had come from. There was a showcase with hard candies and tinned fancy cakes and a giant glass jar of pickled eggs on top. She sucked a piece of candy as she moved past another case filled with buckets, tubs, tinware, white-ash hoops for hoop nets, netting for gill nets and trammel nets, wire poultry netting for crawfish traps.
Through an open doorway in the right wall were three rough wooden steps down to a small damp room where a row of live-bait boxes took up the space except for a plank walkway around them.
Maman, in her mid-forties and blessed with remnants of Vangie’s same beauty, was bent over one of the bait boxes with a small scoop net in her hand. She was a warm, vital woman with a lined, bright, open face, wearing a cotton dress of no particular style. She glanced up at Vangie in the door frame at the head of the steps, then back at her work with a small wry welcoming smile.
“Too much tracas for little-little money, to dis?”
“Yeah, I know,” said Vangie softly. “Jesus, do I know.”
With a twirl almost like Vangie’s when she was dancing, Maman spun around at the sound of Vangie’s voice. A slow radiant smile illuminated her features. She dropped her little scoop net, darted toward her daughter with open arms.
“Vangie! So beautiful you have become!”
They met at the foot of the steps; Maman enfolded Vangie in her arms. Vangie felt a flush mantling her features, embarrassed and ashamed to be bringing her big-city trouble to this place.
“Ten years you gone,” exclaimed Maman, stepping back from their embrace. Her eyes twinkled. “You bring me some pretty little grandchildren, non?”
Vangie gave an uneasy laugh. “Um... not quite yet, Maman.”
Maman held her at arm’s length, impressed and pride-filled. She looked over Vangie’s shoulder, saw the attaché case.
“A secretary to an important man, my Vangie?”
“Ah... non, Maman. A... singer. And a... a dancer...”
“Singer? Dancer? Maybe I see you on the TV?”
“Uh... not quite yet, Maman.” She added uncomfortably, “I’d... like to stay for a while...”
“Stay? Of course you stay!” Maman gestured toward the front of the store. “Ten year ago you walk out dat door, you. Now you back, Maman gonna keep you, not let you go!”
She nodded happily to herself and bent again over the live-bait tank. She deftly scooped the dead shad from the surface with her little net and tossed them aside, casting sideways glances at Vangie and speaking with her eyes on her work.
“You think Maman not know how hard it is to make your way in dat outside world, dere? You got some trouble, Vangie, you tell your maman, we fix it up real quick, non?”
“Yeah, I got trouble, Maman...” She paused, added, “No trouble with the law, trouble with some men who want...” She paused again. “They don’t know where I am, so I just need a... place nobody outside the parish knows about, okay?”
Maman winked at her gaily. “Okay, you,” she said.
They both laughed. Vangie spoke in a new tone.
“Et Papa? Where’s he?”
Maman laid aside her scoop and straightened up. She looked at Vangie with great love and pride in her face. She took her daughter’s arm. “Out checkin’ de set lines, where else? Dat catfish, he been runnin’ real good, him.”
“Where?” demanded Vangie eagerly.
“Bayou Tremblant, by dat boscoyo knee of cypress where Dede catch de ten-poun’ bass on dat little-little perch hook.” They mounted the steps together. “We got time for one demitasse of café, non? Den you go surprise him, you.”
Vangie only nodded silently, her eyes blurred with tears of relief and love and release and safety. She was moved beyond anything she could have imagined. Arms around one another, they went toward the living quarters at the back of the store.
Dain stopped the car nose-up next to a couple of others on the steep grassy side of the levee above the Breaux Bridge boat landing. As he got out and locked it he could see, downslope beyond him, a concrete boat launching ramp and a U-shaped dock with a dozen outboard motorboats moored. On the galerie of the store a couple of loungers paused in their checker game to look at him and make comment with appropriate gestures.
He went down the bank on his slippery leather-soled oxfords to the edge of the water, moving warily, obviously out of his element. Stepping onto the dock, he stopped dead. Inverness was sitting in a flat-bottom scow moored to the dock, grinning at him like Brer Rabbit from the briar patch. Dain walked out with deliberation, seeking his stance.
Inverness was going to be a complicating factor, for sure. He was a cop, with a cop’s ways. On the other hand, maybe without him Dain would discover nothing at all in this unfamiliar world — he would be as competent in this environment as he was in any other. Dain stopped on the dock above him.
“Back to San Francisco, huh?” said Inverness ironically.
“Change of plans, but how about you? I thought you’d accepted Zimmer as a suicide, pure and simple.”
“We still need Broussard’s statement. Since she’s Cajun, I figured she’d hightailed it for home. Most of ‘em do when they think they’re in trouble. Course I’m not telling you anything new, since you’re here too.”
“A manhunter’s intuition,” said Dain, ironic in turn, then he had to chuckle. “It was her name. Broussard. Cajun. Originally, the Acadians. Run out of Nova Scotia by the British in the seventeen hundreds. French descent. Still speak a patois. Evangeline.”
“Yeah,” said Inverness. “Settled in the bayou country to farm, but they got flooded out every spring so they embraced the swamp — fishing and hunting and moss-gathering and fur-trapping. Very in-turned, family very big with them. For a city boy, you know a lot about Cajuns.”
“For a New Orleans cop, you know a lot about swamp folk.”
“I’m not married, got no family, so I fish and hunt. That means the bayou country. For damn near five years, every weekend and holiday and vacation I can wangle, I’m right out here.”
“Couldn’t the Lafayette parish police get her statement?”
Inverness grinned. “This gives me an excuse to get out into the swamp. That explains me, but what about you?”
“She’s worth money to me,” said Dain easily.
“Ah, yes. Money money money. The older I get...” He didn’t finish the thought. “Anyway, I think Broussard’s folks run a little general store somewhere out of Henderson. But since Broussard is one of the four most common Cajun names, don’t make book on it.”
“I don’t make book on anything,” said Dain, “not any more.”
“If I’m right, the easiest way to their store is by boat — almost all their trade is with swamp people working the bayous.” He jerked his head. “Get in. May as well look for her together — it’s a hell of a lot of backwoods out there.”
Dain started to unfasten the painter from the stanchion on the dock. “If we don’t find her?”
“I’ve got a motel room at Lafayette for the night.”
Dain jumped down lightly into the boat, shoved it away from the dock. A slow eddy caught the prow, swung it out into the river. Inverness was priming the motor.
“What if she takes off into the swamp instead of talking?”