They had cleared the semisolid ground and passed into a watery, primeval forest of widely spaced cypress trees and small grassy islands. He could not immediately detect the path she mentioned. Then he saw the chunks of rock, more like man-made mortar, colored green with slime and moss. She was using them as stepping stones.
“These chunks came from the foundation of the original house.”
Augusta’s feet grasped the rocks like a second pair of hands. He fared less well, but with practice, his toes got the hang of it. Both his arms shot out as balancing beams until he stepped onto soggy but more solid ground, a small rise jutting over a sea of water hyacinth. A pondlike area had been cleared of the choking plant life covering the rest of the water. This must be the narrow tributary which ran alongside the road to Cass Shelley’s house.
“This is the tip of Finger Bayou.” Augusta’s lips curled inward as she sucked in air to make a sound like a child’s fingers rubbing the skin of a balloon. She pointed to a log floating toward them, though the dark glass surface of the bayou showed no trace of a current. Augusta made the strange sound again, and he realized that she was summoning the log.
And now Charles could see that it had large reptilian eyes. The beast hung in the water only four feet from his toes, and there was time to remember that this was not a zoo with bars to keep the wild things in their place. This thing went wherever it wanted. In this primordial habitat, Charles had slipped to a humbler notch on the food chain. “Don’t you worry about having a flesh eater in the neighborhood?”
“You’ve been listening to Betty Hale,” said Augusta. “Alligators prefer dead humans to live ones. But even if you were three days dead and real tasty, this one wouldn’t touch you. It’s his hibernation period. He only surfaces every two days. He knows when I’m coming with the chicken. Won’t eat but a few pieces, and sometimes nothing at all, but he’s gotten used to me over the years, and we never disappoint one another ”
“Could Cass’s body have been eaten by an alligator?”
“No, there were no gators in those days. They were wiped out before Cass died. You can trust me to know the exact count of every living thine that crawls in the swamp and swims in the bayou. I put this alligator in myself when he was small. That was after I cut off the herbicide to give him shelter from those poaching Laurie brothers.”
“Then what could have happened to her body?”
“You won’t get the solution to every mystery, Charles. Just let it go.”
“But I’m not made that way. I need that solution.”
Augusta stepped onto a small man-made platform of rock chunks, some with corners, a wharf of sorts, and she threw the small bits of chicken to the alligator. Its massive jaws opened to expose the sharp teeth, hundreds of them. The jaws clamped down and the water exploded in sudden violence. A tail appeared and Charles could see the enormous size of the monster. The leviathan’s tail splashed down, hitting the water with the force of a hammer, raining frothy particles far and wide. The water bubbled and boiled, and when the foam subsided, the alligator had vanished. Large waves slapped the side of the bayou, and the water hyacinth bobbed and rocked in the wake of waves.
As Augusta had promised – a sight to remember.
“Magnificent, isn’t he? If that fool Ray Laurie or his brother Fred knew the gator was here, he’d be dead by this time tomorrow. I trust you to keep my secrets, Charles, and I will keep yours.”
“Actually, I wouldn’t have any secrets if you hadn’t told Lilith that I didn’t know Mallory. I always meant to ask why you did that.”
“Mallory – I can’t get used to that name. I always think of her as little Kathy Shelley.”
“Perhaps it was her father’s name?”
“Can’t help you there. Cass never mentioned Kathy’s father. I couldn’t even say if there was a marriage. Never thought to pry. Cass was pregnant with Kathy and carrying her maiden name when she came back here to practice medicine.”
As he followed her out of the swamp, he well understood the need for a guide. He had no sense of direction in this alien world. Things slithered here, and the plant life reached out to him, pointing accusing fronds at his eyes. He swatted the back of his neck where a tiny winged thing had bitten him, and now there was a spot of red on his palm. Bloodsucking insects were so unfair in the month of November.
When the house was in sight, he walked abreast of her to the place he had left his shoes and socks. “Do you think the father might have had something to do with Cass Shelley’s death? A love affair gone wrong?”
“No, that doesn’t work for me,” said Augusta, looking down at his wet socks and ruined leather. “The man who fathered Cass’s baby would be a stranger here. Not likely he could bring thirty friends along without someone taking notice. And how would a stranger get thirty locals to go through with a thing like that?”
“The father couldn’t have been a Dayborn man?”
Augusta shook her head. “Cass left town when she was eighteen and didn’t come back till she was twenty-eight. Most everyone else who went off to school never came back. Tom did, but he was home four or five years before Cass.”
“Could there be a connection between Cass’s murder and Babe’s?”
“Doubt it. Cass had no enemies. Now her death was a genuine mystery. But Babe was such a mean-spirited bastard, no one was too surprised when he turned up dead.” She waved her hand with impatience to rid herself of this topic, which obviously bored her. “So where are you off to now, Charles?”
He hesitated for a moment. Well, he supposed he could hold her alligator as a hostage against a secret of his own.
“I’m checking out of the bed and breakfast. Henry invited me to stay with him, but I don’t think he wants that generally known.”
Augusta only nodded, with no curiosity in her face. “Well, that can wait, can’t it? I’m just gonna put the horse in his stall, and then I’d be pleased if you’d join me for a meal. It’s all cooked – I just have to turn a light under it.”
“Thank you.”
“And then I’m gonna send you over to Earl’s Dry Goods. I know he’s got a pair of jeans that would fit you, and maybe some sturdy boots.”
They walked together over the sodden ground, which became more solid, less watery with each step toward the mansion. The only approach to Trebec House was the path from the cemetery. Every patch of surrounding ground would be rough going for a car unaccustomed to lakes in the grass and no traction to speak of. And there was only one road into Cass Shelley’s house. Beyond that it was swamp and bayou. “I suppose the killer took Cass’s body away in a vehicle.”
“Well, he didn’t dump it here in the swamp. If you put a body into this ground, eventually it will bob up to say, ‘Hello again.’ ”
“Is it possible, just possible, that Cass could have survived?”
“No, it isn’t.” Augusta was firm in this. “There was so much blood, Tom Jessop even gave up little Kathy for dead. Cass could not be alive.” And there was a trace of menace when she said, “Don’t you even suggest that to her child.”
Cassandra Shelley’s child turned to the north, where Trebec House crouched behind the oak trees, hidden but for the attic window. Reflected clouds created the illusion of movement and life in that round pane of glass.
Mallory carried the dog’s body into the dense foliage at the far side of her mother’s house to block any view from the mansion’s dark window, so like an eye. In early childhood, she had believed that eye had followed her about. She remembered it well, and somewhere between heightened instinct and imagination, she believed the window-eye also remembered her.
She sat down beside her dog and ran one hand over the scarred pelt, still warm to the touch. It was a comfort, this tactile deception of life. She did not look at his eyes, for with the passage of only a little time, they had lost their roundness and could not fool her anymore. She continued to pet him.