Eleven-year-old Charles had responded with behaviors common to childhood. He had cried, thrown down his guilty flowers and run away.
Now Charles, the grown man, hunkered down by the tombstone to look at Babe’s portrait, and a young king of the world looked back at him. The symptoms the old man had endured might have been in this younger man’s future had he lived another fifteen or twenty years.
“Henry? Who do you think killed Babe Laurie?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
Charles was about to speak when Henry signaled for silence. He could hear voices from the bridge over Upland Bayou, and Betty Hale’s was the loudest.
“Now stay together,” said Betty, shepherding her flock of ten guests across the bridge. One damn fool was veering off on the side road. “You don’t want to go in that direction, Mr. Porter. Three feet off the path and you’re into Finger Bayou.”
Mr. Porter was entranced by the worn wooden arrow pointing the way to the old Shelley place. Perhaps he took it for a traffic sign, for she could see he was longing to obey it despite the No Trespassing sign posted on a near tree.
“Is the bayou very deep, Mrs. Hale?”
“Well, no. But you could break your backside trying to get yourself out of there.” Yes, he would definitely crack his ass if he fell on his face.
“Now if you’ll all gather round, please.” Betty pointed up through a break in the trees. “That house is where the bats come from.” Cameras began to click photographs of the roof and its round window as souvenirs of last evening’s bat races.
“It’s more than a hundred and fifty years old,” said Betty. “It was built by the Trebec family. Miss Augusta is the last of the line. When she dies, the house passes over to the state of Louisiana.”
“So she’s leaving it to the state as a historical site?” asked the woman from Arizona.
“No, her father arranged that in his will,” said Betty. “He put all his money in a trust fund. Augusta only got a caretaker’s salary.”
“Some caretaker,” said an elderly woman, eyes focussed through field glasses. “There are holes in that roof.”
“Oh, the whole place is a wreck,” said Betty. “The roof is the least of it. It’s a damn shame to see one of those beauties go to ruin that way. Augusta Trebec is the Antichrist of the St. Jude Parish Historical Society. They invoke her name every time they cuss.”
The line got a smattering of laughter, and Betty decided to leave it in the tour speech.
“The house has quite a history, and I – ”
“Could Cass Shelley be alive?” Mr. Porter was asking.
“Not likely. Now Augusta became the mistress of Trebec House under very sinister – ”
“Are there any alligators in that bayou?” asked the intrepid Mr. Porter “You think maybe an alligator could’ve eaten her body?”
Though she wanted to stuff a sock in Porter’s mouth, Betty smiled on him with benevolence. “A gator could eat you whole. When he clamps down on you, he goes into a death roll and drags you under.” She liked that image of Porter. “But if the gator isn’t hungry just then, he’ll stuff your body in some underwater hole or a cranny in the bayou wall ” Either way the gator went with that, Porter would be just as dead. “And then he’ll bide his time till your body rots up real tender.”
Now she had everyone’s attention. Bloodthirsty bastards, bless their little hearts and credit cards. “But an alligator didn’t eat Cass Shelley. Fred and Ray Laurie killed every single gator in these bayous a long time ago. Finger Bayou runs up near Trebec House. Before Cass died, I used to take my tour groups up there. Augusta won’t allow strangers on the place anymore, though. I guess the stoning spooked her. She stopped the herbicide on the bayou, and now it’s choked off with water hyacinth, impassable by boat. You see those plants floating on the water? And most of the land surrounding the house is swamp, infested with poisonous snakes. So I repeat, you don’t want to stray off on your own. Now what was I saying before we got off on gators?”
“The house,” said the man from Maine.
“Right. Now the house and a few acres was all that was left of the original plantation. The town sprung up, lot by lot, as the Trebecs sold off the land.”
“You said the house was ruined,” said the man from Maine. “So Miss Trebec is too poor to maintain it?”
“Poor? Augusta? Oh, no.” Betty laughed. “She’s a master of shady land deals. She owns all those cane fields out by the highway. Bought her first forty acres with seed money inherited from her mother. Then she sued a chemical factory for fouling the water on her land. That gave her cash for more land near another factory. Over the years, she’s filed lawsuits against most of the chemical plants along the River Road. They always settle out of court. Today, Augusta owns most all of St. Jude Parish, except for Dayborn and Owltown.”
“Could you lose a body in that bayou?” asked Mr. Porter, impatient to get back to the subject of murder. “Maybe sink it down with weights?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Betty. “The sheriff was all through Finger Bayou dragging for that body. He would have turned it up.”
“I can understand her not wanting to spend her own money on a house that isn’t hers,” said the man from Maine, still trying to make sense of the ruined mansion. “But if the woman is rich, there’s nothing to keep her here. So why doesn’t she just leave?”
“Oh, Augusta won’t go till the house falls down. She could set a match to it, but that would offend her sporting nature.”
The man from Maine gaped. “You mean she wants it to – ”
“What about quicksand?”
“No, Mr. Porter,” said Betty. “There might be a bog or two back there in the swamp, but even a bog will yield up a carcass eventually. Of course, only a Cajun could walk that swamp – or Augusta. She’s what you might call a Cajun without portfolio.”
The rest of the group had their binoculars trained on the top window of Trebec House. One scrawny woman from California was shaking her head sadly. “Surely the historical society will restore the house when this crazy woman dies.”
“Can’t,” said Betty. “It would take too much money. They waived their rights in favor of Augusta’s proposal for a bird habitat. Those ornithologists won’t waste a dime on Trebec House. They’ll just watch it rot. That’s the deal they made with Augusta.”
“So what do you think happened to the body?”
“It is a mystery, isn’t it, Mr. Porter?” And if it were ever solved it would cut into her business, now evenly divided between bird-watchers, amateur detectives and the visiting New Church seminar suckers.
“Is it possible to lose a body in that swamp, say if you sunk it in a bog, and – ”
“What goes into this ground will come up again, Mr. Porter. I’ll show you what I mean.”
She led them through the skirt of trees and into the cemetery. “We generally bury bodies aboveground. If we sink ‘em in the earth, they just rise again, and it doesn’t matter how many stones you put in the coffin to weight it down. Now some of these bodies here were buried in a traditional manner, but you see that big slab of concrete? That’s to keep the coffin belowground.”
“Couldn’t there have been one alligator hiding in the bayou?” asked the hopeful Mr. Porter.