“No, you’re not, Lissa. Why not try starting at the beginning?”
She eased back in her chair; she seemed small in it. It was a big barrel of a wicker, the top a little higher than her head, the arms great convolutions of wicker curved halfway around her.
“You’ve heard of the events of February 14, 1929, in Chicago, of course.”
I thought for a second. “The St. Valentine’s Day massacre?”
“Yes... so it’s known. Seven men waited for the arrival of a hijacked truckload of bootleg booze — six gangsters and an optometrist who enjoyed the company and life-style of gangsters. A mongrel dog was also present. Bugs Moran, the prime target in the gangland sortie, should have been there, but he was running late. As he approached the Clark Street warehouse to join the gangsters inside, he saw a big Caddy, police gong on the running board, pulling up and disgorging four men. Two were in police uniform, two in civvies. A fifth man, the driver, stayed in the car. Moran turned and made tracks while his seven pals were blasted with shotguns and submachine guns. Close range. Really gory. The gunfire attracted notice, but when two men in uniform herded two in civilian clothes out, it seemed just another Chicago episode in a time when such raids were commonplace. No one was ever convicted. Al Capone, having masterminded the tactic to wipe out members of a rival gang, had taken himself off to his Florida estate, and at the hour of the massacre was chatting with the Dade County solicitor.”
“A perfect alibi,” I remarked. “But why dwell on violence and murder on a day given to love?”
“Because there was another St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Cody. Way back in 1865.”
“Close of the Civil War,” I said.
“Yes. It made regional headlines, quickly forgotten, especially in the chaotic aftermath of war. But it’s still in the history books, those multi-volume things covering Louisiana history. Occasionally it crops up in Sunday supplement feature stories in one of the larger state newspapers.”
“Who was massacred?”
“Seven young men, Yankee soldier boys sent in to help police a riverfront town in a region already neutralized and under Union control. They were invited to a St. Valentine’s Eve party by a beautiful young woman, Marie Louchard. On the way they were captured by a band of marauders, thieves, cutthroat killers posing as die-hard Rebs. They were herded onto a barge, hands bound, and dropped into the Mississippi. One by one their bodies washed ashore in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove. It’s an inlet, and the river currents twist shoreward.”
Lissa was still more than a hundred years from my fears for Valentina, but I had a foreboding that the threads were going to cross. I wanted Lissa to shut up, but I had to hear on.
And she continued, “The leader of the renegades was one Alberto Batione y Ochoa. He was of two families powerful at the time when the Spanish flag flew over the Cabildo in New Orleans, once the seat of Spanish government in Louisiana. Both families were notorious for their blood lust, sadism, and cruelties, and the genes certainly came to full expression in Alberto...”
She paused, taking a small breath. “Seven years ago, Cody, the first body washed up in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove. Young man. Hands bound. Cause of death, drowning. It was a run-of-the-mill report in the Sword and hardly made the other papers. Then the next year, another body... and the year following... always the same, a satanic valentine for Wickens. Along about the sixth year, the investigative reporter in me began to take notice, frame questions.”
“And you discovered?”
“Nothing right away. Cases unsolved... During the course of a full year what’s one more killing in a society rife with daily murders, rapes, muggings? The seven bodies in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove in life had been as unlike as peas and potatoes, one a street person, another a filling station attendant, a drug peddler, fellow who worked for an outdoor sign company... but my head wouldn’t let go. And I came up with a link, Cody. Dear God, I went into the history of each victim, and I discovered that two were cousins, and I backtracked them, in a growing obsession with this thing. And would you know... every single one of the seven young men was descended from Alberto Batione y Ochoa. Cody, I swear... am I going nuts? The spirits of those seven Yankee soldier boys of 1865 have been about their revenge. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth... spirits real, or spirits imagined in an insane head... the result is as undeniable as men taking a trip to the moon.”
“Seven,” I said. “Seven Yankee boys, seven of Ochoa blood now accounted in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove.”
“You fool,” she said quietly. “You’re trying to tell yourself that it’s over. For some reason, you want to believe it. You’re afraid for Valentina, Cody. I can see it in your eyes. I can smell your fear. I don’t know how or why, but thank God you’re in Wickens this St. Valentine’s. This year, if the pattern holds, this is the season for the pièce de résistance. The woman who betrayed the seven Union soldiers — Marie Louchard — is yet unatoned.”
I pressed back away from Lissa’s sweat-beaded face. “Hush!” I said thickly. “Don’t say anything more.”
“All right, Cody. As you say.”
“No — you must.” My hand caught her arm. “Valentina... Marie Louchard...”
“Five generations, Cody. Direct descent, through Valentina’s paternal grandmother.”
The night was a vacuum. Then Lissa shivered. “I’m cold,” she said.
I was hardly aware when she rose and slipped away into the house.
3
I opened my eyes, and the world outside was deceptively pleasant: friendly sun, blue skies, a fluttering of birds outside the bedroom window.
The sun’s brilliance suggested midmorning. Puffy-eyed, I stumbled into the shower. Sleep, when it came finally, had been deep, dark, a flight into temporary death.
Steady now. The little rituals: shower, shave, brush the teeth, get dressed, comb the hair.
While I made the automatic motions, I tried to cast my thought in the mold of Lissa. More than two years now since the fifth body had washed ashore in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove, quite a bit of rope for a reporter of Lissa’s gifts. It wasn’t difficult to comprehend what had sparked her first curiosity. Five corpses. All young males. All drowned. Same location, same time each year. Who were they, really? Did they have anything in common? And the common ancestry had hooked Lissa.
She had probably wanted to go at it full-time, but a metropolitan editor involved in the large scene wouldn’t have seen it that way. What you smoking these days, Lissa? What’s this poppycock? Even if you devise a spook tale out of a riverfront town, so what? Louisiana abounds in spook tales, stories of voodoo queens, ghosts in the spreading live oak where Creole aristocrats fought duels, haunted mansions. If we’re to go the sleazy tabloid route, why not go out to one of the rat holes today, buy a love potion or pin-stuck doll, and tell our readers about it? You should be in Baton Rouge, Lissa, telling me who is behind the sugar quota bill; you should be in Houston finding out where the oil brokers from Louisiana are meeting with their buddies in Texas; you should be tracing the ownership of the plot on which Parks and Recreation, City of New Orleans, is going to squander another million, sure as a piss ant crawls. Now get the hell to Baton Rouge, Lissa — and I can’t pass up the old compliment that you’re pretty when you’re angry.
So it would have gone, whetting her interest the more, returning her spare time and thoughts again and again to Wickens.
When I came out into the upper hall, I heard the whirr of a vacuum cleaner downstairs. That would be Reba. She and Clyde, middle-aged couple, were the domestic staff, having a small home adjacent to the Marlowe place. Reba arrived each day and Clyde pruned, raked, fixed leaks, and painted as need arose, doing a little truck farming and fishing.