He was wearing pajama bottoms, barefoot. It was sufficient. “The keys are in the pickup.”
He drove daredevil fast, but not recklessly, with the expertise instilled by terrains in many parts of the world.
“Tell me,” he said.
I hung on to the seat, other hand braced against the instrument panel. “You won’t believe me.”
“Try me. I don’t know how you came by this knowledge of the LeMoines place, or how I’m so certain you know that she’s out there. But tell me — who did she meet?”
“Keith Vereen.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Very.”
“Why did he do it?”
“Because he couldn’t help himself.”
“A man can always help himself, Cody.”
“What if he’s not entirely himself? What if he is traumatized in a car accident eight years ago and dies? What if seven residual life forces, psychic echoes, spirits, ghosts, whatever the hell you choose to call them, are present inside Keith, dwelling in a level just below his own sentience, when the doctors slam an electric charge and restart his heart?”
He didn’t slow the pickup. Water showered, glitters in the night, as we slashed through a shallow ford.
“He was never the same after the accident, that much is for sure,” George admitted.
“Call him spirit possessed, or simply mad. The result is the same. He was compelled to search out seven male descendants of the man who murdered seven Yankee soldier boys on a St. Valentine’s Eve a long time ago. He had to balance the scales, even the score.”
“If any of this is true, Cody... if I’m not suffering a nightmare... that old massacre, involving Marie Louchard, it happened over a hundred years ago.”
“They had time, those seven — eternity. But they had no instrument — until Keith’s moment of death became a latchkey.”
“And Lissa?”
“Getting too uncomfortably close. She didn’t suspect Keith and forewarned him with a phone call. He simply drove out to U.S. 61, the only main road from New Orleans, and watched for her car. It was simple then to follow her into the parking garage, to say hello as she was getting from her car, to put his hands around her throat. She wouldn’t have been able to make a sound.”
The mailbox and rust-eaten wagon-wheel arch reared in the glare of the headlights. I was out of the truck, running, before George had fully stopped it.
I saw Keith’s Mercedes parked in the weed-grown ruin of the driveway leading to the shack.
Then I saw the moving shadows, human figures, in the moon-frozen darkness just beyond and to one side of the shack.
He was carrying her across his shoulder. She wasn’t moving. How hard had he slugged her?
“Valentina!”
I had outdistanced George, for all his conditioning. Keith turned slowly to face me.
“Stay back, Cody. Don’t come any closer.”
“Put her down, Keith. Back off. Please — you’ve known her all her life. She’s your friend. She loved and trusted you.”
“She’s a Louchard, Cody. It’s in the records. Go look at the records, as I did.”
His every word had a different inflection. Seven inflections? Seven voices speaking through his lips?
“Kill the bastard!” George had reached my side. “Take him, Cody.”
I had already decided it was the only way. A jump ahead of George, I was at Keith.
He stood unmoving.
A veil came, a gossamer shimmering through which Keith’s image rippled and flowed. I gasped from a force that struck me.
I saw the moon spin, and knew that I had slammed onto my back. I heard bamboo rattling a fierce tempo. Wild palms bent and reared like slashing shadows. Night creatures were screaming, and a hard, quick wind showered jungle debris across my face, against the side of the LeMoines shack.
I realized that George was sprawled beside me, frothing incoherent sound.
“Stay back,” Keith said. “She has Louchard blood in her veins. She is the guiltiest of all, and this is the moment reserved for her.”
He turned and was starting to carry her away.
A bellow of anguish came from George’s lips. “You fool! You mad fool! She is not Louchard, she’s my bastard daughter. Not a part of the Louchard line. She was born nine months after a furlough — neither Elva nor I meant for it to happen. It was only that once. Charles Marlowe proved out infertile. Maybe he guessed, before the end, why he and Elva had not had other children. She’s mine, you son of a bitch!”
The clearing seemed to suck a breath. Keith had heard. He hesitated, staring about as if for outside guidance.
This time my contact with him was hard, satisfying: he, I, and Valentina went down in a tangle. He thrashed, slipped free. His wild kick caught me on the cheek, breaking the skin. I heard viney tearings, and Keith was gone.
George was on his knees, gathering her up, cradling her against his chest, rocking in anguish.
“Oh, my baby! My little girl!...”
And she moaned softly.
As the jetliner entered the traffic pattern over the familiar grid of Washington National Airport, Valentina said quietly, “We’re back, Cody.”
“Yes.”
“It’s all over.”
“Yes.”
“Poor Keith” — her voice echoed a gentle pain — “making the river, trying to swim to freedom — or maybe not — washing up in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove.”
“We agreed to let the past bury the past,” I reminded her.
“And so we will. We’ll close the door for keeps and take up life as we’re meant to — after you tell me one thing. Just who am I, Keith?”
“You’re the daughter of two wonderful people.”
I touched her cheek. I imprinted every detail of her face in my mind forever.
“To borrow from Gershwin... You is my woman, Val.”
Her lips parted just a little; her eyes deepened. “And I got to love one man ’til I die.” A tiny crinkling at the corners of her mouth. “Aside from calling the Mississippi an old man, that poet fellow did have his perceptions.”