He could hear the buzzing of flies in the next room. If anything had happened to Arlette, he felt, his heart would tear open like the ground had torn in the quake, and he would die on the spot. His nerves tingled as he walked past the big butcher-block kitchen table to the arched doorway that led to the dining room. There, by the dining table, he found Penelope, Gros-Papa’s younger half-sister, who had moved into the house to look after him after his wife died. She had been shot several times in the back. She had her apron on when she died.
Gros-Papa lay in the front parlor, all three hundred pounds of him, in the jacket and tie he wore even on informal occasions. His silver-rimmed glasses were perched firmly on his stern nose. Shot in the chest. The watch chain he wore across his big stomach was gone and, Nick presumed, the watch with it, the watch that played “Claire de Lune” when you opened it.
Nick went to the gun cabinet in Gros-Papa’s study, but the guns had all been taken. The drawers of the desk and file cabinets had been opened, and their contents strewn on the floor. Gros-Papa’s second son Gilly—short for Guillaume—was on the stair, as if he’d tried to run upstairs and been shot as he fled. Near misses had punched holes in the wall above the stair and knocked down a small watercolor that someone had made of the house a hundred years ago.
Nick’s head swam. He hadn’t really dared to breathe since he’d entered the house. He forced himself to take in a breath, and then he searched the house for Arlette and her mother. He went to Arlette’s room first, found the closets ransacked, the drawers emptied. The scent of his daughter still hung in the room. His own image, a photo of Nick, gazed up at him from its frame.
The other rooms had been looted as well. Jewelry was gone, and probably money. Nick found no living persons, no additional bodies. Arlette and Manon and the others of the household were gone. They’d evacuated, then. Got away before this had happened. Relief sang through Nick’s blood. But the relief died as a horrifying thought rose in his mind.
Where had the killers come from? Arlette and her family were moving down the bayou by boat, toward the White River and the Arkansas. They had probably left sometime yesterday. If the killers had been coming up the White, they would have encountered the David family, and the encounter might well have been violent. But Nick and Jason had seen no sign of any violent encounter, or any encounter at all. Which meant that the killers were coming down the bayou, traveling on Arlette’s heels, possibly only a few hours behind. They hadn’t turned down the White, because otherwise they would have met Jason and Nick. So that meant they had gone upriver, right on Arlette’s trail…
He felt his lips peeling back from his teeth in a snarl. No. He would find the killers before they could find Arlette, and do what was necessary.
Nick went down the stair, avoiding Gilly’s body, and then crouched for a moment next to Gros-Papa. He steeled himself, then reached out and touched the old man’s large dead hand. Cool to the touch. He took the hand in his fingers and tried to raise it, but there was still a faint stiffness in the corpse: the rigor not yet passed. The death had been fairly recent, maybe last night.
Nick straightened, felt his head swim, then walked carefully back to the kitchen. Light glared in from the screen door. He paused by the butcher-block table for a moment, tried to clear his head and decide what he needed to do, and then he looked down and saw the envelope that rested on the table. The word Daddy was written on the back in Arlette’s hand.
Much of his burden of dread fell instantly away. He felt physically lighter, as if someone had removed a burden from his shoulders.
Arlette had left him a message, and if she’d done that she wouldn’t have been herded away at gunpoint. He picked up the envelope and headed out the screen door.
Jason stood in the shade of one of the oaks, pale and nervous. His lips were blue as if he’d been standing up to his neck in cold water. “What happened?”
“Three people killed,” Nick said. And then, in answer to the question he saw in the boy’s horrified eyes, he added, “Not Arlette. Not Manon. They must have left before it happened.”
“Is it gas again?” Jason asked. “Poison or something?”
Nick’s fingers trembled as he opened the unsealed envelope. He shook his head. “They were shot. Robbers.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Jason said. “Jesus, Nick, I’m sorry.”
Nick’s fingers were trembling so hard he couldn’t manage to get the paper out of the envelope. He paused, took a breath, pressed his hands together with the envelope between them. Then tried again, and succeeded. His daughter’s round, exuberant script opened before him like a flower. Daddy,
I am sorry but we have to leave. The phone exchange was flooded and I couldn’t call you to let you know, and the water plant is flooded too and the water is not safe to drink. We are going in boats to Pine Bluff and I am drawing you a map.
I love you and I hope to see you soon. Don’t worry about me, I will be safe. Love, your daughter.
Below the words were a row of hearts and then the map, which looked as if it had been traced off a highway map. Nick crushed the paper to his face, inhaled the scent of paper and ink and, maybe, Arlette. Don’t worry about me, I will be safe. It was up to Nick to make certain that remained true.
“Come on,” he told Jason, “we have to hurry.” And he began walking off before Jason began asking questions.
Nick didn’t want to leave the bodies unburied, to leave the house open. But his duty was to the living, and every moment might count.
There was decay in Toussaint’s general store, and for a moment Nick felt faint, expecting more bodies. But then he realized that the smell was coming from dead minnows in the galvanized bait tanks that lined one side of the store. The bayou hadn’t reached high enough to wash the minnows out. Toussaint consisted of about a dozen buildings grouped around a crossroads, most of them owned by the David family. People’s farms and private residences spread for miles up and down the roads, and they all gave “Toussaint” as their address, but what passed for the village itself was tiny. It was tinier now than it had been. The brick office building had been wrecked, along with its post office, and so had the brick filling station. The David family, who between them owned all these properties, had taken a couple big hits.
The general store had come off its foundations in the quake and had collapsed to one side. The roof sagged. Clapboards and shingles were missing. The flood had risen to the middle of the doorframe. Nick tied the boat to one of the supports of the sagging porch, then dropped into the cool water. He felt ahead with his feet as he carefully made his way into the store’s interior.
When he returned he was armed with weapons that had been stored high above the flood. He had a Winchester Model 94 lever-action 30-30, a pump shotgun, and a couple of revolvers, a pair of .38s, one large and one small. He hadn’t handled firearms since he’d left high school, and they felt heavier than he’d remembered, solid and purposeful. The weight of them in his hands didn’t make him nervous, but he found they didn’t give him an increased sense of security, either.
In a rucksack he carried boxes of ammunition, holsters for the pistols, a cleaning kit, and a sling for the rifle. Holding all this over his head, he waded back to the front porch and put it all on the speedboat’s foredeck.
Jason looked down at the pile of weaponry with a stunned expression, as if he was trying to work out what horrible, apocalyptic movie scenario he’d just wandered into. “Jeez,” he said. Nick hoisted himself onto the boat. Water sluiced from his soaked clothing. “Can you take the boat down the bayou?” he asked. “Back the way we came? I’ve got to sort out these guns.”