Chapter Two: I'll Stand Bayou
"I don't know, Cay," Raven LeFleur shook her head and handed Cayenne a heaping plate of steaming Barbequed Shrimp as they sat and enjoyed a late dinner at Raven's house. "Depression is a slippery thing. If Penelope had been drinking, or under the influence of drugs, who know what state of mind she could have been in? Everyone is in shock during the first part of a disaster, but now people are settling in to new lives and the reality is hitting people hard."
Bryant Petronowitz, Raven's boyfriend who had joined them for dinner, agreed as he passed a basket of hot French bread. "I know lots of folks who are really struggling. Bad times, here in the Gulf. Here, take the bread and dip it in the juices. That's the best way to eat it."
Raven pointed at Cay's plate. "That's a recipe I got in New Orleans from a class I took with Food Historian Kathy Boyd one winter. I know you've been missing home so I made is just for you." She passed another bowl filled with a bright mound of yellow corn. "Here's a little maquechoux to go along with that."
Cayenne scooped herself up a serving as she talked. "I'm thinking it is probably a suicide despite Nicolette's doubts. Still, I feel I owe it to her to go and look around where Penelope died. Maybe the beaded shoe will miraculously rise to the surface and I can close this case out."
Raven's eyes twinkled. "Her brother was that hot, huh?"
Cay choked on the spoonful of maquechoux she had just put in her mouth, and then the taste of the dish made her forget the comment. "This is to die for, Raven." Cay moaned, then caught herself. "Forget I said that.
She continued. "Penelope was found in the swampy land near the northeast shore of Calcasieu Lake. There's a way by road to get near the spot where Penelope died, but when Bernard heard I'd never been out on the swamp, he arranged for a tour by boat with one of his guys."
"A piece of advice, love," Bryant said, as he took a sip of Abita beer. "Don't dangle your hands in the water."
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The police had not yet designated Elena as a missing person, so Cayenne thought she'd check out Penelope's alleged suicide first and wait to see what unfolded with the other missing candidate for Queen. She accepted Bernard's offer for a boat guide around the marshy areas south of Lake Charles where Penelope had been found. She looked forward to the adventure even though its purpose was grisly. Being a tourist had been the last thing on her mind these past months. She would run with Roux along the trail bordering Lake Charles and loved to watch the sailboats slicing through the water on mild days. But that was as close as she came to any thing remotely maritime in this part of Louisiana.
Raven told Cay that Lake Charles was named after Charles Sallier, who had befriended Pirate Jean Lafitte. Sallier owned a homestead near a large lake that fed into the Calcasieu River which served as a convenient highway to the Gulf of Mexico, out of the easy view of authorities. Lafitte, who preferred to be called a privateer instead of a pirate, cached his treasures along "Charlie's Lake" as he referred to it. Over time, the town grew to be named Lake Charles. Jean Lafitte was still a popular and famous figure around these parts. There was a local krewe named the Krewe du Lac that prided themselves on dressing like Lafitte and pulling off good natured stunts around town. Lake Charles threw a festival each May called "Contraband Days" which sported a pirate theme. And of course, the casinos that dotted the area sported one-arm bandits and gladly relieved gamblers of their gold and booty.
Cayenne headed south down unfamiliar roads and followed the directions to Bernard's dock on the northeastern shore of Calcasieu Lake. She spotted a small sign for Creole Country Adventures and pulled her car into a gravel pullout.
She was disappointed Bernard would not be her guide. She would feel safer to have the big man around. He looked as if an alligator rose from the swamp he could swat it back down with his right hand while munching on a oyster poorboy with his left. Bernard said he already had a private tour lined out, but he would arrange for his cousin Frank, one of his best guides, to take her out.
Seems like everyone out here was related or went to school together or played in a band together at some time, Cay thought as she parked her car and got out.
Cayenne had dressed casually for the outing. She wore a lightly lined nylon jacket over a sweater had and donned a beat up pair of running shoes figuring there was a good chance she would get wet. The temperature in January could be either warm or cool, but today the numbers landed squarely in the middle. A grey day, neither cold or damp.
She followed the path to the shore of the lake and spotted a storage shed. To the right of the shed descended a rickety set of metal steps. Cayenne gingerly took them down to a floating dock. She spied a figure squatting down to check the gear of one of the two boats tethered at the side of the dock. She called out, "Hello? Hello?"
The figure rose and turned toward her. He was a tall, lanky fellow in his early thirties with dark eyes, black curly hair and almost mocha colored skin. He wore a green slicker , a pair of white rubber boots and a pair of jeans that hung on him just the way they are supposed to hang on a man. He smiled at her and attempted a wave, which was more of a gesture since he still held a thick hemp rope in his right hand. Cay felt the dock shimmy and almost fell into the water from sudden vertigo. She whispered a prayer of thanks to Bernard for being busy today. Her love life had been non-existent since she left New Orleans, but this guy could make her fall off the wagon hard.
"Are you Frank Estopinal?" she called out, praying with all of her Yankee heart that it was.
"That's me. You must be Cayenne?" He dropped the rope to the ground, stepping on it so it didn't fall back into the water and extended his hand. It was calloused and large, but warm and enveloped her smaller hand. Cay was thinking very bad thoughts as she shook Frank's hand.
Frank looked down at her feet. He frowned then slanted a slightly disapproving look at her, creases wrinkling his eyes. "Those shoes won't do. Let me get you some proper boots. What size shoe do you wear?"
"Uh, sevens," she muttered. She really wore eights but she thought sevens sounded more feminine.
He searched her face with piercing look. "Bernard says that women always downsize their foot when I ask that question, so I'm gonna get you a pair of eights and a pair of wool sock to cover all my bases. "
He darted up the metal staircase and disappeared into the supply shack that Cay had passed. He emerged with a pair of beat up, scuffed white Extra Tuffs and heading back down the dock toward Cay.
"Shrimpers' boots. That's what you wear on the water. Not fashionable, but serviceable." He turned and winked at her as he handed her the boots and tossed her a pair of wool socks. "And the alligators can't get their teeth through them."
Cay plopped herself down on the dock and exchanged her running shoes for the clunky boots. Frank continued putting supplies in the boat-- extra gas, an oar, a small red cooler. All the while, he chatted easily with Cay.
"You're that detective from New Orleans, huh? Pretty fancy stuff for around here. Only crime we get around here is when someone steals your favorite hunting spot, steals your girl for a dance, or a tourist gets rolled in one of the Casino parking lots."
He tossed two life jackets toward the boat's stern.
"I got a friend over in the crime lab in Lake Charles. Joy Bottell. You know her? She went to school with my aunt."
"I'm really just a private investigator," she corrected him. "I don't get into police work. Right now I'm doing a little insurance work out here, just until New Orleans gets built enough to need me again."
Frank nodded. "That girl that they found? Penny? I remember her dealing at the Isle of Capri Casino. I guess she used to be over at Harrah's on the other side of the lake until it got wrecked by Rita." He smiled sheepishly. "I sat at her table a couple times. Nothing else to do in town on a week day with your money."
Cay nodded, "Casinos are big around here. I see the busloads from Texas coming in every night." She was eyeing the boat, flat bottomed, flimsy looking thin shelled contraption. "Are you sure this is going to work?"
Frank laughed. "We'll use a regular motorized boat to tow it until we get to the edge of the marsh, then switch over to the pirogue to get deeper into the bayou. This pirogue is the best thing for marsh, swamp and even mud flats when needed.
"In Chicago, a pirogi is a pastry stuffed with sausage and cabbage."
"Imagine that!" Frank said and flashed a white smile against pleasantly weathered skin. He put his hand over his heart as if making a pledge. "Don't worry, Ms. Del Roi. Bernard docks my pay if I come back without the customer, so I'm determined to make this a return trip."
They didn't talk much because the loud roar of the boat's engine made it impossible to hear. They pushed the boat as far into the bayou as they could until they came to a small wooden dock. There they tethered the motor boat and switched into the swamp boat. Cay ungracefully plopped herself into the boat and it rocked precariously to each side. She clutched at the gunnels. She thought she had discovered how Penelope had really died. Frank had flipped her over in the boat and left her in the swamp.
Spanish moss dangled like grey-green forgotten tinsel from the branches of the live oaks. Frank poled through the increasingly narrowing waterways and the pirogue was silent, creating only a slight swish as it sliced through the brackish water. As Frank poled and pushed the boat over grasses, brown water and occasional roots, Cay could see all kinds of trees and plants she wasn't familiar with. She asked Frank what they were.
"There's some red maples over there and of course, too many willows to count." He pointed over at a large broad based tree that narrowed to a straight trunk reaching up toward the sky. "We got a few water tupelo around here, but you have to go to the real swamps farther south to see the bald cypress, which is the really big tree with the huge roots."
"Are there really alligators out here?"
"Why, yes there are, m'am. I strongly advise you not to feed them or anything. We try not to give them any reason to come near the boat." Cay thought about Bryant's earlier warning and let go of her death grip of the gunnels, tightly folding her hands in her lap.
Frank continued, falling easily into his guide's voice. "Don't see too many gators this time of year. They go through a semi-dormant stage, but a few of the feisty ones keep guard over the place so we respect their spot in the world. There really is more of them down in the Sabine Refuge and farther east from here in Grand Chenier and over to Houma. But there's a lot of wildlife in these water…nutria, herons, egrets."
"And snakes," he continued. "Lots of snakes. Over a hundred different kinds. The cottonmouths have quite a bite. More people get sick from them then ever get bitten by an alligator. The alligators, they like the little dogs best of all. I think they taste just like Chicken McNuggets to them."
Cay looked up in horror, then quickly realized she was being teased. She decided to take control of the conversation. The motion of the boat, listening to the four dozen ways to die in the swamp, and her lusty feelings for the captain of the ship were all beginning to make her quite queasy.
"Did you grow up around here? Is that why you know so much?"
"I spent a lot of summers up here as a kid, roaming around these bayous with Bernard and spending time with my tia." He spoke as he poled. "But my true home is near Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, down in St. Bernard Parish east of New Orleans. That's where my family has lived for generations."
"But now you live here?"
"St. Bernard Parish got hit hard in Katrina. We evacuated up here, and then there was nothing to go back to. After Rita hit this part of Louisiana, there was lots of construction work. I decided to stick around while my folks headed back to clean up. Bernard uses me as needed for bayou tours and I got hired on over at the crew working on rebuilding Harrah's Lake Charles casino. That place has been closed since the hurricane." He paused, then shrugged. "I'm making good money, but I'd give it all up if I had a home to go back to."
"So your family is okay?"
"Most of them evacuated when they heard how big Katrina was gonna be. My uncle Felix refused to leave. Said God would either keep him safe or take him in the wind, and he said he was fine with either decision. His house was flattened by the sea surge. Rescue teams found his battered body in his truck wrapped around a big oak about a quarter mile from his property. Looked like he decided to leave after all, but didn't make it out in time."
Cay's hand went to her mouth. "I am so sorry, Frank."
"He was one that named me Francisco, as in San Francisco, the saint, not the town. Said it would help me grow up to love the water, love the animals, and love the land." Francisco looked into the deep darkness of the bayou. "It worked."
Cay felt a familiar lump of grief lodge itself into her throat.
"I lost someone, too," she confessed. "He was an old musician who wore terrible suits and who just elected himself the new Chief of the Yellow Magnolias Indian Tribe. Owned a little shot gun house in the 9th Ward. He said he'd been through Betsy and Camille and he'd be damned if he couldn't get through this hurricane, too."
She paused to wipe away the tears that filled her eyes. "Funny thing is, he was right. He survived the hurricane. But not the flooding from the levy breaking. He drowned in his own attic." Her voice caught. "When I heard the news, all I could think of wondering which suit was he wearing the day he died? I can't believe he is gone. He didn't even get the jazz funeral parade he deserved because there weren't enough musicians left in the city to have one. He lay in a makeshift morgue for days before someone could even get down to identify him."
Cay remembered hearing later that it had been a particularly difficult task for Rufus Thibodeaux, a family friend and a detective for the New Orleans Police Department. Amdist all the chaos, hurt and disaster, he was the only one left in New Orleans to do the deed.
They poled through the swamp, each lost in their grief. After some thought, Frank spoke up. "It is not good to be so sad in such a dark place. My grandfather taught me a song he wrote about his love for our part of the country. Can I sing it for you?"
"Please." Cay said. Anything to get her thoughts away from the death of Mr. Jonathon.
Frank's baritone voice rang through the bayou, sounding flat and lonely again the dense trees.
Con la pena y el problema
Y por el hace de Dios
Sobre viviremos los problemas
Viven para siempre en
San Bernardos
Vive España y su bandera
Con todo el corazón,
sé que somos Americanos
Pero nuestra sangre es española.
"Wow, that's beautiful!" Cay said, touched at sound of the song ringing through the moss. "Music seems such a big part of the Cajun way to survive tough times."
Frank snorted and spit into the water. "Soy un isleño, no un Acadian."
"What?"
"My family are isleños. Spanish. Not French." Frank said tersely. "We have been here as long as the French have That was a decima written by mi abuelo. There's not a single French word in it."
"Hey, I'm sorry! I've never heard of the islanders." Cay felt her budding romance slipping away.
"Isleños, " Francisco corrected her. "The Spanish first colonized the Canary islands and then in the late 1700s, those people came here and settled all around what is now known as New Orleans. We worked the military outposts that protected the area from the British. When the soldiering work went away, we became crabbers and shrimpers and hunters. If mi abuelo tells the truth, some of us dabbled as bootleggers as well."
He smiled, the cloud passed and all forgiven. "The language has pretty much passed into history but some of the older people still sing the decimas, or the songs. The Spanish heritage of Louisiana is as important as the French." He expertly poled the pirogue over to a small clearing on the shore had appeared around the corner. "As mi abuelo Irvan would always say, 'In the gumbo, the hottest of the spices comes from St. Bernard.' "
In the dark, brooding beauty of the swamp land around them, Cay found herself wanting to explore that comment very much.
"Here we go," as he slid the boat smoothly on shore and jumped out in the shallow water, his rubber boots slapping against the surface. "Careful now," he extended his hand to Cay. "Bernard said that a hunter found her body over there, half in the water and half out. Over there where that bank juts out into the water."
He pointed to a trail that came close to the area. "Bernard said she must have come in by that trail 'cuz that they found her car at the trail head just a few hundred yards up. If you know this landing is here, it's easy to find. She's not the first to choose this spot to kill herself."
They pulled the easily maneuverable boat completely up onto the land. Frank pulled out his cooler and selected a sandwich to eat while Cay did her investigation.
She carefully walked to the small peninsula where Penny had been found. She kept her eyes on the ground. Even though the foliage had alread started to spring back, there were obvious signs of multiple footprints. Dark stains soaked the ground near the water's edge. She spend a good fifteen minutes looking around, but the scene was too trampled by the hunter and the resulting police who had also combed the scene to yield anything she or the police did not already know.
And despite a hope she knew was naive from the start, she could find no shoe. She puzzled it over out loud as she searched.
"It doesn't make sense she would bring the shoe out here. If she was going to wear it as a final gesture, she would have brought both of them, right? Not just one. But where is the other one? They didn't find it on her. Did she give it away? People give away things right before they commit suicide." Cay continued to talk out loud to herself as she bent down to examine some deep diagonal scrapes in the mud near the water's edge. "Either that shoe is at the bottom of the swamp or Nicolette is right. Someone else has got to have it."
Frank had finished his sandwich and now drew closer. Cay hunkered down and pointed out the churned ground where Penelope's body had been found. "What about these scuff marks? These aren't footprints. These almost looked like she was dragged into the water."
Frank looked at her somberly for a moment, weighing his words before he spoke. "Could have been made by a gator pulling her out of the water, too. She was pretty badly mangled. Gators have been known to munch on the bodies found out here in the swamp. Maybe the alligator ate the shoe as well. "
A violent rush of bile grabbed at Cay's chest. She barely had time to turn her head before she vomited in the tangling roots of a nearby cypress. She heaved a couple times before she could raise her head up. She felt Frank brush her hair back with his hands and hand her a napkin left over from his snack. She sat for another minute gathering her dignity and wiping her mouth.
"Well, that's one way to contaminate the crime scene!" She joked, pushing herself into a standing position. The gloominess of the swamp seemed to be seeping into every bone in her body. She felt a million years old.
"Time to go, mujere," Frank said, gently taking her arm. "I think we have seen enough."
She nodded and allowed herself to be led back to the pirogue. Suddenly the world just seemed an awful place. She had lived out of a suitcase for months. People were dying. Her newly adopted part of the world was rent in two by wind and rain and flood, and now death by depression and bayou. Cayenne shook off her gloom.
"Okay, muchacho. Vamonos!" she said lightly, repeating the only Spanish she knew.
LINKS
CHAPTER THREE: Coffee Beans and Rice
Copyright by Aileen M. McInnis, 2006. All rights reserved. Contact the author at aileen_mcinnis@yahoo.com.
