Cypress Nights (22 page)

She listened hard, as hard as possible with the wind picking up and the warm rain falling harder. When it was like this, there were a hundred sounds vying for attention.

For as long as she could hold still, she waited, scarcely breathing.

If Sig called her name again, she didn't hear him.

She had made it work. By taking a different direction, heading for the bayou and falling silent, she had thrown him off. What she'd done to him was horrible. He would be terrified for her, but she couldn't face him now. Once she got where she was going, and it wouldn't take too long unless she was unlucky enough to hurt herself again, but once she got there she'd call to let him know she was okay.

All she had needed to do was let him know she wasn't ready to get physical with him. Easier to admit than pull off.

Sig was a psychologist. That didn't mean he wasn't also a man.

Madge huddled. She had run away to be alone, but she didn't want to stay here. Scrambling, she stood and carried on, hunched over, until she was close to the bayou.

Her purse was in Sig's car. She paused for breath and felt sick at the thought of having to see him again, to talk to him and apologize—to try to explain that he'd been right to think she wasn't very worldly.

Clinging to the track at the edge of the bayou, she mostly walked, afraid to run in case she tripped in the dark and couldn't carry on. Every cut and bruise stung. She kept thinking about a hot shower and washing her hair—and putting a locked door between her and the world.

After that, she'd call Sig to tell him to forget all about her.

When she saw a distant, flickering light, she knew safety was close. The light would be inside St. Cecil's where sconces burned at all times.

She would rinse her feet and legs under the faucet at the back of the rectory, go inside quietly and make a call from her office. Then she'd slip out again and get back to Rosebank.

 

No reception committee awaited Madge inside the rectory. She'd been half afraid Sig might have called Cyrus. If that had happened, every light in the place would have been blazing and Cyrus would have called for help to find her.

Sig hadn't called.

Perhaps he thought something would almost definitely happen to her and he didn't want to be blamed.

In her office, she used the phone as quietly as she could, not that Cyrus was likely to hear anything way up in his aerie under the roof.

Sig answered with a quiet, “Yes.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Damn you,” he said and hung up.

All of the tension left her body, and she trembled wildly. It was over.

The phone rang and she snatched it up. “Yes.”

“You little idiot,” Sig said. “Did you think you'd call me and I'd be glad…Christ, I
am
glad to hear from you. I feel like my kid just ran across a freeway in rush hour and made it to the other side. Shaking you hard would feel so good—for about ten seconds. Good night.”

“Good night,” she said and hung up.

Back in the hall, barefoot, she looked up the dark stairs leading to the floor where the big room was, the one where Cyrus met with small groups of parishioners, or even with just one if they need comfort or simply to talk. Also on that floor were a number of mostly small bedrooms where those in need were given a place to stay for as long as needed.

Madge started to climb.

She needed peace.

Tonight she wanted to curl up in cool, white sheets and forget that she was a woman who belonged in no world. Rosebank was just a place to keep her things. She had no home, no committed companion on her journey. And the choice had been hers.

She started toward the little bedrooms at the end of the house nearest the church, but couldn't keep going. Back
she walked, all the way to the opposite end of the corridor where a door stood open. On the other side of the door, more stairs, these very narrow, led upward.

This was the last, the highest flight. At the top, in the big, bare room, Cyrus would be sleeping on his single bed.

Madge sat on the bottom step and rested her forehead on top of folded arms.

Later the same night

R
oche needed a shower.

Cold.

Damn the bigmouths in this town. And damn Lil Dupre for the sneaking, dirty-minded prude she was.

He had hoped the story of what Lil saw and embellished that night had gone away. Enough time should have passed. But why did he think so, really? Once the mud hit you, it never completely came off.

This wasn't the first time he had taken refuge in his offices on Cotton Street. He came here to think, to find the quiet he must have, regularly, or to deal with any inner demons on patrol. After the scene with Bleu, all the demons were out. He'd driven roads to nowhere for hours before coming here.

Once inside the building, via the waiting room, he entered his consulting rooms through a door behind his receptionist, Crystal's mosaic desk.

Crystal was beautiful—an asset to him—around thirty and married. And Roche had never looked at her and wanted to have sex. Sure, he thought she was sexy, but that was different.

His “little” addiction took a very different form from that of most sex addicts.

Roche tore off his shirt.

Air-conditioning didn't cool the kind of heat he felt.

He balled up the shirt and shied it across the room. What was happening to him, with Bleu, hadn't come up before. He had never felt what he felt now.

Just lust?

Could be. He was the doctor, the shrink, but he didn't have all the answers.

Love?

He loved his twin. In a way, he loved his father. But the kind of love a man could supposedly feel for a woman? He didn't know, but he did care about Bleu, he did dream about her, waking and sleeping. He could still feel her skin on his, her hair slipping across his face.

He could still smell her perfume.

And he could still feel her encasing him.

Torn apart. His body and mind betrayed him. Sweat ran down the sides of his face. An erection sprang hard.

Hard,
but not only-wanting-sex hard. He wanted Bleu. Now. And he couldn't have her. She thought he could be a rapist.

From the office, he could go into a bathroom, and a bedroom containing a single bed and a closet where he kept spare clothes. And there was a galley kitchen for those times when he really felt like holing up here.

He kept wine in the refrigerator and the other booze in a cabinet in the office.

She danced nude in his mind.

Roche kicked off his shoes and walked into the bathroom. The bedroom stood open to his left and he went in there, unbuttoning and unzipping his pants as he went. When he got them off, hopping from foot to foot, he was grateful for the freedom.

Inside the dark walk-in closet he saw a shape reflected in a mirror on the far wall. A man. Tall and straight, his face indistinct, the man looked back at Roche. He started to turn away, but let his gaze pass over the rest of the man in the mirror.

Ready for sex. Wanting sex.

Roche averted his eyes, but an image exploded in his mind. Another room, another mirror, the same man, but with a woman. God, she felt like heaven, looked like heaven.

Cool-looking, covered with a white cotton spread, the bed invited him and he closed his eyes. Shudders convulsed him. He shook with the effort it took to hang on and deal with the power of his arousal.

But his need was for her and no one but her.

He hit off the lights and fell onto the bed. Stretched out on his back with his fingers shoved into his hair.

Light in the bathroom sliced a glaring wedge through the door. The gleaming blade cut over the bottom of the bed, over his feet, his lower legs. Every sense shivered and opened like a wound.

At first, Bleu had been frightened of him. She argued otherwise, but he had known what he felt emanating from her. He wanted to tell her the truth about himself, but couldn't blurt it out. He didn't know how.

How would he explain? “I'm sexually addicted, not to any and every woman I see, but when I am with one,
alone, and she's willing, then I want to take her and not just take her, but own her.”

Even that was too simple, too general.

I become someone obsessed, insatiable. Sex can be a work of art. Two people can satisfy one another, or they can come together with mind-blowing perfection.

And that was so damned esoteric, he made himself sick.

It could be he didn't have to put anything into words, ever. By that morning, she hadn't only started to melt—she showed him how much she wanted passion. She had reveled in herself and the way she felt, the way she felt with him.

Bleu, I don't just want you to want me—I need you to need me.

Later yet, the same night

F
uck it.

He'd backed into something rough and hard.

Justice grabbed his ankle and rubbed. He had hauled the pirogue away from the bayou, between trees and stumps, over snarled undergrowth, rocks, earth that went from shallow mud to deep mud, depending on the spot you were in. This was as far as he had to go…tonight.

It had taken too long to get back here. Finding the right boat had been hard enough. Getting way back into the swamps in the dark, among the boxy houses that looked and smelled as if they were made of sheet rust, corrugated, had about made him crazy. And locating a boat no one was watching too closely had taken hours of crouching and running in ankle-deep water. He'd had to go to a settlement far enough away that they wouldn't come right on down to this part of the Teche after him and looking for their property.

Theft like that might make those swamp people, quiet though they might be, turn really ugly.

Ugly enough to punish someone so they could never do the same thing again.

Now he had to finish his practice run and retrace his path. This time it could be even harder.

Someone had to pay for the trouble that had come his way. If they'd left well enough alone, he'd still be on his way to getting exactly what he wanted, and no one ever the wiser about what they didn't see or know.

But they couldn't leave things alone. No, their sights had been set on change.

This next death had to be different. The sheriff and his boys would be looking for patterns. Well, he wouldn't be giving them any. A man and his imagination, just the two of them was all it took.

What they said about killing was true. Once you did it, the next one got easier, and the next. He'd been hasty with the first one, but he'd learned his lesson: never start anything without having a complete exit plan. Afterward, he had panicked.

But that was history. He'd worked hard and covered his tracks well enough to make sure they never caught him—ever.

This murder was going to be brilliant—as pretty as a picture. Well, damn, he might try his hand at painting that pretty picture one of these days. He had a long life ahead of him to do what he fucking-well pleased.

This
one would be pretty and so goddamn painful, he'd have to make sure no one heard anything.

Pain. Pain in the darkness, and confusion.
Why are you doing this to me? What have I done to you?
The questions would come first, then the begging and the promises.
He curled his lip and whispered, “You were born, sucker, that's what
you
did to
me.
”

The sacks of dirt were right where he'd left them, carefully weighed, tied shut. He hefted them, one by one, into the bottom of the pirogue.

They needed to be arranged so they'd be distributed like a person's weight. A particular person.

Satisfied he had it as right as it was going to be, he retrieved a canvas duffel with a drawstring at the top.

“What are you doin' to me?” he said in a falsetto.

He would pack the fool's mouth then and say, “Why, there's nothing for you to worry about. I'm going to make a nice hole in your brain so it won't overheat anymore.”

From the duffel, he took an old-fashioned manual drill he'd found in a sale at a hardware store going out of business in New Orleans. They had stuff there he bet most folks didn't know ever existed. The drill didn't have a lot of choices when it came to the size of holes it made. There was nice-and-small, nice-and-big, and really big. He had finesse. Justice already knew he'd go for nice-and-small. Not such a mess that way; he didn't want to get anything on him.

He didn't need to, but he rested the point of the drill bit on the single bag of dirt at one end of the boat. A knob on top let him hold the tool in place with as much or as little pressure as he wanted. A handle in the middle of the shaft rotated under his free hand. Around and around it went, and the nice-and-small bit broke through the stretched sacking—just like it would through skin. It hit the rocky dirt he'd shoveled inside the sacks, and ground slower, kind of like going through gristle and bone.

That was good enough.

The job would be done.

He put the drill away.

Justice heaved and shoved. On the downhill path back to the bayou, the load moved faster than he'd expected. One of the benefits of soft mud and an incline. And the extra weight actually worked for him.

At the water's edge, he looped a fat coil of rope over his head and around one shoulder. He knew just how many feet of line he had, because he knew how far it had to stretch.

The only thing that could mess with him now would be if the water's current didn't do what it was supposed to do here.

Once launched, the pirogue wobbled a bit then settled low in the water. Justice took the oar and gave the stern a mighty shove, playing out the line at the same time.

He almost whooped.

Gently, smoothly, the dark shape slid forward and kept on going.

Justice shrugged off the coil and tied one end of the rope to a piece of metal pipe conveniently abandoned in the same place he'd found the boat.

He ran along the bank, using the rope to stop his toy from floating away.

There were the lights of St. Cecil's!

Hot shit—it would work.