Disembodied Bones (5 page)

Roosevelt frowned. “I dunno. Just a name that
came up.” He stood up and took the paper from the patrolman. “I’ll
talk to Mr. Simoneaud.”

•

Leonie didn’t know what the time was, because
she’d forgotten to put on the little Timex watch with the Minnie
Mouse on it. It was sitting on her nightstand next to a book about
dreams that she’d borrowed from Michel Quenelle who was going to
medical school in the fall. He never minded answering her endless
questions about the family’s abilities.

But Michel was certainly smart enough that he
would have remembered to put on his watch. He had already finished
a pre-medical degree, summa cum laude, and Leonie knew what that
meant because she’d looked it up in the school dictionary. However,
now she had neither the watch nor Michel. Instead she looked up at
the sun and judged that it was close to three o’clock. She’d wasted
so much time, but she could still feel Douglas inside the large
house. Alone in a dark room, he was so frightened. He was trying to
keep his eyes open but he was becoming so very tired.

Her hands rested on two wrought iron bars of
the fence that surrounded the Whitechapel house. There didn’t seem
to be a way into the fence other than the main gate, so she slowly
circled the exterior, looking for something that would aid her.
There might be a tree that she could climb or some bit of broken
fence that would allow her through. Or she could simply ring the
bell on the buzzer that she saw next to the gate. She could, but
why would the man let her in? Furthermore, she had the feeling that
for the moment Douglas was the only living thing inside.

The chain and padlock were still on the front
gate and Leonie decided that the road just inside the gate was
little traveled. There were blades of grass and weeds springing up
in the cracks of the pavement as if no car regularly drove along
its uneven surface.
A house this big
, she thought,
might
have…two entrances? And I’ll find the other one
.

Half way around the large perimeter, Leonie
found a tree growing next to the fence. If all the branches within
ten feet of the ground had not been trimmed, it would have been a
good way to get inside. But someone was conscious of this fact and
neatly cut the canopy so that it was far above her head. She chewed
on her lower lip in concentration and was unaware that she’d made
it begin to bleed.

But there was another tree a full fifteen
feet away from the fence that someone had dismissed as a potential
avenue of entry for thieves and would be rescuers. Its lower limbs
were intact, Leonie noted with no little amount of pleasure. What
they hadn’t perceived was that Leonie, who was undeniably the queen
of all family children in the art of tree climbing, could easily
scale it. And from the furthermost tree’s taller, outstretched
limbs she could access the tree closest to the fence. She would
simply lower herself from a limb drooping over the inside of the
fence until she was hanging by her hands and drop onto the private
property where she so desperately needed to be.

As Leonie did just that, she didn’t think
about how she might get back outside the fence.

•

“Leonie was here and you simply let her walk
out the door,
n’est pas
?” the irate Jacques Simoneaud asked
heatedly, spreading his arms wide in an unmistakably Gallic manner.
He turned to the younger man who had introduced himself as Louis
Padeaon, a name Roosevelt Hemstreet recognized as the one Leonie
had mentioned as having driven her there. Jacques rattled off a
stream of angry bastardized French and Roosevelt didn’t need
translation to understand that Jacques was berating Louis soundly
for allowing Leonie to get out of his sight.

Louis groaned loudly. “She is as swift as a
deer, Jacques. How can I possibly know she simply went out the back
door of your office? That you weren’t even in the office.”

“Mr. Simoneaud,” said Roosevelt curiously,
still thinking about his gold Cross pen. “How did you know she was
here, if Mr. Padeaon last saw her at your office building?”

Jacques stuck a finger into his ear and
scratched it. “I hoped?” he answered weakly, not knowing exactly
what to say to an outsider who was also a police officer. The truth
was altogether different. Both Jacques and Babette Simoneaud had
suddenly begun to feel a little of what was going on in their
daughter’s head. It was like a switch had suddenly been turned on.
At first Babette’s thoughts were ecstatic.
Our little girl, at
last, isn’t it wonderful, Papa?
But they had felt a little fear
in Leonie. Then the clear vision of the police station came through
to them, and Jacques had leapt off the bobcat he’d been using to
rip up a driveway in north Shreveport, leaving it running even
while his boss yelled irritated questions at his retreating back.
Another family member who worked the same construction company had
driven him, pleading to the foreman that there was an emergency.
Fortunately, the foreman was easygoing and waved them off with an
exasperated look.

On his way there was a faint message from
Louis, and it told of how Leonie had come to Shreveport, and what
she’d done when she got there.

How was I supposed to know, Jacques?
came Louis’s indignant thoughts.
She said she was looking for
you.

“Anh,” Jacques said aloud. “Did Leonie say
anything to you,
M’su
Detective?”

Roosevelt stared at the two men standing in
the waiting room. The crowd had gone down from the lunchtime rush.
Only Eloise Hunter bore witness to the angry Lake People who were
interrogating a detective as if he were the criminal. “She said she
knew where the Trent boy was at. She said that she could locate
him.”

“The Trent boy?” repeated Jacques. A confused
look traversed his handsome face.

Roosevelt realized that these two men had the
same curious gold color of eyes as did Leonie Simoneaud. And the
same rich, raven’s wing black hair. Family traits ran strongly in
this group, Roosevelt grasped. It was like a stamp that proclaimed
them all of the same kith and kin. Did they know the same things
that Leonie did? As a father, Roosevelt thought he would understand
what it would feel like to lose a child. Having talked to the Trent
family, he couldn’t quite appreciate the agony of a missing child.
Looking at Jacques Simoneaud, Roosevelt wasn’t sure that he could
until it had happened to him, and there was an urge to find some
wood upon which to rap his knuckles for the luck that would prevent
such an occurrence.

Louis shrugged suddenly. “
Le p’tite
that was taken yesterday,
non
? From the mall?”

“What does that have to do with Leonie?”
asked Jacques, clearly baffled.

“Could your daughter have possibly been a
witness to Douglas Trent’s kidnapping?” Roosevelt asked, not ready
to leave any stone unturned, the mental image of that Cross pen
twirling around in his head.

“
Non
,” protested Jacques. “She was at
home all day long. Her
maman
was off yesterday. They
preserved strawberries. Leonie was giggling about how we’d be
eating strawberry jam until we died.” His voice trailed awkwardly
away as he became aware of what he’d said.

“Has Leonie ever come to the police station
before to tell about some crime she didn’t really know anything
about?” Roosevelt asked gently.

Jacques’s eyes found the floor, puzzlement
melting away to practiced neutrality. “
Non
,” he said.
“
Non
. I’ve never known Leonie to lie. She’s a good girl. She
would only tell you such a thing if she honestly thought she was
trying to help the boy.”

“But it couldn’t be possible that she would
know where the child is located, then?” Roosevelt persevered
quietly.

Jacques looked up at the large black man and
then slowly looked at Louis. Louis’s face was stricken. Finally,
Jacques said and his voice was tired, “It’s not possible that she
could have seen the boy kidnapped,
non
.”

“I didn’t really think so,” said Roosevelt.
His voice was barely a thread of noise. He didn’t really know what
was going on here. “Does your daughter have…does she ever-”

“What?” snapped Jacques. His gold eyes burned
at Roosevelt as if he knew exactly what the detective wanted to ask
of him. “Does my daughter what?”

“See things? Have visions that come
true?”

Jacques Simoneaud stared at the outsider and
thought about his aunt who had died before he was born. She had
been the eldest child of five and his father the youngest, merely a
toddler when his sister had finally succumbed to the pain that
tormented her final years on the earth away from her beloved
fiancée and the strength of the family. The tattered black and
white photographs that remained showed what a beauty Lisette had
been and reputedly a kind woman as well. She had been cruelly
betrayed by a once-trusted outsider who had disappeared into the
black waters of the lake years later after his crimes had been
known. Varden Comeaux had cruelly extracted his revenge and none of
the family had judged him for his actions. Jacques answered slowly,
“Leonie has never had visions that came true, M’su Detective. Will
you tell your police force to look for her?”

Roosevelt stared hard at the other man. He
knew something was wrong. Something was being held back by Leonie’s
father. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but that it was
something he should know, something that would help them find
Douglas Trent and probably Leonie Simoneaud as well. “Yes, I’ll
have them look for her as well. Perhaps you can give us a
photograph of her to use. We might be able to get it into the news
this evening. Hopefully we’ll have her home before nightfall.”

Jacques looked outside and thought that the
sun had never moved so fast across a clear blue sky.

-

This is a thing all things devour:

Birds, beasts, trees, even a simple flower;

It gnaws iron, and bites steel;

Grinds hard stone to meal.

It slays all in its path, and will ruin many a
town,

And it will beat the mighty mountain down.

What is it?

It is time.

It occurs once in every minute,

Twice in every moment,

And yet never in one hundred thousand years.

What is it?

“A word with you, Rosy?” said Gerald
Ritchie.

With an impatient grumble, Roosevelt turned
away from Jacques Simoneaud and Louis Padeaon. Gerald was waiting
by Eloise Hunter’s counter with a piece of paper in his hand. He
stuffed it into Roosevelt’s hand with a curt nod and said in a low
voice, “I remembered where I heard that name, Whitechapel. A fella
from Mexico called a few months ago, asking about a guy named
Monroe Whitechapel, an American who lives here in town. He was down
there, slumming, I reckon. I expect something happened and the
Mexican guy wanted to know if maybe this guy might be a part of
it.”

Roosevelt looked at the piece of paper in his
hand. There was a name and a number scrawled in Gerald’s messy
handwriting.

Gerald went on without waiting for an answer.
“You’re lucky I ain’t cleaned out my desk in a month of
Sundays.”

“You never clean out your desk, Sarge,” said
Roosevelt. “What did this guy want?”

“He’s a cop down in Chihuahua, I think. Maybe
it was Mexico City. I don’t recall.” He screwed up his features.
“Wanted to know if Whitechapel had a record.”

Roosevelt screwed up his own features in
confusion. Some other police officer, even if it was in another
country, wanting to know about a man named Whitechapel sent up
silent alarms in his head. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, said
the cop-on-the-beat mentality in Roosevelt. He firmly believed that
99% of criminals messed up regularly. Most crimes were solved
because of perseverance on the part of determined police officers.
If fingerprints didn’t match up with a known perp, try again in
five years because the chances were good that in that time the guy
had gone and committed a crime in some other locality. “Did the cop
say why he needed the information?”

Gerald sighed. “I gotta go. We got a call
from somewhere by Gillmer Bayou. Somebody found some kid’s clothes
and we have to drag the swamp.” He hesitated. “I don’t remember
what the guy had to say, Rosy. And I sure as shit don’t remember
what I found out about the Whitechapel guy, nothing I think. I
think I had ten cases come up in one week, including a triple
murder at the bowling alley, and my wife done forgot my name. Think
she was sleeping with the mailman and the milkman. The cop probably
thought I was one rude SOB, if I said what I think I said. You can
call him and ask him. If he’ll talk to you.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Roosevelt and watched the
sergeant walk away, in a hurry to be at the latest possible crime
scene. If the boy had been murdered, finding his clothes probably
would lead right to the body. He glanced over his shoulder at
Jacques and Louis, who were actively discussing something in
rapid-fire French. It didn’t look like a happy conversation.

“Having problems, Dee-tective Hemstreet?”
asked Eloise saccharinely.

Roosevelt looked back at Eloise. She had her
chin resting on her propped arms and was looking pleased that
Roosevelt’s day wasn’t going agreeably. He bared his teeth at her.
“Why don’t you stick a lollipop up your butt, Miz Hunter? It might
sweeten your disposition.”

Eloise’s mouth made an “o” of disbelief, but
Roosevelt had already turned back to Jacques and Louis.

He didn’t waste any time. “Do you know a man
named Whitechapel?”

“Whitechapel?” repeated Louis. “That sounds
familiar.” He glanced at Jacques and shrugged weakly. “I don’t got
a great memory for names.”