Fever Dream (19 page)

“Sunflower?” Pendergast repeated.

The woman nodded. “Sunflower, Louisiana. Not two miles over the state line. Take the Bogalusa turnoff, just before the swamp.”
And she pointed the direction.

“I’m most obliged to you.” Pendergast turned to D’Agosta. “Vincent, let us not waste any time.”

As they strode back to the car, the woman yelled out, “When you pass the old mine shaft, take a right!”

Sunflower, Louisiana

K
NOW WHAT YOU’D LIKE, SUGAR?” THE WAITRESS
asked.

D’Agosta let the menu drop to the table. “The catfish.”

“Fried, oven-fried, baked, or broiled?”

“Broiled, I guess.”

“Excellent choice.” She made a notation on her pad, turned. “And you, sir?”

“Pine bark stew, please,” said Pendergast. “Without the hush puppies.”

“Right you are.” She made another note, then turned away with a flourish, bouncing off on sensible white shoes.

D’Agosta watched as she wiggled toward the kitchen. Then he sighed, took a sip of his beer. It had been a long, wearisome
afternoon. Sunflower, Louisiana, was a town of about three thousand people, surrounded on one side by liveoak forest, on the
other by the vast cypress swamp known as Black Brake. It had proven utterly unremarkable: small shabby houses with picket
fences, scuffed boardwalks in need of repair, redbone hounds dozing on front porches. It was a hardworking, hard-bitten, down-at-the-heels
hamlet forgotten by the outside world.

They had registered at the town’s only hotel, then split up and gone
their separate ways, each trying to uncover why Helen
Pendergast would have made a three-day pilgrimage to such a remote spot.

Their recent run of luck seemed to sputter out on the threshold of Sunflower. D’Agosta had spent five fruitless hours looking
into blank faces and walking into dead ends. There were no art dealers, museums, private collections, or historical societies.
Nobody remembered seeing Helen Pendergast—the photo he’d shown around triggered only blank looks. Not even the car produced
a glimmer of recall. John James Audubon, their research showed, had never been anywhere near this region of Louisiana.

When D’Agosta finally met up with Pendergast in the hotel’s small restaurant for dinner, he felt almost as dejected as the
FBI agent had looked that morning. As if to match his mood, the sunny skies had boiled up into dark thunderheads that threatened
a storm.

“Zilch,” he said in answer to Pendergast’s query, and described his discouraging morning. “Maybe that old lady remembered
wrong. Or was just bullshitting us for another twenty. What about you?”

The food arrived, and the waitress laid their plates before them with a cheery “Here we are!” Pendergast eyed his in silence,
dipping some stew out with his spoon to examine it more closely.

“Can I get you another beer?” she asked D’Agosta, beaming.

“Why not?”

“Club soda?” she asked Pendergast.

“No thank you, this will be sufficient.”

The waitress bounced off again.

D’Agosta turned back. “Well? Any luck?”

“One moment.” Pendergast plucked out his cell phone, dialed. “Maurice? We’ll be spending the night here in Sunflower. That’s
right. Good night.” He put away the phone. “My experience, I fear, was as discouraging as yours.” However, his alleged disappointment
was belied by a glimmer in his eye and a wry smile teasing the corners of his lips.

“How come I don’t believe you?” D’Agosta finally asked.

“Watch, if you please, as I perform a little experiment on our waitress.”

The waitress came back with a Bud and a fresh napkin. As she placed them before D’Agosta, Pendergast spoke in his most honeyed
voice, laying the accent on thick. “My dear, I wonder if I might ask you a question.”

She turned to him with a perky smile. “Ask away, hon.”

Pendergast made a show of pulling a small notebook from his jacket pocket. “I’m a reporter up from New Orleans, and I’m doing
research on a family that used to live here.” He opened the notebook, looked up at the waitress expectantly.

“Sure, which family?”

“Doane.”

If Pendergast had announced a holdup, the reaction couldn’t have been more dramatic. The woman’s face immediately shut down,
blank and expressionless, her eyes hooded. The perkiness vanished instantly.

“Don’t know anything about that,” she mumbled. “Can’t help you.” She turned and walked away, pushing through the door to the
kitchen.

Pendergast slipped the notebook back into his jacket and turned to D’Agosta. “What do you think of my experiment?”

“How the hell did you know she’d react like that? She’s obviously hiding something.”

“That, my dear Vincent, is precisely the point.” Pendergast took another sip of club soda. “I didn’t single her out. Everyone
in town reacts the same way. Haven’t you noticed, during your inquiries this afternoon, a certain degree of hesitancy and
suspicion?”

D’Agosta paused to consider. It was true that nobody had been particularly helpful, but he’d simply ascribed it to small-town
truculence, local folk suspicious of some Yankee coming in and asking a lot of questions.

“As I made my own inquiries,” Pendergast went on, “I ran into an increasingly suspicious level of obfuscation and denial.
And then, when I pressed one elderly gentleman for information, he heatedly informed me that despite what I might have heard
otherwise, the stories about the Doanes were nothing but hogwash. Naturally I began to ask about the Doane family. And that’s
when I started getting the reaction you just saw.”

“And so?”

“I repaired to the local newspaper office and asked to see the back issues, dating from around the time of Helen’s visit.
They were unwilling to help, and it took this—” Pendergast pulled out his shield. “—to change their minds. I found that in
the years surrounding
Helen’s visit, several pages had been carefully cut out of certain newspapers. I made a note of what
the issues were, then made my way back down the road to the library at Kemp, the last town before Sunflower. Their copies
of the newspapers had all the missing pages. And that’s where I got the story.”

“What story?” D’Agosta asked.

“The strange story of the Doane family. Mr. Doane was a novelist of independent means, and he brought his extended family
to Sunflower to get away from it all, to write the great American novel far from the distractions of civilization. They bought
one of the town’s biggest and best houses, built by a small-time lumber baron in the years before the local mill shut down.
Doane had two children. One of them, the son, won the highest honors ever awarded by the Sunflower High School, a clever fellow
by all accounts. The daughter was a gifted poet whose works were occasionally published in the local papers. I read a few
and they are, in fact, exceedingly well done. Mrs. Doane had grown into a noted landscape painter. The town became very proud
of their talented, adopted family, and they were frequently in the papers, accepting awards, raising funds for one or another
local charity, ribbon cutting, that sort of thing.”

“Landscape painter,” D’Agosta repeated. “How about birds?”

“Not that I could find out. Nor did they appear to have any particular interest in Audubon or natural history art. Then, a
few months after Helen’s visit, the steady stream of approving stories began to cease.”

“Maybe the family got tired of the attention.”

“I think not. There was one more article about the Doane family—one final article,” he went on. “Half a year after that. It
stated that William, the Doane son, had been captured by the police after an extended manhunt through the national forest,
and that he was now in solitary confinement in the county jail, charged with two ax murders.”

“The star student?” D’Agosta asked incredulously.

Pendergast nodded. “After reading this, I began asking around Kemp about the Doane family. The townspeople there felt none
of the restraint I noticed here. I heard a veritable outpouring of rumor and innuendo. Homicidal maniacs that only came out
at night. Madness and violence. Stalking and menace. It became difficult to sift
fact from fiction, town gossip from reality.
The only thing that I feel reasonably sure of is that all are now dead, each having died in a uniquely unpleasant way.”

“All of them?”

“The mother was a suicide. The son died on death row while awaiting execution for the ax murders I spoke of. The daughter
died in an insane asylum after refusing to sleep for two weeks. The last to die was the father, shot by the town sheriff of
Sunflower.”

“What happened?”

“He apparently took to wandering into town, accosting young women, threatening the townsfolk. There were reports of vandalism,
destruction, babies gone missing. The people I spoke to hinted it might have been less of a killing and more of an execution—with
the tacit approval of the Sunflower town fathers. The sheriff and his deputies shotgunned Mr. Doane in his house as he allegedly
resisted arrest. There was no investigation.”

“Jesus,” D’Agosta replied. “That would explain the waitress’s reaction. As well as all the hostility around here.”

“Precisely.”

“What the hell do you think happened to them? Something in the water?”

“I have no idea. But I will tell you this: I’m convinced they were the object of Helen’s visit.”

“That’s a pretty big leap.”

Pendergast nodded. “Consider this: they are the
only
unique element in an otherwise unremarkable town. There’s nothing else here of interest. Somehow, they’re the link we’re
searching for.”

The waitress hustled up to their table, took away their plates, and went off, even as D’Agosta began to order coffee. “I wonder
what it takes to get a cup of java around here,” D’Agosta said, trying to attract her attention.

“Somehow, Vincent, I doubt you’ll be getting your ‘java’ or anything more in this establishment.”

D’Agosta sighed. “So who lives in the house now?”

“Nobody. It was abandoned and shut up since the shooting of Mr. Doane.”

“We’re going there,” D’Agosta said, more as a statement than a question.

“Exactly.”

“When?”

Pendergast raised his finger for the waitress. “As soon as we can get the check from our reticent but nevertheless most eloquent
waitress.”

T
HE WAITRESS DID NOT ARRIVE WITH THE
check. Instead, it was the manager of the hotel. He placed the check on the table and then, without even a show of apology,
informed them they would not be able to stay the night after all.

“What do you mean?” D’Agosta said. “We booked the room; you took our credit card numbers.”

“There’s a large party coming in,” the man replied. “They had prior reservations the front desk overlooked—and as you can
see, this is a small hotel.”

“Too bad for them,” D’Agosta said. “We’re already here.”

“You haven’t unpacked yet,” the manager replied. “In fact, I’m told your luggage isn’t even in your rooms yet. I’ve already
torn up your credit card voucher. I’m sorry.”

But he didn’t sound sorry, and D’Agosta was about to rake the man over the coals when Pendergast laid a hand on his arm. “Very
well,” Pendergast said, reaching into his wallet and paying the dinner bill in cash. “Good evening, then.”

The manager walked away, and D’Agosta turned to Pendergast. “You’re gonna let that prick walk all over us? It’s obvious he’s
kicking us out because of the questions you’re asking—and the ancient history we’re stirring up.”

In response, Pendergast nodded out the window. Glancing through it, D’Agosta saw the hotel manager now crossing the street.
As D’Agosta watched, the man walked past several store buildings, shuttered for the night, and then vanished into the sheriff’s
office.

“What the hell kind of town
is
this?” D’Agosta said. “Next thing you know, it’ll be villagers with pitchforks.”

“Our interest doesn’t lie with the town,” Pendergast said. “There’s no point in complicating things. I suggest that we leave
at once—before the local sheriff finds an excuse to run us out.”