Fever Moon (3 page)

There was a slight hesitation before Raymond spoke, as if he weighed his words. “Henri was attacked by some kind of wild beast. You might as well hear the truth because gossip will be all over town by morning. Adele Hebert was found at the body. It’s already spreading that she’s possessed by the
loup-garou.”

Michael swallowed. The images were vivid in his mind, and they brought to life his dark suspicions that the swamps were filled with unholy creatures. “A werewolf?” He shivered, aware that his bare feet were freezing. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. I’m worried what the town believes. It was a gruesome murder. I want you to go to the Bastion plantation and prepare the family. Don’t let Mrs. Bastion buy into the werewolf business.”

Michael bristled at Raymond’s tone. “Marguerite Bastion is an educated woman. She’s not a fool.”

“Father, you and I both know it’s easier to believe in evil than good. Many people believed Rosa Hebert was a stigmatic. You among them, I think.” Raymond’s point was quietly made, and it opened the door on the box of Michael’s personal demons. It wasn’t his belief in Rosa that tormented him, but his lack thereof.

“Rosa was a child of God chosen to bear the marks of Christ’s suffering, a living sign of God’s love and sacrifice. She was God’s emissary. The
loup-garou
is a superstition used to keep wicked children in line by parents who fear to use the rod.” The distinction was clear in his mind.

“I somehow don’t see bleeding from the hands and feet as an example of God’s love.”

Raymond was baiting him, and Michael wouldn’t allow himself to respond in anger. “Raymond, I know you suffer. You’ve lost your way.” Raymond hadn’t set foot in the church since his return from the war. The man mocked and defied God.

“Well said, Father. Still, if wounds opened up in my hands and feet every Friday, I’d hang myself, too.”

“That’s blasphemy.”

Raymond’s voice took on a different tone. “You saw the wounds, didn’t you? They were real. Not self-inflicted.”

He hesitated, wondering what Raymond’s angle might be. “Rosa was given a gift and a burden. It was too much for her to carry. She failed our Father and took her own life. There was nothing I could do to change any of it.”

Silence hung between them for a long moment. “That’s not an answer to the question I asked, but it’s an answer to another question. Good-bye, Father, and good luck with Mrs. Bastion.”

Michael heard the click of the phone. He replaced the receiver and walked to the window, his bare legs covered in chill bumps. First light would arrive soon; it was pointless to go back to bed. Raymond had left him with images and memories as wicked and sharp as the devil’s pitchfork.

His curiosity urged him to the parish jail, but his duty directed him to the Bastion home. He didn’t want to drive there in the dark. Not on this night when a strange, moist wind howled down the chimney and the past had reawakened like a sleeping corpse. Adele’s anger at her sister’s excommunication was fresh in his mind. She’d cursed him and the church. She’d called down the vengeance of God on him because he’d followed his bishop’s orders and closed the sanctified ground of the church cemetery to Rosa’s body. A suicide could not be buried in hallowed ground.

Adele had taken Rosa, and then the bodies of her twin boys, into the swamps to a secret grave. He’d never gone to counsel her, at first not wanting to agitate her more and then finding it impossible to overcome the inertia that touched him whenever he heard her name. Even if he’d found her, she wouldn’t have listened to him. Her grief and fury had obviously driven her mad.

A log in the fireplace snapped as a gust of wind rushed down the chimney. A shower of sparks, vaguely in the shape of a woman, blew across the room. The priest moved quickly, stepping on the tiny burning embers that had fallen on the rug. The fireplace was dangerous, the night even more so.

He’d wait for dawn to face the grief of Marguerite Bastion. This night, he’d pray to overcome his own inadequacies, which were plentiful.

C
HULA Baker put her car in neutral and set the hand brake before she got out. She left the motor running. It was an old car and sometimes unreliable about starting. The first light of a cold October morning was creeping up the eastern sky, and she saw the clutch of cars and men standing in the road just beyond Beaver Creek. The letter on the front seat of her car was a tragedy for the Lanoux family. What straddled the road and blocked her path was another. Death always came in threes.

She headed toward the men who hadn’t yet noticed her approach. Her heavy skirt, belted around a small waist, swung against bare legs. There were no stockings to be had since the war, and post office regulations prohibited a woman from wearing pants. On this cold October morning she wore her skirts long and stout shoes padded with thick socks. Eighteen-hour days had quickly disabused her of a longing for high heels.

“Ms. Chula.” Sheriff Joe Como blocked her path. “What are you doin’ out here,
cher?”

She studied his face. Even though the temperature was in the low forties, sweat beaded on his forehead. His eyes looked left and right but never into hers. “Got a letter last night for the Lanoux family. From the army. I didn’t want to be out in that storm, but I figured I should bring it on this morning.”

“Is it Justin?”

“I can’t read people’s mail.” She thought of the official envelope and the hundreds of others she’d delivered like it. “Never saw good news come in a letter like that, though.”

The sheriff spit a brown stream into the still muddy road. “Iberia Parish gone dry up and die. All our young men killed over in Europe. Gotta have an old man like me keepin’ the law.”

“Joe, you’ve still got a good thirty years.” She craned to see around his body. “What’s going on here?”

He moved to block her view. “Been a murder. Something you don’t want to see.”

“Murder?” Such things didn’t happen in New Iberia. At least not out on a public road. If a man wanted to kill, he did it in the swamp where the body could be slipped into a canal for gator bait. “Who is it?”

“Henri Bastion.”

She registered the name with even more shock. Henri was the wealthiest man in the parish. His money had bought him the most fertile land, a high-blood French wife, and hellion children. It had also bought fear of him. “How’d he die?”

“We’re trying to figure that one out.”

She snorted. “How hard could it be? Gunshot, stabbing, what?”

The sheriff finally stared into her eyes. “Looks like some kind of wild animal tried to eat him alive.”

“Good Lord, Joe. You said murder, not animal attack.” She had no desire to see this mess. She had mail to deliver.

“We got someone who confessed to killing him. Says she’s the
loup-garou.”

Joe wasn’t the kind of man who joked about swamp creatures. They were part of his background, like hers. A dense web of superstition connected the parish. It had come to the land with the Acadians and been mingled with the folklore of the Indian tribes and the Negroes. Such a rumor could start a panic.

“I wouldn’t be talking any
loup-garou
if I were sheriff.” She lifted an eyebrow. “What with the war taking the boys and men, womenfolk don’t need another reason to be afraid.”

Joe nodded. “Can’t help what Adele Hebert claims, though. She says she killed him. Looks like she tracked him through the woods while he was walking, jumped out, and tried to eat his liver.”

Chula put a hand on the sheriff’s chest. “I’d stop that talk right here. I know Adele. Her brother is Clifton, the trapper. She’s no more the
loup-garou
than I am, and if you say that to the wrong person, it’ll be all over the parish in half a day and you’ll see what real trouble is.”

He drew back and she saw she’d offended him. There were times, though, when Joe Como acted like the brains God gave him were insufficient. Chula Baker knew she was viewed as uppity and overly educated. She’d spent time in Lafayette and Shreveport, cities without respect for the values of the rural parishes. She’d gone to a teachers college where she’d discovered a love of learning and acquired the skills necessary to pass the postal department’s civil service test—an accomplishment that several men had failed. She’d learned to speak her mind from her mama, who at sixty-two was still feared for her sharp tongue and ability to cut a man in half and leave him bleeding in the dirt.

“I thank you for your concern, Miss Chula.” Joe slid back from her.

“I’m not tryin’ to run your business, Joe. I’m trying to keep a wild rumor from turning into some kind of vigilante lynch mob.” Her softer tone was more acceptable. “People are tired of doin’ without. Most every family has buried a son or brother or father. We’ve carved a living from land that would’ve killed a lesser people. These swamps’ve done their worst to us, but we didn’t leave. A tall tale about a werewolf on the loose could be the final straw here.”

The sheriff took off his hat and wiped his forehead on the long sleeve of his tan shirt. When he looked at her some of the resentment was gone from his brown eyes. “You make a point,
cher.”

“What does Doc Fletcher say?” While she’d stood in the road trying to talk some sense into Joe, the sun had climbed over the top of the trees. The morning was still chill, but it would be warm and sunny by afternoon. One of the most effective tools in vaporizing foolish ghost stories was a good strong sun.

“Doc was over to a convention in Baton Rouge last night. He’ll examine the body when he gets back to the area.”

She patted Joe’s arm. “Just tell folks you’re waiting to get Doc’s professional opinion. Tell ’em it’s a puzzle, but don’t let on like it’s anything supernatural.”

She felt him begin to tense under her hand. She was stepping across that invisible line again. “I’d best tend to my business and let you handle yours.” She smiled innocently and was relieved to see him return it. “Come by for some whiskey. Clifton brought Mama a new bottle last week. She’d welcome your company for a drink.” She winked at him. “On the sly, of course.”

“You got your mama’s bitter tongue,
cher
, but you got your daddy’s Irish blarney.” His brows drew down. “Good thing, too, or I’d have to predict spinsterhood.”

She laughed out loud, a sound that bounced off the wall of trees that defined the edge of the mud road. “There are worse things, Joe. Believe it or not, there are worse things.”

Her gaze drifted to the men lifting something from the road, and she recognized Raymond Thibodeaux’s muscular back. She felt a pain beneath her breast, a sharp memory of the beauty of his body before he’d gone to war. He’d gone to Europe a lively young man with a quick smile and come home a specter. His dark hair was shot with silver, and some days he walked with a limp, his eyes daring anyone to notice. A bomb had exploded and sent shrapnel into his body. Gossip was that he might become paralyzed.

Moving to the shade, she waited until Henri’s body had been loaded into a truck bed. When Raymond was left standing alone, she walked to him. “Mother and I would love for you to come to dinner, Raymond.” It was an invitation extended often, and always ignored. Others in town might accept his isolation, but Chula could not. The memory of his kisses, his hands so expert in touching her, would not be snuffed out by his anger. What they’d shared was gone, but never her affection for him.

“I’m busy, Chula, but thank you.”

“Raymond, we’ve known each other a long time. I know you grieve Antoine, but you can’t continue like this. Your brother wouldn’t want that.”

She saw the fire snap into his dark eyes. So he wasn’t quite dead. At least not yet. “You don’t have a clue what you’re stepping into, Chula. Mind your own affairs.”

He bent down to pick up Henri’s hat that lay sodden in the road.

“You once loved the fact that I was smart and spoke my mind.” Her voice was soft as she remembered a summer afternoon in her shady backyard when he told her he was going into the army, that when he returned he wanted to be a journalist. “The war took your brother, but only you can let it steal your dreams.”

His eyes, once a golden brown, bore into her. It was true that the color had changed to near black. “The past is dead, Chula. So is the man you knew. Leave what’s left of him in peace.”

He took the hat to the patrol car, and Chula felt the gaze of the sheriff watching them. It would be best to walk away, but she couldn’t. She’d delivered two letters to Mrs. Thibodeaux, the first last November telling of Antoine’s death in a small town, a village of no consequence to either army. Antoine had been the youngest son, the charmer in a family of handsome men.

Six months later, she’d brought the second letter on a beautiful May morning with robins calling from the wild hedges. Mrs. Thibodeaux had opened the door without expression. She’d ripped open the letter, read the words, and looked up into Chula’s eyes with an expression of furious anguish before she slammed and locked the door.

Raymond had arrived home two months later, unable to walk without crutches. In a matter of weeks he was using a cane. When the cane was gone, he pinned on the deputy’s badge.

“Raymond, there are people who’d care about you if you’d let them. I remember—”

“Don’t. Don’t remember, Chula. The past is like a dream. It only exists in memory, and sometimes it’s best to let it go.” He walked away.

Chula went back to her car, feet sliding in the thick cake of yellow mud called gumbo by the locals. She sat for a moment before she started her car, watching Raymond talk with the sheriff.

Henri Bastion was dead, and from the sound of it he’d died violently. Such foolishness. If a man wanted a violent death, he could accomplish it easily by joining the army. There were still plenty of German and Japanese bullets. So why bring it home? That was a question without an answer.

Raymond got out of the patrol car in front of the jail and watched as the sheriff followed Henri’s body over to the funeral home. Doc Fletcher would be there directly to look it over. For now, Raymond had a chance to be alone with Adele Hebert. He’d done a bit of digging, and what he’d learned showed Adele to be a hard worker who’d retreated into the swamps alone to raise twin boys. No one would hazard a guess as to the boys’ father. She’d shown up in town big with child and refusing to name the father. Doc had given her vitamins and caution to rest, but Adele had seen him only once. As far as anyone knew, she’d delivered the babies on her own.