Rebel Without a Cake (10 page)

When Eskil Percifield walked through the kitchen door, I expected a few tears of relief from the womenfolk. Maybe even a hug or two. But both his sisters and his mother looked at him with bored expressions.

“I might have known you were all right,” Tallulah said, sounding almost disappointed. “What happened?”

Eskil plucked a stray piece of sausage from the cutting board and tossed it into his mouth. “The damn boat ran out of gas on me. I coulda sworn the tank was full when I left.”

“You need to be more careful,” Bitty cautioned as she slapped his hand away. “Now go wash up. You stink.” She leaned over to look out the door at the assembled crowd and called out, “That goes for the rest of y'all. Supper's on the table but none of y'all are sitting down until you wash yourselves.”

A lot of good-natured tussling over water from the hose and the bathroom sink took place over the next few minutes. Bitty and Bernice did their best to tell Miss Frankie and me who they all were, but with two dozen cousins, uncles, and neighbors roaming through the house, I got lost in a hurry. There were even a couple of women in the search party, both of whom seemed more comfortable with the men in the yard than the women in the kitchen. I checked a few other faces for that birthmark, but Eskil seemed to be the only one present who had it.

While glancing out the window, I noticed one of the women talking to a young man with shaggy dark hair. He cut her off with an angry wave of his hand and stalked away. She called after him, but her voice got lost in the dozen conversations floating around me so I didn't hear what she said. She was old enough to be his mother and I wondered if she was.

The look on her face and the angry set of his shoulders tripped my imagination and sent it racing forward twenty years. Would that be Edie and her baby in the future? Or the baby and
me
? I felt a little light-headed at the thought, but there was nothing I could do about it now so I stuffed my concerns into the back of my mind and focused on putting together the meal for the search party.

Eventually everyone was clean—in a manner of speaking—and everyone found a place to sit, or lean. A dozen people crowded around the huge table and the rest spilled into the living room and out onto the porch. Cousin Somebody-or-other said grace, then everybody dug in with enthusiasm.

The food was delicious and hearty. A rich gumbo with just the right amount of spice, fried okra, melt-in-your-mouth cornbread dripping with honey, a crisp salad of fresh-from-the-garden greens and tomatoes, and a roast that could have been anything from beef to raccoon for all I knew. It was seasoned with peppers and onion, and enough cayenne pepper to make a hole in the ozone layer. Dessert, a rhubarb-orange pie, was to die for. The crust was flaky and buttery, the filling perfectly tart and sweet. I knew plenty of professional pastry chefs, myself included, who couldn't make a better crust or match the flavors Aunt Margaret had coaxed out of the fruit.

Conversation was lively, if a bit confusing, but I found myself enjoying the company more than I'd expected to. After a while, the meal wound down and people began to drift away. That's when the real work began. Miss Frankie and Bernice cleared the table while Tallulah and Bitty gathered dishes from the living room and porch. I scraped food into the trash and stacked dishes beside the sink, and Aunt Margaret put away the leftovers. Now that I'd seen Eskil and formulated a theory about him being Bernice's late-night visitor, I was dying for a chance to talk to her. I'd seen the shock of recognition on her face, and I assumed she had some idea why he'd showed up on her back deck last night. She was having such a good time with her family, though, I didn't want to interrupt.

We'd almost finished cleaning up when Bernice gasped and put a hand on her chest. I was at her side in a flash, alert for any sign of trouble. It had been a long, troubling day for her, and I didn't want the stress of it to get to her.

“What's wrong?” I asked. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Oh. Yes.” She looked a little embarrassed by my reaction. “I just remembered my pills. I'm supposed to take them with dinner and I plum forgot.”

I wondered how serious it would be for her to skip a dose. “You left them home?”

Bernice laughed and shook her head. “No, baby, they're in my purse. I left it in your car. I'll have to run out there and get it.”

Oh. Well, shoot. I hadn't been raised to let a nice older lady go wandering around in the dark, so even though I was spooked by the dark swamp outside, there was no way around it. I told Bernice to stay where she was, grabbed my keys, and turned on the tiny LED light on my keychain. After giving myself a mental pep talk for courage, I stepped out into the night.

A thousand stars lit the sky, and the moon looked gigantic without city lights to dull it. Something rustled in the nearby bushes, and something else let out a loud warning buzz. I was nervous, but I could also hear voices floating on the air so I knew I wasn't alone.

Even with odd sounds coming from the shadows, being outside wasn't as frightening as I'd imagined it would be. Still, this part of the world was completely foreign to me. I'd spent my entire life in cities, as had generations of family before me. There'd been no childhood visits to an
abuelo
's farm. No summers at camp. I was completely out of my element in nature.

When I was a few feet in front of the car, I used my keyless entry to unlock the doors. The headlights flashed, momentarily blinding me with the bright light. I moved cautiously to the passenger's side door and found Bernice's purse.

So far, so good.

I pressed the remote to lock the car, and this time I saw something long and dark in the ditch illuminated by the headlights. My heart stopped beating and my mind screamed
alligator!
but the rest of my body froze in fear.

Car. I needed to get inside the car.

Scrambling like a madwoman, I tore at the door and threw myself inside. I had no idea if an alligator could get through a locked car door, but I sure hoped it couldn't. Unable to stop myself, I leaned up to look at the beast. And in that moment, I realized it wasn't an alligator at all—unless alligators in Baie Rebelle wore hunters' orange vests and white rubber boots.

I started the car and turned on the lights, and I sat there for a long time just staring at the body and willing it to move. It didn't, so I made myself get out of the car for a closer look. He was facedown in the brackish water, but I didn't think he'd been part of the search party who'd stayed for supper.

I checked my cell phone, but just as Ox had predicted, I had no service. I walked back to the house and went straight to the kitchen, where I'd seen a telephone earlier. Aunt Margaret was there chatting quietly with Miss Frankie and Bernice. Tallulah and Bitty had disappeared somewhere.

Miss Frankie smiled at me when I came through the door. “Margaret has kindly invited us to stay overnight, sugar. Do you think we should, or do you need to get back?”

“I don't think we're going anywhere for a while,” I said. “I just found a dead man in the ditch.”

*   *   *

Things move a lot slower in the country than they do in the city. It took a local sheriff's deputy nearly an hour to show up at Aunt Margaret's. During that time curious onlookers—those who were still hanging around after dinner—trampled all over the driveway and the banks of the ditch. I didn't know how the poor man had died, but I thought it would be easier for the sheriff to determine what happened if the evidence wasn't disturbed. Every effort I made to keep people away fell on deaf ears, however. I had a hard time believing that the citizens of Baie Rebelle were that naïve—it seemed far more likely that they didn't mind destroying whatever evidence there might be, which made me think the man in the ditch probably hadn't keeled over from a heart attack.

While we waited for the authorities to show up, rumors began circulating. Nobody had touched the body, but everyone seemed to know that it was Silas Laroche, the neighbor Eskil had been having trouble with. I didn't like the sound of that, his body being in Eskil's ditch and all, but nobody else seemed all that upset that Silas was dead. The women just kept the sweet tea and coffee flowing, as any self-respecting Southern woman would if a dead body showed up in her front yard.

After a long wait, a police cruiser pulled up the driveway and a small woman in a blue uniform got out. She looked to be in her midthirties, about my age, with a slight build and brown hair pulled into a ponytail. She took a look around and then approached the porch, where we were all sitting, hands on hips. “What's goin' on here, Miss Margaret?”

“Well, hello there, Georgie. Come on up and set. I'll get you a glass of tea.”

Georgie shook her head. “Thanks, but I can't. Got a call about some trouble out this way.” She pulled a paper from her uniform shirt pocket and glanced down at it. “Is there a Rita Lucero here?”

I waved my hand over my head and stood to make it easier for her to spot me.

She motioned for me to sit. “I need you to stay there, ma'am. You're the one who called dispatch?”

“I am.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

I'd already explained the problem to the dispatcher, but I'd had enough experience with the police to know this was how they worked. Besides, Deputy Georgie had a look in her eye that convinced me I'd be smart not to argue. “I went to my car to get something and noticed a body lying in the ditch. It's just down there if you want to take a look.”

“It's Silas Laroche,” Tallulah interjected. “Looks like he finally did what we always knew he'd do: got himself drunk and fell in a ditch.”

Georgie looked surprised. “You positive it's Silas?”

“It sure looks like him,” Bitty said. She put on a virtuous expression and stood a fraction of an inch taller. “Of course, I could be wrong. We didn't touch the body.”

Georgie nodded curtly. “Y'all stay right here. I'll go have a look.”

She took a brisk walk toward the ditch, scrambled down the bank to check the body, and made a call using the radio on her shoulder as she walked back toward us. “It's Silas all right,” she said when she finished her call. “Only it doesn't look like he drowned in the ditch. I'd say somebody hit him over the head with something hard enough to crush his skull.” She zeroed in on me. “You're the one who found the body, then?”

I said again that I was, and after warning everyone else to stay put, Georgie led me inside. I swallowed my questions and tried to give off a cooperative vibe. The kitchen smelled of fresh coffee, underscored by Tallulah's gumbo.

We settled at the table and sized each other up. Now that we were closer, I could see that Georgie had clear gray eyes and a smattering of freckles on her nose and cheeks. “I've never seen you around here before,” she said. “You aren't from around these parts, are you?”

I said that I wasn't, and rattled off my address and cell number before she could ask.

She introduced herself as Georgie Tucker and put both elbows on the table. “You're all the way down here from New Orleans, huh? Funny, you don't look like the kind to hire a hunting guide.”

“I'm not,” I said with a smile. “I drove my mother-in-law and her neighbor down here this afternoon. Bernice got a call this morning that her cousin Eskil was missing out on the swamp. Naturally she was worried about him.”

“Bernice is your mother-in-law?”

I shook my head. “My mother-in-law is Frances Mae Renier. Bernice Dudley is her neighbor.”

Georgie made a few notes. “You ever meet Silas Laroche?”

“Never.” My mind flashed back to the man I'd seen outside the bar when we pulled into town, but I told myself it couldn't have been the same guy. Plenty of men wore ball caps and white rubber boots. “I'd never even heard of him until tonight.”

“So you had no reason to want him dead?”

“No.”

“You know of anybody who did?”

I shook my head. “I never even met any of these people until tonight. This is my first time in Baie Rebelle.”

I wasn't sure Georgie would believe me, but to my surprise, she nodded. “That's what I thought. So tell me, what did they do between the time you called in and when I got here?”

The question surprised me. Not including my friend Liam Sullivan, the last dealings I'd had with a cop had left a bitter taste in my mouth. Georgie's easygoing manner and apparent lack of suspicion helped me relax.

“I think just about everybody had a look around. I tried to stop them, but they weren't in the mood to listen. For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Bitty was telling the truth. They trampled all over, but I don't think anyone touched the body.”

“Did you see anybody arrive? Or leave?”

“Lots of people,” I said. “Like I said, Eskil was stranded out on the water somewhere and people were out looking for him. They used this place as command central. The clearing was full of trucks and cars when we arrived. People left at various times. Some left after they found Eskil and some after we finished eating. I wish I could tell you who left when, but I met so many people, I don't remember more than a handful of names.”