Блейз Клемент - Raining Cat Sitters And Dogs

I told myself that I was involved in Victor’s kidnapping because I’d let Maureen manipulate me into taking that damn duff el bag of money to the gazebo. I reminded myself that she hadn’t mentioned me in her staged press conference, so maybe my name would never come up. I rebutted that the possibility of my name never coming up was about the same as the possibility of a summer in Florida without a hurricane.

By the time I stepped out of the shower I was close to being water dissolved but no closer to seeing anything positive about the situation. Pete Fountain was still playing on the CD, but as I reached for a towel I heard a ring on my cellphone that made me shoot out of the bathroom trailing water droplets. Only a handful of people have my cellphone number, and only three people—Michael, Paco, and Guidry—rate a special alert ring. Michael and Paco know they’re on the elite list. Guidry doesn’t have a clue.

I hoped Michael was calling to tell me he’d heard from Paco, but it was Guidry.

He said, “Are you at home?”

I admitted that I was.

“I’m just turning into your lane. I’ll be there in two minutes.”

Damp and gasping, I wriggled into a thigh-length spaghetti-strapped tank and pulled my wet hair into a knot. With Pete Fountain playing in the background, I met Guidry at the door with bare feet and a bare face. His gray eyes tried for objective and neuter, but his irises gave him away. Stand in front of a man with your nipples hard under knit, and his irises will expand like spreading inkblots. The other side of that, of course, was that my nipples had given me away first.

He said, “I wanted to talk to you about the girl.”

My mind had been so stuck on Maureen that it took a moment to realize he meant Jaz. I gestured toward the love seat and dropped into the matching chair. I folded my legs under me, realized I was exposing a lot of thigh, and tugged the tank toward my knees. Ella hopped into the chair with me and settled into the corner. I was glad to have her there. She made a little warm mound behind my hip.

Guidry’s eyes flicked toward the sound of Pete Fountain’s clarinet.

I said, “I saw Jaz this morning at Hetty’s house. She said she and her stepfather live nearby. She doesn’t know the house number but I described Reba Chandler’s house—you know, built on stilts with a tall stairway—and she said it looked like that.”

His eyes said I’m listening, but his head leaned a fraction of an inch toward the music, so I wasn’t sure if he was paying attention to me.

I said, “While we were talking, Jaz noticed the time and got scared. She said if her stepfather came home and found her gone, he’d kill her. I don’t think she meant it literally, just, you know, the way kids talk. Anyway, she rushed out and I followed her. Drove behind her and watched where she went. She ran into the nature preserve behind the Key Royale, so I knew the only place she could be going was there, to the hotel.”

Guidry’s eyes had grown sharper on me, so I was pretty sure he was listening.

I said, “I talked myself into the Royale and one of the employees showed me around the place. They have honeymoon cottages that back up to the nature preserve, and he said rabbits come from there all the time. The cottages are built on tall stilts exactly like Reba’s house, so I think Jaz must have described one of them to somebody, and that’s why those boys came in Reba’s house looking for her. She didn’t have a house number to give them because those cottages are all named instead of numbered.”

Guidry looked skeptical. “You think she lives in a honeymoon cottage at the Key Royale?”

“I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I do. The guy who showed me around said those cottages rent for twenty thousand a weekend. Jaz’s stepfather doesn’t look like he could afford that, but I don’t think there’s any other explanation. I’m thinking he must work there as a security guard, but Don—that’s the guy at the Royale who showed me around—said the hotel doesn’t give living quarters to anybody except the managers. The employees I saw were all well dressed and sophisticated. Not like Jaz’s stepfather.”

He said, “Did you or Ms. Soames ever get a last name from the girl?”

“No, but I found out Jaz is short for Jasmine, pronounced Jas- meen, and she said that’s what her mother named her. She resents her stepfather calling her Rosemary. When she mentioned her mother, she got teary and stopped talking. Hetty doesn’t believe there’s a mother in the picture, and she may be right. Hetty took her shopping last night and bought her some new clothes. She’s also feeding her.”

Pete Fountain began playing “Tin Roof Blues” and Guidry’s eyes changed in a way that made me positive he was as aware of the music as he was of me.

I suddenly felt like a complete dolt. Maybe it hadn’t been my nipples that had caused Guidry’s pupils to dilate, maybe it had been Pete Fountain. Guidry was from New Orleans. His name was Jean Pierre. He spoke French. He came from a wealthy family, and he was smart as all get-out. New Orleans French Quarter jazz might turn him on more than I did.

I said, “Guidry, are you French Creole or French Cajun? What is Cajun, anyway?”

I swear to God I hadn’t meant to say that. It wasn’t an appropriate time or an appropriate question. Besides, I truly didn’t care what kind of French he was. It was just that my mouth didn’t know I didn’t care.

Ella raised her head above my hip to look hard at me. She said, “Thrippp!” and curled up behind my back again. The music had apparently brought out her scatting tendencies. Either that, or she was embarrassed at my nosiness and didn’t want to be seen with me.

Guidry’s gray eyes examined my face for a moment, pretty much the way Ella had. When he answered he sounded a bit like a teacher whose patience is stretched.

“You’ve heard of the French and Indian War? When Canada fought France and Great Britain?”

I shook my head. I was sorry I’d asked. I didn’t want a history lesson, I just wanted to know if he was Creole or Cajun.

“France and Great Britain both claimed an area in Canada that had been settled by Frenchmen. Part of the area was Acadia. Great Britain won the war and ordered all the French settlers to leave. A lot of them went to Louisiana. That’s what the poem Evangeline is about. Since they’d come from Acadia, they called themselves Acadian, but the Americans in Louisiana pronounced it Cajun . French Creoles were already there when they came, and the Cajuns spoke a different French dialect. Still do. It’s about as hard to find a pure Cajun today as it is to find a pure Creole. Lots of intermarrying, lots of different bloodlines.”

“So you’re Cajun?”

He grinned. “When did you get into genealogy?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Okay, here’s my family story. Too bad my sister isn’t here, she could tell you all the details.”

I assumed this time he meant a real sister, like in a family, not a nun who’d taught him to fear girls in school.

He said, “First-generation French colonists in Louisiana were just called French . Their children were called French Creole to identify them as American-born rather than immigrants. My French Creole several-times-great-grandfather met my several-times-great-grandmother at a Quadroon Ball.”

I was only half listening. My mind was back on the fact that he had a sister. I wondered if he had more than one, and if he had any brothers.

He said, “You know what a quadroon is?”

“Old French money?”

He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. “A quadroon was somebody less than a quarter black. A Quadroon Ball was where French Creole men were introduced to beautiful, well-educated young quadroon women.”