John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

Louis actually smiled. “Joe ain’t gonna be too keen on talking to you, seeing as how his boy tried to put you in the ground.”

“I kinda figured that,” I replied. “Could be that Lionel Fontenot might help us out there.”

We walked back to the Flaisance. The streets of New Orleans aren’t the safest in the world but I didn’t think that anyone would bother us.

I was right.

I SLEPT LATE the next morning. Rachel had returned to her own room to sleep. When I knocked, her voice sounded harsh with tiredness. She told me she wanted to stay in bed for a while, and when she felt better, she would go out to Loyola again. I asked Angel and Louis to watch out for her, then drove from the Flaisance.

The incident at Metairie had left me shaken, and the prospect of facing Joe Bones again was unappealing. I also felt a crushing sense of guilt for what had happened to Rachel, for what I had drawn her into and for what I had forced her to do. I needed to get out of New Orleans, at least for a short time. I wanted to clear my head, to try to see things from a different angle. I ate a bowl of chicken soup in the Gumbo Shop on St. Peter and then headed out of the city.

Morphy lived about four miles from Cecilia, a few miles northwest of Lafayette. He had bought and was refurbishing a raised plantation home by a small river, a budget version of the classic old Louisiana houses that had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, a blend of French Colonial, West Indian, and European architectural influences.

The house presented a strange spectacle. Its main living quarters were on top of an aboveground basement area, which had once been used for storage and as protection from flooding. This section of the house was brick and Morphy had reworked the arched openings with what looked like hand-carved frames. The living quarters above, which would usually have been weatherboard or plaster-covered, had been replaced with timber slats. A double-pitched roof, which had been partially reslated, extended over the gallery.

I had called ahead and told Angie I was on my way. Morphy had just got home when I arrived. I found him in the yard at the rear of the house, benching two hundred in the evening air.

“What do you think of the house?” he asked as I approached, not even pausing in his reps as he spoke.

“It’s great. Looks like you still have some way to go before it’s finished.”

He grunted with the effort of the final rep as I acted as spotter, slotting the bar back onto its rest. He stood up and stretched, then looked at the back of his house with barely concealed admiration.

“It was built by a Frenchman in eighteen eighty-eight,” he said. “He knew what he was doing. It’s built on an east-west axis, with principal exposure to the south.” He pointed out the lines of the building as he spoke. “He designed it the way the Europeans designed their houses, so that the low angle of the sun in winter would heat the building. Then, in the summer, the sun would only shine on it in the morning and evening. Most American houses aren’t built that way, they just put ’em up whatever way suits ’em, throw a stick in the air and see where it lands. We were spoiled by cheap energy. Then the Arabs came along and hiked up their prices and people had to start thinking again about the layout of their houses.”

He smiled. “Don’t know how much good an east-west house does around here, though. Sun shines all the goddamn time anyway.”

When he had showered, we sat at a table in the kitchen with Angie and talked as she cooked. Angie was almost a foot smaller than her husband, a slim, dark-skinned woman with auburn hair that flowed down her back. She was a junior school teacher, but she did some painting in her spare time. Her canvases, dark, impressionistic pieces set around water and sky, adorned the walls of the house.

Morphy drank a bottle of Breaux Bridge and I had a soda. Angie sipped a glass of white wine as she cooked. She cut four chicken breasts into about sixteen pieces and set them to one side as she set about preparing the roux.

Cajun gumbo is made with roux, a glutinous thickener, as a base. Angie poured peanut oil into a cast iron skillet over a high flame, added in an equal amount of flour, and beat it with a whisk continuously so it wouldn’t burn, gradually turning the roux from blond to beige and through mahogany until it reached a dark chocolate color. Then she took it off the heat and allowed it to cool, still stirring.

While Morphy looked on, I helped her chop the trinity of onion, green pepper, and celery and watched as she sweated them in oil. She added a seasoning of thyme and oregano, paprika and cayenne, onion and garlic salt, then dropped in thick pieces of chorizo. She added the chicken and more spices, until their scent filled the room. After about half an hour, she spooned white rice onto plates and poured the thick rich gumbo over it. We ate in silence, savoring the flavors in our mouths.

When we had washed and dried the dishes, Angie left us and went to bed. Morphy and I sat in the kitchen and I told him about Raymond Aguillard and his belief that he had seen the figure of a girl at Honey Island. I told him of Tante Marie’s dreams and my feeling that, somehow, David Fontenot’s death at Honey Island could be linked to the girl.

Morphy didn’t say anything for a long time. He didn’t sneer at visions of ghosts, or at an old woman’s belief that the voices she heard were real. Instead, all he said was: “You sure you know where this place is?”

I nodded.

“Then we’ll give it a try. I’m free tomorrow, so you better stay here tonight. We got a spare room you can use.” I called Rachel at the Flaisance and told her what I intended to do the next day and where in Honey Island we were likely to be. She said that she would tell Angel and Louis, and that she felt a little better for her sleep. It would take her a long time to get over the death of Joe Bones’s man.

It was early morning, barely ten before seven, when we prepared to leave. Morphy wore heavy steel-toed Caterpillar work boots, old jeans, and a sleeveless sweatshirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt. The sweat was dappled with paint and there were patches of tar on the jeans. His head was freshly shaved and smelled of witch hazel.

While we drank coffee and ate toast on the gallery, Angie came out in a white robe and rubbed her husband’s clean scalp, smirking at him as she took a seat beside him. Morphy acted like it annoyed the hell out of him, but he doted on her every touch. When we rose to go, he kissed her deeply with the fingers of his right hand entwined in her hair. Her body instinctively rose from the chair to meet him, but he pulled away laughing and she reddened. It was only then that I noticed the swelling at her belly: she was no more than five months gone, I guessed. As we walked across the grass at the front of the house, she stood on the gallery, her weight on one hip and a light breeze tugging at her robe, and watched her husband depart.

“Been married long?” I asked, as we walked toward a cypress glade that obscured the view of the house from the road.

“Two years in January. I’m a contented man. Never thought I would be, but that girl changed my life.” There was no embarrassment as he spoke and he acknowledged it with a smile.

“When is the baby due?”

He smiled again. “Late December. Guys held a party for me when they found out, to celebrate the fact that I was shooting live ones.”

An old Ford truck was parked in the glade, with a trailer attached on which a wide, flat-bottomed aluminum boat lay covered in tarpaulin, its engine tilted forward so that it rested on the bed. “Toussaint’s brother dropped it over late last night,” he explained. “Does some hauling on the side.”