Blood in the Lake Page 3

  “And then I noticed the drain board. A zip-lock bag of pork roast and gravy lay limp and warm in a puddle of water. The sight of that thawed meat stabbed me in the gut. I knew right then something was terribly wrong. PawPaw would never leave food out overnight.”

  Mom saved leftovers so PawPaw wouldn’t have to cook for himself. He always had a supply of those little zip-lock bags in his freezer. Every morning he’d take out one for his dinner, which he ate at noon. Tuesday’s meal would’ve still been icy if it had come out of the freezer that morning.

  “And so you figured he hadn’t been home since after breakfast the morning before?” I asked.

  “Right. My first thought, but I didn’t let on to Bub. I’m sure I was chattering like a fool, telling him PawPaw would have some simple explanation, that he’d probably changed his plans and spent a night with one of his other children. I told Bub we just had to check with the family to see where he went. I picked up the telephone and began to call your aunts and uncles.” Mom smiled and tipped her head to a list taped under the calendar from Our Lady of the Sea. “I just read the inch-high telephone numbers PawPaw keeps on the wall right above the phone. I called all the family—except Dora of course.”

  When my Aunt Dora married, she and her husband moved to a suburb outside Atlanta. Dora was the only one of PawPaw’s children to graduate from college. I remember PawPaw saying you end up leaving home if you get a lot of education. Would I leave? Maybe, if I ever figured out what I wanted to do with my life.

  “Then I checked with PawPaw’s buddy, Thib Thibodeaux. Thib said PawPaw hadn’t shown up for morning coffee, and they all wondered if he was sick or somethin’. Thib expected the boys to start gathering again pretty soon. He’d ask them if anyone had seen PawPaw around. I probably sounded crazy, trying to keep a smile in my voice so Bub wouldn’t get worried.”

  Her strained, oh, everything is all right voice had gotten a workout.

  PawPaw loved his coffee hour with the boys. Every morning, around eleven o’clock, he and a half-dozen of his buddies gathered at Thibodeaux’s Grocery in Coteau—not another town, just the settlement to the northwest. They tipped back in wooden chairs and propped their boots up on an old pot-bellied stove. The stove would’ve been cold in the late summer, but it crackled with fire in the winter. The boys at Thib’s had very little concern for national or international affairs. Once they’d exchanged information about the height of the sugarcane and the going price for sugar and rice, they moved on to the political maneuvering for the next election. PawPaw would say it used to be so simple to know how everyone stood on the issues and to keep track of who supported who when everyone was either Long or an Anti-Long. Now things were all mixed up. You couldn’t predict how a politician would turn out. They’d tell you one thing and do another.

  Right then, I had a wave of dread. I’d begun to think of PawPaw in the past tense.

  Mom again glanced at the door to the hall. No one in earshot. She kept going.

  “A half hour later, calls began to come back in. One family member after another asked me if I’d heard anything. Not yet, I told them. And then they started coming to the house.” Mom sighed. “My cheeriness wasn’t fooling Uncle Bub. He went out on the porch and propped himself on the railing, his face pale. I made another pot of coffee and convinced him to come back inside. I pulled out a kitchen chair and got him to sit down. His cup rattled in the saucer. The lower half of his face looked funny, drawn to one side, and his fingers did little dance steps on the tabletop. He gave me the telephone number of the radio room at the sheriff’s office—six twenty-one, twenty-one hundred—and told me to call and tell them PawPaw had gone missing. His voice crackled as he spoke.”

  At this point, my Aunt Mazie came from the central hall into the kitchen.

  “Any coffee, Mandy? Did your Mom make any coffee for us? Did she?”

  Damn Aunt Mazie. The most aggravating member of the family. She said everything twice.

  “Over on the counter, Mazie,” Mom said through tight lips. She took my arm and drew me with her out to the back porch so she could continue her report out of Mazie’s presence.

  “Elnora on the sheriff’s switchboard said she’d notify her boss and radio the deputies who were patrolling in our area of the parish. They’d make a pass by the house. Bub then insisted we get Ti to come over. I didn’t know Ti’s cell phone number so I called his wife Nell.”

  “She must have found him. He just pulled up outside,” I told Mom.

  “Good. Anyway, I guess that’s good. Then I called you.”

  “I’m glad you did, Mom,” I told her, circling her shoulders with another hug.

  Then my Dad came out onto the back porch. He went right to Mom and kissed her on the cheek.

  “I swear, Mimi, Mandy can get all the way here from Baton Rouge in the time it takes me to escape from the boys at the firehouse. The chief made us go through the hurricane protocol for the tenth time!”

  “I told you not to come, Emile. We’re fine here. We’re just waiting for the sheriff.”

  Of course Dad had come. He wouldn’t let any of us be in trouble without trying to help.

  “Let’s go back inside, Mimi. We’ve got quite a crowd in there now.”

  Within a half hour after I arrived at PawPaw’s house, the law appeared. Chief Deputy “Big” Theriot pulled the sheriff’s customized Jeep onto the scruffy growth that passed for the front lawn. Without Mama B to nag him, PawPaw hadn’t kept the place up the way he had in the past. Anyway, we can’t make our yards look like the ones we see in magazines. In Louisiana, a fifth column of squirrels works ‘round the clock burying acorns in the damp earth, and birds scatter seeds of every known variety of weeds. Trees and weeds. If we don’t stay on top of the growth, in three months we have ourselves a jungle like the one that awaited the Spanish conquistadors and Acadian settlers two hundred years ago.

  Sheriff Septimus Landry, a bulldozer of a man, slid down from the passenger seat of his jeep. He paused to tug his pants into place, and motioned to one of his deputies to get back in the unit and lower the window. Although the sheriff had a cell phone and a walkie-talkie strapped on his body, he wanted to stay in touch with the police scanner as well. He strode up the front walk to the house. Boots give a man a walk that says don’t give me no trouble; the sheriff’s stride broadcast the message loud and clear.

  The sheriff greeted the family and friends assembled on the front porch, and they fell on him. Led by Uncle Ti, they asked and then demanded action. Filling his ample chest with air, the sheriff squared his shoulders and took command of the situation. “OK, men, let’s go on inside and get to work.”

  Men, he said.

  The sheriff instructed Big to go back out to the car to give the OK for a missing person alert. Out on the wire went a BOLO. Be on the lookout for Pierre Boudreaux, WM, 80, 6’, 200 pounds, driving white Ford pickup, LA DES 062.

  Once in the central hall of the old house, the sheriff pulled Ti Pierre to his side, threw his burly arm around Ti’s shoulders in a man-hug, and faced the assemblage. So transparent. He wanted to make Uncle Ti think he was second in command of this situation. The truth? The sheriff held on to Ti to keep the family hothead on a short leash.

  The sheriff drew from his shirt pocket a topographical map of the area surrounding Lake Peigneur and asked Ti to hold the corners while he taped the map to the back wall. Then the sheriff pulled over an antique marble-topped table, placed it under the map, and laid out a stack of colored markers. He picked up the red marker and drew a circle, Lake Peigneur at the midpoint. Then he drew spokes leading from the center of the lake to the edges of the map.

  “See these pie-shaped areas, men? I’ll assign a team to each section. Each team will be headed by a member of the family and accompanied by one of my deputies.”

  Reverse the instruction and you have a true translation of his order. Each team will be headed by one of my deputies and accompanied by a member of the family.

  �
��We’re gonna scour every damn inch in every damn section, one after the other,” the sheriff said.

  With about twenty men now antsy to take to their trucks, the sheriff again put his arm around Uncle Ti. “Ti Pierre, I’m gonna need you to get this search organized. Work with Big to make up the teams.” Sheriff Landry turned to me. “Mandy, you write down these assignments so we have a record of who is on which team and where they go. Clock the times in and out.”

  The sheriff was oblivious to my raised eyebrows. I was to be the secretary of the operation. OK. No need to make trouble. For a greater cause, I could handle the role. I shrugged my acceptance—but I wasn’t about to say ‘yes sir.’ I got a legal pad and pen from my car and prepared to take down the plan for the search.

  The sheriff continued booming out his instructions. “Ti Pierre, take your big truck home and come back in your 4X4. I’m goin’ out to my unit to make radio contact with the office. With that storm out there, I’ve got a shitload of work to do. We’ve got a few days leeway until it could come onshore, but it’s easier to get everything ready before the rain. You know the drill. We’ve gotta touch base with all the shelters. We gotta make sure the barns have what they need for sandbag distribution. We gotta put the National Guard on alert. But rest assured, we’re on top of the search for your PawPaw. Major Theriot here will be making calls to all the places the family thinks he might have gone, and I’ll be back within the hour to see you off on the search. Big, get goin’ on those calls.”

  I caught sight of Bub sitting by himself on the sofa by the front door. I put my hand on Mom’s arm. “Bub looks so lost. I think I’ll go talk to him a bit.”

  “Do that, Mandy. He probably cares for you as much as anyone in this world, with the exception of PawPaw.” I was glad to hear her use the present tense.

  I sat down next to my youngest uncle, moving his crutches aside. “Feel like talking?” I asked.

  “That’d be OK,” Bub answered softly.

  “You’re the last one to see PawPaw, Uncle Bub. Tell me about it.”

  Bub swallowed hard.

  “Yesterday we had our coffee and biscuits at the table in the kitchen, like always, and we talked about the storm. I guess that’s all we talked about. Around eight o’clock I went out onto the front porch to wait for the patrol car. PawPaw walked out with me. Deputy Green pulled up, I got into the unit and waved. That’s it Mandy, the last time I waved him good-bye.” Bub squeezed out the word good-bye as slowly as toothpaste from a tube. “The last time I saw him.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual about PawPaw? Like did he seem sick or anything?”

  Bub shook his head. “Everything was just like usual. What could’ve happened to him? I know he would’ve told me if he was going somewhere.”

  “I don’t know what happened, but we’re gonna find out. For sure.”

  Bub slumped down into the sofa pillows and muttered to himself.

  “Why in Jesus’ name didn’t I look over here when I finished supper last night? Just a glance would’ve done it. I’d have noticed his truck was gone. We could’ve started looking for him right then.”

  We were all blaming ourselves. I was wondering if we should’ve let PawPaw live alone. Or drive. Mom said she’d put off an appointment with PawPaw’s cardiologist in Lafayette. Now she felt that if they’d gone, maybe a doctor would’ve detected some problem with his heart.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about what might have been, Bub. Anyway, we’re gonna find him. It’s just a matter of time.”

  True. We would find PawPaw, all right. But in what condition?

  Bub dropped his head and stopped talking. I put my hand on his thigh.

  After a few minutes of quiet, Uncle Bub sat up straight, or at least as straight as he could. I saw the first smile on his face since I’d come home.

  “I’m remembering something else PawPaw and I talked about yesterday morning. He said he was on his way to town to cash his Social Security check so he’d have some money for the storm. Yesterday I saw the check under the sugar bowl, but it isn’t there now.”

  “Good thinking, Bub!” I gave him a high five. “We’ll get in touch with the bank to see if anyone remembers him coming by. They’ll have a record if he cashed his check.”

  “Yeah, and something else.” Bub’s eyes opened wider. “PawPaw said he had to pay his water bill. Maybe he went by LAWCO after the bank.”

  Another high five.

  Big Theriot interrupted us. “I need you over here, Mandy.”

  Shit. I was being summoned to resume my duties as madam secretary.

  “Keep on thinking, Bub. I’ll get Big on this right away.”

  * * *

  Unknown to all of us, something else was taking place that morning, not very far away—a bad house fire, with serious injury, on Captain Cade Road. Sometime in the afternoon the Boudreaux family heard news of the fire and of a woman who had been seriously hurt. But none of us knew for days that the event had any connection to PawPaw’s disappearance.

  The Find

  MY EVENING SEMINAR vanished from my mind.

  I set up my legal pad on another of one of Mama B’s little marble-top tables. Chief Theriot stood by the phone punching in the numbers I found for him. He made his first call to Thib’s Grocery. Thib said he’d questioned the boys when they came for the morning coffee hour, but none of them remembered seeing their good buddy Pierre.

  I made a note of the conversation.

  Next, Big called the branch of the Farmers’ and Seamen’s Bank where PawPaw always cashed his checks. The manager took a while to locate the teller who had been on duty at the drive-in window on Monday morning. When he found her, she recalled the transaction and remembered PawPaw stuffing the cash—a little over $400—into his shirt pocket. She didn’t think the money would be secure, but perhaps the old man, who was a bit wide in the girth, couldn’t maneuver his wallet out of his pants while seated in his truck. No, she hadn’t noticed anyone suspicious in the area. I wrote all that down.

  The clerk at the water company found the record of bill payment at 9:30 a.m., but she had no memory of PawPaw. She didn’t think anything unusual had happened all day. No, she said, she didn’t make a practice of conversing with the customers. She just took the money, punched the amount into the computer, and handed the customer a receipt.

  All day, every day. What a dull job that must be. I didn’t know what kind of work I’d find after graduation, but I hoped I wouldn’t be stuck doing anything like that.

  Calls went out to the hospitals, the used car lots, the bus station, even to the mall in Houma, where Aunt Mazie lived. Nothing. Yesterday, at 9:30 a.m., Monday, the thirty-first of August, when I was back at school getting ready for my first class of the day and the rest of the family was worrying about a hurricane, the trail went cold.

  I drew a copy of the sheriff’s map on my legal pad. Uncle Ti claimed leadership of the search party assigned to the pie-shaped segment stretching from the west side of Lake Peigneur toward Vermilion Bay. As a life-long hunter, he knew the land out there. Anyone unfamiliar with the area could get lost in the thick woods for days. I took down Uncle Ti’s assignment with care. He’d give me a piece of his mind if I got it wrong.

  Uncle J. Allen claimed another isolated area, the segment that included the shoreline of Lake Tasse, teacup in English, a smaller body of water closer to town. In the early spring—off-season on the sugarcane farm—my uncles leased a couple of acres of fallow rice fields to flood for their crawfish traps. PawPaw often took a ride out there to see if nutria had dug breaches in any of the little levees controlling the flow of water into the ponds, and he’d check the locks on the metal shed where they stored their pirogues and stacks of wire traps. Maybe PawPaw had gone over there yesterday and run into a problem. Major Theriot signed himself on as the deputy for J. Allen’s segment of the pie.

  “Take Bub along with you,” Uncle Ti instructed. “He knows that area like the back of his hand. And Chief, when
you get there, you be sure you get down from your truck—all the way down—to look for tire tracks, trampled scrub, anything unusual.”

  Chief Deputy Major Theriot wasn’t called Big Boy for nothing. His muffin-top belly hung over his belt, and he got short of breath just getting in and out of his unit. Uncle Ti thought Big needed reminding you can’t do much detecting sitting on your rump.

  Uncle Ti allotted the remaining segments to his brothers, his brothers-in-law, and the older grandsons. The sheriff assigned an experienced deputy as the so-called assistant to each search group. I noted every assignment.

  Sheriff Landry instructed a deputy to man the radio in the jeep in front of the house, take the calls, and send messages inside to be posted in my notes. He ordered one of the patrol deputies to stand by the map ready to yellow-highlight each area searched.

  Uncle Ti was loving this. He strutted around like a rooster, bellowing instructions to every crew. “Check every friggin’ road, every ditch beside every friggin’ road. Call in your reports.”

  Faces stiff with resolve, one by one the men of the family climbed into their off-road vehicles and pulled away from the house. That was how the search began.

  By dusk, I had almost filled my legal pad with handwritten notes. Yellow highlight covered large portions of the sheriff’s map. The search parties returned one by one, shut down by darkness, scheduled to crank up again at first light. What a different picture. Now shoulders sagged; steps slowed. Discouragement breeds exhaustion. No one had seen any trace of an old man or a white pickup, license number DES 062.

  Women had been coming in all afternoon carrying covered dishes and staying to help my aunts pass the anxious hours. Word spreads quickly through the countryside around the lake.

  I was raised saying the rosary, and I love my Aunt Tut, but when she pulled those beads out of her purse and summoned her daughters to the front room, the sing-song mumble got on my nerves. Holy Mary, Mother of God. The Lord is with you. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. The litany droned into the night. When I could, I hid out in the kitchen.