‘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 an iron-based pan over a hot 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 colour. 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 peppers, onion and garlic salt, then dropped in thick pieces of chorizo sausage. She added the chicken and more spices, until their scent filled the room. After about half an hour, she spooned white rice on to plates and poured the thick rich gumbo over it. After that, we ate in silence, savouring the flavours 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 workboots, 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 smelt of liniment.
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 prepare to leave.
‘Been married long?’ I asked, as we walked towards 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.’
A breakdown truck was parked in the glade, with a trailer attached, on which a wide, flat-bottomed aluminium boat lay covered in tarpaulin, its engine tilted forward so that it rested on the bed. ‘Touissant’s brother dropped it over late last night,’ he explained. ‘Does some hauling on the side.’
‘Where’s Touissant?’
‘In bed with food poisoning. He ate some bad shrimp, least that’s how he tells it. Personally, I think he’s just too damn lazy to give up his morning in bed.’
In the back of the truck, beneath some more tarpaulin, were an axe, a chainsaw, two lengths of chain, some strong nylon rope and an icebox. There was also a dry suit and mask, a pair of waterproof flashlights and two oxygen tanks. Morphy added a flask of coffee, some water, two sticks of French bread and four chicken breasts coated in K-Paul’s Cajun spices, all contained in a waterproof bag, then climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck and started her up. She belched smoke and rattled a bit, but the engine sounded good and strong. I climbed in beside him and we drove towards Honey Island, a Clifton Chenier tape on the truck’s battered stereo.
We entered the reserve at Slidell, a collection of shopping malls, fast-food joints and Chinese buffets on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain named for the Democratic senator John Slidell. In the 1844 federal election, Slidell arranged for two steamboats to carry a bunch of Irish and German voters from New Orleans to Plaquemines Parish to vote. There was nothing illegal about that; what was illegal was letting them vote at all the other polling stations along the route.
A mist still hung over the water and the trees as we unloaded the boat at the Pearl River ranger station, beside a collection of run-down fishing shacks that floated near the bank. We loaded the chains, rope, chainsaw, the diving gear and the food. In a tree beside us, the early-morning sun caught the threads of a huge, intricate web, at the centre of which lay, unmoving, a Golden Orb spider. Then, with the sound of the motor blending with the noise of insects and birds, we moved on to the Pearl.
The banks of the river were lined with high tupelo gum, water birch, willows and some tall cypress with trumpet creeper vines, their red flowers in bloom, winding up their trunks. Here and there, trees were marked with plastic bottles, signs that catfish lines had been sunk. We passed a village of riverside homes, most of them down-at-heel, with flat-bottomed pirogues tied up outside them. A blue heron watched us calmly from the branches of a cypress; on a log beneath him, a yellow-bellied turtle lay soaking up the sun.
I still had Raymond Aguillard’s map but it took us two attempts to find the trevasse, the trappers’ channel that he had marked. There was a stand of gum trees at its entrance, their swollen buttresses like the bulbs of flowers, with a sole green ash leaning almost across the gap. Further in, branches, weighed down with Spanish moss, hung almost to the surface of the water and the air was redolent with the mingled scents of growth and decay. Misshapen tree trunks surrounded by duckweed stood like monuments in the early-morning sun. East, I could see the grey dome of a beaver lodge and, as we watched, a snake slithered into the water not five feet from us.
‘Diamondback,’ said Morphy.
Around us, water dripped from cypress and tupelo, and birdsong echoed in the trees.
‘Any chance of ’gators here?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe. Don’t bother people
much, though, unless people bother them. There’s easier pickings in the swamps, and they’ve been known to take dogs that wander too close to the bank. If you see any while I’m down there, fire a shot to let me know what’s happening.’
The bayou started to narrow until it was barely wide enough to allow the boat passage. I felt the bottom scrape on a tree trunk resting below the surface. Morphy killed the engine and we used our hands and a pair of wooden paddles to pull ourselves through.
It seemed then that we might somehow have made a mistake in our map-reading, because we were faced with a wall of wild rice, the tall, green stalks like blades in the water. There was only one narrow gap visible, big enough for a child to pass through. Morphy shrugged and restarted the engine, aiming us for the gap. I used the paddle to beat back the rice stalks as we moved forward. Something splashed close by us and a dark shape, like a large rat, sliced through the water.
‘Nutria,’ said Morphy. I could see the big rodent’s nose and whiskers now as it stopped beside a tree trunk and sniffed the air inquisitively. ‘Taste worse than ’gators. I hear we’re trying to sell their meat to the Chinese since no one else wants to eat it.’
The rice blended into sharp-edged grass, which cut at my hands as I worked the paddle, and then the boat was free and we were in a kind of lagoon formed by a gradual accumulation of silt, its banks surrounded mainly by gum and willows that dragged the fingers of their branches in the water. There was some almost firm ground at the eastern edge, near an accumulation of arrowroot lilies, with wild pig tracks in the dirt, the animals attracted by the promise of the arrowroot at the lilies’ base. Further in, I could see the rotting remains of a T-cutter, probably one of the craft that had originally cut the channel. Its big V8 engine was gone, and there were holes in its hull.
We tied the boat up at a sole red swamp maple, which was almost covered with resurrection fern waiting for the rains to bring it back to life. Morphy stripped down to a pair of Nike cycling shorts, rubbed himself down with grease and put the dry suit on. He added the flippers, then strapped on the tank and tested it. ‘Most of the waters around here are no more than ten, maybe fifteen feet deep, but this place is different,’ he said. ‘You can see it in the way the light reflects on the water. It’s deeper, twenty feet or more.’ Leaves, sticks and logs floated on the water and insects flitted above the surface. The water looked dark and green.
He washed the mask in the swamp water then turned to me. ‘Never thought I’d be looking for swamp ghosts on my day off,’ he said.
‘Raymond Aguillard says he saw the girl here,’ I replied. ‘David Fontenot died up the river. There’s something here. You know what you’re looking for?’
He nodded. ‘Probably a container of some sort, heavy, sealed.’
Morphy flicked on the flashlight, slipped on his mask and began sucking oxygen. I tied one end of the climbing rope to his belt and another to the trunk of the maple, yanked it firm then patted him on the back. He raised a thumb and waded into the water. Two or three yards out, he began to dive and I started to feed the rope out through my hands.
I had had little experience of diving, beyond a few basic lessons taken during a holiday with Susan on the Florida Keys. I didn’t envy Morphy, swimming around in that swamp. During my teens, we went swimming in the Stroudwater river, beyond what are now the Portland city limits, during the summer. Long, lean gars dwelt in those waters, vicious things that brought a hint of the primeval with them. When they brushed your bare legs, it made you think of stories you had heard about them biting small children or dragging swimming dogs down to the bottom of the river.
The waters of Honey Island swamp were like another world compared to the Stroudwater. With its glittering snakes and its cowens, the name the Cajuns give to the swamp’s snapping turtles, Honey Island seemed so much more feral than the backwaters of Maine. But there were alligator gar here too, and scaled shortnoses, as well as perch and bass and bowfins. And ’gators.
I thought of these things as Morphy disappeared below the surface of the bayou, but I also thought of the young girl who might have been dumped in these waters, where creatures she couldn’t name bumped and clicked against the side of her tomb while others searched for rust holes through which to get at the rotting meat inside.
Morphy surfaced after five minutes, indicated the short, north-eastern bank, and shook his head. Then he submerged again and the line on the ground snaked south as he swam. After another five minutes the rope began to pull out quickly. Morphy broke the surface again, but this time some distance from where the rope entered the water. He swam back to the bank, removed the mask and mouthpiece and breathed in short gasps as he gestured back towards the southern end of the bayou.
‘We got a couple of metal boxes, maybe four feet long, two feet wide and eighteen inches deep, dumped down there,’ he said. ‘One’s empty, the other’s locked and bolted. Couple of hundred yards away there’s a bunch of oil barrels marked with red fleurs-de-lys. They belong to the old Brevis Chemical Company, used to operate out of West Baton Rouge until a big fire in ’eighty-nine put it out of business. That’s it. Nothing else down there.’
I looked out towards the edge of the bayou, where thick roots lay obscured beneath the water.
‘Could we pull in the box using the rope?’ I asked.
‘Could do, but that box is heavy and if we bust it open while hauling it in we’ll destroy whatever’s inside. We’ll have to bring the boat out and try to pull it up.’
It was getting very warm now, although the trees on the bank provided some shade from the sun. Morphy took two bottles of still mineral water from the icebox and we drank them sitting on the bank. Then Morphy and I got into the boat and took it out to his marker.
Twice the box caught on some obstacle on the bottom as I tried to pull it up, and I had to wait for Morphy to signal before I could start hauling it in again. Eventually, the grey metal box broke the surface of the water, Morphy pushing up from beneath before he went back down to tie the marker rope to one of the oil barrels in case we had to search them.
I brought the boat back to the landing and dragged the box up on to the shore. The chain and lock securing it were old and rusted, probably too old to yield anything of any use to us. I took the axe and struck at the rusty lock that held the chain in place. It broke as Morphy walked on to the bank. He knelt beside me, the oxygen tank still on his back and the mask pushed up on to his forehead as I pulled at the lid of the box. It was stuck fast. I took the blunt head of the axe and struck upward along the edges until the lid lifted.
Inside was a consignment of breech-loading Springfield .50 calibre rifles and the bones of what seemed to be a small dog. The butts of the rifles had almost rotted but I could still see the letters ‘LNG’ on the metal butt plates.
‘Stolen rifles,’ said Morphy, pulling one free and examining it. ‘Maybe eighteen seventy or ’eighty. The authorities probably issued a stolen arms proclamation after these were taken and the thief dumped them or left them there with the intention of coming back.’
He prodded at the dog’s skull with his fingers. ‘The bones are an indicator of some kind. Pity nobody been seein’ the Hound of the Baskervilles out here, else we’d have the whole mystery cleared up.’ He looked at the rifles, then back out towards the oil drums. He sighed, then began to swim out towards the marker.
Hauling in the drums was a laborious process. The chain slipped off three times as we tried to haul in the first. Morphy came back for a second chain and wrapped it, parcel style, around the drum. The boat almost overturned when I tried to open the barrel while I was still on the water, so we were forced to bring it back to dry land. When we eventually got it on to the bank, brown and rusting, it contained only stale sump. The drums had a hole for loading and pouring the oil, but the entire lid could also be prised off. When we opened the second drum it didn’t even contain sump, just some stones which had been used to weigh it down.
By now, Morphy was exhausted. W
e stopped for a time to eat some of the chicken and bread, and drink some of the coffee. It was now past midday and the heat in the swamp was heavy and draining. After we had rested, I offered to do some of the diving. Morphy didn’t refuse, so I handed him my shoulder holster then suited up and strapped on the spare tank.
The water was surprisingly cool as I slipped into it. As it reached my chest, it almost took my breath away. The chains were heavy across my shoulder as I guided myself along the marker rope with one hand. When I reached the spot where the rope entered the water, I slipped the flashlight from my belt and dived.
The water was deeper than I expected and very dark, the duckweed above me blacking out the sunlight in patches. At the periphery of my vision, fish twisted and spun. The barrels, of which five remained, all piled in a heap, were gathered around the submerged trunk of an ancient tree, its roots buried deep in the bottom of the swamp. Any boat that might have been using the swamp bank to land on would have avoided the tree, which meant that the barrels were in no danger of being disturbed. The water at the base of the tree was darker than the rest, so that without the meagre light the barrels would have been invisible.
I wrapped the top barrel in chains and yanked once to test its weight. It tumbled from the top of the pile, yanking the rope from my grasp as it headed for the bottom. The water muddied and dirt and vegetation obscured my vision, and then everything went black as oil began to leak from the drum. I was kicking back to get into clearer water when I heard the dull, echoing sound of a gunshot from above me. For a moment, I thought that Morphy might be in trouble until I remembered what the gunshot was supposed to signal and realised that it was I, not Morphy, who was in trouble.
I was breaking for the surface when I saw the ’gator. It was small, maybe only six feet long, but the glare caught the wicked-looking teeth jutting out along its jaws and its light-coloured underbelly. It was as disorientated by the oil and dirt as I was, but it seemed to be angling towards the beam of my flashlight. I turned it off and instantly lost sight of the ’gator as I made a final kick for the surface.