Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (22 page)

“Sorry!” shouted the red-haired woman who had wielded the video camera inside Three Sisters Pantry. Then she drove off, shifting unhurriedly down the highway, the van’s one functioning taillight winking with each pothole.

“Did you see that?!” Nick sputtered in anger. “She hit my car! She . . . who the hell is she?”

He raced over to his MG and looked at the dent. “Damn!” He kicked a rear tire in frustration.

“Name’s Holly Worthstone,” Big John said calmly. “Been filming some kind of video about the Katogoula for months now. I don’t know what she calls herself—amateur sociologist or anthropologist, one of them people-ologists, anyway—but she used to work for the TV station in Armageddon. My parish has to pay for every unfunded mandate Baton Rouge can think of, but they can still find the taxpayer dollars for that! It’s enough to make me want to try for ol’ Representative Girn’s seat in the legisla—”

Nick ran back to Sheriff Higbee. “She hit my car, blatantly, and drove off! Aren’t you going to do anything about it? Give her a ticket. You saw what happened. That car’s a classic.”

“Looks like a classic piece of junk to me, man, and I didn’t see nothin’. Consider yourself one lucky genealogist. Didn’t you notice how pretty that woman is? You crazy or gay or something? The ice been broken, you know what I’m saying? And my information is she doesn’t
have a steady man. . . . Reminds me of how me and my wife met. She ran a red light over in Armageddon, plowed into a cattle trailer. I was on motorcycle duty that day, if you can believe it.” He slapped his substantial belly in self-mockery. “Nobody hurt, ’cept a few cows. But man, I never seen such a beautiful woman in my life. Now . . .” he glanced longingly at the stars, his smile of pleasant reminiscence fading, “now she look like a doggoned UPS truck. Big, brown, and noisy. They ought to put one of them beepers on her for when she backs up!”

Nick laughed with the sheriff, and forgot his anger.

“You’re right, Big John. It
is
a piece of junk.”

Sheriff Higbee dropped into the driver’s seat of his car, which dipped substantially with his weight.

“Say, Nick, keep that about the claw marks under your hat, all right? No sense getting everybody riled up about something that might not even exist. They might’ve been there before.” He started the car. “I’m thinking about what you said a minute ago, about that tribal myth, and something worries me. Tommy and Brianne got twins.”

He slammed the door and drove off in a hail of gravel and red dust, leaving Nick alone in the parking lot.

The lights inside Three Sisters Pantry went out.

Like a pale apparition, Luevenia Silsby’s face appeared in a window of the darkened store and then was gone.

CHAPTER 15

N
ick spotted Holly Worthstone’s van as he searched for his room at Greensheaves Court Motel. He’d convinced himself to take Sheriff Higbee’s advice on matters of romance—and on self-preservation.

It was well past 11 p.m., but he saw lights on behind the seedy curtains of what he took to be Holly’s room.

There were few other guests. The Greensheaves had seen much better days. He drove on according to directions the owner—a blowzy, ill-tempered woman in a frilly robe—had given him as he checked in.

The motel consisted of three carelessly placed, boxy sections, each room named for a figure from pioneer and Western lore. For fifty years or so, the Greensheaves had served the area’s minimal lodging needs; now, in expectation of a casino-driven boom, at least eight hotel chains had surveying teams stealthily triangulating likely properties. Nick noted two out-of-state trucks, conspicuously logo-less, bristling with storage tubes and compartments that no doubt hid high-tech measuring equipment. The front-desk woman had reason to be testy: she was about to be inhospitably put out of business by the national hospitality industry.

Nick parked in front of “Daniel Boone.” He opened the hatchback and grabbed his briefcase and his much-battered suitcase from the
litter atop the folded-down backseat. The room door had been damaged many years ago. With a shoulder he shoved it open and then understood why trespassers weren’t a problem.

“Daniel Boone” was water-stained, chilly, very small, and as musty as a two-hundred-year-old coonskin cap. Half a century’s dust, hair, and flaked paint caked at the baseboards. Husks of countless insects gave Nick a gothic chill of mortality. If the Western-kitsch decor was ever truly in vogue, he was thinking, now it was simply depressing—too depressing to remain in alone.

He washed his face, splashed on some cologne and gargled mouthwash. Then he grabbed the cracked plastic ice bucket and two bottles of wine from his suitcase, slammed the door several times until it stuck, and set off toward the ice machine he’d seen near the office.

“Who’s there?” the guarded voice said from the other side of crossed wooden-pistol cutouts on the door of the room dubbed “Annie Oakley.”

“Nick Herald. The guy you ran into over at Three Sisters Pantry.” He stopped himself from adding “literally.”

The window curtains moved. She opened the door as far as the chain allowed.

He could have sworn he’d seen her on the back of a magazine, advertising hypoallergenic cosmetics. She radiated that kind of wholesome beauty.

Holly Worthstone stood about three inches shorter than Nick. She wore tight black leggings above thick gray socks, and a long blue fleece pullover dotted with fanciful snowflakes. Her lustrous long hair was sunset red and gold in the deficient light of the room. She’d worn it tied
back in a practical ponytail at the store, but now it cascaded freely to the front over her right shoulder to frame a high, full cheek and strong jaw line; on the left it fell straight back behind her ear, tossed there probably by habit. Through the narrow aperture she allowed him, Nick had a fleeting image of her dimpled mouth as two oversized, coalescing teardrops.

Below graceful, thin, sorrel brows, her eyes were light green, like translucent quartz, repeating the motif of her pretty mouth. Eyes at once vulnerable, longing, and relentless. Nick felt himself getting lost in them. He concentrated on her slightly mannish nose; it alone saved her from being impossibly drop-dead gorgeous.

He had no trouble deciding that her room was much more pleasant than his. Even though the decor was about as ugly, the company was the deciding factor. Now, if he could only convince her not to brain him with the wooden coat hanger she held raised in one hand.

“I don’t think you’ll need that. See?” he said, holding up the ice bucket containing the tapered green bottles. “I bring a gift of good will.”

“Wow! You scared me.” Her relief was audible.

She undid the chain and flung the coat hanger on a chair, where her faded blue jeans rested in a heap like a cast-off lover. A pair of well-used hiking boots lay abandoned on the floor. “Come in, Nick. I’m the one who should be making peace with you.”

She stepped aside, shivering at the cool air flooding into the warm room. A lot warmer, in a different way, than his.

“We haven’t formally met,” she said, closing the door and chaining it again. “I’m Holly Worthstone. But you know my name already, obviously.”

“The obvious is vastly overrated.” They shook hands. Nick liked the feel of her firm, forthright grip.
A modern woman, and you damn well better
not forget it!
“I wouldn’t be a very good genealogist if I settled for the easy answers, for hearsay and tall tales.”

“Yes, digging in other people’s business seems to be your forte. You’ve made a lot of people nervous.”

“That’s normal when family histories are dusted off,” Nick said. “I’m used to it.”

“I suppose it’s a tribute to your abilities. And something tells me you like to stir things up. I don’t know, must be that naughty look in your eyes.” She nodded approvingly at the wine. “This place has room service? Why didn’t I know that? And the waiter isn’t half bad, either.”

“I never travel without the little comforts that ease the nagging anxieties of existence.”

“When a man whispers sweet existential nothings in my ear,” she said archly, “I go all mushy inside. What do you do now, quote Sartre to complete the seduction?”

“Shakespeare usually works: ‘I shall see thee, ere I die, look pale with love.’
Much Ado about Nothing
.”

“Ooh. You’re right. But before I throw myself into your arms, you mind giving me a taste of that . . . whatever it is.”

“New York Gewürztraminer,” Nick said, already using his indefatigable Swiss Army Knife to open a bottle. “Finger Lakes region.” He poured wine into two smudgy water glasses Holly held out.

“Sounds like a rare breed of dog.” She took an exploratory sip. “Yum! Spicy. I like it.” She finished the glass. “More porridge, please.”

“You may need the
hair
of a rare dog tomorrow. This stuff is deceptively strong. Best to drink it slowly,” Nick advised, sensing at the same time that she wasn’t the type to take her pleasures in moderation.

“Oh, give me a break! You’re talking to an LSU sorority girl. I minored in shooters, stomach hoses, and vomit buckets. And I
despise
being patronized. So don’t.”

“Hey, just trying to be helpful. You don’t have to prove anything to me. I’ve seen you in action. Your hit-and-run style shows great confidence.”

She blushed deeply and sought refuge in the wine, which she nevertheless sipped more daintily.

“See all that?” she said, diverting the conversation from the uncomfortable subject. She walked over to two videotape machines hooked up to an editing controller and two monitors, all on a cheap table too flimsy for the load. “I set all this up, all by my ditzy lonesome. I’m living here, temporarily, trying to finish my Katogoula documentary. What a place, huh?”

“Charming, for about half a second.” Nick had noticed the mess of extended motel habitation: dirty clothes spilling from luggage, bottles and tubes and a hair dryer crowding the tiny basin counter beside the bathroom, greasy boxes of recent fast-food meals stacked by the trash can.

Holly said, “I wanted to talk to you earlier tonight, but I never got the chance. Except, of course”—she pursed her lips, a contrite little girl—“when I apologized for hitting your car. I was in a hurry to get back here and edit in the new footage I shot tonight; it worked perfectly, too. . . . Anyway, I may have some ideas for your genealogical research. General background stuff.”

“I need all the help I can get.”

“So, you, uh, mad about the car thing? Much ado about nothing, right?”

“Forget it. Really. That’s not why I’m here. I didn’t feel like going to sleep just yet in Daniel Boone’s armpit.”

“You’d prefer mine, right?” She smiled, challenging him to deny it.

With some difficulty he stopped himself from giving full-throated assent to that idea. “I see you weren’t tucked in yet, either.” The video
equipment gave off a low hum; yellow legal pads with full sheets rolled back lay around the machines. “What do you say we chat until the Moon of Falling Needles sets?”

A slight smile and an eyebrow’s elevation told him she didn’t miss his use of the traditional Katogoula name for the season. She absently rubbed the rim of her glass across her lower lip before finally taking a sip. Nick felt he’d passed some secret test.

“Sounds like a great idea to me,” she said.

They sat down together, each claiming a wobbly arm of a vinyl sofa patched with duct tape. She curled her legs under her, getting cozy in her fleece pullover; he turned toward her, one knee on the sofa, one arm over the back.

“Moon of Falling Needles. Such a poetic heritage. I envy the Katogoula.” She parted the curtains right behind them and looked up into the night sky. “We’d say something prosaic and sterile like ‘October moon,’ or ‘full moon,’ and go to an almanac to check out the rising and setting times.” Her jewel-like eyes focused on him. “American Indians retain that beautiful concept of connectedness, of timelessness. The sky, the earth, the animals and plants, the spirit world, themselves—all interacting!” She crossed her legs Indian style and reached for the bottle on the coffee table before the sofa. “We’re all science and money and malls. False things. They’ve kept an essential beauty in their lives, in spite of all we’ve done to homogenize them.”

She refilled their glasses.

Nick was noticing her own essential beauty, which she wore with unaffected grace. He had known people blessed with great physical or mental gifts, who used their genetic luck to manipulate others, who flaunted it like a big bank account, or who fell into a bog of self-gratification. Holly was not one of these. She considered her quietly stunning looks simply as lagniappe, the thirteenth oyster in that
dozen-on-the-half shell of life. And, as she told him a little of her past, Nick discerned a strong personality seeking a cause to build a crusade around, searching for something larger than the merely physical.

“I’ve been working with the Katogoula for about six months now,” she was saying. “At LSU I was an anthropology major—my real minor, by the way, was Spanish, not drinking. I got hooked on the history and culture of Louisiana Indians. I graduated, and then screwed around for another year or so, doing independent study, thinking about getting a master’s. No real program. I just knew I loved learning about us”—she patted the soft blue fleece at her breastbone—“mankind. It felt, oh, I don’t know, relevant.