Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (48 page)

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t do anything like that.” Lying was the ignoble course to take, but Nick didn’t consider himself hero material anyway. “I think I can explain things to Sheriff Higbee without mentioning the Vulture Cult. And as far as Wooty goes, that’s a matter for you and him to work out, if you decide to. But you
can
help me on another matter of tribal history. The Quinahoa. What do you know about them?”

“Well, my great-grandmother—”

“Adolicia Hastard Coux?”

Luevenia gave Nick that uneasy look again, but it passed quickly. “Yes, that’s her. She used to tell me the chief of the Quinahoa swore his warriors to vengeance before the Katogoula and the Yaknelousa tore off his flesh and burned him alive. Some of them lived in the woods, watching their women . . . serve the Katogoula warriors.”

Comfort women. Like the Korean and Chinese women forced to “serve” Japanese soldiers in World War II. Nothing really ever changes; search far enough back, and we’ve all got something to be ashamed of
.

“When I was coming up,” Luevenia continued, “it wasn’t something we talked about a lot. The Quinahoa. Oh, there was some name-calling in school, and one or two mothers wouldn’t let their children play with children from those families; but most of us didn’t take it no more
serious than that.” She thought about it a moment and then shook her head. “No. I’m sure we all thought of ourselves as Katogoula by then, in our hearts.”

“Do you know the families that are supposedly descended from the Quinahoa captives?”

“I think Altrice Mateet had one in her family; but she don’t live here anymore. And I recall poor Grace Dusong’s cousin’s first husband was one. Nooj, too, they say, way back on one side or the other. But all of us got a little of another tribe in them. Me, I’m part Yaknelousa. But you know that, like you do everything else.” She seemed to grasp what Nick was thinking. “Why are you asking me about the Quinahoa?”

“You were driven to extreme measures by your concerns with the past.”

“You mean Nooj?” Luevenia laughed tensely. “But he’s always been so involved with the tribe, since he was a boy. When we have a Trade Days or a mini pow-wow, Nooj dresses up in the traditional feathers and skins. He’s so good with the white and black children, teaching them the dances and all. Knows more about the old ways of hunting and the forest than anybody now, since Carl is dead. Nooj, he don’t go in for this gambling and development, either, like me—and I do think it’s wrong, even without my secrets. He voted against it. No, Nooj wouldn’t do nothing bad to his own people he loves,” she said, with wilting conviction.

Nick had discovered feuds that lasted centuries for less substantial reasons. That Luevenia remembered who had Quinahoa ancestors proved to him that the old prejudices weren’t quite dead yet. But he wasn’t looking for Luevenia’s agreement. He’d gathered important facts from her, and in so doing had eliminated her as a suspect in the murders. That was all he’d hoped to accomplish here.

“How did you first find out about the recognition?” he asked.

“Brianne called and told me the good news, that very afternoon the sawmill closed. Well, I didn’t think it was so good at the time. All kinds of things was going through my head.”

“Did Nooj visit the store that day?”

“How’d you know?” But she answered her own question, nodding at this further proof of Nick’s omniscience. “Nooj stopped by not long after Brianne called. He don’t get too worked up about much, even that. But he did buy a Lotto ticket. He let the machine pick the numbers; I remember, because he usually marks his own. Maybe his way of celebrating.”

He had ample time to plan Tommy’s framing ambush and Carl’s murder
.

“I think it would be best if you didn’t mention our conversation to anyone. I could be wrong, of course. In that case, we wouldn’t want to spread false suspicion, or show the real killer our hand.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“There’s one more thing, Miss Luevie.”

She nodded and reluctantly held out the Bible over the coffee table.

He put up his hand to refuse it. “No, you keep that. My job is to help clients find their heritage, not rob them of it. Actually, I was thinking of dinner.”

A big smile bloomed across her face. “You’re hired again.”

CHAPTER 34

T
he sun had plunged into the depths of the earth; the great deity of daylight had called back his myrmidons to his molten court.

Crouching behind a thick pine tree, disoriented in the profound darkness, Nick found it easy to believe in the gods Stone Age humans had worshipped. He, too, was feeling curiosity, wonder, and fear as he witnessed elemental forces battle for control of the forest.

For all our science, the primitive endures, and ever will
.

He wouldn’t have much time to search Nooj’s fire tower bachelor pad; the wildlife enforcement agent would soon figure out that someone had a reason for distracting him, calling him out on a wild goose chase for phantom violators.

Nick listened to the crickets searching for each other in the darkness. Then he moved toward the tower.

A cone of glare from a bare bulb illuminated the foot of the stairs. Nick had brought along a small flashlight, but decided not to use it for the climb. The light would be a dead giveaway to someone approaching the tower, visible for many yards even in the dense forest. He preferred not to confront Nooj, especially considering his recent injuries and his recollection of the game warden’s formidable physique.

The sunset had faded to a lavender glow in the west. Nick climbed the first flight within the steel frame of the tower, pausing on the
pine-plank stairs to give his eyes time to adjust. It took concentration to sort real from floating false images, but he was beginning to get the hang of it. The dark square of the living quarters loomed above. He resumed his ascent.

With each flight the stairs changed directions. The forest slumbered around and below him. He glanced down and a sense of his altitude sucked his breath away for a moment. When his mind shook off its bout of acrophobia, he thought he detected a star pattern in the shadowy stair angles below.

Patterns reveal themselves, in human lives as in the physical world, only from the right perspective
.

Nick emerged on a metal-mesh deck that surrounded what had once been the tower’s fire-observation room. The wind was stronger up here at the level of the treetops. The door to Nooj’s quarters was locked. Nick recalled that one of the Shawe twins had broken a window, but Nooj apparently had repaired it.

Genealogy wasn’t all paperwork; Nick sometimes needed to resort to the unorthodox, and, well, the slightly illegal. He’d acquired a lock pick that resembled the innocuous Mini Maglite he also carried on such questionable missions. The screwdriver-like, wavy-tipped blade extended, the lock pick became a different animal. He inserted the pick blade and the companion tension wrench into the doorknob keyhole. Working the pick with inexpert jiggles, in-and-out, up-and-down, he simultaneously turned the tension wrench . . . the knob yielded and the metal door opened.

Nick was careful to point his flashlight down as he assessed the roughly twenty-by-twenty room. A monkish place, a bit warmer than outside but not welcoming to visitors. He thought of Henry David Thoreau, building his cabin by Walden Pond “to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles,” making use of only the “necessaries
of life.” If Nick was right, Nooj parted with Thoreau over the idea of nonviolent civil disobedience; his style was a more active form of protest: murder.

A couple of tables; three chairs; a squat cast-iron wood-burning stove; a kitchenette; a bed on the upper level of a prison-issue iron bunk set, the lower level converted into an open closet for Nooj’s uniforms and a few other belongings. Three shotguns and two rifles filled a gun rack on one wall. He saw no evidence of running water but noticed a clear plastic water jug, three-quarters full, upended in a dispenser. Except for the electricity that powered the small but obviously adequate space heater cooling now in a corner, the wildlife agent could have been living in the nineteenth century.

The storage area below the bed seemed the logical place to start. Nick pushed aside Nooj’s uniforms. Shoes, boots, fishing rods, stacks of
Louisiana Conservationist
,
National Geographic
, and
Penthouse
. . . could have been a Boy Scout’s closet.

Nick moved to the middle of the room. Something wasn’t right. A million ice ants charged up his back and neck and into his scalp.
The wood-burning stove!

Why did he need a wood-burning stove? The kitchenette, the lights, the space heater . . . all electric. Could it be a heat backup, for outages, which probably happened here often as a result of falling limbs? Nooj was much tougher than that. Maybe it was a relic from a time when the place wasn’t wired. Why was there no visible chimney pipe exiting through the wall or ceiling?

In the capacious, ash-less belly of the stove Nick found three bundles carefully wrapped in what appeared to be deerskin suede.

In the first thin bundle he found an atlatl. Was it Tommy Shawe’s childhood toy, stolen from his garage the evening of the day Nooj and the rest of the tribe learned of federal recognition? Yes: a child’s hands
had carved the word “Tommy” in the wood. Just a simple, forearm-sized stick, really—with an un-toy-like rock strapped by leather cords at the base below the spear socket. Nick envisioned an ancient hunter, in the company of other similarly armed men, snapping his atlatl forward and hurling a spear with deadly accuracy at that evening’s tribal entrée.

He was careful not to touch the atlatl. There could possibly be Nooj’s incriminating fingerprints on it. He knew full well that he was tampering with evidence; but he wasn’t a cop and didn’t have to follow the official, complex code. Not that cops always did, either. A lot could happen with evidence between crime scene and courtroom.

The second deerskin bundle contained an assortment of unmatched notebooks. Nick used the supple deerskin like a glove to flip pages. Four books were of relatively modern vintage, from the last fifty years or so. The fifth and others were much older, of worn canvas and peeling leather. Many different hands had written in them; the earliest entries were in poor French.

Death dates. Only death dates. Spanning a period of perhaps two hundred years. In each book the old core families had separate sections, the Bellarmines, Nooj’s mother’s family, included. There was also a section for the Cheneries. It was clear to Nick that the Cheneries should be considered the seventh core family; though elusive in official records, they had in fact maintained a constant local presence. Other pages handled more numerous non-core families who moved in and out of the Cutpine area, including many names Nick hadn’t encountered in his research. When the last member of a family died, the chronicler used the same transliterated phrase, in the Roman letters of the white conquerors:
BAH-UA CU-BISH-NAW-A
. Nick presumed that these words were Quinahoa, some expression of triumph from the lost ancestral language of the defeated and enslaved tribe, though he had no inkling of the exact meaning.

The pen strokes of each of the writers infused the phrase with exultation. That needed no translation. He understood the human emotions that crossed ethnic boundaries and millennia, that seemed to make the notebooks glow with oppressed pride and hot vengeance in the murky fire tower. The Cheneries were ghoulish reverse family historians, not celebrating the triumph of life through the generations, but watching with silent, bitter satisfaction as the Katogoula tribe staggered toward extinction.

Nooj was apparently the last archivist of the Quinahoa blood grudge, the lonely guardian of his lost tribe’s honor, the keeper of the flame of hate.
And in a stove, at that
. Nick scanned one of the oldest notebooks and saw the handwriting of one chronicler give way to that of the next, the passing of the torch confirmed by death dates in the Chenerie section. Nooj was continuing the tradition, with a new twist: no longer watching with passive detachment, but helping along the slow process of gradual death of an entire tribe. And the question formed in his mind: had past Cheneries merely watched, and nothing more?

Tommy and Brianne and their three children were recorded, with a dash after their names; so too were all the other living Katogoula in the Cutpine area. Nooj had duly noted the death dates of Carl Shawe and the Dusongs; he’d judged them for a past they had no hand in creating, using collective guilt to sentence them all to death.

No one should have such power, Nick thought, a hot surge of anger causing him to rip a page as he turned it.

Nick let his imagination touch and probe the discovery he had made. He surmised that some Cheneries apparently wished even for the disappearance of their own name, as they secretly reveled in the larger tribal decay. In the minds of the true believers of the family—Nooj’s father’s line, the keepers of these notebooks—they had been polluted by the Katogoula, even though against their will, and no longer felt deserving
of life. Other Cheneries, ignorant or scornful of the sick vigilance of their kin, had insisted on reproducing, continuing the line. Thus Nooj was born. He’d written his own name and a dash in the most recent Chenerie section—confirming his own contract with oblivion.

Where had it started? With a Chenerie Katogoula warrior who fell in love with a Quinahoa concubine, ten or more generations ago? Was it she who injected the venom of vengeance? From then on, had this Chenerie branch devoted itself to uniting with other families having Quinahoa blood? Nick felt the truth of his theory: in Nooj, the bloodline had been bred back to pure hatred.

Nooj surely knew his ancestors by heart, probably to a time even before these written records. Nick remembered their conversation at Three Sisters Pantry; he’d had the feeling then that the wildlife agent was selling him a bill of goods in claiming that his grandfather was “kind of an orphan.” Was he observing the ancient Quinahoa naming taboo? Hoping to put the snooping genealogist off his trail? Probably both.