Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (11 page)

He wasn’t at all surprised to see her. It must have been hard for her to stand aside during the crisis, and he was more than a little grateful that she’d let him handle this incident alone. Maybe she was mellowing in her old age. Hmm…bad choice of words. Any wise thirty-two-year-old man with a forty-one-year-old wife would do well to erase the word “old” from his vocabulary, and Joe thought he was pretty wise. Wise enough, anyway.

The sight of Amande troubled him. Just because she’d never known her mother didn’t mean that the news of Justine’s death was going to be easy for her. He wondered if he and Faye should stay, so that they could be there for Amande when she heard the news.

He decided it would be strange for them to intrude on that moment, being as how they’d only known the girl for three days. Turning to Miranda, he asked, “Will you be all right if I leave? Or would you like me to stick around, in case that creep ignores the deputies and comes back?”

Tebo butted in before Miranda could answer. “I hope he does come back. I’ve got two fists and a knife with his name on ‘em. Nobody talks to my mother that way.”

To the best of Joe’s knowledge, Tebo hardly talked to his mother much at all. Also, Joe considered the sentence “I’ve got two fists and a knife with his name on ‘em,” to be in exceedingly poor taste when said in the company of a woman whose son had been knifed to death the day before. It was even worse when that woman was your mother.

Joe dealt Tebo the blow that blustering losers enjoyed least of all. He ignored him.

“Ma’am? Will you be okay if I leave? I’ll just be up the hill in our cabin. If you holler, I’ll hear you.”

Miranda was as experienced in dealing with blustering losers as Joe was. She managed to insult her son with her reply, merely by leaving him out of it. “I’ll be fine, but it’s a comfort to know you’re close by.”

In other words, having Tebo close by was no comfort at all.

With that statement, she picked up a banana off the dining room table and walked out of the room without taking their leave. Joe could see the half-made dolls that hung from the ceiling of her bedroom on their swaying strings. They disturbed him in a way he couldn’t describe. In his mind, he knew they were only woven straw, but their motion had a gallows swing that gave him an electric shock of revulsion.

As he gathered his family to leave, he could see Miranda bustling around her tiny bedchamber. She spread a fresh silk cloth on her altar and plunked the banana atop it. Squinting at the arrangement for a minute, she picked the banana up and pulled the peel back, so that a third of the fruit poked out invitingly. Then she poured a couple of fingers of rum in a glass and carefully set it down beside the banana. After lighting an array of votive candles and arranging them just so, she’d pulled a cell phone out of her pocket and dialed it.

Her crow’s voice carried to where Joe was standing. As he turned to leave, he heard her rasp, “Bernie, I got a question for a lawyer. You ain’t much of a lawyer, but you’re what I got.”

Amande had settled herself at the table between Didi and Tebo. She was with family, and that’s where a girl should be when she got the kind of news Amande would be hearing tonight. Nevertheless, Joe didn’t feel good about leaving her.

Episode 2 of “The Podcast I Never Intend to Broadcast,” Part 2

by Amande Marie Landreneau

My mother is dead. It’s taken me a while to get my brain around that one, since she was never really alive to me when she was alive.

I didn’t know her, no more than I knew my dead Uncle Hebert. At least I remember seeing Uncle Hebert, even if I’ll only ever remember him as a corpse floating in the water. My mother is…a ghost. I don’t mean that she’s a ghost because she’s dead. She’s always been a ghost to me, a being who was real but who just wasn’t there.

Even the pictures I have of her are ghostly. She ran away from me and Grandmère when she was only seventeen, not enough older than I am now to even count. We don’t have any pictures of her that were taken after that. Somehow, I don’t think that Steve was the kind of lover who took pictures and saved them like treasures.

The woman who died of breast cancer at age thirty-three couldn’t possibly have looked like the pictures Grandmère gave me, not anymore. I have photos of her with braces on her teeth and acne, and I think they’re interesting, but when I look at them, I don’t think, “Mother.” Now, I guess I’ll never say “Mother” at all. Sally the Social Worker wants to know how I feel about that.

I have no idea. So I think I’ll change the subject and tell one of Grandmère’s stories. We podcasters can do that, because we’re in charge of what we say and how we record it and where we post it for listeners to find. Not that I intend to post this at all.

I think I’ll go with Gola George’s story, because George got carried off from his parents and from his family and from everything he ever knew. He got dumped here in the New World with nothing and nobody, but he didn’t let that stop him from taking his world by storm. Nothing could stop Gola George.

Gola George was an incredibly successful pirate. I’ve read everything about him that I could find on the Internet, and George was the real thing. He captured the biggest ships. He slaughtered the most sailors. He kidnapped the prettiest wenches. Brave men trembled in their kneepants and stockings and buckled shoes when they heard Gola George’s name.

Maybe Gola George landed in the pirates’ hall of fame because he was good at murdering and maiming. Maybe he was just lucky, although being stolen away from home to be a slave doesn’t seem like something that happens to a naturally lucky person. It even occurs to me that maybe he raked in a lot of that plunder simply because he was good at public relations. Pirating would be easy if people dropped their valuables and ran at the very sight of you. I mean, think about those finger bones tied in his dyed red hair and those bloody silk shirts. The man was a marketing genius.

It’s also possible that George owed his rising fortunes to his less flamboyant partner. I picture Henry the Mutineer as being like a pirate accountant, sitting at a desk lit by a whale oil lamp and keeping the account books with a quill pen.

Can’t you just hear him telling his partner that the pirate business had been a little slow lately? “Hey, George…I’m having a little trouble making payroll for the crew this month. You need to be doing a little less raping and a lot more pillaging.”

George and Henry terrorized the Caribbean together for more than a decade. Criminal partnerships don’t usually last that long. Throw two sociopaths together, then add money to the mix, and somebody’s going to betray somebody, sooner or later. And just because a criminal partnership doesn’t end with one party stabbing the other in the back, it doesn’t mean that it will end well. Think of Bonnie and Clyde…Butch and Sundance…

It may be that a successful partnership even puts a criminal in danger. The urge to protect a partner you care about—or even love—is a dangerous thing when there are bullets flying.

But Gola George and Henry the Mutineer made it work for them for many years. They were made for each other. Brain and brawn. Careful planning and sheer audacity. If only one of them had been a woman…or if only they’d both been gay…

If I were telling you this story about Gola George and Henrietta the Mutineer, I do believe it would end with the two of them dying together of old age in bed, surrounded by their lying, thieving, stealing pirate grandchildren, but no.

The story of Gola George and Henry the Mutineer ends poorly because Gola George ignored the sailor’s cardinal rule: Never bring a woman aboard a sailing ship.

Chapter Ten

Faye needed some warm bodies to help her finish this project on time, and she needed them immediately. Rural Louisiana wasn’t teeming with experienced archaeologists, but New Orleans was right up the road. Even better, her cousin Bobby was right up the road, and Bobby knew everybody.

Bobby also knew who was kin to who, and he knew who everybody had slept with, and he knew who wasn’t speaking to who, and he knew how to properly use “who” and “whom” when writing in standard English. More importantly, he had the social skills to know that it was possible to be too pedantic about such things as objective pronouns and split infinitives.

There was no such thing as a short conversation with her dear cousin, because every mention of a human being required him to revisit, yet again, the question of who was kin to who. It was a good thing that Faye’s cell phone plan included unlimited long distance.

“You’ve already talked to Nina, I’m sure?” he said, pinning an unnecessary question mark to the end of his statement so that she’d have to say she did. And then she’d need to give him the details of the conversation, including whether their friend and colleague Nina was dating anybody and whether they were serious, because if Faye didn’t volunteer the information, Bobby would ask.

“Yes, I did. Her new boyfriend is in grad school with her, so I sent the two of them over to Grand Isle to do some initial survey work.” She forestalled Bobby’s next question by saying, “His name is Mark, but he’s from Philadelphia, so you don’t know him. I mean Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, not Philadelphia, Mississippi.”

“Oh.” Bobby’s social curiosity was bounded on the north by Lake Pontchartrain and on the south by the Mississippi River, and it dimmed considerably with each successive mile east and west of Jackson Square.

“Have you seen Dauphine yet?” she asked. “I gave her some library research to do and told her to get you to help.”

Bobby’s connections at the Historic New Orleans Collection had been a godsend for Faye, more than once. Rare documents, old maps, historic photos—Bobby could find paper proof of just about anything that had ever happened in New Orleans or its vicinity.

“Yes, Dauphine hobbled in on her crutches. She’ll be coming in every day, until you finish working her to death.”

Bobby was, in theory, against the notion of gainful employment. In practice, he was a tenured history professor who spent as little time as possible on campus. He came from a family that had only needed to work for a living in recent years…which, in Bobby’s world, meant that it had been more than a century since they were wealthy.

Bobby had not accepted this fate with good grace, but Faye was always impressed with the way Bobby managed to look like a rich man while living on a historian’s budget. He might someday get used to drawing a paycheck, but she doubted he’d ever lose his vaguely imperious manner. And Faye hoped he never did. It suited his slim and well-groomed good looks. So did his scholarly-looking glasses and his slightly too-long crop of dark curls.

“Do you know anybody else who could help me with this project? Archaeologists, history grad students, warm bodies who can run errands and do grunt work…I can use them all.”

“I’ll put out some feelers. Would you like anything else, dear Cousin? Perhaps someone to fan you with palmettos and feed you peeled and seeded muscadine grapes while your minions do your work for you?”

This sounded pretty good to Faye right that minute.

“If you knew anybody like that, they’d be fanning and feeding
you
, Bobby.”

“And how do you know that they’re not?”

Faye had to love Bobby’s style. He gave her no choice.

“Do you have any lawyers on your long, long list of very dear friends? Preferably some who owe you favors?”

“Lawyers? Why do you need a lawyer?” His voice dropped a conspiratorial half step. “You’ve been arrested, and you’ve just wasted your phone call talking about work. Am I right?”

“No. I haven’t been arrested.”

“Then
Joe’s
been arrested. I always knew that man had a shifty look about him. My lady love disagrees with me, but just because she’s a police detective doesn’t mean she’s not wrong. Joe has the kind of virile good looks that make me hate him on principle. I think his muscles cloud Jodi’s perspective.”

Oh, joy. Bobby was sallying forth for another conversational joust.

“Focus, Bobby. We’re talking about my friend’s legal needs, not your jealous heart. There’s nothing shifty about Joe, and there’s nothing wrong with Jodi’s perspective, except for the fact that she’s still planning to marry
you
. Joe has
not
been arrested. There are plenty of true scandalous tales in this world for you to spread. There’s no need to make one up.”