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"Where's the family cemetery?"
"Back in those trees."
He pointed at an oak grove and a group of whitewashed brick crypts with an iron fence around it. The grass within the fence was freshly mowed and clipped at the base of the bricks.
"You know of another burial area?" I asked.
"Way in back, a spot full of briars and palmettos. Holtzner says that's where the slaves were planted. Got to watch out for it so the local blacks don't get their ovaries fired up. What's the gig, man? Let me in on it."
I walked to the iron fence around the Terrebonne cemetery. The marble tablet that sealed the opening to the patriarch's crypt was cracked across the face from settlement of the bricks into the softness of the soil, but I could still make out the eroded, moss-stained calligraphy scrolled by a stone mason's chisel: Elijah Boethius Terrebonne, 1831—1878, soldier for Jefferson Davis, loving father and husband, now brother to the Lord.
Next to Elijah's crypt was a much smaller one in which his twin girls were entombed. A clutch of wild-flowers, tied at the stems with a rubber band, was propped against its face. There were no other flowers in the cemetery.
I walked toward the back of the Terrebonne estate, along the edge of a coulee that marked the property line, beyond the movie set and trailers and sky-blue swimming pool and guest cottages and tennis courts to a woods that was deep in shade, layered with leaves, the tree branches wrapped with morning glory vines and cobweb.
The woods sloped toward a stagnant pond. Among the palmettos were faint depressions, leaf-strewn, sometimes dotted with mushrooms. Was the slave woman Lavonia, who had poisoned Elijah's daughters, buried here? Was the pool of black water, dimpled by dragon-flies, part of the swamp she had tried to hide in before she was lynched by her own people?
Why did the story of the exploited and murdered slave woman hang in my mind like a dream that hovers on the edge of sleep?
I heard a footstep in the leaves behind me.
"I didn't mean to give you a start," Lila said.
"Oh, hi, Lila. I bet you put the wildflowers on the graves of the children."
"How did you know?"
"Did your father tell you why I was here?"
"No… He… We don't always communicate very well."
"A guy named Harpo Scruggs tried to kill Father Mulcahy."
The blood drained out of her face.
"We think it's because of something you told him," I said.
When she tried to speak, her words were broken, as though she could not form a sentence without using one that had already been spoken by someone else. "I told the priest? That's what you're saying?"
"He's taking your weight. Scruggs was going to suffocate him with a plastic bag."
"Oh, Dave—" she said, her eyes watering. Then she ran toward the house, her palms raised in the air like a young girl.
WE HAD JUST RETURNED from Mass on Sunday morning when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was Clete.
"I'm at a restaurant in Lafayette with Holtzner and his daughter and her boyfriend," he said.
"What are you doing in Lafayette?"
"Holtzner's living here now. He's on the outs with Cisco. They want to come by," he said.
"What for?"
"To make some kind of rental offer on your dock."
"Not interested."
"Holtzner wants to make his pitch anyway. Dave, the guy's my meal ticket. How about it?"
