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I LOOKED AT my watch. It was 8:10 when Clete picked up. Rain was drumming on our tin roof, so hard I almost had to yell into the telephone to be understood. “Alafair left a message at six-twenty. She said she was in Broussard and was stopping to talk with someone she met. I haven’t heard from her since.”
“She doesn’t answer her cell?” Clete asked.
“She turned it off. I talked to the cops in Broussard. They haven’t seen a car that looks like hers. I called the state police. Same thing.”
“Why would she turn off her cell?”
“She didn’t want to be bothered while she was talking to somebody I probably don’t like.”
“Not necessarily. It could be a girlfriend or somebody who needs some help. Look, right before you called, Emma Poche was here, pretty soused, wanting to own up to planting my pen in Stanga’s swimming pool.”
“How’s that relate to Alafair?”
“She said she didn’t know who killed Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot. I believed her. So I let her go.”
“So?”
“I thought I should tell you. Maybe I should have sweated her. I let her get her hooks into me. I don’t think I have any judgment anymore.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.
“I just thought I should.”
“No, you think whoever killed the girls has Alafair.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. Turn on the TV. This storm is tearing up Lafayette. Maybe she pulled off the road. Maybe she can’t get a signal.”
“I think Robert Weingart killed Timothy Abelard and the Nicaraguan. I think he tried to put it on you and, by extension, on me. I think he’s probably convinced Kermit Abelard we’re responsible for his grandfather’s death.”
“Who cares? Kermit Abelard is a fop. Stay where you are. I’m coming over.”
I couldn’t think straight. Before I could say anything else, he had broken the connection. I called the sheriff in St. Mary Parish and hit another dead end. He said he didn’t know where either Kermit Abelard or Robert Weingart was, then added, “Frankly, I don’t care.”
“Say again?”
“Because they’re not the problem,” he said.
“Who is, sir? My daughter?”
“Don’t you be laying off your anger on me, Dave.”
“Don’t call me by my first name again,” I said, and hung up.
But getting angry at a functionary in St. Mary Parish was of no help. I tried to clear my head, to think in a sequential fashion, to revisit mentally all the evidence we’d uncovered in the murder of the two girls. The video of the subterranean room we had found in Herman Stanga’s DVD player contained a detail that I couldn’t get out of my mind, one that indicated a story larger than itself. But what was it?
The stones in the walls. They had reminded me of bread loaves, smooth and heavy and rounded on the ends, not given to flaking. Emma Poche had looked at the still photos made from the video and had said they resembled pineapples. Why would she say pineapples? Because of the shape? Was her statement one of those linguistic leaps from an image to an idea based on an association in the subconscious? Did something about them call to mind breadfruit, the food that nineteenth-century plantation owners grew and fed to their slaves in the tropics?
Clete came through the back door without knocking. His slicker was dripping water, his face beaded with it. “Let’s go to Broussard,” he said. “We start talking to everybody we can along Highway Ninety and the old two-lane.”
I had already thought about it. The two-lane was a possibility. It was within the town of Broussard itself, with few places where Alafair could pull off to talk to someone. But the city cops had not seen her car, nor had anyone along the two-lane reported a scuffle or an abduction or anything unusual occurring that evening. The four-lane, also known as Highway 90, was far more problematic. It went for miles and was congested with service stations, fast-food restaurants, bars, convenience stores, and motels, plus any number of business properties where she could simply pull in to a parking lot.
Regardless, one way or another, we had to get off the dime. “We’ll each take a vehicle and divide it up,” I said.
The phone rang. Molly picked it up in the bedroom before I could reach the kitchen counter. “Dave, it’s the state police,” she said.
My heart was beating hard when I picked up. I didn’t know the trooper who had called. He said he was on a farm road not far off the interstate west of Lafayette. “We’ve got a Honda registered in the name of Alafair Suzanne Robicheaux. It’s been involved in an accident,” he said. “I saw the ATL on it earlier. Am I talking to the right party?”
“Yeah, this is Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I’m Alafair’s father. Who’s in the vehicle?”
