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“From the look of your face, I’d say it’s pretty clear who won round two. But cheer up. She’s damn sure worked a miracle where your grandfather is concerned. The old man looked as fit as a bull when he was climbing into her sports car. Nothing like a young girl to get an old man’s blood up, now is there?”
Suddenly, for no reason at all Logan wanted to punch Hayes’s lights out.
“Hey, how come you didn’t mention she was a knockout?”
“Don’t…don’t say another word. And as for her being a knockout, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay the hell away from her.”
“I see. You sure had me fooled. Me and everybody else. We all thought you were serious about Alicia.”
“You don’t see a damn thing. I am serious about Alicia!” Logan thundered.
“Right.” But Hayes’s dark eyes were glinting, and the corners of his lips were twitching with amusement, as he fought a losing battle not to smile.
“You said Mitchell Butler’s story might have a few holes in it.”
“So far it’s only a hunch.”
A sad, lost, homesick feeling swamped Cici as something vicious stung her above the elbow.
“Ouch!”
She quit knocking on her uncle’s door long enough to slap at two giant mosquitoes on her arm.
Closing her eyes, she listened for a long moment. Not that she could hear anything from inside her uncle’s cabin over the chorus of whistles and chirps coming from the swamp.
“Uncle Bos, why don’t you open the door? I know you’re in there. I know you left the bar because I’ve already been there and Tommy told me you’re not feeling well. He sent me over with some of his spicy boudin, made just the way you like it. And Noonoon and I cooked up a big pot of gator gumbo. The roux came out real good. We threw in some cayenne pepper, onion, celery and bell pepper.
She drew a breath and stared at the huge stack of wire crawfish traps, gill nets and hoop nets leaning against the ten-foot pilings beneath her uncle’s shack. “Uncle Bos, I’m beginning to feel stupid yelling at your door.”
Her gaze wandered from the bayou with its dark, funereal vegetation, past the wreckage of his old rooster pens, to the ruined ponds behind their sagging fences where she used to help him raise thousands of little turtles that they’d marketed as pets to kids all over America. Other than the aluminum outboard tied at the end of his dock near the thick stand of tall rozo cane instead of her red pirogue, not much had changed.
Well, maybe the dark brown water had crept a little closer to the house, land being a vanishing commodity in Louisiana thanks to Logan and his kind.
“Okay. If you’re going to be stubborn, I’ll just leave the pots on your doorstep and come back for ’em later. When you’re done, you can leave ’em outside for me to pick up.”
Slowly she climbed down his stairs and walked past his motorcycle and then further out onto the dock to stare at the glimmering reflections in the bayou. Sagging posted No Trespassing signs were nailed to every cypress tree trunk. Her uncle, who’d always been something of a loner, wasn’t the most welcoming type.
No wonder she’d never felt like she belonged. Uncle Bos certainly hadn’t wanted her. She’d been eight when her parents had been washed away by a wall of water caused by a crevasse, or a break in a levee, when the Mississippi had run too high one spring. Luckily she’d clung to a board that had swept her to a tree where she’d held on to a branch for hours.
No, her uncle hadn’t wanted to take in an orphaned niece, but he’d been her only relative. And he hadn’t believed in public welfare. At least, not for any relative of his, even if she’d been a little sissy who didn’t know the first thing about life in the wilderness.
He hadn’t understood her reading or her fascination with pictures in magazines. He’d called her lazy for writing and extravagant for shooting so much film. He’d quit school after the sixth grade because in his view education was a waste of time. Real life was fishing and trapping and hunting and carving and drinking, and pitting one of his prized cocks against another’s and laying bets. He’d made a small fortune cockfighting before it had been outlawed. Not that he was always a man to follow the law.
She and he had had nearly nothing, other than their mutual love of the swamp in common. Yes, she’d come to love the swamp, so mostly she’d tried to stay out of his way. Then, to make matters worse, there’d been the times when he’d vanished for days on end, maybe to attend illegal cockfights. Maybe to drink in the houseboat he kept in the swamp. Maybe to be with a woman. Who knew?
