Talmage Powell

The Jabberwock Valentine

1

Out of New York, the Memphis-bound jetliner slanted its nose below the horizon and knifed into the cumulus. The clouds, so pristinely white and inviting moments ago, swallowed the aircraft in a slithery gray ooze. In my present mood it was no strain on the imagination to feel that the descent was into a repulsive nether region, primeval, roiling with unknown forces.

I looked at her lovely profile hovering in the seat beside me, looked away, forced my head to rest against the seat, and drew a long, careful breath.

I was not experiencing a reaction to flying. I flew as naturally and exuberantly as I sang off-key in an invigorating morning shower.

I was ridden with this certainty: that she was going down into the presence of death.

Since the spiritualist and shrink can’t explain it, I can go no further than the experts, the specialists. I can only make a statement about that which transpires.

The first transpiration in my memory was of myself as a young boy out racing about on his first bicycle. From nothingness came a sudden sensation. It burst over me with the force of a silent scream. Colors spun through my head; they froze, in an image of a boy, myself, tangled and bleeding in the ruin of the bicycle at the next intersection.

I had stopped the bike somehow, left foot extended and touching the pavement, and now I looked wildly about, as if trying to find out what I should see.

The intersection was empty, peaceful. The image slipped away, leaving an unpleasant patina on the skin and a shortness of breath in its wake.

The sound of an engine broke the quietude, rising from snarling whisper to thunder. A car careered through the intersection, a man lolling drunkenly behind the steering wheel.

And I, having stopped my bike in the place and time that I did, missed my appointment. I saw the drunken face in profile, rather than gazing straight ahead at the loose, slavering features swaying behind an onrushing windshield.

I pedaled quietly home; said nothing to anyone, and the moment slipped into the maw of the memory of an active growing boy.

I became a senior in high school, took a job as counselor at a summer camp. And I snapped awake one warm, soft night swathed in the peculiar sweat. I punched the pillow to go back to sleep, telling myself I’d dreamed, had a nightmare. I lay back, closed my eyes. And the scene flashed against my lids: boys mindless with terror, milling and screaming while tongues of hungry flames curled over them.

Muttering scorn for my own stupidity, I rose from my sweaty cot. Wearing the shorts in which I slept, I padded from the counselor’s quarters across the moon-kissed quadrangle to cabin B: it was dark, serene, steeped in sleep. But having already behaved like a fool, I went on inside.

I smelled the first acrid taint of smoke, saw the firefly like flickering in the corner. I turned on the lights, rousted eight confused, blinking boys from their bunks, and put out the small fire before it made its way out of the waste can. It had moldered and finally found life in a wadding of shoeshine rags. Some boy, experimenting with cigarettes after lights-out, had left a spark in a butt tossed in the waste can. We turned up the identity of the culprit, notified his parents, and put him on garbage detail for a week. He departed camp, thumbing his nose and lighting a cigarette.

I was eighteen, and the Vietnam War was winding down, but the draft board had no precognition that America would cut and get out within eighteen months. So I came to manhood in walks through steaming jungles, firefights, and temporary forgetfulness in Saigon whorehouses.

The patrol that day was a piece of cake — to take up station in a friendly village. But the colors burst in my head and I halted my men. I scattered them to cover, enfilading the trail. On their bellies, like bugs, vermin, they sweated in the heat, scratched insect bites, and muttered about the sergeant’s guts and sanity. ComPost crackled the radio. Where the hell is Sergeant Barnard? And I made no reply, no move, except to threaten to shoot a skinny private who finally said to hell with this, ain’t it a friendly?

And as the sun was sinking, Vietcong came creeping from the village to wonder why the intended victims hadn’t come. The Cong were killed; the fire sweeping the trail was too deadly for it to be otherwise. One was a thin-faced boy who had no excuse to own a razor. I wept inwardly and wished the sun would not show itself over the jungle tomorrow morning.

Back in the alien world of home, I enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lacking the sophistication of a ’Nam education, my peers seemed childish, callow, and naive, and I formed no lasting relationships.

One day during my senior year one of those fractured moments of nontime came from nowhere, and I got in the VW and drove home to Asheville. I was not empowered to alter this future moment, but I was with my father at my dying mother’s bedside.

Upon graduation, I landed a junior exec post in marketing in a corporation that made mufflers for cars, trucks, tractors, lawn mowers, boats. Lucky me. Enviable start from which I could one day achieve the privilege of lunching in the penthouse dining room.

I saved some money, got miserably seasick on a freighter wallowing its way to ports in Europe, and backpacked and bummed my way through Spain and Italy.

I thought a lot about going to India, land of gurus. But I already knew the lingo: channeling, trans-spatial existence, the Akhasic Records, trance-states, astral projection. I had done my reading and research, I had sampled cult experiences. I was way ahead of most of the field, and had discovered no guru, medium, or reincarnate worth emulating. They were either charlatans — or touched reality even more tenuously than I.

I went to work in the State Department as an assistant to an assistant secretary. As the years ticked off I became an assistant secretary, liaison to the White House, director of research, ambassadorial courier. Very nice life. Good pay, expense money, movement among the powerful, consorting with intellectual equals, lots of travel first class, in and out of American embassies in Europe. Female relationships of course, but never the satisfying of the quiet hunger within me.

Then in Paris I met her. The mellifluous voice of the ambassador at a party for a bigwig from Algiers: “Cody, I want you to meet Valentina Marlowe. Val, Cody Barnard, one of the unsung who mops up spills of politicians.”

Of course I had heard her name, seen her picture. What model has been more photographed than Valentina Marlowe? I turned, and our eyes met, and I don’t know how long the ambassador lingered. I can’t say what she was wearing or what was said in those first moments, or how we escaped the cloying boredom of the chitchat, clink of glasses, muted strains of a string quartet. By unspoken mutual agreement we sought a quiet in the lights of Paris. We had known each other always. We talked as if picking up a conversation begun and suspended perhaps a week ago.

We had four days that time. Simple pleasures. Communion. Lovers. But more — also friends.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow, Cody. I always spend Valentine’s Day with the home folks. My birthday, you know. Reason my mother tagged me with the given name.”

Home was Wickens, Louisiana.

“How long will you be in Wickens, Val?”

“I’ll leave the day after Valentine’s Day.”

“To Washington,” I said.

The oblique look from the expressive violet eyes in the wonderfully devised face. A toss of the mane of black, a wisp immediately returning to nuzzle her cheek. “You rat, I might have known you were behind the invitation.”

“Made a suggestion in the right ears, that’s all.” I laughed. “Doing my duty for my country. A symposium on women’s rights wouldn’t be complete without the presence of the world’s most beautiful model.”

“Then write my speech! I need ten minutes, and it’s been driving me up a wall.”

Now it was another February, month of the odd day every fourth year to reset the calendar, month of the day given to St. Valentine... Which? There were two saints of the name, you know.

And the clouds outside the descending aircraft were as filthy as the darkness in which I’d awakened three nights ago. The colors in frozen frame... her face in death, partly obscured by a swirling of water... the sounds of bullfrogs harrumping, the smell of swampy Louisiana bayou earth... then only the smothering darkness.

Luminous dial of the bedside clock: 3:00 A.M. I’d got dressed, gone out, and walked the quiet streets of Georgetown until the eastern sky showed gray.

From a phone booth I had called my secretary. No apology for rousting her out of bed. “I won’t be in today, nor for the next several days.”

Her voice cleared the cobwebs of sleep. “I don’t understand, Mr. Barnard.”

“It isn’t necessary for you to do so.”

“But your appointments, correspondence, the report—”

“Make excuses, Miss Clowerson! You’re very good at that sort of thing. Parcel out my chores, take up the slack, use your Washington logic.”

“Well, I can always say that someone very close to you suddenly died.”

I slammed the phone in its hook. Damn bitch! Damn unwitting, cruel, cruddy bitch!

A shuttle flight. A taxicab. Val surprised, her face lighting happily, heartbreakingly, when she saw me standing with a packed overnight and garment bag.

A kiss. Hug. A herding into the apartment with its view of Central Park.

“You’re going to Wickens this year with me!”

“Isn’t it time I met your mother, and this George you’re always talking about, and Keith, Lissa, and Reba who runs the house like a Captain Bligh, and the others?”

“Oh, Cody... I’m so glad you could arrange it. God, this will be the best Wickens year ever!”

Now her elbow nudged me. “Hey, Cody... Memphis below. Then a short commuter flight and you’ll experience Wickens, no less.”

My sham yawn was convincing enough. She’d turned her attention from my closed eyes to look out the window as the jet broke cloud level, and Memphis and the Mississippi River spread like a far-flung relief map.

She laughed. “He was a great songwriter, but he was wrong on one point.”

“Who is that?”

“Ira Gershwin... the lyricist. Look down there at the city, the farms, fields, docks, river craft just rolling along. I ask you. Is that an Old Man River? Male chauvinism, that’s what. Old Man River indeed! Any dummy from this part of the world knows the Mississippi is female.”

Our shoulders pressed as we both looked down before the plane wheeled for approach and the wing cut the river out of sight.

“Pure female,” I agreed. “Giver of life. Mercurial in mood from her icy beginnings in the north to her turgid joining with the Gulf. Comforter. Angry mistress, when she spews over her banks, scorning the levees trying to hem her in.”

“Don’t forget her mysteries.” Val smiled. “Beneath the warm, peaceful invitation of her surface are snags to rip the stoutest boat to pieces.”

“Oh, her mysteries fascinate me most.”

“I’m glad you understand, Cody.” She tweaked my nose. “How could I respect a man who didn’t see a truth so clearly?”

“Hell, it’s obvious. If the Mississippi is an old man, then the Statue of Liberty is a transvestite.”

She laughed, but I had a shriveling coldness inside.

For the nth time I thought to myself: Keep her away from Wickens, Louisiana, this Valentine year. If you can’t think of a logical reason, let her think you’ve lost your mind. Coerce, plead. Do it physically. Lock her in a room someplace and stand guard at the door until the Valentine hour is past.

But somehow I knew that this was not the alternative future that would work. Neither Wickens nor the forces would vanish at my whim. Wickens would be there all the years of her life. The issue had to be settled. There was no escape or normal safety until the issue was put to rest.

2

Val and I were among a trickle of passengers exiting the commuter plane in Wickens. We were hardly down the ramp steps when a man and woman gathered us in, beaming joy, smothering Val, pumping my hand.

“Mom, George, this is the man!”

“Wow! Toss you for this one, Val. Hi, Cody. I’m Elva.”

“I know,” I said, smiling. “Would have known you anywhere.” And it was true. She was the gracefully aging pattern from which Val had been cut.

“And this is George,” Elva said.

“Glad to know you, George.”

“Likewise.” His handshake was good — firm, but not bone crushing. He was a man who didn’t have to display, to prove anything. Mentally I agreed with what Val had said about George Crandall. He was a presence. You either liked him immediately or shied away. I liked the little echo of gentleness in the boom of his voice. I liked the intelligence of the perceptive brown eyes in the face that might have been carved from oak with a trench knife.

This retired army officer, this Colonel George R. Crandall, was second father to Valentina. He was hardly the stereotype southern colonel. No fine-boned aristocrat, no white Vandyke, no broad-brimmed, floppy panama hat or string necktie. He was a tanned, fit light heavyweight in sandals, poplin slacks, and a knitted shirt on which the corners of the collar curled slightly. A man who sweated easily but wouldn’t particularly mind heat or cold.

“Would you like a drink?” he was asking.

“You kidding?” Val said. “We won’t have to wait for the luggage. I want a drink — at home.”

Elva drove. Her car was a modest Chevy. The day was lovely, February cool but touched with that southern Louisiana sense of semitropic in the breath from the Gulf, the river, the bayous and swamps. George pointed out landmarks of possible interest and asked about my work. It was the usual, expected small conversation, but his interest was real, quick, lively.

My impression of Wickens was of modern hustle and a scorn for the passage of time. Taking sustenance from its busy waterfront and natural gas industry, Wickens was state-of-the-moment shopping centers, half a dozen high-rise buildings over a downtown where revitalization had preserved the more historic sites. Wickens was also previous-century on streets where time had been barred, where there was still a corner grocery, a drugstore in an ancient building... it surely had a marble-counter soda fountain. A statue of a Confederate soldier stood guard over a park where old men played checkers beneath hoary live oaks and aged palm trees and pines bearded with Spanish moss. A few young mothers chatted on benches, rocking baby carriages and watching older children at play near an iron-railed fountain. Tract homes and condos hadn’t conquered Wickens. There were broad, tree-shaded streets of impeccable old gingerbread houses from which maidens in crinoline might burst forth at any moment to prepare for a lawn party.

George saw my interest in passing details. “Get to you, if you’re not careful,” he laughed. “Best damn spot on earth — except during hurricane season. Phobia of mine.”

He didn’t strike me as a man of any phobias, which just goes to show.

“Last year, by God, when Charlie was taking on such a load coming up through the Gulf, twisting a drilling platform like it was wet spaghetti, Elva loaded me onto a plane and we shopped and saw the sights in Montgomery, Charlie having aimed straight for Wickens. You were in ’Nam, I understand. Jesus... in those parts I was once in a typhoon... left me without a nail on a single finger. You strike me as a tolerable sportsman, Cody. Golf? Fish? Maybe one night you’d like to break out a watersled and try your hand at frog gigging? Nobody cooks fresh frog legs quite like Elva.”

“I’ve eaten them in Paris.” I grinned.

“Paris? Where the hell is that? For good food you got to go to New Orleans, or Elva’s kitchen.”

We had reached the eastern suburbs, not quite in the country. The houses dotted a landscape of sweeping lawns, small pastures, hedges, fences of wood, iron, chain link, split rail; lines of trees suggested boundaries between acreages of sizes to be called estates.

Elva turned onto a white-graveled driveway that wended between rows of sheltering willows. I saw a farmhouse that was comfortably old Southern, white frame, two stories, tall windows, a porch rambling across the front, a towering fieldstone chimney snugged against the eastern end.

George led me upstairs to a spacious front corner bedroom. Beneath the tall ceiling was a solid old poster bed, chest, bureau, huge oval mirror, writing desk, a Tiffany lamp on a table beside the invitation of a lounging chair.

“Your bath is right there.” George nodded at a door in the rear wall. “The wardrobe filling the corner should do. No closet... House was built by Valentina’s great grandpa, and houses were taxed by rooms in those days. Bureaucrats of course counted a closet as a room, and a hell of lot of people decided to make the wardrobe industry what it was for a while.”

He paused in the doorway. “Just follow your druthers while you’re with us, Cody. We don’t live on ceremony. Shoot any food allergies, or preferences, up front. We’ll do our best.”

“Thanks, George. Not picky in the mess hall. If it’s creeping, just kill it before you serve.”

“Stow your gear, freshen up if you like, and come on down as it suits your mood.”

Half an hour later, I heard the pleasant rise and fall of voices as I went down the oaken-banistered stairway into the spacious lower hallway.

They were in the living room, the forepart of the house off the hall, and Val saw me instantly when I appeared in the broad doorway.

She came and took my hand, ran the fingers of her other hand lightly along my temple. “Your hair is curling a little from the shower damp.” She smiled. “Come let me display you. People, this is Cody. Cody, meet Lissa Aubunelli, with whom I’ve had some pigtail pullings, and Keith Vereen. Careful with State Department classified in Keith’s presence, Cody. He’s one of those monsters known as the press. Publishes the local daily newspaper and brought the first, and only, television station to Wickens, a CBS affiliate.”

Lissa was plump, dark, big brown eyes, brown hair cut short and sassy, teeth that flashed almost as perfectly as Val’s, round, pink-cheeked face with chronic little moisture swatches beneath her eyes.

She gave me a hug and peck on the cheek, a sigh as she stepped back, head tilted, looking me over. “Val the stinker... really got the pick of the litter.”

Keith Vereen was smiling at her, offering his hand to me. He was tall, slender, slightly stooped, sandy-haired with quick, sharp blue eyes in a finely boned face. His movements suggested a carefully tuned conditioning and the reflexes of a cat.

“A real pleasure, Cody. But you’re no stranger. Val’s carryings-on about you in letters to her mother made you a friend quite awhile back.”

“How about a drink, appetizer?” Keith suggested. We drifted toward a buffet burdened with the wherewithal.

“Bourbon?” Lissa said. “I’ll pour; want it neat, or with branch, soda, ginger ale?”

“A splash of branch is fine.”

“How about a Sunday feature, Cody?” Keith said. “Isn’t every day an assistant secretary of state surfaces in Wickens. I’d even ask Lissa to write it.”

“No way,” Lissa said. “Hunk like him... I couldn’t be the least bit objective.”

Our hands touched as I took the proffered drink. “You’re a writer?”

“The best by-hell investigative reporter in the state of Louisiana,” Keith said, “perhaps the South.”

“Why stop there?” Lissa asked.

She didn’t look like an investigative reporter; she looked like a jolly young woman with innocent devilment behind her eyes and pasta recipes in her head.

“She started on the Sword, which is what my grandpappy called the paper when he bought the first linotype machine. Unfortunately, we lost her in a short time to the New Orleans Observer. Been there how long now, Lissa?”

“Seven years, kiddo. Don’t bother to ask my age.”

“She’s had offers from the Washington Post, New York Times, a news magazine or two,” Val said in pride of her lifelong friend.

“They’re not in New Orleans, lamb. They’re in places where there’s no old French market and the yokels don’t know how to listen to Dixieland music.”

Elva and George came in, beginning a pleasant hour. I felt so at home, I might have been born in Wickens.

Despite the comfort of the poster bed, I didn’t sleep well. Finally, about two in the morning, I gave it up. I put on a robe and socks, and slipped downstairs to the kitchen. I filched makings, cold chicken roasted in a piquant Louisiana basting, French bread, shreds of jack cheese, and a generous slap of a cajun version of slaw.

I carried the reuben out to the front porch. The night was nippy, but not cold. A breeze whispered in the pines and palm trees, the moon glinted behind scudding clouds, the faintest insinuation of primeval earth seeped from the swamps.

“You ought to have a cup of steaming coffee and chickory with that drooly goody. The chickory — it gentles everything, lulls you to sleep on a full stomach.”

At the first soft murmur I’d turned. Lissa’s round face, dimly seen, was smiling from a wicker chair in the darkness. Beside the chair was its wicker twin. I sat down, holding out the sandwich. “Want a hunk?”

“Sure.” She reached, carefully wrestled off a modest share, sat back, taking a bite. “Very good.”

“Want a whole one? You hardly got a mouthful.”

“Better not.” She bit into the morsel. “What’s with you? Jet lag? The quiet against big-city ears?”

I shook my head. How could I tell her? An awful premonition won’t let me sleep... I’ve had them before, not often, never know when or how, but they’re more real than the wailing of that night creature, which sounds like it’s in bad trouble.

“Oh, the excitement, I suppose,” I said. “The day. Coming to Val’s home, meeting you people, who are so very much exactly as you should be.”

“So are you.” She was silent a moment. She saw me looking in the direction where the night creature had screamed, one brief wail, abruptly cut off.

“It’s a million years ago, not far down state road 61. But you’ve been in jungle even more deadly.” She rustled, leaning slightly toward me. “You can keep from telling me what’s on your mind, Cody. None of my business. So I won’t ask.”

“I won’t volunteer.”

“Touché. Well, I don’t mind telling you why my bed was smothery, why I finally came down to look at the familiar yard and think about when we were kids, Val and I. Fact is, I need an ear... someone who won’t sigh crossly and tell me I’m an emotional nit, acting like a stupid child.”

“Give you my word. None of us sounds altogether brilliant when we need a sounding board.”

“Truth is...” She took a breath. “Cody, I’m frightened. And if I tell you why, I’ll sound like an underdone fool kid who got hold of some crack.”

“Try me.”

“It’s this... the pattern.”

“What pattern?”

“The appearances of the dead bodies in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove! But of course, you don’t know any of it. I’m not yet making sense.”

“No, you’re not, Lissa. Why not try starting at the beginning?”

She eased back in her chair; she seemed small in it. It was a big barrel of a wicker, the top a little higher than her head, the arms great convolutions of wicker curved halfway around her.

“You’ve heard of the events of February 14, 1929, in Chicago, of course.”

I thought for a second. “The St. Valentine’s Day massacre?”

“Yes... so it’s known. Seven men waited for the arrival of a hijacked truckload of bootleg booze — six gangsters and an optometrist who enjoyed the company and life-style of gangsters. A mongrel dog was also present. Bugs Moran, the prime target in the gangland sortie, should have been there, but he was running late. As he approached the Clark Street warehouse to join the gangsters inside, he saw a big Caddy, police gong on the running board, pulling up and disgorging four men. Two were in police uniform, two in civvies. A fifth man, the driver, stayed in the car. Moran turned and made tracks while his seven pals were blasted with shotguns and submachine guns. Close range. Really gory. The gunfire attracted notice, but when two men in uniform herded two in civilian clothes out, it seemed just another Chicago episode in a time when such raids were commonplace. No one was ever convicted. Al Capone, having masterminded the tactic to wipe out members of a rival gang, had taken himself off to his Florida estate, and at the hour of the massacre was chatting with the Dade County solicitor.”

“A perfect alibi,” I remarked. “But why dwell on violence and murder on a day given to love?”

“Because there was another St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Cody. Way back in 1865.”

“Close of the Civil War,” I said.

“Yes. It made regional headlines, quickly forgotten, especially in the chaotic aftermath of war. But it’s still in the history books, those multi-volume things covering Louisiana history. Occasionally it crops up in Sunday supplement feature stories in one of the larger state newspapers.”

“Who was massacred?”

“Seven young men, Yankee soldier boys sent in to help police a riverfront town in a region already neutralized and under Union control. They were invited to a St. Valentine’s Eve party by a beautiful young woman, Marie Louchard. On the way they were captured by a band of marauders, thieves, cutthroat killers posing as die-hard Rebs. They were herded onto a barge, hands bound, and dropped into the Mississippi. One by one their bodies washed ashore in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove. It’s an inlet, and the river currents twist shoreward.”

Lissa was still more than a hundred years from my fears for Valentina, but I had a foreboding that the threads were going to cross. I wanted Lissa to shut up, but I had to hear on.

And she continued, “The leader of the renegades was one Alberto Batione y Ochoa. He was of two families powerful at the time when the Spanish flag flew over the Cabildo in New Orleans, once the seat of Spanish government in Louisiana. Both families were notorious for their blood lust, sadism, and cruelties, and the genes certainly came to full expression in Alberto...”

She paused, taking a small breath. “Seven years ago, Cody, the first body washed up in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove. Young man. Hands bound. Cause of death, drowning. It was a run-of-the-mill report in the Sword and hardly made the other papers. Then the next year, another body... and the year following... always the same, a satanic valentine for Wickens. Along about the sixth year, the investigative reporter in me began to take notice, frame questions.”

“And you discovered?”

“Nothing right away. Cases unsolved... During the course of a full year what’s one more killing in a society rife with daily murders, rapes, muggings? The seven bodies in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove in life had been as unlike as peas and potatoes, one a street person, another a filling station attendant, a drug peddler, fellow who worked for an outdoor sign company... but my head wouldn’t let go. And I came up with a link, Cody. Dear God, I went into the history of each victim, and I discovered that two were cousins, and I backtracked them, in a growing obsession with this thing. And would you know... every single one of the seven young men was descended from Alberto Batione y Ochoa. Cody, I swear... am I going nuts? The spirits of those seven Yankee soldier boys of 1865 have been about their revenge. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth... spirits real, or spirits imagined in an insane head... the result is as undeniable as men taking a trip to the moon.”

“Seven,” I said. “Seven Yankee boys, seven of Ochoa blood now accounted in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove.”

“You fool,” she said quietly. “You’re trying to tell yourself that it’s over. For some reason, you want to believe it. You’re afraid for Valentina, Cody. I can see it in your eyes. I can smell your fear. I don’t know how or why, but thank God you’re in Wickens this St. Valentine’s. This year, if the pattern holds, this is the season for the pièce de résistance. The woman who betrayed the seven Union soldiers — Marie Louchard — is yet unatoned.”

I pressed back away from Lissa’s sweat-beaded face. “Hush!” I said thickly. “Don’t say anything more.”

“All right, Cody. As you say.”

“No — you must.” My hand caught her arm. “Valentina... Marie Louchard...”

“Five generations, Cody. Direct descent, through Valentina’s paternal grandmother.”

The night was a vacuum. Then Lissa shivered. “I’m cold,” she said.

I was hardly aware when she rose and slipped away into the house.

3

I opened my eyes, and the world outside was deceptively pleasant: friendly sun, blue skies, a fluttering of birds outside the bedroom window.

The sun’s brilliance suggested midmorning. Puffy-eyed, I stumbled into the shower. Sleep, when it came finally, had been deep, dark, a flight into temporary death.

Steady now. The little rituals: shower, shave, brush the teeth, get dressed, comb the hair.

While I made the automatic motions, I tried to cast my thought in the mold of Lissa. More than two years now since the fifth body had washed ashore in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove, quite a bit of rope for a reporter of Lissa’s gifts. It wasn’t difficult to comprehend what had sparked her first curiosity. Five corpses. All young males. All drowned. Same location, same time each year. Who were they, really? Did they have anything in common? And the common ancestry had hooked Lissa.

She had probably wanted to go at it full-time, but a metropolitan editor involved in the large scene wouldn’t have seen it that way. What you smoking these days, Lissa? What’s this poppycock? Even if you devise a spook tale out of a riverfront town, so what? Louisiana abounds in spook tales, stories of voodoo queens, ghosts in the spreading live oak where Creole aristocrats fought duels, haunted mansions. If we’re to go the sleazy tabloid route, why not go out to one of the rat holes today, buy a love potion or pin-stuck doll, and tell our readers about it? You should be in Baton Rouge, Lissa, telling me who is behind the sugar quota bill; you should be in Houston finding out where the oil brokers from Louisiana are meeting with their buddies in Texas; you should be tracing the ownership of the plot on which Parks and Recreation, City of New Orleans, is going to squander another million, sure as a piss ant crawls. Now get the hell to Baton Rouge, Lissa — and I can’t pass up the old compliment that you’re pretty when you’re angry.

So it would have gone, whetting her interest the more, returning her spare time and thoughts again and again to Wickens.

When I came out into the upper hall, I heard the whirr of a vacuum cleaner downstairs. That would be Reba. She and Clyde, middle-aged couple, were the domestic staff, having a small home adjacent to the Marlowe place. Reba arrived each day and Clyde pruned, raked, fixed leaks, and painted as need arose, doing a little truck farming and fishing.

The vacuum was racketing in the living room, a counterpoint to Reba’s work rhythm as she sang an old hymn. (“Oh, Beulah Land, sweet Beulah land, as on the highest mount I stand...”) Her tempo would get her through the living room in short order.

Seeing no one about, I went on to the secrets of the large, airy kitchen with its walk-in cooler, gas range, sinks of old-timey zinc, racked pots and pans of cast iron and copper. A work area centered the room and a sunny breakfast nook bay-windowed on the east.

Too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. I sure as hell had been out like a light once I tipped over the edge.

Hot coffee was in the urn, and I cut crusty Louisiana French bread for toast and found marmalade in the pantry.

I was munching, listening to the house, anxious to hear those little details Lissa might have left unsaid, when footsteps sounded and George appeared in the doorway.

A smile creased his hewn face. “Must have been the Louisiana air.”

“Someone should have called me.”

“Why? You got an appointment with the ambassador from Paraguay? How’s the coffee holding out?”

“Tastes like it was just made.”

He reached into the china cabinet for a big white mug that had his initial on it.

“Hate to eat and run, George.” I dropped my napkin beside the marmalade-smeared saucer. “But I want to talk to Lissa.”

He glanced as he turned the urn spigot. “She’s not here.”

“Oh?”

“She left about half an hour ago.”

“Did she say where she’s going?”

He shrugged. “Who asked? Whose business?”

He sat down opposite me at the breakfast nook table. “She did mention she wouldn’t be here for lunch — popping down to New Orleans and back. Something about a detail in some records that had spewed up in her mind. (Her words.) Whatever it was, she seemed a little put out with herself that it had escaped notice before. ‘Spewed up in her mind’... tendency to overwrite despite her brilliance, wouldn’t you say? She told Elva she’d be back long before dinner. My guess is that she’s gone off to buy a birthday-valentine gift for Valentina. Those two... they trinket-shop for each other as if they were buying for Saint Anne.”

He was looking at me over the top of the coffee mug. “Anything wrong, Cody?”

Was anything right? I shook my head. Nothing for it now, except to wait until Lissa got back. I said, “You’ve known Val a long time.”

“All her life. Her mother and I... everyone was sure we’d wind up married.”

“What happened?”

His lips made an ironic smile. “Career... I was hell-set on the army. Dedication to the ambition, you might say, got me in West Point despite the muscularity between the ears. Elva was hell-set against it. Radical kid in those days. Flower child, Saint Joan of the armies of righteousness. The saps do run high when you’re young, don’t they? We had attitudinal difficulties, it’s safe to say, estrangements based on noncompromise of principles, which are the worst estrangements of all, pigheaded stubbornness on the part of both, pride, and wounded hearts. I had my career and she ended up marrying Charles Marlowe. I’d like to call him a bastard, but he was a fine man, Cody. He passed on...”

“When Val was fifteen,” I said. “She’s told me about him. She was never close to him.”

“It happens with kids sometimes. They were cut in different dispositions, but she respected him, and he never had a moment’s trouble with her.”

“Val would never give anyone trouble, George. If the relationship was like that, then excise the relationship, however painful.”

“Like her mother,” he said.

“You never married?”

His beefish shoulders lifted, dropped. “Mistresses. Not cheap. Lived with three women all told. The relationships were nicer than most run-of-the-mill marriages. Difference between me and a lot of officers, I didn’t change mistresses at every post, with a wife back home. Very fond of all three, but the kind of love a man should have for a woman got stranded at the altar in Saint Louis Cathedral the day Elva married Charles Marlowe. I was a shavetail on duty in Panama that day.”

“Did you see Elva often after that?”

He laughed, brief belly laugh. “Son, I came back here on my first leave after her marriage, spit and polish, sabers at the ready. Ah, youth... I was full of fire to duel old Charlie or something like that and drag Elva off by the hair. She kept us apart. And after that meeting with her, I knew she was too Catholic to divorce him. Sure, I saw her now and then during my career years, small town, old family ties. You don’t move around much in Wickens without the bumping-into.”

He reached across to slap my shoulder. “You can bet your last franc I see her often nowadays.”

“Why don’t you marry her, George?”

“Hell, I intend to. I think she keeps stalling because of Val.”

My frown questioned.

He spread his hands. “It nettles me, I’ll admit, but no throwing down of the gauntlet this time. I can wait. It’s like she’s got some kind of notion she shouldn’t think solely of herself, but should wait to tie the knot until Val is safely married and the last shred of umbilical cord cut for good. What the devil’s wrong with you, Cody? Val’s the loveliest, most sensitive, intelligent woman on earth, and I can’t believe you’re a man with a stuck zipper. Heaven’s sake, Cody, marry the girl and get her the hell out of our hair.”

Before I responded, Reba came into the kitchen, pleasant, robust, giving me a sniff. “Had a special cut of country ham to go with the eggs and grits for you, Mr. Barnard, and you come sneaking down behind my back.”

“I’m sorry, Reba.”

She went to the dishwasher to remove crockery. “Now you know. No excuse.”

George stood and stretched, lazily and contentedly. “Well, Cody, what’s on for today? Name it, and I’ll tell you if I’m amenable or any good at it.”

“I really must talk to Lissa.”

“Then I’ll wander over to the country club and see if I can catch a foursome or try a hand at a penny-ante poker game. Come on over. You’ll meet likable people.”

“Thanks, George.”

As he went out, I said to Reba, “The house is very quiet. Did Val and Elva go out?”

She nodded. “They went downtown to do some last-minute shopping for the valentine-birthday party. You’ll have a ball! Real blowout every year, Val coming home and all, paper lanterns and people all over the lawn. Caterers are brought in so’s me and Clyde and Elva ain’t got a thing to do but have fun. Last year, Lissa hired a genuine Dixie band to come from New Orleans. Sakes alive, I wondered if those decrepit old blacks had played the processional for Noah to enter the ark. The old boys propped themselves up on the bandstand George had planked together on the lawn, and when that music started — day of miracles. Those fellows shed about thirty years apiece, first tune, and they got younger and stronger with every note. Lawdy, my blood is still singing from that music.”

“Any Louchards at the party, Reba?”

She stiffened, then slowly slipped the last plate from the dishwasher. “Where’d you hear that name?”

“Val’s part Louchard, isn’t she?”

“There ain’t no more Louchards, Mr. Barnard,” she said thinly. “The last to bear the name was Valentina’s great grandfather. He had but one daughter. The name ain’t gonna be found in any Wickens phone books.”

I didn’t press Reba. She’d let me know I was on verboten ground. Marie Louchard’s conspiracy to murder seven Yankee boys in 1865 was not a subject for conversation in a region where family trees still cast long shadows.

The respectful quality of my silence was the best ploy, though I’d used it inadvertently. Reba was thinking about it and as she stacked the dishes, she cleared her throat and said, “I reckon you’ll be part of the family and have a right to know. So to save you folks trouble, I’ll give you the Louchard bit — if you’ll take it as the meaningless bit of scandal it is, let it go at that, and keep your mouth shut on any further question.”

“Agreed, Reba.” I looked at her with fresh interest. “Fire away.”

“Ain’t much firing, really. Marie Louchard, the ancestress you don’t talk about, was a dilly in capital letters. At fifteen she was in a wealthy planter’s pants long enough to rob him. She shilled for a riverboat gambler. She was come-on for a saloon keeper who rolled his passed-out patrons in a back alley. She was part of them hoodoo’ers for a while, would go to their bonfires and naked dances in swamp glens. She bedded with that cutthroat Alberto Batione y Ochoa, who was spawned by families worse than Attila and Hitler. She had a bastard boy, Ranee Louchard, who was doubtless the seed of Alberto. He ended up on the gallows for cutting a trapper’s throat and selling the pelts, but not before he’d sired a son, who sired a daughter, who was Valentina’s grandmother. And that’s the whole of it, Mr. Barnard.”

“How did she end up, this dilly of an ancestress?”

“The story goes that she gave her bastard away, met a ship’s captain, went to live in France, turned professional with her hoodoo dancing, making a great hit, toast of Paris. Her salon became the watering place for artists, writers, musicians, high-ranking politicians. She lived to a great age, passing peacefully in her château in the south of France.”

“Some woman.”

“And I guess ninety percent of it ain’t fable. You want anything else?”

I shook my head, thanked her, and left the kitchen.

Once a stable, the garage was perhaps fifty yards off behind the house where the graveled driveway ended. A pickup truck was inside the sprawling frame building, keys in the ignition. Always wheels of some sort around, Val had said, so help yourself anytime you feel ambulatory.

I got in the truck, backed out, turned it, and drove off, trying to recall the street pattern between the Marlowe place and downtown.

The Sword occupied a three-story concrete-and-glass building in an area that had received city and private sector planning and reclamation money. Old structures had been razed to make way for a shopping arcade, off-street parking, a modern high rise, an arts center.

The state seal and motto were inlaid in the terra-cotta flooring of the spacious entry foyer. The main-floor office was a busy, sweeping array of desks devoted to advertising, bookkeeping, circulation. Wicket gates and a counter confined the public. A girl came to the counter, smiling and asking what she could do for me.

I told her who I was and asked if I could see Keith. She clicked a switch and intercommed with someone upstairs.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Barnard. Mr. Vereen is out. He’s on the parks commission and an inspection of some sort was scheduled this morning. If you’d care to wait, the reception room is off the foyer, a TV, copies of the paper...”

“May I wait for Mr. Vereen in your library?”

“He may be out all day and just phone in. But if you like, the morgue is on the third floor. You can take the self-service elevator in the foyer. I’ll tell Mr. Vereen’s secretary where you are, and let Miss Kitterling know you’re coming up.”

“Thank you.”

Miss Kitterling was a grayish, spare, pleasantly smiling woman in a long, brightly lighted warren of filing cabinets, tables strewn with clippings, packed bookshelves, and microfilm equipment.

An efficient woman, she soon had me seated at a small table whereon was a monitor screen, beside which she deposited the films I requested.

“I’ll see if my computer gives me any further cross-indexing, Mr. Barnard, but I’m sure this is the batch of it.”

I thanked her, and she retired to her long table and clipping shears, giving me a covert glance that expressed curiosity... an assistant secretary of state, personal friend of Mr. Vereen’s, poring through files covering St. Valentine’s Day, unsolved murders of the past ten years.

I imagined she would have a go at the files herself, once the mysterious stranger was out of sight. She wouldn’t find any answers, I finally admitted to myself. She wouldn’t know what she was actually looking for. I knew vaguely, and I didn’t find any answers.

The stories were routinely out of police records: DEAD MAN FOUND IN MAD FRENCHWOMAN’S COVE. DEAD WOMAN FOUND IN APARTMENT. MAN SOUGHT IN SHOOTING. GIRL STRANGLED IN BACK ALLEY.

I thought of the Atlanta child murders and how many little black boys had died before the city got the drift. Sometimes you do have to hit people over the head to get their attention. The Atlanta case had two critical elements: black boys, and a compressed time frame.

The Wickens situation lacked both. No visible relationship or common link between the victims — until Lissa, only Lissa had glimpsed a shred of light. No mounting certainty that next week or the week after would yield a dead body of prescribed race and color.

Just a body fished out of Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove now and then, some of them coincidentally on St. Valentine’s Day. Start digging in that direction and you might find Yuletide, even Halloween victims.

Without critical elements, there was no hue and cry, no marshaling of special forces by police, not even the same detective quoted in consecutive years, except for the past two. His name was Homicide Detective Max Dufarge.

I thanked Miss Kitterling for her hospitality and asked the directions to police headquarters.

It was less than two blocks distant.

“Max is out, can I help you?”

“Out on a case?” I asked the burly desk sergeant.

He nodded. “That’s his job, isn’t it? Girl this time, right under our noses.”

“Your noses?”

“Cruddy parking garage... girl strangled, body in her car... before this, too many muggings, senior citizens mostly, like we should patrol every level around the clock.”

Phones were ringing; a lawyer was haggling bail for a client; two cops dragged in a wildly resisting drunk.

“This girl — have you identified her?”

The desk sergeant grimaced. “Max and his people just got over there and cordoned it off. She must have been killed within the hour. Max just radioed in for a make on a tag number and driver’s license issued to a Lissa Aubunelli.”

A captain was yelling at the sergeant from a frosted glass cubicle.

The sergeant muttered a curse under his breath. “Look, friend, the public is always curious. That’s why we have TV. You can see all about it on the evening newscast.”

4

Valentina reacted to the news with a frightful calm. “Lissa is dead,” she said to no one outside herself. “I won’t be seeing Lissa again.”

She looked then, at the faces, mine the closest. “I would like to go up to my room, Cody.”

“Val—”

“I’ll be okay. Just give me a small moment to accept it.”

She went, quietly and quickly, up the broad stairs, and, watching from the bottom level, I heard her door close. I crept up and stood uncertainly. Then I heard her weeping beyond the closed door, and I knew she would come out, steady, dry-eyed, when she was quite ready.

George and Elva still stood in the lower hallway. George was stunned, but had presence — white faced, tight lipped, in control, the unflappable career army officer. Elva was rigidly steeled, tears in her eyes.

She shook off George’s supporting arm. “I’ll have to tell Reba and Clyde.”

“How about Lissa’s family?” I asked. “Shouldn’t it be one of you, rather than a policeman knocking at their door?”

“She had no family, Cody,” Elva said. “None other than us. Her parents were killed in a house fire three years ago. She had no brothers, sisters, grandparents — perhaps a distant cousin or two. We’ll have to find that out.” She slipped quietly toward the kitchen to look for Reba and Clyde.

George started to barrage me with questions, but driveway gravel showered outside and we heard a car door slam.

As we reached the front door, Keith burst upon the porch. The aristocratic cut of his lean face was all hard, flat planes. His blue eyes had darkened almost to black.

He jerked to a halt, looking from one to the other. “You— You’ve heard.”

“Yes,” George said, “Cody just now came with the news.”

Keith let go a breath. “Then I’m not the messenger. Was certain I’d have to be. The news came across the mainframe printout, from our unit interfaced in the press room at headquarters. I got Dufarge on the wire, but as yet there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of follow-up detail.”

His movement was taut, uncomfortable. He pressed his buttocks against the banister, half sitting, and brooded briefly. “Apparently another mugging in the gloom of the parking garage. Frigging city out to sell it. Private owners would up the rate but provide security the city can’t with its stretched-out manpower. Fatal mugging this time...” His thin lips tightened to disappearance. “And I might have stopped this one.”

George glanced from Keith to me. My eyes were on Keith. “How?”

“Lissa called from New Orleans late in the morning. The call was relayed to my car during a parks inspection. She said she wanted to see Max Dufarge and me as soon as she got back, and she was calling from the northern end of the parish, already out of the city proper.”

“Did she say what it was about?”

Keith scathed me with a bitter look. “What would be the first thing a newspaperman would ask? She said I might possibly be bidding on a Valentine story. She’d been spare-timing a thing for a long time, and had the gist of it in place — except for the final identity. She’d eliminated a final false lead in New Orleans and said the answer was here in Wickens. She said it was time now to holler for help.”

“Did she elaborate?”

“Not on the phone. She said Max and I would get it up to this point, all she had, before the day was out. She said she had enough to convince us it wasn’t smoke and vapor, and we would move. Sounded a bit scary. But Lissa couldn’t resist center stage; it was the trait that breathed fire into her most mundane story.” An involuntary shiver went through him, delayed reaction. He looked a little sick, but pushed himself up. “How is Val?”

“Taking it,” I said.

“Can I do anything?”

“Can anyone?” George asked.

“Have we got a shot of Jack Daniel’s around the place?” Keith asked.

“We could all use a drink,” George said, and led the way inside. He poured at the dining room sideboard and we went aimlessly into the living room, George carrying the bottle. We heard a door close in the back of the house. George tossed his drink, set the glass and bottle on the coffee table. “That will be Elva.” He hurried out.

Keith sank into an overstuffed chair, pulled up again. “I could use another.” He poured a second finger. “No ticket back for Lissa.” He raised his eyes, saw my confused frown, and added, “Of course the statement is meaningless to you, Cody. But there was a ticket back in my case.”

“Excuse me?”

He threw the drink down his throat. “Car accident. Terrible concussion... trauma... heart stopped... dead as last year’s rose. A great medical team and that electric gadget they use to bang the old ticker started me up again. But for a minute or two, the reading of my will could have proceeded legally.”

He looked at the shot glass, decided against a third, and eased the glass onto the table.

“I’ve tried to remember — but I couldn’t at the time and the mists of eight years haven’t helped — how it felt to die. You’ve heard the stories of people who cross over and are snatched back. A lot of them report a marvelous experience, a golden light, a feeling of joy and peace, a feeling of not wanting to be brought back, but to have the golden freedom of the light.”

“How was it with you, Keith?”

“No golden light. I really have never been able to remember. I think it was dark, cold, a feeling of terrible anxiety because I was dying, dead. Maybe my linen was soiled when I got over there... Poor Lissa — I hope she got over there with her linen clean.”

After the local evening newscast, the telephone began to ring. It wouldn’t stop. Elva kept answering, hearing the sympathetic expressions, consoling the shocked caller, answering the same questions. Finally she took the obvious measure and left the phone off the hook.

We talked to Homicide Detective Max Dufarge, who came accompanied by one of his men. We told him everything we knew.

We sat about the table. Food was on it. Perhaps we ate.

It was St. Valentine’s Eve and all the plans for the party had to be cancelled, the caterer told by phone to send his bill but not himself, likewise the booking agent in New Orleans who handled Dixieland jazz groups.

Lissa Aubunelli was stretched out in a funeral home downtown, and we, finally, in our beds.

A moon milked palely in the darkness. The night was not quiet: the scratching of a night creature scurrying across the roof; the faraway striking of the grandfather clock in the lower hall; a skirl of night wind, creak of a house timber, a whisper of movement. Here in the house? Someone up, needing an aspirin? I rose to an elbow, listening. Nothing. I eased back and gradually my senses slipped into a halfway house of nonsleep.

The colors came in a single glimpse of tangled mangrove, saw grass, heat-blasted pines weeping dead, gray moss tendrils.

A narrow, rutted road with crushed-shell surface wormed painfully through the jungle. In a clearing off the road was a tumbledown clapboard shack. Beside the road were the ruins of a mailbox. Jagged holes had rusted through. The remains hung crookedly on a weather-eaten chain from a weather-eaten stanchion creatively fashioned from the iron tire of an old wagon wheel.

Zap!

The darkness was a wall.

I jerked on my pants and shoes. Across the hallway I hesitated for a beat of a second. Then I gripped the doorknob, flung the panel open, and I saw what I was afraid of seeing: an empty bed, sheet thrown back.

“Valentina!” My shout shattered through the house. I looked back and forth wildly in the hallway, ran down the stairs, two, three at a time.

“Valentina! Val!”

I was outside, seeing the vacancy of the porch, the land, the emptiness of the whole earth.

I ran back in. The house was awakening, lights flashing on, questioning voices rising.

George was charging down the stairs, in the direction of my voice.

Just inside the front door, I grabbed his arm. “Don’t ask me anything! Just tell me— You’ve known this swamp country for years. Do you know a deserted shack with a mailbox mounted on a wagon-wheel iron rim?”

“Cody, what in the hell—”

“Damn you! Answer my question!”

“Of course I know. It’s the old LeMoines place. Belonged to Keith Vereen’s grandpappy. Hunters, fishermen still use it now and then, not that it’s much shelter when a storm blows in. Now you answer a question for me. What’s going on?”

“It’s about Valentina, you long-winded bastard! She got up during the night. I know now that it wasn’t my imagination or nerves. She slipped downstairs, and he was there, where he’d told her he would be, to talk to her about Lissa, a private thing, something Lissa had meant for her ears alone. What the filthy hell does it matter how he arranged it, the bait he used? He’s got her. Nothing else matters. She’s with him, George, the final one. The Louchard descendant. And I must get to the LeMoines place.”

He was wearing pajama bottoms, barefoot. It was sufficient. “The keys are in the pickup.”

He drove daredevil fast, but not recklessly, with the expertise instilled by terrains in many parts of the world.

“Tell me,” he said.

I hung on to the seat, other hand braced against the instrument panel. “You won’t believe me.”

“Try me. I don’t know how you came by this knowledge of the LeMoines place, or how I’m so certain you know that she’s out there. But tell me — who did she meet?”

“Keith Vereen.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Very.”

“Why did he do it?”

“Because he couldn’t help himself.”

“A man can always help himself, Cody.”

“What if he’s not entirely himself? What if he is traumatized in a car accident eight years ago and dies? What if seven residual life forces, psychic echoes, spirits, ghosts, whatever the hell you choose to call them, are present inside Keith, dwelling in a level just below his own sentience, when the doctors slam an electric charge and restart his heart?”

He didn’t slow the pickup. Water showered, glitters in the night, as we slashed through a shallow ford.

“He was never the same after the accident, that much is for sure,” George admitted.

“Call him spirit possessed, or simply mad. The result is the same. He was compelled to search out seven male descendants of the man who murdered seven Yankee soldier boys on a St. Valentine’s Eve a long time ago. He had to balance the scales, even the score.”

“If any of this is true, Cody... if I’m not suffering a nightmare... that old massacre, involving Marie Louchard, it happened over a hundred years ago.”

“They had time, those seven — eternity. But they had no instrument — until Keith’s moment of death became a latchkey.”

“And Lissa?”

“Getting too uncomfortably close. She didn’t suspect Keith and forewarned him with a phone call. He simply drove out to U.S. 61, the only main road from New Orleans, and watched for her car. It was simple then to follow her into the parking garage, to say hello as she was getting from her car, to put his hands around her throat. She wouldn’t have been able to make a sound.”

The mailbox and rust-eaten wagon-wheel arch reared in the glare of the headlights. I was out of the truck, running, before George had fully stopped it.

I saw Keith’s Mercedes parked in the weed-grown ruin of the driveway leading to the shack.

Then I saw the moving shadows, human figures, in the moon-frozen darkness just beyond and to one side of the shack.

He was carrying her across his shoulder. She wasn’t moving. How hard had he slugged her?

“Valentina!”

I had outdistanced George, for all his conditioning. Keith turned slowly to face me.

“Stay back, Cody. Don’t come any closer.”

“Put her down, Keith. Back off. Please — you’ve known her all her life. She’s your friend. She loved and trusted you.”

“She’s a Louchard, Cody. It’s in the records. Go look at the records, as I did.”

His every word had a different inflection. Seven inflections? Seven voices speaking through his lips?

“Kill the bastard!” George had reached my side. “Take him, Cody.”

I had already decided it was the only way. A jump ahead of George, I was at Keith.

He stood unmoving.

A veil came, a gossamer shimmering through which Keith’s image rippled and flowed. I gasped from a force that struck me.

I saw the moon spin, and knew that I had slammed onto my back. I heard bamboo rattling a fierce tempo. Wild palms bent and reared like slashing shadows. Night creatures were screaming, and a hard, quick wind showered jungle debris across my face, against the side of the LeMoines shack.

I realized that George was sprawled beside me, frothing incoherent sound.

“Stay back,” Keith said. “She has Louchard blood in her veins. She is the guiltiest of all, and this is the moment reserved for her.”

He turned and was starting to carry her away.

A bellow of anguish came from George’s lips. “You fool! You mad fool! She is not Louchard, she’s my bastard daughter. Not a part of the Louchard line. She was born nine months after a furlough — neither Elva nor I meant for it to happen. It was only that once. Charles Marlowe proved out infertile. Maybe he guessed, before the end, why he and Elva had not had other children. She’s mine, you son of a bitch!”

The clearing seemed to suck a breath. Keith had heard. He hesitated, staring about as if for outside guidance.

This time my contact with him was hard, satisfying: he, I, and Valentina went down in a tangle. He thrashed, slipped free. His wild kick caught me on the cheek, breaking the skin. I heard viney tearings, and Keith was gone.

George was on his knees, gathering her up, cradling her against his chest, rocking in anguish.

“Oh, my baby! My little girl!...”

And she moaned softly.

As the jetliner entered the traffic pattern over the familiar grid of Washington National Airport, Valentina said quietly, “We’re back, Cody.”

“Yes.”

“It’s all over.”

“Yes.”

“Poor Keith” — her voice echoed a gentle pain — “making the river, trying to swim to freedom — or maybe not — washing up in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove.”

“We agreed to let the past bury the past,” I reminded her.

“And so we will. We’ll close the door for keeps and take up life as we’re meant to — after you tell me one thing. Just who am I, Keith?”

“You’re the daughter of two wonderful people.”

I touched her cheek. I imprinted every detail of her face in my mind forever.

“To borrow from Gershwin... You is my woman, Val.”

Her lips parted just a little; her eyes deepened. “And I got to love one man ’til I die.” A tiny crinkling at the corners of her mouth. “Aside from calling the Mississippi an old man, that poet fellow did have his perceptions.”

Content

Talmage Powell
The Jabberwock Valentine

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