“Oui! Whenever the menfolk in my family finally gets their heads on straight after being thunderstruck with love, they usually need help in winnin’ their wimmen.”
“Oh, my God!” Claire murmured.
“Get awt!” Rebekah murmured.
“Exceptin’ fer Remy. No Village People for him. Instead, he pretended to be Richard Gere from that movie An Officer and a Gentleman.”
“Oh, my God!” Claire murmured again. Rebekah just looked confused. Lizzie was grinning.
“With my help and Tee-John’s and, of course, St. Jude, this girl might just have a chance.”
“What’s idle American?” Rebekah wanted to know.
“It’s a TV show,” Claire said.
“No! Lizzie, ya can’t be thinkin’ of doin’ ye singin’ in front of Englishers.”
“That’s exactly what I’m thinkin’.”
“Why can’t ya be satisfied with the Sunday-night singin’s?”
“It’s not the same thing, Mam. So there’s no sense ya tryin’ ta talk me inta comin’ home. Besides, I’m still in Rumspringa. I’m allowed my running around as long as I need it.” The girl thrust her chin out in defiance.
“Your running around has gone on far too many years, daughter. Ya been pushin’ it fe a long time.”
“Okeydokey! Enough is enough!” Tante Lulu stood and braced her hands on the table. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. Claire, take Lizzie for a walk down by the bayou. Me and Rebekah need ta talk.”
Once those two had left, Tante Lulu gave Rekekah her “look.” The one that made her nephews cower. The one that pretty much said, “You are such a dumb cluck.”
The woman didn’t budge.
“Rebekah, chère, do ya love yer son Caleb?”
Rebekah stiffened with affront. “’Course I do.”
“Then how in the name of St. Jude kin ya cut the boy off fer almos’ twenty years?”
Tears welled in Rebekah’s eyes. “Ya just don’t understand our way. It was Caleb’s choice. And Jonas’s, too. They coulda stayed and repented. But they alveese was stubborn boys.”
“Rebekah, Rebekah, Rebekah.” She took the weeping woman’s hands in hers. “I’m Cajun, and I’m Catholic. Thass my blood and allus will be; I wouldn’t give up either. But family comes first, and I sure as shootin’ would’ve found a way to get around that shunnin’ business.”
“You have no right to say that,” Rebekah said. Then, “What way? My husband would never break the Bann.”
“Women has all the power, honey. We have ways ta make men do what we want without them ever knowin’ it weren’t their idea ta begin with. Ya know what they say, ya kin make a gator do the polka iffen ya know how ta teach it the right moves.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. By the way, dontcha get hot wearin’ all those clothes? It’s only seventy today, but when it goes up to ninety, I imagine you feel like a vampire under a swelterin’ Looz-ee-anna sun.”
“Vam-vampire?” Rebekah stuttered as if she had invoked the devil. “Jah, it gets hot sometimes, but ya get used ta it. Besides, I’m outside most of the time, milkin’ the cows, hangin’ laundry, workin’ in my garden.”
Now it was Tante Lulu’s turn to go boggle-eyed. “I ain’t no wimmen’s libber, but, sweetie, you are killin’ yerself fer nothin’.” She put up a hand to halt Rebekah’s protests. “But that’s neither here nor there. Far as I kin see, ya got two big problems here: Lizzie, and the shunnin’ of yer two sons. Let’s take care of Lizzie first. Is there any place she kin go fer a coolin’-off period? If we was back in Loo-zee-anna, I’d move her into my cottage on the bayou, but I’m stayin’ here at Abbie’s house, and I’m thinkin’ ya doan want a young girl in a houseful of horny men.”
Rebekah’s eyebrows were going to freeze upward if she wasn’t careful. “Definitely not. And no, there’s no neutral place. Jonas’s place is no goot ’cause of the shunnin’.”
“Hmmm.” Tante Lulu tapped her closed lips thoughtfully. “How ’bout she stays with Claire fer a few days? I could stay there, too, ta keep an eye on things.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re makin’ me ferhoodled.”
“Thass okay, honey. I gets ferhoodled myself sometimes.” Tante Lulu patted Rebekah’s arm. “Claire is some kinda doctor, and she’s got a few years on Lizzie here. I’m thinkin’ ya kin trust her not ta take yer girl honky-tonkin’ or anythin’.”
“Honking what?”
Tante Lulu had to smile. At some honky-tonks, there actually was a lot of honking goin’ on, if you considered loud noise honking. Like Swampy’s Tavern down on the bayou.
“How do ya know Claire would welcome my daughter . . . or you?”
Tante Lulu waved a hand dismissively. “I got St. Jude on my side. Now, about this shunnin’ malarkey . . .”
Rebekah looked as if she’d like to put her face in her hands. “Do ya alveese meddle in other people’s business?”
Tante Lulu smiled brightly. “Oui! It’s what I do best.”
Then there was light . . .
This was the day.
Caleb had just finished taking the latest set of photographs for the visual record of the project. And Claire had used a pocket tape recorder to note various aspects of the cave that would show up on those pictures.
The two of them leaned against the wall of the five-foot ledge, watching Mark use a claw hammer to make the last couple of hits that would finally open the new cave room, or whatever they would find on the other side. Everyone else stood on the pathway below, waiting with anticipation, including Abbie and Tante Lulu.
“It was nice of you to let Mark be the first one in,” she said.
He shrugged. “The cavern belongs to his family. It was only right.”
“It was still nice.”
“Nice isn’t the way I want you thinking of me.”
“Oh?” She smiled.
The witch.
“What words would you prefer?”
Sexy.
“Sexy?”
Great! Now she’s reading my mind. “That’ll do. Hey, it was nice of you, too, to take my sister Lizzie and Tante Lulu into your home.”
“Hah! I had no choice. Once that old lady gets an idea in her head, she’s like Attila the Caj-Hun.”
He smiled.
Her eyes went half-mast.
Uh-oh!
She gave him a sultry look.
Damn! She’s up to something.
“Nice isn’t how I want you thinking of me, either.”
For a second, he couldn’t speak over his thumping heart. “You don’t like being called nice, huh? How about bad?”
“I can be bad.”
Now another body part was thumping. I stepped into that one. Like an Amishman in a pigpen on a hot summer day.
“But I’ll tell you one thing, I do deserve a medal. Tante Lulu has already taken over my life. One night and she’s rearranged my kitchen cabinets ‘the right way,’ she promised to take your sister clothes shopping ‘at the Gap,’ and she’s planning my wedding menu ‘Cajun style.’ She even had the nerve to say I’m almost over the hill and I better get moving while I can still get up the hill. And have I checked lately to see if I have a dimpled butt like a golf ball? Then she gave me a set of St. Jude wind chimes.”
Good old Tante Lulu! Doesn’t mince words. But then he homed in on something she’d said. “What wedding?”
Claire rolled her eyes.
That was all the answer he needed. “Oh, no! No, no, no! I want to get laid, not laid out. Marriage is not on my radar screen.”
Claire bristled. “What a jackass! I never said I wanted a wedding. I was just relating what Tante Lulu said. Jeesh! Talk about overreacting.”
“Sorry.” He closed his eyes and let out a loud exhale. When he opened his eyes, he put a hand on her arm. “I really am sorry. I was out of line. The problem is . . .” He gulped. “The problem is I have marriage issues.”
She nodded, accepting his apology. Then tossed
in the zinger. “Like that’s a big secret. Honey, you have marriage issues because you have family issues.” She went on then about Indians and men and commitment and family. On and on. Yada, yada. He wondered if she ever got bored by her own ramblings. “And that’s really why you’re scared of marriage,” she concluded.
God spare me from opinionated women. Why can’t I fall for dumb women who don’t need to psychoanalyze me? He was about to argue with her, then stopped himself. “Maybe.” He wasn’t stupid enough to piss her off now and burn any bridges in the sex department.
“Tante Lulu also wants to teach me some sex exercises . . . stuff that makes grown men grovel.”
Guess she was thinking about sex, too. Good sign. “Forget the old biddy. I can teach you sex moves that would make your eyes roll back in your head.”
She shook her head at him as if he were hopeless. “How did we get on this subject? You must think I’m easy.”
“Hah! I wish you were easy.”
She studied him for a long moment. “It’s been a long time since I met a guy as hot as you.”
Me? Hot? Hot must be in the eye of the beholder. He laughed. “I am going to enjoy fucking you till you scream. And scream. And scream.”
Instead of being offended and calling him a jackass again, she leaned closer and whispered, “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”
What a woman! She didn’t flinch or bend at all. Took it in the face and threw it right back at him. That was proven when she added, “Maybe I’m going to be the one fucking you, big boy. Until you scream. And scream. And scream.”
“I can only hope.”
“Yo, Peach! You two gonna do the deed right in front of us?” It was LeDeux yelling up at them. “My aunt is about to have a hot flash.”
“I am not!” his aunt protested.
He glanced down, and Tante Lulu had binoculars, of all things, aimed at them. Today her hair was perfectly styled and bluish gray, maybe a wig. She had on some kind of spandex jumpsuit thing in an ungodly shade of puke green, with kid-size combat boots on her feet.
“Me, I’m gonna send for popcorn,” LeDeux continued. “Ya want I should get you a cigarette, cher?”
“Wait till I go get the video camera.” Now Famosa joined the peanut gallery.
And yep, his head had been lowered, and he’d been about to kiss Claire.
“Shush yerself, boy.” Tante Lulu slapped her nephew on the arm. “Cain’t ya see the thunderbolt workin’? Ya should never interfere with the thunderbolt. Or St. Jude.”
“Is she for real?” Claire said under her breath. Her cheeks carried a nice blush. Now, that was interesting. They could use blue language with each other, and she wasn’t fazed a bit. But spectators embarrassed her.
“I’ve got it!” Mark shouted. “I’ve got it! Un-be-freakin’-liev-able!”
Loose pebbles could be heard falling on the other side of the opening. It took a long time, but finally there was a splash.
Amid the cheers and high fives all around, Mark stood clumsily by bracing one hand on the wall. “You got the flashlight, Claire?”
She stepped forward, and the two of them leaned slightly into the opening, which was about five feet wide, four feet high, and three feet deep. Claire had the flashlight in one hand and her other arm around Mark’s waist for balance.
“Unbelievable!” Mark said.
“Oh, my God! It’s huge,” Claire observed.
“That’s what a guy likes to hear when he shucks his skivvies for the first time,” he remarked in an undertone. Luckily, no one was paying any attention.
Mark picked up a small rock and dropped it into the hole. Caleb counted the seconds on his watch till he heard the splash of water, then did a quick mental calculation. “It’s a twenty-foot drop to the water’s surface. I wonder how deep the water is. We’ll have to use a weighted tape measure.”
“I have a good idea for another feature if you open this cavern up to tourists,” Claire told Mark. “You know how they call regular pearls ‘mermaid tears’? You could call the pearls taken from this cavern ‘dragon tears’, as in prehistoric cavern, dragon, fantasy world, that kind of thing.”
Mark loved the idea.
Caleb did, too, and was only surprised that Claire hadn’t pinned some Native American appellation on the pearls. It might still come.
Caleb was next at the opening when Mark stepped to the side, yelling down to those below just what he had seen, or not seen.
The chamber was utter blackness and still as death.
He and Claire lay on their bellies, with their feet still on the ledge. The carbide lamps on their hard hats did little to show what was on the other side of the gaping hole, but the high-powered flashlights let them see in a narrow, headlight sort of way.
Eerie stalactites, like grotesque monster fingers, rimmed the roof of the circular room down to a rough ledge formed of helictite formations. In this light, the pool was black as silk with no ripples.
“I’d say the room is about seventy feet in diameter.” He would have a lot of observations to record once he got back to the house.
“Uh-huh. Look over there. Doesn’t that look like an opening?”
Caleb was still side by side with Claire, so close he could feel her breath on his face when she spoke. “I’m not sure. It might be just a dark shadow. But right next to it . . . that pile of stuff. Could be bones, or maybe just shattered rock.”
She sighed at the possibility. “And beside it. That wall, where it’s smooth, it looks like drawings. Be still my heart!”
“Are you sure? Nah, it’s too far away to be sure. It might just be discolorations in the rock from centuries of dripping moisture.”
“I think it’s drawings,” she insisted.
Probably wishful thinking, but he kept his opinion to himself. “I figure this chamber must have been dry at one time, thousands of years ago, or at least only shallow water at the bottom.”
“It would have had to be in order for the pearls to form. They have a nucleus, usually a grain of sand, same as oyster pearls, but unlike regular pearls, these don’t need constant agitation or rotation to form. Just the slow, constant drip of water, which caves have in abundance.”
“It’s dank in here, but not rank like stagnant water. I’m thinking there might still be an underground stream.”
“Maybe we should have a geologist check it out.”
“Your semi-fiancé?” he asked, referring to Adam’s joking about her once being semi-engaged to Del Finley.
“Get over it!”
He decided to drop that subject.
“This is so exciting. I feel as if I have adrenaline pumping through my veins warp speed. Is that how you feel every time you make a new discovery?”
“Yep.” He winked at her. “You ever heard of adrenaline sex?”
“Is that all you ever think of?”
“Around you, yeah.”
He could tell that pleased her.
Note to Caleb. Pursue the adrenaline sex later while the adrenaline’s still pumping.
“Okay, first things first. We’ve got to get some light in here. Lots of it. I’m thinking maybe we could run cables all around the edges and loop them over the outcroppings.”
“Caleb! How could you possibly manage that? This inner ledge is at most a foot wide in some places and almost nonexistent in others.”
“This is what we do best. It’ll be like mountain climbing, in a way. Famosa, LeDeux, and I have exper-tise in that arena. I remember one time when a buddy and I were hanging by a hair from a cliff in Afghanistan while the Taliban were running all over the place hunting for us, guns blazing. Believe me, fear gives a guy the strength to hold on.”
Too much information, he realized instantly at the expression of horror on her face.
She shook her head to clear it . . . of the image of his ass being a hanging al-Qaeda target, no doubt. “I’ve mountain climbed, too, but that doesn’t mean I’d dangle myself over a bottomless pool with God onl
y knows what sticking up from the bottom.”
He grinned and chucked her under the chin with his flashlight, which, framed by the darkness, illuminated her face and made her look ethereal and beautiful. Which he shouldn’t be thinking about now. “Piece a cake!”
Mark and Claire went down below, and Famosa and LeDeux joined him up above with long loops of rappelling rope and lifelines with underwater lights attached at intervals. The three of them cased the situation and came up with a plan.
First they used a weighted measuring tape and determined that it was twenty-two feet to the top of the water, and the pool itself was roughly forty feet deep, not including any mud or silt on the bottom. With double tanks of oxygen, and a pony tank, a diver should be able to stay down there more than an hour. But they had a lot of work to do before they reached that stage of the operation.
Using a grapple gun, Caleb shot rope in one direction, then another, so that two arcs were cut on two sides of the circle, tips meeting in the opening. The ropes were more than secure but were intended to be guidelines with little or no weight on them. Whoever was climbing would have a strong rope attached to a back brace, as well, in case of an accidental fall.
Soon Caleb dangled over the side, arms holding on to the rappelling rope, bracing his taut legs against the walls as he crab-walked sideways slowly. With one hand holding on to the guideline, he used his other hand to hang the light cables off of protruding abutments. He and Famosa and LeDeux took turns over the next three hours setting out the light cables. This kind of prep work would save hours, maybe days of work later if they didn’t have the cave illuminated properly.
It was four o’clock before they finished. The three of them were sitting on various narrow ledges around the chamber, lit so far only by their carbide lamps and flashlights. “Time to flick and see if we can rock ’n’ roll. Hit the switch!” Caleb yelled to Mark, Claire, and Tante Lulu, who were peering through the hole.
“Turn her on,” Mark yelled back to his grandmother, who was presumably back at the mouth of the cave, manning the electrical switch box.
The chamber was suddenly, magically illuminated, like the White House Christmas tree.
“Aaaaaah!” they all said.