“No, you misunderstood what I—”
She raised a hand to stop his interruption. “I might give the impression of being promiscuous, but I’m not a slut. Casual sex never appealed to me, and one-night stands are a no-no. In fact, I haven’t had a relationship for more than two years. Last night just…well, happened.”
That was what she’d told him earlier, but he had hardly been able to credit it. “Two years! But those pills of yours? The ones you braved an alligator to retrieve, the ones you told Cain prevent conception?”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Women of my time take them for lots of reasons, even when they’re not active sexually.”
He shook his head at her bluntness. “So you’re saying last night happened because we’d both been deprived for a long time?”
“Not at all. What I’m saying is that, at least for me, I behaved in a totally out-of-character manner. I think, however, that our lovemaking was meant to be.”
He laughed. “God promoting illicit fornication? You’ve been reading a different Bible than I have.”
“You know what they say? God moves in mysterious ways.” She smiled again, and he decided this was a dangerous path they were treading. They were conversing almost like friends. Or lovers.
“Get some sleep now,” he said gruffly. “We’d best start early tomorrow, at dawn. The heat won’t be so bad then.”
“I’m not sleeping with you,” she snapped with fierce resolution. Her eyes glittered green fire at him, daring him to disagree, as she reached up to draw her clean hair back off her face. While he watched with undue interest, she retied the loose strands at the nape with a strip of cloth torn off her ruined lavender gown.
“I don’t recall inviting you,” he countered. But I’d like to. Her posture—arms upraised—inadvertently caused his shirt to pull across her chest. In the fading daylight, he could see her high breasts. Or perhaps he was imagining and remembering.
I want her.
Their eyes held in an extended moment of awareness.
She wants me. He could tell she shared the powerful yearning.
“You’ll sleep there,” he said, pointing to a nearby pile of pine needles covered with her discarded gown under a shebang similar to Cain’s. “I’ll sleep here.” He indicated his own neat pile and shelter several yards away. It wasn’t nearly distant enough. The next parish would be better. Or the next state.
She nodded and licked her bottom lip nervously.
Without thinking, he did the same, mirroring her action.
She gasped, a small sound that he heard only because his senses were so attuned to her.
How was he going to manage being around this woman for the next few days without making love to her?
Her eyes couldn’t seem to move away—those odd cat eyes, whose darker, elliptical centers were dilated now to three times their normal size. A clear sign of arousal.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered, folding her arms across her chest.
“How?”
“Like you’re making love to me with your eyes.”
His lips twitched, then broke into a grin. “Body language?”
She nodded.
“You’re doing the same to me, darlin’. If you only knew what your eyes were saying to me!”
She blinked rapidly as if to hide her response.
He couldn’t believe what was happening between them. Loveplay without touching. Amazing!
“You’re going to try to abandon me at Bayou Noir, aren’t you, Etienne? For a second time. I won’t stay, you know.”
“Oh, you will stay. Never doubt it. Don’t cross wills with me on this, chérie. You won’t win.”
“Wanna bet?” Her hands were on her hips now. Another too-revealing pose, conjuring way too many images.
Luckily, Abel reappeared out of the bushes.
He took one look at the two of them and slapped his thigh with glee. “Lordy, Lordy, you two are like a mad hen and a randy ol’ rooster. The air sizzles around you.”
Harriet made a clucking sound of disagreement.
Etienne glowered. “That’s enough, Abel.”
But Abel got the last word in. “Well, look at that. I do believe, my rooster friend, that your comb is red. And, for a certainty, I just heard Harriet cluck at you.” He referred to the old folk tale that the fleshy crest on a rooster’s head turned bright red when sexually aroused, and that the hen demonstrated her willingness by clucking at the old bird.
It was true. Harriet was making a clucking sound, and Etienne didn’t have to put a hand to his hot face to know that he was flushed bright red.
Stomping over to her “bed,” Harriet muttered something about Abel getting a seven on her MCP scale for another crude innuendo. And Abel ambled over to his bed, laughing under his breath.
“Damn!” Etienne swore, but what he really wanted to say was, “Here, chickee. Here, chickee.”
Chapter Twelve
A stark male scream ripped through the bayou. One cry of terror, that was all.
Harriet came instantly awake.
Birds and wild animals echoed the alarm and took flight from their nighttime hiding places. Only silence remained in the small clearing by the stream.
Rubbing her eyes, she tried to orient herself. A whimpering sound, followed by murmuring, came from the other side of the fire.
Harriet stood and made her way uneasily to the spot where Cain and Abel were ministering to a flailing, sleeping Etienne in the midst of one of his night terrors.
Etienne’s head and shoulders were cradled on Abel’s lap. The musician was softly crooning the words of a Negro spiritual—something about God easing man’s misery. Big tears slid down the black man’s face as he sang in a mournful cadence—a rhythm of soulful pain that would one day be called the blues.
A bare-chested Cain hunkered down at Etienne’s side. He repeatedly dipped a cloth—his own shirt—into a basin improvised from a naturally hollowed-out piece of driftwood. “Shush, now, Etienne, you’re dreaming. It’s all over. It’s all over,” Cain said over and over as he ran the cool cloth over Etienne’s face, brushing his hair off his brow until he calmed and slipped back into a normal sleep.
Cain’s anguish-filled eyes lifted and he saw her for the first time, standing a few feet away with a palm held against her lips to hold back a sob. He stiffened as if she were the enemy, a threat to the emotionally scarred man on the ground. Then Cain made a small motion of his hand. The silent message his gesture conveyed was that they had the situation under control, and Etienne would not want her to see him like this.
Back on her “bed,” Harriet couldn’t sleep. She listened and watched as Abel took over guard duty. Cain disdained Abel’s empty pine pallet, and instead lay down next to Etienne in his makeshift shelter on the bare ground, as he must have done numerous times over the past years.
And Harriet understood. A small part of the puzzle was clear now. Why a serious doctor participated in a madcap gold heist. Why a talented musician traipsed off to the bayou, instead of practicing his craft and staying with the woman he loved. Etienne would do the same for them in a heartbeat if they needed him.
The love shared by these three friends was soul-wrenching in its purity. They joked and teased each other, as they had since childhood. Perhaps even because, in some ways, they yearned to return to that more innocent time before the war. Perhaps because, if they didn’t laugh, they would cry.
Harriet realized something else in that moment, too. She now knew the reason for her time odyssey. Etienne. Oh, she’d known for some time that he was the link to her travel back in time. But her purpose was more clear now. He needed her psychotherapy skills.
She didn’t doubt for one moment that she’d be able to help him recover. The bigger question, though, was whether she would ever be able to return to her own time when she finished. Or whether she would want to. In healing Etienne, would she cripple herself? In making him strong, would she become weak?
&n
bsp; As long as she protected herself, she should be all right, Harriet decided. The most important thing was not to fall in love with the man. That would spell sheer disaster for her when the time came to leave. Harriet would have to work closely with him, but touch was taboo. Touching led to other tempting activities. Like sex. And she couldn’t, under any circumstances, make love with him again.
So that was the plan. Cure the man, and then, somehow, go home. Harriet only wished that niggling inner voice would stop laughing.
Three days later, they were moving slowly through the narrow bayou streams, one leading into another, sometimes so narrow they could reach out and touch both banks.
They should arrive at Bayou Noir by tomorrow morning. It had been a grueling trip, but Harriet didn’t really mind. She adored the bayou, and she could see that Etienne did, too. The deeper they ventured into the swampland’ s mysterious depths, the more relaxed he became.
His head tilted with wonder at the fleeting beauty of a dragonfly dancing on an iridescent sunbeam. He reached out a hand as if to grasp the magic in his palm, but then he pulled back swiftly, glancing around sheepishly to see if he’d been observed.
A hawk circled majestically overhead, and Etienne shaded his eyes with a raised palm, watching for a long time, even after the bird flew away into the distance. He must have witnessed such a scene innumerable times over the years.
When they came upon a wild jaguar perched on an overhanging branch, Etienne stilled Cain’s raised pistol. Some other animal would be its unwary prey.
He pointed to an alligator’s nest—a raised mudflat—where the proud mama tended her large, elongated eggs. With a chuckle, he said to Harriet, “Remind me someday to tell you how a five-year-old bayou boy took his stepmother to visit a gator nest.”
“It took half the plantation to get you and Selene down from that tree,” Cain recalled.
“That would be your stepmother?” Harriet asked.
Etienne nodded. He’d already admitted that the woman in the photograph she’d seen was the former Sandra Selente, or Selene, although now her name was Selene Baptiste. He’d even listened uneasily as she told him of a famous fashion model by the same name who had disappeared mysteriously in New Orleans in 1996. None of them wanted to delve too deeply into the conundrum of her time-travel; so they all skirted around the issue, even as more and more pieces of information were added to the puzzle each day.
“Remember the first time you met Miz Selene, Etienne?” Abel reminisced. “You dropped your trousers and flashed your bare rear at her.”
Now that image Harriet could picture—an adorable brat of a boy mooning his new stepmother. “So you were an MCP even as a child,” she teased.
“I was a terror,” Etienne admitted.
That simple statement caused Harriet’s heart to swell. She was losing her fight to resist this guy.
“You escaped a whuppin’ for the gator prank,” Abel elaborated, “but Blossom got you good with her cane for showing disrespect to your new stepmother.”
“Blossom?” Harriet inquired, fanning away a cloud of mosquitoes with her straw hat. They’d bought it days ago from a passing caboteur, a merchant boat that sold goods along the bayous. They’d also seen a grocery boat, and even a boat manned by a priest, complete with altar. All these to serve the needs of the remote bayou inhabitants.
“The cook. You’ll meet her at Bayou Noir,” Etienne explained with a smile. “Blossom is a tiny little thing. Ancient. But she will, no doubt, flail me with her tongue for every little fault she’s noted since she saw me last. I think she keeps a list. The Rascal List.”
She loved the woman already—a fellow list-maker. Grinning, she asked, “And how long has it been since she’s seen you?”
“A year.” The flatness of his tone spoke volumes.
As they all succumbed to their inner thoughts, she leaned back in the pirogue and studied Etienne against the backdrop of his beloved bayou. They were both a marvel of contradictions.
The old and new vied continually in this biological throwback to ancient times. Thousand-year-old cypress trees stood in stately contrast to watermeal, the tiny green dots that floated on the sluggish water, a tasty treat for myriad ducks and birds. Ever-generating animal life replaced those creatures that grew old or couldn’t survive. Old and new struggled within Etienne, too. Although he was older now—thirty-one—a younger version of Etienne fought to emerge as they neared his home.
Harriet welcomed the calming silence of the bayou, but it was a deceptive peace. Like Etienne’s deceptive silence. Even when he stared quietly off into the distance, emotion churned just beneath the surface, waiting to break loose. As a psychotherapist, Harriet knew her greatest work lay in freeing him from those self-destructive energies.
The putrid odor of decay, even evil, permeated the air, but Harriet had a sense that goodness and purity would always prevail in the bayou. It was God’s handiwork—a veritable Garden of Eden. How symbolic that the arched branches that met over the meandering creeks should resemble praying hands! Etienne was being eaten alive by some mistaken notion that he had failed, or was flawed, perhaps even rotten at the core. But Harriet knew he was basically a good man, albeit a jerk. She had only to see the friendship he shared with Cain and Abel to know that.
Mostly, though, Harriet felt a sense of danger underlying the illusive safety of the bayou. A man could hide forever here and never be found. But one never knew what peril loomed around the next bend in the river. And, without a doubt, Etienne was a dangerous man. To her, to himself, to those who crossed his path with ill intent.
The farther they delved into the swamplands, the fewer people and homes they saw. The ravages of war—destroyed plantations, fallow fields of cotton and cane—were less evident here than in the lands immediately surrounding New Orleans. But the inhabitants of the bayou had felt the effects of the Civil War, too.
“Too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash,” Etienne had declared sadly on more than one occasion when viewing the downtrodden mansions of his neighbors.
Despite the poverty, even the meanest of homes had a quaint appeal. In many cases, Harriet had noted clapboard Cajun homesteads where the gate and chimney were whitewashed. Etienne had explained that it was Cajun tradition for a father to proclaim to all passersby in this manner that he had a marriageable daughter.
Harriet’s musing was broken by a shout.
“Help! Help!” a young boy yelled from the stream bank as they cleared a bend. He stood down an incline from a raised Acadian-style home that resembled a lopsided box on stilts. A barefoot girl, no more than five, stood on the porch. “Help, m’sieurs! Help!”
Paddling swiftly toward shore, the three men jumped from the pirogue to the muddy bank. Harriet followed soon after, with Abel staying behind to tie the pirogue to a stump mooring.
“My papa, he went this morning for the midwife,” the slim youth of about ten explained quickly, “but the bébé, she is coming, quick-quick.”
“What’s your name, son?” Etienne asked.
“Arman Venee.”
“Is your father Henri Venee?”
“Oui.”
Etienne muttered something unpleasant in French.
The boy’s anxious eyes kept darting toward his ramshackle home. His sibling stood on the porch wide-eyed with terror.
“Are you two here alone with your mother?”
The boy nodded. “Geoffrey and Robert, they be trapping down the bayou a ways till tomorrow.”
Cain went back for his medical bag, and they all headed for the house, where a woman’s high-pitched screams were rolling out in patterns that probably followed her contractions.
“How long has she been in labor, Arman?” Cain asked as he dipped his hands in a washbasin on a bench beside the front door. He listened carefully while he soaped himself up to the elbows with a square of yellow soap. With no clean towel in sight, he shook his hands in the air to dry.
Shrugging, the boy who smelled to hig
h heaven and whose tobacco-stained teeth looked as if they hadn’t ever been brushed, finally replied, “Me, I am not sure. Mebbe since las’ night.”
Etienne swore under his breath.
Cain was about to enter the house.
“No!” Arman shouted, putting a halting hand on Cain’s arm. “My papa, he don’t want no niggers hereabouts, no. Best you and the mam’zelle go in.” He pointed at Etienne and Harriet. “Lazy, no-’count niggers gots to stay outside, for certain.”
Etienne’s eyes flashed angrily as he picked Arman up by the scruff of his grimy collar and tossed him off the porch. “You ignorant little pissant! That man is a doctor. Best you show respect to your betters, boy, or you’re gonna be sucking on that bar of lye soap.”
The woman screamed again—a long, drawn-out wail of agony.
Dusting off his behind, the boy hitched up his trousers and made a rude gesture. But Etienne and Cain were already inside. Harriet saw Abel pull a switch off a willow tree. He stalked purposefully toward Arman, who had the good sense to make a mad dash for the small, enclosed barnyard, where a lowing cow regarded his dust-raising passage benignly and chickens clucked their disapproval.
Harriet walked over to the little girl and introduced herself. “Hello. My name is Harriet Ginoza. And who are you?”
The child turned her filthy, tearstained face up to her. “Amelie.”
“What a pretty name!” Harriet extended her arms, but Amelie backed away, her dark eyes going wide with distress. “Don’t be afraid, honey. Why don’t we go inside and get some clean clothing for you?”
Amelie shook her head. “Non. Me, I ain’t goin’ inside, me. Armon say all chilluns haf to stay away till the new bébé come.” Clearly frightened, she added, “Will bébé die, like other one?”
“Your mother lost a baby before?” Harriet asked Amelie. That could be important information that Cain should know.