Hidden Jewel

  After I hung up, I put my palms together under my chin, closed my eyes, and said my own prayer. I prayed for Mommy, I prayed for Pierre, I prayed for Daddy, and I prayed that I would have the strength to help everyone. Then I tried to fall asleep. I tossed and turned for hours before drifting off, but my sleep was restless and continually interrupted. I woke often with a start, listening hard for the sound of a door being opened or a phone ringing. I longed to hear Mommy's voice echoing through the hallway or up the stairs, but the dead silence of our morgue-like house was all I heard.

  Daddy was disheveled and tattered-looking in the morning. No doubt he had stayed awake most of the night. He had slept on the sofa in his study when he did catch some sleep. I made sure he ate something substantial for breakfast and then persuaded him to take a shower. Mrs. Hockingheimer had Pierre up and washed. She got him to eat a portion of his breakfast, but he had the same empty look in his eyes, the same anticipation when I entered. I spoke to him for a while. His lips quivered and then formed the word "Mommy." It shattered the thin veneer on my heart and made me gulp back the tears.

  I convinced Daddy that he should call Lieutenant Ribocheaux to see if they had any leads, but they didn't. Daddy hung up the phone and looked at me, his face lined with exhaustion and frustration.

  "I told you it wouldn't do us any good to call the police," he said. "They don't take this voodoo thing seriously, and when an adult disappears, they're not really concerned. Of course, they promised to keep looking."

  "I can't stand this waiting around, Daddy. We've got to do something."

  "What, honey? Ride around the city?"

  "I don't think she's in the city anymore," I said. "I think we should go to the bayou."

  Daddy laughed. "A lot of good that would do-- you and I, two city slickers trying to find someone in the swamps. If we have little hope of doing so here, where we are familiar with the territory, can you imagine how futile it would be for us to go out there? I wouldn't even know where to begin."

  I thought for a moment, recalling Mommy's stories, and then looked up at him with bright, hopeful eyes. "We'll start at the shack," I said.

  "Shack?"

  "Her old shack, where she returned when she became pregnant with me. She believes in spirits; surely she hopes her grandmere Catherine's spirit will still be there, or even her mother's spirit."

  Daddy said, "Let me look at the picture you said she painted."

  We went to Mommy's studio, and he stood gazing thoughtfully at it for a while.

  "What are you thinking, Daddy?"

  "What was it that crazy old lady, Nina's sister, told us . . . that Ruby went to wherever the curse started. You might be right. In her mind that could very well mean the bayou. Especially when I look at this picture. I'll give Jeanne a call." He returned to his office to do so. I followed and waited at the door while he spoke to Uncle Paul's sister.

  Aunt Jeanne hadn't heard about Jean's death. That news was devastating enough for her to digest. Then Daddy told her about Mommy's disappearance. I waited hopefully at his side, but it was clear from the rest of the conversation that she hadn't heard from or seen Mommy, nor had anyone she knew.

  Daddy shook his head and cradled the receiver. "Well, we know she hasn't been to the bayou yet," he said and sat back.

  "We should still go out there, Daddy."

  "I don't know."

  "It's better than just sitting here and staring at each other hopelessly. Please. Let's go there and search. She might have just arrived, or she could be somewhere the Tates wouldn't know about. They certainly don't go looking around the old shack."

  He considered. "Okay," he said. "I suppose it's worth a try and you're right. Not doing anything but waiting for phones to ring is just eating away at both of us."

  "I'll go up and tell Mrs. Hockingheimer and Pierre what we're doing so he won't miss us," I said.

  "Good idea. I'll dig out my maps of the bayou. It's been a while since I drove there."

  Having a strategy and something concrete to do put hope back into our hearts and renewed our energy. I hurried upstairs to change my clothes, and then I went to see Pierre.

  "I was just about to go down to see you and Monsieur Andreas," Mrs. Hockingheimer said. "I don't like the way Pierre keeps drifting off, and now he's refusing to drink any water."

  "Oh, Pierre," I said, sitting beside him on his bed and taking his hand into mine. His eyes remained fixed on the wall. "You can't do this to yourself any longer. You've got to get strong and well again. We need you to help with Mommy. Daddy and I are going to find her and bring her home to you, but you must eat and drink so you can be strong when she returns. Please," I begged. "Please try."

  His blinking quickened, and he took a deep breath. I brushed back his hair. "Will you, try, Pierre? Will you?"

  He didn't respond, but I thought there was more light and alertness in his eyes.

  "We'll be gone most of the day, Mrs. Hockingheimer, but we'll phone you in a few hours."

  "I'll ask the doctor to stop by later this afternoon," she promised.

  "Fine."

  "Good luck, my dear."

  "Thank you." I gazed back at Pierre. His lips were moving, so I sat beside him again and brought my ear close to his mouth.

  "Mommy . . . Mammy went to get Jean," he whispered.

  His words put a block of ice in my chest where my heart should have been. For a moment I couldn't speak or swallow.

  "Oh, Pierre honey," I moaned. I embraced him and kissed him and rocked back and forth with him. Then I wiped away my tears and rushed from the room, hoping with all my soul that we would find Mommy and bring her home where she belonged.

  9

  My Cajun World

  .

  As Daddy and I headed out of the city toward

  Terrebonne Parish and Houma, the town from which Mommy had come, a kind of paralyzing numbness gripped me. I had not been back there since I was an infant. Our troubles with Uncle Paul's mother and father since the famous trial to determine who should have custody of me had created an almost impenetrable wall around that part of the bayou. The income from the oil well Uncle Paul had left in my name had built a substantial trust for me, but I had never seen the well, since it was at Cypress Woods and neither Daddy nor Mommy could ever find the courage to return. At least, not until now.

  Legal wrangling over the property had kept everyone from enjoying it, although Daddy had vowed never to go back there anyway, and Mommy apparently had too many sad memories that would- be revived in those grand rooms. What was true for them was apparently true for Octavius and Gladys Tate as well, for it was our understanding that they did nothing with the mansion. Aunt Jeanne said her mother wanted it kept like a monument to Paul's memory.

  Mommy might have returned to the shack in which she and her grandmere Catherine had lived and where I was born, but as far as I knew, it had been years and years since her last visit. Whenever I asked her why, she said that none of Grandmere Catherine's friends were still alive, and there weren't many people she cared to see.

  Whenever she talked of her past and told me stories, they were fascinating. So much of her background was interesting to me, and yet so much of it was obviously painful for her. I wondered just how hard it had been for her to make this trip now, if she had indeed made it. Even doing it under the advice of someone speaking from beyond the grave must have been very difficult for her.

  For the first part of our journey, neither Daddy nor I spoke very much. We were both lost in our thoughts and our fears, I suppose. It was a partly cloudy day.

  Most of the -clouds were long, wide fluffy ones and when one of them passed over the sun, the shadows thickened and stretched over the highway and the countryside before us. Soon the roadside restaurants, service stations, and fruit and vegetable stands were fewer and fewer. Snowy egrets and brown pelicans began to appear along the banks of the canals, and every once in a while I saw an old shrimp boat, rusting and rotting in the underbrush.
r />   Soon the toothpick-legged houses began to appear more frequently, some with children playing in the yards, some with Cajun women sitting on their galleries talking as they shelled peas into black castiron pots or wove split oak baskets and palmetto hats to sell to tourists. They looked up as we motored by. Just ahead of us, three fisherman emerged from a swamp, their poles over their shoulders, their beards long and straggly.

  And suddenly it occurred to me how different my mother's old world was from the world in which we now lived. How difficult and frightening it must have been for her at such a young age to leave this world on her own and enter a new world of rich people and sophistication. It must have been like going to another country. But she'd had no choice. She had fled from her drunken grandpere, hoping to be rescued.

  Now she had fled back to that Cajun world, also hoping to be rescued, and we were rushing there, praying we could save her. Life seemed to be drawn in circles. I sighed deeply and turned to look at Daddy. He was smiling at me in the strangest way.

  "Why are you smiling like that, Daddy?" I asked.

  "I was just thinking how right your mother is about you. You've turned out to be quite a strong and amazing young woman," he said. "Other girls your age would probably wilt and moan at home, but not you. You probably get your grit from your mother's Cajun side."

  "What about your family, Daddy?"

  "My family? Well, my whole family was spoiled, and I was no better off for having been born with that silver spoon in my mouth. It would have been better if I'd been born a Cajun."

  "When were you last here, Daddy?"

  "During the trial for custody of you, I suppose. Before that, when your mother was living at Cypress Woods, I took a ride up there occasionally. It was a beautiful place. I was very jealous," he admitted. "And terrified."

  "Terrified? Why?"

  "I thought your mother had everything she could ever want. I would never win her back. She had that beautiful setting, that magnificent studio, a man who doted on her. And what did I have? I had Gisselle, complaining in one ear until that ear was red from listening, and then she would shift to my other." He laughed.

  "What's so funny?"

  "One time when Gisselle and I went to Cypress Woods, your uncle Paul took us all on a tour of the swamps. Gisselle had nightmares for weeks afterward."

  "Why?"

  "The alligators, the insects. Ruby and Gisselle were twins, of course, but one was night and the other was day," he said.

  "It must have been hard for Mommy to pose as Gisselle if she was so different," I said. That part of our story had always intrigued me: Mommy's assuming her sister's identity after Gisselle contracted Saint Louis encephalitis and the switch was accomplished.

  "And now talk about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ruby had to sound like Gisselle, act like Gisselle. I had hired new servants so she could at least be herself when she was with the help. Gisselle was always nasty to those she considered underlings, and Ruby would have had to treat them just as poorly. I know your mother actually was relieved when the ruse was exposed and she could go back to being herself.

  "Now let's see," he said as he studied the road ahead. "I know there's a turn coming up soon." He slowed down and stopped to gaze at his map.

  We were deep in the bayou now. The vegetation was very thick on both sides of the road, and through the brush and cattails, I could see the ponds. When I rolled down my window, I could hear the symphony of cicadas and tree frogs in the marsh. I didn't see it at first, but as I studied the surroundings, a shack appeared behind a cluster of weeping willows. The dull wood-frame house was nearly hidden by banana trees. The yard, or what remained of it, was cluttered with automobile and machine parts. Beside the house, just off the bank, was a half-submerged pirogue. What had happened to the people who lived here? I wondered. Could they have been relatives of mine? Was there a girl my age who was just as curious about my life in New Orleans as I was about her life here?

  "Okay, I remember now," Daddy said. "We go down the road to the left about a mile and then turn left again. The shack is another mile or so along that road. Ready?"

  "Yes, Daddy." I had my fingers crossed.

  We drove on. Through a break in the overgrown bushes and heavy foliage, I saw a young man poling a pirogue. He slipped into a large island of lily pads, and about a dozen sleeping bullfrogs sprang up and splashed around him, making the water pop like bursting bubbles. I had only a glimpse of him, but he looked statuesque and brown-skinned, with a smile of deep pleasure on his face.

  We made the second left and Daddy

  announced, "There it is!"

  My heart began to thump faster. Would we find Mommy sitting on the gallery or wandering about the shack or sitting inside? I hoped she would be surprised but happy we had come for her. We pulled up, and Daddy turned off the engine. For a long moment we both just sat there staring at the shack.

  I wasn't prepared for what I was seeing. I suppose I had been romanticizing the shack in my mind for years. Most of my memories were vague, but whenever I thought about it, I conjured up a sweet little toothpick-legged house with a rug of fine grass and beautiful wildflowers. I envisioned it coated in fresh paint, its corrugated metal roof glimmering in the noonday sun. In my memories the canal ran clear behind the shack. Pelicans and egrets hovered; bream leaped out to catch insects for dinner and the heads of alligators with curious eyes popped up to look our way.

  Instead, we confronted an overgrown front yard where even the weeds were choking to death. The gallery leaned to the right, and the shack leaned to the left. Some of the clapboard had torn loose, and all of the windows had been shattered, probably by young boys having rock-throwing contests.

  Still, my infant memories were stirred. A vision of the gallery flashed in my mind, and in it I felt myself being rocked in a chair and listening to a radio playing zydeco music in the living room. The roadside stand where Mommy had sold her woven hats, baskets, jellies, jams, and gumbo lay broken in the tall grass.

  "It doesn't look like anything on two legs was here recently," Daddy commented.

  "We better look, Daddy," I said.

  He nodded, squeezed my hand and opened the door. "Be careful," he said as I followed. We paused at the foot of the vague front pathway, however. It did look as if someone had traipsed through recently. Daddy and I glanced at each other and then moved faster toward the gallery. The short stairway creaked and groaned under our weight, as did the floorboards. Daddy tued the front door open. It complained on rusted hinges and wobbled.

  Something scurried away inside when we started to enter, and I jumped back with a cry.

  "Could be a raccoon," Daddy whispered. My heart was drumming so hard I thought I would lose my breath. There was a dank stench and gobs and gobs of cobwebs on the ceiling and walls, but the old furniture was still there. Daddy and I paused and gazed around the living room. Then I looked down at the floor and pulled Daddy's sleeve.

  "Someone was here recently, Daddy. See the footprints in the dust?"

  He nodded, crouched, and studied them. "Small, like your mother's."

  We continued through the house. The kitchen was a mess. What was left of the stove was badly rusted. The door of the old-fashioned icebox had been torn off one of its hinges, someone had been swinging on it. Drawers were pulled out, some of them smashed, and here and there were gaping holes in the floor. Daddy gazed at the stairway.

  "Maybe you better wait down here," he suggested. "I don't know how safe that is."

  He started up. The steps creaked, but held. I waited at the bottom while he searched the bedrooms and the loom room. He stayed up there awhile.

  The shack seemed so tiny to me. It was hard to imagine that Mommy and I once lived here. And now that it was so wrecked, it was creepy. The walls creaked in the wind, and things scurried under the floorboards. There were stains that looked like dried blood on the chipped plank table. I had visions of my great grandpere drunk and raging. Despite the high humidity and heat, my thoug
hts gave me the chills. I embraced myself and looked up the stairway. I hadn't heard any movement for a while.

  "Daddy?"

  He didn't respond.

  "Daddy?" I called, a bit more frantic. A few moments later he came down the stairs slowly. In his hands was the picture of Jean that Mommy had torn off the photograph of him and Pierre together. It looked as if candle wax had dripped over it.

  "She was here," Daddy said in a hoarse whisper. "You were right."

  Excited by the discovery, we searched the property for more evidence of Mommy's presence, but there was nothing else to be found and no trail to lead us anywhere. Most of the land around the property was heavily overgrown, and Daddy thought we weren't properly dressed to go traipsing through marshland.

  "Too dangerous. She couldn't have gone that way anyhow," he said.

  "Where should we look for her, then?"

  "There's only one other place I know. Cypress Woods," he said with a deep sigh. "She's going back through her past, a journey I hoped we wouldn't have to make."

  We returned to our car, and Daddy sat thinking a moment.

  "Let's go into town and get something to eat first," he suggested. "Town's not far, but Cypress Woods is the other way. It might be hours and hours before we have another chance to get a bite or something to drink."

  "All right, Daddy," I said. I wasn't as hungry as I was thirsty. Just walking through the shack and around it for a little while was enough to get us hot and sticky. Our clothes looked pasted on us. It was that humid.

  Some of the other shacks we saw along the way toward the town also looked deserted, but most were well kept, the grounds trim. We pulled into the parking lot of the first restaurant we saw. It advertised crawfish, "All you can eat." Because it was summer, there were few tourists at the restaurant. Nearly all of the patrons paused and looked up from their large bowls of crawfish when we entered. Although they didn't appear unfriendly, they did study us with some suspicion. One woman with long black hair and dark eyes paused and craned her neck like a bird around the man sitting in front of her to gape at us. I smiled at her, and she nodded.