Every Dead Thing

An elderly black maid, with a face that I recognized from the Metairie funeral party, emerged from the house with a silver coffeepot and sugar and cream in a matching set, all on an ornate silver tray. There were three china cups and saucers on the tray. Multicolored birds chased one another’s tails around the rim of the cups, and a heavy silver spoon with a sailing ship at the end lay neatly positioned beneath the handle of each one. The maid placed the tray on a small wicker table and then left us.

Lionel Fontenot was wearing a pair of black cotton pants and a white shirt with an open collar. A matching black jacket lay over the back of his chair and his brogues were newly polished. He leaned over the table and poured three cups of coffee, added two sugars to one, and then handed it wordlessly to the burn victim.

“Cream and sugar?” he asked, looking to Louis and me in turn.

“Black’s fine,” I said.

“Likewise,” said Louis.

Lionel handed us each a cup. It was all very polite. Above us, the rain hammered on the porch roof.

“You want to tell me how you came to be looking for my sister?” Lionel said at last. He looked like someone who finds a strange guy cleaning the windshield of his car and can’t decide whether to tip him a buck or hit him with a tire iron. He held his cup with his little finger cocked while he sipped his coffee. I noticed that the burn victim did the same.

I told Lionel some of what I knew then. I told him about Tante Marie’s visions and her death and about the stories of the ghost of a girl at a Honey Island slough. “I think the man who killed your sister killed Tante Marie Aguillard and her son. He also killed my wife and my little girl,” I said. “That’s how I came to be looking for your sister.”

I didn’t say that I was sorry for his pain. He probably knew that anyway. If he didn’t, then it wasn’t worth saying.

“You take out two men at Metairie?”

“One,” I answered. “Someone else killed the other.”

Lionel turned to Louis. “You?”

Louis didn’t reply.

“Someone else,” I repeated.

Lionel put his cup down and spread his hands. “So why are you here now? You want my gratitude? I’m going to New Orleans now to take away my sister’s body. I don’t know that I want to thank you for that.” He turned his face away. There was pain in his eyes, but no tears. Lionel Fontenot didn’t look like a man with well-developed tear ducts.

“That’s not why I’m here,” I said quietly. “I want to know why Lutice was reported missing only in the last three months. I want to know what your brother was doing out at Honey Island on the night he was killed.”

“My brother,” he said. Love and frustration and guilt chased one another in his voice like the birds on his pretty cups. Then he seemed to catch himself. I think he was about to tell me to go to hell, to keep out of his family’s business if I wanted to stay alive, but I held his gaze and for a while he said nothing.

“I got no reason to trust you,” he said.

“I can find the man who did this,” I said. My voice was low and even. Lionel nodded, more to himself than to me, and appeared to make his decision.

“My sister left at the end of January, start of February,” he began. “She didn’t like”-he waved his left hand gently at the compound-“all this. There was trouble with Joe Bones, some people got hurt.” He paused and chose his next words carefully. “One day she closed her bank account, packed a bag, and left a note. She didn’t tell us to our faces. David wouldn’t have let her leave anyways.

“We tried to trace her. We looked up friends in the city, even people she knew in Seattle and Florida. There was nothing, not a trace. David was real cut up about her. She was our half sister. When my momma died, my father married again. Lutice came out of that marriage. When my father and her momma died-that was in nineteen eighty-three, in an automobile accident-we took care of her, David especially. They were real close.

“Few months back, David started having dreams about Lutice. He didn’t say nothing at first, but he got thinner and paler and his nerves started to play at him. When he told me, I thought he was going crazy and told him so, but the dreams just kept comin’. He dreamed of her underwater, he said, heard her banging against metal in the night. He was sure that something had happened to her.

“But what could we do? We had searched half of Louisiana. I’d even made approaches to some of Joe Bones’s men, to see if there was something that maybe needed to be sorted out. There was nothing. She was gone.

“Next thing I knew, he reported her missing and we had the cops crawling over the compound. Mon, I nearly killed him that day, but he insisted. He said something had happened to Lutice. He was beyond reason by then, and I had to take care of things on my own, with Joe Bones hangin’ over me like a sword ’bout to fall.”

He looked to the burn victim.