Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

The father's half-moon eyebrows gave him a happy look, even when he wasn't smiling. He had a habit of turning his whole head as he glanced about himself, like a curious owl on a tree branch. "I got to make my deliveries. Can y'all run Tee Bleu home for me?" he said.

"Show Dave your birdhouses," Molly said.

"They ain't that much to look at," he said.

"No, show him," she said.

He opened up the trunk of his car, exposing a half dozen or so notched and pegged cypress birdhouses lying on a blanket, each with a wood plug in the roof. "See, the trick is not to get no foreign smells inside the house. I stain the outside with vegetable oil and that way it don't have no paint smell. I got a plug in the roof and a feeder shelf inside so you can pour the feed t'rew the hole and not get no human smells on it. If you stick this house up in your tree, every kind of bird there is gonna be flying around in your backyard. They're t'irty-five dol'ars, if you want one."

Thanks, Molly, I thought.

"I already have one. Maybe another time," I said.

" 'Cause I got 'em, ready and waiting," he replied.

Molly Boyle and I dropped Tee Bleu off at the gated entrance to the Chalons property, where he lived in a small house down by the bayou with his father and mother.

We watched him walk through the shade and around the side of the main house. I could not get over his resemblance to Honoria Chalons.

"You didn't want to take him down the driveway?" Molly said.

I turned my truck back onto the highway and headed toward Jeanerette and New Iberia. "I don't want any more contact with the Chalonses except in an official capacity. About this morning —" I said.

"I believe what you told me. You don't have to explain your life to others."

We recrossed the bayou and entered a tunnel of trees that separated the Teche from a row of antebellum homes that were so perfect in their detail and ambiance they looked like they had been constructed only yesterday. The windows in the truck were down,, and Molly Boyle's hair kept blowing in her face.

"Can you have lunch with me?" I said.

She continued to stare straight ahead. I could hear the truck keys jiggling against the dash, a flurry of leaves sucking across the windshield.

"Do you like trouble?" she asked.

"I don't seek it out," I said.

"I heard you were a Twelve-Step person."

"I'm in AA, if that's what you mean."

"Maybe that's what you need to keep doing and not complicate things."

"I'd sure like to have lunch with you."

She looked out the window at Alice Plantation, the acres of clipped St. Augustine grass and the flowers growing along the brick base of the building. "Can we invite another person to join us, an elderly lady who volunteers at the agency?" she asked.

"That'd be fine," I said.

I could feel her eyes on the side of my face. Up ahead, a black cloud moved across the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow. "Do you have any idea who the man in the boat might have been?" she said.

"Probably just a guy shooting water moccasins," I said.

"That seems kind of cavalier," she said.

"When the pros punch your ticket, they're at your throat before you know it. The guy in the boat was just a guy in a boat," I said.

"I worked at a mission in Guatemala during the civil war. Men with binoculars and guns didn't use them to hunt snakes," she replied.

chapter ELEVEN