“You talked to her?”
“No. There was just a little hiccup of a voice, like she’d butt-dialed and was talking to somebody else and clicked off again. At least, that’s what I thought I was hearing.”
“You’re not making sense, Cletus.”
“I think maybe she was saying ‘Help.’?”
I felt a hole open in the bottom of my stomach. “Was Desmond driving a Lamborghini?”
“No, he was in a Humvee, same one he was driving at the res.”
“The lady who lives in the old Burke home saw a cherry-red Lamborghini stop at my house.”
“It was Wexler?”
“There’s no other Lamborghini around here. Just a minute.” I called Helen at home. No one answered. I called Bailey Ribbons. “I think either Lou Wexler or Desmond Cormier has got his hands on Alafair,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound right,” she said. “Des is probably in Arizona now.”
“He’s not. Clete saw him a short while ago.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“It’s not difficult. Desmond Cormier is a liar.”
“You don’t have to talk that way,” she said.
I hung up.
“What do you want to do?” Clete said.
“We’re supposed to ROA with Sean McClain in St. Martinville.”
“I need my piece.”
“Get it,” I said.
“What have you got in the truck?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
• • •
WE DROVE UP the two-lane toward St. Martinville, through the tunnel of oaks on the north side of New Iberia. Perhaps it was the season or perhaps not, but the light was wrong. It was brittle, flickering, harsh on the eyes, suggestive of a cruel presence in the natural world. We passed the two-story frame house with a faux-pillared gallery that had been built by a free man of color before the War Between the States. According to legend, he had worn elegant clothes and spoken Parisian French and had his land and wealth stolen from him by carpetbaggers after the war. To this day, no one has ever succeeded in painting the building a brilliant white: within a short time, the paint is quickly dulled by dust from the cane fields or smoke from stubble fires, as though the structure itself bears the legacy of a man who betrayed his race and sought to become what he was not at the expense of his brethren and ultimately himself.
As I stared through the windshield, the two-lane unspooling before me, I knew something was terribly wrong in the external structure of the day, in the rules that supposedly govern mortality and the laws of physics. Dust devils were churning inside the uncut cane, troweling rooster tails seventy feet into the air, although the temperature was dropping and the wind was cold enough to dry and crack the skin. By the side of the road was a watermelon and strawberry stand with wooden tables under a live oak hung with Spanish moss. There had not been a fruit stand on that road for decades; plus, we never saw melons and strawberries after August, unless they were imported and on sale at an expensive grocery in Lafayette.
Then I saw two middle-aged people holding hands by the roadside. The man was huge and wore strap overalls and a tin hard hat slanted on his head. He grinned and gave me the thumbs-up sign. The woman wore a wash-faded print dress and a red hibiscus flower in her hair; she was also smiling, like someone welcoming a visitor at an entryway.
The man and woman were my mother and father. Behind them, I saw Smiley Wimple with two little girls dressed in white and hung with chains of flowers. The wound in Smiley’s side glowed with an eye-watering radiance.
My truck shot past them, blowing newspaper and dust all over the road.
“Watch where you’re going!” Clete said.
“You saw that?” I said.
“Saw what?”