Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Like a dream in the mind of God. We shouldn’t worry about it.”

“I wish I could be like you,” Gretchen said.

“There’s an amphibian out there,” Alafair said.

Gretchen looked through the window and saw the plane on the bay, not far offshore, floating low in the water, bobbing in the chop. It was painted white, its wings and pontoons and fuselage glowing in the blue band of light on the western horizon. A fiberglass boat with a deep-V hull and flared bow was anchored close by. The cabin of the boat was lighted, the bow straining against the anchor rope, the fighting chairs on the stern rising and falling against a backdrop of black waves. “Where is Varina Leboeuf’s place?” Gretchen asked.

“Right up there about a hundred yards.”

Gretchen pulled to the shoulder of the road and cut the headlights and the ignition. Through a break in the flooded cypress and gum trees, she had a clear view of the plane and the boat. She took a small pair of binoculars from her tote bag and got out of the truck and adjusted the lenses. She focused first on the amphibian, then on the boat. “It’s a Chris-Craft. The bow has a painting of a sawfish on it,” she said. “That’s the boat Clete and your father have been looking for, the one that Tee Jolie Melton’s sister was abducted on.”

Alafair got out and walked around to Gretchen’s side of the truck and stood beside her. Gretchen could see Varina Leboeuf on the stern and, next to her, a man with albino skin and shoulder-length hair that looked like white gold. He was wearing a shirt with blown sleeves and slacks belted high up on his stomach, the way a European might wear them. His forehead and the edges of his face were scrolled with pink scars, as though his face had been transplanted onto the tendons.

Gretchen handed Alafair the binoculars. “I’ll call Clete and tell him about the boat,” she said.

“We don’t have service here,” Alafair said.

“What do you want to do?”

“Confront her.”

Gretchen took back the binoculars and looked again at the boat and at Varina and the man standing on the deck. The man was heavyset and broad-shouldered, thick across the middle and muscular and solid in the way he stood on the deck. He looked in Gretchen’s direction, as though he had noticed either her or her truck. But that was impossible. She forced herself to keep the binoculars directly on his face. He was backlit by the lights in the cabin, his slacks and shirt flattening in the wind. He leaned over and kissed Varina Leboeuf on the cheek, then boarded the amphibian.

The plane’s twin engines coughed, then roared to life, the propellers blowing a fine mist back over the fuselage. Gretchen watched the plane gain speed, the pontoons cutting through the chop, the nose and wings abruptly lifting into the air. Her mouth was dry, her face hot, her breath catching in her throat for no reason.

“Are you okay?” Alafair asked.

“Yeah, sometimes I have kind of a blackout. More like a short circuit in my head. I look at somebody and can’t breathe and get dizzy and have to sit down.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Since I was a child.”

“What do you see through the binoculars that I didn’t?”

“Just that guy with the weird face. He’s like somebody from a dream. When I see a guy like that, maybe on an elevator or in a room with no windows, strange things light up in my head. I’ll go on okay for a few days, then shit starts hitting the fan.”

“What kind of shit?”

“I go out and look for trouble. I’ve got a bad history, Alafair. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to scrub out of my life. That guy with the albino skin and pink scars on his face—”

“What about him? He’s just a guy. He’s made of flesh and blood. Don’t rent space in your head to bad people.”

“He’s like Alexis Dupree. These are people who are made different from the rest of us. You don’t know them. Neither does Clete. But I know everything about them.”

“How?”

“Because part of them is in me.”

“That’s not true,” Alafair said. “Come on, the boat is headed for Varina’s dock. Let’s see who these guys are.”

“I told you I wanted to deal with Varina Leboeuf the way you would. How should I handle it?”

“You don’t ‘handle’ anything, Gretchen. You step back from bad people and let their own energies consume them. It’s the worst thing you can do to them.”

“See? You know stuff I never even thought about.”

They got in the truck and drove down the road to the shell drive that led to Jesse and Varina Leboeuf’s house. Out on the bay, the pilot of the Chris-Craft had throttled back his engine, allowing the boat to drift into the dock. As soon as the hull thumped against the tires that hung from the pilings, Varina stepped off the gunwale onto the planks, and the pilot turned the boat southward and gave it the gas.