“Wait for me in the cruiser, Dave,” she said.
“I’d better stay here.”
“Dave?” she said. She waited. When I didn’t move, she widened her eyes at me, her anger clearly growing. I walked close to Perkins, my face within inches of his, my back to Helen. I could see the tiny red vessels in the whites of his eyes, the dried mucus at the corner of his mouth, the strawberry birthmark that was slick with sweat.
“You get the fuck in your house,” I said.
“Or what?”
Perkins’s denim shirt was spread on the surface of a spool table. On top of his shirt he had placed his sunglasses, gold watch, cigarettes, and cell phone. I rolled them all in the shirt and tied it in a ball with the sleeves and dropped it into the flames. The denim burst alight and sank with its contents into the fire. “Welcome to Louisiana, Mr. Perkins. I love your place,” I said.
CHAPTER
6
THAT AFTERNOON AN elderly cane farmer ten miles outside of New Iberia had been harrowing a field that was bordered by a coulee and a hedgerow of persimmon and gum trees. The lock on his gate had been broken by vandals driving ATVs, and the dirt road he used to get his machinery in and out of the field now gave access to dumpers who had thrown rubber tires and old furniture and raw garbage down the embankment of his coulee. He had called the sheriff’s office to complain and had tried to bury or haul away the trash, then finally had given up.
The breeze was warm and drowsy, and he felt himself nodding off in the tractor seat. Up ahead, a flock of crows clattered into the air above the persimmon and gum trees. The farmer cut his engine, and in the shade of a canvas umbrella he had fastened above the tractor seat, he opened his thermos and poured himself a cup of Kool-Aid. From inside the trees, he could hear horseflies buzzing and see them clustering on the ground and rising suddenly in the air. The wind shifted out of the south, and an odor struck his nostrils that made his throat clench.
He walked into the trees, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare with one hand. At the lip of the coulee, someone had spaded the ground with a shovel and replaced the torn divots of grass with a rake, creating a broken pattern that made the farmer think of a root-bound plant in a cracked flowerpot. He found a long stick and began pushing the divots down the side of the levee, the clods of dirt rilling into the water.
Oh, bon Dieu, bon Dieu, he thought as the odor grew in strength and seemed to clutch at his face like a soiled hand. Then he touched something soft that made him drop the stick and step back, his eyes watering not from the odor but from what he thought he was about to see. He stumbled backward in the shade, away from the thing that was buried in the ground, unable to take his gaze from the hole his digging had created. But in the disturbed dirt, the only image he could make out was a plastic teacup that had a large piece broken out of it. The cup was painted with tiny lavender roses.
The coroner, the paramedics, a half-dozen uniformed deputies, two technicians from the Acadiana crime lab, and Helen and I all arrived at the scene within twenty minutes of one another. The body of the buried girl or woman was fully dressed and had been covered over by no more than a foot of soil. She was blond and about five and a half feet tall, and she wore the kind of tennis shoes a kid might, but because of the heat and the moisture in the ground and the piles of red ants that had been pushed into the depression with her, the decomposition was so dramatic that it was impossible to estimate her age.
Buried with her were two winter coats, an empty handbag, seven shoes, a polyester scarf, coils of costume jewelry, a tube of lipstick, two barrettes, a Bic lighter, and a saucer that matched the broken teacup the farmer had already unearthed.
The farmer had no idea when or how the body had gotten onto his land.
“Did you see any lights at night?” I asked.
“Kids running them ATVs all over my field. I called y’all fo’ times, but ain’t nobody done anything about it. You t’ink them kids done this?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’m fixing to lose my farm. This land has been in the Delahoussaye family for a hundred and fifty years. I ain’t never seen anything like this. Why ain’t y’all done somet’ing?”
“You think someone has a grudge against you, sir?”
“You tell me. What it takes for a man to do his work and be let alone? Why ain’t y’all kept them people off my land?”
“Sir, if you didn’t want ATVs in your field, why didn’t you buy a new lock for your gate?” Helen said.
“They broke t’ree of them. What was I s’ppose to do? Weld a chain on my gate ’cause y’all cain’t do your job?” His face was wrinkled and brown and covered with sun moles, his eyes moist with tears. “She’s just a young girl.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I just seen the coroner take off her shoe. Her toenails is painted, like young girls is always doing.”
Helen and I looked at each other.
“I want you to think real hard about something, Mr. Delahoussaye,” I said. “Did you ever throw any dishware out here? Did you ever see somebody else do it? Did you ever see any lying around on the ground?”
“No, suh, I ain’t.”
“And the last time you were in the grove was two weeks back?”
“Yes, suh.”