“Why would I imagine things about Tee Jolie?”
“To you, she represents lost innocence. She’s the Cajun girl of your youth.”
“That seems frank enough.”
“You asked me.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“You hear songs on an iPod that no one else can hear.”
“I’m going to fix a ham-and-onion sandwich. Do you want one?”
“I already made some. They’re in the refrigerator. I made some deviled eggs, too.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Are you mad?”
“I’ve never been angry at you, Alf. Not once in your whole life. Is that a fair statement?”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You didn’t.”
“You want to talk to Pierre Dupree?” she said.
“If I can find him.”
“I saw him this morning. He’s at his home in Jeanerette. I’ll go with you.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“I think I do,” she replied.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“That’s what bothers me about him. I don’t know why I don’t like him,” she replied.
THE HOME OF Pierre Dupree outside Jeanerette had been built on the bayou in 1850 by slave labor and named Croix du Sud Plantation by the original owners. Union forces had ransacked it and chopped up the piano in the chicken yard and started cook fires on the hardwood floors, blackening the ceilings and the walls. During Reconstruction, a carpetbagger bought it at a tax sale and later rented it to a man who was called a free person of color before the Emancipation. By the 1890s, Reconstruction and the registration of black voters had been nullified, and power shifted back into the hands of the same oligarchy that had ruled the state before the Civil War. Slavery was replaced by the rental convict system, one established by a man named Samuel James, who turned Angola Plantation—named for the origins of its workforce—into Angola Penitentiary, which became five thousand acres of living hell on the banks of the Mississippi River.
The home of Pierre Dupree was reacquired by the same family who had built it. Unfortunately for the family, one of the descendants was insane and sealed herself inside the home while the grounds turned into a jungle and Formosan termites reduced the walls and support beams to balsa wood.
Then the house was purchased by the Dupree family, who not only restored it and rebuilt the foundation and cleaned up the grounds and terraced the slope but turned the entire environment into artwork, even reconstructing the slave quarters, relying solely on antique wood and brick from historical teardowns, going all the way to France to buy eighteenth-century square nails. I had called ahead and had been surprised by Pierre Dupree’s generosity of spirit when I asked if Alafair and I could visit him at his home that afternoon. “I’d be delighted, Mr. Robicheaux,” he had said. “I’m due at my exhibition at UL this evening, but I’d love to have y’all for an early supper. Something simple out on the terrace. I’ll tell cook to put something together. I’m sure y’all will enjoy it. We’ll see you then.”
He hung up before I could reply.
He was waiting for us on the front porch when we turned off the old two-lane road into his drive. His lawns and gardens were already in shadow, the camellias blooming, the sunlight dancing on the tops of oak trees that were easily two hundred years old. He was dressed in a dark suit with a vest and a luminescent pink tie and a watery blue shirt with a diamond design stamped into the fabric. He opened the car door for Alafair and in all ways was everything a gentleman should be. But something continued to bother me about him besides the physicality that emanated from his tailored clothes; I just couldn’t put my finger on it. “Would you like the grand tour?” he asked.
“We don’t want to take up too much of your time,” I said. “I just wanted to ask a question or two of you.”
“Did you know that ghosts live here? Five rebellious slaves and a white instigator were hanged right on that tree by the side of the house. Sometimes people see them in the mist.”
I knew the story well. But the event had taken place outside St. Martinville, not Jeanerette. I wondered why he had appropriated the story, because the details of the execution and the level of inhumanity it involved were sickening.