Under the Cajun Moon Read online

  “Mom? It’s Chloe.”

  At the sound of my voice, she burst into tears. I was surprised but touched, especially when the crying went on for a block and a half. Once she had calmed down enough to speak, though, I quickly realized that much of her outburst had come not from love or concern about my ordeal but from the mistaken assumption that I had killed a man. She went on and on, demanding to know what could have possibly gone wrong to make me do something like that.

  My own mother thought I was a murderer? Even Travis, a guy I hadn’t seen in fourteen years, knew I was innocent. Yet here was Lola Ledet, sniffling into the phone about how could this have happened and what were we going to do and surely she had raised me better than this. I just let her keep going, telling myself that she hadn’t raised me at all. The faculty and staff at boarding school did. Sam and Eugenie did. The nanny did. My mother, on the other hand, had been merely a bystander.

  Now she was a bystander and a traitor.

  FIFTEEN

  The conversation with my mother was made even worse by the fact that I was having to have it in front of a virtual stranger. To his credit, Travis rolled down his window and pretended not to listen, but even so it would have been hard not to hear, considering our proximity.

  “Look, Mom,” I finally interrupted, “we can talk about all this later. Right now I’m trying to find Sam. Do you have any idea where he is or how I could reach him?”

  She did not, as apparently she also had been calling around trying to find him all day. Ledet’s manager had told her that no one there had seen him and that Sam hadn’t even shown up for family meal, which was unusual for him. As we neared St. Peter, I noticed a car pulling out of a metered space off to the side and gestured to Travis that he should park there. He made the turn and attempted to parallel park his big truck in the tight space.

  “All right, Mom, one more question. Last night Sam took the tape from your answering machine and brought it to someone who could enhance the sound. Do you know where he brought it?”

  Travis grunted as he eased carefully into place. Ignoring him, I listened to my mother, who was trying to remember what Sam had said. There was no question in my mind that my father’s shooting and my framing were directly related. I had done a lot of thinking today, and I had the feeling that the best chance of finding the shooter and proving my innocence began with that tape.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember.”

  “Did he say a person’s name?” I prodded. “Maybe the name of a business? Whoever it was, they have some high-tech equipment. Where did Sam take it? Think, Mother.”

  “I’m trying, Chloe. You have no idea how difficult this has all been for me!”

  “Oh, yeah, and a day in jail has been a real walk in the park for me!”

  “Don’t be rude, darling. You know better than that.”

  Speaking of rude, Travis had finished parking the car and was now tapping me on the arm. I waved him off but he persisted. Finally, I asked my mother to hold on and cupped my hand over the phone.

  “What?”

  “C’est moi. It’s me.”

  “It’s you what?”

  “I’m the guy you’re looking for. The recording. Sam brought it to me.”

  Travis popped a CD from the player and held it up to show me. Handwritten in marker on the top were the date and words J. Ledet Phone Msg. He opened the glove compartment and pointed to a small digital tape sitting atop a typed sheet of paper. “Last night, before he came and met you at the restaurant, Sam brought this tape to me at my studio. That’s why I’ve been trying to find him, to tell him what I was able to figure out.”

  Without responding, I took my hand away from the phone and asked my mother if by any chance the name she was trying to recall was Travis Naquin.

  “That’s it, Travis! Alphonse’s grandson. Of course, how could I have forgotten? He’s some bigwig music producer, has a whole studio and everything. Sam thought he might be able to help.”

  “All right, Mom, that’s what I needed to know for now. I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait. When are you coming down to the hospital?”

  “Soon.”

  “I hope so. So many people came to see about your dad that my bodyguard finally made me move into a private waiting room for safety purposes. I’m going stir-crazy in here all by myself. I need someone to talk to.”

  Her words were not lost on me. She wanted me there not to comfort me or to help me figure out what was going on, but because she was bored and tired of being by herself.

  “I only get to see your father once an hour,” she added pitifully, “but of course he doesn’t say a word. It’s awful for me.”

  “Goodbye, Mother,” I said, disconnecting the call. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, counting to ten.

  To his credit, Travis didn’t offer any platitudes to make me feel better. Instead, he quietly waited in silence as I pulled myself together.

  “My phone’s battery is getting low,” I said finally, unzipping a side pocket of my purse and pulling out my car charger. “May I plug it in?”

  “Of course, cher,” he replied, gesturing toward the power outlet.

  “Thanks.” I plugged in the charger and propped the phone in a cup holder. Then I turned to Travis and asked him to tell me about the message. “Were you able to recover the missing parts? Do we know who shot my father?”

  “No, we don’t know that. I was able to clarify a few things and pick up some external sounds, but overall I was disappointed. Between swamp gasses and mineral deposits, south Louisiana is brutal on cell phone transmissions. For the first part of the call, the sound was broken up by external interference, so the missing words can’t be recovered. The only parts I could recover were near the end, when it wasn’t a transmission problem but simply of matter of your father’s voice growing weaker and being drowned out by other noises.”

  “Can I hear it?” I asked, wondering if I was going to be sorry for asking.

  “Sure. Take a look at this first.”

  He handed me the page from the glove compartment, and I looked at it to see that it was a typed transcript of the tape similar to the one Sam had handwritten and shown me last night. This version included some words in parentheses, and everywhere a gap appeared, indicating missing words, Travis had typed a number. He explained that the words in parentheses were the extra words he had managed to recover from the original using his equipment. The numbers were the amounts of seconds unaccounted for.

  “On the parts that are audible, he speaks an average of three words per second,” Travis continued. “So where the gaps are just a second or two, that means we’re only missing a few words. In the longer gaps, obviously, we’re missing far more.”

  “So, here, where you wrote a seven,” I asked, pointing to the biggest number, “that means we’re missing about twenty-one words?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “I know. That’s why it’s so frustrating. I worked on this most of the night, and as you can see, I was able to recover the last third nicely. But there’s still lots of gaps in the rest, especially at the beginning. Like I said, there’s nothing anyone could do to get those missing sections back because they never made it onto the recording in the first place.”

  I asked Travis to play the message, and I braced myself for the sound of my father’s agonized voice to fill the vehicle. Sure enough, suddenly he was talking, and so I read along. I noticed that where Sam had written “bins” and “bins totter” Travis had put “Ben’s” and “Ben’s daughter,” which made more sense. He had also made notations of other sounds, such as the cutting of the boat engine and the noise of that boat scraping on the bottom of the bayou. The most important part of what Travis had done, though, was to recover the last few sentences in their entirety.

  Once the message ended, we sat quietly together in the car. Up the street, music played from a boom box where two little boys were tap-dancing their h
earts out.

  My poor dad. I knew he had suffered before he lost consciousness, but I hadn’t fully grasped the extent of that suffering until I heard his voice on this message. I couldn’t help but focus on the urgency and despair, so I told Travis to play it again, and this time I tried to listen more fully to the words themselves. As I did, two sentences jumped out at me near the end.

  I always told you we had an insurance policy, our special recipe. I just didn’t know it would end up getting me killed.

  “There,” I said. “Stop there. What does that mean, ‘I always told you we had an insurance policy, our special recipe’? What is he talking about?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you should ask your mother.”

  The “special recipe” could have been almost anything, the salt-crusted fish that Ledet’s was famous for, something from one of my father’s many published cookbooks, even the recipe for his pink secret salt. Travis was right. I needed to call my mother back. Though I really didn’t feel like talking to her, I thought she might be of some help. When she answered the phone, I read that sentence to her and asked her if it had any special meaning.

  “‘I always told you we had an insurance policy’? ‘Our special recipe’?” She sounded puzzled.

  “Yes. If Daddy said that to you, what would you think he was talking about?”

  “Hmm. I’m sorry, Chloe, I just don’t know. I do remember him saying ‘If anything ever happens to me, babe, that’s your insurance policy,’ but he wasn’t talking about a real insurance policy.”

  “What was he talking about?”

  “Some poetry he wrote, back before Ledet’s ever opened. He had it framed and hung it in the entranceway. It’s still there. It was just a poem and not a legal document. Whenever he called it an insurance policy, I just thought he meant symbolically, like it represented the restaurant itself.”

  “How about your ‘special recipe’? Does that ring any bells?”

  “Gosh, Chloe, that could be any one of a thousand different things. The man is a chef, you know.”

  “A poem framed and hanging in the entranceway,” I said, trying to remember it. “Are you talking about the one that’s matted with the photo of the ribbon cutting?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  I knew what she was talking about, where it hung, and what it looked like, but I hadn’t bothered to read the verses in years. I also just assumed it was a memorial of the origins of Ledet’s restaurant, a gesture of sentiment to remind my father of where it had all begun. Now that I thought about it, Ledet’s had all begun with a loan from friends who accepted my father’s treasure as collateral.

  The treasure.

  Quickly, I concluded the call with my mother, and as I hung up I had the sudden urge to throw my arms around Travis and give him a big hug. I didn’t, of course, but I couldn’t help but place one hand on his arm and give it a squeeze as I thanked him for his hard work with the tape.

  “This may be my first big break,” I said, a plan forming in my mind. I didn’t tell him about the treasure, of course, but I did explain that there was something I needed from inside the restaurant, something that might go a long way in helping me figure everything out. Once I had that, we could take a quick look in Sam’s apartment, and then I would be out of Travis’ hair, in my own car, and heading to the hospital.

  Five minutes later, I was hovering just outside the front door of Ledet’s, an empty tote bag from Travis’ truck in my hand, pretending to read the menu featured in my window.

  Though I had every legal right to walk inside and take that poem from the wall, I didn’t want to do it in a way that might attract attention. Primarily, I didn’t want to tip anyone off who might be watching that this inane little poem that had been hanging on a wall of the restaurant for forty-two years was of any significance to the things that had been going on in the past few days.

  On a more personal level, I was just so embarrassed at how I looked and what everyone in there must be thinking about me and my murder charge that I didn’t want to show my face inside the restaurant unless I had to. My hope was that whoever was working the welcome station would be someone I didn’t know and who wouldn’t recognize me. As my ace in the hole, I was sending Travis in ahead of me, to distract attention while I nabbed the picture. As long as the hostess on duty had eyes, she would no doubt be quite distracted with the likes of the handsome and charming Travis Naquin, even if he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a backwards-facing baseball cap.

  “Meet you back at the truck, cher,” he said softly as he brushed past me, pushed open the door of the restaurant, and stepped inside. I slowly counted to twenty and then summoned my nerve and stepped inside as well.

  “So you’re telling me if I bring my family here for dinner, you can’t make little Susie a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich?” Travis was asking the woman at the front counter. “I know it sounds weird, but she’s a weird child. All she eats, day after day, is peanut butter and jelly.”

  The hostess was not someone that I knew, thank goodness. While she explained to Travis that their chefs would be happy to try and put together whatever his family would like, within reason, she said she would have to check with the kitchen to get a definite answer on a PB&J.

  “Super. Why don’t you go check right now?” he asked, no doubt giving her a broad dimpled smile.

  “Certainly,” the woman said, pausing before she went to look over at me and ask if I had a reservation.

  “No, I’m waiting for someone,” I replied. “You go ahead and help him first. I’m in no hurry.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

  As soon as she was gone, I stepped over to the frame and tried to lift it off of its hanger. Unfortunately, the wire wasn’t simply on a hanger, it was bolted to the wall! As I struggled to work it loose, I gave Travis a look of panic, and he responded with a tilting of his head toward the dining room. Stepping into there, he just barely headed off the hostess at the pass, talking to her in the next room in order to buy me time to get the frame loose. Finally, as specks of plaster sprinkled to the floor, the bolt came loose from its mooring with a soft thwunk and the frame was finally in my hands.

  Dropping it into the tote bag, I turned around and carried it out the front door. I knew that taking the poem wasn’t stealing, but I still felt as though I had committed a major crime. My heart was in my throat all the way to Toulouse. I had hung onto the keys, and so once I reached the truck, I clicked the remote to unlock the door and quickly slipped inside, locking the door behind me. The tap dancers were gone, but there were plenty of other people milling around.

  Travis would be back in just a minute or two, so in the time I had I pulled the tall, narrow frame from the bag and quickly skimmed the poem. Later, I would take the frame apart and look inside and see if perhaps my father’s “insurance policy” had been an actual insurance policy, something tucked inside behind the poem and picture. I had a feeling, though, that the poem itself was the key. Even just skimming the first few verses, I thought it sounded like a mind game, a puzzle of some kind. The title of the poem was “Recipe for Success.”

  This had to be it, their own little insurance policy, their special recipe.

  Above the poem was a photograph that had been taken back in 1967, a picture of my father with giant scissors in hand, cutting a big red ribbon just outside of the restaurant. He was in his late thirties, wearing a white chef’s jacket, his hair long and pulled back into a ponytail. As that was the era of the hippie, lots of men had long hair, but I had a feeling his had been more an affectation of European style than a sign of the times in America. Not far behind him stood my mother, young and beautiful at just twenty-three. In the photo, she was wearing a leopard skin cape and huge dark sunglasses, looking like a blond Jackie Onassis or a French fashion model.

  My phone rang, startling me, and I quickly grabbed it from where it sat, still charging, in the drink holder. The number on the screen looked familiar, and when I answered I re
alized it was Wade, my father’s old friend who had visited me in jail.

  “Hello?”

  “Chloe? Wade Henkins.”

  “Hello! Thank you for calling me back.”

  From the corner of my eye, I could see Travis approaching, so I gave him a little wave to show that I was on the phone and would be just a minute.

  “When we spoke earlier today,” I said, “I had a feeling there was something you weren’t telling me. Do you have more information for me, something that might help me out of the situation I’m in?”

  He cleared his throat and asked if I was alone. Outside of the truck, Travis was killing time by fooling with the parking meter.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Okay. Listen, it’s not much, but I think it’s important.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “There was one other thing a little strange about yesterday. Down at Paradise. It was after we finished working and I was about to leave to go get groceries.”

  “Yes?”

  “He said something to me, Chloe, something I’ve been thinking about ever since. It was almost like he knew something terrible was going to happen.”

  I sat up straight, my chest tightening.

  “What? What did he say?”

  “After he handed me the keys to his car, he looked at me, real intense like, and said, ‘Wade, if anything ever happens to me, would you give Chloe a message for me? Don’t tell anyone else but her.’ I didn’t take it serious at the time. It was just one of those things a person might say if they was feeling sentimental or something.”

  “What was the message?”

  “He said, ‘Tell Chloe to follow the recipe.’”

  SIXTEEN

  Holding the phone against my ear, I closed my eyes, knowing that very recipe Wade was talking about was sitting on my lap.

  “I don’t know what your father meant when he said that, but it’s been bugging me that he might have known he was in danger.”