Under the Cajun Moon Page 17

  My father went into a rage so extreme that one would have thought I had burned the house down. He took over then, pushing me away from the smoking pan as he banged and clanged and continued to yell. By the time his tirade had run his course, I was still there in a corner of the kitchen, determined to make things right.

  “Can we still make gumbo, Daddy?” I asked softly, trying not to cry.

  At that, he turned to me and gave me his most withering glare.

  “You burned the roux, Chloe. There’s no going any further when you burn a roux.”

  All these years later, I could still feel the sting of that moment, of standing there alone after he left, our happy time together having gone up in smoke.

  “I know how gumbo is made,” I said now to Travis. “I just wonder if there’s some significance to the mention of color here.”

  Unsure, we moved on to the next stanza:

  For the one who loves chou and chouchou,

  I couldn’t have done it without you,

  I add to the roux your trinity,

  First learned in your vicinity.

  That one made no sense to me whatsoever, but Travis laughed, saying this one was about his grandfather. Apparently, Alphonse Naquin’s favorite song was an old Cajun tune called “Chou and Chouchou.”

  “‘I love my chou and my chouchou too. Give me both and be gone wit’ you,’” Travis sang in a surprisingly good voice.

  “What does it mean?” I asked, smiling.

  “Chou is ‘cabbage’ and chouchou is ‘darling.’ It’s just a silly song, meaning ‘All I need is some good food and the woman I love and I’ll be happy.’”

  “Does it mention religion? Down here, he refers to the trinity.”

  Travis shook his head, explaining that the “trinity” is what a lot of people in Louisiana call the three basic ingredients to almost every dish: onion, bell peppers, and celery. Obviously, those were the ingredients that my father had attributed to Alphonse, though he gave no specific amounts in the poem of how much to add.

  Given all that, the last line, “learned in your vicinity,” made sense. Much of what my father knew about Cajun cooking he had first learned from Alphonse and his family down in Paradise.

  The next verse stumped Travis but was clear to me:

  For the Bürgermeister, a man of means,

  Who learned to fight in old Orleans,

  I add some andouille sliced fine as can be

  ’Cause you Allemands love your boucherie.

  In Germany, a Bürgermeister was a form of public office, much like a mayor, I explained to Travis. Given that Conrad Zahn was of German heritage and was a politician, I felt sure this verse was describing him. I didn’t know who or what he might have had to fight about, but again in the last line he is referred to as an “Allemand,” or a German.

  “Here’s his ingredient,” Travis added, pointing to the word andouille, which was a sausage made from lean pork and garlic. That was reinforced in the next line, because a boucherie was a sort of community pig butchering, one that resulted in various pork products, including pork sausage.

  I paused, looking up at Travis.

  “Pig butchering,” I said, feeling something rise up in my stomach. “A person who likes to butcher pigs might have no problem torturing someone and then killing them. Like someone did to Sam.”

  Travis met my solemn gaze with his own.

  “I hear you, cher. If we go talk to Conrad, we had better watch our step.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I didn’t know how much more I could take. In the last forty-eight hours my father had been shot, I had been arrested for Kevin’s murder, and Travis and I had discovered Sam’s brutal death. I closed my eyes, and then I opened them when I felt Travis’ warm hand covering mine again and giving it a comforting squeeze. I wasn’t alone, and I knew the only way out of this situation was to go forward. Taking a deep breath, I smiled at him and then we moved on to the next stanza.

  For king of the Sunday breakdown raids,

  Whose ancestors brought seeds in their braids,

  Professor of juré extraordinaire,

  I add fresh okra into the pot there.

  I had a feeling this one was for Sam, because I knew that “Sunday breakdown” was an old restaurant expression. When I was little, sometimes he would play restaurant with me, and he’d always order things like a “coal yard,” which was a cup of black coffee, and a “flat car,” which was a pork chop. If I remembered correctly, a “Sunday breakdown” was simply fried chicken and grits.

  As for the okra, I knew that this vegetable had first been brought to America by enslaved Africans. I hadn’t heard of seeds being smuggled in braids, but it was possible.

  I didn’t know what juré was, but Travis said that it was a form of music, one that had also come out of Louisiana’s African American culture. Unlike zydeco or Cajun music, juré had no instruments. Instead, it involved clapping and singing, and the words formed a sort of testimony or truth, hence the name juré, which translated as “truth.”

  “Give me an example,” I said.

  Travis told me to clap with him, and then he began to sing in time. The words were Cajun French, but even though I didn’t understand what he was saying, I loved the sound of it. A memory began to stir in my mind, and I could see myself with Eugenie and Sam in their apartment, clapping along to an old recording they had put on their phonograph.

  Tears suddenly welled in my eyes at the memory, and I was overwhelmed at the thought that I would never sit and listen to music with my dear friend Sam again. I blinked hard and took in a deep breath. I would mourn later. Right now I had to concentrate on this task. Travis stopped singing, and somehow I managed to hold it together as we moved on to the next verse.

  This one left us both clueless:

  Next comes the stock to fill up the pot,

  Seasoned with mirepoix, heated till hot.

  For my hoghead friend I shall not scrimp,

  As I add to the gumbo a helping of shrimp.

  We knew mirepoix was the bundle of spices used to season stocks. Other than that, we had no idea to whom this verse referred. Neither one of us had ever heard the term “hoghead” except for hog’s head cheese. We decided to move on.

  Next came this one:

  And finally for he who has always been there,

  Son of a traiteur, kind and fair.

  We grind up filé to add at the end,

  Then the dish is finished and ready for friends.

  I was thinking of a traitor, but Travis said that traiteur was the word for a folk healer, a practitioner of holistic medicine. That didn’t ring a bell for either one of us. I couldn’t imagine how we were going to be able to narrow this one down. The phrase “he who has always been there” led me to think that it had to be of my father’s very oldest friends. But as far as I knew, his oldest friends were Alphonse, Sam, Ruben, and Conrad. Beyond the four of them, I was stumped.

  We moved quickly through the rest of the poem. The next two verses were the ones that explained how the puzzle worked:

  For all who dare make this recipe,

  There is one secret you’ll not get from me:

  The measure of how much each item to add.

  Unless you know that, the recipe’s bad.

  Divided among those named in this poem,

  I give each a quantity that’s theirs alone.

  Together they come to solve this rhyme,

  The treasure they only together can find.

  Obviously, the men each got an amount of their ingredient to be added, and somehow when those ingredients were all combined, they pointed to the treasure.

  It wasn’t until we were on the very last verse that a lightbulb went on over my head.

  But if all else fails, I will tell you this:

  North and West you may search for things gone amiss.

  ’Tween hill and dale and dock and dune,

  It’s out there, under the Cajun moon.

  As I r
ead through it, yet again, something about the words North and West finally clicked for me.

  “North and West,” I cried. “Of course!”

  “What?” he asked, looking down at the page in front of him.

  “North of the equator. West of the prime meridian.”

  “Points on a map?” he asked as the lightbulb began to turn on for him too.

  “Latitude and longitude,” I replied, grinning. “What do you want to bet that the amount of ingredients each person was given somehow combines to give us a set of coordinates?”

  We stared at each other across the table, both of us smiling from ear to ear. In the midst of an enormous amount of suffering, grief, and anxiety, it was nice to enjoy a single moment of absolute victory.

  In the distance, bells pealed to announce that another hour had passed, and it wasn’t until then that I realized how long we had been sitting there working through the puzzle. There was much to do, and not a lot of time to do it in. Travis and I had to get moving. Though I still desperately wanted to be with my father, I didn’t dare show up at the hospital until Sam’s body was found and I learned whether or not I was a suspect. In the meantime, I was doing exactly what my father most wanted me to do: I was following the recipe.

  After several discreet phone calls, Travis had been able to ascertain the whereabouts of Conrad Zahn. Though he had an apartment in the city and a home in Slidell, according to his wife he was out at their camp on Bayou Calas, where he had been for almost a week. Once we knew that, Travis got a map and showed me where we were and where we needed to go.

  Currently, we were about sixty miles southwest of New Orleans, just below Houma. Bayou Calas was another thirty miles west of us, near Lake Palourde. The large property the Naquins called Paradise, where my father had been shot, was another fifteen miles beyond that, also heading west, in a swampy region above the town of Patterson.

  “I have friends and relatives all along in here,” Travis said, running his finger across the map between Lake Palourde and Paradise. “Ma tante lives here, near Duck Lake, and I’ve got a little camp myself across the bayou from her, right about here.”

  On the map, the whole region was marked as swamp and looked uninhabited, but I knew that was deceiving. Plenty of people lived in the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin, mostly on houseboats, with no roads or towns showing up on a map.

  While Travis mapped out the logistics of our trip, I went inside and made sandwiches in the kitchen. It seemed rude to eat and run—or in this case, run and eat—but the kind couple that offered us their hospitality did not seem offended. Outside, Travis and I both thanked his friends profusely for their help.

  “Let’s go, cher,” Travis said to me, moving toward the truck.

  He unlocked the driver’s side and reached in to grab his shotgun, the GPS unit, and my purse. Then he shut the door, handed my purse to me, and began moving down the lawn, toward the water.

  “Where are you going?”

  “A la bateau.”

  Running to catch up, I asked him why we were taking a boat when we had a perfectly good truck.

  He glanced at me and kept walking.

  “Because Sam’s body has been found. Came through on my phone a few minutes ago.”

  “Am I now officially a fugitive?” I asked, the knot in my stomach twisting. On one hand, I was deeply relieved Sam had been found, because I couldn’t stand the thought of his body just sitting there, undiscovered. On the other hand, I had known the clock would begin ticking on me the moment someone found him.

  “It says you’re being ‘sought for questioning.’ Doesn’t sound like there’s an APB out yet.”

  “Sought for questioning. Yeah, I know what that means. It means back to jail.”

  “Probably. Anyway, given that I was caught on film outside the courthouse yesterday helping you escape from those reporters, there’s a good chance the police have connected the dots between us and are on the lookout for a black truck with my plate numbers. I figure we can move around more easily by boat without being caught.”

  We reached the dock, where a ski boat sat bobbing in the water.

  “’Course,” Travis added, “if we go traipsing all over the swamps asking questions, somebody’s bound to turn us into the police sooner or later.”

  “I know, but we have to talk to the men on this list.”

  “I agree, so we’ll just have to take our chances and do the best we can.”

  I took off my borrowed flip-flops, tossed them into the boat, and then climbed in after them. Boating hadn’t been a big part of my life growing up, but a few years before I had dated a man who kept a sailboat on Lake Michigan, and if I had tried to board his vessel in a pair of sandals with black soles, he would have had my head. In fact, it was his stupid boat that had finally led me to break up with him. While out on the lake one day, he went on a rampage because I didn’t coil the rigging lines neatly enough, and I thought he was sounding just a little too much like my father.

  Somehow, Travis didn’t seem the type to stress over the small stuff, though he certainly seemed to know his way around a boat. This vessel we were borrowing was about fifteen feet long, with seating for six and an inboard/outboard motor. Together, we unzipped and unlatched things until the boat was opened up and ready go. Reaching into the storage up under the bow, Travis pulled out a big, floppy hat and some sunscreen, both of which he handed to me.

  He started up the engine while I took in the rest of the rope, and soon we were off. The wind made it too noisy for conversation, but the ride was beautiful, the lush banks overflowing with weeping willows and giant oaks on both sides. I put sunscreen on my face and arms and then gave it to Travis for him to do the same. Settling back in my seat and eating one of the sandwiches, I could only hope that between the floppy hat and my sunglasses I was fairly incognito. Glancing down at my outfit, I couldn’t help but smile. If I showed up at my office in Chicago in this getup, surely no one would recognize me.

  As we ventured up the winding waterways, we passed all sorts of homes and camps, ranging from the most elegant of mansions to the most humble of shacks—sometimes right next door to each other. There were even elevated mobile homes out here, propped high above the earth by steel beams and accessed via exterior stairs or ladders.

  Everywhere we went, people were outside, enjoying the sun and the water and the beautiful spring day. Even though I had grown up in Louisiana, I’d never had much opportunity to get out on the waterways like this, and I found the experience exhilarating. We passed through other regions where there were no homes or camps at all, and those were even more enjoyable. In my mind, I felt like an early explorer, coming to this land and discovering its beauty for the first time.

  An hour and a half later, we turned north and passed through a more populated strip that Travis said was the town of Amelia. Beyond that, we skirted along Lake Palourde and then made our way into the swamps just east of there, where Conrad kept his camp. Puttering along more slowly, I saw that there were no real houses here at all, only camps and houseboats. Some were closed up tight, but others were overflowing with people, and everyone always waved as we passed by. I had never understood why boating was such a friendly event, but just the simple act of waving from a boat and being waved to in return had always made me feel that I belonged to a little club, one whose members shared a love of the water and a knowledge of its etiquette.

  I wasn’t sure how we would know when we had reached the right camp, given that there weren’t any house numbers on them. Soon, however, I realized that it didn’t matter. As we neared a tidy little blue structure up on the left, I spotted Conrad himself, sitting on the end of his little pier, fishing.

  Conrad gave us a smile and a friendly wave as we drew near, obviously thinking we would continue past. He seemed a little surprised when instead Travis gunned the engine in reverse and we eased up to his dock. It wasn’t until I removed the hat and sunglasses that understanding crossed Conrad’s features.

&
nbsp; “Chloe Ledet? This is certainly a surprise!”

  Despite the fact that Conrad had to be in his late seventies, his movements were sprightly and energetic. He hopped up from his chair and tucked his fishing pole into a holder so he could help us with the rope.

  His greeting was friendly enough, but I found myself studying his features, trying to decide if I could detect a glimmer of anger or fear or any other emotion he might not want us to see. Then I remembered that this man was a former politician, and I realized that no matter what he was feeling, he’d probably spent years perfecting the ability to keep it from showing on his face.

  After polite chitchat, I told Conrad we had come here to ask him some questions. Glancing up and down the waterway at the few camps that dotted the shoreline nearby, he suggested we move inside. While I did want to speak beyond the hearing of nosy neighbors, I was also quite comforted that they were there. If Conrad was the killer and he decided to make a move on either one of us, the sound of our yells would carry to at least four camps that I could see.

  Conrad’s place was small but not typical by any means. Instead of a haphazard mix of geegaws and garage-sale furniture, his decor was well coordinated, its tasteful colors and textures suggesting an interior decorator’s touch. In the cozy living room, the wall over the couch was filled with dozens of framed photos and plaques, so artfully hung that the effect was striking. The room was stuffy, but once Conrad opened some windows, warm afternoon breezes swept in.

  Conrad invited us to sit while he went to the kitchen to make tea. Remembering my adventure at Ledet’s the other night, once he was gone I gestured to Travis, telling him through hand motions not to swallow. Once Conrad came back and put ice-cold beverages in our hands, however, that was easier said than done. I was thirsty, and several times I almost took a sip without thinking. Mostly, I just held the sweating glass in my hand as we talked, occasionally tilting it against closed lips and feigning a sip.