Lies Agreed Upon (48 page)

“So what happened?” Tess pressed again.

Before Dreux could respond, a series of sudden booms overhead made them both start and look up. A phosphorescent brilliance lit the whole scene in false daylight as great whistling spirals and cascading plumes of fire filled the sky.

Dreux had to raise his voice, “I hesitated to sign such rubbish, as you might guess. It would tarnish my dear friend’s memory and make me look bad as well. And then Joanne shocked me. She reached behind her chair cushion and pulled out a
handgun and pointed it at me!”

“Did you take it away and shoot her?” gasped Tess.

“Why would you think that, my dear? I abhor violence,” averred Dreux with wide-eyed sincerity. “I signed the statement, of course. She thought she had won. Now I came prepared in case things didn’t go well. I always have a Plan B, Miss Parnell. I pretended to be a bit overcome by events and refilled my wine glass to fortify myself for my defeated departure, politely topping off her glass as well, ever the gentleman. Joanne was gloating over her signed ‘confession’ instead of paying attention to me. She, like everyone else, saw me as a feeble old coward. So I deftly slipped enough sedative in her goblet to knock her out. Your mother would have fallen asleep, and I would have been able to remove any incriminating documents, including that ‘confession.’ She could still make her accusations, but, as you have said, it would be hard for a hysterical outsider, deluded by a sad childhood trauma, to convince wonderfully insular New Orleans to doubt a pillar of society like myself.

“
I drew out the visit to give the sedative time to work. Soon she was slumped in her chair, completely limp and with eyes closed. I reached to gather up the incriminating paperwork. But things went wrong. I should have removed the weapon from the table. I thought she was unconscious, but she mustered her amazing will, opened her eyes and grabbed the pistol. The barrel was swaying wildly, and her finger trembled on the trigger. Her eyes were quite unfocused. I was terrified. I carefully reached out, calmly asking for the gun. Trying to avoid me in uncoordinated panic, she jerked the gun back, muzzle up, and it fired. It was horrible, but what was the point of involving myself? I cleaned up evidence of my presence, and I went through her files to remove correspondence and documents that might raise questions. I did a very thorough job of searching, but I still felt anxious. I feared she had a secret stash of papers that I may have missed. It’s why I kept pressing you about it. Where were they?”

“In a box of personal photos in the office closet,” answered Tess matter-of-factly. Dreux
shook his head over omitting such an obvious cache and studied the rock he still held in his hand, his thumb smoothing over the stone’s surface.

“You don’t believe me,” said Dreux
with a resigned sigh. Tess glanced askance at his small stooped form.

He was right
. She did not believe his story. What were the odds that two of the three people in that library would die in accidental shootings made to look like suicides? But it did not matter to her, she realized.

“The important thing is that my mother did not commit suicide. She did not
abandon me. She did not intentionally throw away her life and inflict her childhood horror on me,” Tess said with quiet conviction.

“How could you ever think that?”

As the last bright spangles faded from the smoky heavens, Dreux blindly weighed the rock in his hand. “You can’t prove I had anything to do with any of these deaths,” he murmured.

“There’s no proof. We’re agreed.
You don’t need to worry that I’ll go public with any of it,” Tess nodded. “I’ve solved the only mystery I really cared about: my mother’s death. I’m ready to move on. I guess I’ll be focusing on what to do with my inherited garden now.”

“But you’ve made friends here, influential friends. You could create unpleasant specul
ation among people who know me. I really can’t tolerate that. Not if there’s a way to avoid it.” Dreux’s voice was soft and his gaze blank, as if thinking aloud.

“There’s nothing to avoid. I told you I’ll keep quiet. I wonder where Tony is. He couldn’t still be talking to Benoit,” Tess commented, squinting at the dark, empty pathways. “I’m su
rprised that no one else has joined us here.”

“Oh, no one comes to this dock for the fireworks because the view is partially blocked by trees
, as I said. Besides, according to legend, it’s haunted. This is where Josephine’s body was supposedly found. It’s nonsense, of course, but I didn’t want to needlessly unnerve you. As for your friend Tony, I’m sure he’s looking for you in the crowd. I told people at the first dock we were returning to the main viewing area,” said Dreux in a chatty tone.

Then he
began to jabber more quickly and so softly that Tess had to strain to hear over the crackle and pop of the ongoing fireworks. She was unable to make much sense of the few words she did catch. “I meant after watching fireworks here. I’ll explain the misunderstanding to Tony. It’s too bad you’re going to send me to find him and stay here on your own. If you’re a little tipsy from too much beer and wine and catch one of your impractical high heels in these planks, you could fall and sustain a severe blow to the head. You’d be faint and disoriented, with your vision temporarily impaired, which could cause you to stumble off the dock into the bayou. No one would hear your weak cries for help. In your barely conscious state, you would struggle for only a short time and then become the unfortunate victim of an accidental drowning. It’s unlikely there’d be an extensive investigation for a lone woman tourist without family.”

“What are you talking about?” Tess looked at him in alarmed confusion. She had not
heard enough of his speech to understand how he got from “he’s looking for you in the crowd” to “drowning.”

“I’m just saying that I didn’t want to be disturbed until we finalized our business,” said Dreux loudly with a bright smile. He looked up as a thunderous bang heralded new fireworks. “But we’re done now. Ah, I do love those feathery cascades.”

Still trying to make sense of his babbling, Tess’s eyes automatically followed his pointing finger upward to the spark-stitched sky. Something moved suddenly at the left edge of her vision. There was an explosion of white light, and soundless black swallowed her.

A boom, crackle and thud came faintly. In her left ear, there was a louder, closer thud, thud, thu
d—a steady pulse of pain. A whoosh-whoosh of tidal liquid echoed. She was tangled in darkness as palpable as black felt, wrapped so tightly she could not move and could not think. There was no light except for a collage of vibrating colors exploding under her eyelids. Her stomach twisted with nausea. Her throat flexed and tried to push out a sound, but her lips released only a soundless puff of air.

A warm and metallic liquid ran down the left side of her face. It formed a wet web over her eye socket and ran along the seam of her lips and down her chin. Her right cheek throbbed. It was resting on roughness that smelled of creosote. She tried to open her eyes and achieved a small flutter of her lids. She tried to move her head. A bolt of pain blinded her and screeched like a banshee, yet only the faintest sigh escaped. Something pulled at her foot, and then something hard pressed against her back and shoved. Her cheek raked agonizingly along the splintered wood, and an explosive painful light seared her eyelids shut. There was another firm push against her back, and she slipped over a hard edge and into space.

She hit cold water and gasped in shock. Instinctively, after the first gulp of foul liquid, she closed her mouth and nose. Then she was sinking down through layers of water, from muddy cool to icy black. She struggled against the bonds of her paralyzed muscles, until her body finally responded, feebly at first and then with uncoordinated panic. She flailed her feet and flapped her hands against the dark embrace, and her head suddenly surged from the water like an unfettered cork.

She sucked in air greedily with a series of wheezing, coughing gasps, but the sound
s were swallowed up by a series of artillery booms. Lightning slithered over the ripples and inside her head. She looked up in confused terror and saw wood, low and tight as a coffin lid. Her frantic hand hit a slimy pole and she reflexively wrapped her arms around it.

She took a few rasping breaths through her burning nostrils and raw throat, and sudde
nly Tess was aware, back in her own mind and body. She realized she was under the dock and holding onto a pylon. Her face was covered in water-diluted blood from a wound to the left side of her skull.

Dreux! In terror, Tess looked at the dock overhead and distinctly heard the tap and squeak of footsteps circling the landing. He was looking in the water for her body. She had been lucky enough to surface under the dock in the middle o
f an aerial bombardment, and the noise had covered her retching, spluttering return from near-drowning. But the sky was quiet again, so Tess struggled to silence her breathing. She clamped her hand over her mouth to hold in a whimper of fear as she realized he had stopped directly above her. He gave a sigh and series of dull thuds followed. Tess wondered frantically what he was doing, and then the realization hit. He was kneeling down to look under the dock.

Tess took a deep silent breath and forced herself under the water. She shimmied down the pylon and held onto it so she would not float upward too soon. Her lungs were exploding, her head was exploding, and her heart was exploding. When she felt herself close to fainting, she shot upward. Still holding her breath, she looked up in terror, but the old man was
not there. A new medley of fireworks exploded, and Tess took a ragged, grateful lungful of air.

“Well, that takes care of that,” commented Dreux’s voice
from somewhere above her, freezing Tess in terror. There was a large splash as he threw something in the water—the rock he’d used to hit her, she concluded.

She listened as he shuffled back along the dock, dropping something light that clattered and rolled to a stop. It was her empty plastic wine glass. He knelt next to the glass and hit the dock with something that showered dust and splinters into the water. Tess saw a flash of pyrotechnic light glint on the shiny patent-leather tip of her sandal heel protruding b
etween the boards.

His footsteps retreated over the planks and vanished. Was Dreux gone so she could climb out of the brown current? She was beginning to shiver with cold and
shock. A new round of rockets shot into the sky so that bright bursts of sparkling light danced on the water—and turned her blood to ice. The fireworks’ flash generated a series of red reflective sparks at the waterline: alligator eyes.

Tess could
not hold in the whimper of fear. Uncle Joe’s cheery swamp-tour descriptions of “death rolls” and drowned prey in “meat lockers” echoed in her brain. Were the beasts moving toward her? Were they already swimming under her? Was a great pair of jaws about to pull her down to its meat locker? 

It no longer
mattered that Dreux might still be close enough to see her; she began to splash frantically toward the shore. She quickly reached the bank and realized that it was too steep and slippery to mount. Although the edge of the dock was tantalizingly low to the water, she did not have the upper-body strength to haul herself upward. Tess sobbed in frustration and terror, and refused to look behind her. She could imagine a gang of grinning alligators advancing, scaly tails waving lazily and eyes like red embers.

The next pyrotechnic flowering began, and its phosphorescence showed Tess her salv
ation. Just a few feet away, the matted roots of a large tree extended out from the bank and dangled into the current. She swam to the fibrous ladder and began to claw upward, ignoring torn nails and scratched flesh.

  As she reached for the last black rung of root to pull her aching body onto the bank, it seemed to writhe and move. She blinked in confusion. Then she realized that the black root, like a fairy tale shape-shifter, had transformed itself into a large black snake. The shock al
most sent her flailing backward into the water, but some extinct of self-preservation stopped her from releasing her hard-won perch. She drew her hand back carefully, and the ersatz root slithered into the water and departed with a sinuous ripple.

She began to worm her way upward again and crawled a few feet forward onto the mu
ddy bank. She began to retch up a brew of brown water and picnic food. Her arms trembled so badly from vertigo and pain that she was afraid she was going to faint in her own vomit, so she shakily crawled a few more feet and collapsed. She rolled onto her back and dizzily blinked at the sky. A great golden orb of sparks boomed, bloomed and haloed the black crown of her savior tree.

She reached up tentatively to probe the left side of her head and
nearly passed out from the jolt of pain. She closed her eyes until a bout of nausea passed. She heaved in several deep breaths and licked her lips. They tasted of mud and blood, and the mineral saltiness had a strangely catalyzing effect. It made her furious. Somewhere Phil Dreux was smugly celebrating.

“Get up.
Stop that bastard.”

Tess rolled to her hands and knees and crawled to the closest tree trunk. Holding onto the rough bark, she raised
slowly to a standing position. She waited until her head stopped spinning and began to walk. Weaving and pausing to lean against the obliging old oaks, she followed the gravel path’s glowing pools of lighting toward the sound of band music and laughter. As soon as she stepped on the sharp gravel, she realized she’d lost both her shoes, but the discomfort was minor compared to her overall throbbing misery.