Lucky's Lady (12 page)

Burke leaned down, bracing his hands on the side of the boat, his gaze intent on Lucky's face. “You tell your friend to start cooperating, then, son,” the Texan said, also speaking softly, as if the weight of the subject required a tone of conspiracy. “My company has gone to a lot of trouble to choose that site, and they mean to have it.”

“Is that supposed to be a threat?”

“It's a fact, son.”

The words hit him wrong. Burke's tone, his voice, his accent, his air of command, all conspired against him in Lucky's mind. For a split second he was back in Central America taking orders from a big Texan who had sold him down the river, a lieutenant colonel who had been using his covert operations team to make himself a bundle. Lucky had uncovered the man for the traitor he was, but not before spending a year in hell. That all came back to him in a flash, and the reins of control slipped a little through his mental fingers.

“You know, there's a lotta things I'm not too sure of,” he said to Burke, a chilling smile curving his mouth. “But there's one thing I do know for certain.” In the blink of an eye the smile was gone. He grabbed the knot of Burke's tie and gave it a yank, pulling the man down toward him so they were nose to nose. “I'm not your son.”

The Tristar rep was over the side of the boat and diving headfirst into the bayou before he could register a protest. He landed in the water like a whale and came up spitting mud.

“You hadn't ought to lean over the side that way,
mon ami
,” Lucky said, wading casually toward the shore. “You might fall in. You fall in, there's no tellin' what might get you in this water.”

As if he had conjured it up by magic to illustrate his point, a water snake slid out of some reeds near the bank. Burke swore and scrambled to get back over the side of the boat. Davis helped him, grabbing him by the back of his pants and hauling him up, shouting at Lucky all the while.

“I mean it, Doucet! I've had it with you running roughshod! Your days out here are numbered.”

Lucky made a face and waved him off. Serena met him on the bank, glaring up at him. Color had come back into her cheeks, he noticed.

“Can't you show respect for anybody?” she asked sarcastically.

“
Mais yeah
,” he said flippantly. “My
maman
, my
papa
, the Pope. Len Burke ain't the Pope, sugar. I don't think he's even a good Catholic.” He gave her an infuriating indulgent look. Behind them the motor of the game warden's boat roared to life, then faded into the distance.

“That's it,” Serena declared, stopping in her tracks. She threw her hands up in a gesture of defeat. “I've had it. There's something about this place that drives people over the edge. I can't stand it. Gifford is going around shooting at people. You— You're—” She couldn't finish the sentence, she was so upset. She gave in to the urge to stamp her foot. It seemed she could control little or nothing out there—not the situation, not her fears or her passions or her temper, least of all her guide.

“This whole situation is just ridiculous,” she said, pacing a short stretch of bank, her arms crossed tightly against her. “Why didn't Shelby call me? Why didn't she just explain all this to me to begin with?”

“Gee,” Lucky said with mock innocence. “Could it be she didn't want you to know? Could it be she thought she might pull off the deal without having you know a thing about it until it was too late?”

Serena shot him a look from the corner of her eye. “Oh, for Pete's sake, you make it sound like a big conspiracy.”

“That's because it
is
a big conspiracy, sugar,” he said, leaning back against the trunk of a massive live oak. He shook a cigarette out of the pack from his shirt pocket and dangled it from his lip without lighting it.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Serena snapped. “You're trying to tell me Shelby is in league with the Tristar people to drive her own grandfather from his land?”

Lucky shrugged. “
C'est bien
. You got it in one. It's a sweet deal. She gets a nice fat commission on the sale and her inheritance besides. On top of that, she and the politically ambitious Mr. Talbot bring industry to a town with a depressed economy. There's nothing like a local hero in an election year, you know.”

Serena planted herself squarely in front of him, settling in for the argument. “You're way off base. In the first place, Mason doesn't have an ambitious bone in his body. If he were any more laid-back, someone would have him interred.”

“You heard your grandpapa,
chère
. The powers that be want Talbot in office. His daddy wants him in office. Shelby wants him in office. You think he's gonna tell all those people no? You think Shelby would let him?”

“You make my sister sound like Lady Macbeth. Shelby is hardly that calculating or devious.”

Lucky knew exactly how devious and calculating Shelby could be, but he didn't give voice to his own experiences. He used Serena's instead. “Isn't she? Are you forgetting what you told me last night? She left you out here alone. You could have been killed.”

“That was an accident, a joke that went wrong.”

“Was it?”

Serena dodged his steady gaze. He was dredging up old hurts inside her and they had no place here. Besides, no one had been more relieved than Shelby when Serena had been found after her ordeal. Her sister had wept at her hospital bedside and had begged her forgiveness . . . and she had thrown her fear of the swamp, the fear that had resulted from that incident, up in her face time and again since then.

Serena shrugged off the grain of doubt trying to insinuate itself into her mind. Her feelings toward her twin were complicated enough already; she didn't need Lucky's dark suspicions adding to the morass.

“Stop trying to turn me against my own sister,” she said irritably. “I'm sure you have every reason to be paranoid, considering the kind of life you lead, but I refuse to fall into that kind of thinking.”

“You shrinks have a word for that too, don't you?” Lucky said, arching a brow. “Denial?”

“Talk about denial,” Serena grumbled, changing the subject as she resumed her pacing. She threw a fuming look up at the cabin. “I can't believe Gifford. He says he's dealing with this
his
way. He's not dealing with it at all. He's making me—”

She broke off as the realization hit her like a brick square in the forehead. Making her deal with it
was
his way of dealing with it. He wanted to force her into caring more about the plantation. He wanted her to take up the banner and fight for the cause, and in doing so revive her sense of tradition and duty. God, he had even lured her into the swamp, the place she had lived in fear of for fifteen years.

“That old fox,” she muttered, planting her hands on her hips. “That old son of a boot.”

He had manipulated her as neatly as a chess master, and now there was no honorable way out. She was involved and she would have to do her best to resolve the situation or lose face with Gifford again. She might have run the risk of incurring his wrath, but she couldn't bear the thought of facing his disappointment in her. He had bet on that and won, the old horse thief.

“Take me back,” she said suddenly, turning toward Lucky. “Take me back to Chanson du Terre. I have to talk with Shelby. I'll straighten this mess out as best as I can. But if Gifford thinks he can guilt me into staying here forever, he can just think again.”

CHAPTER
                        

9

LUCKY DROPPED HER OFF AT HIS HOUSE, TELLING
her he would be back in an hour to pick her up and return her to Chanson du Terre. Serena watched him pole away, then let herself inside. It was silent and cool. One of the baby raccoons peered in the back door at her, its long front paws pressed to the screen. When Serena moved toward it, the coon whinnied and scampered away, its claws clattering on the wooden floor of the gallery, making the exact sound that had scared her witless the night before.

She set her suitcases by the front door, then raided Lucky's small refrigerator and made herself a ham sandwich, taking great care to make certain the kitchen was as spotless when she was finished as it had been to begin with. When that small task was accomplished, she still had forty minutes to wait.

Her mind turned to the question of what she would find awaiting her at Chanson du Terre. It all seemed so unlikely. Mason running for office. Shelby plotting against Giff. The plantation's existence threatened.

Bulldozers, Lucky had said. Tristar would raze the place to make room for labs, offices, manufacturing facilities, warehouses. The possibility, as remote as it was, hit Serena in a tender spot. That old house had borne silent witness to a lot of history. It had seen the last days of French rule in Louisiana, the golden era before the war. Yankees had camped on the lawn, and the staircase still bore the marks where a drunken officer had ridden his horse up it. It had survived the Reconstruction and the Great Depression. Had it survived all that only to fall victim to greed?

No. Of course not. The current situation would be cleared up and life would go on at Chanson du Terre with Gifford ruling the roost as he had for nearly sixty years.

And when Gifford was gone and Shelby was off in Baton Rouge and Serena was back in Charleston . . . what then?

“Oh, no, you don't,” Serena muttered, pushing herself up from her place at the table. This was exactly what Gifford wanted—to rouse her sentimental streak.

Instead, she turned her mind to another puzzle—Lucky. She wandered the two rooms of his cottage, trying to discern as much as she could about him from the things she found. It was an exercise in perception and reasoning, she told herself, not simple curiosity about the man.

What she found in examining Lucky's lair was almost nothing. Utilitarian furnishings that happened to be antique. Nothing frivolous, nothing personal, nothing more revealing than a respect for his heritage and a need for order. He kept no books in sight, no magazines, no photographs, no art on the walls. But that in itself was a revelation. He was a man in hiding. His house was hidden. In his house, everything personal was hidden. He let nothing of his inner self show if he could help it at all.

Why was that? It didn't seem like a wholly natural reticence. It seemed more as if he had carefully constructed a maze of walls around himself for protection. What would a man like Lucky need protection from? He seemed so tough, so self-reliant. And yet there were the contradictions. He gave food to orphaned raccoons. He had defended her to Gifford. He had held her when she had felt miserable and afraid.

She opened the tall door of the armoire in the dining room. The shelves of the cupboard were stocked with only the kind of things one would expect to find in a dining room. Serena groaned a little in disappointment and hesitated a moment before crossing into the other room, which was, with the exception of the quality of the furnishings, barren as a monk's cell.

“Jackpot,” she whispered as she swung open the door of the large armoire that stood opposite the foot of the bed.

The closet had a column of cubbyholes along the left side, with an area for hanging clothes on the right. A set of three deep drawers created the base. She glanced over his wardrobe, which consisted of jeans, fatigue pants, T-shirts, and an army dress uniform with a chest full of decorations. The uniform interested her, but the smaller shelves on the left drew Serena's immediate attention.

They held framed photographs. The Doucet family captured at all different times of their lives. There was a sepiatoned wedding picture of his parents—a handsome, smiling couple gazing at each other with love. There was a battered black and white snapshot of his father standing with his hand on the shoulder of a gangly boy who was proudly displaying a trophy-size fish and a gap-toothed grin. Lucky, she assumed, looking much younger and lighter of heart. There were more recent photos of other members of the clan, unmistakable by their resemblance to one another, children of various ages, chubby babies in frilly baptism gowns, and grade-schoolers taking first communion in their Sunday best with their faces shining and their cowlicks slicked into submission.

Serena felt her heart melt a little as she looked at the photographs. Lucky had a family and he loved them. He wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of framing the pictures if he hadn't cared deeply. Why did he isolate himself from them? Shelby had said his parents were nice people, respectable people. Did Lucky feel unworthy of them because of the life he led? Or was there something else that made him feel separate?

She reached out to touch the photograph of Lucky and his father, brushing her fingertips over the smiling face of the boy he had been. What had happened to that boy to put shadows in his eyes? What events had turned him into the dangerous, brooding man he was today?

A yearning to know that was deeper than professional curiosity ached inside Serena. She wanted to know Lucky's secrets, wanted to reach past them to offer him something—solace, comfort. This longing wasn't wise, and it brought her no joy, but she didn't try to deny it. She just stood there, hurting for him, hurting for herself, wishing to God she had never left Charleston.

“Mom sent over a chocolate cake and some cookies and two loaves of French bread she baked today. I just set 'em on the counter.”

Serena shrieked and jumped back from the armoire as if it had suddenly come alive. She swung around with a hand over her heart to keep it from leaping out of her chest. Standing at the entrance to the room was a boy of about thirteen, beanpole-thin in jeans that were too short and a T-shirt that proclaimed Breaux Bridge to be the crawfish capital of the world. His eyes were dark and round with excitement.

“You ain't Lucky,” he blurted out. “But Lucky sure is.”

The instant the remark registered in his brain he flushed a shade of red that rivaled the color of the baseball cap he wore backward on his head.

Serena laughed, more out of relief than anything. “You startled me,” she said, pushing the door of the armoire closed. “Lucky's not here right now. He should be back in about half an hour. I'm Serena Sheridan.”

“Will Guidry.” He came forward hesitantly, started to offer her his hand but stopped midway to check it for dirt. Finding it relatively clean, he stuck it out in front of him again, looking as if he fully expected contact with her to give him a painful shock.

“It's nice to meet you, Will.” Serena gave his hand a firm shake and released it. “Would you care to wait for Lucky to come back?”

“Um—well—no—that's okay,” the youth stammered. He jammed his hands into his pants pockets and shuffled his oversize feet, staring down at them as if they were the most amazing sight he'd come across recently. “I was just leavin' off some stuff. Mom says she knows he won't take nothing—” He grimaced and corrected himself. “Won't take
any
thing for runnin' them poachers off our crawfish nets, but she said the least she could do was bake him somethin' nice seein' as how he lives out here all alone—” He broke off and winced again, as if some unseen etiquette monitor was smacking him with a switch every time he goofed up. “I mean, he
did
live alone until you— But then, maybe you aren't—I mean, this could just be— Aw, hell—I mean,
heck
—”

Serena stared at him, everything inside her going still. “What did you say?” she asked softly, ignoring the boy's red-faced embarrassment. “Did you say ‘running poachers off'?”

Will shuffled his sneakers and shrugged, giving her a look that told her he suspected she might be a little odd. “Well, yeah. That's sorta what he does.”

“But I thought—” Serena cut herself off, snapping her mouth shut with an audible click.

She had thought what Lucky had wanted her to think. She had taken one look at him and assumed he was an outlaw, and he had let her believe it, had reinforced that image every chance he'd gotten. This was certainly her day to feel like a fool.

“We been havin' some trouble, you know,” Will said somberly, scratching his bony elbow. “My dad's gone down to the Gulf to look for work, so it's just Mom and us kids to home. Poachers figured our nets would be easy pickin'. Lucky showed 'em different.”

“Lucky,” Serena murmured. Big bad Lucky Doucet. Savior of orphaned animals. Defender of the defenseless. Not poaching, but chasing poachers away from the nets of women and children.

“He's some kind of man,” Will said happily. “But I guess you already know that.” His gaze dropped abruptly and he turned red again. He was at the age where nearly everything struck him as a sexual innuendo, and every social blunder seemed catastrophic. He looked at Serena with horror. “I didn't mean that you'd
know
. I meant, you know . . .”

“I know,” she said absently, still too stunned to take much pity on the poor kid.

If Lucky wasn't a poacher, then why had he let her believe he was? And why the antipathy between him and the game warden? Maybe they simply didn't like each other. Maybe Lucky didn't think Perry Davis was doing a good enough job. There could have been any number of reasons, not all of them good. Just because he wasn't a poacher didn't mean he wasn't guilty of something. There was still the matter of the illegal liquor and the room upstairs he didn't want her to see.

“Anyhow,” Will said, gulping down his embarrassment. “I oughta be goin'.” He shuffled backward toward the door, swinging a long, bony arm in the direction of the kitchen. “I just left the stuff on the counter.”

“Yes, thank you. I'm sure Lucky will appreciate it,” Serena said, resurrecting her manners and her smile. “It was nice meeting you, Will.”

He blushed and shrugged, ducking his head and grinning shyly. “Yeah, you too. See ya 'round.”

He bolted out the front door and loped across the yard to a canoe beached on the bank of the bayou. Serena wandered out onto the gallery and waved to him as he paddled away. Even from a distance she could see him blush. Adolescence. What hell. She shook her head in a combination of amusement and sympathy, and wondered what Lucky might have been like at that age.

As if she didn't have enough to figure out about the grown man. If he wasn't a poacher, then what was he? A bootlegger? A gun runner with a heart of gold?

Her gaze drifted across the porch to the stairs that led up to the overhanging
grenier
, the forbidden room.

Never you mind what I keep up here. . . . It's nothing for a pretty shrink to go
sniffing through. . . . You're a helluva lot better off not knowing.

She was better off not knowing, or he was safer if she didn't know?

She was on the steps before she could tell herself not to go on. Whether it was a need to understand the man that compelled her, or a need to justify her attraction to him, she didn't try to discern. In fact, she tried not to think at all. Almost as if they belonged to someone else's body, she watched her feet ascend one step at a time, watched her hand reach for the doorknob and turn it, watched the door swing back.

Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw. Not in her wildest imagination had she suspected this. She thought she had been prepared for anything—crates of guns, bales of drugs, boxes of stolen goods—but she hadn't been at all prepared for beauty, for art.

The room was ringed with paintings. Canvases, stacked three deep, leaned back against the walls. An easel took center stage in the open, airy room. On it was propped a work in progress.

Serena wandered into the room, gazing all around her in a daze. Unlike the first floor, the attic was not divided, but was one large room with windows at either gable end and skylights punctuating the ceiling on the north side. The light that filtered in through the blinds was soft and dusty-looking, spilling onto the floor in oblong bars of gold. There was a long workbench against one wall, loaded with jars of brushes and tubes of paint, sketch pads, pencils, paint-spotted rags. A heavy sheet of canvas served as rug and dropcloth, covering a large area of the wooden floor surrounding the easel. The smell of oil paint and mineral spirits hung heavy in the air like cheap perfume.

So this was Lucky's deep dark secret. He was an artist.

Serena walked around the edge of the dropcloth, trying to take in the paintings propped against the wall. They depicted the swamp as a solitary place of trees and mist, capturing the stillness, the sense of waiting. They were beautiful, hauntingly, powerfully beautiful, filled with a dark tension and an aching sense of loneliness. They were magnificent and terrifying.

She stood before one that featured a single white egret, the great bird looking small and insignificant among the columns of gray cypress trunks and tattered banners of gray moss and smoke-gray morning mist. She stood there in the hot, stuffy room and felt as if the painting were drawing her in and swallowing her whole. She could feel the chill of the mist, could smell the swamp, could hear the distant cries of birds.

All the paintings shared that ability to draw the viewer into the center of the swamp and the center of the artist's anguish. They were extraordinary.

“Oh, Lucky,” she whispered as understanding dawned painfully inside her. She closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her face.

This was what he hadn't wanted, for her to see beyond the façade of macho bravado, not because he was ashamed of what she would find, but because it was too personal, too private. He wasn't a man who would easily share his inner self; she'd known that all along. But she had never suspected his inner self would be so tender, so full of pain and longing.