Lucky's Lady (6 page)

Serena kept one eye on the alligator and both hands firmly clamped to the edge of the seat. “For your information, my sister and I are nothing alike.”

“I know what your sister is like.”

The cold dislike in his statement made her glance over her shoulder at him. “How? I can't imagine the two of you run in the same social circles.”

Lucky said nothing. That mental door slammed closed again. Serena thought she could almost hear it bang shut. He looked past her, as if she had ceased to exist, his face a stony mask. His silence left her free to draw her own conclusions.

Perhaps Shelby had made some kind of public statement against poachers or places like Mosquito Mouton's. It would be like Shelby to get on a soapbox and publicly antagonize people she thought of as unsavory. Her views would be met with widespread approval among the upstanding members of the community, something that would appeal enormously to her ego. Shelby had always required a great deal of attention and praise, and had been willing to go to whatever length she needed to get those things. It wouldn't have been beyond her to pick on a man as dangerous as Lucky Doucet. She would have considered the potential for self-aggrandizement long before giving a thought to the potential for trouble.

Serena wondered if her sister had any idea she'd made an enemy of a man who carried a hunting knife the size of a scimitar.

They moved on up the bayou, the silence of the swamp as heavy and oppressive as the heat. The denser the vegetation became, the more overwhelming the stillness. It played on Serena's nerves, tightening them so that something as innocent as the “quock” of heron set them humming.

The deeper they penetrated into the wilderness, the less it looked like man had ever intruded upon it. The most conspicuous sign of human habitation Serena saw was the occasional slip of colored plastic ribbon tied to a branch to mark the location of a crawfish trap.

Lucky pulled up beside one of these—a red ribbon tied to the branch of a willow sapling—and set about emptying the dip net set in the shallow water beneath it. The thin mesh was brimming with red crawfish. He raided four nets along the same bank, emptying their contents into the onion sacks he had stored in the bow of the pirogue, going about his task as if Serena were nothing more than an annoying piece of cargo he had to step around. She watched him with interest, not daring to ask if the traps he was harvesting were his.

“Are we nearly there?” she asked as Lucky once again began to pole the pirogue north, then east.

“Nearly. You'll know when we're just about onto Gifford's.”

“I doubt it. It's been years since I've been out here.”

“You'll know,” he said assuredly.

“How?”

“By the gunshots.”

Serena made a face. “That's ridiculous. Old Lawrence said something about people getting shot at too. I know my grandfather can be cantankerous, but shooting at people? That's absurd. Why would he shoot at people?”

“To scare them off.”

“And why would he want to scare people off?”

“So they'll leave him alone.”

Serena shook her head impatiently. “I don't understand any of this. In the first place, it's not like Giff to desert the plantation for so long a time, not even during crawfish season.”

“He's got his reasons,” Lucky said enigmatically.

Serena gave him a long, searching look. She didn't like the idea of this man knowing more about her family's concerns than she did. It made her feel like the outsider. It also threw a glaring spotlight on her deficiencies as a granddaughter. She didn't come home often enough, didn't keep up with the local news, didn't call as often as she should. The list of venial sins went on, adding to her feelings of guilt. Still, she couldn't keep herself from asking the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

“And just what do you think those reasons are, Mr. Doucet?” she queried, looking up at him.

His face remained impassive. “Ask Gifford, if you want to know. I don't get involved in other people's lives.”

“How convenient for you. You have no one to worry about, no one to answer to except yourself.”

“That's right, sugar.”

“Then what are you doing bringing me out here when you would clearly rather have come alone?”

Lucky scowled at her, his black brows pulling together like twin thunderheads above his eyes. When he spoke his voice was soft and silky with warning. “Don' you go tryin' to get inside my head, Dr. Sheridan.”

Serena rolled her eyes. “God forbid. I'm sure I'd rather fall into a snake pit.”

One and the same thing,
chérie
, Lucky said to himself, but he refrained from speaking that thought, knowing it was the kind of statement a psychologist would pounce on. He was managing just fine. If everyone would just butt the hell out of his life, he would be great.

“How come you don' know Gifford's reasons for comin' out here?” he asked, going on the offensive. “Don' you ever talk to your grandpapa on the telephone? Mebbe you don' care what goes on down here. Mebbe you don' care about this place or Chanson du Terre, eh?”

“What kind of question is that?” Serena bristled, rising to the bait like a bass to a fly. “Of course I care about Chanson du Terre. It's my family home.”

Lucky shrugged. “I don't see you livin' there, sugar.”

“Where I live is none of your concern.”

“That's right. Just like it's none of my concern if someone wants to come in and flatten the place with bulldozers. It's not my family what's lived and worked on that land two-hundred-some years.”

Serena stared up at him, feeling as if she'd been hit in the chest with a hammer. “What do you mean, flatten the place? What are you talking about?”

“Chanson du Terre, angel. Your sister wants to sell it to Tristar Chemicals.”

“That's absurd!” she exclaimed, laughing at the sheer lunacy of the statement. “Shelby wouldn't want to sell Chanson du Terre any more than Scarlett O'Hara would put Tara on the market! You obviously
don't
know my sister. It would never happen. Never.”

She went on chuckling at the idea, shaking her head, trying to ignore the terrible certainty in Lucky's eyes as he stared down at her. The look was meant to assure her of the fact that he knew many things she didn't have a clue about. A part of her rejected the notion outright, but another part of her churned with a sudden strange apprehension.

At any rate, there was no time to question or argue the issue, because as they rounded a bend in the bayou there came the sudden deafening explosion of a shotgun—firing at them.

CHAPTER
                        

5

SERENA HAD NO TROUBLE MANAGING A SCREAM THIS
time. She shrieked, dropping to her knees on the floor of the pirogue and covering her head with her arms as buckshot hit the bayou in front of them, spewing muddy water and bits of shredded lily pad everywhere.

Her first thought was that they were being set upon by one of the honest men Lucky had been poaching from. Perhaps even the rightful owner of the crawfish squirming in the onion sacks two feet from her nose. She expected to hear another volley of shots and wondered if Lucky had a gun tucked away someplace to defend them with. But the initial
boom
faded away. In the ensuing silence, she lifted her head a few inches and peeked out between her fingers.

Gifford stood on the bank, legs spread, the smoking gun cradled loosely in his big hands. He was a tall, well-built man who didn't look anywhere near his age except for his thick head of snow-white hair, one lock of which insisted on tumbling rakishly across his broad forehead. With his square shoulders and trim waist, he still looked fit enough to wrestle a bear and win. His bold features were set in a characteristically fierce expression—bushy white brows lowered, square chin jutting forward aggressively. His nose was large and permanently red from years spent in the fields under the relentless southern sun.

“Goddammit, Lucky!” he bellowed, his voice a booming baritone that rivaled the shotgun for volume. “I thought you were that bastard Burke!”

“Naw,” Lucky called back calmly, poling the boat forward as if getting shot at didn't affect him in the least. “You might wanna shoot me anyway, though, when you see what I brought you.”

Serena rose up on her knees, snapping her head around to give him the evil eye before turning back toward her grandfather. She pushed her hair out of her eyes with one hand, hanging on to the side of the pirogue with the other to steady herself. Conflicting emotions shoved together in her chest like a logjam as she looked at the man who had essentially raised her. With adrenaline still pumping through her veins and the sound of the shotgun blast still ringing in her ears, anger took precedence for the moment.

The pirogue slid in beside a weathered dock with gnarled pilings and pitted planks. Serena didn't even wait for the boat to settle. She clambered out of it, awkward in her haste as she pulled herself up onto the rickety wharf. The pirogue scooted away as she pushed off from it and she slipped and hit her shin but managed to keep from falling back into the muddy shallows. Dirty, disheveled, with blood seeping into the previously immaculate white cotton of her pant leg and her hair tumbling in disarray around her shoulders, she stormed for shore, limping.

“Dammit, Gifford, what the hell do you think you're doing? Shooting at people! My God!”

Gifford scowled at her. “Jesus Christ. What the hell kind of language is that for a lady to use?”

“The kind I learned from you!” Serena shot back. She planted herself in front of him, her hands on her hips, staring up at him with as much defiance as she could muster.

“Well, hell,” Gifford muttered. There wasn't any way around that one. He cracked the shotgun open and extracted a shell, which he slipped into the breast pocket of his faded chambray workshirt. “I'll bet you don't use that kind of language up in Charleston.”

“I'm not up in Charleston.”

“For once,” he said with a snort. “What are you doing out here?” he asked, frowning down at Serena again. “I sure as hell never expected to see you riding around the swamp in a pirogue.”

“Believe me, it's not my idea of fun,” Serena said, shooting a glare Lucky's way. “I can think of a lot better things to do with my free time and much more pleasant company to do them with.”

“She takes exception to my temperament,” Lucky said with a sardonic smile as he approached, an onion bag of crawfish swinging from his fist.

“Among other things,” Serena muttered.

Lucky stopped beside her, dropped the bag at his feet, and lit the cigarette dangling from his lip, his eyes on Serena the whole time.

He tilted his head back and blew a thin stream of smoke into the air. “Guess I'm gonna have to go back to charm school for a refresher course,” he drawled laconically.

“Don't you believe him, Miz 'Rena,” Pepper Fontenot said with a gravelly chuckle as he ambled toward them from his lawn chair. Pepper was a thin, wiry man with the same pitch-dark skin and light eyes as his sister, the formidable Odille. He had somehow managed to sustain a very merry personality despite having lived with Odille his entire life, and wore his wide smile as comfortably as he wore his faded old coveralls. He slapped Lucky on the shoulder. “He charm the hide off a 'gator, dis one, if he be of a mind to.”

Serena arched a brow at Lucky. “He must not have been of a mind, then.”

“Mebbe it was the company,” Lucky said through his teeth.

Quelling the juvenile urge to stick her tongue out at him, Serena turned back toward her grandfather. “You might tell me you're glad to see me,” she said, not quite able to hide her hurt at his cool reception.

“I might say it once I find out what you're doing here.”

“What
I'm
doing here!” she exclaimed, splaying a hand across her chest. “I'm here because you took off without a word of explanation to anybody. I come down for a visit and the first thing I'm told is that you moved yourself out here two weeks ago and haven't been heard from since. What was I supposed to do? Say, ‘Oh, gee, too bad I missed him' and just go on with my vacation? My God, Gifford, you could have been dead for all we knew!”

“Well, I'm not,” he snapped. “If that's all you came to find out, you can go on home now. You aren't going to inherit for a while yet if I can help it.”

“What kind of a rotten thing is that to say?”

“It's the kind of thing a man starts saying when he's nigh onto eighty with a bum ticker and a couple of ungrateful granddaughters.”

He snapped the shotgun closed with a decisive click, turned, and walked away.

Serena stood there, dumbfounded, watching him walk up the slight incline toward the cabin. Every time she saw Gifford in the flesh she was stunned by how badly she wanted his love and approval and how badly it hurt when he didn't offer them freely. It was as if the instant she encountered him, the child in her revived itself.

She was tired and frustrated, hungry and dirty. All she wanted to do was snuggle into her grandfather's embrace and let go of the determination that had gotten her this far. She wanted to be able to tremble and have Giff soothe her fears away as he had when she'd been a little girl, but that wasn't an option. She wasn't a child anymore, and Gifford hadn't been sympathetic to her fear of the swamp for a long, long time.

When she hadn't gotten over it after what he thought was a reasonable amount of time, his understanding had metamorphosed into a subtle disapproval and disappointment that had colored their relationship ever since. He thought she was a coward. Watching him walk away, she wished he could have realized how much courage it had taken her to get this far.

“Yeah, there's just nothin' quite so heartwarmin' as a family reunion,” Lucky muttered, his eyes also on Gifford's back as the old man walked away.

Serena glared at him. “Butt out, Doucet.” She stomped after her grandfather, her espadrilles squishing in the damp, spongy dirt that constituted the front yard.

The cabin was a simple rectangular structure covered with tan asphalt shingles. It was set up a few feet off the ground on sturdy cypress stilts to save it from the inevitable spring flooding. The roof was made of corrugated tin striped with rust. A stovepipe stuck up through it at a jaunty angle. The front door was painted a shade of aqua that hurt the eyes. There were no curtains at the two small front windows.

The cabin had never contained any amenities, certainly nothing that could have been considered “decorating” unless one included mounted racks of antlers. Serena doubted that had changed since the last time she'd been out here. The hunting lodge was one of those male bastions where anything aesthetically pleasing was frowned on as unmanly. Gifford undoubtedly still used the same old tacky, tattered furniture that hadn't been good enough for the Salvation Army store twenty years earlier. The floor of the two-room structure was probably still covered with the same hideous gray linoleum, the kind of indestructable stuff that promises to last forever and unfortunately does.

Serena wasn't going to find out immediately. Gifford didn't go to the door of the cabin. He climbed partway up the stairs, then turned around and plunked himself down with his gun across his lap as if he meant to block the way. Serena's step faltered just long enough so that the two old blue tick hounds that had jogged out from behind the woodshed could jump up on her and add their paw prints to the front of her shirt. She groaned and shooed them away, scolding them.

“You used to love them dogs,” Gifford grumbled, scowling at her disapprovingly. “I suppose they don't allow hounds like that up in Charleston.”

Serena shook a finger at him as she came to stand at the foot of the steps. “Don't you start that with me, Gifford. Don't you start in on how Charleston has changed me.”

“Well, it has, goddammit.”

“That's not what I came out here to discuss with you.”

Gifford swore long and colorfully. “A man can't get a scrap of peace these days,” he said, addressing the world at large. “I came out here to get away from people, not to form some pansy-ass discussion group.”

Serena ignored his protest and pressed on. “It's not like you to just take off, especially this time of year. There's too much work to be done around the plantation.”

He rolled his big shoulders and looked down at his feet. “That's what I've got Arnaud for. He's the manager, hell, let him manage. Tired old men like me are supposed to take off and go fishing.”

“When you knew I was coming to visit?” Serena pushed the hurt away with an effort and gave an unlady-like snort. “Since when are you a tired old man?”

“Since I figured out I don't have an heir who gives a rat's ass about everything I've broke my back for.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Gifford!” she snapped. “What are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about you living eight hundred miles away and your sister ready to sell the old place at the drop of a hat. That's what I'm talking about.”

“What is this nonsense about Shelby wanting to sell Chanson du Terre?” she demanded irritably. “I've never heard anything more ludicrous in my life. Ever since we were little girls she's talked about growing up and getting married and living on the plantation. She wouldn't dream of selling it!”

“Well, that just shows how out of touch you are with your own family, young lady,” Gifford announced piously.

“Oh, for the love of Mike!” Serena cut herself off abruptly, not trusting herself to say anything more until she reined her temper in a notch. She clamped her mouth shut and paced back and forth along the base of the stairs, her arms banded tightly across her as if to keep herself from exploding.

“Honestly, I don't know what to think,” she muttered more to herself than to Gifford. “People telling me Shelby's lost her senses and wants to sell Chanson du Terre. Shelby tells me she thinks you've gone senile—”

“Senile!” Gifford launched himself off his step like a rocket, shooting up to his full height. His craggy face turned an unhealthy shade of maroon. “By God, that tears it! Is that what you've come out here for, Serena? Is this a professional visit? You out here to see if the old man's lost his marbles? Then y'all can get that candy-ass lawyer husband of Shelby's to have me declared incompetent, sell the old place, and live off the sweat of my carcass— By damn— By God—I won't have it!”

He clutched the railing with one hand and the shotgun with the other and hissed a breath in through his teeth, struggling suddenly for air.

Serena rushed up the steps, her own heart thundering in alarm. “For God's sake, Gifford, sit down!”

He complied without argument, his knees buckling, backside hitting the old step with a thump. The tension went out of his muscles. His wide shoulders sagged and he drew in a ragged deep breath. He fished around in his shirt pocket for a pill, pulling out the shotgun slug and tossing it carelessly aside.

Serena kneeled at his feet, shaking all over. She pressed her hands against her lips and struggled not to cry, realizing for the very first time just how old he was, just how mortal. She watched him stick a little pill under his tongue and held her breath as his color faded slowly from red to pale gray. He seemed to age twenty years before her eyes, his incredible inner fire dimming like a flame that had been abruptly turned down.

“You all right, Giff?” Lucky said, his dark voice shot through with tension. Serena realized with a start he was on the step right behind her. He leaned down to get a look at Gifford's face, laying a hand on her shoulder in a manner that might have been intended as comforting.

Gifford muttered one of his more virulent oaths.

Pepper stuck his head in under the stair railing and flashed a smile of relief. “He kin cuss like dat, he all right. He stops cussin', him, den you ax him if he be dead.”

“Smartass,” Gifford growled.

Pepper gave a hoarse laugh and withdrew to snatch the squirming bag of crawfish away from the inquisitive coon hounds that were sniffing and pawing at it.

Serena felt herself sag with relief. She couldn't stop herself from reaching a hand up to touch her grandfather's knee, just to reassure herself. “You ought to go in and lie down, Giff. We can talk later.”

“I don't need to lie down,” the old man snapped. “Just a little dizzy spell, that's all. Christ, I don't know who wouldn't be dizzy with all this going on around them. It makes me so damn mad, I can't see straight half the time. I make one remark about selling, and your sister, who couldn't sell ice water in hell, runs right out and finds a buyer. Judas H. Priest. And where are you? Off shrinking heads in Carolina, as if there aren't enough lunatics in Lou'siana to go around.”