Wolfsbane Read online

  “War heroes don’t mean much to young Americans,” he had tried to warn her. “And Americans don’t understand mercenaries. Don’t think marrying me is going to bring you lots of fame and glory. ’Cause it’s not going to happen.”

  She had not believed him.

  With the marriage deteriorating almost from the start, Pat began turning to the bottle and the brawls. Now, sober, he looked out into the darkness.

  “Five years gone,” he muttered. “Five years lost and I can’t remember, clearly, a year of it.”

  But, he promised, I’m going to do better from now on.

  He was still wondering why this sudden change had swept over him as he went to bed.

  He dreamed of the rescue mission, bringing back Captain Simmons. And he dreamed of Simmons’ wife. But he could not put a name to her, or a face to her body.

  Chapter Six

  It was as if a sudden pall had fallen on the small town of Joyeux. Nothing tangible; no horrible tragedies occurring. But it seemed to Sheriff Vallot that the spirit had gone out of many of the town’s residents.

  Not so much the young people, Edan thought, as he sat in his office, boots up on his desk, gazing out the window at the main street of town—although some of them did seem unusually listless and surly—but the older residents of Joyeux, almost to a person, seemed depressed.

  Why? he pondered.

  And petty crime had increased while church attendance was down . . . at all the churches. And married people seemed to be having an undue amount of problems: family disturbances were on the increase. Nothing major, just a lot of little things that kept his people on the run and the small local police department as well.

  Why?

  And those damned sightings of monsters roaming around the edge of town and in the swamps. But it was far too early for them, so why were they cropping up now?

  Unanswered questions.

  Edan looked at the leather pouch on his desk, sighed, and shook his head. He picked up the bag and tucked it in his pocket as he walked out the door of his office to his patrol car.

  The heat hit him in the face like a hot, damp rag and he hurried to his car, quickly turning on the air conditioning. He drove the main street of the parish seat. One of the largest parishes in the state, but with the smallest population because so much of Ducros was swampland and bayous. Rice, sugar cane, and beans planted on the good land. Four towns in the parish, Joyeux the largest. Population: five thousand. Parish population: eight thousand. And it was a mixed population: Indians, blacks, Creoles, Redbones, Cajuns, four Jews, and a bunch of plain old WASPs.

  Ducros was an old parish; one of the first settled inland, and much of the land had been in the same family for two hundred years. No industry. Some abject, dire poverty, and a handful of people worth millions. A few oil wells.

  Edan Vallot drove the parish roads, his mind racing, nibbling at . . . He cursed. Whatever in the hell was wrong in Joyeux?

  He passed Eddie Guilbeau’s fishing lodge. The entrance had a chain across it and there was no sign of life in or around the camp. Something was wrong, Edan thought. He slowed the car and turned around, heading back to the camp. He honked the horn at the chained drive.

  No reply.

  Sheriff Vallot got out of the car and climbed the chain, walking up to the lodge, a feeling of alarm building in him with each step. He knocked on the door, listening to someone—or something—scurry about inside the lodge.

  But no one came to the door.

  “Come on, Eddiel” Edan’s voice was sharper than he intended. “I hear you in there. Open the door. This is Edan—I want to talk to you.”

  The scurrying, scratching sound had stopped.

  Edan tried the door. Unlocked. Cautiously, he pushed open the door and stuck his head inside.

  He pulled his head back outside much quicker than he had stuck it inside. Sweat beaded the young sheriffs forehead, dripping down his face.

  The scurrying sound had been rats.

  Feeding on the pale bodies of Eddie and Jenny Guilbeau.

  Sheriff Vallot walked back to his car, walking on legs that seemed made of rubber. His booted feet occasionally dragged in the shell driveway.

  He called his office, told them to get in touch with the coroner. And have his chief deputy get out to Eddie Guilbeau’s fishing camp. On the double. And don’t say a damn word about this to anybody!

  “Yes, sir,” the dispatcher said.

  Sheriff Vallot did not want to, but he forced himself out of his car and unhooked the chain from one post, letting it drop to the driveway. He walked slowly back up to his house. Unconsciously, his fingers touched the amulet hanging around his neck, under his sweat-soaked shirt, hanging from a leather thong. He jerked his fingers from the charm.

  “Shit, Edan!” he raged at his actions. “You’re getting as bad as an old woman.”

  But before he reached the lodge, he had touched the amulet twice more. And he did not even realize he had done so.

  Chapter Seven

  “Bite marks around the throat,” Doctor Lormand said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, Edan.”

  “Is that the cause of death, Don?” the sheriff asked.

  The two men were the same age. The best of friends. They had gone to high school together and then on to college, remaining friends while Edan was on the sheriffs department and Don was interning at a New Orleans hospital.

  “That’s part of it,” Doctor Lormand said, hedging the question.

  “I don’t need part of it, Don.”

  The doctor looked up at his friend. “They . . . don’t appear to have any blood on them.” He rose from his hasty examination.

  “What the hell happened to it? There isn’t that much blood on the floor.”

  The doctor shrugged.

  “What attacked them, then?”

  “Dogs, I should imagine,” Don replied, but he did not sound very convincing.

  “And then drank the blood!” Edan almost shouted.

  “What the hell do you want from me?” his friend yelled. “Goddamn, Edan—I don’t know! Someone with a very sick mind, perhaps. How about that for a theory? What do you want me to say?”

  The two friends glared at each other for a few seconds; then both of them relaxed, ashamed at their outbursts.

  “Okay, Don—tell me what kind of animal would suck the blood from its victims.”

  Doctor Lormand said nothing.

  “Now, I’m no medical person, Don, but I can tell all those bites on their necks didn’t happen at the same time. Some of them look older than the others. Will you—can you—explain that?”

  “I wouldn’t even try at this stage, Edan.” He knelt down by the bodies and picked up several strands of coarse hair. He put them in an envelope.

  “Human?” Edan asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Dogs didn’t do this, Don.”

  The doctor rose and met his friend’s eyes. “Then you tell me what did?”

  “Can you come by the house this evening? ’Bout seven?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “We’ll talk this evening. Maybe cook some beef. Okay?”

  “All right.”

  Both young men were bachelors.

  Doctor Lormand looked closely at his friend’s neck. “What the hell is that around your neck, Edan? A leather thong! You gone hippie on us?”

  “It was a gift,” Sheriff Vallot replied, and did not elaborate. He changed the subject. “There are large footprints out back.”

  “I saw them.”

  “They are definitely not dog tracks.”

  “They’re not human, either,” Doctor Lormand said.

  “I don’t want any word of this to leak out, Don. I’ll ask Blanchet at the funeral home if he can’t rebuild the. . . throat area. I’m going to try to pass this off as a throat-cutting. Simple murder. I want these people in the ground as fast as possible.”

  “Why, Edan?”

  “Because I .
. . I don’t want to start a panic, that’s why.”

  Don Lormand studied his friend’s face closely. “You maybe know something I need to know? Now, you want this down as a throat-cutting . . . okay, I’ll play. But you tell me what’s on your mind, buddy. It’s a gruesome way to die, yes, but a panic?”

  “We’ll knock it around tonight—okay?”

  Doctor Lormand snapped his bag shut and walked to the door. “All right,” he said, looking at his friend. He shook his head and walked to his car.

  Edan knelt by the bodies and once more examined them. He fingered several more strands of the dark hair before putting the hair into a plastic evidence bag.

  “There’s more of that hair on the door jamb,” Deputy Andrus said.

  “How high up?”

  “Too damned high to be from a dog.”

  “Unless it was one hell of a big dog.”

  Blaine Andrus smiled grimly. “You see a dog that big, Edan . . . you let me know—okay? ’Cause if you do, I’m gonna trade this .357 in for an elephant gun.”

  “You got the pictures, Blaine?”

  “In living color.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be.”

  “Okay, take some from this angle. Not quite so vivid from this side. I’m gonna try to pass this off as a throat-cutting.”

  “Why would you wanna do that, Edan?”

  “Why start a panic—if you know what I mean?”

  “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

  Edan ignored that.

  Blaine looked at the stiff hair in the evidence bag. “That isn’t human hair, Edan.”

  “I know it.”

  Their eyes met. Neither man said a word for a very long moment. Finally, Blaine said, “So if it wasn’t done by a human . . . what did do it?”

  “A real big dog,” Edan replied, trying to force conviction into his tone.

  But the chief deputy wasn’t buying. “Sure,” he said dryly. “Right. And if you think the coroner’s jury won’t buy a throat-cutting, you’re gonna tell ’em it was dogs?”

  “What else is there to say, Blaine?”

  “No signs of a forced entry. Very little signs of any struggle. It happened over a period of days, I say. Come on, Edanl You’ve already added it all up. And more. You finish it for me.”

  Sheriff Vallot looked at his friend, his deputy. He sighed. “If it had been dogs, how did they gain entrance? For dogs to leave that much hair on the door jamb, they’d have to be five feet tall. I’ve never seen a dog five feet tall. But they could have reared up and done it, remember that. But . . . had it been dogs, the couple would have fought them; gone into a panic, lamps and chairs turned over. None of that here. And why were they naked? And where is the blood?” He shook his head.

  Deputy Andrus looked at the hair in the bag. “You believe much in the old ways, Edan?”

  “Don’t start that crap, Blainel”

  “How come you got a gris-gris around your neck, Edan?”

  “Like I told Don, it was a gift.”

  “How many sightings we had in the past two weeks, Edan?”

  “There is no such thing as a roo-garou, Blaine.”

  “Just remember this, Edan: I didn’t say the words . . . you did.”

  Late that afternoon, Betty Jane Vincent moaned as first orgasm shook her. Doctor Lormand wasn’t built up like her husband, Nick, not nearly so large, but he sure knew how to love a woman. Real gentle, with lots of messing around before he put it in. She liked that pre-screwing stuff. But she could never convince Nick of that.

  She moaned again; it was getting real good to her now.

  Nick would maybe stick a finger in a few times, get her wet, then POW! here comes the choo-choo up the tunnel. Looked like an RC bottle. Felt like one, too, if she wasn’t real ready.

  Nick the RC bottle with an animal attached. Don, the Moon Pie. Can’t have one without the other.

  She giggled under Doctor Lormand.

  “What are you thinking of?” he asked, fingers gripping her firm, hot flesh.

  “Moon Pies,” she gasped.

  “Sometimes I worry ’bout you, Betty Jane,” the good doctor said, never missing a stroke. “You get hungry at the strangest times.”

  She moaned. “Here comes the choo-choo!”

  Doctor Lormand, always willing to oblige, said, “Whoo-whoo!”

  In the room next to the locomotive and the tunnel, another pair of Joyeux’s wayward couples—both of them slipping rapidly past their prime—listened intently and enviously through the thin walls of the Pineland Motel—Best Inn Town—the only motel in town.

  “Are they fucking or playing with toy trains?” Sinclair Charlevoix asked, fondling one of Ruth Vickers’ huge breasts.

  “Whatever they’re doing,” she replied, “it sure beats hell out of what you’ve been able to accomplish this afternoon.”

  “Don’t give up hope, dear. The afternoon is young.”

  “Maybe it is, but we ain’t.”

  “Are not,” Sinclair corrected. Sinclair was a retired English professor from LSU.

  “Oh, screw youl” Ruth said. Ruth owned a truck stop/motel just outside of town—the motel they were now attempting to copulate in. Her husband drove a truck, and came home an average of three times a year. Which suited Ruth just fine. Sinclair really was kind of a sissy fellow, but she was, in her own way, quite fond of him.

  “Look!” Sinclair cried, pointing to his pecker. “It’s hard!”

  Sinclair’s penis resembled a Vienna sausage with a mild deformity.

  “Oh, hell, Sinclair! You call that a hard-on? I had a truck driver the other night had a pecker looked like a four-cell flashlight. Why, he . . .”

  “I am not in the least interested in your escapades with those semiliterate, concrete-crunching dolts!”

  Realizing she had bruised his easily injured ego. Ruth took his penis in one work-hardened hand and gave it a couple of pumps. “Hell, Sinclair!” she cried. “It’s really hard!”

  “Whoo-whoo!” yelled Doctor Lormand from the next room.

  “Cause of death?” Eli asked Sheriff Vallot.

  “Someone cut their throats,” Edan replied, becoming more comfortable with the lie. Blanchet had gone along with it, asking no questions. He remembered the day his father had helped burn the body of Claude Bauterre. And this was not the first case of “throat-cutting” he had seen over the years.

  “Motive?”

  “Robbery, I suppose.”

  “What was missing?”

  “Our investigation is still incomplete.”

  Eli smiled, and the sheriff did not like the smile. It was . . . smug . . . nasty. Suddenly, Edan realized he did not like Eli.

  “Of course it is,” Eli said, the smile never leaving his lips. “See you.” He walked away.

  Edan stood for a time on the sidewalk, watching the retreating back of the newspaper editor. He wondered why, after all these years, he would suddenly decide he did not like Eli Daily?

  The bourbon had been tapped, the steaks on the grill, and neither man had mentioned the Guilbeau murders, choosing instead to keep the level of conversation at small talk.

  “Nick beat up Betty Jane again,” Don said.

  “I’ve told you before, Don: anytime she wants she can come down to the office and we’ll work it from the legal angle. Or she can walk out. The choice is hers. Why the hell does she stay with him?”

  The doctor shook his head. “Used to be because she thought they could work it out; they had a chance. She knows now there is no hope for that.”

  “You in love with her?”

  “Yes,” Doctor Lormand said quietly. “Yes, I am.”

  “Nick’s a troublemaker, Don. He can be rousted, you know?” Edan reminded the man of his position and profession.

  “I wouldn’t want it that way, Edan. But thanks.” The doctor glanced at him. “Okay, let’s quit walking around the Guilbeau thing. If you’ve got a theory, let’s
hear it.”

  “Theory? I don’t know. What I have on my mind just might be called insane.”

  “Your usual frame of mind, as I recall. So give, brother.”

  Edan freshened their drinks, checked on the steaks and gave them another turn, then sat down opposite the doctor in the den, a coffee table between them.

  “Back in 1934, Don, a man name of Claude Bauterre was killed in Ducros Parish. You ever heard the story?”

  “No, can’t say as I have. I know the name, though.”

  Edan told him all he knew.

  “Jesus!” Don drained his drink. “Burned him to ashes? What in the hell did the man do to deserve that?”

  “I suspect the people thought he was a roo-garou,” Edan said softly, bracing himself for anticipated laughter.

  None came.

  Doctor Lormand, instead of laughing, nodded his head. “The Cajun pronunciation of loup-garou. Yeah, 1934 would be just about the end of the old ways; the old beliefs. The last of the ju-ju hands and the mojos and the gris-gris and mommas telling their children if they didn’t behave the cauchemar would punish them on his night rides through the bayous. I’ll buy that. But what does something that happened forty years ago have to do with the deaths of Eddie and Jenny Guilbeau?”

  “I suspect, but can’t prove, that Eddie was one of the men who shot Claude Bauterre.”

  “So . . . revenge from a family member—that what you’re saying?”

  Edan shrugged. “Maybe. But think about this: we’ve had twenty, thirty supposed ‘sightings’ of monsters in the past month. Two deaths—that were reported to my office, that is. But none of it started until Madame Bauterre—wife of Claude Bauterre—returned to Ducros Parish. And it’s too soon for the sightings. They always, in the past, occurred in late October. Until this year.”

  “All right, so I’ll buy another part of your story.” He grinned. “Old lady Bauterre sure has a super-fine, good-lookin’ granddaughter, doesn’t she?”

  “Keep your mind on business, doctor—not on pussy.” Edan returned the grin. He rose to get the steaks.