Family Reunion. Peg Sutherland

slid a finger beneath the flap of the envelope.

      Her signature was full of sweeps and flourishes, not what he would have expected at all.

      And she wanted to help the family find Margaret Lyon. Also not what he would have expected.

      He read the letter six times. Finding people was a hobby of hers, the letter said. The letter recounted some of her successes. Scott was impressed. Intrigued. He thought about the weary tone of André’s voice when he’d spoken of all the dead-end leads he and his wife had followed up on. No need to add to the burden, Scott told himself.

      He could talk to the former judge himself.

      After all, he’d been wanting to for two years.

      CHAPTER TWO

      SCOTT WAS A CITY. BOY. He knew very little about Louisiana’s fabled bayou country. Recreation in Scott’s mind was a late night in the French Quarter following his nose to exotic new cuisine or his ears to the hottest new jazz or blues musicians.

      He’d heard of Bayou Sans Fin. Some kind of family connection, although he couldn’t think what.

      Bayou Sans Fin—bayou without end. The idea sent a little shiver along the back of his neck as he steered his low-slung two-seater along the snaking blacktop. Live oaks met overhead, blocking out the sky and the sun, dripping gray Spanish moss to within inches of his New Orleans Saints ball cap. Dense thickets of cypress, hackberry and willow trees fronted the marshes and swamps, which were neither land nor water, but some mysterious in-between territory that exuded an aura of danger.

      The only sign of human habitation was the occasional mailbox. Narrow dirt driveways were overgrown with vines and weeds and other plant life alien to someone who’d grown up around the Garden District’s immaculately sculptured flower beds. The driveways, he supposed, signaled the possibility of homes. Of people. The kind of people who wanted to live far beyond the reach of prying eyes and friendly voices, perhaps.

      Mostly, however, Scott imagined other life forms. Gators and muskrats and mink lurked in the dense overgrowth, maybe keeping a wary eye on the sleek red monster Scott drove. He imagined he could feel their wild unfathomable eyes on him and shivered again.

      Then again, maybe it wasn’t gator eyes he imagined at all. Maybe the eyes he conjured up in his imagination were equally unfathomable, but as blue as the bits and pieces of sky visible through the canopy of trees.

      He was going to see her. After two years, the memory of her had never quite vanished, and now he was going to talk to her. Get to know her maybe. Find out about the finely drawn upper lip that didn’t quite match the lush lower lip.

      His mind was out of control.

      He was supposed to be at work, lugging a video camera all over the Crescent City. Point, pan, zoom. Hours of taping for minutes of on-air time, measuring yours against theirs, holding your breath to see which reporter nailed the lead story that day, strutting if you won, clamping your jaw and saying wait till tomorrow if you ended up on the cutting-room floor.

      He crossed a rickety plank bridge, holding his breath all the way, then spotted an enormous mailbox on the left a few yards ahead. It bore the name Bechet, hand-lettered in yellow on red. His tires squealed a protest as he wheeled into the turn and hit dirt and rock. A tree limb brushed the shiny paint on the passenger door; vines hung low above his open car. He wondered what he’d do if a snake dropped out of the trees overhead.

      About two hundred yards off the highway, the driveway cleared and widened marginally, revealing a cypress archway with a sign—Welcome to Cachette en Bayou Farm. Hideaway on the Bayou. The sign might give lip service to the idea of welcome, but Scott wouldn’t have called the entrance inviting by any stretch of the imagination. He braked almost to a halt.

      Unbidden came the image of the massive iron fence encircling Lyoncrest, the impressive family mansion in the Garden District. With its sleek bronze lions posing at the front gate, Lyoncrest had sometimes struck him as uninviting—as this dark entrance seemed to him now.

      He glanced up at the letter from Nicolette Bechet clipped to the visor. He had, after all, been invited. Well, not him specifically. But a representative of the Lyon family. Which he was. So he wasn’t intruding. He drove on.

      The house came into view. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but this wasn’t it. The building wandered in every direction, turning here, rising there, making another twist just when you expected it to finally come to a stop. Obviously it had been added to over the years—perhaps every time a new generation of Bechets was born.

      What appeared to be the original core of the house was a square three-story structure made of unevenly formed bricks the color of just-boiled shrimp. The house rose on stilts above the unkempt yard, the ground level ringed with small windows, letting scant light into what was likely an above-ground cellar. Wide, steep steps rose to the second-floor gallery and main entrance, which was unimposing and standing wide open. Shuttered windows were as high as any door. Wings went off in both directions, one of natural cypress, one painted a dreary dun color. The roof was tin, the shutters hung crookedly, and the chimney was a listing steeple of bricks that appeared ready to topple and inflict serious bodily harm.

      The ungainly house was surrounded by pickup trucks—Scott counted six—in varying states of repair, and one finned Cadillac circa 1960. The house leaked noise from every open door and window—sawing and hammering and drilling and conflicting music, zydeco from the cypress wing and country from the other.

      This surely could not be the home of Nicolette Bechet.

      He pulled his sports car in beside a polished blue pickup with fancy stripes, farthest from the disaster-waiting-to-happen chimney, and questioned his presence here one last time before he killed the engine.

      Then he saw her.

      She was hanging out a third-story window, precariously braced with one boot-clad foot inside the window, the other on the tin roof. She was tugging on one of the dilapidated shutters. A claw hammer hung from a loop on the overalls she wore. A white painter’s cap with its brim yanked to one side covered her head, but didn’t come close to covering her hair, which had been sleek and gold the last time he’d seen her. Now, it was long and wild and spilling to her shoulder blades.

      If Scott’s heart hadn’t lurched in his chest and his breath come out in a whoosh when he saw her, he’d never have believed that figure was the carefully buttoned-up judge he remembered.

      He took the keys out of the ignition, removed the letter from the visor clip, opened the car door and got out, never taking his eyes off her.

      She almost lost her balance when the shutter pulled free. With a fierce grunt, she turned and shoved it off the edge of the steep roof, calling after it as it rattled and fell and splintered on the ground, “Now you’re trash. Irritating trash at that.”

      He looked up at her, his reaction not diminishing. Her eyes landed on him. “Who are you?”

      She’d certainly lost her judicial manner in two years. He grinned.

      “Scott Lyon.” He fluttered the letter in the air by way of explanation.

      She hoisted her other foot out of the window and stood on the roof, hands on hips, feet apart. “Get the hell off my farm.”

      She must’ve misunderstood. His grin deepened. “I got your letter.”

      “And I’ve got a shotgun I can put my hands on in forty-five seconds flat if I don’t see your rear end headed in that direction by the time I get back inside.”

      She gave that a second to sink in, her expression granite, then turned and crawled back in the window, more graceful than anything he’d ever before seen in overalls and cowboy boots.

      “Best leave,” came a voice from the zydeco side of the house. Scott looked into the amused eyes of a dark bearded man with a big smile and an industrial-strength drill dangling lightly from one beefy hand. “She don’t be a half-bad hand with a shotgun.”