PROLOGUE
The girl was just plain amazing with a knife. She had a natural talent, a gift from God Almighty, or so her father, Big Daddy Jake Renard, told her when, at the tender age of five and a half, she gutted her first speckled trout with the precision and expertise of a professional. Her father was so proud, he picked her up, put her on his shoulders — with her little skinny knees on either side of his face — and carried her down to his favorite watering hole, The Swan. He plopped her down on the bar and gathered his friends around to watch her gut another fish he’d tucked into the back pocket of his worn-out overalls. Milo Mullen was so impressed he offered to buy the child for fifty dollars cash right then and there, and he boasted that he could make three times that amount in one week renting the little girl out to the local fish shacks on the bayou.
Knowing Milo was only trying to be complimentary, Big Daddy Jake didn’t take offense. Besides, Milo bought him a drink and made a real nice toast to his talented daughter.
Jake had three children. Remy, the oldest, and John Paul, a year younger, weren’t even teenagers yet, but he could already see they were going to be bigger than he was. The boys were pistols, slipping in and out of mischief every single day, and both as smart as whips. He was proud of his boys, but it was a fact that his little Michelle was the apple of his eye. He never once held it against her that she damned near killed her mama getting herself born. His own sweet Ellie had what the doctors called a massive stroke inside her head right smack in the middle of that final push, and after her daughter was washed and wrapped in clean blankets, Ellie was taken from their marriage bed to the local hospital on the other side of St. Claire. A week later, when it was determined that she was never going to wake up, she was transferred by ambulance to a state institution. The doctor in charge of Ellie’s care called the foul place a nursing home, but Big Daddy, seeing the stark, gray, stone building surrounded by an eight-foot iron fence, knew the doctor was lying to him. It wasn’t a home at all. It was purgatory, plain and simple, a holding area here on earth where all the poor, lost souls did their penance before God welcomed them into heaven.
Jake cried the first time he went to see his wife, but he remained dry-eyed after that. Tears wouldn’t make Ellie’s condition any better or the terrible place she rested in any less bleak. The long hallway down the center of the building opened to room after room of seafoam green walls, institutional gray linoleum tile floors, and rickety old beds that squeaked every time the side rails were raised or lowered. Ellie was in a big square room with eleven other patients, some lucid, but most not, and there wasn’t even enough space to pull up a chair next to her bed and sit a spell and talk to her.
Jake would have felt worse if his wife had known where she was resting, but her brain kept her in a state of perpetual sleep. What she didn’t know couldn’t upset her, he decided, and that fact gave him considerable peace of mind.
Every Sunday afternoon, once he had gotten out of bed and shaken off his aches and pains, he took Michelle to see her mama. The two of them, hand in hand, would stand at the foot of Ellie’s bed and stare at her for a good ten or fifteen minutes, and then they would leave. Sometimes Michelle would pick a bouquet of wildflowers and tie them with twine and make a pretty bow. She’d leave them on her mama’s pillow so she could smell their sweet fragrance. A couple of times she made a crown of daisies and put them on her mother’s head. Her daddy told her the tiara made Mama look real pretty, like a princess.
Jake Renard’s luck changed a couple of years later when he won sixty thousand dollars in a private numbers game. Since it wasn’t legal and the government didn’t know about it, Jake didn’t have to pay taxes on his windfall. He considered using the money to move his wife to a more pleasant setting, but somewhere deep down inside his head he could hear Ellie’s voice scolding him for being impractical, wanting to spend the money on something that would do no one any good. And so, instead, Jake decided to use a little of the cash to buy The Swan. He wanted his boys to have a future tending bar when they finished growing up, stopped chasing skirts, and settled down with wives and babies to support. The rest of the money he tucked away for his retirement.
When Michelle wasn’t in school — Jake didn’t figure she needed an education, but the state figured she did — he took her everywhere he went. On fishing days, she sat beside him and passed the time talking like a magpie or reading stories to him out of the books she made him take her to the library to get. While he took his afternoon nap, she set the table and her brothers prepared supper. She was quite the little homemaker. She kept an immaculate house, no small feat given the fact that her father and her brothers were admittedly slovenly. In the summer months she always had fresh flowers in mason jars on the tables.
In the evening, Michelle accompanied Big Daddy to The Swan for the late shift. Some nights the little girl fell asleep curled up like a tabby cat in the corner of the bar, and he’d have to carry her to the storage room in back, where he had a daybed set up for her. He treasured every minute he had with his daughter because he figured that, like many of the girls in the parish, she’d be pregnant and married by the time she turned eighteen.
It wasn’t that he had low expectations for Michelle, but he was a realist, and all the pretty girls married young around Bowen, Louisiana. It was just the way things were, and Jake didn’t figure his daughter would turn out any different. There wasn’t much for the boys and girls to do in town except diddle with one another, and it was plain inevitable that the girls eventually found themselves in the family way.
Jake owned a quarter acre of land. He had built a one-bedroom cabin when he married Ellie, and he added on rooms as his family expanded. When the boys were old enough to help, he raised the roof and created a loft so that Michelle could have some privacy. The family lived deep in the swamp at the end of a winding dirt lane called Mercy Road. There were trees everywhere, some as old as a hundred years. In the backyard were two weeping willows nearly covered in moss that hung like crocheted scarves from the branches to the ground. When the mist rolled in from the bayou and the wind picked up and began to moan, the moss took on the eerie appearance of ghosts in the moonlight. On those nights, Michelle would scramble down from the loft and sneak into bed with Remy or John Paul.
From their house, the neighboring town of St. Claire was a quick twenty-minute walk away. There were treelined paved streets there, but it wasn’t as pretty or as poor as Bowen. Jake’s neighbors were used to poverty. They did the best they could to scratch a living out of the swampland and the water, and they scraped together an extra dollar every Wednesday night to play the numbers in hopes they would catch a windfall the way Jake Renard had.
Life took another surprising turn for the Renard family when Michelle entered the third grade at the Horatio Hebert Elementary School. She was assigned a brand-new teacher, Miss Jennifer Perine. During the fourth week of school, Miss Perine administered the standardized tests, received the results, and then sent an urgent request home with Michelle for a parent-teacher conference.
Jake had never gone to one of those before. He figured his daughter had gotten into a spot of trouble, maybe a little fistfight. She could be hot-tempered when pushed to the wall. Her brothers had taught her how to defend herself. She was little for her age, and they assumed she’d be an easy target for the bullies at school to pick on, so they made sure she knew how to fight, and fight dirty.
Jake reckoned he’d have to soothe the teacher’s nerves. He put on his good Sunday clothes, added a splash of the Aqua Velva he only used on special occasions, and walked the mile and a half to the school.
Miss Perine turned out to be a pain in the ass, which Jake expected, but she was also pretty, and he hadn’t expected that at all. He was immediately suspicious. Why would an attractive, young, single woman want to teach in the little gnat of a town of Bowen? With her fine looks and her shapely figure, she could get herself a job anywhere. And how come she wasn’t married yet? She looked to be in her twenties, and in the parish that made her a spinster.
The teacher assured him she didn’t have any bad news to impart. Quite the contrary. She wanted to tell him what an exceptional child Michelle was. Jake’s back stiffened. He interpreted her remarks to mean that his daughter wasn’t quite right in the head. Everyone in the parish called Buddy Dupond an exceptional child, even after the police hauled him away and locked him up in a loony bin for setting fire to his parents’ house. Buddy didn’t mean any harm, and he wasn’t out to kill anyone. He just had a fascination with fires. He’d set over twelve good ones — all in the swamp, where the damage didn’t matter. He told his mama that he just plain loved fires. He liked the way they smelled, the way they glowed all orange and yellow and red in the dark, and most of all he liked the snap, crackle, and pop noise they made. Just like the cereal. The doctor who examined Buddy must have thought he was exceptional, all right. He gave him a fancy name. Pyromaniac.
It turned out that Miss Perine hadn’t meant to insult Jake’s little girl after all, and when he realized that fact, he relaxed. She told him that, after she had received the first set of tests back and read the results, she’d had Michelle tested by experts. Jake didn’t know squat about IQs or how these experts could measure an eight-year-old’s intelligence, but he wasn’t surprised that his Michelle was — as he proudly told Miss Perine — as smart as a cookie.
It was imperative that he do right by the child. She told Jake that Michelle was already reading adult literature and that she was going to be skipping the equivalent of two full grades next Monday. Did he know that Michelle had an aptitude for science and math? Jake summed up all the educated talk to mean that his little girl was a natural-born genius.
Miss Perine told him that she believed she was a good teacher, but even so, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep up with Michelle’s educational needs. She wanted the little girl moved to a private school where her talents could be nurtured and she could set her own learning curve — whatever in tarnation that meant.
Jake stood, towering over the teacher as he shook her hand and thanked her for the nice things she had to say about Michelle. However, he added, he wasn’t interested in sending his daughter away. She was just a little girl, after all, and it was too soon for her to leave her family.
Miss Perine coaxed him to hear her out. She offered him a glass of lemonade and pleaded with him to sit down again. Since she’d gone to the trouble of fixing refreshments — there was a little plate of cookies on the table too — he reckoned he had to be polite and listen.
The teacher started talking a mile a minute then, telling him all about the advantages his daughter would have with the proper schooling, and surely Jake didn’t want to deprive her of the wonderful opportunities that would open for her. Miss Perine pulled a pink folder from her desk drawer and handed him a slick brochure with pictures so he could see what the school looked like. Michelle would love it there, she promised him. She would study hard, certainly, but there would also be time for fun.
Jake wanted the best for his daughter, and so he listened to every word Miss Perine had to say. The two of them were getting along just fine, sipping tart lemonade and chewing sweet peanut butter cookies while they chatted amicably about his girl, but damn if she didn’t insult him by suggesting that he could apply for state assistance in paying the tuition, maybe even qualify for a grant he wouldn’t have to pay back. Jake had to remind himself that the woman was new to Bowen and didn’t know any better. Surely she hadn’t meant any harm. Why, she was just trying to be helpful. But because she was new to the parish, she didn’t have any notion how important a man’s pride was in these parts. Take pride away from a man and you might as well run a knife through his heart.
Jake gritted his teeth as he politely explained he wasn’t about to become a charity case, and he wasn’t going to let anyone else pay for his daughter’s education.
He was considered by some to be well-off because of his gambling windfall, but she didn’t know anything about that, of course. Folks didn’t talk about their illegal betting games with outsiders. Nevertheless, he still didn’t much care for her making snap judgments about a family based on how they dressed or where they lived. If Jake decided to send his girl to that fancy school, he’d use his retirement nest egg to pay the tuition, and when that money was all used up, then his sons could take on extra jobs to help with expenses.
But, before any decisions were going to be made, he thought he ought to discuss the matter with his wife. He talked to Ellie all the time, in his head anyway, and he liked to think she appreciated being included and that, in her magical way, she helped guide him with important family decisions.
He reckoned he ought to talk it out with Michelle too. She deserved to have a say in her future.
The following Sunday he took her fishing. They sat side by side on the dock with their fishing poles dangling in the murky water. His big knife was nestled in his leather pouch as a precaution against predators.
“Fish aren’t biting, are they?” he remarked while he tried to figure a way to broach the subject of changing schools.
“Of course not, Daddy. I don’t know why we’re fishing this time of day. You’re always telling me early morning is the best time to catch fish. How come you wanted to come fishing this late? It’s going on to four already.”
“I know what time it is, smarty-pants. I wanted to get you away from your brothers and have a talk with you about something . . . important.”
“Why don’t you just spit it out, then?” she asked.
“Don’t you sass me.”
“I’m not sassing you. Honest.” She crossed her heart with her fingers.
She was as cute as a button, he thought, staring up at him with those big blue eyes. She needed her bangs trimmed again. They were hanging down, catching on her long lashes. He guessed he’d get the scissors out after supper.
“That Miss Perine’s a real nice lady. She’s pretty too.”
She turned away from him and stared down at the water. “I don’t know about that. She smells good, but she doesn’t smile very much.”
“Teaching is serious work,” he explained. “That’s probably why she doesn’t do a lot of smiling. Do you get along with her?”
“I guess I do.”
“We had a real nice visit about you the other night.”
“That’s what you wanted to talk to me about, isn’t it? I just knew it.”