“No. He don’t come here.”
“Who’s the dead guy upstairs?”
“Pitt. Vince’s brother. S’posed to guard the girls. Said they didn’t give him time to get ’em out. Len was pissed off. Shot him.”
“And who’s that over there?” Dupree indicated the body floating face down at the bottom of the stairs.
“That’s . . . that was my friend Vince.”
“And your friend was happy enough to whistle while he worked, even after he saw Len shoot his brother?”
“They didn’t get along too good.” No more explanation than that.
“So the guy outside must be Len.”
Dominic nodded. The effort seemed to exhaust him. Dupree leaned to one side and saw that the puddle of blood on the tabletop had seeped over the side and was about to drip into the water.
“Len and Vince brought the girls here. We s’posed to wait here till the coast is clear. Roads are full right now, police, the army, even the damn National Guard . . .”
“Who was going to decide how to move them?” Bull asked.
“They tell Len when it’s clear.”
“How do they reach him?”
“Len has a phone, always on him. Can’t call out. They contact him.”
Amaia waded out of the lodge. Len’s body floated half-submerged a couple of yards from the front door. She rifled through his clothes and she found the phone in the pocket of his life vest. She regarded it with dismay as filthy water poured off it. She tried without success to turn it on as she went back inside. “It’s soaked,” she said. “Done for.”
Dupree sighed in exasperation.
“Didn’t they have any other way to communicate?” Bull asked.
“Don’t know,” Dominic said. By now he was only intermittently conscious.
“You said Samedi didn’t come here.” Dupree pressed him. “You know if Len told them what happened to the girls?”
“Yeah. ‘We lost our catch,’ Len said. Told ’em he blew away Pitt for letting it happen.”
The traiteur, who’d remained silent throughout all this, unhappily echoed Dominic’s words. “‘Our catch.’”
They heard the motor of the returning Zodiac. Amaia crossed the room and rubbed grime off the window.
“They have the girls!” she exclaimed.
Dupree, sitting on the edge of the table at Dominic’s feet, seemed about to pass out.
“Just in time,” the traiteur said mournfully, taking his bloody hands out from under the improvised bandage. “Your Mr. Dominic has just passed.”
The traiteur’s grim stare put an end to the shrimpers’ protests when Dupree announced they were going to carry Médora’s body back in the captured Zodiac. The memory of the six dead girls left behind was a heavier burden than Médora’s insubstantial little corpse, which they’d wrapped in a mattress cover previously stuffed with Spanish moss, but the Cajuns were still visibly relieved when they reached the boat they had left outside the mangrove forest and Dupree tasked them with bringing it back to camp.
Jacob’s sisters hadn’t said a word since they’d been helped through an opening in the back of the mansion’s pantry. They hadn’t responded to questions when Johnson and Dupree asked if they’d seen other girls or remembered anything their captors had said. Holding one another by the hand, they answered only with mute nods or shakes of the head. The little one might have been eight or nine; the older one was probably twelve. The little one was alert, the older one lethargic, maybe even despondent. Both were very pretty and very frightened.
Amaia saw that the girls couldn’t keep their eyes off the crumpled, shrouded figure of Médora. Amaia moved so as to block their view of the corpse. “Diana is the queen of the moon, and Bella means ‘beautiful’ in Italian,” she said, throwing the girls into confusion.
She undid her ballistic vest and fumbled through her pockets. Her blouse rode up, and she noticed her movement had attracted Charbou’s attention. She found the little orange dragon and showed it to them. “Jacob gave me this for you.”
“Oh!” they both exclaimed and grabbed for it.
Amaia turned it over to show them their brother’s name.
They burst into laughter and tears at the same time, throwing themselves at Amaia, hugging her, almost knocking her over. She had to struggle to keep them all from tumbling backward onto the body. Everyone on board was astonished by the girls’ reaction.
“Where’s Jacob?” cried the younger girl.
“And how’s Grandma and Grandpa?” said her sister.
“They’re all fine.”
“But Grandpa . . .”
“We took him to the hospital, and he’s going to get better. They’re all there, together,” Amaia reassured them. “And we’ll take you there as soon as we can. Jacob said your parents work in Baton Rouge.”
They nodded.
“We know their telephone number at work,” declared Bella, the older girl.
“It’s been kind of hard to make phone calls, but we’ll find a way to get in touch with them.”
Dupree nodded at Amaia, encouraging her to keep talking and to probe them for information.
Amaia spoke to them. “I need to know if those men hurt you. Or if they gave you any kind of medicine.”
“They scared us,” Diana declared.
“I’ll bet they did! I think you both were very brave, because men like that are really scary. I saw one who was older, and another who was blond and kind of fat. And a bald man and a really tall one. Four in all. Were there any others?”
“No.”
“Did you see any other girls?”
Jacob’s sisters looked at one another. Diana started to nod, but Bella said, “No, there wasn’t any others.”
Amaia had noticed immediately upon seeing them that the girls’ abundant hair was clean and glossy, as if recently brushed. Their heads were crowned with elaborate plaits that gave way to cascading shoulder-length hair.
“Did you comb your own hair?”
They leaned forward to whisper directly to her. “No.”
Amaia huddled with them, trying to think who could have done their hair, for she couldn’t imagine that any of those thugs would have bothered—or been able—to fashion such intricate knots.
“It was the lutins,” Bella whispered. “They combed us while we were asleep.”
Diana solemnly confirmed it. “Lutins like to braid people’s hair.”
Amaia chose her words carefully. “The lutins were there? Did you see them?”
They shook their heads. Diana ran her fingers through her hair. “We too old. Only really little kids can see them. But we heard them laugh. And they did our hair.”
Amaia was careful to keep her voice casual. “And did they talk to you?”
“They don’t talk. They just laugh and play. You don’t know about lutins?” Bella seemed surprised by Amaia’s ignorance.
“Sure, I know what they are. It’s just that back where I come from, they’re called mairuak. They’re the ghosts of babies who died before they were baptized.”
Bella was interested. “Did you ever see one when you were little?”