“Smart man,” Ida Belle said.
Gertie shook her head. “If you two are ever going to live together, you’re going to have to figure that one out. The man can’t sleep in his vehicle every time he has to work late and you’ve fallen asleep.”
I felt my neck tense. “We are not moving in together.” I looked over at Ida Belle. “You know I blame you for this. Before you agreed to marry Walter, no one was pushing me toward anything permanent.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Ida Belle said. “After thirty or forty years, most people won’t bother you anymore.”
“Great,” I said. “Something to look forward to.”
“I think we’re coming up on the exit,” Ida Belle said. “Can you check?”
I pulled out my phone and checked GPS. “Yep, take the next exit, then head south. It’s another ten miles to the town Silas lives in and his house looks to be a little south of that.”
“Ha. Town,” Gertie said. “You just wait.”
Gertie was right. The town consisted of a convenience store that also served as a bar and a church. Two old men sat outside the store on rusted metal chairs, staring as we drove past. Fortunately, Ida Belle’s tinted windows allowed me to do all the looking I wanted while no one else could see who was inside the vehicle.
“That’s it?” I said. “Where do kids go to school?”
“They’re bused to the nearest school,” Gertie said. “Assuming they get to go to school. A lot of these embedded Creoles don’t come out much and they don’t like their family to, either. Before I retired, I used to volunteer with a reading program over summers. We set up shop in places like that convenience store and taught people how to read—kids and adults. There’s less distrust when it’s a lone woman in your local hangout.”
“Well, let’s hope Silas thinks the same about three women,” I said.
“I imagine he’ll think we’re a waste of time, but not a threat,” Ida Belle said.
All of a sudden, Ida Belle slammed on the brakes. “Crap,” she said. “I think that was our turnoff. Let me back up.”
The sign for the road, such as it was, was lying over in the weeds, the name painted on the wooden plank weathered so much that you could only make out a couple letters. But they matched the letters we were looking for, so we went for it. The road was as weathered as the sign and typical of the remote bayou locations I’d experienced around Sinful. It was basically dirt, with a little bit of rock thrown in and holes big enough to lose a tractor in. Ida Belle drove slowly, winding around the holes when she could and dipping carefully in and out of them when she couldn’t. I really hoped that Silas went for the waste-of-time option instead of the fire-first-ask-later option because no way could we speed out of there. A guy with a walker could get close enough to shoot a vehicle on this road.
The brush and trees finally parted and we found ourselves in a surprisingly large clearing. The house was barely more than the shacks people called camps, the roof sagging and much of the siding with paint peeling and some rotted wood along the eaves. The porch was the only thing that had seen a somewhat recent attempt at maintenance. At least one section of it sported planks that weren’t rotted and sagging like the rest of the house. Since it was the section right in front of the door, I assumed Silas didn’t bother with things unless it became absolutely necessary and then he did only the minimum required to keep it functional. An older-model black Dodge pickup was parked to the side of the house. It looked like it hadn’t had a good washing since it was purchased. I could see a small shed off to the right of the shack and off to the left was a chicken coop and a garden.
“Self-sufficient,” Gertie said. “Bet he doesn’t have electricity.”
“What about plumbing?” I asked, hoping that ramshackle shed wasn’t serving as a bathroom.
“No city service out here,” Ida Belle said. “He’d have a well. But there’s a hose rigged over the clothesline. Likely that’s his shower.”
“Is that an outhouse?” I asked.
“Could be,” Ida Belle said. “Wouldn’t surprise me. If the plumbing went to crap, a guy like Silas wouldn’t pay to have it fixed. He’d just go back to basics.”
“A water hose and an outhouse are not basics,” I said. “That’s primitive.”
Ida Belle shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the only one living that way out in these marshes.”
“How close is he to the bayou?” I asked.
“Maybe a hundred yards according to GPS,” Ida Belle said. “Might be able to get decent groundwater or he could have a cistern behind the house. From the deed, looks like he owns all the way back to the water.”
“Probably lives off those chickens, the garden, and fish,” Gertie said. “And I think that might be a peach tree back there that I can just see the tips of.”
“Great,” I said. The less people needed to interact with other humans, the more they seemed to resent interacting with humans.
Ida Belle insisted Gertie leave her purse in the SUV, just in case Silas decided we were armed and dangerous, and we climbed out. Of course, we were still armed and dangerous, but with any luck, he wouldn’t need to find that out. We walked slowly and with our arms and empty hands in clear sight of the house in case he was watching. We’d made it halfway to the porch when a man stepped out the front door, holding a shotgun.
Chapter Eleven
Silas Broussard walked to the end of the porch and glared at us.
Looked about eighty but I knew he was almost a decade less. Six foot five. Two hundred seventy pounds. He was definitely fitting a steak in his diet somewhere because that mass did not survive on lean meats and vegetables. Scar on his left elbow from an old break and his hip was higher on one side, indicating a likely back issue that had probably led to the obvious knee issues. It was clear to see where Molly had gotten her size.
“This is private property,” he said. “You best skedaddle.”
“Are you Silas Broussard?” I asked.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why you ask? You from the insurance?”
Immediately, my radar went up. This was the first we’d heard of insurance, so I needed to play it smart and see what I could get out of him.
“My name is Fortune Redding,” I said. “I’m a private investigator looking into your daughter’s disappearance. Insurance companies often hire people like me in order to get enough information to process claims.”
“What about them?” He nodded toward Ida Belle and Gertie.
“They handle the paperwork,” I said.
He lowered the shotgun a bit to study me. From his expression, he wasn’t impressed.
“Molly ain’t disappeared,” he said. “She done gone got herself in trouble on them bayous like her brother. They ain’t the place for everyone. You gotta know what you’re doing or bad things happen.”
“Of course,” I said. “But I’ve been told that Molly did know what she was doing, and that she would have been extra careful given what happened to her brother.”