The Jabberwock Valentine

4

Valentina reacted to the news with a frightful calm. “Lissa is dead,” she said to no one outside herself. “I won’t be seeing Lissa again.”

She looked then, at the faces, mine the closest. “I would like to go up to my room, Cody.”

“Val—”

“I’ll be okay. Just give me a small moment to accept it.”

She went, quietly and quickly, up the broad stairs, and, watching from the bottom level, I heard her door close. I crept up and stood uncertainly. Then I heard her weeping beyond the closed door, and I knew she would come out, steady, dry-eyed, when she was quite ready.

George and Elva still stood in the lower hallway. George was stunned, but had presence — white faced, tight lipped, in control, the unflappable career army officer. Elva was rigidly steeled, tears in her eyes.

She shook off George’s supporting arm. “I’ll have to tell Reba and Clyde.”

“How about Lissa’s family?” I asked. “Shouldn’t it be one of you, rather than a policeman knocking at their door?”

“She had no family, Cody,” Elva said. “None other than us. Her parents were killed in a house fire three years ago. She had no brothers, sisters, grandparents — perhaps a distant cousin or two. We’ll have to find that out.” She slipped quietly toward the kitchen to look for Reba and Clyde.

George started to barrage me with questions, but driveway gravel showered outside and we heard a car door slam.

As we reached the front door, Keith burst upon the porch. The aristocratic cut of his lean face was all hard, flat planes. His blue eyes had darkened almost to black.

He jerked to a halt, looking from one to the other. “You— You’ve heard.”

“Yes,” George said, “Cody just now came with the news.”

Keith let go a breath. “Then I’m not the messenger. Was certain I’d have to be. The news came across the mainframe printout, from our unit interfaced in the press room at headquarters. I got Dufarge on the wire, but as yet there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of follow-up detail.”

His movement was taut, uncomfortable. He pressed his buttocks against the banister, half sitting, and brooded briefly. “Apparently another mugging in the gloom of the parking garage. Frigging city out to sell it. Private owners would up the rate but provide security the city can’t with its stretched-out manpower. Fatal mugging this time...” His thin lips tightened to disappearance. “And I might have stopped this one.”

George glanced from Keith to me. My eyes were on Keith. “How?”

“Lissa called from New Orleans late in the morning. The call was relayed to my car during a parks inspection. She said she wanted to see Max Dufarge and me as soon as she got back, and she was calling from the northern end of the parish, already out of the city proper.”

“Did she say what it was about?”

Keith scathed me with a bitter look. “What would be the first thing a newspaperman would ask? She said I might possibly be bidding on a Valentine story. She’d been spare-timing a thing for a long time, and had the gist of it in place — except for the final identity. She’d eliminated a final false lead in New Orleans and said the answer was here in Wickens. She said it was time now to holler for help.”

“Did she elaborate?”

“Not on the phone. She said Max and I would get it up to this point, all she had, before the day was out. She said she had enough to convince us it wasn’t smoke and vapor, and we would move. Sounded a bit scary. But Lissa couldn’t resist center stage; it was the trait that breathed fire into her most mundane story.” An involuntary shiver went through him, delayed reaction. He looked a little sick, but pushed himself up. “How is Val?”

“Taking it,” I said.

“Can I do anything?”

“Can anyone?” George asked.

“Have we got a shot of Jack Daniel’s around the place?” Keith asked.

“We could all use a drink,” George said, and led the way inside. He poured at the dining room sideboard and we went aimlessly into the living room, George carrying the bottle. We heard a door close in the back of the house. George tossed his drink, set the glass and bottle on the coffee table. “That will be Elva.” He hurried out.

Keith sank into an overstuffed chair, pulled up again. “I could use another.” He poured a second finger. “No ticket back for Lissa.” He raised his eyes, saw my confused frown, and added, “Of course the statement is meaningless to you, Cody. But there was a ticket back in my case.”

“Excuse me?”

He threw the drink down his throat. “Car accident. Terrible concussion... trauma... heart stopped... dead as last year’s rose. A great medical team and that electric gadget they use to bang the old ticker started me up again. But for a minute or two, the reading of my will could have proceeded legally.”

He looked at the shot glass, decided against a third, and eased the glass onto the table.

“I’ve tried to remember — but I couldn’t at the time and the mists of eight years haven’t helped — how it felt to die. You’ve heard the stories of people who cross over and are snatched back. A lot of them report a marvelous experience, a golden light, a feeling of joy and peace, a feeling of not wanting to be brought back, but to have the golden freedom of the light.”

“How was it with you, Keith?”

“No golden light. I really have never been able to remember. I think it was dark, cold, a feeling of terrible anxiety because I was dying, dead. Maybe my linen was soiled when I got over there... Poor Lissa — I hope she got over there with her linen clean.”

After the local evening newscast, the telephone began to ring. It wouldn’t stop. Elva kept answering, hearing the sympathetic expressions, consoling the shocked caller, answering the same questions. Finally she took the obvious measure and left the phone off the hook.

We talked to Homicide Detective Max Dufarge, who came accompanied by one of his men. We told him everything we knew.

We sat about the table. Food was on it. Perhaps we ate.

It was St. Valentine’s Eve and all the plans for the party had to be cancelled, the caterer told by phone to send his bill but not himself, likewise the booking agent in New Orleans who handled Dixieland jazz groups.

Lissa Aubunelli was stretched out in a funeral home downtown, and we, finally, in our beds.

A moon milked palely in the darkness. The night was not quiet: the scratching of a night creature scurrying across the roof; the faraway striking of the grandfather clock in the lower hall; a skirl of night wind, creak of a house timber, a whisper of movement. Here in the house? Someone up, needing an aspirin? I rose to an elbow, listening. Nothing. I eased back and gradually my senses slipped into a halfway house of nonsleep.

The colors came in a single glimpse of tangled mangrove, saw grass, heat-blasted pines weeping dead, gray moss tendrils.

A narrow, rutted road with crushed-shell surface wormed painfully through the jungle. In a clearing off the road was a tumbledown clapboard shack. Beside the road were the ruins of a mailbox. Jagged holes had rusted through. The remains hung crookedly on a weather-eaten chain from a weather-eaten stanchion creatively fashioned from the iron tire of an old wagon wheel.

Zap!

The darkness was a wall.

I jerked on my pants and shoes. Across the hallway I hesitated for a beat of a second. Then I gripped the doorknob, flung the panel open, and I saw what I was afraid of seeing: an empty bed, sheet thrown back.

“Valentina!” My shout shattered through the house. I looked back and forth wildly in the hallway, ran down the stairs, two, three at a time.

“Valentina! Val!”

I was outside, seeing the vacancy of the porch, the land, the emptiness of the whole earth.

I ran back in. The house was awakening, lights flashing on, questioning voices rising.

George was charging down the stairs, in the direction of my voice.

Just inside the front door, I grabbed his arm. “Don’t ask me anything! Just tell me— You’ve known this swamp country for years. Do you know a deserted shack with a mailbox mounted on a wagon-wheel iron rim?”

“Cody, what in the hell—”

“Damn you! Answer my question!”

“Of course I know. It’s the old LeMoines place. Belonged to Keith Vereen’s grandpappy. Hunters, fishermen still use it now and then, not that it’s much shelter when a storm blows in. Now you answer a question for me. What’s going on?”

“It’s about Valentina, you long-winded bastard! She got up during the night. I know now that it wasn’t my imagination or nerves. She slipped downstairs, and he was there, where he’d told her he would be, to talk to her about Lissa, a private thing, something Lissa had meant for her ears alone. What the filthy hell does it matter how he arranged it, the bait he used? He’s got her. Nothing else matters. She’s with him, George, the final one. The Louchard descendant. And I must get to the LeMoines place.”

He was wearing pajama bottoms, barefoot. It was sufficient. “The keys are in the pickup.”

He drove daredevil fast, but not recklessly, with the expertise instilled by terrains in many parts of the world.

“Tell me,” he said.

I hung on to the seat, other hand braced against the instrument panel. “You won’t believe me.”

“Try me. I don’t know how you came by this knowledge of the LeMoines place, or how I’m so certain you know that she’s out there. But tell me — who did she meet?”

“Keith Vereen.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Very.”

“Why did he do it?”

“Because he couldn’t help himself.”

“A man can always help himself, Cody.”

“What if he’s not entirely himself? What if he is traumatized in a car accident eight years ago and dies? What if seven residual life forces, psychic echoes, spirits, ghosts, whatever the hell you choose to call them, are present inside Keith, dwelling in a level just below his own sentience, when the doctors slam an electric charge and restart his heart?”

He didn’t slow the pickup. Water showered, glitters in the night, as we slashed through a shallow ford.

“He was never the same after the accident, that much is for sure,” George admitted.

“Call him spirit possessed, or simply mad. The result is the same. He was compelled to search out seven male descendants of the man who murdered seven Yankee soldier boys on a St. Valentine’s Eve a long time ago. He had to balance the scales, even the score.”

“If any of this is true, Cody... if I’m not suffering a nightmare... that old massacre, involving Marie Louchard, it happened over a hundred years ago.”

“They had time, those seven — eternity. But they had no instrument — until Keith’s moment of death became a latchkey.”

“And Lissa?”

“Getting too uncomfortably close. She didn’t suspect Keith and forewarned him with a phone call. He simply drove out to U.S. 61, the only main road from New Orleans, and watched for her car. It was simple then to follow her into the parking garage, to say hello as she was getting from her car, to put his hands around her throat. She wouldn’t have been able to make a sound.”

The mailbox and rust-eaten wagon-wheel arch reared in the glare of the headlights. I was out of the truck, running, before George had fully stopped it.

I saw Keith’s Mercedes parked in the weed-grown ruin of the driveway leading to the shack.

Then I saw the moving shadows, human figures, in the moon-frozen darkness just beyond and to one side of the shack.

He was carrying her across his shoulder. She wasn’t moving. How hard had he slugged her?

“Valentina!”

I had outdistanced George, for all his conditioning. Keith turned slowly to face me.

“Stay back, Cody. Don’t come any closer.”

“Put her down, Keith. Back off. Please — you’ve known her all her life. She’s your friend. She loved and trusted you.”

“She’s a Louchard, Cody. It’s in the records. Go look at the records, as I did.”

His every word had a different inflection. Seven inflections? Seven voices speaking through his lips?

“Kill the bastard!” George had reached my side. “Take him, Cody.”

I had already decided it was the only way. A jump ahead of George, I was at Keith.

He stood unmoving.

A veil came, a gossamer shimmering through which Keith’s image rippled and flowed. I gasped from a force that struck me.

I saw the moon spin, and knew that I had slammed onto my back. I heard bamboo rattling a fierce tempo. Wild palms bent and reared like slashing shadows. Night creatures were screaming, and a hard, quick wind showered jungle debris across my face, against the side of the LeMoines shack.

I realized that George was sprawled beside me, frothing incoherent sound.

“Stay back,” Keith said. “She has Louchard blood in her veins. She is the guiltiest of all, and this is the moment reserved for her.”

He turned and was starting to carry her away.

A bellow of anguish came from George’s lips. “You fool! You mad fool! She is not Louchard, she’s my bastard daughter. Not a part of the Louchard line. She was born nine months after a furlough — neither Elva nor I meant for it to happen. It was only that once. Charles Marlowe proved out infertile. Maybe he guessed, before the end, why he and Elva had not had other children. She’s mine, you son of a bitch!”

The clearing seemed to suck a breath. Keith had heard. He hesitated, staring about as if for outside guidance.

This time my contact with him was hard, satisfying: he, I, and Valentina went down in a tangle. He thrashed, slipped free. His wild kick caught me on the cheek, breaking the skin. I heard viney tearings, and Keith was gone.

George was on his knees, gathering her up, cradling her against his chest, rocking in anguish.

“Oh, my baby! My little girl!...”

And she moaned softly.

As the jetliner entered the traffic pattern over the familiar grid of Washington National Airport, Valentina said quietly, “We’re back, Cody.”

“Yes.”

“It’s all over.”

“Yes.”

“Poor Keith” — her voice echoed a gentle pain — “making the river, trying to swim to freedom — or maybe not — washing up in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove.”

“We agreed to let the past bury the past,” I reminded her.

“And so we will. We’ll close the door for keeps and take up life as we’re meant to — after you tell me one thing. Just who am I, Keith?”

“You’re the daughter of two wonderful people.”

I touched her cheek. I imprinted every detail of her face in my mind forever.

“To borrow from Gershwin... You is my woman, Val.”

Her lips parted just a little; her eyes deepened. “And I got to love one man ’til I die.” A tiny crinkling at the corners of her mouth. “Aside from calling the Mississippi an old man, that poet fellow did have his perceptions.”