Dead on the Bayou. June Shaw
scattered items in his open toolbox. “Don’t you and Eve own a remodeling and repair business?”
“We do.”
“Then I’m sure you both know how to handle tools really well. Eve looked right at home using that power nailer when I helped her board up that sliding glass door someone smashed at her house.”
His mention of that horrible incident when she almost died sent shivers down my back and arms. “Of course we can use tools. Our daddy was a good teacher. But I have problems with my shoulder that have developed more difficulties and my doctor won’t give me clearance yet to work on people’s houses. We have customers waiting.” My insurance wouldn’t cover medical attention if I did physical work for others now. And if he didn’t know that being shot had caused my problem, I didn’t need to discuss it with him or anyone else who hadn’t heard about my encounter with a gunman. “I’m developing sketches for someone’s remodeling that we have subcontractors working on.” And I hoped Eve’s sadness cleared so she could come up with more creative ideas.
“I hope your shoulder gets better fast.”
“Thanks.” I noticed the wood he had knocked in the ground. “You’re making a fence?”
Dimples deepened in his cheeks. “Almost everybody around here has one.” He pointed to the white vinyl one that ran behind his lawn and the similar one on the opposite side of his house.
I took a couple of steps away and turned. “You have your permit, don’t you?”
“I need one?”
“If you’re going to build a fence over six feet tall to match both of theirs, you do. Most people don’t realize that.” It was one of the many recent rules for permits that made people avoid some remodeling in the first place.
I needed to drive around only one block to the rear to reach my place. With houses less fine than on Eve’s street and plants selected and planted by people who were paying on those homes instead of landscapers, lawns here didn’t look as lush. Cars were less fancy. Most of us had carports instead of closed garages. Sometimes the differences in our places bothered me, but not anytime lately. We had experienced happy times since Eve became a grandmother. I still couldn’t believe my sister’s child gave birth. We were still so young. But Nicole had done like Eve and married at an early age. Baby Noah thrilled us. But now Eve was wretched. I wished I could make her feel better.
Parked on my carport, I recalled one of the tools I had noticed in Jake’s open box. Our dad had a ball peen hammer just like it, a tool that, as a child, I had thought was adorable and liked to hold. With its small rounded head and no claws, it was one of the hammers our carpenter father hadn’t used too often. Remembrance of him and Eve’s unhappiness made tears swell inside my throat.
I entered the storeroom at the back end of my carport, fingered my father’s worn tool belt, and tied it around my waist. I’d gotten to keep most of his tools after he passed on, but had found only claw hammers. I picked one out now. Grabbing the closest nails and a couple of short two-by-fours, I angled one piece across the other, leaned them against a plastic sawhorse, and slammed the hammer with my right hand. The hit felt good.
What should have made Eve content was having Dave around. He was the man she had been searching for all along, she believed, yet he had told me he didn’t have the same interest in her. Slam. The nail went deeper. No, I didn’t want him to fall in love with her. I only wanted her out of her current dark mood. Slam. Wham.
If she and Jake got together, a new romantic relationship sprouting in her life would pull her out of any doldrums. I made sharp taps with my hammer on smaller Brad nails while I tried to conceive a plan and almost missed hearing the ring of the phone in the pocket of my slacks.
“How is she?” I believed a man asked, although I was finishing a strike against a nail. “Sunny, this is Dave,” he said, and I pulled back my hammer before letting it hit again. “She was in such a sad state that I hated to leave her that way, but she insisted I go.” Concern gripped his tone.
She always wanted Dave around, the closer the better.
“She doesn’t want me there, either.” I set the hammer down. Instead of being exciting about Dave, I remained concerned about my sister. “I think it won’t be long before she can work off the misery she’s feeling from baby withdrawal and be ready for real life again.”
“I certainly hope so.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “What are you doing?”
I glanced at my silly woodwork. “Just playing around with a hammer to get some frustration out.”
He hesitated a long minute. “You could come and play around and get more frustration out at a place I need to repair.”
His words intensified my hearing and interests. Dave said repair, one of my favorite activities. He also invited me to his place. Did live chickens have heads? “I’d love to do that.”
“Wait,” he said, making my chest deflate and my five-foot-eight height shorten. Was he going to tell me not to come? “I know you aren’t supposed to work for clients yet so I won’t be a client, but I will want to pay for your assistance.”
“Oh no, I wouldn’t take your money.” I surely needed more income, but not from him.
“Here’s what we’ll do. You come and look over the old fishing camp I bought and let me know how you think I can fix it up, okay?”
“Just tell me when and where.”
Chapter 2
The next morning I drove around the block to Eve’s house to check on her. The air was still as I rang the doorbell and waited. She didn’t come to the door, so I let myself in. “Eve, it’s me.” Shivers raced around my back while I entered, a carol trying to start in my throat. I knew I feared finding someone again trying to kill her. Singing Christmas carols when I was afraid began when I was a child alone with our older sister and someone shot her, and I didn’t know what else to do while I waited for help. That affliction competed with my dyslexia for which of them often made me feel more like a rabbit that ought to burrow in a hole, although my self-worth was gradually improving.
I didn’t see her immediately but checked the alarm box inside her foyer, my own body’s alarm relaxing a pinch when I found Home glowing in green and then saw her across the way. Dave’s company had installed this system.
Instead of being dressed in a stylish pantsuit or dress, Eve still wore a lavender silk robe over her matching nightgown that was partly visible beneath the robe’s hem. Through the open doorway beyond her den, she didn’t look toward me, not even when I stepped up beside her. She stuck her brush into a can and thrust wide black strokes across those already ruining her canvas and didn’t pay attention to the black splatters on her sleeve and tie of her robe.
“That isn’t a recent lover, I hope.”
“My disposition.” She slashed at her canvas with more furious strokes.
I watched her create no pattern, but getting her annoyance out. “Anything I can do?”
For the first time since I entered her house, she turned to me. “Leave.”
My sister shooting me such an irate word and stare stopped my breath. I released it, knowing her heartbreak came elsewhere. Let me know how I can help almost came from my mouth, but she would probably just shout, so I kept the offer inside and let myself out.
Driving away, I opened my windows and sucked in fresh air, feeling a need for some. Eve would feel better soon, I told myself, my own disposition lifting once I aimed my truck at Bayou Boogie Woogie.
South Louisiana was home to a great number of these slim waterways with irregular borders. Many bayous forked off the Mississippi and split again and dumped their waters that were normally brown but sometimes green into the Gulf of Mexico. The numerous manmade canals were much straighter. All of them made fishermen happy