“Delivery,” Gilbert emphasized. “That’s what we were comin’ to talk to the boy about.”

“First of all, let’s get something straight,” Drake said in disgust. “Joshua is a man. He does a man’s work and he takes a man’s responsibility.”

Beau sighed and looked at his brother, shaking his head. He looked down at the ground, defeated. Gilbert scowled. “You don’t want to hear the truth.”

“Sure we do, Gil,” Remy said. “Spit it out and don’t try sugarcoatin’ it, because I think our leader has an itchy trigger finger right about now.”

“You may have heard the rumors about our father,” Gilbert muttered. “Every one of them was true. He raped women and beat them. He beat our mother, beat us. He killed Renard. We couldn’t prove it, but he did. And he gambled. Mostly he lost.”

Drake raised his eyebrow.

Gilbert flushed. “I’m not whinin’ about my life. I’m tellin’ you the truth. He began workin’ for the Merciers, runnin’ their gardens for them. Mostly, he told everyone what to do. And he made deliveries to special customers. Eventually we took over makin’ the deliveries. The money was good and we didn’t think much about it until we started makin’ those deliveries in the middle of the night to boats comin’ in from all over.”

“So you’re saying you didn’t know about the opium when you first started working for the Merciers?”

Gilbert shook his head. “When the old man got sick, he told us to take over the night deliveries. That was when we knew. So about three years ago, we get a call and we go. We should have stopped as soon as we figured it out, but the money was good and we didn’t want to keep huntin’ gators.”

“And there was Evangeline,” Beau added. “We both felt we had to protect her.”

“Did someone threaten her?” Remy asked.

Beau looked at his brother. “Not outright. One night we came home and Evangeline’s room was wrecked. There was a knife stuck in the middle of her mattress. We’d hesitated about makin’ the delivery, hedgin’ a little when the call came in. We didn’t do that anymore. We figured whoever made those calls was tellin’ us we play ball with them or Evangeline dies.”

“Who made the calls?”

The two men looked at one another. Gilbert shrugged. “I don’t know. They used something, a device, to change their voice to a mechanical sound.”

“So after all this time working for the Merciers, you want us to believe you don’t have a clue who gives the orders?” Drake demanded.

Beau shook his head. “We didn’t want to know. We thought it was safer that way. They have a master gardener and crew tending the flowers. We just make the deliveries. To the dock, to the local shops and the special ones.”