Mrs. Thibodeaux shook her head. “I met their momma in the store last week. She told me Vincent and Victor got in a fight over how to season a rabbit spaghetti, and one of them knocked the other’s front teeth out. I forgot which did which.” She stared through a window into the misting rain slanting across the backyard. “But they might be right,” she murmured.

During the afternoon, six ladies, Colette’s uncle Lester, and Grand-père Abadie came by to visit. Into the refrigerator went another bowl of potato salad, a platter of stuffed crabs, and a pot of shrimp stew. A sick feeling of danger and loss built in her along with the food, and she stepped out into the yard more than once to stare at the clouds coming low over the levee like wayward dirigibles. She touched her hair and felt the ponderous, uncaring sky on her like an inverted sea.

At five-thirty the Coast Guard called, telling her they were suspending the search until the morning, and she fought the urge in her throat to scream at the voice on the phone. If the rescue attempt would be as large as her fear had grown that afternoon, dozens of boats would be combing the waves day and night. But what could she tell the voice? To fly their slow, blind airplanes in the dark through the moppy clouds? She hung up. The searchers could do no better than they had done, and though they were professionals, they could operate only through science, not kinship.

She kicked open the screen door and went out again. In the backyard, staring up at clouds, Colette knew she was going to do something important, though she had no idea what, but she felt it coming, the way she knew the next step was coming up in a dance, the music propelling her toward that inevitable motion. She felt her will swell up and move the flesh along her back, because everything she had sensed and thought about Paul in her life came funneling down to this moment, this dot in time, and at once she knew what she was going to do. In that instant, she knew she loved him. It was the knowing what to do that told her.

She ran into the house, saw the kitchen telephone, and took the next step in the dance, dialing information for Pierre Part, getting Etienne the giant’s father on the line.

Chapter Twenty-one

Twenty-one

“Mr. Benoit, this is Colette Thibodeaux,” she began. “I own half of the Saxon—”

Emile Benoit cut her off. “Hot damn, ain’t this a hell of a mess?” Colette had never seen Emile, but he sounded as big as a lion. “The Coast Guard just called here,” he said. “They call you?”

“They gave up for the night.”

“They say they got no idea where them boys is at. I told them where Etienne was gonna pull the trawl.”