Colette heard another visitor come into the front room and a corresponding rise in exclamations, lamentations. She pulled the phone closer to her mouth. “Mr. Benoit…”

“Call me Emile, baby.”

“Do you want to go to the Gulf and look?”

There was no pause. “Well, hell yas.”

“You know anybody with a boat large and fast enough that you could borrow?”

“My brother, Lucien, he got a t’irty-five-foot crew boat he don’t use since the oil business went flat. Hey, you got to know I been thinking about this already. Everybody at my house thinks it’s crazy.”

“I knew it.” She socked her thigh with a fist. “Will it get us out there?”

“Mais, let me make a phone call, then I get you right back.”

She gave her number, hung up, and listened to the voices in the front, faint and worried. The image of Paul struggling in the water tried to form in her mind, but she shook this off. She straightened her back and prayed for the phone to ring. A few moments later it did, and Emile growled directions for her to meet him at first light on the levee road twelve miles above town.

“You got field glasses?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Bring ’em. Bring some baloney sandwiches and soda pop.”

“Okay.”

“Bring a good life jacket and a rosary,” he said, and hung up.

At her own house she found Mrs. Fontenot watching early reruns of Gunsmoke that had been dubbed over in Cajun French. “Lâche ton fusil, toi,” Marshal Dillon told an outlaw as Colette came into the living room. Matthew was playing on the floor. She offered to pay Mrs. Fontenot to spend the night.

“Hell, this baby ain’t nothing to look after. My grandson would of had me all skint up and tied to a tree in the yard by now. And I brought my sleepin’ gear already ’cause I know how these things go.” She pushed herself off the sofa and walked, bent over, into the hall. “Just let me go call my sister and tell her where I’m at.” Colette picked up Matthew and looked at his hair, at his jaw. She thought of the nutria hunt, when Paul had fished her out of the canal in the dark when he could barely save himself. A thunderclap sounded a long way off, and Mrs. Fontenot came into the room dressed in a faded purple housecoat with LAS VEGAS embroidered in orange across the back. “Rain, rain, rain,” she complained. “My greens gon’ rot in the ground.”

*   *   *