The FBI, NYPD detectives and local police descended on the old plantation house on the outskirts of the swamp. Because it took several hours to coordinate the cooperation between state and local authorities, the manager of the facility had been discretely called before any agents or police had stepped foot on the property. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway; the boy had escaped his room nearly 12 hours earlier.
Elmira Neige had discovered the boy missing, called her nephew and they were out searching for Cris. Neige had brought hounds, friends and co-workers who were eager to track the boy down for a promised percentage of the bloated Trust Fund. Locals, they knew the area well and had already found sign on the deer trail.
The dogs kept up an excited howl as they pushed deeper into the forest. Neige and the others wore knee high waders, carried shotguns and knives. They were aware of the dangers of snakes, gators and Russian hogs, all of which were abundant in the swamp.
“Where’s he going?” Neige muttered under his breath. “There ain’t nothing out here but swamp. And who’s helping him? Ain’t no way he managed to walk out here on a broken leg.”
He lifted his cap and wiped sweat off his forehead. “Bob Lee, any sign of a second man?”
The Cajun shook his dark head. He was a local guide for hunting and fishing, knew the area well.
“No. Moves canny, too. Leaves hardly any sign. You sure he’s in a cast?”
“Compound fracture of the tibia, fibula and spiral fracture of the femur. By all rights, he shouldn’t be able to even walk on it,” Neige said frustrated.
“He a strong one,” Bob Lee agreed. “He ain’t running to just run?”
“Non. He got a place in mind. Dogs will find him. Best noses in the state,” he answered.
The dogs led them to the huge tree but no matter how many times they circled it, they lost the scent there. Baffled, the small party examined the huge tree and marveled at its size and age. It was Bob Lee that found the names carved in the largest trunk and read them aloud.
“Little Fox and Falling Rain. Native names but carved in English,” he said in puzzlement. “Thought it’d be in the local dialect. Abenaki for Cherokee. They lived around here when this ol’ tree was a sapling.”
“Where do we go from here?” Neige asked and the dog handler shrugged.
“Dogs don’t know. We can fan out, see if we pick up any tracks or we can head for the nearest trail just to our east. It skirts the edges of the swamp, comes out by Lake Hartwell and some seasonal cabins he could break into. That’s where I’d guess he’d go. If he knew the area.”
“He’s never been here before,” Neige denied. “I took him camping and fishing in Louisiana, he grew up there and in Tennessee. He does have extensive camping, hunting and survival skills even though he’s only ten-years-old.”
“Ten! How’d you lose control of a ten-year-old kid?” the three asked him.
He shrugged. “Me and his Mom fought like cats and dogs. She run off and took him. I been looking for over two years. Just found him a month ago. He sick and thinks I want to hurt him. Kill him. He thinks I killed his momma.”
Bob Lee looked him in the eyes. “Did you?”
“She died in a car crash in upstate New York. No, I didn’t kill her. Though I wanted to after she run off with him. I got a temper.”
“So, I’ve heard,” Bob Lee muttered but the thought of the reward money silenced those concerns.
They searched long into the afternoon and found no other passage from the boy. As the shadows grew stronger and the sun faded in the deep woods, they decided that searching into the darkness was futile and dangerous.
Heading back to a main trail, they emerged from the woods about a mile from the old house. When they reached the long driveway up to the building, they were met by the group of FBI agents, SAR people, detectives from the local Sheriff’s Department, Sanderson and Eachann.
Eachann recognized Neige on sight, anger flushed his pale face red and he surged forward with every intention of decking the taller man. Jake pulled him around in a circle and bear-hugged him without a word.
“Who the hell are you?” Neige snarled as he and his group stared the agents and cops over. The blue windbreakers with white ‘FBI’ letters needed no explanation nor did the red-suited SAR people with their search dogs. The two crowds milled around each other, the Feds giving the locals the stink eye.
“I’m Matt Eachann, Detective First Class, NYPD and the man appointed by the ‘John Doe Living Trust’ to protect Cris Snow and his interests. Your parental rights had been suspended as of three months ago,” Eachann sneered.
Neige laughed at the detective. “I’m his daddy. Ain’t no judge gonna take a boy away from his daddy, not in this state. Besides, he ain’t here no more. He run off into the biggest, baddest swamp in the South. Gators, water moccasins, constrictors, wild hogs and swamp people are just a few of the things you got to worry about in there. Quicksand sink holes and don’t forget the Swamp Monster.”
“Is Bigfoot in here, too?” Matt sneered.
“You got a warrant on me, Hoss? No? Then, I guess you best let me go, off-i-cer.” Neige’s voice was full of contempt at the suited cop with his razor cut hair, expensive shoes and cane. He turned his back on the trio as he went for his vehicle, a rented SUV. The rest of his crew drifted off into the brush after giving the Feds names and addresses. Which probably weren’t real, but the agents didn’t push it.
His great-aunt went with him; she had not said one word since the FBI and local Sheriff’s Department had handed her the warrant to search the facility.
Sanderson watched the pair go with worried eyes. He commented, “he’s not going to stop looking. If he’s local or those boys with him are local, they’ll know where to look, where the boy might have gone.”
“We can’t do anything in the dark, nor can they,” the lead volunteer said. “But the FBI has helicopters with FLIR. They could pick up a campfire or a child’s heat signature.”
“And tell it apart from a deer or a hog?” Matt asked.
“Pretty near. Forward looking infrared radar has become nearly pinpoint accurate. Like GPS. It can even determine between a live image and a dead one by ambient body heat.”
“You mean a body?” the young police rookie asked, swallowing.
“The only thing it can’t read is if something is buried in the ground.” Which led them all to think about graves, bodies and a dead child. Even if Neige had not yet killed the boy, the swamp could do it for him, leaving him without the legal label of murderer.
*****
Tempe drove as if consumed by road rage, at least until he was no further than the old dock hidden behind the house, the original owners of the house had access to the river and the bayous into the swamp. They used the myriad waterways to smuggle slaves during the war and other illicit and valuable cargo into the area. Buried in reeds and cattails, the dock was surprisingly sound for its age, built of cypress logs over 12 inches thick. There was a flat-bottomed boat bobbing gently in the water.
Elmira laid her wrinkled, gnarled hand on her nephew’s knee. He faced forward and the resemblance between the two despite their age difference was uncanny. When she spoke, a shiver touched him. Her voice had that strange quality which had always seemed unearthly, weird and terrifying to him when he was a child. It still did. As the old house had pulled at his soul and made him grow a tough exterior, a cold mind and a facile charm.
“You know he’s gone to the Swamp’s Heart,” she spoke softly. “The place where the haunts are. Ain’t no one ever found it come back to say where or what. You can wait seven years to declare him dead. If you go, you die. I seen it, you’ve seen it in your nightmares. You can’t spend no money from the grave. Or in it.”
“I don’t believe in haunts or visions,” he denied harshly. He placed his hand on his weapon. “I ain’t waiting seven years to get that money. I put up with her and his punk ass for ten already.”
“You kill him, they prove it, you won’t get a dime. You got that gold from him. That’s worth over 5 million. Take that and forget the boy.”
Neige turned to look at her cold gray eyes. “He’s my son, Elma.”
She cackled. “He’s ten minutes worth of jism with a lot lizard. Your very words. That means something to you? Didn’t mean nothing to your daddy when he stuck his pecker in your seven-year-old ass.”
He struck her in the face with the pistol, cracking it against the skull with a force so hard that her face collapsed. Blood splattered him in the face, the dashboard and the windshield as she fell forward. Gray matter, her brains oozed out onto the car seats. She did not move nor breathe as he sat there trembling with rage and horror at the memories she had brought up.
After what seemed like hours but was only a few minutes, he exited the rental and went to her side of the car. Dragging her body out wasn’t easy. She was tall, lanky and dead-weight, but he managed to carry her to the dock and roll her into the flat-bottomed boat.
In seconds, he was out of sight from the dock, the house and any remaining agents. The reeds and brush closed back over the hole in the water and left no sign of the direction of his travel.
His destination wasn’t into the river channel but through the bayous that crisscrossed the swamp; the home of one of those oddball people who preferred to live off the grid. One of those that he deemed too…strange to help with the search before. Poaching, fishing, hunting and stealing from neighbors provided them a living and if anyone knew the swamp and its mysteries, it would be the man Neige was going to visit. He had even arrested the oldest on DUI charges but let him go for favors.
Halfway there, he pushed the stiffening body of his great-aunt over the side and into the black water. She hit without a splash and sank immediately, as if the dark waters were eager to receive her. Her eyes remained on his until she was deep enough to hide from his view. He was, he thought with surprise, without remorse for the murder of his great-aunt, the woman who had raised him after he had killed his own father.
Thirty years ago, he remembered, with astonishment. Thirty years dead and it still had the power to bring forth the shimmering rage that blinded him. He too, was buried in the swamp, another ghost that had never bothered to haunt his murderer.
When he reached the house on stilts hidden on a small spit of solid land, he knew that he had been under surveillance long before he had seen the rude shack. Built of cypress logs that had been cut and planed a hundred years earlier, the 24 by 24 cabin had weathered hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and fires.
A long dock was the entry to the front porch that was nearly as large as the house; Tempe waited a stone’s throw from the deck. He called out his name and who he was there to see and waited for the reply. To come any further was to invite a harsh rejection which would end in his bullet ridden body disappearing into the murky swamp.
It wasn’t long before a familiar face merged out of the thick bushes alongside of the house, holding a sawed-off shotgun. He was joined by a matching pair with AR-15s on the porch. Twins, they closely resembled the shotgun wielder and if their eyes were a bit too close together, one didn’t notice against the other facial and skeletal oddities. Arms a shade too long. A neck that didn’t match the trunk, rounded shoulders loaded with muscles, legs that looked more like an ape’s than man. Yet, they weren’t ugly, just…odd.
Known as the Beilby twins, they were part of the myths and lore of the Swamp. Clearly, they looked as if they were the products of an incestuous relationship of generations, but Neige knew better. Clovis, the oldest brother had an MBA from Wharton. The twins were masters of naval architecture. They lived like characters out of ‘Deliverance’ because it suited their peculiar sense of humor.
“Well, Deputy Snowman,” Clovis drawled in a Cajun accent that he mocked. “Heard you might be needing a guide into Old Muddy. Seems you lost something important. Your boy and his lovely Trust Fund.”
Neige knew how the jungle grape vine was equal to NSA intelligence. “How much you boys want to find him for me?”
“How’s a million sound?” Clovis said, his witchy eyes as dark as the swamp water that rippled near his feet. “Each.”
“You guarantee you’ll find him? Alive?” Neige asked. “If he’s dead, the cops will blame me. I won’t get a dime, nor will you. And the Feds are here looking for him, too.”
“If we don’t find him and if he’s not alive and kicking, we’ll settle for half of your gold. And the Feds couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.”
Neige fumed but he knew better than to show it. “Call me when you find him. I can’t be here, they already know I’m looking. I ran into the FBI, state and locals with the Roberts boys.”
“The Roberts?” Clovis laughed. “Bob Lee’s good for hunting gators but they don’t know the swamp like us boys, right Twin?” He didn’t wait for his brothers to answer.
Neige turned the pirogue around with a thrust of his paddle and headed back. Clovis last words made his skin crawl.
“Say hello to Aunt Elmira on your way out, Deputy.”