Page 21 of Hurricane Irene

Cam pointed two fingers to port. Hunter nodded and passed the warning backward with the same motion, though no boat followed his. Their radios remained clipped to their vests.

At the next bend, a whole pecan tree blocked half the channel. Its crown had been shoved into the mud, and its roots rose twenty feet in the air, packed with clay, bottles, and torn strips of blue tarp.

Cam nosed toward the opening along the far bank. Oliver moved to the bow with a boat hook, sounding the bottom. Tap. Mud. Tap. Wood. At the third strike, the pole vanished nearly to his hands.

Cam reversed before the propeller could bite whatever waited below. The skiff slewed sideways, close enough for branches to rake across the gunwale and pluck at their sleeves.

They pushed through one yard at a time.

Past the tree, the bayou widened into a flooded basin. The storm had emptied houses into it. A mattress drifted upright, its springs exposed like ribs. Cabinet doors, family photographs sealed behind glass, a yellow rain boot, and a church pew traveled together in a lazy gyre. The steeple of Saint Odile’s showed beyond the levee, crooked but standing. Around it, nothing moved—not a truck on the road, not smoke from a chimney, not a heron lifting from the shallows. Even the insects seemed to hush when the wind fell.

“We go slow,” said Remy. It was the first full sentence spoken in nearly an hour.

The boats entered the cut with their motors tilted high. The men poled them beneath low branches filmed with mud at shoulder height, proof of how high the surge had climbed. Spanish moss dragged across their caps. Nails protruded from boards just under the surface.

Once, a propane cylinder rolled out from beneath a raft of branches and bumped the lead hull, making a dull bell note before spinning away. Farther in, they passed the corpse of a buck suspended in a young cypress, its antlers caught in the fork, brown water dripping from its hide.

Then the trees opened. The shell road lay beneath four feet of water, a pale submerged ribbon leading toward the ridge.

Luke took the binoculars and scanned the area, hoping to find what they wanted.

“Up ahead,” said Theo swallowing back a cracked sob. The men all turned, looking at the three young firefighters, their heads lowered.

Luke lowered the binoculars without realizing he had raised them. One by one, the men stood. The motors idled. The boats drifted together in the ruined bayou, and every face turned toward what waited beneath the oak. Eric finally whispered what they were all thinking.

“God in heaven.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

They took photos. They wrapped the bodies and they returned to Belle Fleur without a word. More than a dozen of the strongest, most stoic, brave men in history and they were reduced to nothing.

Nine, Gaspar, Cruz, Doc, Riley, Suzette, and Gabi waited at the docks as the boats pulled in. They noticed the boats heavy at the rear and each gasped at the sight of the six body bags.

“Do we know them?” asked Gaspar stepping forward.

“No,” said Luke shaking his head. “I-I don’t. Maybe y’all do.”

“Were they all from one house?” asked Nine.

“We’re not sure,” said Bodhi stepping up onto the dock. “They were all chained to a pipe coming up from a concrete slab. A concrete slab, Nine. No one out this way does concrete slabs in the middle of the bayou.”

“The slab was probably thirty by thirty,” said Cade. “Pipe was on the east side and stretched up about three feet and then curved back into the concrete. There was no reason for it to be there.”

“Any idea of ages?” asked Baptiste.

“All women. All relatively young, maybe twenty-five to thirty. They weren’t naked. Shorts and t-shirts mostly. One was wearing a dress,” said Ben. His voice caught and he gave a sound as if he’d hiccupped. “It was p-pretty. P-pretty flowers and lace. It was someone’s daughter, Dad. She was someone’s daughter!”

Gaspar gripped his son’s neck pulling him close and kissing the top of his head. He knew what the men saw. They saw their own wives, sisters, daughters, daughters-in-law. He would see the same.

“There was no way for those poor girls to get out. They couldn’t even climb a tree or swim,” said Oliver. “Someone made sure of it.”

“We’ll take them to cold storage until the coroner can make his way out here,” said Nathan. “Someone is missing their child, wife, or sibling.”

The older men watched as the bodies were lifted and placed gently, lovingly on the ATVs. The large cold storage building at the back of the property had been used for just such emergencies.

“Coroner is going to be a busy man,” said Gaspar. He opened each body bag, glancing at the faces of the young women. He looked at their hands, hoping for signs of a wedding ring or even a class ring that might tell them where they were from.

Nine was on the opposite side, check the right hands, as Gaspar checked the left. On the fifth bag, he noticed the woman’s hand was clutched into a fist. He gently pried her fingers open and took the crumpled, wet piece of paper.