When all three men had a bowl of gumbo, warm fresh bread and hot café, Wyatt glanced at his grandmother.
“Tell me what’s going on around here that has you packin’ a shotgun, Nonny.”
She leaned back in her chair and looked at him with her faded blue eyes, eyes still as sharp as ever. “There’s been a coupla strange things happenin’, Wyatt. I know you don’ believe in the Rougarou, and in truth, I never much believed either, but there’s been things in the swamp there’s no accountin’ for.”
She paused dramatically. Malichai and Ezekiel both paused as well, the spoons halfway to their mouths. Wyatt kept shoveling food in. He was used to his grandmother’s storytelling abilities. She could hold an audience spellbound. She’d used it more than once to keep the boys from wolfing their food.
“Food disappearin’, clothes stolen right off the line.”
“Sounds like someone hungry, Nonny, a homeless person maybe.”
At the word “hungry,” both Malichai and Ezekiel resumed eating.
“Maybe,” Nonny conceded. “But the food was taken from inside the houses. Sometimes the clothes as well. The houses were locked.”
“No one locks houses on the bayou,” Wyatt said.
“They do now with all the thievin’ goin’ on. I keep a pot of somethin’ simmerin’ on the stove at all times, Wyatt. You know that. Neighbors drop by. Sometimes Flame comes unexpectedly when Gator’s out doin’ whatever it is he does. I lock up, and I’ve got the dogs. Twice I let them in the house with me, but every third or fourth mornin’ the food was gone out of that pot, even with the dogs inside.”
“Someone entered the house while you were sleepin’?” Wyatt demanded, his temper beginning to do a slow boil.
Nonny nodded. “Yep. I couldn’ even figger how they got in. When food disappeared here, I started puttin’ a package out with little bits I thought might help. Food, clothes, even a blanket or two. Each time I put somethin’ out, it was gone the next mornin’, but three mornin’s in a row after that, I had fresh fish on my table waitin’. Dogs didn’t bark. The doors were locked. I couldn’t tell how they got in, but it made me a mite uncomfortable knowin’ the Rougarou was in my house.”
“Why the Rougarou and not a person, ma’am?” Malichai asked.
“Delmar Thibodeaux seen it himself, with his own two eyes. It was movin’ fast through the brush, so fast he could barely track it.”
“Delmar Thibodeaux owns the Huracan Club, where liquor flows in abundance,” Wyatt explained to the others.
“He swore he wasn’t drinkin’ when he saw it.”
Wyatt sighed. “What else is goin’ on around here, Nonny? That shotgun wasn’t out for the Rougarou. You wouldn’t kill it.”
“I might,” the old lady insisted. “If it threatened me.”
Wyatt lifted his eyebrow at her. “Animals don’ threaten you, Nonny. Everyone in the bayou knows that. Even the alligators leave you alone.”
The boys were fairly certain they’d inherited their psychic abilities from their grandmother, although she never admitted to anything.
Nonny let out a resigned sigh. Clearly she wanted the shapeshifting legend to be true. “Do you remember that old hospital that burned down a couple of years back? There were whispers about that place, some madman owned it and held a girl prisoner there and she set the whole thing on fire to escape.”
Wyatt nodded reluctantly. There were always rumors in the bayou – superstition melding with truth. The bayous and swamps were places where myth or legend often was rooted in reality. In this case, he knew the whispers were true.
Dr. Whitney, the previous owner of the hospital, was truly a madman. He had dedicated his life to creating a supersoldier. Those soldiers were known as GhostWalkers, because they owned the night. Few saw them, or heard them as they carried out their missions. Few knew that their DNA had been tampered with and they were all psychically as well as physically enhanced.
Now they were getting into classified things – things he couldn’t discuss with his grandmother. He kept his head down while he ate.
“I remember it,” he admitted.
“Some big shot bought up the land right away and cleaned it all up. They built a long, ugly building with few windows and walls at least a foot thick, all concrete. Not a single man or woman on the river was employed.”
There was no denying the little sneer in her voice. It was considered an insult for a large company to come into the bayou and not hire the locals who needed work. Most of the families living on the river would have taken it the same way. The “big shot” hadn’t made any friends with his decision to give work to outsiders, but he hadn’t broken any laws either.
“Who owns the land now, Nonny?” he asked.
Whitney Trust had owned it, and Lily, Whitney’s daughter, had sold it the moment she realized her father had used the facilities to experiment on a child. Wyatt didn’t look at either of the Fortunes brothers. Like him, they were fairly new in the GhostWalker force, but he had information they didn’t on the founder and creator of the program.
“They have a big sign up on their fourteen-foot-high chain-link fence with razor wire rolled up along on the top and men with guns patrolling with dogs,” Nonny said in disgust. “Like they’re afraid everyone in the bayou wants to know their business.”