Family Reunion

“I slipped out,” he said, hoping André wouldn’t ask why.

André nodded, reached out and punched a button on the coffee machine. A cup dropped into the slot, and coffee began to trickle.

“Any word?” Scott asked, knowing no further explanation was necessary.

André shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Unless...” Retrieving the cup from the machine, he shook his head again.

They walked out of the break room together.

“Unless what?”

André took a deep swallow of his coffee and grimaced. “Unless you count the crackpots. A lot of crackpots. Gaby and I have waded through more crank calls and useless leads since the story broke.” He paused and gave his cousin a poor imitation of an encouraging smile. “We’re tired, that’s all.”

“If I can help...” Scott almost hated to make the perfunctory offer. He doubted that help from his branch of the family tree would be welcome.

André put a hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate that, Scott. I know you’re in an awkward position here.”

“No. I stay out of it. And I mean what I say. If I can help, I want to. Aunt Margaret...” His throat grew unexpectedly tight at the mention of her name. He could almost see the grande dame of the Lyon family marching purposefully down a corridor at Lyon Broadcasting in one of her severe navy dresses, head high, shoulders back. Being seventy-seven hadn’t slowed her down a bit. “I think a lot of her.”

That was an understatement. Scott wondered if André knew that. The truth was, he loved Margaret Hollander Lyon; she’d been more of a mother to him than his own mother, and more of a role model for him than his own weak-willed father. As the youngest child in the family, almost a tagalong, born as his parents’ marriage was disintegrating into cold silence and emotional withdrawal, if not divorce, Scott had found little stability or warmth in his life. Until he got to know Aunt Margaret.

“I appreciate that, Scott. But the truth is, I don’t know that there’s much any of us can do. Except wait and pray.”

“I’m not much good at either of those,” Scott admitted.

“Me, neither. And I hate like the devil having to learn it under these circumstances.”

As André went his way, Scott turned in the direction of the newsroom—in time to see Raymond and Jason lurking in the door outside Raymond’s office in the accounting department. The morning news conference obviously over, they apparently had been watching Scott’s conversation with André. Feeling the building closing in around him, Scott wheeled into the newsroom without acknowledging his brothers.

In the newsroom a handful of reporters and camera technicians were beginning to gather. Early mornings were the slowest time of the day at WDIX-TV. Reporters and crew members straggled in and milled around waiting for their coffee to kick in. Sometime before noon, the activity cranked up. Phones rang, voices called out across the room, and chaos ruled. By late afternoon the chaos was organized and transformed into the evening news.

Scott could remember a time when he’d been excited by the process. When the desire to be the first to crack a story had been in his blood. But it didn’t seem to be there now.

All he felt these days, after years of watching competition and greed consume his family, was the desire to be someplace else.

He wondered, sometimes, if that was what had happened to Aunt Margaret.

“Hey, Scott,” said the sweet, beguiling voice of the newsroom clerk behind him, “what’s shaken’?”

He turned to give her a smile. Tiffany Marie Dalcour was young, just out of college, and ambitious. She seemed to think that cultivating the only single male Lyon in the building might somehow further her goal of making it on-camera herself.

“Not much, Tiffany.”

She was sorting mail for the newsroom. Piles and piles of mail. She didn’t miss a beat even as she intensified her smile at Scott. “So there’ll be no broadcast tonight, then?”

He laughed, and she looked pleased. At thirty-four, he had no interest whatsoever in the twenty-four-year-old, but he returned her teasing, anyway. “We’ll make it up if we have to.”

“Oops,” she said, tossing an envelope aside. “That one should have gone to the executive offices, I guess.”

Scott glanced down at the envelope. It was addressed to “The Lyon Family.” He started to walk away when the name on the return address registered.

Nicolette Bechet.

He went back and picked up the envelope. Nicolette Bechet, with an address out of the city, in one of the rural districts.

He fingered the envelope. He was curious. A little excited, even.

The Lyon Family.

He had as much right to open it as anyone.

Without examining his logic too scrupulously, he slid a finger beneath the flap of the envelope.

Her signature was full of sweeps and flourishes, not what he would have expected at all.

And she wanted to help the family find Margaret Lyon. Also not what he would have expected.

He read the letter six times. Finding people was a hobby of hers, the letter said. The letter recounted some of her successes. Scott was impressed. Intrigued. He thought about the weary tone of André’s voice when he’d spoken of all the dead-end leads he and his wife had followed up on. No need to add to the burden, Scott told himself.

He could talk to the former judge himself.

After all, he’d been wanting to for two years.

CHAPTER TWO

SCOTT WAS A CITY. BOY. He knew very little about Louisiana’s fabled bayou country. Recreation in Scott’s mind was a late night in the French Quarter following his nose to exotic new cuisine or his ears to the hottest new jazz or blues musicians.

He’d heard of Bayou Sans Fin. Some kind of family connection, although he couldn’t think what.

Bayou Sans Fin—bayou without end. The idea sent a little shiver along the back of his neck as he steered his low-slung two-seater along the snaking blacktop. Live oaks met overhead, blocking out the sky and the sun, dripping gray Spanish moss to within inches of his New Orleans Saints ball cap. Dense thickets of cypress, hackberry and willow trees fronted the marshes and swamps, which were neither land nor water, but some mysterious in-between territory that exuded an aura of danger.

The only sign of human habitation was the occasional mailbox. Narrow dirt driveways were overgrown with vines and weeds and other plant life alien to someone who’d grown up around the Garden District’s immaculately sculptured flower beds. The driveways, he supposed, signaled the possibility of homes. Of people. The kind of people who wanted to live far beyond the reach of prying eyes and friendly voices, perhaps.

Mostly, however, Scott imagined other life forms. Gators and muskrats and mink lurked in the dense overgrowth, maybe keeping a wary eye on the sleek red monster Scott drove. He imagined he could feel their wild unfathomable eyes on him and shivered again.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t gator eyes he imagined at all. Maybe the eyes he conjured up in his imagination were equally unfathomable, but as blue as the bits and pieces of sky visible through the canopy of trees.

He was going to see her. After two years, the memory of her had never quite vanished, and now he was going to talk to her. Get to know her maybe. Find out about the finely drawn upper lip that didn’t quite match the lush lower lip.

His mind was out of control.

He was supposed to be at work, lugging a video camera all over the Crescent City. Point, pan, zoom. Hours of taping for minutes of on-air time, measuring yours against theirs, holding your breath to see which reporter nailed the lead story that day, strutting if you won, clamping your jaw and saying wait till tomorrow if you ended up on the cutting-room floor.

He crossed a rickety plank bridge, holding his breath all the way, then spotted an enormous mailbox on the left a few yards ahead. It bore the name Bechet, hand-lettered in yellow on red. His tires squealed a protest as he wheeled into the turn and hit dirt and rock. A tree limb brushed the shiny paint on the passenger door; vines hung low above his open car. He wondered what he’d do if a snake dropped out of the trees overhead.

About two hundred yards off the highway, the driveway cleared and widened marginally, revealing a cypress archway with a sign—Welcome to Cachette en Bayou Farm. Hideaway on the Bayou. The sign might give lip service to the idea of welcome, but Scott wouldn’t have called the entrance inviting by any stretch of the imagination. He braked almost to a halt.

Unbidden came the image of the massive iron fence encircling Lyoncrest, the impressive family mansion in the Garden District. With its sleek bronze lions posing at the front gate, Lyoncrest had sometimes struck him as uninviting—as this dark entrance seemed to him now.

He glanced up at the letter from Nicolette Bechet clipped to the visor. He had, after all, been invited. Well, not him specifically. But a representative of the Lyon family. Which he was. So he wasn’t intruding. He drove on.

The house came into view. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but this wasn’t it. The building wandered in every direction, turning here, rising there, making another twist just when you expected it to finally come to a stop. Obviously it had been added to over the years—perhaps every time a new generation of Bechets was born.

What appeared to be the original core of the house was a square three-story structure made of unevenly formed bricks the color of just-boiled shrimp. The house rose on stilts above the unkempt yard, the ground level ringed with small windows, letting scant light into what was likely an above-ground cellar. Wide, steep steps rose to the second-floor gallery and main entrance, which was unimposing and standing wide open. Shuttered windows were as high as any door. Wings went off in both directions, one of natural cypress, one painted a dreary dun color. The roof was tin, the shutters hung crookedly, and the chimney was a listing steeple of bricks that appeared ready to topple and inflict serious bodily harm.

The ungainly house was surrounded by pickup trucks—Scott counted six—in varying states of repair, and one finned Cadillac circa 1960. The house leaked noise from every open door and window—sawing and hammering and drilling and conflicting music, zydeco from the cypress wing and country from the other.

This surely could not be the home of Nicolette Bechet.

He pulled his sports car in beside a polished blue pickup with fancy stripes, farthest from the disaster-waiting-to-happen chimney, and questioned his presence here one last time before he killed the engine.

Then he saw her.

She was hanging out a third-story window, precariously braced with one boot-clad foot inside the window, the other on the tin roof. She was tugging on one of the dilapidated shutters. A claw hammer hung from a loop on the overalls she wore. A white painter’s cap with its brim yanked to one side covered her head, but didn’t come close to covering her hair, which had been sleek and gold the last time he’d seen her. Now, it was long and wild and spilling to her shoulder blades.

If Scott’s heart hadn’t lurched in his chest and his breath come out in a whoosh when he saw her, he’d never have believed that figure was the carefully buttoned-up judge he remembered.

He took the keys out of the ignition, removed the letter from the visor clip, opened the car door and got out, never taking his eyes off her.

She almost lost her balance when the shutter pulled free. With a fierce grunt, she turned and shoved it off the edge of the steep roof, calling after it as it rattled and fell and splintered on the ground, “Now you’re trash. Irritating trash at that.”

He looked up at her, his reaction not diminishing. Her eyes landed on him. “Who are you?”

She’d certainly lost her judicial manner in two years. He grinned.

“Scott Lyon.” He fluttered the letter in the air by way of explanation.

She hoisted her other foot out of the window and stood on the roof, hands on hips, feet apart. “Get the hell off my farm.”

She must’ve misunderstood. His grin deepened. “I got your letter.”

“And I’ve got a shotgun I can put my hands on in forty-five seconds flat if I don’t see your rear end headed in that direction by the time I get back inside.”

She gave that a second to sink in, her expression granite, then turned and crawled back in the window, more graceful than anything he’d ever before seen in overalls and cowboy boots.

“Best leave,” came a voice from the zydeco side of the house. Scott looked into the amused eyes of a dark bearded man with a big smile and an industrial-strength drill dangling lightly from one beefy hand. “She don’t be a half-bad hand with a shotgun.”

Scott was still grinning. “She sent for me.”

The workman shook his head. “She’ll send you to hell in a quick minute, that’s what.”

A shot rang out. Scott flinched. He glanced up at the window. She stood there with the shotgun pointed skyward, glaring.

“Warning shot,” the workman explained. “Me, I don’t mess with her.”

“She’s worth the effort, seems to me.”

“We fancy our hides.”

“Maybe I fancy hers.”

The slash of white teeth against black beard grew wider. “I understand that, you bet. Still, I’d duck under the gallery if I was you.”

Scott looked up. She seemed to be taking aim. “Good idea.”

He bounded up the steep steps, all new boards, raw and unfinished but sturdy, a match for the new planks on the porch. A mutt dozed in a circle of dappled sunlight and raised two sleepy eyes to take him in. The animal was less wary of visitors, apparently, than the lady of the house. Scott peered through the open front door. The rooms were dark. The foyer was broad, rising two stories. He stepped in.

“I heard the shooting. I’m guessing you’ve already seen my granddaughter.”

He turned to the left, where an old woman sat in a straight-backed rocker beside a fireplace in a rustic parlor. No arches and fancy work here, just a square serviceable room with scarred hardwood floors and plaster walls that were gutted at intervals to reveal electrical wiring.

“I’m Scott Lyon,” he said, taking off his ball cap. “I think she’s forgotten. She wrote me. The family, actually.”

A cat was curled up in the old woman’s lap and an imposing white bird with brilliant orange markings sat on her narrow shoulder. “Scott. I don’t know a Scott.”

“Prescott Lyon, ma’am. Charles Lyon’s youngest son.” Scott was used to people not knowing him but recognizing his family name.

“You may call me Riva, Prescott.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

“You may not call me ma’am. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She gave him a hard look, a look he’d already seen once today from the woman on the roof.

“Yes, Riva.”

She nodded slightly. “Better. So, you the son of Charles Lyon. The ne’er-do-well, yes?”

Her outspokenness reminded him of Aunt Margaret and made him instantly at ease with her, even though she couldn’t have been more different from his aunt on the surface. Riva looked much older, what with her face so lined and weathered and the slumped way she sat in her rocker. Yes, far less vigorous than Margaret Lyon. Also, Margaret wore impeccable navy suits and dresses, decorating herself with nothing more elaborate than a single strand of pearls. In contrast, Riva wore a garish purple wrap of some kind, a red-and-yellow scarf, gaudy jewelry dripping from her ears and her neck and her wrists, and ballet slippers on her tiny feet.

“Yes,” he said, liking the woman well enough not to take offense at her assessment of his father. “There are those who might describe my father as a ne’er-do-well.”

She cackled. “Never mind. They called me worse.”

“Uh-oh,” said the bird.

Riva glanced over Scott’s shoulder and her face broke into a smile. “Ah, Nicki. Your guest has arrived.”

Scott turned slightly to take her in. With her this close, he could almost feel the animosity rising off her in waves. It made his heartbeat accelerate.

She had left the shotgun upstairs.

He extended a hand, gave her a warm smile. “Thanks for not shooting me.”

She ignored his hand. “I asked you to leave.”

“Actually you told me to leave.”

“Nicki, m’enfant, how rude. This young man, he will think the bayou makes us inhospitable.”

Nicki glared at the old woman. “You stay out of this.”

The bird joined in with a shrill “Shut up!”

“You taught him to speak, I take it,” Scott said to Nicki.

Riva cackled. He thought he heard approval.

“I’m only here to take you up on your offer,” he said, tapping the folded letter against his palm. “I suppose I should’ve called first, but—”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Her blue eyes flashed and her wavy hair almost quivered with emotion.

He gave her the letter. She opened it and read it as if she’d never seen it before. Then she balled it up and threw it into the open fireplace.

“Maman, you go too far,” she said, her voice lapsing into a Cajun cadence he hadn’t heard her use before. She looked at Scott. “I’m sorry you wasted your time. My grandmother is toying with us, and I apologize for her, since I doubt she’ll apologize for herself. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

“But...”

She was leaving. Walking away. He took a step in her direction, but didn’t know what to say to change her mind or to pull her into the emotional whirlwind she always created in him.

Maybe if he simply followed and kissed her.

“Wouldn’t do that,” Riva said.

He spun around. “Wouldn’t do what?”

Riva laughed and didn’t answer. “Sit,” she said, and gestured at a matching rocker, occupied at the moment by a ball of yellow-and-gray fur, which proved to be two sleeping cats. When he approached, one hissed while leaping off the chair, the other stood on the armrest and waited patiently for him to sit. Then the feline dropped into his lap and circled four times before settling.

“She likes you, my cat.”

“Your granddaughter does not.”

“My cat is a better judge of people.”

“I’d like to think so.” He waited.

“It is true, what the letter says. Nicki finds people. She uses computers.”

“She doesn’t seem inclined to help.”

Riva shrugged. “She hates the Lyons.”

He didn’t have to ask why. “Then why am I here?”

“Because you want to find Margaret.”

He ran his hand over the cat’s fur and studied Riva Bechet. He had the most compelling sense that he was also here because Riva Bechet wanted to find Margaret, as well.

NICKI TOOK HER FURY to the pier, the only structure on the entire 106 acres that wasn’t falling apart. She looked at the film of green duckweed covering the still water and fumed.

How dare she!

Her grandmother was an unrepentant busybody. Among her many flaws, that was one nobody disputed. Riva Reynard Bechet believed she knew how everyone’s life should be managed, and she never hesitated to jump in and try.

But this! Inviting the Lyons to Cachette en Bayou and using Nicki’s name to do it.

When she turned back toward the house, a gasp of outrage escaped her lips. Riva had brought him onto the brick patio. He was holding a chair for her. Riva placed a hand on his arm as she lowered herself into the chair. She was smiling up at him. He was smiling back.

Nicki wheeled around to face the water again. She couldn’t stand this.

“Hey, Quick-Nick, what’s she done now?”

Nicki squeezed her eyes shut at the sound of her eighteen-year-old cousin Toni’s voice. Not now, she pleaded with whoever had the power to intervene in her life. She felt the slight give of the boards as the girl dropped onto the pier.

“I was out at the cabin and heard the gunshot. Who is he?”

Nicki drew a deep breath and opened her eyes. The water was still smooth and green. Elephant ears still swayed in the barest of breezes, and clumps of bulrush still provided nesting areas for black-crowned night heron and red-tailed hawks. A smattering of low-lying fog clung to the opposite shore. You could count on the bayou, from moment to moment, from year to year. The only change from seconds earlier was a snowy egret that had dropped silently onto a cypress log lodged against the opposite bank. The bird was graceful and still, unlike anything in Nicki’s life.

“I’m coming back as an egret in my next life,” she said.

Toni chuckled. “Not me. I’m going to be a gator. Snap at anything that makes me see red. Course, I guess you’ve got that covered this go round.”

A wry grin touched Nicki’s lips. “Smart mouth.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got my bad points, too.”

The egret took to the air, again without a sound.

“He’s a Lyon,” Nicki said. “Scott Lyon.”

“A Lyon? Oh, the big shots in the news. Some old lady ran off with the family fortune or something. Right?”

Nicki had a moment of envy for the obliviousness that could still be one’s companion at eighteen. The world remained narrowed to one’s immediate concerns—a boy who looked good in his jeans, a weekend gig for the band you believed was your heart and soul, the certainty that you’d always be a size six no matter how many cheeseburgers you ate.

“Something like that.”

“You gonna find her?”

“No.”

“His brains you were blowing out, then?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? He looks cute enough from here.”

Nicki restrained herself from looking. She didn’t have to. She could will Scott Lyon into her mind’s eye with a minimum of effort. He had changed since that day two years ago. His hair was short now, clipped so close to his head you couldn’t grab a handful. And it was mostly silver, even though he had to be about her age, which was thirty-four. He wore a tiny gold hoop in his left ear, the perfect size to hug his earlobe and no more. Strong bones formed his face, giving him a chiseled jaw and a square chin, high cheekbones and the nose from a statue by Michelangelo. His taut face was tanned to perfect gold, his eyes a smoky gray.

Those eyes had haunted her for two years.

She had been inclined to trust them two years ago when he’d burst into her chambers. Nicki usually trusted her instincts about people, and her instincts had told her Scott Lyon had no hidden agenda. He said he’d come to help her and he meant just that.

Silly her.

“I don’t like the Lyons,” she said.

“Because they run the TV station that started all that stuff after Uncle David died of a drug overdose?”

So maybe teenagers weren’t completely oblivious. Nicki felt the strongest urge to stalk away. But she did that a lot. So this time she stayed put.

“That’s right.”

“Dad said it was all true.”

Nicki opened her mouth to say that Toni’s father was a straitlaced coldhearted son of a you-know-what, but she caught herself. Uncle James might indeed be a little chilly where emotions were concerned, but he was still Toni’s father. Besides, Nicki was well aware that some of her younger cousins considered her to be a straitlaced coldhearted you-know-what herself. They didn’t understand.

Maybe she didn’t understand Uncle James.

“True or not,” she said, “I wasn’t crazy about having it pointed out to everybody in the city that my father was a drug addict who raised his daughter as a street performer.”

She flinched just saying it out loud. Giving voice to the words was her way of declaring that the truth had no power over her. Maybe someday, if she said it enough, it might be true.

“It’s not like anybody was going to blame you because Uncle David was, you know, sick. And a lousy father.”

Nicki glanced at Toni. Her young cousin was a Reynard, from the top of her mane of wild red hair to the tips of the toes she had shoved into a pair of size-ten snakeskin boots dyed red and purple. She also had the kind of husky throbbing singing voice that could give a saint a hard-on, a body the far side of Marilyn Monroe and an outspokenness saved from insensitivity only because she was always on target.