Half Moon Lake Read online

  Nobody could agree on why the prints petered out.

  ‘He’s been taken,’ Jackson said. ‘Lifted onto a train.’

  ‘Then why’s there no grown man’s footprints? You saying somebody strong enough to jes’ reach out and swoop him up from a moving train?’ one man asked.

  ‘Impossible,’ John Henry said.

  ‘There’s no train today,’ another chimed in.

  ‘Freight trains go slower,’ Jackson said.

  The sheriff held one hand up to silence the men. ‘I’ve told you twice to back off. Y’all hard of hearing?’

  John Henry exhaled loudly. Ignoring the sheriff’s instructions, the men had stomped around the prints, snapping twigs and squashing Indian grass, making and perhaps destroying leads. His own children knew better.

  Sheriff Sherman asked his deputy to drive to the stationmaster’s house to get the schedule, but he was clearly sceptical of Jackson’s theory. ‘Even a beanpole like you couldn’t reach out that far from a train, no matter the speed.’

  All through the night, searchers came into the house in waves, trudging up the hill under a starry sky with only a sliver of moon. The men smelled of whiskey, pine smoke and salty sweat, and lay down in the kitchen and dining room on make-do bedding brought in by the Ladies Aid. Esmeralda spread hessian sacks on the ground for the dogs. The symphony of snores – hound and human – croaking frogs, hooting owls, and music from the resort made the house thrum. The sounds carried to the Davenports’ bedroom, where John Henry slouched for a brief rest in a chair by the window and Mary wept and slept, shook then sat numb, clutching Sonny’s toy rabbit.

  Down the hallway, George and Paul sat cross-legged on their beds in the dark.

  ‘He’s too chicken to be out at night,’ George said. ‘Unless he’s really lost, or you said something to make him stay there. Did you say something?’

  ‘Nothing bad,’ Paul whispered.

  ‘What’d you say?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  The following afternoon, Tom McCabe and Eddie Dale arrived at the lake.

  ‘Wish he’d let us come out earlier.’ Eddie dropped his cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with his heel.

  ‘You’ve got plenty of time to get your pictures,’ Tom said.

  ‘Spoken like a writer.’

  Tom surveyed the scene, taking in the army of men, the exhausted dogs lying in packs, the glossy lake rippled from Negroes dragging heavy nets through it. He smelled the tadpoley muck of roots draped along the lake’s edge, felt warmth rising up from the earth. Tom put his hands in his pockets, jiggling his lucky pennies. Then, instead of heading to the lake to get the facts from the sheriff – like he knew he should – he went to the house to find the boy’s mother.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out which woman was Mary Davenport. She sat in a white wicker chair at the front of the house, in the shade of a tree, upright and pale as a lily, ignoring the women who swooshed about her. She’d fixed her eyes on the lake. A breeze blew tendrils of fallen hair from her face, creating a clear line of sight into which Tom intruded.

  ‘Mrs Davenport? My name’s Tom McCabe. I’m a reporter at the St. Landry Clarion. I’m here with our photographer, Eddie Dale.’ He used his hat to point out Eddie, who’d stood his tripod near the lake.

  Mary looked at Tom, her attention perfunctory.

  ‘We’d like to tell our readers about your missing boy. One of them might know something.’ He waited. ‘I’m sure he’ll be back home in no time, Mrs Davenport, no time at all, but I –’

  ‘You think they’ll find him soon?’ Mary flicked her eyes up at Tom. Hazel, bloodshot, Tom noted, with a spray of freckles across her nose. ‘Do you think so?’

  And though he had no idea about anything, Tom said, ‘I’m sure of it, Mrs Davenport.’ He took out his notebook and licked his pencil. ‘So what’s Sonny like – is he a good boy?’ Tom shook his head. ‘Of course he is. What does he like to do? When I was a boy I was crazy for animals. Chased chickens around the yard, rode the mule though I wasn’t supposed to.’ Mary turned her attention back to the lake. ‘I have a dog now, Mrs Davenport – he’s named Walter. He’s a terrific dog. Does Sonny like dogs?’

  ‘Sonny loves dogs. He begs his father for one.’ Her voice softened. ‘When Sonny’s found I’ll tell him he can have a dog, any one he likes.’

  ‘I’ll bet you will. And what boy wouldn’t love that.’

  Esmeralda came out of the house and shooed Tom away. ‘Mrs Davenport needs quiet.’

  Tom didn’t like being spoken to that way by a Negro, but neither Mary nor her attendants reprimanded Esmeralda. Tom dipped his head to Mary and walked down the hill to Eddie, who was pulling himself out from under his camera cloth.

  ‘This is Jackson Lane.’ Eddie nodded at the man in front of his lens. ‘You’ll want to talk to him – he found a clue.’

  ‘And I can too reach a boxcar from there,’ Jackson said. ‘Lay down and tested it.’

  ‘Bully for you,’ Tom muttered, and rolled his eyes at Eddie. How many times had he told him to steer clear of the crazies?

  A dozen yards away, John Henry boomed out instructions to the Negroes standing thigh-deep in the lake. Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw Mary stride towards her husband. He hoped she didn’t say a reporter had planted ideas in her head about a dog. If he wanted to get the story he’d need to win over all the players. Huh, but there was something telling: as Mary moved closer to John Henry he turned, sensing her, and his hand and hers rose up and reached out through the air for its mate.

  As the sun dropped behind the hills, the lake changed colour from moss green to fleshy pink, purple, resting at black. Slow-moving searchers made fires and lit lanterns. Smoke whorled against the spangled sky and amber firelight cast strange shadows on the men’s faces. To John Henry, watching from the porch, the scene resembled a Bible School painting, a Hell of barking dogs, black men and wild flames, in which his boy wandered, lost.

  Local women shuttled chicken, yams and corn to the trestle tables set up on the lawn and put a tray out for leftovers to give to the coloured men. John Henry was close enough to hear the women talking to one another, blending practical and personal comments, sharing anecdotes.

  All of this to an unseemly score of ragtime tunes drifting out from the resort.

  It was remarkable to John Henry how quickly an abnormal situation had become normalised, how by the second night there were systems in place for eating and sleeping. He approved of the methodical intelligence of it but struggled to control his rising panic. None of this noisy industry had yielded anything, but it would. It must.

  Meanwhile, Mrs Billingham stood at the living-room window, one hand holding back the heavy curtain so she could watch. ‘I’m certain they haven’t put out enough food,’ she said to Gladys, then abandoned her post to collapse into the nearest armchair. ‘But I’ll spend what energy I have caring for Mary.’ She rubbed her worked wrist. ‘What an awful ordeal.’

  ‘So awful. I do hope they find him soon.’

  Mrs Billingham glanced at Mary, who had unintentionally consumed enough alcohol to fall asleep on the sofa, her face squashed into a cushion, another skirt ruined. ‘Ring the bell, Gladys. I’ll have Esmeralda help Mary to her room.’

  Gladys was tapping her boot in time to what she could hear of the distant Joplin tune.

  ‘Gladys.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Gladys, pouting, walked across the room and rang the bell. ‘Another night ruined because of one naughty boy. I’m not sure I ever want children.’

  ‘Tell me,’ George insisted, again. It was too hot to sleep. They knelt on the wooden floor, side by side, and stuck their heads out the window in the hope of seeing some of the action, but the backyard was empty.

  Paul folded his arms on the sill. ‘What does it matter? They’ll look for him anyhow.’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  Knowing that George would keep at him like a woodpecker, Paul gave in. ‘I told him he wasn�
�t our brother. That we were only letting him stay till his real family came back from a war. And then he’d have to go live with them in the North and we’d never see him again and good riddance because I was sick of him following me like a bad smell.’

  ‘What war?’

  ‘I made that up.’

  ‘You made all of it up.’ George punched his brother in the arm. ‘Idiot.’

  ‘I didn’t know he’d run off forever.’ Paul’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Do you think he’s okay?’

  ‘No. He can’t even buckle his shoes.’ George stood up. ‘I’m telling Pa.’

  ‘Don’t! It won’t make any difference.’

  George figured this was probably true. The adults would search for Sonny until they found him, no matter what Paul had said. And if Paul admitted he’d scared Sonny, he’d be made to sit alone and think about what he’d done, banned from playing games, and George would be left with nothing to do. That wouldn’t be fair. He glared at his brother. ‘You’ve done a lot of dumb things, but this is the dumbest.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Thick clouds covered the sky and heavy midsummer rain fell, making the search harder. Day after day, men trod across gummy mud and slippery grass, and sought to keep memories of comfortable beds at bay.

  If there’d been other footprints they were washed away, along with any scent of the boy. Without a doable task, the dogs became fretful and undisciplined, chased squirrels darting for cover, played deaf to their owners’ calls. Bill O’Sullivan’s setter was snatched by an alligator when the dog padded too close to the water’s edge, nose down, not seeing the serpentine eyes in the lake’s pocked surface. Bill shot at the gator as it yanked his fine-boned setter into the lake, but in a flash there was nothing to shoot at other than trampolining water.

  Men came from Crowley, Alexandria and Baton Rouge. Each train that stopped near Half Moon Lake collected sodden searchers to return them home and delivered a fresh batch of helpers. When the trains stopped for the night, the men slept on floors and in canvas tents, the coloured men taking shelter from the rain on the back porch. But the searchers found nothing, not a trace of Sonny Davenport aside from that one set of vanished prints.

  The reporters who milled around the muddy patch where the footprints had been discovered, now marked by a flagged stick, agreed it would take a giant of a man to reach that far from a moving train.

  ‘Unless,’ Tom whispered to Eddie, ‘he wasn’t on a train.’

  Eddie raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Could be our man was on a horse, walking the tracks, knowing he’d hear a train if one came. Lot of scrub and uneven ground up here, except on the tracks. Sees the boy. Easy enough to help him onto a horse, tempt him with a ride home.’

  ‘A horse wouldn’t like those rocks between the sleepers. Maybe the boy was walking the tracks by himself. That wouldn’t leave prints either.’

  ‘Less likely, I’d say.’ Tom had already fashioned horse-related headlines and didn’t want Eddie messing with his percolating theory.

  The sheriff had his men interview the guests, staff, musicians and suppliers who’d passed in and out of the resort on that day. He contacted stationmasters along the train line and extended the foot search ten miles in every direction. He sent for Indian trackers, regretting he hadn’t done so before the rain. And he reluctantly told John Henry about a possibility closer to home.

  ‘It might be that an alligator’s taken him. Wouldn’t be the first time around here.’

  John Henry nodded. ‘I know.’

  The sheriff didn’t mention Bill O’Sullivan’s dog; he only wanted John Henry to be clear about why he’d instructed his men to blast the lake.

  The ground shook as men threw sticks of dynamite into the water. The blasts brought scores of stunned and dead catfish, crappie and bass to the surface. A tree was uprooted and drifted across the lake, its branches wafting about like hair. Each time a whole alligator floated to the top, belly up, tangled in hyacinth, the men dragged it onto land and sliced it open with care. They cut through the armoured back and dug into the creature’s carcass, pushing muddy fingers into organs and around muscle, feeling for any trace of the boy – shredded clothing, human bones – while being mindful of how much the skin would be worth once they determined who had the right to sell it.

  In the quiet between booms, people shouted to one another and whistled to wayward dogs. The men’s numbers grew to two hundred. The manager of the Starry Lake Resort, more understanding than the groundskeeper, dispatched another dozen members of his ground staff. The Davenports’ friends sent their servants to assist. Gladys and Mrs Billingham stayed on and had their maids travel from Opelousas to tend to their needs. Half Moon Lake had never seen so many people.

  They would find him. The reporter had assured Mary of that again yesterday when she’d snuck downstairs for relief from her room and the endless unhelpful visitors. He’d asked if he could join her on the porch, then leapt up the steps two at a time like Paul did. She’d almost smiled.

  ‘Mrs Davenport.’ He’d lifted his hat an inch above his head.

  ‘I’m sorry, I –’

  ‘Tom McCabe, and you owe me no apology. This isn’t any way to make a person’s acquaintance.’ He’d glanced towards the open front door. ‘I’d wager it’s crowded in there, too. You have a lot of friends, Mrs Davenport.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know these people. I’m grateful for their help, of course –’

  ‘Of course.’ He’d lowered his voice. ‘Not everyone is as helpful as they’d like to believe in these situations though.’

  At that, she had smiled. ‘Are you helpful, Mr McCabe?’

  ‘I sure am. A good reporter is part bowerbird, part bloodhound. There’s many a time a reporter has solved a case before the detective.’

  ‘Is that so?’ she’d said, as though they were at a party, making playful conversation. ‘I wonder if Sheriff Sherman knows that.’

  Uttering the sheriff’s name had sobered Mary, and she’d fallen silent.

  ‘Mrs Davenport,’ Tom had said, in a tone determined to reassure, ‘there are hundreds of men out there now, whole acres of brawn and brain. There’s no doubt they’ll find him.’

  Mary lay in bed, as unable to sleep as her boys, replaying her conversation with Tom McCabe. John Henry had brought the doctor from Opelousas that morning, and though he’d come armed with medicines for anxiety and insomnia, Mary refused to take them. She wanted to be alert when Sonny was found.

  So many unfamiliar sounds filled her house this evening. She could pick out Esmeralda’s steadfast clomp up and down the stairs, the insistent ringing of the living-room bell, the ceaseless opening and closing of doors. But there were voices she didn’t recognise: men on the porch, women in the hall. There was a braying horse, metal clanks – and was that Gladys singing?

  Rain hammered down so relentlessly that Mary imagined the roof collapsing onto her, a wet crash of wood and slate. She pictured water streaming through her room and down the hill, gouging into the earth, filling the lake. The thought of this watery chaos – of Sonny outside in this monstrous weather – was too awful. She slapped the bedspread with one hand, Hop in the other, and pushed herself up.

  Mary walked to the mantle to stare again at the photograph of Sonny in an oval brass frame. He’d enjoyed having his picture taken, the only one of the three who did. George had tolerated it, as always showing serious forbearance. Paul had fidgeted and fussed, complained about the tedium of so much sitting. Sonny had grinned – more than John Henry had wanted for this family record, but she’d winked at her son, encouraged him. Why wasn’t there more of him, she thought. A picture, clothes, a toy rabbit: that wasn’t enough.

  She’d had to part with the photograph for two days. The sheriff wanted the newspapers to use the one picture and written description. ‘Otherwise they take unhelpful liberties,’ he’d explained.

  Mary and John Henry had drafted Sonny’s description together, giving rise to the worst d
isagreement they’d had since his disappearance. When they’d recalled the origin of Sonny’s unique feature – a curved scar above his elbow, wide in the middle, from being yanked out of the birth canal by forceps – Mary became angry about the scar Paul sported on his arm from an irresponsible (Mary’s word), unfortunate (John Henry’s) lesson in whittling. Later, the sheriff told them he’d omit the detail of Sonny’s scar in any case, saying to Mary that he often withheld one piece of information to check for hucksters, and then, to John Henry, that it was a mark easily added to a child’s arm by unscrupulous criminals hoping for a reward. They described Sonny instead as having his mother’s almond eyes and rosy cheeks, with fair hair and all his teeth; a shorter build than some boys of his age, but still robust. Mary wanted to add ‘cheerful’ but the men pointed out, gently, that under the circumstances that might not be the case.

  Sonny was her favourite. Each of the others had held that title for a while, then lost it.

  She’d been besotted with George because he was the first, and such a happy baby. But once he could talk, John Henry became his teacher, and the boy grew so clever so quickly it alarmed her. George didn’t mean to rattle her with his hungry intelligence, but Mary no longer felt easy in her role. Her warmth seemed childish, her authority shaky. George became his father’s son.

  Then Paul had arrived, a rascal from the start. He’d adored her without restraint, but lately he’d become defiant and argumentative.

  Sonny’s birth had been the easiest, since the doctor brought chloroform. She’d passed out instantly, felt no pain. ‘The miracle of medicine,’ the doctor had said. After the birth, he’d encouraged Mary to drink French tonics when she fed Sonny. They’d both been relaxed for months, and that sweet comfort had stayed between them.