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Bastion home. He didn’t want to drive there in the dark. Not on this night when a strange, moist wind howled down the chimney and the past had reawakened like a sleeping corpse. Adele’s anger at her sister’s excommunication was fresh in his mind. She’d cursed him and the church. She’d called down the vengeance of God on him because he’d followed his bishop’s orders and closed the sanctified ground of the church cemetery to Rosa’s body. A suicide could not be buried in hallowed ground.
    Adele had taken Rosa, and then the bodies of her twin boys, into the swamps to a secret grave. He’d never gone to counsel her, at first not wanting to agitate her more and then finding it impossible to overcome the inertia that touched him whenever he heard her name. Even if he’d found her, she wouldn’t have listened to him. Her grief and fury had obviously driven her mad.
    A log in the fireplace snapped as a gust of wind rushed down the chimney. A shower of sparks, vaguely in the shape of a woman, blew across the room. The priest moved quickly, stepping on the tiny burning embers that had fallen on the rug. The fireplace was dangerous, the night even more so.
    He’d wait for dawn to face the grief of Marguerite Bastion. This night, he’d pray to overcome his own inadequacies, which were plentiful.

3
     
    C HULA Baker put her car in neutral and set the hand brake before she got out. She left the motor running. It was an old car and sometimes unreliable about starting. The first light of a cold October morning was creeping up the eastern sky, and she saw the clutch of cars and men standing in the road just beyond Beaver Creek. The letter on the front seat of her car was a tragedy for the Lanoux family. What straddled the road and blocked her path was another. Death always came in threes.
    She headed toward the men who hadn’t yet noticed her approach. Her heavy skirt, belted around a small waist, swung against bare legs. There were no stockings to be had since the war, and post office regulations prohibited a woman from wearing pants. On this cold October morning she wore her skirts long and stout shoes padded with thick socks. Eighteen-hour days had quickly disabused her of a longing for high heels.
    “Ms. Chula.” Sheriff Joe Como blocked her path. “What are you doin’ out here,
cher?”
    She studied his face. Even though the temperature was in the low forties, sweat beaded on his forehead. His eyes looked left and right but never into hers. “Got a letter last night for the Lanoux family. From the army. I didn’t want to be out in that storm, but I figured I should bring it on this morning.”
    “Is it Justin?”
    “I can’t read people’s mail.” She thought of the official envelope and the hundreds of others she’d delivered like it. “Never saw good news come in a letter like that, though.”
    The sheriff spit a brown stream into the still muddy road. “Iberia Parish gone dry up and die. All our young men killed over in Europe. Gotta have an old man like me keepin’ the law.”
    “Joe, you’ve still got a good thirty years.” She craned to see around his body. “What’s going on here?”
    He moved to block her view. “Been a murder. Something you don’t want to see.”
    “Murder?” Such things didn’t happen in New Iberia. At least not out on a public road. If a man wanted to kill, he did it in the swamp where the body could be slipped into a canal for gator bait. “Who is it?”
    “Henri Bastion.”
    She registered the name with even more shock. Henri was the wealthiest man in the parish. His money had bought him the most fertile land, a high-blood French wife, and hellion children. It had also bought fear of him. “How’d he die?”
    “We’re trying to figure that one out.”
    She snorted. “How hard could it be? Gunshot, stabbing, what?”
    The sheriff finally stared into her eyes. “Looks like some kind of wild animal tried to eat him alive.”
    “Good Lord, Joe. You said