American Heroes Series - 03 - Purgatory by Kathryn Le Veque Page B

central
hall.
    “I get first bite,” she told
Alec.
    He scowled at her. “No way, dude.
This is mine.” He suddenly came to a stop and turned to his mother. “Hey,
before I forget, that old black dude came back this morning wanting to know
when you were going to go visit those women.  I told him to come back later.”
    “Really?” Elliot lifted her
eyebrows, turning to Nash and seeing his curious expression. “Yesterday, we had
a visitor.”
    Nash’s brows drew together.
“Who?”
    Elliot shrugged. “Some old black
guy by the name of Mickey came to tell us that Ms. Biffy, Ms. Tulip and Ms.
Leon wanted me to come over and visit. Do you know them?”
    She exaggerated the ‘mizz’ title
to be funny, but Nash’s face had a stony expression on it.  He just stared at
her for a moment. Then, he sighed heavily, as if something had just occurred to
him.
    “Now this is starting to make
sense,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “You didn’t tell me this
yesterday.”
    Elliot wasn’t sure why he seemed
displeased. “I completely forgot about it,” she said. “It was just some old
man. He seemed nice enough. Why? Is there a problem?”
    Nash scratched his head, almost
irritably. “Could be.”
    “Why?”
    Nash glanced up at the young
people down the hall, now disappearing into the kitchen and still squabbling
over the food.  He motioned for Elliot to follow him onto the porch, which she
did. He stood there a moment, gazing out over the trees and Spanish moss,
trying to collect his thoughts in his sleep-deprived mind.  He finally turned
to Elliot, who was staring up at him with big, expectant eyes.
    “Ms. Biffy, Ms. Tulip and Ms.
Leon are from the Loreau family,” he said as evenly as he could. “They live in
an enormous run-down home called The Bottoms that’s about a mile and a half from
here, up on a rise overlooking the opposite side of Black Bayou.”
    Elliot wasn’t seeing the problem
yet. “The old man said that Ms. Biffy saw me moving in with her ‘looking
glass’,” she giggled. “It was really cute.”
    He shook his head. “Not so cute,”
he said, rather sternly. “The Loreaus and the Aurys go back two hundred years
to the time when Jean-Pierre Loreau was a sea captain on one of Louis-Michel’s
privateer vessels. Loreau, by all accounts, was a bitter and greedy man. He
wanted everything that Louis-Michel had, including Purgatory and Ms. Sophie.
Jean-Pierre built The Bottoms on the opposite side of the bayou so he could
keep tabs on Louis-Michel.  Old family legends say that when Louis-Michel was
away, Jean-Pierre raped Sophie and she became pregnant as a result.
Louis-Michel was so enraged that he murdered Jean-Pierre on the spot. Needless
to say, there are two hundred years of animosity between the Loreau family and
the Aury family.”
    By the time he was finished,
Elliot was staring at him in astonishment. “Good Grief,” she exclaimed softly.
“That’s crazy!”
    He nodded faintly. “Maybe so, but
the Loreaus are a bad bunch,” he said. “Ms. Leon is the matriarch and she’s got
to be over one hundred years old. Her two daughters are Tulip and Biffy. Tulip
never had any children, but Biffy had a son, who in turn had three sons.  They
all live at The Bottoms like a bunch of criminals. If there’s any trouble in
town, there’s a good chance that it involves the Loreaus. Now this whole fire
bomb episode is starting to make some sense.”
    Elliot was growing a little
fearful. “What do you mean?”
    Nash shrugged, reaching to take
her hand.  He began to step off the porch, taking her with him.
    “The Loreaus know about the
legend of Louis-Michel’s buried treasure,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many
times, over the years, we’ve had to chase them off the land, or register
complaints about them. They even took my granddad to court back in the 1940’s,
claiming that they were due any gold found on Purgatory’s property in repayment
for the murder of their