Fever Moon by Carolyn Haines Page B

tomorrow.”
    “She’s beyond my help, Raymond. Has Doc Fletcher returned?”
    “He has, but he can’t do more than you.” Doc was a good man, but he would recommend incarceration in the state asylum. Adele would be taken away without even a trial. Joe Como would want him to drop the case. “Did Praytor see Adele?”
    Madame moved around the table so that she faced him again. “He didn’t come inside. He had no way of knowing she was here.”
    “Good.” Praytor was a mama’s boy and a busybody. No one to fear, but someone to stir trouble if he had half the chance. “I don’t want folks in town to know she’s out here. Could mean trouble for you.”
    Madame handed him a cup of steaming tea. The brew was black, and Raymond thought of his great-grandmother, an Algonquin Indian who had no use for white men, saying they were a curse on the land and would bring death to all living things.
    She’d taught Raymond the cry of the hawk, saying it would bring help in times of trouble. Raymond had taught the call to Antoine, a signal between them when they’d hunted together.
    Nanna, as he’d called the old woman, claimed that she could change into a crow at will, and her eyes had been black and sharp. She’d cocked her head when she listened, like a bird, and she could read the future in the dregs of plants she used for medicinal teas. Once she’d drunk a cup of tea so black it was like looking into a hole. The thing she’d seen had frightened her so badly that she’d only say that Raymond faced a great battle and much hardship. She hadn’t been lying either. He sipped the tea, refusing to look into the cup.
    “Did Adele ever mention the father of her boys?” he asked.
    “She never said.” Madame stood at the sink and sipped her tea. “She came for morning sickness. She walked all the way here. She said only that she was with child and needed something so she could continue to work.”
    “Did you ask her who the father was?”
    Madame nodded. “I told her that he should help her.” She shrugged. “She said he wouldn’t. She said he was nothing to her or the baby. That she would love the child enough for two parents. When twins were born, she was delighted. She had them herself, alone. She is a strong woman.”
    Raymond pondered that as he drank the hot, bitter tea. “She didn’t want the father to share in the baby, so she didn’t love him?”
    “Adele didn’t seem to have love in her life, from any source, except Rosa and those baby boys. The man who planted the babies was never a part of her life. A man sometimes betrays the woman who loves him.”
    Guilt was a physical sensation. Raymond thought of the young girl who’d waited for his return from the war, expecting a ring. He couldn’t explain to her that the man she loved was dead. What had come home from the battlefields was only a husk, a man undeserving of love. A half man deserving only contempt.
    “Raymond, are you ill?” Madame took his teacup from a hand that shook.
    “May I sit with Adele a moment?”
    “Talk to her. Try to reach her,
cher
. She needs someone to bring her back. She has lost her children but she is young. From what I can tell, she can bear a child again.”
    Raymond left the cool kitchen and drew up a chair beside the sofa in the stifling front room. A thin sheen of sweat covered Adele’s face, and he wrung out a cloth in a basin of water and wiped her face. She looked only moments away from death. In many ways, it would simplify things if she died. The parish would calm down, and the wild talk of werewolves would dissipate.
    And a killer would also walk free, because Raymond knew she was innocent. Not by evidence, but by his gut. He’d come to the badge not because of his knowledge of the law or his desire to apply it, but his job was a symbol of who he’d become, a loner. It suited his view of himself, a man watching life from the outside. He judged others as he judged himself. This woman, though, so harshly