The Evidence Room: A Mystery by Cameron Harvey Page B

around this next curve. She might be a couple hundred yards down by now.”
    “Yes, sir.” Ernest gave him a salute from the brim of his filthy baseball cap. Ernest was from a family of shrimpers like James, but there was an uneasiness in their interaction. In Cooper’s Bayou, there were people who lived up the bayou and people who lived down it, and those from up the bayou made sure you never forgot the distinction. The contrast between James’s upbringing and his current profession placed him squarely in the borderland between the two groups, a unique and socially insurmountable situation that meant the men rode in silence, which was fine with James.
    James gripped the railing and felt the spray across his knuckles. The rust-spattered boat was the same as the Jeanerette , the boat he had grown up on with his father. Over his mother’s protestations, his father had tied James to the winch as a toddler so he would be safe while the nets were being hauled. The memory of it stung and warmed him at the same time in the way that only grief could, both comforting and boundless. They had pulled Coleman Mason’s boat intact from the bayou’s depths the summer that James turned thirteen, his father’s keys still in the ignition, the plastic googly-eyed shrimp charm James had given him for his birthday still on the keychain. How could these mundane things have survived while his father had not? The thought was incomprehensible, even now.
    Ernest cut the engine, and the boat shimmied in the water, the copper-colored waves nudging it towards the shoreline choked with pitcher plants. The drowning had been reported an hour ago; a high school junior named Madison Leo had fallen overboard off a boat full of kids on Bayou Triste, out for a night of partying. Nobody had noticed her missing until it was too late. James had sent Glenn to handle the death investigation, the drunk kids, the devastated family. The living made James far more squeamish than the dead. He could not stand there and answer the family’s questions the way Dr. Boudet had answered his mother’s questions all those years ago. How , she’d asked then. Now James knew some of the answers, the ones he’d learned in medical school. He’d seen shooting victims, patients ravaged by disease, but drowning was still the worst kind of death that James could imagine.
    Around the next curve, the aging knee of a bald cypress dripping with Spanish moss partially blocked their path, and James realized why his father had not been the sole occupant of his consciousness. This was the place where he had first met Raylene Atchison.
    And not far from the place she had died.
    “A little to the right, you can make it clear around,” James instructed. All these years, and his eyes were still good, acclimating fast to the darkness. There was still life in the old man yet. Something moved in the shallows, and a line of obsidian-colored scales broke the surface, like a tiny mountain range, before submerging again, the water closing above it in a perfect seam. The gators were still in this spot, where Raylene had helped him. Of course they were. They’d been around for more than a hundred million years. Twenty-five years would be nothing to them, the blink of an eye.
    James would always remember the case. It was back in the mid-eighties. An unexpected summer storm had come up strong and capsized a pontoon full of garden club members from Kervick County, its scattered contents drifting through the labyrinth of sloughs in the flooded forest. All but one of the passengers had swum safely to shore. The police chief had advised him to call the alligator nuisance man to help navigate the boat and accompany him for the body recovery of the one missing woman. James had resisted at first, but then dialed Hunter Broussard. When he’d arrived at the scene, he’d been met instead by the sight of a pregnant woman huddled inside an enormous jacket standing on the bow of an ancient-looking