THREE

It was the only E-mail message waiting for me and it was to the point:

DO NOT GO BACK TO DESIREE. IF YOU DO, WHAT HAPPENS WILL BE ON YOUR HEAD.

I stared at it and then at the gobbledygook of letters at the top that stood for an address. I walked into the lab. A couple of workers were sorting potsherds at one of the long tables and a thin young man with thick glasses sat at a desk in the corner, inputting data into a computer. L. Franklin Hill was the lab supervisor as well as our resident computer guru. I caught his eye and he got up and followed me into my office. I motioned him around the desk and pointed to the computer screen.

“Thing crashed again?” he asked, frowning. “I thought I fixed that.”

“Read the message,” I said.

He bent over and then looked up at me.

“Is this a joke?”

“I don’t know. Not that many people know we’re working at Désirée.”

“Ummm.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Maybe Freddie?”

Freddie St. Ambrose was one of our local competitors, an unscrupulous operator with dubious credentials who would close his eyes to tearing down the Great Pyramid for a parking lot if the price was right.

“He’s not above it,” I said. “But there would have to be something in it for him. Can you trace this back to the place it was sent from?”

Frank Hill shrugged. “Theoretically. But nobody who’d send this kind of thing would do it from their own computer. Let’s see …”

His fingers began to dance over the keyboard while I paced back and forth. Minutes later Hill grunted.

“About what I thought. This comes from the computer lab at the university.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, you can find out who this address belongs to, but I don’t think it’ll help you.”

“Why?”

“Chances are somebody forgot to sign off and your mystery messenger cruising the lab found it. Happens all the time. Kind of like one of these Xerox machines with an access code. Somebody forgets to cancel their code when they’ve finished and the next person, if they’re not honest, just charges it all to that account.”

“Great.” I looked over his shoulder at the words on the screen and then sighed. “But how did they get my E-mail address?”

He gave me a pitying look. “Isn’t it on your business cards?”

“You’re right. Thanks, Frank.”

I let him get out of the little office and then printed out the message and stuck the paper in my top drawer. Then I exited the Internet.

It made no sense. My business cards were all over town. But the last person I remembered handing one to was Brady Flowers, the caretaker of Désirée, when we’d stopped by a week ago to ask permission to look around the place. But Flowers hadn’t seemed very interested and had told us he didn’t care what we did as long as we didn’t tear things up.

I went into Marilyn’s office. Tiny, efficient, and feisty, Marilyn served as office manager, bookkeeper and receptionist. Only twenty-five, she swore at least twice a month that she was looking for another job and at least twice a month I coaxed and flattered her into staying.

“I’m going to see Sam,” I told her. Sam MacGregor was my ex-professor and mentor, the man who’d started the company and invited me to work with him when I’d returned from New Mexico some years back, after a failed marriage and no prospects. Today he lived in retirement in a plantation on the River Road and was always free with a glass of whiskey and advice.

Marilyn jerked her head away from her computer screen to consider the source of the distraction.

“You can’t call him?” she asked. “We really have to go over these balance sheets.”

“It’s Friday,” I said. “Can’t it wait until Monday?”

“Monday you’ll want to put it off till Tuesday.”

“Got me,” I said.

“And Rosemary Amadie called again. She wants you to talk to her class.”

“Can’t somebody else handle it?”

“She wanted you.”

“It’s wonderful to be famous,” I said. “Tell her I’ll get with her in a day or two.”

“Like Monday?”

“Marilyn, you get smarter every day.”

“And there was a woman named Goforth who’s with one of the television stations. She said she heard we were working at Désirée and she wants to do an interview.”

“How did she find out?” I asked.

Marilyn shrugged. “Is it a secret? I’m sure everybody in Port Allen knows. It’s only the other side of the river.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “Well, I need Corps clearance to give interviews.”

“I told her.”

“Is that it?”

“Alan, you really need to call Dr. Ardoin and get him to pay up.”

“I’ll do it as soon as I get back from Sam’s,” I said and felt her disapproving eyes follow me out of the office.

It took me half an hour to reach Sam’s house, partly because I stopped to pick up a bottle of Dant’s, mainly because I followed the winding River Road instead of taking Nicholson, which cut off most of the curves of the river. But it gave me a chance to get my questions in order. When I got there, though, the place was closed and I remembered vaguely something Sam had said about taking a trip in the fall.

I could have called first, of course, but the drive had given me a chance to go over things in my mind, and to try to tell myself that the man buried in the mound across the river was just one of the hundreds of anonymous travelers who’d struck out for the old Southwest, as this part of antebellum America was called, and never been heard from again.

And I could have believed it if I hadn’t seen the same dark car behind me on the River Road as I made my way back that I’d noticed behind me on the way down. By the time I reached Gardere Lane, on the outskirts of the city, it was gone, taking, I supposed, the short route back to town.