The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Page A

squeezed her against him, his eyes as bright as a butane flame, the sweat stain in his armpit inches from his wife’s cheek.
    O N S ATURDAY MORNING I drove to the rural community south of Jennings, where Bernadette Latiolais had lived with her grandmother. It had been raining hard for two hours. The ditches in the entire neighborhood were brimming with water and floating trash, the fields sodden, the sky gray from horizon to horizon. Few of the mailboxes had legible names or numbers, and I couldn’t find the grandmother’s house. At a crossroads, I went into a clapboard store that had a pool table in back and a drive-by daiquiri window cut in one wall. Through the rear window I could see rain swirling in great vortexes across a rice field that had been turned into a crawfish farm. I could see an abandoned Acadian cottage, its windows boarded, the gallery sagging, hay bales stacked inside the doorless entranceway. I could see a rusted tractor that seemed to shimmer to life when lightning splintered the sky. I could see thick stands of trees along a river that was blanketed with fog, the canopy green and thrashing inside the grayness of the day. I could see all these things like a transitional photograph of the Louisiana where I had been born and where now I often felt like a visitor.
    One wall of the store was stacked from floor to ceiling with cartons of cigarettes. I bought a cup of coffee and started to ask directions to the grandmother’s house from the woman behind the cash register. I had my badge holder in my hand, but I had not unfolded it. She interrupted me and waited on a car full of black men who had already ordered frozen daiquiris through the service window. She gave them their drinks and their change and shut the window hard, holding it firm for a second with the heel of her hand. Her arms and the front of her shirt were damp with mist, her physique bovine, her face stark, like that of someone caught unexpectedly in the flash of a camera. I identified myself and asked again for directions to the grandmother’s house. She glanced at my badge and back at me. “All the daiquiris was sealed,” she said.
    “Pardon?”
    “Ain’t no law been broken long as I seal the cups. I know what they do when they leave here, but it ain’t me that’s broke the law.”
    “I understand. I just need directions to the home of Eunice Latiolais.”
    “The law says the driver ain’t s’ppose to have an open container. That’s all the law says.”
    “Will you give me the directions to the Latiolais house, please?”
    “Go sout’ a half mile and turn at the fo’ corners, and you’ll see it down by the river. People been dumping there. There’s mattresses and washing machines all back in the trees. If you ax me, the people been doing this is the kind that just left here. I’m talking about the dumping.” She paused. Her hands were pressed flat on the counter. She had run out of words. She looked out at the rain and at the backs of her hands. “This is about Bernadette?”
    “Did you know her?”
    “She use to come in for her Ho Hos every afternoon. The school bus goes close by her house, but she’d get off early for her Ho Hos and then walk the rest of the way.”
    “What kind of friends did she have?”
    “Her kind ain’t got friends.”
    “Ma’am?”
    “There ain’t no reg’lar kids anymore. One’s drunk, one’s smoking dope, one’s trying to steal rubbers out of the machine in the bat’room. A girl like Bernadette is on her own. Come in here in the afternoon and see the bunch that gets off the bus. Listen to the kind of language they use.”
    “She was a good girl?”
    “She was an honor student. She never got in no trouble. She was always polite and said ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am.’ She wasn’t like the others.”
    “Which others?”
    “The other ones that’s been killed. The others was always in trouble with men and dope. Her brother and sister wasn’t no good, but Bernadette