PART V THE CATHOLIC ESTATE
PART V
THE CATHOLIC ESTATE
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything.
Delacroix, Louisiana
12 October, 1730 hours
Southeast of New Orleans, the swamps are dense, murky, alligator-infested and enormous.
They are also, quite simply, hostile to human life.
But this hasn’t stopped humans from trying to live there.
Religious orders, fishermen, loners, losers and outcasts have tried over the centuries to establish themselves there, only to eventually be washed away by hurricanes or floods or both.
It was Hurricane Katrina in ’05 that finally drew the line in the sand for human habitation beyond Delacroix. Katrina smashed the area so comprehensively that no-one had tried to live there since.
After catching a Greyhound bus from the western side of the state to New Orleans in the east—$56.99 with free wi-fi—I now swept through the northern reaches of the swamp at fifty miles an hour in a mini-airboat.
It was a shallow-draft two-person utility boat that I’d borrowed from my friend Royce at Big Easy Airboat Tours in New Orleans.
Royce called it the ‘Rascal’.
It was Royce’s rescue-and-repair boat: a little flat-bottomed runabout with a feisty 44-horsepower fan that he sent out with fuel or parts when one of his tour boats broke down somewhere on the bayou.
I drove alone, steering with the Rascal’s compact rear fan, homing in on the GPS coordinates Heidi had sent me.
I could see why it had taken her longer than she’d expected to find the Church property.
Without the GPS, I’d have gotten hopelessly lost.
The swamps were a maze of flooded brown alleyways flanked by bushes and withered trees.
The water was often covered by a layer of scum so thick it looked like you could walk on it.
It wasn’t deep, maybe three feet, but you didn’t dare set foot in it: there were alligators everywhere.
They watched me pass with unblinking eyes.
Abandoned huts on broken stilts lay half-submerged on low islets: evidence of the folks who had tried to live here.
False islands made of tangles of bracken looked solid but were actually floating.
After about thirty minutes of this kind of travel and as the sun was getting low in the sky, I came to a long straight natural canal that—oddly—ran for about a hundred yards and which, even more oddly, was flanked by evenly spaced oak trees.
Oaks didn’t belong in a swamp like this.
They leaned inward over the narrow lane, forming a striking canopy that framed a substantial island at the far end.
And suddenly I realised that this canal wasn’t natural at all.
It had once been a driveway for land vehicles—a Southern allée—only this one had been covered over by swamp water.
At the distant end of the waterway, I saw a concrete dock flanked by tall statues.
Two figures stood on it, one of them waving.
It was Heidi, standing on the shore with her friend.
THE BISHOP’S ESTATE
‘Welcome to the old bishop’s estate,’ Heidi said as I stepped out of the Rascal onto the worn concrete dock. ‘This is my friend, Brenda. She’s a trucker outta New Orleans. Drives a big-ass Freightliner.’
I shook Brenda’s hand. ‘I’m Sam. Freightliner, huh? Like Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China. What model?’
Brenda was a stocky woman with short hair, big hands and a strong grip. She wore a red flannel lumberjack shirt, jeans and Dr. Martens boots.
‘Class 8, Cascadia,’ she said.
‘Long hauler, nice,’ I said.
I took in the area and realised that the dock on which we stood—bookended by two grey seven-foot-tall angel statues—wasn’t originally a dock at all.
It had once been a simple low balcony reached by three or four steps, but over the decades the rising swamp had turned it into a dock.
The angel statues that adorned it were cracked and decayed, their once beautiful faces pockmarked with pits and cracks, their wings broken.
They reminded me of the angels in that Doctor Who episode, the scary ones that crept up on people when they closed their eyes or blinked. Freaked me out, that episode.
The estate had clearly once been beautiful: with lawns, -gardens, statue-lined paths and, in the middle of it all, a two-storey 19th-century mansion.
Now it was derelict.
The mansion had once been painted white, but all the paint had been stripped off by years of hurricanes.
Every window was shattered.
Anything made of wood was warped.
The gardens were overgrown.
A fountain was occupied by alligators.
Spanish moss hung from the surrounding trees.
The building’s ground-level doors had long ago been flung open by gales and flood surges and now the whole bottom level was covered by an intruding two-foot-deep layer of brown water.
‘The graveyard is this way,’ Heidi said, guiding me off the concrete dock toward a nearby gate set in a low picket fence.
The graveyard was bigger than I’d expected. It stretched away for almost a hundred yards, shrouded by trees.
It, too, was flooded.
Dozens of worn headstones jutted up at odd angles from the swamp water.
They were large and thick. The inscriptions on them variously read:
‘father gerald rawlins 1832 – 1871’
‘brother stanley robertson 1857 – 1899’
Fifteen larger mausoleum vaults rose higher above the water layer, their bases also having been consumed by the swamp.
They were sturdy things, about the size of garages. Once upon a time, their marble flanks had shone but now they existed under layers of grime and mould.
More gators lounged on the steps of the mausoleums, watching us.
Heidi stopped in front of one vault.
‘Took us a while to find the right one because of all the overgrowth,’ she said. ‘Had to chop the vines and moss off six of these mausoleums before we found it.’
I could see that Heidi and Brenda had hacked away a few inches of intertwined vines to reveal the lintel above their tomb’s door.
It was inscribed ‘lasalle’.
Underneath this, beautifully sculpted into the tomb’s iron door, was an image I’d seen before, on the doll with the baby in it and on Cyrus Barbin’s chest: a trident-shaped tree with a Christian cross in its centre and two nooses hanging from its arms.
The lynching tree known as the Tree of Fear.
I gazed at the image of the dreadful tree.
The iron door onto which it had been inscribed had oxidised to a sickly green and was flecked with fungus.
It hung ajar.
‘I picked the lock to get inside.’ Heidi indicated the brass lock embedded in the door. ‘Took a bit of doing. While the tomb is over a hundred years old, the lock is newer. Someone replaced it in the last twenty years.’
‘Well done, Heidi,’ I said. ‘Great work.’
‘Don’t speak too soon,’ Heidi said. ‘Wait’ll you see inside.’
Brenda snorted. ‘I’ll wait out here. I ain’t goin’ back in there. I’ll leave it to you professionals.’
Heidi flicked on a flashlight.
‘Hold on a second,’ I said, looking at the thick swamp around the island estate.
Twilight was falling. Night was coming.
‘Before we go in, let me do some preparations, just as a precaution.’
Ten minutes later, I entered the old marble vault with Heidi.
At the back of the garage-sized structure was a shelf-like -marble recess on which lay four sarcophagi. Pretty standard.
What wasn’t standard was the hole in the floor a few feet inside the doorway.
It was rough around the edges, as if made by a sledgehammer. It wasn’t an original feature of the tomb.
An old wooden ladder poked out of the hole, leading down into darkness.
‘Hold your nose,’ Heidi said as she grabbed the top rung and began to climb down.
I turned on my iPhone’s flashlight as I descended the ladder.
After about twelve feet, I stepped down onto the floor of a long dark space, my boots splashing into a foot-deep layer of water.
The red-brick walls curved at the ceiling, like a railway tunnel.
Water dripped somewhere, echoing loudly.
‘Looks like a cistern for the mansion,’ I said. ‘A water tank. Judging by the brickwork, this is from the 1850s.’
‘Yeah,’ Heidi said. ‘Only at some point, someone made a secret entrance to it via the mausoleum.’
Then I saw the first body.
It sat against the wall a short way from the ladder.
‘Jesus . . .’ I breathed.
It wasn’t so much a corpse as a skeleton wrapped in withered flesh.
This skeleton was male.
It was hard to guess how long he’d been dead, but it must have been at least a decade.
Over the years, his skin had tightened around his bones so that it was now stretched over them like a foul kind of cling wrap.
He’d been a tall man, broad-shouldered and there was enough skin to see that he’d been African-American.
He sat with his back against the wall, his arms pinned behind him, held to the wall by a pair of rusted manacles.
Rags covered his modesty.
I turned to Heidi. ‘What do you think? Ten years?’
‘When we opened the front door, a wash of rancid air rushed out,’ Heidi said. ‘All the grime and mud over the years must’ve air-sealed it. I’d say they’ve been rotting closer to twenty.’
I aimed my flashlight at the darkness, illuminating the long brick-walled space, and saw the others.
The seated figures stretched away from me into the gloom, heads bowed, arms manacled to the wall behind them, seven to each side.
Heidi said, ‘Fourteen in total. Eight women, six men, all African-American except for one of the men who’s white. The other thirteen are dressed in rags, with no obvious injuries or death wounds.’
‘One is white?’ I said. ‘And he’s dressed differently?’
‘Yeah, he’s down here.’
Heidi stepped down the row to the farthest figure on the right-hand wall.
‘Caucasian male, approximately sixty years old, and not nearly as rotted as the others. And he’s wearing regular clothes—shoes, trousers, button-down white shirt, plus a cute little bolo tie—and he has wounds all right.’
‘Wait, a bolo tie?’ I said before I saw the man and cut myself off.
Even with his head bowed, I knew who he was.
It was Arthur Hillerman.
Private investigator, my old examiner and mentor whom Nia Carter’s family had hired to find her.