Fever Dream - Douglas Preston [130]
Despite herself, Hayward turned slowly around.
“June was an attractive woman. And it appears she’d been having a long-term affair with Slade.”
Hayward spoke at last. “There you have it,” she snapped. “It wasn’t a suicide. The husband murdered her and took off.”
“There are two pieces of evidence against that supposition. The first is the suicide note.”
“He forced her to write it.”
“As you know, there’s no sign of stress in the handwriting. And there’s something else. Not long before her suicide, June Brodie was diagnosed with a particularly fast-acting form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: Lou Gehrig’s disease. It would have killed her fairly quickly anyway.”
Hayward thought. “The disease would argue for suicide.”
“Murder,” murmured Pendergast. “Suicide. Perhaps it was neither.”
Hayward ignored this typically Pendergastian comment. “Your PI, Hudson, was killed while investigating Brodie. In all likelihood, that means whoever’s behind all this doesn’t want us on her trail. That makes June Brodie a person of key importance for us.”
Pendergast nodded. “Indeed.”
“What else do you know about her?”
“Her family background is unremarkable enough. The Brodies were once quite wealthy—oil money—but in the 1960s the oil ran out, and they fell on hard times. June grew up in reduced circumstances, went to a local community college, graduated with a nursing degree, but only practiced for a few years. Perhaps the profession didn’t agree with her, or perhaps she simply wanted the higher salary of a personal secretary to a CEO. In any case, she took the job at Longitude, where she worked for the rest of her life. She married her high-school sweetheart but, it seems, soon found a more exciting diversion in Charles Slade.”
“And the husband?”
“Either he didn’t know or he put up with it.” Pendergast had slipped a manila folder out of his suit coat and handed it to her. “Now, please take a look at these.”
She opened it to find a number of yellowed newspaper clippings in plastic sleeves, along with a map. “What’s all this?”
“You just said June Brodie was of key importance. And I agree. But I rather think there’s something else of key importance here—geography.”
“Geography?”
“Black Brake swamp, to be precise.” Pendergast nodded toward the clippings.
She leafed through them quickly. They were mostly local newspaper stories of legends and superstitions about Black Brake: mysterious lights seen at night, a frogger who disappeared, stories of buried treasure and ghosts. She’d heard many such rumors growing up. The swamp, one of the largest in the South, was notorious.
“Consider,” said Pendergast, running his finger along the map. “On one side of the Black Brake you have Longitude Pharmaceuticals. On the other, Sunflower and the Doane family house. You have the Brodie family, who lived outside Malfourche, a small town on the lake at the eastern end of the swamp.”
“And?”
Pendergast tapped the map lightly. “And right here in the middle of the Black Brake, you have Spanish Island.”
“What’s that?”
“The Brodie family owned a hunting camp in the middle of the swamp, called Spanish Island. No doubt it’s an island in the delta sense: an area of higher, firmer mud. The camp itself would have been built on piers and creosote pylons. It went bankrupt in the 1970s. The camp was shuttered and never reopened.”
Hayward glanced at him. “So?”
“Look at these stories. All from local papers in the small towns bordering the swamp: Sunflower, Itta Bena, and particularly Malfourche. I first noticed these stories when I was going through the newspaper archives of Sunflower, but thought nothing of them at the time. If you map these stories, though, you find they’re all vaguely oriented toward one place—Spanish Island, in the deepest heart of the swamp.”
“But… but they’re all just legends. Colorful legends.”
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
She shut the file and handed it back. “This isn’t police work; this is guesswork. You don’t have a single hard fact pointing to Spanish Island as a