Blackwater Parish - Color Coded

Courtney starts digging into the investigation, even while she has doubts that this is her type of case.

Chapter Three

I woke up at seven, not because I was ready, but because Oingo and Bongo have feelings about when I’m supposed to attend to them. I know goats are intended to help la gardienne function economically and maybe they did a long time ago, but now they’re mostly just a pain in my ass. They’ve never bred or given birth, so I didn’t get milk from them. I just got woken up by vague threats of them eating the house if I didn’t make with the goat pellets.

I turned off the bedroom AC, pulled on “going around town” clothes, and headed out to feed the pair of them. Outside, it was already in the mid-80s and the air promised a humid feels like 100+ before the day got too much older. I fed the goats and checked on Stewart, who had found someplace else to be. I could reach out mentally and connect with him anytime I wanted, but most of the time, the answer was tastes like fish. There were probably good reasons why most familiars weren’t alligators.

I paused just inside the door, letting the living room AC wash over me. The gears in my head started catching, slowly. Most people use or abuse coffee or energy drinks to wake up. I can’t take the jitters, so my mornings run on autopilot up to a point.

I had a case. Maybe. I still wasn’t totally convinced this was a me kind of problem, even if the sheriff was. The photograph was weird and creepy, sure. But until I knew what did or did not happen the night of the fire, I couldn’t really pin down possible suspects or motives. It bothered me that the picture, no matter how old it looked, was virtually brand new and had little to no aura.

I could visit the Mom? It had been a while, but there was no statue of limitations on condolence casserole in Blackwater Parish. I hated cooking for myself, but it wouldn’t be the first time I did it for a case. Bring her some food, charm my way in, and open up my magical senses while seeing if I could get her to talk. Could get awkward if Danners showed up with exhumation paperwork while I was there.

I could dig on the photo. I wasn’t the most tech savvy person, but surely there were ways to tell if it had been AI generated. I could go down to the parish library, use one of their computers, scan the image in, and see if I could figure it out. By figure it out, I meant ask another artificial intelligence if AI had made it. On the positive side, the library had air conditioning I didn’t have to pay for and was a block away from my favorite burger place. On the negative side... I don’t know if there was a negative side, I wasn’t really awake yet.

The journal, right. I had been planning on checking out the records from the last two la gardiennes of Blackwater Parish. Sadly, fifty years was all I got. No one ever got really specific about what happened to the one before that or why all the previous three hundred years of records just didn’t exist anymore. But I had some elements to work with: fire, family annihilation, mental torture of the sole survivor, images of dead children. It wouldn’t take long to see if that pattern had occurred together in Blackwater before. But doing that would mean I would be the one paying for the AC today and probably no burger for lunch.

I sighed, made sure the ringer was up on my phone, and headed for the office. There was no point gallivanting about town interrogating people or crosschecking evidence until the sheriff got the ball rolling on digging up two children’s graves. I pulled the first notebook from the shelf, checked on my latest batch of tinctures, and went back to the couch in the living room to start reading.

April 1, 1973 greeted me, same as always. Elizabeth had such excitement at starting the position. That hadn’t been my experience, but to each their own. Her portion of the journals were easy reading for a case like this one. She used a combination of colored pencils and highlighters to code her entries. Orange for fire, blue for water, green for earth, yellow for sky. Anything related to kids was specifically underlined in pink. I spent an hour scanning for anything that combined orange and pink. There was remarkably little pink at all in the book. Rougarou tended to prefer adult victims.

There had been a fair number of fires in Blackwater. When people got their insurance checks to rebuild after a hurricane, usually at well below the level of damage done, it wasn’t unusual for the repair work to not be up to code. Still, Elizabeth had carefully investigated a number of them throughout the 70s and 80s before concluding they were natural causes. There had been one in 1986 where a family of werewolves had their house firebombed, but no one had died and there wasn’t any apparent connection to this one.

I had just traded in book one for two when my phone rang. I checked caller ID and saw it was Sheriff Danners. “Good morning, Sheriff.”

He growled back in a way that said he had gotten even less sleep than I had. “I got the mom’s permission. Coroner is willing to skip the court order if you say it’s needed.”

I tried not to blush and understood his frustration. “Tell her I said it’s needed.”

“I heard that! Give us a couple of hours, Cort! It shouldn’t take long to match up the dentals.” Coroner Chastity Daigle’s voice was far too bright and cheery over the phone.

“Alright, I’ll see you both about 1:30.”

“Yay! See you then Cort! Hope this one is as weird as the last one.”

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Thanks so much for reading! I’ll see you next Thursday with Chapter 4. Come back and see me Saturday for more Choose Your Own Adventure.