“Give me an antidote. Right now,” Luc demanded.
“There is no antidote.”
He appeared taken aback by that news. “Well, then, you’d better be prepared to spend the next week or so on your back, sweetheart.”
He couldn’t mean what she thought he meant.
“And another thing… did you start on the pollution tests I asked you to do? Shrimp are dying as I speak. Am I going through this torture for nothing?”
“Shhh,” Sylvie warned once again. Matt had taken out a small notebook and was engaged in some serious scribbling, the whole time inclining his head toward Blanche, who was babbling away. “I did some of the preliminary tests, you jerk,” she gritted out. “And the results were just as you expected. Worse, even. Wait till you see the components in that sample. You may be able to make a direct connection with Cypress Oil. I’ll mail them to you in the morning.”
“Mail? Mail?” he sputtered.
“Hold the bloody presses!” Matt came up and hooted at Luc, as if suddenly enlightened. “I just made the connection between you and Sylvie… a lawyer and a chemist. Don’t tell me you’re representing that bunch of ragtag fishermen that are trying to fight Cypress Oil? ‘The Swamp Solicitor’ and the shrimpies? Man, you guys must have a death wish. And isn’t your father involved with Cypress?”
Luc blinked at Matt. Horror soon replaced the expression of fury on his face as he realized how much he’d risked by coming to a public place to confront Sylvie. Of course, it was all guesswork on the newshound’s part thus far. Still, Luc would have to be more careful. “You’re way off base, Sommese,” he lied. “And if you print one word, I’m gonna sue the pants off you. Then I’m gonna cut you up into gator bait, starting with that flapping tongue of yours. Don’t think I’ve forgotten the last hatchet job you did on me.”
“You mean, the one about the dingbat Vermilion Parish farmer who sued the electric company? The guy whose ducks stopped laying eggs when the power went dead for a day, cutting off the Cajun music piped into their pens?”
Luc put his hands on his hips and glared belligerently at the foolhardy reporter. “I won, didn’t I?”
“That’s because the judge was a Cajun. And you kept playing ‘Jolé Blon’ in the courtroom to illustrate your case. The judge couldn’t stop tapping his feet. The atmosphere in the jury box was like a regular fais do-do … a Saturday night dance down on the bayou.”
Luc told Matt to do something anatomically impossible to himself.
Out of her peripheral vision, Sylvie saw her Aunts Margo and Madeline approaching. The fire in Luc’s eyes was nothing compared to the bonfire in theirs. The legal-eagle gate-crasher, now chugging down another Scotch, had represented a client five years earlier who’d prevented them from expanding their herbal tea company onto a neighboring trailer park property. He’d claimed he was preserving local culture. Apparently, there were some antique trailers there… pieces of rusted-out Cajun Americana, much like the vanishing steel highway diners of the past.
Luc had lost the case, but managed in the process to give the trailer park so much publicity that its market value increased dramatically, beyond her aunts’ willingness to pay. Now, every time they looked out their office windows, they were forced to view a neon-sign-blinking tourist attraction.
But her advancing aunts were only a small part of the soap opera that was becoming her life.
Behind her aunts, Sylvie saw two late arrivals. Valcour LeDeux—an older, alcohol-dissipated, though still handsome, version of Luc in an expensive, tailor-made suit—strolled forward with a bourbon in one hand and his nymphet common-law wife in the other.
Luc’s body went completely tense the minute he noticed his father.
Rumor claimed that the man had physically abused his sons when they were children, and Sylvie could recall Luc with black eyes or a limp. At the time, she’d assumed he’d been brawling with boys his own age. Now she wondered. It would seem that Luc’s father had a lot to answer for.
Despite his unsavory reputation, Valcour LeDeux had money and power, thanks to his dumb-luck interest in Cypress Oil, and for that reason alone, he was her mother’s guest. Probably, he’d donated a pigload of cash to her last campaign.