Buch lesen: «Family Reunion»

CHAPTER ONE

Bayou Sans Fin, November 1999

“SILENCE! Now!”

The cranky cockatiel’s command merely added to the usual morning chaos around the breakfast table at Cachette en Bayou Farm.

Tony and his cousin Toni were perfecting a riff in the song the two were writing for their zydeco band. Beau’s baby girl was demanding attention using the best technique known to six-montholds. Milo the mutt whined for a biscuit; Michel’s current live-in girlfriend whined about her hair. And twelve-year-old Jimmy was practicing his forward pass over everyone’s head, using the six unsuspecting cats as target.

Nicki sighed.

“Quiet!” That was Perdu the cockatiel again, more frantic this time. He made an impatient little skip on Maman Riva’s shoulder. The histrionics, Nicki knew, would serve no good purpose. The Bechet family was a freight train with no brakes.

“We start electrical work this week,” Nicki announced quietly, spooning up a slice of pink grapefruit.

“This one’s a bullet!” Jimmy shrieked. “Watch your noggins.”

Jimmy had not been raised to throw footballs at the breakfast table. This Nicki knew. His side of the family was normal, sane, well behaved. But as soon as they reached Cachette en Bayou, some sort of insanity gene kicked in and they were off and running.

Nicki swallowed the bite of grapefruit. “That means we’ll be without lights. Without refrigerator. Without hot water. Without air-conditioning.” Nobody took any notice of her. She thought wryly of her days on the bench. People had sat up and taken notice when Judge Nicolette Bechet spoke. Those days were gone forever. “It could go on for a week or more.”

Still no reaction. Yet Nicki knew that each and every one of them would look at her after several hours without power and demand to know how she could have sprung this on them without warning.

“This I cannot believe!” Maman Riva said, shaking her head and brushing Perdu’s beak with the fluff of snow-white curls peeking from beneath her purple paisley turban. “Months she is missing and not a word. Outrageous! Scandalous!”

“Shut up!” Perdu demanded, his tone even more strident.

Riva Reynard Bechet waved her cotton napkin in the cockatiel’s face. “Where you learn to talk to your elders that way, you so-and-so? You shut up, you hear?” She surreptitiously dropped a warm biscuit in the vicinity of Milo’s tan-and-gray nose. “You get old, nobody pays you no mind. This is the problem. My problem. Her problem. I try to keep my family in line, nobody pays me mind. She disappears, nobody pays her no mind.”

Riva was still obsessing over the disappearance of Margaret Lyon, the revered matriarch of the Lyons of New Orleans. Every morning since the story had broken in the Times-Picayune a month ago, Riva couldn’t wait to read the latest details. The Lyons seemed to hold some kind of special fascination for her, as if they were royalty.

The Lyons themselves certainly seemed to think so, Nicki thought. But it annoyed her that her own grandmother should have such skewed thinking. Didn’t she remember it was the Lyons and their TV station that had smeared the Bechet name, ruined her career?

Riva may have forgotten, but Nicki definitely had not.

“Perhaps you should stay in town with James and Cheryl while we do the electrical work, Maman,” Nicki said, instead of what she was thinking.

“You’re wanting, I think, to run me off my farm.” Riva didn’t look up from the newspaper. “See here, now, those Lyon scoundrels file junk in the court. They try to steal her TV station. Lord-a-mercy, is a great lot of peril in growing old.”

Junk in the court. Nicki supposed her grandmother meant an injunction of some kind. When it suited her, Riva could be so Cajun she was almost unintelligible to the rest of the world. Riva was sharp, had always run the Bechet family like a benign dictator. Papa Linc Bechet had been no match for her. Even Riva’s two surviving children, Nicki’s aunt Simone and uncle James, couldn’t get her to budge once she’d made up her mind. They kept trying to persuade her to move into town, sell the old farm or, better yet, let them run it.

That was usually when Riva lapsed into dialect and stared at them as if she’d never heard a word of proper English in her life.

The same way she’d been acting for the past six months whenever Nicki tried to have a reasonable conversation with her grandmother about Cachette en Bayou Farm. Riva didn’t want to fix up the farmhouse, which was crumbling around the edges. She didn’t want to sell. She just wanted things to be the way they’d always been. At least that was what Nicki concluded. Maman would not discuss it, so it was virtually impossible to know with any certainty what the eighty-four-year-old woman’s motives were.

“We need to talk about the house, Maman. It’s not going to be habitable for the next week. You should—”

A football landed in the huge pottery bowl of cheese grits. Gasps and giggles and groans broke out, along with howls of outrage aimed at the skinny twelve-year-old future pro quarterback, who should have been in school in the city.

“Why you not in school?” Beau demanded.

“They probably don’t want him around, either,” Tony said.

“Now you leave my Jimmy boy alone.” Riva waved off the comments. “Come here, Jimbo. Give an old lady a thrill.”

The sheepish adolescent gave her a hug. Nicki supposed her youngest cousin was currently in residence at the farm because his mother was having another of her famous migraines. Nicki suspected what incapacitated her uncle James’s society wife had more to do with bourbon than migraines, but she certainly wasn’t about to say so. Nor would anyone else in the family.

Then again, the Bechet family was enough to produce a headache, that much she could vouch for.

“Maman—” Nicki made another attempt “—if you stay with James for the next week, you can help out until Cheryl gets back on her feet, Jimmy wouldn’t miss any school and—”

“You must find Mrs. Lyon.”

Nicki tried not to grind her molars. “Maman, the Lyons do not need my help finding anyone.”

“Oh, but yes. I am thinking they do.”

“Besides which, I am not remotely interested in helping the Lyon family.” The volunteer work Nicki did was dear to her heart. She did searches for people, usually on behalf of adopted children looking for their birth parents. She did it because she knew from personal experience what it felt like to be abandoned.

She did not do it for millionaire families whose toughest decisions centered around whose life to ruin next.

Riva folded the newspaper neatly and clasped her hands on top of it. “Good. This is decided.”

“No, it’s not decided!”

Nicki realized from the silence following her words that she must have raised her voice. Raising one’s voice to Maman Riva was not recommended. Nicki strove to sound reasonable.

“Maman, I have work to do. Renovation work here at the farm—”

Riva shook her head. “Not necessary.”

“It is unless you want the place to fall in on top of you.”

Riva looked around, seemed to consider that possibility. “The boys have their cabin. Simone, she and John are settled. James and Cheryl, they have a big fancy house.” Riva shrugged. “You, you might find a nice man yourself if you had noplace to go. Me, I am old. If it falls on my head, I go on to heaven. Better than this mean old world, where old women disappear and not a body cares.” She reached over, patted Nicki’s hand and smiled the smile no one could resist. “You help find Margaret Lyon, that’s a good girl.”

“They haven’t asked for my help.”

“So you go to them.”

Nicki stared at her grandmother. Riva seemed to have forgotten just who had caused all the upheaval in the Bechet family two years earlier. Nicki would be just as happy if this morning’s headline reported that the entire Lyon family had been sentenced straight to hell with no chance for parole. But she couldn’t say that to her grandmother.

“I have too many search projects already. I—”

“You do good jobs for people,” Riva interrupted, still smiling. “You will do a good job for the Lyons.”

Nicki heard the rattle and chug of the pickup truck belonging to the couple helping with renovations. She stood. “This discussion is over. I have work to do.”

Riva stood and began collecting empty plates. “You call the Lyons. Make your grandmother happy.”

Nicki was accustomed to the fact her grandmother never played fair. Well, let her think she’d won. Nicki had real work to do.

SCOTT LYON LEANED against the wall closest to the conference-room door, one foot propped on an empty chair, his arms crossed tightly over his chest.

He ought to resign from the station.

Hell, he ought to resign from the family.

The morning editorial meetings at WDIX-TV were wearing him down. These days the time was rarely spent assigning stories and scheduling tapings, as it should be. Instead, the meetings disintegrated into bickering as everyone jockeyed for control. He should be used to it by now; it had been this way in the Lyon family all his life. He’d been weaned on his father’s bellyaching that he’d been robbed of his inheritance, a victim of greed and unfairness. Now, thanks to Aunt Margaret’s disappearance and the injunction filed by Scott’s three older brothers—Jason, Raymond and Alain—the ugliness simmering beneath the surface for as long as Scott could remember had exploded to the surface.

Jason, the sales manager at the station, had obviously made it to the conference room first this morning. He occupied the chair at the head of the table, a seat usually reserved for the news director. But the news director wasn’t family. To hear Jason and Alain tell it, even family wasn’t family these days.

“We don’t need to be covering that,” Jason said now about a press conference for a beleaguered city official whose career was drowning in scandal.

The city official was a buddy of Alain, the oldest of the four brothers. Scott pursed his lips to keep from opening his mouth. He didn’t get involved in decisions made by his brothers. He preferred the role of neutral bystander. He pretended not to register the news director’s rolling eyes.

“It’s news,” Bailey Ripken said with illdisguised contempt. “That’s what we do, Jason. Cover news.”

“Are we a tabloid scandal sheet now?” Jason Lyon looked around the table at the assignment editors and reporters who had managed to get the news on the air for years without his assistance or input. “Is that what we’re stooping to? Airing people’s dirty linen? I don’t think so. Lyon Broadcasting stands for more than that. Next story.”

Scott slipped out the door and closed it behind him as the words “journalistic integrity” and “muckraking” filled the air in the tense little conference room.

He stood in the corridor for a minute, working his jaw muscles and battling the urge to walk straight out the front door. He could dig ditches, for God’s sake. Drive a cab. He didn’t have to put up with this.

When he was calm enough to face the world without spitting out some kind of venom he would later regret, Scott made his way to the break room. He inserted quarters into the vending machine and treated himself to a breakfast of hot sweet coffee and two somewhat stale sweet rolls. He wolfed them down, barely noticing the taste.

His coffee had just gotten cool enough to drink when his cousin André walked into the break room. The hum of conversation quieted with the presence of the station’s embattled general manager.

André Lyon looked embattled, all right. At fifty-eight, he had always been tall and square-shouldered. But Scott thought his cousin’s shoulders had begun to sag with the weight of all that had happened since the station’s fiftieth anniversary this past summer. First, André’s father and co-founder of WDIX-TV, Paul Lyon, had died. Then, the day of the funeral, André’s mother had vanished. Most everyone had assumed that Margaret Lyon simply needed to get away from the glare of publicity, find a quiet spot to grieve and let go of the man with whom she’d shared her life and founded a broadcasting dynasty.

Then signs began to point to the possibility of foul play.

And in the midst of absorbing that emotional blow, the family had received another: Jason, Raymond and Alain were challenging Paul Lyon’s will in court. André wasn’t the rightful heir, they claimed. He wasn’t a Lyon and they swore they had the documentation to prove it.

Scott was incredulous, and ashamed that his own brothers would pull such a disgusting stunt. The rest of the family was equally stunned. And Andre, it appeared to Scott, had been nearly broken by the series of events.

Breathing out a heavy sigh, Scott took his litter to the trash bin beside the machines. André looked up as he passed. His once decisive and calm face looked distracted.

“Oh, Scott. How goes it? News conference already over?”

Rising to the occasion, trying to sound normal. Scott had to respect that in his cousin. It was one of the things he’d always admired in Aunt Margaret, too. His own side of the Lyon family should take a lesson.

“I slipped out,” he said, hoping André wouldn’t ask why.

André nodded, reached out and punched a button on the coffee machine. A cup dropped into the slot, and coffee began to trickle.

“Any word?” Scott asked, knowing no further explanation was necessary.

André shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Unless...” Retrieving the cup from the machine, he shook his head again.

They walked out of the break room together.

“Unless what?”

André took a deep swallow of his coffee and grimaced. “Unless you count the crackpots. A lot of crackpots. Gaby and I have waded through more crank calls and useless leads since the story broke.” He paused and gave his cousin a poor imitation of an encouraging smile. “We’re tired, that’s all.”

“If I can help...” Scott almost hated to make the perfunctory offer. He doubted that help from his branch of the family tree would be welcome.

André put a hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate that, Scott. I know you’re in an awkward position here.”

“No. I stay out of it. And I mean what I say. If I can help, I want to. Aunt Margaret...” His throat grew unexpectedly tight at the mention of her name. He could almost see the grande dame of the Lyon family marching purposefully down a corridor at Lyon Broadcasting in one of her severe navy dresses, head high, shoulders back. Being seventy-seven hadn’t slowed her down a bit. “I think a lot of her.”

That was an understatement. Scott wondered if André knew that. The truth was, he loved Margaret Hollander Lyon; she’d been more of a mother to him than his own mother, and more of a role model for him than his own weak-willed father. As the youngest child in the family, almost a tagalong, born as his parents’ marriage was disintegrating into cold silence and emotional withdrawal, if not divorce, Scott had found little stability or warmth in his life. Until he got to know Aunt Margaret.

“I appreciate that, Scott. But the truth is, I don’t know that there’s much any of us can do. Except wait and pray.”

“I’m not much good at either of those,” Scott admitted.

“Me, neither. And I hate like the devil having to learn it under these circumstances.”

As André went his way, Scott turned in the direction of the newsroom—in time to see Raymond and Jason lurking in the door outside Raymond’s office in the accounting department. The morning news conference obviously over, they apparently had been watching Scott’s conversation with André. Feeling the building closing in around him, Scott wheeled into the newsroom without acknowledging his brothers.

In the newsroom a handful of reporters and camera technicians were beginning to gather. Early mornings were the slowest time of the day at WDIX-TV. Reporters and crew members straggled in and milled around waiting for their coffee to kick in. Sometime before noon, the activity cranked up. Phones rang, voices called out across the room, and chaos ruled. By late afternoon the chaos was organized and transformed into the evening news.

Scott could remember a time when he’d been excited by the process. When the desire to be the first to crack a story had been in his blood. But it didn’t seem to be there now.

All he felt these days, after years of watching competition and greed consume his family, was the desire to be someplace else.

He wondered, sometimes, if that was what had happened to Aunt Margaret.

“Hey, Scott,” said the sweet, beguiling voice of the newsroom clerk behind him, “what’s shaken’?”

He turned to give her a smile. Tiffany Marie Dalcour was young, just out of college, and ambitious. She seemed to think that cultivating the only single male Lyon in the building might somehow further her goal of making it on-camera herself.

“Not much, Tiffany.”

She was sorting mail for the newsroom. Piles and piles of mail. She didn’t miss a beat even as she intensified her smile at Scott. “So there’ll be no broadcast tonight, then?”

He laughed, and she looked pleased. At thirty-four, he had no interest whatsoever in the twenty-four-year-old, but he returned her teasing, anyway. “We’ll make it up if we have to.”

“Oops,” she said, tossing an envelope aside. “That one should have gone to the executive offices, I guess.”

Scott glanced down at the envelope. It was addressed to “The Lyon Family.” He started to walk away when the name on the return address registered.

Nicolette Bechet.

He went back and picked up the envelope. Nicolette Bechet, with an address out of the city, in one of the rural districts.

He fingered the envelope. He was curious. A little excited, even.

The Lyon Family.

He had as much right to open it as anyone.

Without examining his logic too scrupulously, he slid a finger beneath the flap of the envelope.

Her signature was full of sweeps and flourishes, not what he would have expected at all.

And she wanted to help the family find Margaret Lyon. Also not what he would have expected.

He read the letter six times. Finding people was a hobby of hers, the letter said. The letter recounted some of her successes. Scott was impressed. Intrigued. He thought about the weary tone of André’s voice when he’d spoken of all the dead-end leads he and his wife had followed up on. No need to add to the burden, Scott told himself.

He could talk to the former judge himself.

After all, he’d been wanting to for two years.