Haunted

Out of the darkness she came, bringing memories of murder and disappointment and a season of living with fear and darkness.

I haven't though about Dekkie Moate in years. She is a part of my past in New Orleans. Since I've been raking up old ashes in search of a spark of life and remembrance about those days it was inevitable that should would catch fire and burn her way back into the forefront of my mind. She did.

We met at a temporary agency, both looking for better paying jobs, any jobs. Since we were both hired for the same job, nuclear investigations in Tennessee, and she didn't have a car it was suggested that we pool our resources. We did. I promised to pick her up once the formalities were signed, sealed and delivered and take her to Tennessee with me. In return she took me to a lonely shell and rock strewn shingle, like a dirty secret, in the bayous surrounding Lake Pontchartrain. Twisted, gnarled skeletal trees like pale wraiths scattered among the tangled, humped roots of trees sucking life through the brackish and iridescent oil slicked waters of bayou cupped a small cold beach. "What do you feel?" she asked.

I shivered and looked back at her. Wrapping herself close with her arms, her eyes shifting nervously among the shadows as she inched closer to the one pallid ray of sunshine spearing it's way down from a cloudless sky beyond the reach of the trees. "Cold fear," I said. "This is not a happy place. Why did you want to come here?"

We stood at the end of a long dusty shell packed road where the dregs of Lake Pontchartrain licked noisily at the slimed rocks and sterile fingers of beach. We stood on the point of Frenier Beach where her mother went missing and her mother's lover died with his pants down around his knees slumped over the reclining front seats of his dark green Nash. Her mother's clothes were neatly folded in a paper grocery sack on top of the neatly typed lyrics of a song from The King and I.

We Kiss in a Shadow

We kiss in a shadow,
We hide from the moon,
Our meetings are few,
And over too soon.

We speak in a whisper,
Afraid to be heard;
When people are near,
We speak not a word.
Alone in our secret,
Together we sigh,
For one smiling day to be free
To kiss in the sunlight
And say to the sky:
"Behold and believe what you see!
Behold how my lover loves me!"

We speak in a whisper,
Afraid to be heard;
When people are near,

We speak not a word.
Alone in our secret,
Together we sigh,
For one smiling day to be free

To kiss in the sunlight
And say to the sky:
"Behold and believe what you see!
Behold how my lover loves me!"

To kiss in the sunlight
And say to the sky:
"Behold and believe what you see!
Behold how my lover loves me!"



Over the next few months as we shared a room at the Quality Inn in Sweetwater, Tennessee she told me about her mother and her life and the most famous murder/disappearance in Louisiana history, a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.

I wondered then, as I wonder now, how it would have affected me had my mother's lover been murdered when my mother disappeared and left me looking for truth among the lies that no longer held her life together. It is no wonder, despite the cold evil presence that haunts Frenier Beach, she is unable to stay away.