Read Online Fever Moon by Carolyn Haines - Free Book Online

me, to make me feel safe.”
    Michael drew her into his arms. He was violating one of his personal rules with the females of his congregation, but Jolene was on the verge of a total collapse. He felt her bitter tears soaking through the starch of his collar. He held her in his arms, an intimate embrace, feeling only compassion.
    He let her cry herself out, then assisted her into a chair. He poured a small measure of brandy into a lovely crystal glass from a set his grandmother had sent from County Cork. “Drink this.”
    She tried to resist but he pressed it into her hand.
    “If Jacques smells liquor on my breath …”
    “Send him here to talk to me. There is a duty to God we shall discuss.” He walked to the window and looked out. Plants grew lush and thick in the Louisiana heat and humidity. Even now, so late in the year, there were blooms on the roses in his garden. While the nuns labored over collards and other winter crops for the Victory Garden that would feed them, Michael had planted an assortment of mums that bordered his paths in bright golds, oranges, and russets—a sunset rush of color and graciousness in the middle of a brutal swamp.
    Beyond the garden was a wrought-iron fence, and beyond that a live oak with graceful limbs that swept the ground. He could recall in vivid detail the morning he’d looked out this very window and taken such pleasure in his flowers, his gaze sweeping up to the fence and the tree, and the dawning horror of Rosa Hebert swinging in a gentle wind.
    He didn’t hear the door close as Jolene left, her footsteps muffled by the vacuum of his private nightmare.
    The line of twenty prisoners, mostly Negro men, swung machetes in unison, then advanced and swung again, hacking their way into the purple rows of sugar cane. Behind them, another line of twenty men stripped the stalks and tossed them into the bed of a wagon for delivery to the refinery. In the distance, working another field, Raymond saw the migrant workers, paid labor, hacking and stripping. Haitians and Puerto Ricans had been brought in to work for minimal wages for the harvest, but it was the convicts who interested Raymond. Henri had controlled their lives the same way a human determined the destiny of livestock.
    A breeze swept across the field, and Raymond caught the scent of the sugar cooking at one of the refineries. The odor was sickly sweet, nauseating. The men kept working as if they didn’t smell a thing. Raymond watched the process, the endless bending and hacking of the first row of men, followed by the quick stripping and tossing of the second. The cane had to be cut close to the ground, for the sweetest part was near the soil. Almost everyone who lived in southern Louisiana had worked the cane fields at one time or another. Such labor had taught Raymond as a young boy that he wasn’t interested in farming.
    The convicts moved in a steady rhythm across the rippling field of cane. The men would work until darkness stopped them and rise again at first light. The race was on to beat the first frost of the year, which would destroy any unharvested cane. Marguerite Bastion’s comfortable future rested on the backs of the convicts and imported poor who toiled in her fields.
    Even from a distance Raymond could see the skeletal quality of the men, hear the clank of the leg chains that bound them to the job and to each other. The chains were unnecessary. None of the men looked as if he could make it to the road if he tried to run. They were in pathetic condition. It was ironic that the slaves once used to grow and harvest the cane were better treated because they were financial investments. If half the prisoners never returned to Angola, it would be that many less mouths for the state to feed.
    He drove on to the house and parked. He was halfway across the yard when Marguerite stepped onto the front porch. Like Bernadette Matthews, Marguerite had a child clinging to her skirts. Unlike Bernadette, Marguerite was