Read Online The Red-Hot Cajun by Sandra Hill - Free Book Online Page B

bayou for what he called a campout. It was his way of alleviating our fears.”
    “My childhood wasn’t so hot, either,” she confessed.
    He raised his eyebrows skeptically.
    “But I never became a bayou scientist as a result.”
    He shrugged. “From an early age I loved the bayou, but I recognized that some things were wrong.
    The biggest wake-up call came when my dad sold the family land, poor as it was, to an oil company.
    Almost immediately, the landscape changed. We could no longer drink the water. They dug canals. Pipes burst. Hell, our rusted-out trailer soon sat in a foot of water.” He shrugged again. “But that was only one nail in the coffin. The biggest culprit by far is the levees.”
    “The levees?” She frowned with confusion. “Levees prevent massive flooding. Levees are a good thing, aren’t they?”
    “Not in Southern Louisiana. The annual flooding of the Mississippi over thousands of years is what put the rich alluvial deposits here that make up the bayous. The levees have straitjacketed that process. Taming the river has sparked a chain reaction of devastating proportions. Now mud deposited by flooding, which would normally have settled into swamps of Atchafalaya or Barataria Bay, is just carried out to the Gulf.
    Do you know that we are losing land the size of a football field every twenty minutes or so? In a year’s time, we lose a landmass equal to Manhattan.”
    “No way!”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Why isn’t anybody doing anything about it?”
    He laughed.
    “Okay, I get it. That’s what you’ve been trying to do as a lobbyist and getting knocked on your patoot at every turn.”
    “Yep.”
    “How can you just give up?”
    He shrugged as color filled his face.
    She realized something then. “You’re not giving up, are you?”
    “Of course not. How can I?” He looked at her and said, “Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic. There was a commission formed a few years ago and it came up with a proposal called ‘Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Louisiana.’ It’s a coalition of eleven state and federal agencies that are going to try to rebuild the wetlands, but it would cost a whopping fourteen billion dollars.”
    “What will you do?”
    “I’m not sure yet. That’s why I came down the bayou, to think and regroup. I’ll never give up, though.
    I’m kind of offended that you thought I would. That would be like knowing a family member is dying and doing nothing about it.”
    Just then, something happened that surprised them both. The radio announcer interrupted Toby Keith’s “Whiskey Girl” and said, “We have a news bulletin regarding missing Trial TV analyst Valerie Breaux.”
    They looked at each other and froze.
    Rene shoved away from the porch rail and went over to turn the volume up on the radio.
    “Houma Realtor Simone Breaux, Valerie Breaux’s mother, held a news conference today, along with her aunts, Congresswoman Inez Breaux, and herbal tea moguls Madeline and Margo Breaux, and her grandmother, oil lobbyist Dixie Breaux, along with FBI agents and local law enforcement officials, declaring Valerie Breaux a missing person.”
    Well, at least, they know I’m missing. And care.
    “Oh, shit!” Rene said.
    The FBI agent spoke up on the radio. “Ms Breaux is officially missing under suspicious circumstances. Her car was discovered at the airport with her handbag and all her luggage. However, there has been no ransom note or other indication of a kidnapping. Not yet.”
    How about two days without contact? How about any woman leaving without her purse, you idiots?
    “Oh, shit!” Rene said again.
    “Please let my darling daughter come home,” Simone Breaux said tearfully.
    Darling daughter? That’s a laugh. Her mother, and all the other relatives, would find a way to profit from this disaster.
    “This is a friggin’ nightmare!” Rene shouted.
    She started to tell him that she had told him so, but decided he already knew that.
    “Trial TV president, Amos