Christmas in Dogtown Read online

“Sure.” Her answer was automatic, and she hated the flash of disappointment that crossed his face. Or had she imagined it? Now, he was smiling.

  “Didn’t have to think much about that one, did you? You have a house there?”

  She nodded. “A little Victorian shotgun, uptown—well, in the poor part of uptown. It’s exactly what I always dreamed about living in.”

  “I’m glad your dreams came true, then.” Chan leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Why did it feel like a goodbye? And why did that suck?

  She started to add that her dream house also was expensive, constantly in need of repairs, bordered a dangerous neighborhood, and, mostly, was empty. Would saying that wipe the sad look off his face and turn that brotherly kiss into something more?

  She finally realized what the quicksand had been that had wrapped itself around her in Dogtown. Companionship. Friendship. She hadn’t been lonely here. But she couldn’t promise Chandler Caillou more than she was willing to give. Not that he’d asked for more.

  He just looked so sad.

  ~7~

  People lined up outside Madere’s early the next morning. Three days before Christmas, and folks from New Orleans, Kenner, Metairie, and LaPlace bought up the boudin as fast as Resa and Uncle Aim could get it in the display case. Special orders stacked up, and a couple of Madere cousins had come in to work the cash register.

  “Today and tomorrow will be crazy, but you think you can spare me for about an hour after lunch?” Resa worked the grinder, squeezing out a spicy mix of boudin blanc into the casings and twisting them with a deft hand. “I want to go and see if Chan needs anything else for the bonfire day after tomorrow.”

  Actually, she’d been stewing over the way they’d left things yesterday. She didn’t want them to spend her last week and a half here avoiding each other. No reason they couldn’t be friends.

  Uncle Aim didn’t answer at first, and Resa regretted asking. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve taken too much time away and the whole reason I came here was to help you. Never mind—I’ll catch up with him later.”

  “You’ve helped me plenty, niece.” Uncle Aim smiled at her, but unless Resa was imagining it, his expression looked…worried. “You go and find Chandler. I have a couple of the other kids coming in this afternoon to help. Might want to drop by his house.”

  Resa didn’t exactly know where Chan lived. “Why? Phone’s easier—he might not be home.”

  Uncle Aim shrugged and took her spot at the grinder. “Do as you will, girl.”

  Talk about passive-aggressive. “Where does he live?”

  “Up at the end of the old parish road, right before you hit the wildlife preserve.”

  Great. He probably had alligators in his backyard.

  Resa drove down River Road first, and used her cell phone to take a photo of the Madere/Caillou sign in front of the bonfire frame. No sign of Chan, though, and he didn’t answer her call.

  Something felt off-kilter. Resa couldn’t say exactly what—just a sense of strangeness from Chan yesterday and now from Uncle Aim. She thought about calling her mom but decided against it. What would she ask: Feel something weird in the air these days?

  As she drove north to hit the old parish road, it struck her that she was thinking a lot like a Dogtown resident all of a sudden, with strange feelings and a need for mystical enlightenment. That seriously needed to stop.

  The road narrowed as it went northward, and even in the brightness of midday, heavy shade and shadows gave the road an eerie cast. Why the heck would Chan live up here instead of closer to town?

  She had her answer when the road ended, in the form of a confection of a small wooden house. Rustic Barbie might live here—it wasn’t quite a log cabin, but the scent of cypress and tupelo told her it was new construction. Window boxes full of herbs were attached to the sides of the house where the sun would hit them.

  Resa parked next to Chan’s truck, walked onto the narrow front porch, and raised her hand to knock on the solid wooden door. Instead, intrigued by the wraparound decking, she walked to the left corner of the house. The porch extended all the way along the depth of the building, which was bigger than it looked from the front.

  Did it go all the way around? Resa walked along the rough planks and stopped abruptly at the point where the porch took another ninety-degree turn to span the back of the Chez Chandler.

  Unlike the front porch, which was too narrow to even set chairs, the back porch extended far over the edge of the Maurepas Swamp, and windows covered most of the rear of the house. Chan would feel as if he were the only person in the world even from inside.

  Without thinking, Resa sat on a sturdy rocking chair near the edge of the deck, over the water, and pushed herself into a gentle rhythm as she looked out at towering cypress trees reaching for the heavens, their gray trunks scored and ancient. A snowy egret sat on a log protruding from the murky water, then took flight with a broad spread of wings. Something splashed in the distance, creating ripples.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Resa started and looked up to see Chan standing behind her, his hands on the back of the rocker, stilling its movement. “It’s amazing. You know, all the way out here I wondered why you’d live in such a remote area. But I understand. I totally get it.”

  “Do you? I’m not so sure.”

  Resa stood and faced him, ready to rip him a new one for presuming to know how she felt. Her words died in her throat at the sight of him.

  “You’re sick. Oh my God, what’s wrong?” Instinctively, she reached up and pressed the back of her hand to his cheek and forehead. “You’re burning up. Why didn’t you call me? You should be in bed.”

  Resa realized her Inner Jeanne was coming out, but she couldn’t help it. She grabbed Chan’s wrist and pulled him inside. A blanket and pillow lay on an oversize sofa that stretched across an open living room, facing the wall of windows. All the time she’d been watching the swamp, Chan had been watching her.

  “Lie down on the sofa again. You need something to drink? Do you have juice? Milk?”

  “Juice is good.”

  As soon as she was sure Chan had re-settled himself on the sofa, Resa looked around. The first floor was one big room, with a single door leading off into what she assumed was a bathroom. A staircase on both ends led to a loft, probably a bedroom. He could lie in bed and look out into the swamp.

  “You had this built after you moved back? It smells new.” Resa walked to the corner kitchen area and found a glass. A carton of orange juice—and not much else—sat on the top shelf of the fridge.

  “I built it.” Chan coughed, and took a sip of the juice she handed him. “Lived in Mike’s place in town until I got enough done to live in it. Still trying to decide how I want to divide up the first floor.”

  Resa went back to the kitchen, doused a paper towel with cold water, and perched on the edge of the sofa next to him. “It’s beautiful. I’d leave it just like this. The open space is nice.” She gently wiped his face with the cool, wet towel. “Maderes and Caillous don’t get sick, you know. You’re breaking the rules.” Except Uncle Aim had been sick, too. Obviously, her theory had been wrong.

  “That’s me, the rebel.” He drank the rest of the juice and handed her the glass. “Thanks.”

  She twisted the glass around in her hands. “Why didn’t you call and tell me you were sick, Chan? I do care, you know.”

  He gave her a long, steady look from fever-bright eyes, then closed them with a sigh. “’Cause I’m Dogtown, Resa.”

  “Meaning…?” But he’d dropped off to sleep and didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. That one short sentence spoke volumes.

  ~8~

  The hairdryer’s buzz drowned out her ringtone, but Resa had it set to vibrate as well. The shaking danced the phone off the little White Castle dressing table and onto the floor. By the time Resa scrambled for it, the call had gone to voice mail.

  Jeanne’s voice was annoyingly chipper first thing in the morning. “
Resa, where are you? I can see out the back window there are people already lined up at Madere’s and Emile isn’t answering his home phone or the store. He’s probably on his way, honey, but could you run over and open for him? Stop by tonight for dinner, why don’t you, and bring Chandler?”

  Yeah, well, she had the impression Chan didn’t plan to go anywhere with her. The more she’d thought about his “I’m Dogtown” comment after she got home yesterday, the more ticked off she’d gotten. It felt a lot like an ultimatum: If you aren’t Dogtown, you aren’t in my life. If you don’t want Dogtown, you don’t want me and I don’t want you.

  Why did Dogtown have to be all or nothing? Resa stopped on her way out the door, surprised. She’d never thought about it, but that was the reason she’d tried so hard to get away. It wasn’t to escape her family or the meat business. It was Dogtown itself, or that mystical thing in the air here.

  You couldn’t be from Dogtown and live somewhere else. You had to be Dogtown.

  And why did it bother her so much that Chandler Caillou had written her off as not Dogtown?

  Jeanne was too chipper early in the morning, and Resa was too damned serious.

  She stuffed her phone in her jeans pocket, locked the trailer door behind her, and walked to Madere’s, using her key to let herself in the back.

  Everything was neat, just as they’d left it yesterday when she helped close up after the disturbing kiss in the truck. That niggling wrongness tickled the back of Resa’s mind again, and she shoved it aside. Uncle Aim was just running late. He’d come breezing in any minute with a joke or a snatch of a Cajun ballad.

  For the next three hours, she handled customers and in spare moments refilled the case from the big refrigerator in back. By noon, with no word from Uncle Aim, she gave herself permission to be officially concerned.

  When her phone rang at 12:30 and his name showed up on the screen, she realized exactly how worried she’d been. The relief drained through her, turning her muscles shaky. She held the phone to her ear. “Where are you? Are you all right? You scared me.”

  Uncle Aim’s voice echoed, tinny and distant. And serious. “Leave the store with your cousins, niece. Come to my house. Don’t tell anybody where you’re going, and do it now.”

  Huh? “Why—”

  “Come now, Theresa Ann Madere.”

  “Wait…why…?” The connection broke.

  Crap. Everybody in Dogtown was a freakin’ drama queen.

  Resa lured her cousins Janelle and Darcy into Madere duty with a feigned headache and the promise that they could take home whatever smoked gar was left at the end of the day. She turned right at the crossroads bear totem and drove a winding set of backroads to her grandfather’s small woodframe house, set back from the road under a cluster of live oaks dripping Spanish moss.

  Uncle Aim’s pickup sat in the drive, but he didn’t answer the door. Resa didn’t know whether to be pissed off or worried, so she settled for something in between.

  “Uncle Aim!” She walked around the side yard and spotted movement from the densely forested, swampy thicket beyond. “Uncle Aim, is that you?”

  If he thought she was wading into that muck, he was nuts. She had no desire to be Dogtown’s latest victim of Boars Gone Wild.

  A rustle of branches drew her farther into the thicket, and then she saw it. Except there were no bears in South Louisiana, were there?

  She froze in place as it ambled out of the trees, swiping at a bush with a huge, clawed paw. Had Uncle Aim been killed by the bear? Had his accident finally happened?

  Yet even as she asked the questions, she knew the answer. On some level, she’d always known, even if she’d chosen to disbelieve until someone shoved the truth in her face. This was her uncle, shoving. “Uncle Aim? Is that you?”

  The bear sat back on its haunches and looked at her a moment before the air around it shimmered. Its fur and skin melted and reformed and changed in seconds until, instead of a bear, a white dog sat before her. Not a special, huge, magical white dog, but a mutt. It watched her with a steady intensity, no wagging tail or bark of recognition.

  Yet she recognized it. Much as when she’d first entered the prep room at Madere’s, Rese’s mind buckled under an avalanche of memories. That dog had been around a lot when she was a kid. She and Chan had played with it more than twenty years ago.

  Resa and the dog stared at each other a long time before she turned her back and walked toward the house. “When you get ready to come in, I’m ready to listen.”

  She was sitting in the living room, in her grandmother’s old blue armchair, when Uncle Aim came in the front door. He sat on the sofa facing her, his brown eyes somber. “I’m sorry I had to do it that way. There’s no time to ease you into it. We should have told you a long time ago. Your daddy wanted to but I kept telling him to wait until you were old enough to decide what you wanted. But time’s running out.”

  Resa’s heart thumped as she acknowledged the doubts, questions, and fears she’d lived with her whole life—or at least her life in Dogtown. “Tell me now.”

  “We are what the people around these parts call rougarou. We carry the genes of the shapeshifter.”

  Resa nodded. The bear at the crossroads. The name of the community. She should be shocked, reeling, hysterical. Yet on some level, she’d known. She’d just been willing to ignore it until someone forced her to acknowledge it. “By ‘we’ you mean the Maderes?”

  Uncle Aim leaned back against the sofa cushions and scratched distractedly at his beard. Resa bit back the urge to ask him about fleas. “The Maderes and the Caillous. Two parts of a whole. For seven generations, we’ve been here. Before the Grand Dérangement, we were together in Canada. Each generation produces a shapeshifter.”

  “My father? Was he..?”

  Uncle Aim shook his head. “The shapeshifter has to come from the union of a Madere and a Caillou—no other way. I was the firstborn of the last Madere-Caillou union. But there were no Caillou women in my generation, so I never married.”

  Understanding slowly bloomed in her gut, and Resa had trouble breathing. “What happens if there are no more Madere-Caillou unions?”

  “The rougarou dies out. We become like everyone else. We get sick and die like everyone else. Do you understand what I tell you, niece?”

  Uncle Aim had been sick. Chan was sick.

  “This is why everyone has pushed Chan and me together.”

  “You and Chan are the first Madere-Caillou couple—the only one—of your generation.” Uncle Aim chuckled. “Oh, there was rejoicing in Dogtown when you were born, niece. After that whole string of boys, here finally came a pretty little curly-haired Madere girl, just six months behind Chandler Caillou.”

  Resa couldn’t speak. “Is Chan going to die?” Are you going to die?

  “Eventually, but probably not right now. His daddy said he has a cold is all.” Emile Madere, sausagemaker and part-time shapeshifter, looked out the window, into the woods. “But we’re near the end of the cycle. Sixty years without a new union, and the magic dies.”

  Chan’s words, the ones he’d spoken on that first day outside the White Castle, came back to her. Sometimes we’re born into situations, he’d said. We have to decide if we’re gonna be a part of it or if we’re gonna put an end to it.

  “He came back to be a part of it,” she whispered, fingering the end of her shoelace, where the plastic tip was coming off. She’d have to buy new ones.

  Damn it. They’d put it all on her. Whether it continued or it ended. A ten-foot gar named responsibility sat on her chest, and she had trouble drawing breath. Or maybe she was feeling trapped. Yeah, definitely that.

  “Why did no one tell me? When does the cycle end?”

  Uncle Aim sighed. “New Year’s Eve ends the cycle, if no commitments are made. You were so smart and determined to make a life in the city that your daddy and I agreed to see how things went for you. Thought if you found someone in New Orleans and were happy, maybe it was time to
let the old ways die out.”

  But she hadn’t found anyone—Jules had been a placeholder. She hadn’t even been all that happy. “Then why tell me now?”

  A long silence ate up the air in the room. “I don’t want our traditions to end. Only the people of my generation know about it, and some of the young ones would exploit it—it’s why we don’t tell more than we need to.” His eyes were fierce. “I thought once Chandler came back he’d tell you, especially after you two got closer. But he wouldn’t. Stupid, romantic fool wants you to love him.”

  Had that kiss on the levee been real, or manipulation? “He doesn’t love me.” He didn’t even know her.

  “You sure about that? It’s a thing between Madere and Caillou, I was always told. Parts of a whole.”

  Resa couldn’t look at him anymore. Just the shoelace. The sofa springs creaked as Uncle Aim got to his feet, and still she didn’t look up. “Better get back to the store. You know everything now. You do what you think is best. Maybe this year’s the time to let it go.”

  The front door closed behind him with a soft click. Resa still couldn’t move.

  ~9~

  Storm clouds had threatened all day on Christmas Eve. Resa worked on auto-pilot at Madere’s, hauling out the last of the boudin for the special orders and sending customers home laden with boxes and bags. At noon, they closed for the holidays, with plans to open a few hours on New Year’s Eve for people to pick up party orders.

  Resa spent the rest of the day in the White Castle, stewing and making a few phone calls. She and Uncle Aim hadn’t said more than a few words to each other since the big revelation, and Resa hated the tension between them. She also resented the position she’d been put in. The whole future of the Madere-Caillou tradition had been set squarely on her shoulders and, by God, she should’ve had more than a few days to make a decision like that.

  She had to accept her share of the blame—she’d been so adamant about never living in Dogtown, about how her life lay elsewhere, that no one had been willing to tell her the truth and risk killing her dreams. But they should have. Chan should have.