Free Louisiana Lament by Julie Smith Page A

snack or something? I’ll be fine by myself.”
    He hesitated, knowing he shouldn’t go, but one more look around the sad little apartment clinched his decision. “Okay. Meet you there?”
    Talba nodded but realized he probably didn’t see her. She was already bent over the files, and he was on his way down the stairs.
    Babalu hadn’t kept a file on each patient, but she did have certain accounting records in the top drawer and a file marked “Important Stuff.” Other than that, she seemed to have kept mostly magazine articles about breakthroughs in alternative healing. There were also plenty of catalogues offering vitamins, nonallergenic pillows, incense, fengshui equipment, and other New Age staples.
    Talba pulled out “Important Stuff” and opened the second drawer. Here was poetry, files and files of it. So much of it that it would take weeks to go through. She thought,
I hope the family isn’t so stupid they just throw it out.
    There were probably clues in here, if not to Babalu’s death, at least to her life. There might be whistle-blowing poems—real reasons for her family to hate her. She couldn’t take them now, there were too many. But maybe Mary Pat and Jason could pack them up for safekeeping—and possibly Talba’s perusal—before the family found them and destroyed them.
    For now, she closed the poetry drawer and opened the file marked “Important Stuff.” Ha! There, along with a passport and other papers, were Babalu’s marriage license and divorce decree. She’d been Clayton Patterson in her single life, and, according to her passport picture, a brunette. She had married a Robert Xavier Robineau.
    There was one more item of interest in the file: a typed document on legal letterhead identifying itself as the last will and testament of Clayton Robineau. In it, she left all her professional equipment to Mary Pat Sutherland (also named her executor) and everything else to her sister, Hunter Patterson of Clayton, Louisiana. Odd, Talba thought, that so young a woman had thought to make a will—especially someone who lived as if she hadn’t a penny. She compared the dates on the will and the divorce decree. Odder still that she was married at the time and hadn’t named her husband her beneficiary. She plucked the will from the file for Mary Pat, someone she hoped to meet very soon.
    Finding nothing else in the files, she made herself go back to the private areas of the house—go through the dresser drawers, the medicine cabinet, the closet. And still she found nothing—most notably no drugs, prescription or otherwise, except birth control pills.
    She took a final spin around the living room, gazing idly at the bookcases, noting that Babalu sure didn’t go in for cheap escapist reading. There were several shelves of poetry, and nearly everything else was some kind of Jungian tome or health-related paperback, many published by presses unknown to the general public. A whole shelf was devoted to religion—every kind you could name. How on earth, Talba wondered, did people live without fiction? She was about to pick up her things and leave when a book caught her eye that seemed very different from the others—much bigger, more important and a little tattered. A Bible? she wondered. She pulled it from the shelf.
    It wasn’t a Bible. It was what alcoholics call the Big Book, and it was well read and well thumbed. If she had to guess, Talba would have said the reader and thumber was Babalu herself. That might to some extent explain her Spartan lifestyle, which gave new meaning to the term “clean and sober.” A last-minute look for frozen assets alongside the ice cream, and Talba was out of there. Not till she’d padded down the stairs and locked the door did she admit to herself how creepy the whole thing had been. She didn’t blame Jason for deserting her.
    She found him at one of the tables outside Whole Foods with a sandwich in front of him, only he seemed to find it as appetizing as a nice