Abigail heard it in dreams, the soft, unsettled whimper, the stirring of tiny limbs under soft blankets. Beyond, rising over a long, lush spread of grass, a great white manor stood watchful in the moonlight.īetween them, teeming with life, vigorous with death, the bayou laid its line. Near the river, while the owl dived and the rabbit died, an old gray house with a swaying dock slept in shadows. The owl swooped from its perch with a swift spread of wings. Alerted, a marsh rabbit ran for his life.Ī breeze stirred the air, then was gone, like the single sigh of a ghost. In the high limbs of a live oak, shadowed by moss and leaves, an owl hooted its two mournful notes.

Players of the marsh music, they blended with the buzzes, hums and drips that were punctuated by the shocked squeals of the hunted. Mosquitoes, voracious vampires of the swamp, whined in a jubilant cloud of greed. In the night, under a high hunter’s moon, death was busy. Vast with secrets, the bayou was never quite still. Knew, even in the vicious summer heat, it was cold, cold. Others had known the cruel, silent depths of that river. When it struck, its tail whipping a triumphant slice through the water, when it clamped the unwary muskrat in its killing jaws, the bayou echoed with a single short scream.Īnd the gator sank deep to the muddy bottom with its prey. Through the dark, moon-dappled water, the long, knobby length of an alligator carved with barely a ripple. Silent as a snake, its river swam a sinuous line-black water under a fat white moon where the cypress knees broke the surface like bones piercing skin. Its breath was thick and green, and its eyes gleamed yellow in the dark. Cloaked by them, a whisper in the marsh grass or rushes, in the tangled trap of the kudzu, meant life, or fresh death.

Death, with all its cruel beauty, lived in the bayou.

Nora roberts bayou