There was a slovenly looking fat woman with greasy black hair and a dirty smock behind the counter. People who were overweight didn’t bother Barb, Lord alone knew she had to fight to stay in any sort of shape, but dirt did. There was no reason in this day and age that a person couldn’t take at least a weekly bath and throw their clothes in the washing machine from time to time. But they were all God’s children so Barbara smiled in as friendly a manner as she could muster.

“I’m looking for a hotel,” she said, smiling pleasantly. “Is there one around?”

The woman looked at her for a long time without speaking, then nodded, frowning.

“Im de parsh set been Thibaw Een,” the woman said, pointing in the direction Barb had been traveling. “Bein closin soon.”

Barbara smiled again and nodded, blinking in incomprehension. It was the thickest Cajun accent she had ever heard in her life. Back home the locals sometimes put on a thicker than normal southern drawl to confuse visiting Yankees and people from Atlanta. If you talked like your mouth was full of marbles it made you virtually incomprehensible. She wondered if the woman was doing that to her but was too polite to ask for a translation. So she nodded again and walked back out to her car.

Apparently somewhere down the road was the “parish seat,” which would be the center of the local county government. Where, hopefully, she could find something called the Thibaw Inn or similar.

Even in road daze she never really went to condition white: totally unaware of her surroundings. She had been raised by a father who was marginally insane from a paranoia perspective and he’d spent hours teaching her to keep her guard up to the point that it was old hat. But she hadn’t really examined her surroundings and when she did she considered turning around and heading back to bright lights and the big city. The road was flanked on either side by bayou and the arching cypress overhung it, draped with gray Spanish moss, some of the longest she’d ever seen. The bromeliads were waving gently in the light night wind and combined with the croaking of the frogs in the bayou and the call of a night bird they gave the scene an eerie feel.