Chapter 27

December 20, 1997 - Hazzard, the Duke farm

Damage control.

Not something Cooter imagined he'd be doing today. Turning his attention away from the window and the scene that was about to play out in the field, he walked back to the table and tried to smooth things over between Uncle Jesse and Consul Jeong.

Bo waded through thistle and sedge weed that covered the field, wondering how Annie had been able to put so much distance between them in so short a time. Fast-moving dark clouds threatened as the stalks of the grassy weeds licked at his jeans. He stopped short and called out to her.

"Annie, stop!"

But Annie kept moving and stopped only when she reached the one boulder in the field that Bo and Luke had not yet blasted out. She'd had to dodge three or four craters to get that far. How much Bo loved making things explode worried her sometimes.

Sinking limply onto the rock, she picked at stick-tights that covered the hem of her skirt and emptied the contents of both shoes, sending gritty red-orange earth back from whence it came. By the time Bo reached her, she had slid down the side of the rock to the ground. He knelt in front of her, holding the sweater she'd not grabbed before running from the house.

"Annie...it's gettin' cold, and there's a storm comin'. You can't stay out here. And look, you done hurt yourself."

Her legs and ankles, sliced repeatedly by the prickly spines of the thistle leaves, looked like she'd been attacked by triffids. Tiny droplets of blood were forming where the rock had scraped patches of skin off her left arm. 28

Without warning, Annie reached up and grabbed him around the neck, holding him as tightly as she could for a few seconds and then let go of him as quickly. He wouldn't have been more surprised if he'd been struck by lightning...and that was a real possibility if they stayed out here in the open.

It was different with Annie than the other girls he had dated. Dated, that was a word that didn't really fit their relationship. They'd been spending a lot of time together. Aside from Thanksgiving day, when she had put her head on his shoulder, they had not advanced any further than hand-holding.

It wasn't that she was playing coy, or hard-to-get, or any of those female wiles. He was sure of that. It was something else he couldn't put his finger on. But considering his not-so-secret reputation, he was so afraid of doing something that would spook her that he hadn't even tried to kiss her, let alone make any advances of a more forward nature. It had been nice, for a change, to just enjoy being in the company of a woman he really liked. But now, something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

A long, loud rumble of thunder cut through the air, making Bo pull Annie up to her feet and guide her to the lean-to at the edge of the field where they stored fencing material. He sat her down on a pile of stacked fence posts and sat beside her. She wasn't crying - just limp - with a kind of zombielike glaze over her emerald green eyes. Bo couldn't help it. He threaded his hand through her hair to push it back off her face, exposing barely visible strands of reddish-brown roots within the otherwise strawberry blond.

She bent her head into his palm and shook it slowly. "I'm just so tired."

"Annie..." he whispered and expelled a worried sigh.

"Bo...My name isn't...Annie is the name my sister used to call me when we were little."

"Annie! Bo!" Daisy called. She ran to within twenty feet and stopped, bent over, leaning her hands on her knees. In jeans, she had managed to avoid the thistle barbs and knew where the blast holes were. She should. She had watched Bo and Luke blast nearly every one of them. Catching her breath and seeing the quizzical look on Bo's face, she could guess that Annie had either spilled her guts or was about to.

"Ya'll, we need to go in. Now. Or we're gonna' get caught in a gully washer," she said, looking up at the dark gray looming overhead.

A crack of lightning struck about a mile away, prompting Bo to pick Annie up in his arms to avoid any more thistle attacks and run in the direction of the house, with Daisy in the lead. As southern rain can do, the downpour started with a vengeance, then slacked off before they reached the middle of the yard. Daisy and Bo were not too wet, but Annie was soaked to the skin before they made it onto the porch. The tractor was in the barn, so they knew Luke had had the sense to bring the kids back when the clouds started moving in and the thunder started. Noticeably missing from the yard was the black Hyundai and Cooter Davenport's truck.

Bo put Annie down onto her feet when Uncle Jesse came out onto the porch with three large towels and gave one to each of them. "Daisy, you take Annie upstairs, and ya'll change into somethin' dry."

"C'mon, Annie," Daisy said, opening the front door.

Annie was quiet and shivered in the towel. She looked back at Bo, who still had a question mark on his face.

Sophie followed them up saying, "I'm sure I have something that will work."

After the three of them disappeared up the stairwell, Uncle Jesse turned to Bo and said, "You too. Git."

"Yes, Sir," he said and beat it to the room he now shared with Caleb, passing Luke and the kids on the way through the parlor. "Glad ya'll made it back in before it rained."

"Yeah, it was tundrin and lighting," Emily giggled. Caleb was sitting next to Emily on the sofa when Luke returned from the kitchen with two cups of hot chocolate.

Upstairs, Sophie found a light dress for Annie. "I think it'll fit. You can put your sweater over it, so you don't get chilled."

Annie eyed the sundress with some trepidation and said, "Thanks."

But there was a height difference between Sophie and Daisy. She wasn't sure if anything she could offer would fit.

"Don't worry about it, Sophie. I think I left some things in Emily's room."

Daisy went through a box she pulled from the top of the closet and found an old pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt from the eighties. When she came back into Sophie and Luke's bedroom, she said to Annie, "I'm not too wet, so you can use the bathroom across the hall. Then, you and me have to talk before we go back down."

"I know," Annie said and ducked into the bathroom to change her clothes.

"I'll just go back down," Sophie said, feeling more than awkward.

Downstairs, Bo came out of his room. Having put on dry socks and an unbuttoned fresh shirt, he rubbed the dampness out of his mop of sandy blond hair. Luke was in the parlor grilling Sophie and Uncle Jesse about what happened to get their uncle's dander up.

"Who was in that fancy black car?" Luke asked Jesse.

"It was that blamed magazine," Bo said.

"What blamed magazine?" Luke asked.

"The one the man from the Korean Embassy had...the yahoo in the fancy black car. While Uncle Jesse was givin' the man a piece of his mind, Annie was readin' the article about Enos, then she tore it up and just ran out."

Jesse sat down in his chair, leaned his head back, and sighed, trying to wipe the day off his face with his hand.

"Uncle Jesse, you want me to tell him?" Sophie asked, still holding the trash can she had used to clear the gossip magazine's torn pieces.

"Maybe we all oughta wait till Daisy and Annie git back down here ta' figure out what's gotta be said. I'm not rightly sure I got the answers."

Luke sidled over to Bo and whispered, "You know what this is all about?"

"I aint' got a clue. All I know is Annie told me her name's not Annie. She read the garbage in that paper and got so mad she ripped it to pieces and ran out of here. Then Daisy came out to get us, and now the two of um are upstairs."

"Whad'ya mean her name's not Annie?"

Bo shrugged his shoulders. Even though he'd put on his clueless face, behind it was a worried one. Watching Annie descend the stairs behind Daisy, he quickly buttoned his shirt and imagined the next hour going a lot different than it did. There must be a simple explanation. When Annie reached the bottom step, he moved toward her, but Daisy's voice stopped him.

"Bo. Sit down on the sofa. Sophie, can you take the kids upstairs for a little while? There are some things Uncle Jesse and my cousins need to know. Luke can tell you later."

"Sounds like a good idea," Sophie said, smiling nervously, as she scooped Emily in her arms and motioned with her head toward Caleb. "Come on upstairs, Caleb."

"Why can't I stay?" Caleb complained.

"If it's any of your business, Luke and I will tell you later. If it's not, then it's going to have to remain one of life's great mysteries." Uncle Jesse couldn't help expelling a quick chuckle.

Caleb followed his mother in quiet protest. Bo sat on the couch, and Annie, who he'd expected to sit beside him, took up a seat on the piano bench across from him, focusing on her hands in her lap.

"What's this all about, Daisy?" Luke asked as he took up a place beside the fireplace with his arms folded. He looked over to Uncle Jesse, who seemed to know something more than either he or Bo did.

"Say what you got to say, Daisy," Jesse said, settling deeper into his favorite chair.

What did she have to say? Enos had left it up to her what she would tell the family and when. She had left so much out the last time she told them 'a story.'

"I guess..." she faltered. Now that the moment of truth was upon her, she wasn't sure how much she should tell them or whether she should leave some parts out. But if she left things out, nothing would really make sense. She went to the kitchen table, grabbed a glass of water and a chair, and sat down on it in the middle of the room.

"I guess I should start at the beginning," she said, then realized how stupid it sounded.

Luke asked, "Shouldn't we wait till later to do this, Daisy?" obviously directed at the fact that Annie, even though she was sort of dating Bo, was sitting in on a Duke family meeting. "No offense Annie..."

Annie was still looking at her hands and mumbled, "None taken." She and Daisy had decided that the family needed to know who she was, and what it might mean to them, sooner rather than later.

"Annie needs to stay," Daisy said and took a deep breath. "I guess I need to start by telling you about Enos and what he's been doing out in LA."

Bo sat up with a look of consternation on his face. "What's Enos got to do with it?" he asked, then suddenly remembered that Annie had gotten upset when she read what was inside the paper – the one that, even though he couldn't see all of his face 'cause of the giant print across it that read THE DETECTIVE AND THE HOOKER, he knew that it was Enos.

"Just about everything. So, if you'll just be patient, I'll tell you."

Bo slumped back into the couch, looking noticeably peeved. Annie still had not made eye contact with him.

Daisy started again.

"About nine and a half years ago, when Enos was a little more than half-way through his year with his training officer, her name is Inez...you remember Uncle Jesse, I told you a little about the training period from his letters... Well, he and his TO got tangled in this case where people, who were already involved in prostitution, started exploiting kids in a child pornography ring. Enos and Inez worked with one of the women, Kate Broussard, to gather enough evidence to issue a warrant and bust up the ring. Kate's the woman on the front page of that trashy, lying, bottom-feedin' rag that poor Mr. Jeong pulled out of his briefcase." Daisy took a drink of water to get the taste of disgust out of her mouth. "Anyway," she continued, "The head of the prostitution ring was a man named Hebert – somebody Kate knew from back in New Orleans. She had gone with him to California and got involved in his...um...business. Not the porn, just the prostitution."

"Like Miz Mabel's girls," Bo said.

"No, Bo. Not like that." Sometimes Bo could be so naive. "Kate was..." she hesitated, looking over at Annie, knowing how hard this must be on her. But they had agreed upstairs that Daisy should be the one to tell the story. Annie was afraid she would never be able to get through it.

"Doesn't matter. Kate and Enos, and Inez got enough evidence against this Hebert guy to put him away for a long time. But somehow, he got out of town before they could serve the warrant, and the case went cold for more than nine years. Kate and Enos got to be good friends after that, and she started helping teens and even younger kids who had been sold into prostitution or abused - or worse. Over those next nine years or so, they worked together sometimes because he kind of made a habit of getting teen prostitutes off the street. Didn't make Enos real popular with the people who made money off them. Ya'll know much about human trafficking?"

"I know it exists, especially in the big cities on the coast," Luke said.

"Kate's been working with a non-government organization for the last few years to rescue sex-trafficked teens. And most recently, on a case involving some young girls that were taken from Eastern Europe. One of them was found murdered in Griffith Park, and that's how she and Enos and Inez got involved in another case together...sort of. Enos and Inez were the detectives investigating that poor little girl's murder...She was only fourteen years old."

"Enos put all this in those letters he wrote you?" Bo asked.

"No, Bo, he didn't."

"Then how..?" he tried to ask before Uncle Jesse shushed him.

"I still don't see what all this has to do with us," Luke said.

"I'm getting to that, Luke, just keep your shirt on."

Annie shifted on the hard piano bench enough that Uncle Jesse and Bo both noticed.

"Miss Annie, you should come over and sit on the sofa. That bench can't be any too comfortable," Jessie said.

Annie mumbled a 'no, thank you' and shook her head, still not making eye contact with Bo. If she had, she would have seen that he was getting more than a little peevish about the situation and antsy to get on with it.

Daisy continued. "I guess before I go any further, I should tell ya'll that I left out quite a bit from the original story."

"I'da' bet my life on that," Luke said, sarcastically.

Any other time, Daisy would have thought he was just being the same old grumpy Luke. But he had a right to be suspicious and a family of his own to worry about.

"Well, to start with, I flew to Los Angeles on Halloween."

Only her Uncle Jesse was not surprised, and both Luke and Bo noticed.

"Why?" Luke asked.

"What do you mean 'why?' Because I'm a grown woman, and I can do what I want without asking your permission. And because...after I read his last letter, I wanted to talk to Enos."

Luke turned to his uncle. "You knew about this, Uncle Jesse?"

Jesse looked at Daisy before answering. "Well, I didn't know until she was already there an' I still don't know much more than that."

"There's reasons I didn't say anything till now," Daisy said, with a sad, half-smile on her face. "And I'm sorry I couldn't tell you this part before."

"It's alright, Daisy, you asked me to trust you."

"And ya'll will understand better if you just let me get this out without interrupting me all the time." Daisy directed those comments to Luke and Bo. "It ain't a short story. I can't just put it in twenty-five words or less."

"Sorry, Daisy," Luke said, watching Annie move from staring at her hands on the bench to standing and staring out the window. Bo hadn't missed it either but tried not to make her more uncomfortable. He was still struggling with what any of this had to do with her but had the nagging feeling he should.

"This is the hard part because everything happened so fast that I had a devil of a time keeping it straight myself," she said, then proceeded to chronicle the wild three days she had spent between landing at LAX and landing in Atlanta in early November.

After she had gotten to the part about transferring to her Harley once she and Rosco were within a mile of the house, she realized how unbelievable a story it must be to them - unless they had lived it like she had.

Uncle Jesse's first question was, "Is Enos okay? I mean the broken nose and the concussion and all?"

"Yes, Sir. His nose was mostly healed by the time he and Soonie got married. He still can't remember what happened after he left the charity ball till he woke up in the hospital, but he stopped getting the headaches, and he said the doctor cleared him for duty. 'Course that was the day he turned in his badge."

She was still not going to tell them that Enos quit so he could go looking for Kate.

"There's something else," Daisy said.

"What in the Sam hill else could there be?" Bo asked, still mind blown.

"The reason I told you all of that was so that you could understand what I'm about to tell you. And why you have to keep it to yourselves. And I mean that. Other than Rosco, 'cause he already knows most of it. Nobody outside this family can know any of it. There are things that Enos has to do, and if you tell anyone, it could put him and his family in danger. And not just him."

She took a breath and continued, "Back nine and a half years ago, when Kate wanted to bring down Hebert's operation and put him in jail, there was only one thing stopping her. She had to hide something, something real valuable that Hebert knew about and threatened her with every day to keep her in line. Enos found a way to help her do it. When this Hebert took off before the warrant was served and they couldn't find hide nor hair of him, this real valuable thing had to stay hidden for the long term. And now that all this happened, it's more important than ever to keep it secret. The guy was out for revenge against Enos and Kate, but mostly Kate. Enos still thinks he was just collateral damage. And Even though Hebert's dead, and...Kate's missing...there's no telling how many other people were involved or who else might want Kate out of the way...or who are still looking for what she hid." There were still some crucial bits she couldn't tell them, and she suspected there was more Enos wasn't sharing with her – but he had some reason to think they should all still be cautious. They were just going to have to trust her, as she trusted Enos.

Annie, her head bent, started sobbing.

Bo got a sinking feeling when he suddenly remembered Annie's last words out in the field, "Annie is what my sister used to call me."

When Annie turned to face him, her eyes were red, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

"I'm so sorry I got you involved in this, Bo."

"You said your name isn't Annie..."

Annie shook her head. "My name is Mignon Broussard. Kate is my sister."

References:

(28) Factoid – Triffids (which have always looked like thistles – especially the kind that can grow very tall here in Louisiana) were a monster plant featured in the movie, The Day of the Triffids, 1951