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that bad,” Goodeau said. “Come on. Let’s get back and have some lemonade.”
    I thought Wascom was going to argue, but suddenly the fight seemed to have gone out of him. His shoulders slumped and I saw confusion in his face.
    “Lemonade,” he said. “Yes, I suppose we ought to. I…” He looked from one of us to the other. “I’m sorry if I involved you in my private problems. I just think…” He raised his hands in supplication. “This has to be everybody’s problem. Doesn’t it?”
    “Of course, Carter.” Goodeau helped his cousin to the base of the bluff and waited patiently while the tall man scrambled to the top. When Wascom was halfway up, the warden turned to us and shrugged apologetically.
    He needn’t have, though. I’d seen the suds, and wherever they were from, they’d ruined the bayou.

F OUR
     
    It was early afternoon when we got back to the office. There were three message slips from Bertha Bomberg on my desk. The first one said Urgent , the second said Extremely urgent , and the third said Call before two!!! It was now one-fifty-six. With a sigh, I dialed her number at the Corps of Engineers and hoped that she’d still be out to lunch and the call would switch over to one of her less obnoxious office mates.
    But when I heard the line click on the second ring I knew there would be no further reprieves.
    “Bomberg, Planning.”
    “Hi, Bertha, this is Alan.” I tried to put some cheer in my voice. “Looks like we’ve been missing each other.”
    “Have you been avoiding me, Alan?”
    “Not at all. I tried you Friday and I was out all this morning.”
    “I was sick Friday. I went home early. I’m still sick. I shouldn’t even be in the office at all.”
    “I’m sorry.” I tried to sound as if I really was.
    “Thank you. Alan, I have some questions about the report you did for us on the Plaquemine Revetment.”
    “The one we did three years ago.”
    “Is that a criticism?”
    “Not at all.”
    “Good. Because I am the government.”
    A bad sign, I thought: She usually saved that part for last and now she was sticking it in at the beginning.
    “Is there a problem with the report, Bertha?”
    “If there wasn’t, would I be calling?”
    I made an indecipherable sound.
    I heard papers rustling on her desk.
    “Now,” she said. “I have a lot of corrections, and I’m going to send them all to you, with the marked draft copy, but there was one, I guess I should say, glaring problem.”
    I entertained a vision of having to send a crew back into the field and taking a ten-thousand-dollar loss.
    “A problem?” I swallowed.
    “Yes. I’m surprised you didn’t find it yourself. You do read over these things, don’t you?”
    “Of course.”
    “Well, then, why didn’t anybody catch the problem of the levee?”
    “The levee?” A cold shudder ran through me. Had one of our maps put it in the wrong place?
    “The levee,” she repeated. “You didn’t look under it.”
    “Under it? Fifty tons of dirt?”
    “Your history section clearly states that the levee wasn’t built until the 1920s. That was thirty years after Darling Plantation was divided up after a sheriff’s sale.”
    “So?”
    Her voice took on an air of impatience as she instructed her wayward child:
    “So there may be cultural resources under the present levee. Did you look for them?”
    Silence as I visualized the levee, a thirty-foot-tall pile of dirt.
    “How do you look under a levee?” I said.
    “That’s not the point,” she shot back.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Evidently. And that’s why we may have to have a meeting.”
    “A meeting?”
    “To address this kind of inadequacy. You’ll get the report by FedEx tomorrow. I expect to hear from you as soon as you’ve read the comments.” There was an audible sigh. “Alan, I can promise you, when the next contracts are bid, this issue will come up.”
    “So what do you want us to do?”
    “You’ll have my comments in writing. I see no