“So she replaced her phone, the week before she went missing?”
“Yep. Because it got soaked. Not wet. Soaked. And she didn’t tell me where or how. And we told each other everything. But that wasn’t all . . .”
“I’m listening.”
“There was a card. It was on her desk. Can’t wait to see Elysium. XO, M. I didn’t make much of it at that time. There was going to be a party at Elysium that weekend, the weekend they . . . I mean, that’s why we were all driving out there that night. But the more I thought about it, it just didn’t seem right. And she only had one relative I know of whose names start with M, an uncle. And he died two years ago. Besides, the card had hearts all over it.”
“But you’ve got no real proof the two of them went out there together.”
“I’ve got the card.”
“A card that says M on it.”
“Marshall uses drug dealing and lies to try to break them up. Days after they get back together, her entire family disappears. A week later he throws himself out a thirty-one-story window and no one knows why. Remember his last words? The ones you couldn’t remember until today? I . . . put . . . a . . .”
“I remember,” Marissa said.
“I think he was trying to confess. I think he put something in their car. Maybe it was in the gas tank or the brakes, I don’t know.”
He could tell from the way she was staring openly at him, without any apparent regard for how her mouth was hanging open and her nostrils were flaring, that he almost had her. That she was more convinced by his theory than she would like to be. But all she said was: “Well, Mister Broyard, you are imaginative and articulate.”
“Only when I have to be.”
“Do you have to be?”
“You expect me not to find out the truth?”
“I think the truth is always good. And if that’s what you’re after, you’d be jumping at the chance to give me an interview. But you’re not. Do the police know everything you just told me?”
“They know about the phone and the card.”
“But not what Marshall did to try to break up your friends?”
Ben hoped it was dark enough that she couldn’t make out his flaming cheeks.
“So you’re keeping this all to yourself because you’re afraid if your pal Anthem gets wind of it he’ll yank Marshall Ferriot off life support.”
“Marshall’s in a coma, but he’s not on life support.”
“Still . . .”
“Something like that,” Ben whispered.
“You really think Anthem’s capable of that?”
“I didn’t think he was capable of what he did to that bartender yesterday. But he did it. And I just stood there and watched him.”
“It’s not your job to keep that boy from blowin’ sky high if that’s what he needs to do about all this. Not if it costs you your mind.”
“So you think I should go to the police?”
“I think you made up a theory because it gives you something to solve, and you think solving it will keep your Anthem from going off the deep end.”
“That’s not true.”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s not true. And maybe Marshall had something to do with what happened to your friend. And maybe he didn’t. Either way, you’re gonna have to start living your own life at some point.”
“Is that why you’re here? ’Cause you just wanted to give me a bunch of advice?”
“No. I’m here because you were right about one thing.”
“Which thing?”
“My column was crap. What that boy did . . . it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life. And I just couldn’t go there. So as a result, my column . . . well, it was crap. Also . . .”
“What?”
In the long silence that ensued, Marissa Hopewell seemed to be summoning her courage. For a crazy instant, Ben thought she was going to ask him out on a date. Finally, she said, “You really went to every hardware store in Orleans Parish to find that bulb?”
“Orleans and Jefferson Parish.”
• • •
Peyton Broyard was on the front porch, sucking nervously on a Virginia Slim, when Marissa went to leave. “God damn you,” Peyton whispered.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry. I just . . .” She exhaled a long drag through pursed lips, angling the smoke stream in the opposite direction from where Marissa stood just outside the front door; it was an oddly polite gesture, given her angry greeting. “This whole Delongpre thing. It’s awful, but I thought I might have a shot . . . I just listed the house. My sister, she lives in St. Louis. I’m going to move there as soon as it’s sold.”
“You were eavesdropping?”
“Once he has the diploma, I’ll stop. Until then. My house, my surveillance rules. Okay?”
Marissa nodded and showed the woman her palms.
“You got kids?” Peyton asked.
“No.”
“Pity. If you did, you might think twice about having Ben hang out at your office every day?”
“I think your son has some real investigative skill. He just needs to learn how to focus it.” Peyton’s laughter turned her next drag into a series of light coughs.
“A shot at what?” Marissa asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Just now. You said you thought you were going to have a shot at something. With Ben. What did you mean?”
“He’s just like his father with this damn city. The two of them, they see . . . promise in it that I just don’t see. You know he didn’t apply anywhere besides Tulane? Oh, you should’ve been here for that. The fight, I mean I thought the neighbors were going to call the cops. And now . . . Now he’s going to stay here and end up working for you, trying to take down the latest in an endless series of felons we keep electing to public office.”
“It’s a summer internship, Ms. Broyard. I wouldn’t say we’re deciding his fate here.”
Peyton stamped out the cigarette in a tiny ashtray on the porch rail. The street around them was quiet and oak-shadowed, save for the pinpoint spotlights set within the manicured front lawns of the surrounding mansions. To Marissa, beholding the beauty of the Greek Revival façade was like taking a sip of champagne studded with broken glass; the Doric and Ionic columns and the soaring keyhole doors always appeared edged with the blood of field slaves.
“I keep having dreams,” Peyton Broyard said, as she studied their beautiful surroundings with an expression that said she had come to regard them as threatening. “The same dream, really. About it all just getting washed away . . . But maybe that’s just ’cause of what happened to them. The Delongpres, I mean.”
“I didn’t think we knew what happened to the Delongpres.”
“Well, they had to have gone into the bayou, right? I mean . . .” She cut her eyes to the door to make sure no one was listening, then she whispered, “They had to have drowned, right?”
“A bayou has almost no currents to speak of. If they had drowned, the bodies probably would have turned up by now.”
“So . . . what? What do you think happened?”
“I think no one knows.”
I think they’re on the run for something, something the father did. And I don’t think all of them got to go along for the ride; Noah Delongpre probably decided who would be excess baggage and who wouldn’t be.
“That won’t be good enough for him,” Peyton said.
“The only Press Club Award I’ve ever won was for a column about levee protection in St. Bernard Parish. They don’t even like black folks in St. Bernard Parish.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying if your son’s got any real knack for journalism, he’ll have to learn what we all do. You do your best work when you’re not working your own agenda.” Marissa had never put it quite that succinctly before, and now that the words we’re out of her mouth she wasn’t quite sure she believed them. Peyton Broyard didn’t look like she was all that sold on them either.
“I see . . . okay. Well, good luck, Ms. Hopewell.”
“Good evening, Ms. Broyard.”
“Drive safe now.”
As she slid behind the wheel of her Prius, Marissa gave herself some credit for not firing off her mouth at Peyton Broyard over her recurring flood nightmare. As if anything could wash the Garden District away, perched as it was on the highest, safest ground in the city. If a deluge ever did come, it would be the poor black folks in her neighborhood who’d see their whole lives swept away in an instant.
But the woman was right; her nightmare probably had more to do with her own dark imaginings of what fate might have befallen the Delongpres. Although there had been a wire story just that afternoon. Apparently the Atlantic storm season that year was poised to produce some of the strongest hurricanes on record.
III
* * *
MARSHALL
11
* * *
ATLANTA
MAY 2013
The nurse who had saved Marshall Ferriot’s life liked to take long walks in the morning. To the other joggers and bicyclists in Freedom Park, Arthelle Williams probably gave off the unhurried air of a retiree. But if you studied her the way Allen Shire had been hired to do, you could make out her stunned, thousand-yard stare and the white-knuckled grip with which she held her purse on her lap, even though there was no one within striking distance of her favorite bench and the halo of shifting shade offered by the elm branches overhead.
Movies had filled people’s brains with stupid ideas about private detectives, so when Arthelle saw the short, balding man with knife-slashes for eyes and a broad, ungainly smile take a seat a few feet away from her, she didn’t seem to pay him any notice. A good private detective was not a dapper, sharp-tongued fox; he was the type of guy who you wouldn’t have second thoughts about inviting into your living room, or allowing to take a seat on your bench. Allen Shire was that guy—unattractive, unremarkable, quiet; that’s why Cypress Bank & Trust gave him their most sensitive cases.
He kept his mouth shut, hoping the woman would get lost in her thoughts again so he could catch her off guard when he finally did speak. New town homes were sprouting up across the street, and beyond them, downtown’s shiny skyline etched a clear blue sky. Something about Atlanta always got him a little; as if the city had become everything his hometown of New Orleans might have been if it was just a little less corrupt, a little more above sea level, a little less easy.
“You a cop?” Arthelle Williams asked him. Her gaze was focused on two young female joggers as they passed in a burst of excited chatter. “You been followin’ me for four hours and you haven’t shot at me yet, so you must be somethin’.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Reporter?”
“Nope.”
“You lookin’ for somebody?”
“You’ve been on to me all day and you haven’t called the police? Brave woman.”
She shrugged, as if she wasn’t brave because he wasn’t all that scary.
“Figure this has got something to do with Marshall Ferriot, right?”
“That’s correct,” Shire answered.
“Well, if you’re lookin’ for the woman who tried to kill him, I’m not sure why you’re botherin’ the one who saved his life.”
“I’m not looking for Emily Watkins. I know where she is.”
“Jail, I hope.”
When he didn’t answer, she looked at him for the first time, adjusted her giant purse on her lap, craned her neck a little as if his silence had caused him to double in size. “No. Come on, now—”
“You sure hightailed it out of Lenox Hill fast, Ms. Williams.”
“They didn’t charge that girl with anything.”
“There was no one around to.”
“What are you— What do you mean?”
“I mean the person I’m looking for is Marshall Ferriot.”
The confusion passed over the woman’s deeply lined, jowly face, leaving behind a look of mild satisfied surprise. Then she laughed, the kind of bitter, sarcastic laugh people picked up from characters in movies. “Well, good for her, then.”
“Good for who?”
“Marshall’s sister. She took my advice, it looks like.”
“And that was?”
“To get her brother the hell out of town before another crazy nurse tried to kill him.”
• • •
“Mind control?” Danny Stevens asked for the third time since they’d started their phone call.
“I’m not trying to argue that it’s a thing here, I’m just telling you what the woman told me today, okay? And she didn’t believe it either. She thought the other nurses were all nuts, which is why she quit.”
The two men had been frat brothers back at LSU, and Danny had been Shire’s entrée into Cypress Bank & Trust back when Danny started his own one-man firm. But most of the jobs they’d worked on up until now had been extensive background checks on high-profile new hires. This was the first real headache they had ever suffered together.
Before she had died the year before, Heidi Ferriot, grande dame of Uptown society turned tragic widow and bitter, shut-in nursemaid, had drawn up a will that shuttled most of her estate into a fat trust fund intended to provide medical care for her son, who had, according to the file the bank had given Shire, made one of the stupidest suicide attempts known to man and landed in a permanent vegetative state.
Heidi Ferriot and her son had evacuated New Orleans during Katrina’s approach, never to return. But as penance for abandoning the city that had made her family a small fortune, the woman had kept her money in one of the last locally owned banks in Louisiana. The only problem? Because her son had not spoken a word or responded to stimulus in almost eight years, the job of caring for him, and of receiving the hefty checks that came from the trust each month, had passed to his older sister, Elizabeth, a job the woman tended to only when she wasn’t engaged in the dogged pursuit of other women’s husbands and cocaine.
For most of the four days he’d been in Atlanta, Shire had been treated to a nonstop cavalcade of ugly stories from friends Elizabeth had stolen from, lied to or cheated on. And with each new sordid revelation, he and Danny Stevens had inched closer to the working theory that Princess Ferriot, as they’d come to call her, had saved up as much as she could from the disbursements and then hightailed it to a tropical island somewhere. As for her brother . . . well, every time they got close to discussing the awful possibility that she’d dropped him like deadweight, Shire would say it was time to alert law enforcement, and Danny would stall by saying Shire needed to interview more friends—as if the girl actually had any friends. And around and around they’d go while Shire lived it up at the Renaissance Concourse Airport Hotel, watching Delta Airlines jets take to the sky.
But now, in light of Arthelle Williams’s revelation that morning, the narrative had shifted, as his political clients like to say.
“How long were you working this nurse angle?” Stevens asked.
“It just seemed weird to me.”
“A bunch of nurses thinking an invalid is sending out . . . what? Messages? I mean, how does this mind control shit even work?”
“Look, if you want me to open up a file on the nurse who killed herself, I can, but I’m going to bill you for it. So let me just tell you now, for free, that everyone I talked to said Tammy Keene wasn’t remotely unstable or intoxicated that day. But for some reason, she used a box cutter to gut herself like a catfish when she went inside the kid’s room.”
“Let’s not get dramatic, Shire. Just curious how much of this you actually believe. That’s all.”
“I didn’t say I believed any of it. I said it was weird, is all. And the only part that matters is . . . well, now we know someone at that facility told Elizabeth Ferriot to get her brother out of town or he was going to be killed. Which means no income for Princess.”
“She won’t get any income if she stays out of contact, Shir
e. Six of one, half dozen of the other, as they say.”
“I know that.”
“I’m just saying. We got two questions here. And you haven’t answered ’em both. Not yet. So they’re running from the nurses, fine. But why’s she running from us?”
“Will it matter if I know where she went?”
• • •
The ferry landing was in a little town called Fernandina Beach, that sat just on the Florida side of the state’s border with Georgia. Apparently, there was a historic district, but all Shire could see was a few blocks of two-story brick buildings painted various pastel shades. The tallest thing in the skyline was the plume of white smoke coming from the refinery at the water’s edge.
Shire had expected at least a clutch of people at the harbor, but the blonde inside the ticket booth looked up from her copy of Twilight with a dazed expression that suggested he was the first person to ask something of her since she’d been hired. The harbor itself was tiny, just a few rows of slips around a pavilion-style restaurant that looked empty. Steel-colored clouds were knotted across the eastern horizon, draining the color from the expanse of tidal pools and rounded islands of marsh grass below.
Somewhere out there was Chamberland Island; he’d get there on the 3:00 ferry. He had Elizabeth Ferriot’s former best friend to thank for bringing him to this humble little coastal village. During the tongue-lashing she’d been giving about her ex-roommate—hell hath no fury like a woman who discovered you borrowed her AmEx number without permission—Margery Blakely had made one of those invaluable offhand comments that doesn’t mean anything until you look back at your notes and plug it into a search engine. End of the day, all that skank wanted was some rich sugar daddy to buy her a place out on Chamberland Island. He’d never heard of the place before that moment. Now he was doing his best to commit a map of the twenty-mile-long coastal island to memory. Large salt marshes made up its western shore, but the ocean-facing side was one of the longest stretches of undeveloped beach in the continental United States. Most of the island was national park, but nestled at the northern tip were a few private parcels wealthy residents had managed to hold on to when the parks service took control of the island in the early seventies. When he located the deeds, Shire recognized the name of only one of the owners, but it was a hell of a hit. Perry Walters, chief financial officer for Ferriot Exports from 1992 to 1999. His name had even been on a list of extended family and business contacts Danny Stevens had given him in case his investigation in Atlanta hit a dead end. Walters was pushing ninety now; it was doubtful he was making many visits to his family’s old cottage. There was no bridge to the mainland, just ferry service that ended around dusk. Overnight camping was prohibited, which meant the only people allowed on the island after dark aside from residents were guests of the White Tail Inn, the historic bed-and-breakfast located at the island’s southern tip. It was, in other words, the perfect place to hide out from a bunch of crazy nurses who were convinced your cash cow brother was responsible for the death of one of their own.
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