The Gates of Evangeline

by Hester Young

  “You said she was upset when she came into the kitchen,” says Detective Minot, still pursuing the Maddie angle. “What did you mean by that?”

  Danelle is cautious, and I can see that she and Maddie must have been friends. “Just . . . upset.”

  “A little bothered, would you say, or extremely distraught?”

  “I wouldn’t know, I was thinkin’ about waffles, wasn’t I?” She leans forward in her chair and stabs the air with her pointed finger. “Look, if you gonna try to pin somethin’ on Maddie, I got nothin’ else to say ’cause you’re a damn fool. Maddie loved that li’l boy more than her own son. She loved all those kids, even Andre and those yappity girls. She raised every one of ’em.”

  “I’ve heard nothing but good things about her,” Detective Minot assures her. “I’m sure it was hard for everyone when she and Jack left Evangeline.” He doesn’t bring up the circumstances of their leaving, but even I know the Lauchlins’ departure—just two weeks after Gabriel went missing—caused quite a stir in the media. DEVEAU BLAMES NANNY, one paper speculated, reflecting the widespread belief that they’d been fired.

  Danelle scowls, well aware of public perception. “Nobody made ’em go,” she says, “if that’s what you’re thinkin’. Maddie and Jack left ’cause they wanted to. She couldn’t stand the place no more. Had nightmares. And with the baby gone, she had no job left anyhow.”

  “Where did she and Jack go?” Detective Minot asks.

  “They had some family things to attend to, I don’t recall where.”

  For the first time since our awkward introduction, I jump in. “You mean their son? Do you know what happened to him?” If Danelle’s got information about Sean, I want to hear it.

  “I think it was Maddie’s sister.” Danelle regards me probingly, and I realize I have loudly broadcast our special interest in Sean.

  Just as I’m resolving to keep my stupid mouth shut, Detective Minot stands and tucks his notebook under his arm. “Mind if I use your restroom, Ms. Martin?”

  She grunts her assent. “First door on the right.”

  From the look he gives me on his way out, Detective Minot doesn’t need the bathroom at all. This is it. My chance to be alone with Danelle, woman to woman. To establish a rapport. But how? I’m afraid she’ll skewer me for any subject I bring up.

  “So . . . were you and Gabriel close?” I expect some smart-ass answer, but she only shrugs.

  “I never was a fan a little ones. Always got on better with Andre. He was old enough to have some sense.”

  Ah, I think, the ever-elusive Andre. Now that I’m acquainted with his sisters, mother, and boyfriend—not to mention the time I’ve spent going through his personal items—it’s starting to feel ridiculous that I haven’t talked more to the sole surviving Deveau male. The fact that he’s Danelle-approved makes me even more curious. “I take it Andre was a good kid?”

  “Sure.” Danelle isn’t going to make this easy.

  “The twins said he never got on well with Neville.”

  “Andre and his daddy were different, that’s all.”

  “And Hettie? Was she more accepting of Andre’s . . . differences?”

  Danelle meets my gaze with a steely look, annoyed by my pussyfooting. “He’s a homosexual. How easy do you think he’s had it?” She clucks her tongue in disapproval. “Come on, now, you writin’ a book or a gossip column?”

  I have to admire her loyalty. Danelle Martin is a decent human being, and it’s her decency, her respect for privacy, that makes her a hard nut to crack.

  I don’t want to leap to unfair conclusions, but Andre is a male relative who surely had access to his little brother. “Did Andre show an interest in Gabriel? Did he spend much time alone with him?”

  The question comes out more pointed than I intended.

  Danelle knows exactly what I’m getting at, and she doesn’t like it. Her hand twitches as if she’s fighting the urge to slap me. “Andre may have liked men,” she says with cold fury, “but he did not like little boys, and he certainly wasn’t after his own brother.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he had crushes on older men, not younger.”

  I pry further. “Older men like who?”

  Danelle doesn’t look happy to be having this discussion, but my insinuations of incest and pedophilia are too much to ignore. “Fellas in their late twenties, mostly,” she says reluctantly. “Andre took a shine to one a the drivers when he was twelve. And when he got older, I’d say he had special feelings for Maddie’s boy, Sean. That’s all I know about it, and I’m done talkin’, you understand?”

  I half-smile at the mention of Sean. Not you again. Those Deveau kids couldn’t get enough of you. It occurs to me that in 1982 Sean was about the same age that Jules is now. Perhaps Andre has always been attracted to men of that age. That gets me wondering: Could Sean Lauchlin have been more than just a crush? Could he and Andre have actually been involved? I study Danelle, seeking the answer in her face, but she’s tapping her fingers, waiting for Detective Minot to return so she can hustle us out.

  There’s no evidence that Sean was gay. He fathered a child, and he was making plans to leave the country with a woman. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t a woman he was running away with. Maybe that’s why Maddie and Jack disapproved, why they never told Noah much about his dad. I can only imagine the fireworks if Maddie discovered that Sean, her almost-thirty-year-old son, was having a relationship with the barely legal Andre. I remember what the librarian said, how Sean read poetry in English class and never seemed interested in the girls around town. I’d assumed he was just a sensitive type who didn’t fit in. Now I see another interpretation.

  However compelling this theory is, it does nothing to explain Gabriel’s disappearance or Sean’s abnormally large bank account. And how does Noah’s mother fit into all this?

  I throw it out there, just in case. “Did you ever see Sean Lauchlin with a woman named Violet?”

  Danelle doesn’t miss a beat. “Violet Johnson? Never saw ’em togetha, but she mighta known Sean. Got the impression she knew a lot a men.”

  Aha. That could explain why Maddie Lauchlin was not a big fan of Noah’s mother.

  “Who was she?” I ask.

  “Violet was a cleanin’ girl at Evangeline. Pretty li’l thing, and she knew it.” Danelle rolls her eyes, unimpressed by pretty little things. “That who you askin’ ’bout?”

  “I think so. When did she work there?”

  Danelle thinks it over. “She wasn’t there long. Woulda been ’75, ’76.”

  Noah was born in 1979, leaving several years unaccounted for, but at least I have some idea now how his parents met.

  “What happened to her? Why’d she leave?”

  Danelle answers with her characteristic warmth and affection. “Never knew, never cared.”

  Detective Minot has no visible reaction when he returns to find us sitting in awkward silence, but I gather he is disappointed. I can’t blame him. Part of me was really expecting to blow the lid off everything today, to succeed where hundreds of trained professionals failed. I’m forced to admit that things are not moving in that direction.

  For another half hour or so, Detective Minot continues with his slow, plodding questions. Both Danelle and I are squirming in our seats by the time he wraps it up.

  “Well, this is a good start,” he tells her. “I’ll be in touch with you in the next few weeks and we can arrange a time for a written statement.”

  She makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a snort. Detective Minot rises to his feet and holds out a hand. She folds her arms, leaving him stranded.

  “Y’all still in the dark, same as you always was,” she declares. “Thirty years, and you back to where you started.”

  Detective Minot doesn’t dignify the remark with an answer, just thanks he
r and heads out.

  I don’t follow. I’m not done with Danelle. “So that’s it?”

  “I answered every damn question you folks asked, didn’t I?”

  I don’t believe for a moment that she’s given us the whole story. “I don’t get you.”

  “Nobody asked you to.”

  “You know something.” I can’t let it go. “You know something, and you’re holding back.”

  “I know a lotta things,” she retorts, “and I tell you one. We done here.”

  “I admire your loyalty, I really do.” I shake my head. “But at this point, who is it you’re protecting?”

  Danelle stares stonily back at me but doesn’t say a word.

  “Thirty years ago, Ms. Martin, I could understand. But there’s no one left, don’t you know that?” Maybe she doesn’t know. She hasn’t worked for the family in a couple of decades. I decide to do a quick update. “Neville is dead, Maddie and Jack are dead, and Hettie’s brain is so fried she thinks the gardener is her son.”

  Some of her hardness melts away at this news. “Jack died?”

  “Last year.”

  “He was a good man.”

  “They’re all gone now,” I say quietly. “There’s no one left for you to hurt.” For a moment, I think I’ve got her.

  Doubt flickers across her face, but it’s quickly replaced by attitude. She puts a hand on her hip and looks to the door. “Your cop friend is waitin’ on you, and I got things to do. You better skedaddle.”

  Fail.

  Outside, Detective Minot has started up the Impala.

  I climb into the passenger seat, defeated. I tell him about my conversation with Danelle and slump back, sure that he regrets bringing me.

  “Why the long face?” His cheery tone surprises me. “I think it went all right.”

  “We got nothing. This was our chance.”

  Detective Minot keeps his eyes on the road, but I know he sees me pouting. “Most of these old cases never get solved, Charlotte, and that’s just how it is.” He’s so stoic, so resigned to inaction. “Anyway, I wouldn’t give up on Danelle Martin just yet. Give her a few days.”

  “A few days for what?”

  “Let her sit with it.” He pulls out into an intersection and I see that traffic has picked up. “She might come up with something interesting.”

  Is he stupidly optimistic or trying to make me feel better? “I think she’d rather lose her other boob than tell us shit,” I say.

  “All right, you think. But I think deep down that woman’s itching to talk.” He gives me a rare smile. “Fifty bucks, what do you say? Give her a week.”

  “Easiest money I ever made.”

  But Minot’s confidence rekindles my hope a little.

  17.

  I’m not sure why, but the meeting with Danelle fires me up. Back in my guest cottage, I attack the boxes of Deveau miscellanea with renewed vigor. I know it’s just a bunch of old crap that’s been lying around in storage, but no one has ever properly sorted it. Why stress out over what Danelle does or doesn’t say when I’ve got real, uncensored artifacts all around me?

  I set aside the box of Andre items I’ve already gone through and choose another, laying out its contents on the bed. Children’s items, for the most part, that must have belonged to the twins. Dolls, a pink diary with only two pages filled in, a bottle of sparkly purple nail polish. I pull out a third-place ribbon for an equestrian competition, flip through a sketchbook with pencil drawings of badly proportioned horses. On the bottom of the box, there are some 1978 issues of Teen. The twins have marked their answers to a “What Type of Guy Do You Go For?” quiz in green ink. I learn that twelve-year-old Brigitte had a thing for jocks, while Sydney preferred bad boys. Actually, Sydney may not have outgrown that. I think I saw something in a tabloid once about her ex-husband being a sex addict.

  The one good find is a scrapbook that Brigitte tried to keep. Like the diary, the pages are mostly blank, but over the years she sporadically pasted things in it. Movie stubs and airplane tickets, playbills, concert programs, Polaroids with friends. What thrills me, though, are a couple of baby photos of Gabriel. It’s been hard to find any pictures of him at all, and these aren’t bad. He’s probably just a few weeks old, a shapeless blob in Brigitte’s teenage arms. In the other, taken maybe a month or two later, he lies on his back, flashing a gummy smile at the camera. Looking at it, I feel a sense of recognition, a strange rush of love for this child that I never knew and will never know.

  He was so small. Vulnerable. And someone took advantage. I remember the feeling of fingers over by the swamp, the violation. I don’t know what that poor little body was subjected to, but there must have been signs. Signs that something was wrong. Signs people missed.

  What room do I have to judge? I know all about missing signs.

  I’ve searched my mind a thousand times, and I still can’t recall anything unusual about the day Keegan died. I was in a rush that morning, like always, and he was taking his sweet time. He fussed about the cereal I gave him, stirring it around until it got soggy. That was nothing new—he was a picky eater. But maybe that morning was different. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe he already had a headache. I never asked how he was feeling, just packed him into the car and hightailed it out of the house. I don’t even remember the last thing I said to him when I dropped him off at day care. Have a good day at school, maybe. I love you, perhaps. But it could just as easily have been a reminder to behave himself. He’d been a handful for the teachers lately.

  How could you forget those last words?

  I wonder if Hettie went through this, too. Did she remember the last thing she said to her son? Did she comb through every memory, searching for something a little off? Was she like me, certain in her heart of hearts that, ultimately, the fault was her own? She must have regretted attending that sweet sixteen party every day of her life since.

  It takes a couple of hours, but I make it through four more boxes and confirm they’re all junk. When I find a brown leather Bible in box number five, I almost ignore it. But it’s lying amongst items from the early eighties, and there’s a bookmark inside, so I open to the marked page just to see.

  I skim the section briefly: the Judgment of Solomon. I’m not much of a biblical scholar, but even I remember the two women fighting over a baby from the children’s Bible my aunt Suzie gave me. The story is supposed to contain a great lesson on wisdom, I guess, to inspire the reader with Solomon’s brilliant deductive powers.

  Who in the Deveau family was drawn to this story? And why? I flip to the first page of the Bible to see if there’s a name or inscription and find a sheet of yellow stationery covered in big, loopy cursive. Not Andre’s handwriting—I remember the tight, neat numbers and letters in his old physics notebook. This looks female and it doesn’t match what I’ve seen of the twins, so my money’s on Hettie.

  I unfold the paper and realize that it’s a list of Bible passages.

  Isaiah 64:6. We have all become like one who is unclean,

  and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.

  We all fade like a leaf,

  and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

  This strikes me as a pretty bleak worldview, but I keep reading.

  1 Corinthians 6:18. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.

  This gets my attention. Was Hettie considering sexually immoral acts? Was she worried for someone else she deemed immoral? There’s no date on the paper, so I can only imagine when this might have been written.

  1 Corinthians 10:13. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability.

  I can’t help but think of Andre as I read. These seem like passages that a rel
igious mom might dig up after learning that her son was gay. Could Hettie have been trying to offer him spiritual guidance? Or was she seeking help for her own reasons?

  1 Thessalonians 4:3–5. For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust . . .

  The reverse side of the paper has two more passages, a little less grim:

  1 Corinthians 13:7. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

  1 Peter 4:8. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.

  I look for a common thread in the Solomon story and these Bible verses, but the lessons in each don’t strike me as similar. I could ask Leeann what she thinks—she’s pretty churchy. I don’t have much confidence in her capacity for theological analysis, however. Maybe Dr. Pinaro could shed some light.

  I put the Bible on the table by my bed and work through the remaining boxes. By the time I’m done, it’s past midnight and I’ve got nothing more of interest. The Deveau clan may be fancy folk, but their twelve boxes of attic junk wouldn’t fetch fifty dollars at a yard sale. The day has not been all I hoped. I slip into my PJs, turn on the TV, and go to bed. For some people, going to bed means going to sleep. I am not one of them.

  • • •

  I DON’T LEAVE THE COTTAGE the next morning. It’s Friday, and if Cristina Paredes has a purely working relationship with Noah, she should be heading home today—not that her leaving would prove his innocence. There’s something funky going on with them. At this point it’s just degrees of bad. Still, I open the curtains enough to keep an eye on what’s happening outside.

  In the late morning, Isaac calls to discuss the chapters I sent him. “This is risky,” he mutters, almost to himself. “You’ve got kind of a nonfiction novel going. It’s not what we discussed. I can’t use it for the Greatest Mysteries series.”