by Hester Young
“He wouldn’t take you?”
“He said . . .” Andre chokes on the words. “He said, ‘Did you really think I was a faggot like you?’” He closes his eyes. “He started walking to his car, and that’s when I took out the gun. I don’t know why. I don’t know.”
“You were only eighteen, Andre.”
“Eighteen,” he echoes. “Legally, an adult. What could I do? There was no one to go to except my mother. She was all I had.” He takes a few listless steps down the hallway. “She helped me clean up. She helped me bury him.” He wipes his eyes. “I don’t know who she was covering for, me or herself. Part of me wanted to go to the police, but I didn’t want to go to prison. Can you imagine what they’d do to me in prison?”
“You would’ve had a good case,” I murmur. “You were under extreme emotional duress. You’d just learned that your mother was being unfaithful to your father.”
“That’s still manslaughter,” he says, “best case. Up to forty years in Louisiana.” He stares at the floor. “Everything would’ve come out at trial. You think I would’ve had a chance once the jury found out I was gay? And God knows what my father would’ve done to my mother.”
“She wasn’t just protecting you all these years,” I observe. “You’ve been protecting each other.”
“Yes. So now you know.” He smiles wanly at me. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Answers? A tearful confession?”
Something about the way he says it makes me ashamed. What did I hope to accomplish here? Justice? Andre is not the purely evil villain I’ve been looking for. He was a frightened kid, and bringing all of this to light now, when Sean’s been dead so long, does little more than punish the innocent. Namely, Noah. He’s the only innocent one in this whole dirty story.
“What are you going to do?” he murmurs.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “It was a long time ago.” I don’t know if I’m being honest or trying to placate a man who has just confessed to murder. Should I tell Detective Minot about this? Would legal punishment really be worse than the mental anguish Andre has already suffered? Perhaps silence is best. Either way, the choice should not be mine to make.
“I’ll make it worth your while.” Andre’s gotten hold of himself again. “Tell me how much. I’ll get my checkbook. Name the amount, and we’ll settle this.” He opens the study door and marches inside.
“I don’t want your money,” I protest, but he rummages through his desk nonetheless, searching.
“A million dollars. How does that sound?” He shuffles through some papers. “That was what I asked for in the ransom note.”
“You wrote the ransom note?”
He plucks a key from the back of the drawer and inspects it for a moment. “I told my mother the night Sean died that it was him or me. That she could send me off to jail if she wanted, but I wasn’t going to watch her dupe my father every day, pretending Gabriel was his. After that night, the kid was poison. Every time we looked at him, all we could think of was Sean.”
The idea of anyone viewing a two-year-old as poison sickens me, but I’m not done with my questions. “What about Maddie and Jack?” They participated in this whole elaborate cover-up, after all. “Did they know you killed their son?”
“You think Maddie was surprised?” Andre flashes me another one of his jaded, not-really-amused smiles. “Only that it was me who did it. She’d been telling Sean for years that my father would kill him. She knew he was playing with fire every time he touched my mother.” Andre sees this blame-the-victim stance doesn’t sit well with me. “It could’ve been worse for Nanny and Daddy Jack,” he says defensively. “They got what they wanted in the end.”
“You mean Gabriel.”
Finally, he devotes a thought to his brother. “I don’t know what became of that poor son of a bitch, but he’s probably had a better time of things than I have.”
Wow. He really doesn’t know.
I know from various chats with Noah that Hettie spent years cultivating a relationship with him through cards, little gifts, a handful of visits. When he was nineteen, she gave him money to start his own business. On her deathbed, she found a way to bring him back to Evangeline. All that contact, yet no one ever found out who Noah really was. Not Noah, and not Andre, her co-conspirator in just about everything else. I have to admire, if not respect, the woman’s ability to dissemble.
“I bet your brother turned out okay,” I say.
Andre has already abandoned all thoughts of Gabriel, however. He stands by the desk, staring at the key in his hand. The gears in his head are turning. “You really don’t want money?”
I shake my head. “I wanted to know what happened to Gabriel. Now I do.” I back away from the study, ready to put all the distance I can between myself and Evangeline. “I should go, Andre. The past is past, I understand that. Let’s leave it there.”
“Wait.” He holds out the key to me. “You’re in this deep with us, you might as well know everything. There’s one last thing you should see.”
Part of me wants to leave. I have the answers I need. If this family prefers to live with all these lies, I have no business interfering. Maddie and Jack struck their dirty bargain years ago, absolving Andre and Hettie of their son’s death in return for their grandchild. If they could forgive, or at least move on, it seems ridiculous for me to make waves now. And yet, as Andre offers this small metallic object to me, I can’t help wondering what I’m missing.
What’s left for him to show me? What final piece of the puzzle remains?
I enter the study gingerly. He points to the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk: a keyhole. He presses his gloved hand firmly into mine and deposits the key.
“Go ahead. Open it.”
I unlock the drawer, already regretting the decision. My stomach tenses up into a hard knot. “This isn’t going to be—gross, is it?”
“No,” he promises with a dry laugh. “Just open it.”
I pull open the drawer and discover a small silver revolver lying on a green cloth. This is actually better than I anticipated. It’s not a tooth, at least, or human hair.
“Is that the gun that killed Sean?”
“No,” Andre replies, and in one quick, smooth motion, he picks it up, presses it to my neck. “This is the gun that’s going to kill you.”
• • •
I’VE NEVER BEEN HELD AT gunpoint before, but the experience is not what I imagined.
I don’t get hysterical. Don’t scream, don’t beg for my life. My mind is surprisingly clear, surprisingly logical, as if sharpened by my fear. I tell myself not to piss him off. That no one will hear me if I yell, and even if I do, it’ll be too late. He could’ve shot me already, but he hasn’t. I want to see what his next move will be.
If he were a stranger, I might take my chances with a struggle. But I know Andre’s secrets. He’s on the edge right now, unstable, his mother terminally ill and his boyfriend teetering between life and death. If I’m calm, maybe I can defuse this. But I’ve got to keep him talking.
“Andre,” I say in a steady voice, “don’t make this mistake again.” The butt of the revolver pushes my chin up so I can’t see his face. “Killing me will create a lot more problems for you than it will solve, you know that.”
“Not killing you is what got me into this mess,” Andre retorts. “I should have dealt with you when you started asking questions about Sean. I told my mother this was coming.”
It sounds like Andre has been contemplating how to rid himself of the Charlotte problem for a while. His awkward attempts to be my friend were not pathetic, I now realize, but strategic. Friends close, enemies closer. My palms begin to sweat.
“I’m not your enemy,” I say. But even I can hear the lameness of this approach. “I got in over my head, and all I want to do is go home.”
“Right. Home.” He doesn’t have t
o tell me; I know now we’re well past the point of my walking away. His weight shifts behind me as he considers his next step. “You said Sean’s letter was in the guesthouse. Is that true?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Let’s go for a little walk.”
He repositions the gun so it’s no longer tilted up toward my head, but directly at my neck. This seems worse. A well-aimed shot through the chin would kill someone instantly, but a hole through the neck? Would I bleed out? Choke to death on my own blood? I don’t want to end that way.
As he steers me out of the study and toward the kitchen, I run a quick mental calculation. From the rear of the house, what are the chances that the guard at the gate or the person monitoring cameras in the carriage house could hear me if I screamed? More to the point, what are the chances they could help? Slim to none. By the time someone arrived to help, I’d be dead, and Andre would be free to tell whatever convenient story he liked.
But there are cameras. He wouldn’t shoot me on camera. There must be some gesture I can make to get the attention of Zeke, or whoever’s watching the cameras today, some universal sign that I’m in a hostage situation.
I rack my brain for ideas, my calm rapidly devolving into panic as Andre pushes me through the kitchen. He nudges me out the French doors, his hand on my left shoulder to ensure that I don’t make a sudden break for it. When he catches me looking hopefully at a camera on the perimeter of the house, he makes a little tsk, tsk, tsk sound.
“I’m afraid the camera system is down today.” His breath is warm on my ear. “I had to send Zeke into town to see about repairs.”
This could happen, I think. I could die. He’s really going to do this. Because Andre’s not behaving rashly. He’s not a guy who needs to be talked down from the ledge. He has planned this carefully. Somehow he’s disabled the security system and cleared Evangeline of anyone who might interfere with his plans. He’s wearing gloves so that his fingerprints will never turn up on that revolver. He had me unlock that drawer myself, so the only prints on that key will be my own. What’s he aiming for? Another supposed suicide right on the heels of the Jules incident would strain credulity. Maybe he’ll pretend that I attacked him, claim self-defense.
“When we get to the cottage, enter the door code and walk straight in,” he instructs me. “I’ll be right behind you. Do you know where the letter is?”
Of course I do. It’s on the bed where I left it, folded in the book of Shakespearean sonnets. But I won’t tell Andre that. There might be something in the cottage that I could use as a weapon. A knife. Or something heavy I could strike him in the head with.
“I don’t—remember where I put it,” I stammer. “I might’ve left it in the kitchen.”
I could tell him that he’s wasting his time, that Detective Minot already has a copy of the letter, but it might well be the only thing Andre’s keeping me alive for. I’m not sure why he’s so fixated on it. Sean’s words and their implications are not as obviously damning as Andre’s guilty conscience seems to think, but as long as he believes it’s evidence against him, I’ve got leverage. Sort of.
Now, if I can just find the right moment—a distraction, maybe, to break his focus—then I can make my escape. Or die trying. Because I’d rather get shot several times in the back than bleed out my neck. I think.
“You’re very quiet,” Andre remarks. “I thought you’d try to talk your way out of this.”
I trudge along the path, increasingly doubtful I can avoid taking a bullet, wondering what type of wound gives me the best chance of survival. “It sounds like you’ve made up your mind what’s going to happen.”
“You know, I didn’t want it to be like this, Charlotte.” I still can’t see Andre’s face, but there’s something genuinely regretful in his voice. Fat lot of comfort that gives me. “You’ve given me no options. You could’ve left us alone, but you didn’t. What am I supposed to do? Turn myself in? After everything my mother and I have sacrificed?” He shakes his head. “I made one mistake, and I hate myself for it every day. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”
“Then don’t.”
“It’s too late. You’ve screwed up my life past the point of no return.”
That seems like an unfair overstatement. “Me? What did I do?”
“You helped them find Sean. I don’t know how, but you did. Now I’ve got the FBI up my ass, and Jules might as well be dead because of you. The one person who made me happy, gone.”
He’s starting to sound totally delusional now. “You think I’m to blame for Jules’s overdose? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Oh no? Who do you think all that Ambien was for?”
I stop walking. It never occurred to me that Andre was the one slipping drugs into the booze. And it certainly never occurred to me that said drugs were intended for me.
“But I don’t even drink tequila.”
“No.” He pushes me forward with his free hand. “You drink Shirley Temples. With grenadine.”
Grenadine. Of course. The sickly sweet cherry flavor would help to mask the bitterness of all that Ambien. And if you mix grenadine with tequila and orange juice, you have yourself a tequila sunrise—the drink that nearly did Jules in. So Jules didn’t have a death wish. He had a drunk wish, and he had the misfortune of using a bottle that his boyfriend had laced with sleeping pills. A bottle meant for me.
“It should’ve been easy,” Andre says. “You had a prescription for Ambien, and I found out about you, about your son. Of course you’d be depressed. Nobody would’ve questioned it when they found you.”
He’s right. Even Detective Minot might’ve bought the idea of my offing myself, knowing how much I miss Keegan.
“If you’d just sat down with me last Friday,” Andre laments, “if you had just joined me for a drink. You could’ve saved us both a world of pain. Jules, too.”
“But I didn’t,” I say. “And no one will believe it’s a suicide now. Not after Jules.”
“No,” Andre agrees. “It’ll be harder this way, for both of us.”
I want to ask what he means by that, but I have a feeling I already know. He’s got that gun, and he’s got a boat. I may have saved Jonah from a watery grave only to end up in one myself.
We’re at the cottage now. He steps back, revolver still trained on my neck, while I punch in the door code. I sneak in a sideways glance and finally get a look at his face: a little green as he contemplates the next phase of his plan.
“This is going to be a mess,” he murmurs, like I might actually feel sorry for him.
The keypad blinks and the door opens. I’m running out of time. I need to make a move or it’s game over. We enter the cottage, and I note that Andre leaves the door half open behind us. Not that I could get by him. But maybe if I knocked him over, somehow caused him to lose his footing?
I try to distract him. “They’ll find my car, you know. You’ll have a lot of explaining to do.” I could dash into the bathroom. There’s a lock on the door but no window, no way out. Still, it might buy me some time.
“I can get rid of the car.” Andre’s eyes fall on the boxes of family junk, scanning for Sean’s letter. “They all think you’re leaving today. I’ll tell them you did. They’ll believe me.”
I can’t disagree. It would take days for anyone to realize I was missing, and weeks before police would take a missing-person report seriously. A lot could happen to a woman driving alone from Chicory to Stamford. How hard would anyone really look at Andre?
“The letter,” Andre reminds me impatiently. “I want the letter.”
“I’m trying to remember where I put it.”
His eyes narrow, suspicious now, and he closes the distance between us, holds the revolver to my temple. “Don’t screw with me. Is it here or not?”
“It’s here somewhere, I just . . .”
No time left
for hesitation. I have to act, however wrongly. I glance down at the floor, ready to slip my ankle behind his and try to knock him off balance. But before I can position myself correctly, attack him with what little I have, something freezes me in my tracks.
“Put that gun on the ground and your hands in the air.”
Never, I think, has a Texas twang sounded so beautiful.
Andre’s head jerks over toward the door to see who’s speaking, but he doesn’t release his grip on me. I can’t see much with the revolver pressed to my head, but from my peripheral vision, I can make out the familiar slope of Noah’s broad shoulders, his square jaw. And, in his outstretched hands, the nine-millimeter I always feared. I wonder if this moment will alter my views on gun control.
Whatever happens, at least I know he came back for me.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time,” Noah tells Andre. “You put down your gun or I shoot you. First the kneecaps, then your stomach. Then any other place I can think of that’ll hurt like hell.”
I twist just enough to get a glimpse of Andre’s face. He doesn’t look angry or defeated, just confused. “Aren’t you the gardener?” he asks, somewhat absurdly. “What are you doing on my property? I fired you.”
Noah ignores the question. “I’m gonna count to three. One way or another, you’re gonna drop your damn weapon.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.” Andre’s voice rises. “This isn’t any of your business. Just—leave.”
“One,” says Noah. “Two.”
“Stop! Stop counting at me! Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m your fuckin’ brother.”
One word, but for Andre Deveau, more frightening than any firearm. I can feel the instant he puts it all together: the sharp intake of breath, Andre’s arm going limp. The revolver drags lightly across my cheek, then dangles at his side. I disentangle myself and scurry over to Noah, blood pumping so hard I think every vessel in my body might burst.