The Boy

by Tami Hoag

  “You seem to have very strong feelings about a minor employee you’ve only known for a few months,” Nick pointed out. “Why is that, Mr. Avery?”

  Avery came out from behind his desk and strode for the door. “I’ve had about enough of you, Detective Fourcade. It’s my duty to cooperate, but I am a happily married man, and I won’t have you insinuate otherwise.”

  “I didn’t,” Nick said with the same infuriating calm he’d used the whole interview. He leaned back against the edge of Avery’s desk and crossed his arms over his chest, settling in even as Avery put his hand on the doorknob.

  “My wife has been equally involved in helping Genevieve and KJ,” Avery went on. “She got her ladies’ group at church to add Genevieve to their outreach program for families in need—”

  “When did you last see Ms. Gauthier?” Nick asked, uninterested for the moment in the Christian charity of Jeff Avery’s wife.

  “I’m not sure,” Avery said impatiently. “Late in the day yesterday, I guess. I told you, I was very busy all day. I don’t have time to oversee every employee.”

  “Mr. Avery, where were you last night between eleven and one in the morning?”

  Avery gasped. “Oh, that’s it!” he exploded. “I’ve had it with this bullshit! You need to leave. Now.”

  Nick didn’t so much as twitch a muscle. “I don’t get paid to be a diplomat, Mr. Avery.”

  “My tax dollars pay your salary,” Avery said, indignant. “So you do, in fact, work for me. I will feel free to lodge a complaint—”

  “You do that. Me, I don’t worry do you like me or not. I’m not shopping for friends.”

  “Good thing. I can’t imagine you have any.”

  “I’m still waiting for an answer,” Nick said, unperturbed. “Where were you last night between eleven and one A.M.?”

  Avery looked out through the glass in his door, like a trapped animal longing to escape. His pulse was visible in the side of his neck where his carotid artery stood out like a length of cord.

  “I was here,” he said with resignation. “Working. I have paperwork to catch up on before the inspection. I suppose you’ll try to twist that into something.”

  “The truth will twist itself into the light,” Nick said, lazily pushing away from the desk. “It always does. I am but a facilitator, a gatherer of facts. Thank you for your time, Mr. Avery.”

  FOURTEEN

  This is so exciting! Me, I don’t get many visitors. Do I know you, cher?”

  “No, ma’am,” Annie said, smiling gently at Clarice Marcel.

  She was a petite woman with dark eyes and a soft cloud of nicely done blue-gray hair. Eighty-five, the nurse had told Annie. She was a bit stooped and leaned on a cane but was still relatively healthy, save for the Alzheimer’s that had begun to erode her memory several years past.

  “This is Detective Broussard from the Sheriff’s Office, Clarice,” Donna Goldberg, the facility’s head nurse, said loudly for the second time. “She needs to ask you some questions.”

  Clarice chuckled. “Well, good luck with that, my dear!” she said, reaching out to pat Annie’s arm. “I don’t always remember things anymore. That’s what happens when you get old. The parts start wearing out, starting right up here,” she said, tapping her temple with a finger gnarled by arthritis. “Come sit down, you!”

  She shuffled her way to a brown velvet recliner that sat with its mate tucked into the alcove of a bay window that looked out on a broad lawn studded with live oak trees heavily draped in moss. Annie chose to sit on a wheeled ottoman so she could get closer to the woman and hopefully avoid the need to shout. The nurse excused herself to see to her duties, closing the door on her way out.

  “I don’t care for that one,” Clarice said, making a face. “She’s bossy. Thinks she knows everything. She give me a tin of stale cookies on my birthday, like I wouldn’t know the difference. Hard as rocks! Bought them at the drugstore, if you can imagine that! Giving people stale cookies from the Walgreens! Talk about! You wouldn’t do that, would you, dear?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You was raised good right here, yes?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Right here in Bayou Breaux.”

  “That one, I think she’s not from here. Maybe she don’t know no better. Maybe she’s from up north.”

  “Maybe. You have a lovely home, Mrs. Marcel,” Annie said, glancing around. The entire place could be seen from right where she sat—a tiny kitchenette on one end of a living area furnished with generic oak pieces and a flat-screen TV tuned to a home improvement show, a single bedroom, and a bathroom wafting out the cloying scent of some flowery air freshener through the partially opened door.

  Annie swallowed against the urge to gag.

  “Oh, it’s not my home,” Clarice corrected her. “I have a lovely home, but I don’t recall how to get to it. I lived there with my husband. He passed, God rest him. No one here will take me back to my house. I asked Genevieve, but she don’t know how to get there either. She’s not from here.

  “Where is she?” she asked. “Do you know? She didn’t come dress me this morning. That fat Hebert girl, she dress me today. Look at this!” she said with disgust, gesturing to her mauve velour tracksuit.

  “You look very nice,” Annie said.

  “Bah! These aren’t my clothes! Where is my Genevieve? She get my right clothes. She’s a good girl. She’s my sister, you know.”

  “Your niece, you mean?”

  “My niece?”

  “Genevieve Gauthier. Your niece,” Annie said, though she assumed the term was not technically accurate. The age difference made it implausible. Clarice Marcel was eighty-five. Genevieve Gauthier was twenty-seven. She was more likely a great-niece. Still, Annie asked, “Is she your sister’s daughter? Or brother’s?”

  Clarice Marcel blinked at her. “What you talking ’bout, cher? I don’t have a brother.”

  Annie took a deep breath and started over. “Mrs. Marcel, Genevieve isn’t here today because she was injured last night. She’s in the hospital. She’ll be all right, but she won’t be to work for a few days. Maybe a week or more.”

  “Oh, no!” the old woman said with genuine distress. “What happened to her? Was she in a car accident?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m afraid not. Someone hurt her.”

  Tears rose in Clarice Marcel’s eyes. She pressed a wrinkled hand to her cheek. “Who would hurt my Genevieve? She’s a good girl! Who would do such a thing?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Annie said. “But we’re looking into it. That’s my job. I’m a detective with the Sheriff’s Office.”

  “You’re a detective? Mais non!” she exclaimed with a mix of amusement and disbelief. “A purty girl like you, cher? Non! That’s a man’s job, that!”

  “I am. I swear,” Annie assured her, showing the woman her badge. “I’m trying to find out who might have wanted to hurt Genevieve. Did she ever tell you if anyone was bothering her?”

  “Mais non. She never said such a thing. I told her, you find you a good man, Genevieve, and you hang on to him ’cause most of them ain’t worth a damn. She already knew that.”

  “Did she tell you about any bad man in particular?”

  She made a face and shook her head. “She’s a quiet girl, that one. But she had her heart broke, for sure. I can see that, even with my old eyes.”

  She reached over to the end table that squatted between the two recliners, picked up a small, framed photo, and held it out to Annie. “Here we are. Once a week she dress me up nice and we go out for lunch.”

  Annie looked at the photo. Clarice Marcel in a lavender sweater set and a long gauzy summer skirt, and Genevieve Gauthier, in capri pants and a simple black top, her slender arm wrapped carefully around the older woman’s frail shoulders. It was hard to reconcile that image with the image of the battered woman Anni
e had left at Our Lady just a few hours earlier. The young woman in the picture was pretty, with soulful brown eyes and a shy smile. The two women stood in a gravel parking lot in front of a long two-story wood-frame building with a wide front porch. A placard in the window behind them read ICI ON PARLE FRANCAIS. Annie’s eyebrows rose as recognition dawned.

  “You go out to the Corners for lunch?” she asked.

  “Sometimes. They got good fish, them. All the time fresh, their fish. And a good gumbo.”

  “I know,” Annie said. “I grew up there. Sos and Fanchon Doucet raised me.”

  “Oh!” Clarice looked delighted. She wagged a finger at Annie. “That Sos, he’s a rascal, him!”

  Annie laughed. “Yes, he is.”

  She could easily imagine Uncle Sos laying on the Cajun charm with Mrs. Marcel and her young companion. He loved to play the host to ladies, young and old—not in a predatory way but because he genuinely loved women of all shapes, sizes, ages, and races. He was a champion flirt and considered it his duty and his calling. Tante Fanchon had always just smiled and shook her head. “That’s just Sos, chérie,” she would say, waving a hand as if to shoo away any concerns. “He wants every woman to feel beautiful, but me most of all.”

  And that was true. Annie had never known two people more in love, more devoted, than the two of them.

  “Are they well?” Clarice asked. “I don’t remember when I saw them last.”

  “Fanchon had a stroke this summer.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thank you. It was a hard few months,” Annie said. “But she’s doing better now.”

  “Getting old isn’t for wimps, cher,” Clarice said. “Me, I used to be all the time on the go. Then I fell and hurt my hip. Now I sit in here like a bird in a cage. Genevieve, she flies around for me.”

  “She runs errands for you?”

  “Oui. Me, I pay her a little extra on the side. She don’t want no money for it, but I give her some, just the same. She’s a good girl, her.”

  “Does she pick up your medications for you?”

  “Sometimes. And she goes to the grocery. She picks up my maple leaf cookies that I like. Would you like one?”

  “No, thank you, ma’am.”

  “Well, I think I’m out of them, anyway. Genevieve, she gonna bring them. Maybe today,” she said hopefully. “Maybe later.”

  “Genevieve won’t be coming today,” Annie reminded her. “She’s in the hospital. Someone hurt her last night.”

  She hoped to God the woman didn’t ask about Genevieve’s son. It was hard enough to explain the one tragedy.

  Clarice let out a soft sigh as she took the photograph back from Annie.

  “Oh, no, that’s too bad,” she said, touching Genevieve’s face in the picture. “Bad things happen to my poor Genevieve. She’s too pretty to be all the time so sad, pauvre ’tite bête.”

  * * *

  * * *

  PAUVRE ’TITE BÊTE . . . Poor little thing . . .

  Something in the quality of Clarice Marcel’s voice—the sadness, the pity, the patina of age—took Annie instantly back in time to the day she had learned of her mother’s death. She was a little girl, nine years old, just back from her first-ever vacation trip with Uncle Sos and Tante Fanchon. The doting surrogate grandparents, they had taken her to Disney World, and it had been the most wonderful, magical, happiest time of her young life. And then they had come home to the Corners, where Annie and her mother lived in the apartment above the store and café, to be greeted by the parish priest with the news that Marie Broussard had taken her own life. Out of sight and out of mind, Annie’s mother had quietly slipped the bonds of a burden she had never shared with anyone.

  How many times had Annie heard those whispered words of pity in the days that had followed? A hundred or more as family and friends had come calling on the Doucets. Fanchon and Sos had taken Marie in when she was pregnant and destitute, a stray cat from who-knew-where, and loved her like the daughter they never had. Now Marie had gone and left them behind with her fatherless child. Pauvre ’tite bête . . .

  Poor little thing . . . Annie could still see them in her mind’s eye from the perspective of a child, looking up at the sad faces, the sorrowful eyes. She was the poor little dear, the child abandoned by the woman who had sheltered her from whatever truth she had herself been unable to bear. Even as a child Annie had seen the irony, even if she hadn’t known what to call it.

  Those same adults had doubtless used those same words to describe Marie Broussard, herself, when she had been alive. Poor Marie. Poor little thing, all the time so sad. Poor Marie, locked inside herself with her secrets.

  The picture of Annie’s mother easily morphed into the picture of Genevieve Gauthier, another young woman with a secret sadness in her eyes and a past that cast a shadow over her present. Had that past come calling in the night? Had it taken her boy instead of her life?

  “. . . hey, Earth to ’Toinette!”

  Annie startled back to the moment. She sat behind the wheel of her SUV in the Evangeline Oaks parking lot, swamped by the memories and the heat. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the car. Hadn’t thought of it, she’d been so lost in her own head.

  Nick reached in through the open window and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I was just . . . lost . . . thinking,” she corrected herself.

  “Bébé, start the car,” he chided gently. “It’s hot. Your face is flushed.”

  Annie turned the key in the ignition and breathed a sigh of relief at the cool air that rushed out the vents. She took a deep breath, glad to bring her attention back to the moment at hand, to the sounds of birds and traffic, to the sight of her husband and the view of Veterans Park across the street.

  “What did you find out?” Nick asked, leaning his forearms on the window frame.

  “The head nurse says they dispense all of Clarice Marcel’s meds because of her Alzheimer’s, but she had a fall a couple of months ago while she was out of the facility with Genevieve. Genevieve went with her to the ER. That’s probably where the ’script for the Oxy came from.”

  “She didn’t turn the pills over to the nurse?”

  “Clarice refuses strong drugs. She doesn’t want anything more than Tylenol. So the ER doc might have written her the ’script, but the nurse here wouldn’t have been looking for those pills.”

  “So Genevieve wound up with that prescription. Serendipitous for her,” Nick said. “Find out from the pharmacy if she ever had it refilled. Or she might have duped it at another pharmacy. Call around.”

  “But you only found the one bottle?” Annie asked.

  “Far as I know. I haven’t looked at the inventory from the house.”

  “If she’s pharmacy hopping, there should be multiple bottles.”

  “Not if she’s selling those pills—or using heavily herself. Stokes said he also found some random loose Vicodin in the medicine cabinet. Did the nurse say anything about drugs going missing in general?”

  “She said no, but she was slow to answer,” Annie said. “I’m sure that’s not a rumor they want floating around town. Won’t look good on the sales brochure: Retire to Evangeline Oaks, where our staff will rip off your meds.”

  “That’d be some bad publicity,” Nick agreed. “Avery said they’re getting ready for some big state inspection. He needs everything here to look shipshape.”

  “As an aide, Genevieve is in and out of a lot of different apartments,” Annie said. “Residents who are more independent than Mrs. Marcel take care of their own medications. It would be a simple thing to pick up a pill or two here and there. But I should think the administration would have been quick to fire her if they thought there was a problem like that.”

  Nick hummed a note. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “So
mething going on with the boss?” Annie asked, and sighed. “Oh, I do hate a cliché.”

  “That story line is a cliché for a reason,” he pointed out. “He does seem to have more than a passing interest in her. Mr. Happily Married Man, he didn’t like me poking around that subject.”

  Annie arched an eyebrow. “And if someone suggested to you that you were fooling around on me, what would your reaction be?”

  “They’d be picking their teeth up off the ground,” he said with a wry smile. “But that’s not what I got from him. I got a lot of puffed-up outrage on the heels of some lame excuses. There’s plenty more to that story.”

  “For what it’s worth, the office manager champions him as the perfect pillar of the community and a God-fearing Christian man.”

  “That only makes me want to double down on the idea, given his level of discomfort with me. Adulterous guilt shouldn’t sit well on the shoulders of a religious man.”

  “Well, Miss Mavis believes he walks on water and multiplies loaves and fishes on the weekends,” Annie said. “She does not like Genevieve. At all. While Mrs. Marcel thinks Genevieve is an angel.”

  “Avery had all good things to say about her. Called her a model employee.”

  “And Miss Mavis claims Genevieve is perpetually late to work and suffers no repercussions for it. Genevieve’s supervisor, Nurse Goldberg, falls somewhere in the middle. She gives Genevieve a B-plus for her work and extra credit for the time she spends with Mrs. Marcel.”

  “But no one has any idea who might have wanted to hurt this girl,” Nick said, frowning.

  “Not a clue. Not a word about an ex or current boyfriend. According to her supervisor, she doesn’t seem to be close with any of the other aides here. She does her work and goes home. No one here seems to know anything about her social life, if she has one.”

  “She had one once,” Nick pointed out. “Maybe it came up from Dulac for a visit last night.

  “Let’s go to the office and regroup,” he said. “We should have some background on her and the boy by now.”