The Boy

by Tami Hoag

  He could hear Dean laughing like a maniac, the sound growing louder and louder as he came closer and closer. He didn’t look up to see where Dean was. It didn’t matter now. He couldn’t get up and run again. He couldn’t fight Dean Florette and win. All he could do was give up and take his beating and hope it was over quickly—or that he died.

  At this point, all things in his life considered, death didn’t seem like the worst alternative.

  TWENTY

  The Florette home was a big two-story clapboard house in an older middle-class neighborhood. The wide front porch sagged in the middle from decades of heavy foot traffic in and out of the house. Warped by time and weather, the old dark-green wood-framed screen door didn’t quite close.

  Upkeep was clearly not the owners’ forte. The roots of a huge oak tree had heaved up the sidewalk. The grass in the front yard was struggling, scrubbed down to the dirt near the front porch where bicycles and tricycles of various sizes had been abandoned, some standing, some tipped over.

  Two minivans filled up the driveway to the detached garage.

  A pair of teenaged girls in short shorts and skimpy tank tops burst out the front door, giggling as Annie climbed the steps.

  “I’m looking for Nora Florette,” she said.

  The girls looked at her like she had asked for something disgusting and smelly—a sack of garbage, a roadkill possum. Or maybe that was their impression of her. She held up her badge and arched an eyebrow.

  “Is she home?”

  “Why would I care?” one said caustically. She was clearly the Florette of the two—black of hair, round of face, like the younger brother, with narrow eyes and too much mascara.

  Tired, hot, running on the half-melted Snickers bar she had finally dug out of her purse on the way from the school, Annie had no patience left for teen-girl attitude. She moved to block the Florette girl’s path down the steps and gave her a hard stare.

  “I don’t care if you care, sweetheart,” she said. “And I have heard all the Florette smart mouth I can stand for one day. What’s your name?”

  “Nicole,” the girl said grudgingly, as if she was giving up a state secret.

  “Nicole, I’m Detective Broussard from the Sheriff’s Office. Is your sister, Nora, home? I need to speak with her, please.”

  “What’d she do now?” the other girl asked—blond hair in pigtails, bra strap falling off one shoulder, shorts barely clearing her hoo-ha. Annie shuddered to think of the trouble the pair of them were headed for, just old enough to think they were grown up, still young enough to be jailbait.

  “What’d she do before?” Annie asked.

  Nicole shot her friend a dirty look, turned, and went back to stick her head inside the screen door. “No-ra! Nora, get down here right this minute!”

  Out in the street, a jacked-up electric blue pickup pulled to the curb in front of Annie’s vehicle. A shirtless young man, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with a goatee and bleached, spiked hair stuck his head out the passenger window.

  “Load up, bitches!” he yelled, then fell into gales of laughter along with the driver of the vehicle.

  “Do we have to stay?” Nicole asked, coming back to Annie, one eye on the truck, ready to bolt. “I don’t know anything about anything Nora does. She’s just an irritating brat child.”

  Apparently, that ran in the family.

  “No,” Annie said. “You can go.”

  Giggling, the girls clattered down the porch steps to the sidewalk and made their way toward the pickup on precariously tall wedge-soled sandals, the blonde snatching the edge of her shorts out of her butt crack as she went. The word bitch floated back at Annie.

  “Have fun,” Annie muttered as she watched them climb into the truck. “Try not to get pregnant.”

  No one had come to the door of the house. She peered in through the screen to a messy living room with a television blaring and a toddler standing on the couch punching a doll in the face. Somewhere deeper in the house, a baby was crying. The smell of onions frying wafted out from the kitchen, wherever that was.

  She knocked and waited and checked her watch. She could hear faint voices rise and fall, and the sound of a utensil banging on a pot. She knocked again and called, “Sheriff’s Office! Anybody home?”

  The toddler came running on stubby legs and peered up at her through the same narrowed eyes as Nicole and Dean Florette.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Annie said. “Where’s your mama?”

  Who’s your mama? She wondered as the child scampered off into the depths of the house, dragging the doll by the hair.

  Annie banged on the door and called again. “Hello? Sheriff’s Office!”

  A petite twenty-something young woman with a crying baby on her hip and a cigarette dangling from her lips picked her way through the minefield of abandoned toys in the living room, the toddler dogging her heels.

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Florette,” Annie said. “Detective Broussard, Sheriff’s Office.”

  Plucking the cigarette from her mouth and holding it out to the side, scattering ash on the floor, Twenty-Something turned and yelled toward the back of the house, “Aunt Jojean! It’s the po-lice!”

  An equally strident voice shouted back, “I can’t leave my meat! Come on back here!”

  Annie followed the mother-and-child procession back through the living room to a messy, cluttered kitchen where Jojean Florette stood at the stove stirring a huge cast-iron skillet full of raw, sizzling ground beef. She was a short, round woman with a belligerent face that easily marked her as the mother of her children. The steam rising from the meat glazed her ruddy skin and frizzed the short dark hair along her forehead. She gave Annie a scathing once-over.

  “Miz Florette, I’m Detective Broussard with the Sheriff’s Office,” Annie began. “I need to speak with your daughter Nora.”

  Jojean heaved a sigh and jammed one dimpled hand on her hip, continuing to stir absently with the other. “Oh, what now? Is that bitch pressing charges? I don’t know who she thinks she is! Comes to town and starts lording it over everybody like her shit don’t stink. Nora swears she didn’t steal that trinket box, and who’s to say she did? Not Miss High-and-Mighty! And here she is sending in the goddamn cavalry—”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Annie confessed bluntly, too tired and impatient to pretend interest in anything not related to the case. In the past hour she had already experienced enough of the Florette offspring to not be surprised one of them had been accused of stealing.

  Jojean’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Then why are you here?”

  “I have some questions for her about yesterday, that’s all.”

  “What about yesterday?”

  “She was babysitting KJ Gauthier.”

  “You don’t think she hurt that boy, do you?” Jojean said. “Did Genevieve say Nora did something to him? After all we’ve done for her—”

  “No one is accusing Nora of anything,” Annie said. “I just want to ask her if everything was normal yesterday, if maybe they ran into a stranger in the park or if KJ might have said something—”

  Jojean cut a look at her niece in the doorway. “Tiffany, go call Nora downstairs.”

  “It’s terrible what happened,” she said belatedly as the niece left the room. “People aren’t safe in their own beds at night.”

  “How do you know Genevieve?” Annie asked.

  “Work. I’m a cook at Evangeline Oaks.”

  “That’s how Nora came to be her babysitter?”

  “NO-RA!!! Your mother wants you!” the niece screamed in the front of the house.

  Lord, what a family of hog callers.

  “She needed someone to watch KJ after school,” Jojean went on. “Time for Nora to get some responsibility. Earn her own money.”

  “Did Nora say anything to you last night? T
hat anything was out of the ordinary?”

  She stirred her meat, frowning. “I didn’t see her last night. I was working.”

  “At Evangeline Oaks?”

  “No. I work some evenings at the liquor store. Lambert Liquor—that’s my cousin Joe Lambert. I didn’t get home ’til late.”

  “And Nora didn’t say anything this morning?”

  “I didn’t see her this morning. I have to be at the Oaks by five to start the breakfast.”

  “You didn’t talk to her on the phone?”

  “For what? She’s old enough to get herself up for school.”

  “But she wasn’t at school today,” Annie said.

  “What?”

  “She was absent. Didn’t you get the text from the school office?”

  Jojean made a face like she’d tasted something bad. “I don’t pay no mind to those. They’re all the time sending texts about this and that and the next thing. And Nora skipping school is not a news flash. I’m not gonna drop everything and go find her. She can just pay the piper and sit in detention when she goes back. She has to learn responsibility.”

  It was the second time in three minutes she had mentioned her daughter learning responsibility—this mother who hadn’t spoken to her youngest child since who knew when, ignored messages from school, and believed her daughter’s delinquency was her own business to deal with. Annie wondered if Jojean Florette had any idea or care that her son was a bully or that her older daughter had just gone off dressed like a backwater hooker in a truck with boys too old for her.

  The back door slammed, and Dean Florette came thundering into the house, dodging piles of clothes on the floor in what must have been the laundry room just beyond the kitchen. His eyes went wide at the sight of Annie, and he came to an almost-comic skidding stop in the middle of the room. His face was smeared with blood. The front of his shirt was soaked with it.

  “What happened to you?” Annie asked.

  He dodged her gaze and then his mother’s. “I crashed my bike.”

  “And broke the fall with your face?”

  His nose looked squashed and swollen, and he had a fat lip, like someone who had been on the wrong side of a fistfight. His knuckles were skinned as well in a way that suggested he had punched someone. Annie wondered if the red-haired boy in the park had gotten the better of him. That was hard to imagine, as timid as the other boy had seemed. But then, Dean Florette no doubt had a whole list of kids who might want to punch him in the face. Anything might have happened on his way home.

  He shrugged and turned away from her toward a sink full of dirty dishes.

  Jojean just rolled her eyes, completely unconcerned with his injuries. “Go wash your face in the bathroom. And don’t get blood on my fancy towels!”

  “His nose might be broken,” Annie suggested.

  “Boys get into scrapes,” Jojean said. “Especially that one. If he’s not crying about it, neither am I.”

  The niece came back into the kitchen then from the other direction, the baby on her hip red-faced and wailing like a siren. “Nora’s not here.”

  “She’s probably asleep,” Jojean said.

  “I went up to her room. She’s not there.”

  Jojean angrily cracked her spatula handle on the edge of the skillet. “Oh, that girl!”

  Annie caught Dean by the shoulders as he tried to escape past her. He was drenched with sweat and smelled like a wild animal. “Dean, did you see your sister this morning?”

  He wrenched away from her, scowling. “Which one?”

  “Nora.”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Did you see her after school yesterday?”

  “Yeah—uh, yes, ma’am.”

  “In the park with KJ?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And later? Was she home?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, fidgeting impatiently. “Hogging the bathroom and talking on the phone, like always.”

  “Do you know where she might be now?” Annie asked.

  “How would I know?”

  “She’s probably running around with her friends,” Jojean said. “Probably with that Troiano girl.”

  “She’s supposed to be grounded,” Dean grumbled.

  “No,” Annie said to Jojean. “I saw Lola Troiano half an hour ago. She hasn’t spoken to Nora all day.”

  “She probably ran away,” Dean said. “I hope so.” He looked hopefully at his mother. “Can I have her room if it turns out she’s dead?”

  “Dean Allan!” Jojean shouted. “Go wash your goddamn face before I slap you!” She turned on her niece. “Give that baby something to chew on before I lose my mind!”

  “It’s not my fault she’s teething!” Tiffany shouted back, tears springing up in her eyes. The toddler flung himself down at her bare feet and began to sob.

  Annie thought her head might explode. If this was the usual chaos of the Florette home, she wouldn’t have blamed anyone for running away from it.

  “Tiffany,” she said calmly, “could you please take your children into the front room while I speak with your aunt? There’s a little too much going on here.”

  “Well, whose fault is that?” the girl snapped, shooting a glare at her aunt.

  “Oh, really? Seriously?” Jojean snapped back, still stirring her ground beef. “Well, you don’t have to come over here, crying about your rotten marriage ever again, little missy. How about that?”

  Tiffany gasped. “Well, I won’t, then! You’re so hateful to me!”

  She turned and hurried away through the dining room, abandoning the little boy on the floor before shouting in afterthought, “Cody Matthew, come here this minute! We’re going home!”

  Blubbering and rubbing his eyes, the toddler got up and trotted after her.

  “Oh, boo-freaking-hoo!” Jojean called after her. She sniffed indignantly and muttered, “She’ll be right back here tomorrow, crying in her beer.”

  “Is there any reason to think Nora might have run away from home?” Annie asked, steering the conversation back on track.

  “That girl is too lazy to run anywhere,” Jojean said. “She’s just off with her friends.”

  “She’s supposed to be grounded? What for?”

  The mother put a misfit lid over the pan of meat, turned down the burner flame, and picked up a dish towel to mop the sweat from her brow and wipe her hands. She didn’t want to answer. Her mouth bent into a stubborn little horseshoe frown.

  “Don’t make me play twenty questions, ma’am,” Annie warned. “I’ve had enough of this day, and it’s far from over. I’ve got a dead boy laying in the morgue at Our Lady and—”

  “Nora wouldn’t be involved in such a thing—”

  “I’m not saying she would be, but if your daughter might be able to shed any kind of light on what happened yesterday between the time she left school with KJ Gauthier and the time Genevieve picked him up, I need to hear it from her. I need to know everything I can know. I need to know everything I can know about every person in this picture. So why was Nora grounded? Did she get in trouble at school? Out of school? What?”

  Jojean heaved a sigh. “She got caught shoplifting at the Quik Pik. My friend Arlene was the manager on duty. She called me to come get her.”

  “When was this?”

  “Monday. I grounded her for a month.”

  A month was a long time to a kid, Annie thought. Long enough that Nora Florette might have thought running away from home was a viable alternative? It sounded like she and her mother butted heads on a regular basis. Had that grounding been the last straw?

  And she had chosen to run away the day after the boy she babysat was murdered. Was that a coincidence? A damned strange one, if so. Did Nora know about what had happened to KJ? Did s
he know he was dead? Did she think she might get blamed? Why would she? Genevieve had picked up her son, as usual, and gone home, as usual, for an unremarkable evening.

  “Aside from Lola Troiano, does Nora have other friends she might have gone to?”

  “Maybe her cousin Tina or Janey Avery.”

  “I need you to call anyone you can think of and try to find her,” Annie said. “And I’d like to go take a look around in her bedroom, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Fine,” Jojean said impatiently. “Do whatever. But I’m telling you right now, she won’t stay gone. She’ll probably be home in time for supper.”

  It wasn’t hard to pick Nora’s room from the others’. Dean’s room had a hazmat sign on the door and NO GIRLS! printed in Magic Marker right on the white paint. Nicole’s name ran down the center of her door in pink glitter letters. That left a door with NO BOYS ALLOWED! and a dozen stickers of unicorns and rainbows on it. Someone had used a marker to draw giant penises on the unicorns and poop falling from their butts.

  Evidence of the living hell of having a brother like Dean.

  The bedroom looked like it had been ransacked by thieves. Annie supposed it was probably normal, though it was going to make it hard to determine if anything was missing. The bed was unmade, a wild tangle of sheets and pillows and stuffed animals. Clothes were strewn everywhere— on the bed, on the chair, left in rumpled piles on the floor. The walls were papered in posters of baby animals and pop music heartthrobs.

  The dresser was cluttered with figurines and Beanie Babies and a pile of underwear. A small table near the window was covered in craft supplies for making jewelry—beads and baubles for necklaces and earrings.

  The current work in progress was a friendship bracelet like all Annie’s young cousins were wearing and making for one another. She remembered going through that phase herself when she was that same age. Friendship bracelets and getting her ears pierced. Hanging posters of the singers and actors she had crushes on. She had kept a diary full of her deepest, innermost thoughts and desires, chronicling the dramas of school life.