by Tami Hoag
“No!”
“Dean told me she was hogging the bathroom and talking on the phone all evening. She didn’t call you?”
“No! I’m not a liar!”
“You said she threatened to run away. Did she tell you where she would go?”
She rolled her eyes in tween-girl fashion. “She always says she’ll go to Hollywood or she’ll go to New York and become an actress or a model. Like that would ever happen.”
“You don’t think she means it?”
“She would never really do it,” Lola scoffed. “She doesn’t have any money. How could she go anywhere?”
Annie’s mind was rolling over the possibilities, imagining the sixth-grader hitchhiking, getting in a vehicle with a sexual predator, being snapped up into a sex-trafficking situation. Her stomach turned sour at the idea.
“Besides,” Lola said, “Nora’s a big chicken. She’s probably hiding somewhere just to make her mom mad. She’s done that before.”
“Where would she go to hide?” Annie asked.
Jessica’s eyes popped wide. “She’s not here, is she?”
“No!”
“Lola, so help me, if she’s in your closet—”
“She’s not here!” Lola shouted. “Why won’t you believe me? You’re treating me like a criminal!”
“You are not winning any gold stars for trustworthiness tonight, young lady.”
“Who else might she go to?” Annie asked. “Who are her other girlfriends?”
“She doesn’t have many—”
“There’s a shock,” Jessica muttered.
“—so I go out of my way to be nice to her,” Lola said pointedly, “because my mother always tells me to be kind to kids who don’t have friends.”
“Not the ones with criminal records!”
“Who else?” Annie prompted.
“Her cousin Tina,” Lola said. “But she lives out in the country someplace. And she used to be friends with Janey Avery, but Janey’s not supposed to hang out with her anymore, either.”
“Avery?” Annie said. “Any relation to Jeff Avery, the administrator at Evangeline Oaks?”
Lola shrugged.
Jessica nodded. “Yes. I know Janey’s mom, Janine. They’re a lovely family. It’s no surprise she wouldn’t want her daughter hanging around with Nora Florette, either.”
“You’re a bully,” Lola declared angrily. “You’re like the mean girls in the cafeteria. You’re the Mean Moms of Bayou Breaux!”
“Yeah,” Jessica returned, “we’re a bunch of mean ol’ moms trying to keep our children out of reform school. Call child services!”
“Does Nora have a boyfriend?” Annie asked.
Jessica looked horrified. “She’s twelve!”
“I don’t even want to tell you what that doesn’t mean anymore,” Annie said. She looked again to Lola. “Does she?”
Lola shook her head. “No. She has crushes on practically every boy in school, but they don’t pay any attention to her ’cause she doesn’t have boobs yet.”
“Oh, my God,” Jessica said with a groan, pressing a hand to her forehead.
“Lola, how was Nora with KJ Gauthier?” Annie asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Did she enjoy babysitting him?”
The girl shrugged, frowning just a little. “No. Her mom made her do it. He was like hyperactive or something.”
“And there are a lot more fun things to do after school than hang around with a second-grader, right?” Annie suggested.
“Well . . . sure . . .”
“Did she ever lose her temper with him?”
“Sometimes,” Lola murmured. “She yelled at him a lot.”
“Did she ever do more than yell at him?”
“. . . . No . . .” The syllable was barely audible. She dodged Annie’s gaze.
“Oh, my God,” Jessica Troiano murmured again, hugging herself, tears rising in her eyes. “You don’t think she hurt that child, do you?”
“I’m just gathering information,” Annie said. “We need as complete a picture as we can get of everything leading up to what happened last night—who might have seen something, heard something, knows something.”
To Lola, she said, “Did you hang out with her when she was babysitting KJ?”
“Not really. I mean, when we’d hang out in the park, but I don’t like going to her house.”
“Because of Dean?”
“Because of everything,” Lola confessed softly, hastily swiping away a tear. “They’re always yelling and fighting, and their house is dirty, and . . . yeah . . . Dean.”
Annie’s phone chimed the arrival of a text message. She glanced at the screen. Nick.
Meet me at Remy’s.
She typed Yes and hit Send.
“Okay,” she said on a sigh. “I have to go.”
She reached out and touched Lola on the arm. “Thank you, Lola. I know this isn’t fun, but it’s important. You’ve got my card. If you hear from Nora, you call me. I don’t care if she makes you swear on a stack of Bibles not to tell. You call me right away. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She pulled another card out of her pocket and handed it to Jessica Troiano. “Thank you. I’m sorry I had to disrupt your evening.”
“Is there anything else we can do?” Jessica asked as they moved toward the front door.
“Call anyone you think might have seen Nora,” Annie said. “If she shows up here, keep her here.”
They had arrived at the foyer when the question occurred. Annie had already started to reach for the doorknob. She turned back to Lola.
“What time were you at the Quik Pik on Monday?”
“About four thirty.”
“So KJ was with you?”
The girl shook her head and looked down at her feet, her long hair falling like a curtain around her face.
“Where was he?” Annie asked.
“She left him,” Lola admitted reluctantly. “She just left him at her house, watching TV.”
“Did she do that a lot? Leave him at the house and go do whatever she wanted?”
“Sometimes. When her mom wasn’t home.”
“And that was okay with you, was it?” her mother asked, eliciting the smallest of shrugs.
“And who else was at the house that day?” Annie asked.
“Dean.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Mean Dean the Killing Machine. Cameron drew him with a head as round as a pumpkin, with slashes for eyes and pointy, triangular teeth in a mouth shaped like a football.
He wasn’t very good at drawing. He got the proportions all wrong. The heads were too big and the limbs were too skinny. The bodies were too small, and the legs and feet always came out looking like hockey sticks. It didn’t matter. Drawing was something he did just for him. He didn’t have to be good at it.
He didn’t ever show his drawings to anyone. His mother would have just picked his pictures apart. She was a firm believer in what she called “constructive criticism,” though Cameron seldom saw anything constructive about it. She would have hated the terrible cartoonishness of his drawings. She would have found them grotesque and disturbing, because he tended to draw when he was angry, and he drew pictures of fights and car crashes and volcanoes going off and bombs exploding. If his mom looked at his drawings, the next thing anyone knew, she would be signing him up for proper art instruction and making him talk to the youth pastor, who would tell him to pray his anger away.
The youth pastor wasn’t going to ever do anything about Dean Florette beating him up or calling him a faggot. He’d tell Cameron to turn the other cheek and then lecture him on the evils of homosexuality, like he probably secretly agreed with Dean that Cameron was gay. And Cameron would come away just feeling even worse about
himself and his life.
“You should just go kill yourself and be done with it,” Dean’s voice murmured in the back of his mind. “Faggot!!!”
“I AM NOT A FAGGOT!!!!” he wrote in a word bubble above the image of himself, red-faced with anger, burying an axe in Dean’s round pumpkin head. He touched his electronic pencil to the color bar on the side of the iPad screen and then drew bright red blood spurting out of Dean’s brain like a geyser.
He drew on his iPad so he could quickly hide his pictures if his mom came in his room. She always wanted to see what he was looking at on the Internet, but she never demanded to see anything stored in his hard drive or on the cloud. Cyberspace was the only place he had any real privacy. She routinely searched his room, turning over the mattress and going through his drawers, looking for marijuana and cigarettes and whatever else grown-ups did but forbade kids to do.
When they lived in Houma, shortly after his dad had died, he had found a Playboy magazine in the recycling bin when he was taking the trash out to the curb. His mom had been on a tear, clearing out the closets and dumping everything out of his dad’s desk and dresser drawers, bent on getting rid of every trace of him.
Cameron had been shocked to find the magazine. Shocked, and curious, and excited in a way he didn’t quite understand at twelve years old. He had snuck it back into the house and hid it between the mattress and box spring of his bed. Late at night he looked at it with a flashlight under the covers, mesmerized and horrified by the naked girls and the feelings they stirred in him.
His mother had found the magazine the following week when she changed his sheets and had gone completely ballistic. She had screamed at him for an hour about male perversion, and women being sluts and whores, and hellfire and damnation. She had then dragged him to the youth pastor at their church, and she had totally lied about where Cameron had gotten the dirty magazine. The youth pastor had lectured him on all the same things his mother had already done, telling him only perverts looked at pornography, and only whores posed for pictures with their clothes off, touching themselves and trying to tempt men into sin.
Cameron had wanted to blurt out that the magazine had belonged to his father, so his father, who had been on the church council, must have been a sick pervert. But he had known that would only have made more trouble for himself, so he kept quiet. People had respected his father. Telling the truth about him would have only made everyone angry. In Cameron’s experience, adults wanted to believe only what they wanted to believe—whether that was the truth or not.
The truth was his father had not been a nice man, constantly finding fault with everyone, ruling the house with an iron fist and a raging temper. Cameron had always been torn between wanting his father’s approval and wishing he was an orphan. He and his mother had walked on eggshells around his dad, neither of them wanting to be the one to set him off.
Cameron had both hated his father and loved him in a tangled, toxic mix of emotion he could never understand. He had always tried so hard to make his father proud by being the best student, by being a good Boy Scout, by keeping his room clean and helping around the house and mowing the lawn and taking out the trash. Of course, he was never quite good enough no matter how hard he tried. There was always something he could have done better.
When his father died, the emotions that swamped Cameron were even more confusing and shameful. A part of him had been relieved. Another part of him had felt ashamed and guilty and desperate, wanting him back, hurting so hard he cried himself to sleep at night.
Now he had Kelvin to contend with, which was pretty much the same, only worse. Kelvin wanted him to be an athlete and learn how to shoot animals and gut fish, and all kinds of things for which Cameron had no desire and no talent. He was not a talented kid. That was just the truth of it. He was book smart, and he worked hard, but he had no real talent for anything. He couldn’t escape the idea that no matter how hard he tried, he was going to be a source of constant disappointment for his new dad, just as he had been for his original one.
His hands began to tremble and his stomach churned and rolled as he thought of the lady detective asking him questions that afternoon. He could imagine her telling the sheriff how she’d seen him and questioned him in the park when he should have been at football practice. Kelvin hadn’t come to the house yet for supper, but he would be here soon. It was only a matter of time before the shit hit the fan.
Cameron closed his iPad and got up to pace his bedroom on shaky legs. He liked his room. He liked this house. It was newer than their house in Houma. The furniture was new. His room was larger than his old room—big enough that he could have a desk, and a big easy chair in one corner. And he had his own bathroom. He didn’t have to share the space with his mother and all her makeup and beauty creams and whatnot. His room was at the end of the hall, right next to a door that went out to the pool area—a real swimming pool.
What if Kelvin got mad enough that he didn’t want them around anymore? What would they do? Where would they go? His mother would hate him for ruining everything. She deserved to be happy. She told him so all the time. She deserved to be married to a man like Kelvin Dutrow.
Anxiety went through Cameron like a current of electricity. Yet again, he felt his sense of himself shrinking and shrinking, disconnecting from the shell of his body and becoming a tiny little duplicate, a teeny tiny little version of his big self that stood in his eye socket and stared out at the world, terrified, his heart pounding.
He’d been a nervous wreck since he’d gotten home, terrified his mother would come home before he could clean up and do something about his clothes. He’d torn his pants and scraped his knee, his hands, his arms, and his chin when Dean knocked him down on the bike path. His shirt and pants had been smeared and stained with blood. And then there was the explosion of diarrhea to deal with.
The stench had backed Dean off from trying to further kick his ass for just long enough to save him. By the time Florette had decided to do it anyway, some adults had called out from the direction of the schools, scaring Dean away. Cameron had scrambled to his feet and run home, limping, the diarrhea running down both legs as he went.
He had wanted to just throw away his pants and underwear, but his mother would have asked where the clothes had gone. There was no avoiding telling her he’d fallen, anyway, as scraped up as he was. His solution had been to rinse the clothes off first with a hose down by the boat dock, then put them in the washing machine before his mother could see or smell them. He had told her the truth about falling down—he just left Dean Florette out of the story.
It wasn’t really a lie that way, was it? He had fallen down. If he told his mom Dean had knocked him down, she would want to call Florette’s mother and make a big stink of it. She would complain to Kelvin, and Kelvin would want to know why he hadn’t fought back. Cameron would be caught in the middle, like he always was.
His mother had always harped on him not to get into fights, to go tell an adult if another kid was picking on him. His father had scoffed at the idea and called him a sissy for not sticking up for himself. He had regularly called Cameron a mama’s boy, said he would never be a real man, that they might as well have had a daughter.
Not wanting anyone to be angry with or disappointed in him, Cameron had mastered the art of telling half-truths. He didn’t like to lie. He wasn’t any good at it. Telling a lie just gave him something more to worry about getting wrong.
He paced his room, sweating and chilled at the same time, his stomach rolling and twisting, his heart thumping in his chest. How did he get so many things wrong when he tried so hard to do everything right? he wondered as he paced and fretted, feeling sicker and sicker. His intentions were always good—harmless, at least. But he seemed to screw up over and over, then had to work twice as hard to keep anyone from seeing his mistakes.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. Someone as rotten as Dean Florette cou
ld go around doing all kinds of terrible things because he was just a terrible person, and no one expected anything better of him. Cameron tried to do everything right and suffered for it because everything always went wrong.
He stopped in front of a window and stared out at the backyard. The yard light on the end of the big garage had come on, spotlighting the space where Kelvin usually parked his Suburban. It looked like an empty stage awaiting the arrival of the star of the show.
Maybe he wouldn’t come tonight. Maybe he was too busy. He had appeared on the six o’clock news, talking about the murder, promising he would solve the crime, threatening the person responsible, glaring at the camera. “You can run, but you CANNOT hide!”
Cameron almost jumped to the ceiling as a knock sounded on his door.
“Cameron?” his mother called. “I’m coming in!”
The door was opening before he could say anything.
“I’m going to set a place for you at the table,” she said, coming in and going directly to his bed to smooth the coverlet he had messed up earlier. “I know you said you’re not hungry, and I hate to have you eat late, but you cannot go to bed on an empty stomach. You’re a growing boy, and you need your nutrition.”
“But I don’t feel good—”
“You don’t feel well,” she corrected him, coming to him and pressing her hand to his forehead. “I don’t think you have a fever, but you’re positively clammy. You need to put something in your stomach, even if it’s just a little rice or some breakfast cereal or something. Anything. I swear you have these stomach problems because you don’t eat regularly the way you should. I can’t be with you every minute of every day, telling you when to eat.
“Did you eat your lunch today?” she asked, looking him hard in the eyes.
He shrugged away from her, frowning, tears pressing up behind his eyes. “I told you this morning I was sick at my stomach, and you wouldn’t believe me!”