The Boy

by Tami Hoag

  His mother gave one of her Big Sighs that told him she was exasperated with him.

  “If I let you stay home every time you said you were sick at your stomach, you’d never go at all.”

  “That’s not fair!” Cameron argued, his voice cracking badly.

  Outside, headlights flashed past the window as Kelvin swung his Suburban into his parking place down by the big garage. Cameron’s stomach cramped hard.

  “You will come and sit down and have something to eat with Kelvin,” his mother said. “Go splash some water on your face and comb your hair. And turn the fan on in your bathroom. The smell is terrible.”

  He went into his bathroom and did as he was told, his hands shaking as he cupped water to wash his face. How was he going to sit at the table and eat? Maybe they wouldn’t even make it to the table. Maybe Kelvin would start yelling at him as soon as he came in the door. Cameron almost hoped so, just to get it over with, and yet, he couldn’t bring himself to move. He stared at his reflection in the mirror until he thought he didn’t recognize himself.

  Who was he?

  What was going to happen to him?

  Would his mother send him off to military school like Kelvin wanted her to? She thought he didn’t know, but he did. The idea terrified him. He was barely surviving junior high. How would he ever make it out of military school alive?

  “Cameron!” his mother called sharply from his bedroom door. “Hurry up! Don’t keep Kelvin waiting!”

  “I’m coming!”

  He took one last long look at the stranger in the mirror then left his room and walked down the hall like he was going to his death, thinking maybe he was.

  TWENTY-SIX

  She killed a baby.”

  Hands tightening on the steering wheel, Annie relived the sickening jolt of shock that had gone through her when Nick greeted her with those words in Remy’s driveway. More than an hour had passed since the revelation. They had tucked their son into bed and then sat down to share a rushed dinner of takeout Thai food in Remy’s kitchen, Nick filling in the details of the story.

  Dixon had dug into Genevieve’s juvenile record and then cross-referenced with news stories from the archives of the local Houma papers. The murder of an infant by her teenaged mother had been big news thirteen years past.

  The story was one that happened more than most people would ever care to know. A scared teenager had managed to keep her pregnancy a secret until it was too late. She had given birth in the bathroom at school. Two months later, the baby was dead. SIDS, the teenage mother had claimed. The coroner had disagreed strongly enough that charges had been brought. Fourteen-year-old Genevieve Gauthier had been found guilty of suffocating her baby daughter and had been sentenced to eighteen months in the Terrebonne Parish Juvenile Justice Complex on a negotiated plea of involuntary manslaughter.

  Fourteen. Just two years older than Lola Troiano and Nora Florette, little girls who traded friendship bracelets and kept stuffed animals on their beds. Barely old enough to know how babies were made, Genevieve had given birth to one alone in a bathroom stall.

  Everything about her story was upsetting and tragic. Annie had a thousand questions she wanted answered. Who was the father? What had been the circumstances of the conception? Was the pregnancy the result of kids having consensual sex, or had this been a case of rape or incest?

  “It doesn’t matter,” Nick said. “It matters that a baby is dead. She killed her own child.”

  “You can’t say it doesn’t matter,” Annie argued, twirling her fork in her pad thai. “The truth goes to motive.”

  “Don’t talk like a defense attorney to me, ’Toinette,” he said, stabbing a shrimp. “It doesn’t matter to me why she did it. It matters to me that she did it. Now I know she’s capable of murdering a child. She has murdered a child—her own child. And here we are, investigating the murder of another child—a child with problems, a child she’s already told us wouldn’t settle down last night while she was fighting a migraine headache. She’s alone, she’s frustrated, she’s poor—”

  “Is there a higher rate of stabbing deaths among children of the poor that I don’t know about?” Annie asked snappishly. “’Cause this would be the first stabbing-because-I’m-poor case I’ve come across. But you’ve been at this longer than me, so—”

  “Her circumstances had her backed into a corner,” Nick pressed on. “There she is, stuck living in that shit hole, wanting a better life. What’s holding her back? That child. She can’t get ahead, she can’t get away, she can’t get a man. She blames the boy. She’s already crossed the line to kill once. That makes it ten times easier to do it again.”

  “Well, first,” Annie argued, “there’s a big difference between suffocating an infant and stabbing a seven-year-old to death while he’s fighting for his life. Second, that’s a boatload of speculation as to her state of mind. I haven’t seen any evidence that she didn’t want her son, have you?”

  “She was drinking and popping pills last night because she couldn’t deal with his behavior.”

  “And I had a meltdown in the parking lot at school this morning because our son was having a temper tantrum. Does that make me a murder suspect?”

  “Mais yeah,” Nick insisted. “If he turns up dead, it does!”

  Annie sighed and looked away, absently taking in the details of her cousin’s kitchen, a spotless magazine spread of elegant cabinetry and Carrara marble. A far cry from the cramped, dingy closet of a kitchen in Genevieve Gauthier’s shitty rented house on the edge of nowhere. A far cry from where Annie herself had spent her early life with her mother, in the apartment over the store and café at the Corners.

  As young and pretty as Genevieve, Marie Broussard had never talked about wanting anything more than she had. She had never spoken of having dreams and aspirations for a fancier life. But then, Marie Broussard hadn’t envisioned a life for herself at all, as it turned out, and Annie would never know why. No matter how many years passed, the ache of that loss was never far from her heart.

  She didn’t know enough about Genevieve Gauthier to make a judgment about her, though she knew Nick was right. They had to consider Genevieve as a possible suspect. A parent was, sadly, the most obvious suspect in the death of a child. But Annie had stood in the morgue and listened to the mother’s soul-wrenching sobs that morning, crying over the body of the child she had carried and nurtured and struggled with, and struggled for, and the mother in her wanted to reject the idea. Had those cries been heartbreak? Despair? Remorse? Remembrance of another dead child?

  “Have you asked her about that baby’s death?” she asked. “Have you asked her did she kill KJ?”

  “No. I just found out about the baby. It can wait ’til tomorrow. She isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Because she’s in the hospital with knife wounds,” Annie pointed out.

  “C’est vrai.” Nick nodded. “And now we have to wonder: Could those wounds have been self-inflicted?”

  “That cut on her shoulder is deep. The knife chipped her collarbone. I can’t imagine someone doing that to themselves.”

  “I don’t reckon she planned it that way.”

  He got up from the table and pulled a boning knife from the wooden block on the kitchen island.

  “Sharp knife, adrenaline pumping,” he said, setting the stage. “She’s just killed her son in a frenzy. She realizes the horror of it. She’d better make it look like they were attacked.

  “She brings the knife down like this,” he said, pantomiming with the boning knife, his right hand coming down at an angle across his left shoulder. “A sharp knife cuts like hot steel through butter. It would be easy to go deeper than she meant to. There’s not much to her, little slip of a thing. That bone is right there just under the skin . . .”

  “Who’s to say she owns a sharp knife?” Annie challenged. “Cheetos and whiskey for supper.
That’s not exactly a chef’s kitchen she’s got going on there.”

  Nick put the knife back in the block and took his seat. “For the sake of this theory, we’re gonna say she had a sharp knife.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Bottom of the bayou, I should think.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’ve got it all figured out,” Annie said irritably, shoving her plate away. “I’ll just leave you to it then and go on my way and find this babysitter who seems to be missing for no good reason. Or do you think Genevieve stole her out of her bed and killed her, too?”

  “Why are you getting mad at me?” Nick asked, annoyed. “I’m just following this thread through to the logical possibility. That’s our job. It’s not my fault if it turns out she killed her own child to free herself from a shitty life.”

  “You know my mother was poor and alone and overwhelmed, too,” Annie said, “and she didn’t stab me to death.”

  “No. She killed herself.”

  His words struck like a fist to the solar plexus. Annie gasped, shoved her chair back, and shot to her feet. Nick rose and took a step toward her, looking more exasperated than contrite.

  “’Toinette, I didn’t—”

  “Don’t you even think about touching me!” she snapped as he reached out.

  He heaved a sigh, his thick shoulders rising and slumping as he set his hands at his waist. “’Toinette, I didn’t mean—”

  “I am half past sick of having to listen to the postmortem on what you said versus what you meant,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. “I’m leaving now. I have a twelve-year-old girl MIA, not that her mother seems to give a shit one way or the other.

  “Oh, but then maybe Jojean Florette just up and killed her daughter!” she said, feigning amazement at the idea. “Seeing how she has to work two jobs while her husband is off in the Gulf of Mexico playing around on some oil rig. Anyone can see how killing her children would be the obvious solution to all her problems! I can’t imagine why she hasn’t done it already—especially the boy. I would have started with him, myself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous—”

  “Don’t follow me out,” she warned, grabbing her handbag and heading to the kitchen door. “I might become hysterical and shoot you.”

  “Bébé, please . . .”

  “Don’t you bébé me. I don’t want to hear it. I’m out of here.”

  She hit the screen door hard with both hands, wishing it was the old-fashioned wooden kind that would fly back and bang off the house. No such satisfaction from a modern screen door. She was so angry she felt like she might explode. Tears rose up like floodwaters behind a dam, pressing on her eyeballs, burning, blurring her vision.

  It only made her angrier that she was about to cry. She didn’t want to cry. She didn’t want to overreact. She already wished she hadn’t reacted at all. She should have just gotten up and left. “’Toinette!” Nick called behind her. “Arrête, toi!”

  She didn’t want to stop. She didn’t want to go to him. She had no interest in hearing his apology. She kept her focus on her vehicle no more than twenty feet away now, wanting to run to it but not willing to look that desperate to get away.

  As he put a hand on her shoulder, she shrugged him off and kept walking.

  “You didn’t let me finish,” he said.

  Annie glared at him over her shoulder.

  “My point was that your mother didn’t hurt you. She hurt herself.”

  “That’s your point?” she asked, resting her hand on the door of the SUV. “That my mother didn’t kill me, so she killed herself instead. So it’s my fault my mother is dead?”

  “Mon Dieu!”

  “God isn’t helping you out of this. So you just keep digging that hole. You’ll be able to bury yourself upright.”

  “I did not say it with the intention of hurting your feelings.”

  “Oh, well,” Annie said, opening the car door. “It doesn’t matter to me why you said it. It matters to me that you said it.”

  He held up two fingers. The missio. The gladiator’s symbol of surrender. Their symbol for the end of an argument. It didn’t give her any satisfaction.

  “I don’t want to fight with you.”

  “We’re not fighting,” Annie said, climbing into the driver’s seat. Nick moved into the open space and held the door open before she could shut him out. “You hurt me, and I’m angry with you. That’s not a fight.”

  “Bon. I’m relieved to hear it.”

  She stared out the windshield at the inky blackness beyond the reach of Remy’s yard light, working to compose herself. She didn’t want to fight with him, either. She didn’t want to be angry or upset or feeling the breath of any of the demons from her childhood.

  “I’m sorry if I overreacted,” she said, struggling for calm. “But this is hard for me, Nick. I will never know why my mother did what she did. I will never know if I caused it—”

  “Bébé, you were just a child—”

  “So? You’ve just posed a very sound theory that a child being a child might drive a young mother over the edge. I have lived with that notion every day of my life since I was nine years old. I can’t look at Genevieve and not think of my mother, of what she went through and what it did to her.”

  The pain came in a wave. She couldn’t stop it. The emotion forced itself out on a sob to alleviate the internal pressure. Tears spilled down her cheeks. Then Nick’s arms were around her, and her cheek found his shoulder, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. He held her tight and whispered words of comfort. She clung to him and soaked in his strength. Just for a moment. Just long enough to remind her she wasn’t alone, and she wasn’t nine, and she didn’t have to stay in that painful emotional place. She could put those feelings back in their box and hope that they would stay there for a while.

  When the wave receded, she sat back and wiped the tears away with her hands. She found a tissue in the console and blew her nose. Nick slowly stroked a hand over the back of her head.

  “Are you okay?” he asked softly, still close enough that his breath tickled her ear.

  Annie nodded. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch.”

  “Hush. You’re not a bitch,” he said, leaning in to press a kiss to her cheek.

  “Don’t ever think I don’t love you,” she whispered, looking into his dark eyes.

  He shook his head, smiling slightly. “Non, cher,” he murmured. “I don’t ever think that.”

  “Please be careful tonight.”

  “I will. I wanna come home and slide into bed with my wife later.”

  “That’s a pleasant fiction we probably won’t get to realize tonight,” Annie said. “But I’ll be happy to look forward to it, just the same.”

  “Me, too.” Gently, he brushed her hair back from her face. “I’m sorry this is hard on you, baby. I’m sorry you have to have those memories. But you know that can’t stop us having to look down that road with Genevieve. Her story is not your story.”

  She took a slow, measured breath and released it at the same deliberate pace. “I know.”

  “Maybe if you can find this babysitter she’ll be able to shed some light on the situation.”

  “Let’s hope,” Annie said, starting the car. “My fear is that’s the reason she’s missing in the first place.”

  * * *

  * * *

  THE QUESTION WAS whether Nora Florette was missing because of something she’d done or because of something she’d seen. Was she gone by choice or gone by violence?

  Annie tried to sort out the threads in her mind as she drove back toward town. Genevieve had killed a baby thirteen years ago. Now her second child was dead. Nora Florette was her babysitter. Now Nora Florette was missing.

  “She killed a baby . . .”

  Genevieve Gauthier had killed a baby when she
was little more than Nora’s age. Had she meant to? Had she done it out of desperation or rage? Was she a person with a red line, and once the red line was crossed she was capable of things she otherwise wouldn’t imagine doing? People could snap. Annie had seen it happen, had seen the results. Some people had a rage switch that, once flipped, rendered them capable of almost anything.

  She also knew the challenges of being a new mother with a colicky baby, at the end of her rope, struggling to cope on too little sleep, buried under an avalanche of insecurity. Put that burden on a fourteen-year-old with few resources. Add the trigger point of suddenly realizing she had effectively ended her youth by having a baby.

  After the initial rush of attention from others cooing over the new baby, her school friends would have moved on and gone back to their lives where making the cheerleading squad and getting a date for prom were the heaviest priorities. A classmate with a baby wouldn’t fit in, wouldn’t be fun, wouldn’t be included. Had the dual pressures of isolation and responsibility been too much?

  And here she was thirteen years later, isolated, alone, solely responsible for a difficult child . . .

  Nick said Genevieve had been popping pills and drinking because she had a migraine and couldn’t get her son to settle down. But the mix of those particular drugs didn’t induce hallucinations or paranoia or cause people to become violent. Quite the opposite was true. Oxy and Xanax combined to create a sense of relaxation and euphoria. Adding alcohol to the mix should have made Genevieve more apt to fall asleep than to pick up a knife.

  Her story of waking up at the sound of her son’s cries was more in line with someone whose senses were dulled than someone jacked up into a killing frenzy. She had trouble getting out of bed, got tangled in the sheets, and fell—as a person with impaired motor skills might.

  And even if Genevieve was some kind of murderous mastermind and had killed her son, how and when could she have gotten to Nora? And why would she? Dean claimed Nora had been home last night. It made no sense to think Genevieve could have done anything to her. Neither did it make any sense to Annie to try to cast Nora in some kind of villainous role.