by Tami Hoag
He shook his head again and turned toward the hallway.
“What are you going to do?” Sharon asked, following at his elbow as he left the room.
“I’m going to teach your son not to lie to me.”
“Kelvin, no. Please!” she begged, snatching at his shirtsleeve. “This is my fault! I made the mistake.”
“Yes, you did,” he said.
He stopped a few feet short of the boy’s bedroom door and looked down at her with her tear-wet face and smeared makeup. The pretty paint was coming off, exposing the truth, he thought.
“And now your son will pay for it.”
* * *
* * *
CAMERON PACED IN his room, terrified. His head was pounding with the effort to not cry out loud even as tears poured down his face, and his breath caught in his throat, and his nose ran like a faucet. He could hear his mother crying—Kelvin, please! You’re hurting me! He could hear Kelvin shouting—I am a pillar of the goddamn community!
It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault. Everything is always all my fault.
His stomach rolled and twisted. When he heard his mother cry out in pain, he rushed to the wastebasket by his desk and threw up.
Why was he such a loser? Why did he always screw things up? Now his mother was being hurt, and it was his fault, and he couldn’t do anything to help her. If he had been bigger and braver, maybe he would have rushed back to the family room and done something to help. But he was weak and clumsy and scared to death of Kelvin, and so he allowed his mother to be injured.
“You should just go kill yourself and be done with it.”
Maybe he should, he thought as he looked out the window at Kelvin’s Suburban sitting in the puddle of light at the end of the big garage. Maybe everyone would be happier if he was gone. At least he wouldn’t be able to mess up anymore, and he wouldn’t have to be miserable and afraid and angry all the time.
The sound of his mother’s voice startled him back into the moment.
“No. Kelvin, no! Please! Please don’t hurt him! He’s just a boy!”
In the next second Cameron’s door flew open and Kelvin filled the doorway. He looked huge, puffed up like the Incredible Hulk. His face was like stone.
Cameron braced himself to be yelled at, but when Kelvin spoke, his voice was normal, almost quiet.
“I want your phone and your iPad. Now.”
Cameron stared at him, frozen in panic, the images he’d drawn in his iPad flashing through his head like a movie on fast-forward. If Kelvin looked at them, he’d be furious. He’d be screaming for Cameron to be shipped off to military school or to an insane asylum or maybe even jail.
“Are you deaf?” Kelvin snapped. “Get them. Now.”
“Cameron, do as he says,” his mother pleaded. She clutched at the doorjamb as Kelvin stepped farther into the room. Her face was wet from crying, and her eye makeup and lipstick had run and smudged so she looked like she was melting.
“Now!” Kelvin shouted.
Cameron jumped and scurried to grab his cell phone off his desk. He clutched it in his hand as he stared at his iPad, wishing it would vanish.
“There will be consequences to your actions,” Kelvin said, reaching in front of him and snatching up the iPad. “Give me the phone.”
Cameron held out the phone reluctantly, and the sheriff grabbed it from his hand.
“You do not ever lie to me,” Kelvin said. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” Cameron mumbled.
“Not for any reason. Not even if your mother condones it. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can be without these for a month.”
A month!
“But, Kelvin,” his mother said. “A month? He uses the iPad for his schoolwork.”
“He’ll have to make due.” Kelvin turned and thrust the devices at her. “Take these and go to the bedroom, and stay there.”
Her eyes went wide and shiny with new tears. “Kelvin, what are you going to do?” she asked in a small, trembling voice.
“I’m going to teach him a lesson he will not forget, and he will never lie to me again,” Kelvin said, shutting the door in her face.
As the door latched and locked, Cameron stood paralyzed, his heart racing in the bottom of his throat. He thought if he threw up his heart would come shooting out of his mouth and land on the bed, flopping like a fish as it died.
Kelvin turned toward him, a frown bending his mouth. The look in his eyes was cold and hard.
“You’re a young man now, Cameron,” he said quietly. “A man lives by a code of honor. You don’t seem to understand that. You still behave as a child when it suits you. You lied to me like a child, like you thought somehow I would never find out the truth. I will always find out the truth, Cameron.”
“Yes, sir,” Cameron mumbled, tears rising in his eyes as Kelvin took a step closer.
“And if you’re gonna behave like a child, then you’re gonna be punished like a child,” he said, unbuckling his belt.
Panic ran through Cameron as he watched the sheriff slide his belt free of the loops on his pants.
“Take your pants down and bend over.”
The humiliation was almost the worst part of it. Almost. He was fourteen, not four. To have to pull down his pants in front of anyone, especially this man, embarrassed him and made him feel weak and helpless.
He had never been whipped before. His father had spanked him when he was little, but it hadn’t been like this. Just a few swats with his hand and it was over, leaving him with a stinging bottom and a lasting lesson not to misbehave in the same way again. He had learned not to anger his father, to try to stay out of his way. For the most part, his father had lost interest in him.
This was different. This was cruel. The belt burned and stung and cut as Kelvin applied it with force. And every time Cameron cried out as leather met flesh, his mother cried out in the hall outside his bedroom door.
It’s all my fault, he thought. It was always his fault just because he’d been born, because he’d never been the son anyone wanted, because he couldn’t do anything right.
“You should just go kill yourself and be done with it,” Dean Florette had told him.
Maybe Dean was right.
TWENTY-NINE
Is she dead?” Dean Florette asked, his small eyes bright with morbid excitement.
“Go get your mother,” Annie ordered.
She had no patience left for nonsense. It was past ten o’clock. Her nerves were rubbed raw. The day had begun with the murder of a child. She’d just had to walk away from a situation where her gut told her a child might be in some kind of emotional jeopardy. And a twelve-year-old was missing from a home where no one seemed to care.
“Go!” she snapped.
The smirk fell from Dean’s battered face. He ran back toward the kitchen, calling for his mother.
Annie invited herself into the house and stood just inside the front door, taking in life in the Florette household. Taylor Swift was belting out a song upstairs. The television was blaring Family Feud in the living room. An elderly man with thick glasses and cotton-candy hair sat expressionless in a recliner, watching the TV and smoking a cigarette. He didn’t spare Annie a glance. A toddler she hadn’t seen before was asleep on the sofa with a pacifier in her mouth. In the dining room, someone had dumped a basket of rumpled laundry on the table.
Dean came shooting out of the kitchen, flipping Annie off as he ran past and thundered up the stairs, out of sight. Jojean emerged from the kitchen, scowling, drying her hands on a dish towel. She was followed by a younger, pregnant version of herself, a twenty-something sour-faced young woman with a shaved head and tattoos on both bare arms.
“You still haven’t heard from her?” Annie said without preamble.
“No. I told you I’d call you.”
“Mrs. Florette, we need to call the police—”
“I’m not calling the police,” Jojean said stubbornly, crossing her arms over her ample chest. “It’s not that late. She won’t stay out all night. That girl is afraid of her own shadow. She’ll be home by midnight. Mark my words. She’s just trying to worry me.”
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t seem to be working,” Annie said. “I have to wonder why that is.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means maybe you’re not worried where she is because you know where she is. Maybe you’re not worried she’s not coming home because you know she’s not coming home.”
Jojean wadded the dish towel into a ball, her stubby fingers digging into it. “What are you saying? Are you saying you think I did something to Nora?”
“I don’t know what else explains your attitude, to be perfectly honest,” Annie said. “Maybe we ought to be having this conversation at the Sheriff’s Office.”
“You listen to me, little Miss High-and-Mighty,” Jojean said, advancing on her, her forefinger pointed to wag in her face. “I don’t have an attitude. You’re the one with the attitude. Coming in my house, telling me you know more about my kids than I do.”
Annie stood her ground. “You haven’t laid eyes on your daughter in two days.”
“She was here last night. Just because I didn’t see her doesn’t mean she wasn’t here.”
“Let’s just see about that,” Annie said. She turned and marched to the foot of the stairs and hollered up in the tone of the Florettes. “Dean Florette, come down here this minute!”
She glanced back at Jojean. “Is your other daughter home? What’s her name again?”
“Nicole,” the pregnant one answered. Earning a dirty look from Jojean.
“Nicole! You too!” Annie shouted. “Right now, before I come up there and haul your ass down!”
Dean came first, grudgingly, stomping hard on one stair tread and then the next, his mouth set in an almost comical frown. His sister followed just behind in skimpy baby-doll pajamas, her hair up in a messy pile on top of her head.
“Dean, when did you last actually see Nora with your own two eyes?” Annie asked.
“I told you, she was here last night,” he said.
“I know what you told me. I asked when did you actually see her last? You said she was in the bathroom and hogging the phone. Did you actually see her?”
He frowned harder.
“’Cause I been talking to her friends,” Annie went on, “and none of them had a call from her last night. So, if she was here and she was on the phone, who was she on the phone with?”
Dean frowned harder.
“Has she got a boyfriend no one here is telling me about?” Annie asked, scanning the faces in the room.
“She’s twelve,” Jojean said. “She ain’t got no boyfriend at twelve.”
“Really?” Annie said. “She was stealing a Penthouse magazine at the Quik Pik for herself?”
“That was just a stupid kid thing,” Jojean said.
“Was she stealing that for you, Dean?” Annie asked. “Was that how she paid you for dumping KJ Gauthier here after school so she could run off with Lola?”
“She didn’t bring me no magazine!” Dean said.
“Well, she got caught, didn’t she?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Annie looked to Nicole, who clung to the newel post, chewing on a thumbnail. “What about you? Did you see Nora last night? This morning?”
The girl started to shrug but thought better of it as Annie stared her down. “No.”
“That was you on the phone last night, not Nora?”
“I guess.”
She turned to Dean again. “You saw Nora after school yesterday, then what?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t come straight home.”
Annie heaved a sigh, trying to put together the timeline in her head. “She brought KJ here. Genevieve must have been the last person to see her when she picked him up after work.”
Jojean dropped her dish towel and pressed a hand across her mouth.
“What?” Annie asked.
“She wasn’t here,” Jojean said, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “When Genevieve came to pick up KJ, Nora wasn’t here. She called me and complained. I said it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t like he was left alone. There’s always people here. What difference did it make if it was Nora?”
“Shouldn’t you be out investigating that murder?” the pregnant woman piped up belligerently. “Instead of harassing our family?”
“What makes you think I’m not investigating a murder?” Annie asked. “Nora could be dead in a ditch for all y’all seem to care.”
“Don’t say that!” Jojean snapped. For the first time Annie thought she might have caught a glimpse of worry in the mother’s eyes.
“Why not?” she challenged. “I hear you dragged Nora out of the Quik Pik by her hair on Monday.”
“Who told you that? That horrid little Troiano girl—”
“She’s been threatening to run away from home for days—weeks, probably—and who can blame her?” Annie went on. “Her friends tell me she talked about it all the time. She told you she’d never speak to you again. Maybe you’re just as glad. From what I’ve seen, you’ve got a house chock-full of mouthy females. All the better to have one less, right?”
“Shut your mouth!” Jojean shouted. “Who do you think you are—”
“I’m the only one seems to give a rat’s ass. That’s who I am. Your twelve-year-old is gone and you won’t even bother to call the police!”
“She’s coming home!” Jojean insisted, though tears had begun to well up in her eyes. “She’s just doing this to scare me! She’s gonna walk in that door any minute!”
“And what if she doesn’t?” Annie demanded. “What if she’s raped and murdered and thrown in a bayou?”
“Stop it!”
“What if she’s tied up in a car trunk on her way to New Orleans to be sold as a sex slave?”
“Stop it, goddamn you!” Jojean cried, rushing at Annie, her arms raised as if to strike her.
Annie caught her by the wrists and shouted in her face, “What if she doesn’t ever walk in that door again?”
“Then it’s my fault!” Jojean cried.
The last of the hard shell cracked and split, and the emotion came pouring out. She pulled back out of Annie’s grasp, reeling as if she’d been stunned.
“It’s all my fault!” she cried again. “She said she’d run away. And I told her I didn’t care.”
Sobbing, she sank down to her knees on the floor, dragging an armload of laundry off the table as she went. She buried her face in the clean, rumpled mess as she cried.
“Look what you done!” the pregnant one shouted at Annie as she knelt awkwardly to comfort Jojean.
Dean stared at the scene with morbid fascination. “Do you really think she’s dead?”
Nicole sat down on the steps and hugged herself as if she’d gone suddenly cold.
Feeling drained and terrible, Annie pulled her phone out of her pocket and went outside to call the police.
THIRTY
The lightning appeared on the southern horizon as a soft white glow behind the clouds. Miles away yet. According to the weather report on his phone, the storm was still out over the Gulf, but moving north. Damned weather. Nick hoped it would stall out or take its time, at least. For now he had some moonlight to navigate by.
Standing in the back of the boat, he used a pole to propel it forward soundlessly across the black water.
He had built the pirogue himself from cypress and marine plywood, just like his papa had taught him when he was a little boy and the family had lived the s
wamper’s life on a house barge on the edge of the Atchafalaya Basin. Nick had painted the boat green and red—the traditional colors the old fishermen back in the day had used to distinguish themselves from the sports who came to play on the weekends at their fish camps. As if there could ever have been any confusing the two—the sports coming with their fancy aluminum and fiberglass boats tricked out with sonar fish finders and whatnot.
Now aluminum bateaux and fiberglass pirogues were the norm, and practically every Cajun man alive had a bass boat with two outboard motors. But since he didn’t have to make his living on the water, and his idea of water sport didn’t involve noise or speed, Nick had the luxury of embracing tradition.
Building the pirogue had been a labor of love to preserve his sanity when he had first come to Bayou Breaux, psychologically battered from the demise of his career in the New Orleans PD. Navigating the bayous calmed him and centered him. As shallow and delicate as a milkweed pod, the pirogue skated across the water, skimming over the duckweed and water hyacinth, deftly slipping between the cypress trees. It was the perfect craft for navigating the shallows where bigger boats could never go. Perfect for his mission this night.
He knew these waterways like the back of his hand, knew he could launch from a particular spot on Pony Bayou, slip around behind Blue Cypress Point, and connect to the nameless little backwater across the road from the home of Genevieve Gauthier in a matter of half an hour with no one the wiser. This time of night, no one would see him save the creatures of the swamp. As much as he likened Roddie Perez to a reptile, none of the snakes or gators would bother to warn him trouble was coming.
He sank the pole into the mud and pushed, working the muscles of his shoulders and back and arms. The pirogue shot forward, and he automatically adjusted his weight over his feet as the boat rocked beneath him. It was all as natural to him as breathing.
Inhale. Focus. Calm. Exhale. Focus. Calm . . .
He cleared his mind of the noise and clutter and contentiousness of the day to connect with the only world that truly made sense to him. He breathed deep the warm, humid air, the smell of water and mud and lush vegetation. He listened to the sounds of the night—the singing of frogs, the chirping of crickets, the splash and slap of a fish breaking the surface. Birds chattered their disapproval of his presence as he brushed past a tangle of willows and hackberry saplings. And in the distance, the rolling growl of thunder echoed the throaty purr of an alligator on the bank.