by Tami Hoag
In her quiet moments, when doubts crept in, she told herself it didn’t matter that he wasn’t overly loving toward her. That just wasn’t who he was. He was respectful, a gentleman, and besides, she’d never been one to dream of a romance novel hero for herself. That wasn’t realistic. A marriage was a partnership built on more important things than physical passion. So, if she sometimes felt like she was just a prop for him, she tried very hard not to let that hurt her feelings. He was the star. She expected to be a supporting character.
That was her role—to support her man. And if he was sometimes cold and demanding, well, he was under a great deal of pressure. He was a very important man in the community now. All eyes were on him. He even talked sometimes about having bigger ambitions one day. Running for Congress, perhaps. And once he was established and they were truly settled, then maybe he would be more attentive to her and to Cameron.
But it had been clear from the start that Kelvin wasn’t fond of Cameron. He had wanted to send Cameron off to military school, and Sharon just hadn’t been able to abide the thought. Yes, maybe she coddled the boy, but he was her only child, and he hadn’t had it easy. He had never been what his father wanted in a son. Though he was quite bright, he had always been a little awkward, both physically and socially. He had trouble making friends. But he wanted so badly to do everything right it made her heart ache.
Since the beginning of her relationship with Kelvin, Sharon had stressed to Cameron again and again the importance of doing what he was told, of not being a bother or an embarrassment to Kelvin. And he had tried so hard.
He had taken to watching true crime shows on television to learn about police work and to come up with questions to ask Kelvin. Even though he was a city kid, he had learned to row the little boat Kelvin had bought for him. The two had gone out fishing in Kelvin’s boat once, as well. And though the job of gutting the fish had made Cameron throw up, he had stuck it out and finished. Sharon had been so proud of him, she’d taken his picture holding up one of the fish, his other hand held high in victory, encased in Kelvin’s too-large protective steel-mesh glove.
The memory of Cameron’s beaming smile in that photo brought tears to her eyes now. Her poor, sweet boy. Never had she imagined Kelvin would become physically abusive. As she stood in the hall outside Cameron’s room, just the sound of the beating had made her hysterical. And seeing the damage that had been inflicted had made her physically ill.
What had she done? In her effort to have the family she wanted, she had put her own child in jeopardy. It was her fault. All of it. She should have found a way to dissuade Kelvin from the idea of putting Cameron in football. She should have found a way to save Cameron from playing. She should have gotten him a doctor’s note or enrolled him in some activity that conflicted with the football schedule. She should have found a way to break it to Kelvin that she had allowed Cameron to quit that wouldn’t have left him feeling ambushed.
She couldn’t blame him for getting angry, really. He was a proud man, and he had been embarrassed in front of one of his own detectives. Of course he’d been angry. He was a man who didn’t lose control of his temper or anything else. He probably hadn’t even realized he was hurting her when he twisted her arm. He would probably be embarrassed and remorseful.
She would have to find a way to make that easy for him, a way to smooth things over and make amends. She would make sure it never happened again.
Maybe if Cameron could just go stay with her parents for a few weeks. Through the holidays, maybe. Time for Kelvin to cool off and for them to reboot their relationship. Cameron would probably be relieved. He hadn’t made many friends here. And when he came back, they could all start over. She would just have to figure out how to make it work with his school credits.
Slowly she sat up, touching her mussed hair, taking a shaky breath. She felt a little more in control with a task to strategize. Making a plan required structure and careful thought. These were things she was good at.
She got out of bed, her sore arm cradled against her body. She was still dressed, her clothes creased and wrinkled. A glimpse in the mirror above her dresser confirmed her fear that she looked a mess, like something from a horror movie. At least she didn’t have to worry that Kelvin would walk in and see her.
She needed an ice pack for her arm and perhaps a cup of chamomile tea for her nerves, she thought as she went out into the hall. She would check on Cameron. She hoped that he was sleeping. She had given him a pain pill she had left over from a trip to the dentist, hoping it would help him sleep through the night.
The house was so quiet. It was her dream house, really. The perfect size and style, everything shiny and new. She especially loved the patio and pool. She envisioned entertaining out there under the patio cover. It was so pretty and magical at night with the landscape lighting. She had the gardener set the timer so the low-voltage lights and the pool lights ran all night. Maybe it was frivolous, but she allowed herself that. She had told Kelvin it made her feel more secure to have the lights on at night, and he had accepted that as a sound safety precaution.
She glanced out the bay window as she walked into the kitchen and startled at the sight of a figure standing by the pool. Then a motion-sensor light came on and she could see it was Cameron, standing in the rain in his pajamas at the pool’s edge.
“Cameron?” she called as she stepped out of the kitchen door. “Cameron? Sweetheart, what are doing out here? Oh, my goodness! Come in out of the rain!”
He didn’t move as she hurried up to him. He just stared down into the water, rain dripping from his nose and chin. Perhaps the painkiller had been too strong for him. Or maybe he was sleepwalking, as he had when he was younger.
She touched his face and took him by the arm. “Are you all right? Darling, come inside. You’re soaking wet.”
“I don’t want to be here,” he said softly as he started to cry. “I don’t want to be here.”
Her heart broke for him, and for herself as she wrapped her good arm around her child, and they cried together in the rain.
* * *
* * *
SHE COULDN’T SLEEP. The pain in her shoulder burned and throbbed. The shame and self-pity and depression came in relentless waves, one on top of the other, over and over and over, making her feel worse and worse and worse. She had cried until she couldn’t cry anymore. She had asked for more pain medication. It had yet to kick in.
She wanted to be numb, or unconscious, or dead. What a stunning clusterfuck she’d made of her life. This was her second night in the hospital, though she didn’t really remember much about the night before. Just as well. What little sleep she’d had tonight had been plagued with images of KJ lying broken on the floor in a sea of blood, or KJ lying cold and pale on the stainless steel table in the morgue, his body washed clean, the knife wounds just small, straight cuts that didn’t look like anything anyone would die from.
A song came to mind as she relived the memory, the melody playing in her mind like a soundtrack to a movie. The Band Perry. “If I Die Young.” It was a pretty song. A simple country song. She had always liked the melody without ever really thinking about the lyrics. If I die young . . .
A Dr. Benton had come to check on her late, asking if she remembered him, but she couldn’t say she did. She had managed to eat some dinner and drink some ginger ale, and so he had removed the IV from her arm. He said he thought she would be released the next day.
The idea terrified her. Where was she supposed to go? Back to the house? She couldn’t. She couldn’t go back there. No. Not ever. But she had nowhere else to go. She didn’t have money for a deposit on a new place. She didn’t have money for a hotel. She didn’t know anyone who would take her in.
She was afraid to ask Clarice. People at Evangeline Oaks raised their eyebrows at her as it was. How was Clarice Marcel her aunt? She was too old. Genevieve was too young. Why were there no older pictur
es of her in Clarice’s apartment if they were so close? Why had she never come to visit before moving to Bayou Breaux?
“Aunt Clarice, my ass,” she had once heard Mavis Parsons say behind her back.
But Clarice Marcel had not always lived at Evangeline Oaks. For all anyone knew, Genevieve might have visited all the time. And plenty of people called someone aunt or uncle without being blood kin. No one ever thought about that when they looked at her helping the old woman and taking a little money on the side for doing errands and whatnot.
People always thought the worst of her, anyway.
They weren’t always wrong.
She didn’t have much to be proud of in her life. Her mother had always told her she would never amount to anything. So far, despite Genevieve’s best efforts, her mother was right.
Gingerly putting weight on her bandaged feet, Genevieve eased herself off the bed. Restlessness and anxiety stirred through her like the ache from a fever. She needed to move. Her body felt big and awkward, like it wasn’t her own, making movement clumsy and slow.
The room was lit by the television, playing an infomercial without the sound. She didn’t want to hear what was being said. There was too much inside her mind as it was. She only wanted the visual company of the tiny two-dimensional people on the screen. They made her feel less alone.
She made her way to the window and stared down at the hospital entrance. It had rained, but the rain had stopped, leaving the pavement wet and shiny in the little puddles of light. The white statue of the Virgin Mary basked in the glow of amber up-lights, her back to Genevieve. That seemed fitting, all things considered.
Where will I go? What will I do? she wondered. Like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.
Frankly, my dear, no one gives a damn.
That was the truth. She had nothing and no one. She thought of the people who had come to see her today—the detectives, who only wanted her story; the sheriff’s fiancée, who only wanted to feel superior because she’d done a kindness for someone less fortunate; her boss and his wife, the perfect couple, doing their Christian duty. It wouldn’t have mattered to any of them if she had died.
The only person she had ever really mattered to was KJ. He needed her. All day, every day. He needed her to feed him, to clothe him, to take him to school, to kiss his boo-boos and put him to bed. She worked to earn a paycheck to take care of him. Nothing was for her—not time, not money. Her life was all about her child. And now her child was gone.
What purpose did she serve?
The idea of starting over was by turns daunting, exciting, terrifying, exhausting.
Would people feel sorry for her because she’d lost her child? Or would they blame her for living when he had died? What would they have been thinking if she had died, too? That she was unlucky? A victim? A loser? A heroine? The brave mother who died protecting her child?
It would have been the first time anyone had thought anything good about her—if she had died.
She stared out the window and sang the song.
“If I die young . . .”
THIRTY-FOUR
Nick didn’t sleep. Not really, not in any restful way. He closed his eyes and tried to meditate with limited success. Inhale. Focus. Calm. Relax. Exhale. Focus. Calm. Relax. Inhale . . . Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth, counting the seconds—four seconds in, four seconds out . . .
His brain was too busy to rest, trying to sort and make sense of all the information he had taken in from the moment he’d walked into the crime scene at the Gauthier house to the last words he’d had with Annie before she’d fallen asleep—that there were too many people from Houma in this to suit him.
Gus had brought Dutrow up from Houma PD to take the chief deputy position. Dutrow had brought Kemp up to run his crime scene unit. And Dutrow’s fiancée and her son had followed. There was nothing strange in any of that. But about the same time, Genevieve and her son had moved from Dulac, just outside of Houma, into Roy Carville’s shitty rental house on a bayou with no name. She had settled for a job beneath her skill set on the excuse of working near a woman who may or may not have been a relative.
Genevieve, who had killed a baby years ago. Genevieve, who may have had a drug problem. Genevieve, who had a police record from the department where Dutrow and Kemp had worked—where Keith Kemp had turned in his badge to take a job for which he seemed to have no passion.
Annie stirred restlessly beside him and made a small sound of distress in her sleep. Nick shifted positions, wrapped an arm around her gently, and pressed a soft kiss to her temple, and she sighed and settled again. He wanted her to sleep. The last few months had taken a toll on her. She’d lost weight. She looked pale. He would have wrapped her up in cotton wool and kept her home if he could have, but she would never have it.
She wanted him to sleep but knew he wouldn’t. She worried about him getting too emotionally involved in the case, and yet she knew that was what drove him. She had fallen in love with that very trait early on in their relationship. She wanted to keep him safe from his own obsessive tendencies, but she wouldn’t be surprised to find him gone when she awakened.
The rage burned inside him all over again at the thought of Dutrow trying to frighten and intimidate her. It was one thing for the sheriff to try it with him, but to do that to a woman or a child? No. That was not acceptable. And for Dutrow to pull that with Annie? Nick would have happily beaten the man into a hospital bed.
Too restless now to even pretend to sleep, he slipped from the bed, went into the bathroom, and dressed quickly and quietly in the fresh clothes he had hung on the back of the door before his shower. Barefoot, he padded silently out into the hall and down the stairs.
The air that greeted him as he left the house was thick and warm. The eastern horizon was a soft charcoal gray beneath the last of an indigo night sky. Fog lay low over the water, drifting like smoke among the cypress trees. The night hunters would be finding their way back to their dens and nests, but it would be another half hour before the songbirds would begin to greet the day. Peace had settled in a temporary hush over the basin. Nature’s held breath before the new day could begin.
Puddles from last night’s storm dotted the gravel drive. Lingering raindrops in the Spanish moss that draped the big live oak in the side yard caught the glow of the headlights as Nick started the Jeep.
The no-frills vehicle had been Annie’s before they had met—and someone else’s before that. At some point it had gotten tricked out with a police radio. Nick preferred the Jeep to any of the unmarked vehicles in the SO’s yard.
He flipped on the regular radio to catch the latest news and weather as he turned out of the driveway and headed toward town. The news was of the murder, and of the missing girl, and of the “altercation” in front of Our Lady that had resulted in the arrest of Bobby Theriot. Nick’s name was mentioned, along with a brief litany of his checkered past. Dutrow would be unhappy. No one was supposed to get more media attention than himself.
The weather report centered on a freshly named tropical storm spinning in the Gulf, which might have been the reason Nora Florette’s father had balked at the idea of coming home. If the weather had already begun to amp up where his rig sat, miles offshore, flying became a dicey proposition. Helicopters and hurricanes didn’t mix well, though it wouldn’t have been enough of an excuse for Nick had his child been missing. He would have moved heaven, earth, and sea to get back.
Clearly, the Florette family preferred to think this girl was crying wolf, disappearing to punish and scare them. Maybe they thought that because she’d done it before. Harlan Hanks, the detective from the PD who had wanted to drag his feet, knew the family, Annie said. Personally or professionally? Nick wondered. Either way, a twelve-year-old girl had been missing for more than a day. She was the babysitter for a murdered boy. She was the sister to a budding sexual predator, according to A
nnie.
Nick didn’t like the Florettes’ proximity to the Theriot house, though no one had made mention to him any concern over this Florette boy—not his detectives, who had interviewed the kids, nor the Theriots themselves. His focus had been on chasing down the phantom lead of a drifter having been seen in the area in the days leading up to Vanessa Theriot’s assault. Nothing had panned out, much to the dismay and frustration of both the family and law enforcement.
Nick would want to go back over the interviews with the neighborhood kids. But his immediate attention had to be on the Gauthier murder.
A mile south of town, he took a right onto a blacktop road and drove toward the just-pinking dawn. The properties on either side of the road were tidy hobby farms with white or stained-dark fences, brick houses, and big metal-sided sheds for RVs.
The lights were on in the horse barn on the property where Nick turned in, a place divided into paddocks, studded with gnarled old live oak trees reaching their twisted branches out to provide islands of shade. He parked at the end of the barn and walked down the wide center aisle, greeted by the nickers of half a dozen quarter horses hanging their dainty heads over their stall doors.
“Well, if it ain’t the star of stage and screen, Nick Fourcade himself!”
Gus Noblier came out of the feed room pushing a cart full of whatever horses ate for breakfast. Dressed in jeans and a plaid western shirt, he was a big, rawboned man with a belly that advertised his love of rich food. His color was healthier since he’d left the Sheriff’s Office, but his crew cut was more silver than steel now.
“Saw you on the news last night,” he remarked, giving Nick a look. “Twice. Winning friends and influencing people, as usual. ‘Get that fucking camera out of my face’ was my personal favorite moment.”