by Tami Hoag
She could see him standing on the Florettes’ front porch, the center of attention for the news people gathered there on the lawn. Asshole. This wasn’t his case—unless, of course, he decided to take it away from the Bayou Breaux PD, which was entirely possible. The SO had greater resources, more manpower. The case was another chance for attention for a man who seemed to feed on the media spotlight like a vampire on blood.
Chief of Police Johnny Earl stood beside him, looking distinctly unhappy as his counterpart ranted and gesticulated for the cameras.
Annie put on her sunglasses and a baseball cap, tugging her ponytail through the opening in the back. She wanted to attract no attention to herself, not from the press and certainly not from her boss. She crossed the street, skirting around the crowd gathered on the Florettes’ lawn, keeping her head down.
Two drones buzzed loudly overhead like small mechanical pterodactyls. Controlled by a pair of deputies decked out in tactical squad gear, they swooped and dashed and hovered where the press could see them. The sheriff’s latest toys, they would be deployed for the search, able to quickly and easily cover more ground than humans could in twice the time.
A handler with a pair of bloodhounds cut a path through the crowd and went up the porch steps to stand to Dutrow’s left, the dogs baying their excitement. Annie wondered how effective they would be considering the torrential rains that had fallen since Nora Florette had gone missing. It would all depend on where the girl had gone and how she had gotten there, she supposed. If she’d gotten in a car and been taken out of the parish, no dog was going to find her.
The sheriff opened the press conference for questions. Annie stood off to the side, listening to the cacophony of voices, picking out the loudest.
“Sheriff, two crimes against children in a matter of days, and the Theriot case remains unsolved. Are children safe in Partout Parish?”
“Sheriff Dutrow, is it true this girl was a babysitter for the murdered Gauthier boy?”
“Is the Gauthier woman a suspect in either case?”
“Is it true that Genevieve Gauthier killed a baby?”
“I can’t comment on that,” Dutrow said.
Oh, shit! Annie thought. How had anyone dug up that detail? Genevieve’s juvenile record was sealed. It was one thing for someone in law enforcement to have access to it, but for someone outside that closed world to get that information . . . Although, south Louisiana was a small place with a long memory. Thirteen years might have been enough to cover most news in a foot of dust, but the murder of a baby by its teenaged mother would have stuck with people who had known about it at the time.
“In light of his actions last night,” another reporter called out, “is Detective Fourcade still on the case?”
Annie held her breath.
“Thank you! Thank you all!” Dutrow called out to the crowd. “That’s all the questions we have time for now. We’ve got crime to fight!”
Annie let out her breath, put down her head, and walked around the side yard to the back of the Florette house. The grass had been worn to dirt in spots and was littered with bikes and trikes and toys. A swing set stood to one side of the yard, ruts carved into the ground beneath the swings. A trampoline took up the other side.
She went up the back steps and into the house through a back porch that had been converted into a laundry and storage room bursting at the seams with shelves crammed with stuff of all kinds—giant cans of tomatoes, clothes, piles of magazines, boxes of lightbulbs, empty Mason jars, plant pots, Christmas ornaments, toys. The floor was a minefield of dirty laundry piles, shoes, and rain boots.
In the kitchen a couple of women she hadn’t seen before were busy cooking. No one had ever died of hunger during a family tragedy in south Louisiana. The answer for literally every catastrophe was for friends and neighbors to cook food and surround those suffering.
The smell of onions and bay leaves perfumed the air in clouds of steam rising from a pot on the stove. Just the idea of gumbo made Annie’s stomach grumble. She had been too tense for breakfast before speaking to Sharon Spicer and too anxious after to think of it.
Jojean sat at the dining room table, looking like she’d been up all night. She looked smaller, weaker, diminished by the stress and the helplessness. The pregnant woman from the night before—Jojean’s youngest sister—sat to her right. Tiffany, the niece with the baby, stood in the living room, baby on her hip, cell phone sandwiched between her shoulder and her ear, as she looked after three toddlers that Annie could see. The sounds of a cartoon emanated from the television.
“Jojean, how are you holding up?” Annie asked, taking the seat to her left.
“She didn’t come home,” Jojean said. Her eyes were full of anguish and the strange kind of surprise that hits victims over and over—the shock that something terrible had struck them like a bolt out of the blue. “I thought sure she would come home. I truly did.”
“I know,” Annie murmured, resting a hand on the woman’s arm. “We’re doing everything possible to find her and bring her home to you. Is your husband coming back?”
“There’s a storm in the Gulf,” she said. “They can’t fly. So I get to do this without him, too,” she added, the sharp taste of bitterness turning her mouth.
“It’s good that you have so much family around,” Annie said. “You have a lot of people here supporting you. Let them help you.”
As she got up to leave, Jojean reached out and caught her by the wrist. “That storm is coming this way. Do you think you’ll find Nora before it hits? I can’t think of her out in a storm.”
“We’ll do our best,” Annie assured her, thinking that Nora Florette—if she was out in the elements—had already been through two storms in the time she’d been missing.
She left the house the same way she’d gone in—through the gumbo-scented kitchen and the Hoarders laundry room. As she walked out onto the back stairs, she spotted Dean Florette on the roof of the garage, chucking rocks up at one of the drones as it hovered overhead.
“Hey! Knock it off!” Annie yelled.
“Suck it!” he yelled back, throwing another stone.
“Dean Florette!” Annie shouted, hustling down the steps. “Get down here right now or I’ll have a deputy come up there and pitch you off. And I’m not gonna care if you land on your feet or your head. You are just one smart-ass remark from me hauling you to jail!”
She hoped to God the press out front were too preoccupied with the Dutrow circus to hear her.
“Get down here right now!” she yelled.
Dean cast a glance toward the street, where half a dozen law enforcement vehicles were parked, and decided not to call her bluff. He scrambled down the slope of the roof, dropped onto the trampoline, and flipped over the edge to the ground.
“How boys live to maturity is beyond me,” Annie muttered, watching him get up, tugging his sweatpants up and his T-shirt down.
The sun hadn’t been up two hours and he was already dirty—or maybe he had started the day that way. His face was a puffy red mess courtesy of Lola Troiano and her soccer ball.
“I don’t have to go to school,” he announced.
“I suppose not,” Annie said. “But you can help with the search.”
“Why?” he asked, looking offended at the notion. “I don’t want to find her.”
He looked up at the drones flying over. “All this fuss for Dead Nora.”
A chill ran down Annie’s arms. “Why do you call her that? Because you wish she was dead or because you know she’s dead?”
He shrugged, disinterested, picked up a baseball off the ground, and tossed it up in the air. Annie reached up and snatched it before he could catch it again.
“I grew up with boy cousins,” she said. “You can’t faze me, Dean. Answer my question. Why’d you call your sister Dead Nora?”
“She’s been
gone two days,” he reasoned. “Two days without hearing her big mouth. She must be dead. Where else would she be?”
“I don’t know. There’s nowhere she might go to hide? No friend she might stay with?”
“She doesn’t have any friends.”
“That’s not true. Lola Troiano is her friend. Cameron Spicer is her friend.”
“The Houma Homo,” Dean sneered. “Mama’s boy. Scared of his own shadow. What good is he? He wouldn’t know what to do with a girl if he had one.”
“And you would?” Annie asked, instantly regretting it as she remembered Lola’s remark about Dean hoarding pornographic magazines. He was getting his lessons in human sexuality from the pages of Penthouse. “Don’t answer that. I’m depressed enough with the state of the society as it is.
“I heard Nora got in trouble for going to Cameron’s house this summer.”
Dean swiped the baseball out of her hand and threw it against the side of the garage. “Yeah,” he answered. “His mom is a scary bitch! She came here screaming and yelling how Nora stole some stupid box, and she was gonna tell the sheriff.
“I thought she was gonna pop my mom in the mouth!” he said, excited at the memory. Then he looked at Annie and squinted. “What happened to your face?”
“Nothing,” Annie muttered. “Did Nora ever go back there again?”
“Only if she was stupid,” Dean said. “That lady would have killed her.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Please try to eat something, Cameron,” his mother said.
She buzzed around the kitchen, busy, busy, busy. Put away a coffee cup, water a plant, neaten a stack of mail, make a note on her list of things to do . . . Cameron watched her flit from one stupid thing to the next to the next, an anxious feeling churning in his stomach. His mother was always very purposeful and efficient, but this was different. Her movements were too quick, her eyes were too bright. She held her left arm across her stomach like it hurt.
“I’m not hungry,” he said. “My stomach hurts.”
“Your stomach hurts because you haven’t put anything in it,” she said, going to the refrigerator. “We have yogurt. You should eat yogurt. The cultures will rebalance your digestive system.”
She pulled out carton after carton after carton of yogurt and lined them up on the counter.
“We have vanilla and strawberry and black cherry and pineapple and— Don’t eat the pineapple,” she cautioned, putting that one back. “Pineapple is too acidic for you. We have blueberry and peach. You like peach. Eat the peach. Yogurt will settle your stomach, and that’s one of your five servings of fruits and vegetables for the day.”
She turned and looked at him with a strange, forced smile, and Cameron felt afraid. She was acting like a pod person from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
She wouldn’t know what that meant if he told her, and she’d be furious to find out he had watched the movie without permission. He wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies because his mother equated them with the occult and devil worship—even if they were about aliens from another planet.
He held himself very still and waited for her to open her mouth and make that weird inhuman screaming sound like the pod people in the movie.
“Cameron, did you hear me?” she asked. “Cameron!”
“I don’t like yogurt,” he said in a small voice.
“What? That’s nonsense! You’ll eat it, and it will help settle your stomach!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cameron said, cringing a little at the sharp tone of her voice.
She closed the refrigerator door and then got a towel and polished away a fingerprint marring the finish on the stainless steel.
“I have so many things to do today,” she said. “Are you all right to stay home alone?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cameron answered, not sure he was all right at all.
He was afraid, to be honest. He felt so strange, so small and lost within a body that didn’t feel like his own. His butt felt huge and on fire. Even the brush of his old sweatpants against his skin was painful. And he was stiff and walking awkwardly, like some kind of robot. He couldn’t sit down. He was too tense to lie down.
I don’t want to be here . . .
The line kept whispering through his brain like a secret. He kept thinking about standing on the edge of the swimming pool as the rain soaked his clothes. What if his mother hadn’t come out to get him? What if she left and he felt that way again?
“I have to go to the school and speak with the principal,” she was saying as he struggled to tune back into the moment. She set a bowl and a spoon next to the half-dozen jars of yogurt on the counter. “And it’s going to be a zoo with everyone preoccupied with finding that horrible Florette girl. And I just know in the end they’ll find she went off with some boy. It would serve her right if something happened to her.”
She went to another cupboard and got out a juice glass and put it next to the bowl.
“Do you want apple juice or white grape juice?” she asked. She didn’t wait for an answer before she got out the jar of apple juice and poured it, then put the jar back and went through the whole ritual of wiping the fingerprints off the refrigerator door again.
“I have to speak with the principal and let him know you’ll be going to spend some time with your grandparents.”
A jolt went through Cameron like he’d been blasted with a Taser. “What?”
His mother looked at him with an expression of strange, cold pity. “It’s for the best, darling.”
“You’re sending me away?” he asked, his voice sounding small and young.
“Just for a short time,” she said, smiling. “Until the holidays, I should think. We just have to give Kelvin some time. He’s upset and angry and embarrassed—”
“But it’s not my fault!” Cameron cried. “I try so hard!”
He tried and tried, but nobody liked him—not Kelvin, not the kids at school, now not even his own mother. He tried to be everything everyone wanted, but he failed again and again and again. And he tried to be so careful not to make a mistake, not to upset his mother or draw the attention of her fiancé. And when he made a mistake, he did his best to fix it before anyone could even find out, but still this was happening. His mother was going to send him away.
“I don’t want to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s!” he cried.
“Would you rather go to military school?” his mother asked sharply. “Because that is where Kelvin wants to put you!”
Put you, like he was a piece of property or an unwanted dog or something.
“You told me last night you don’t want to be here!” his mother said, her voice getting shriller and shriller.
That wasn’t what he had meant, but he couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell his mother that he didn’t want to be in this life—not just here at this house but in this life at all. Who knew what she would do then—probably ship him off to an insane asylum.
“You don’t want me,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes.
“Now you’re just being overly dramatic and completely unfair to me,” his mother said. “I’m trying to repair the damage, Cameron. I’m trying to salvage our situation. I never should have let you quit football. That’s my fault. Now I have to fix this. I need time alone with Kelvin to repair the damage. He’s a proud man, and we’ve wounded his ego. We lied to him. Who could blame him for being angry? I have to fix this! What else would you have me do, Cameron?”
Love me, Cameron thought. His pulse began to roar in his ears so that he couldn’t really hear her anymore, but she kept talking anyway. As usual, not paying any attention to what was going on inside him. He could feel his sense of self growing smaller and smaller until he was terrified he would fall from his perch in the eye socket of this shell of a body and disappear into the black abyss within. How could she not see that? It was happening right
before her eyes.
But at the same time his mother’s eyes were getting bigger and bigger, the look in them wilder and wilder. Maybe her true self had already fallen into the blackness inside her, and this wasn’t really his mother at all. The idea frightened him even more. If this wasn’t really his mom, who would save either one of them?
Cameron wondered if she would hit him the way she had hit Detective Broussard.
He had seen her do it. He had heard her screaming at someone to get out, and he’d been terrified that it was Kelvin, come back to kill them both. Surely, Kelvin had looked at all the stuff on Cameron’s iPad by now, and he wouldn’t want them around. He had guns. He had all kinds of guns and other weapons—knives and clubs and Tasers. And he was the sheriff, so he would get away with it. He would make it look like a lunatic did it, or like he had been defending himself. Then he’d be rid of them, and he’d be glad because he had never wanted Cameron in the first place.
Cameron had crept into the hallway to see for himself what was going on in the kitchen, to find out if he should expect to be shot or stabbed. Shot, he hoped. That was quicker. He didn’t want to know what it felt like to get stabbed over and over until all his blood ran out of his body. But what he had seen was his mother, ranting, screaming, out of control, attacking the detective.
It scared him sick to see his mother that way. She was the most in-control person he knew. No matter what happened, she was calm and had an answer and a plan. She always had a plan. To see her wild-eyed, screaming, hitting a detective right in the face—Cameron didn’t know who that was. The one person he had always counted on had vanished in an instant, replaced by an angry, violent stranger.
He was crying now, just standing there like a dope, barefoot in the kitchen, bawling like a baby. And then his mother was there, standing right in front of him, reaching out to touch him, to reassure him, to give him comfort.
“Don’t cry, sweetheart,” she whispered. “Please don’t cry. Mama will fix everything. I always have. I always will.”