The Boy

by Tami Hoag

“We’ll ask you not to talk to the media about the case because the investigation is ongoing,” he said. “But that won’t stop people from trying to talk to you. It won’t stop people from accusing you. You need to know that’s coming.”

  “I can’t believe any of this is happening,” she murmured, looking toward the window.

  From the bed it was impossible to see the reporters gathered below. She had looked down at them before and felt important, felt like a star. Annie wondered what she was feeling now.

  “I always wanted to be famous . . .”

  “You’re gonna trust me, right?” Nick asked. “Last night you said you want me to be your hero in this. Then you need to trust me to do the right thing, to ask the right questions—even if they hurt. It can be a rough road to justice, but the truth will get you to the other side, guaranteed.”

  She didn’t look so sure of that, Annie thought. She looked like she would just as soon quit as keep going. Annie couldn’t blame her.

  “Just a couple more questions and then we’ll let you rest,” Nick said. “You have that DUI on your record from Houma, about eight years ago. Did you have drugs in the car that night? A little weed? Some pills, maybe?”

  “No,” she said. “I told you that was a mistake. I didn’t have anything like that.”

  “So there’s no chance you might have given evidence against a dealer or something like that in exchange for having charges dropped?”

  “No,” she said, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

  “Did you know any people like that back then?” he asked. “Anyone who might have been nursing a grudge against you all this time?”

  “No. Why would anyone bother? I’m nobody.”

  “And KJ’s father . . . ?”

  “KJ doesn’t have a father,” she said quietly, looking away, back out the window at the stunning blue sky. “He never did.”

  * * *

  * * *

  “SO, EITHER SHE doesn’t know who the father was,” Nick said, “or she’s afraid of him.”

  “Either way,” Annie murmured. She felt so depleted by the experience of watching Nick’s interrogation of Genevieve, she almost didn’t want to know more. “Could be KJ was the product of a rape—which she doesn’t want to talk about. Or he was the product of an affair—which she also doesn’t want to talk about.”

  They sat in the conference room again, Nick attacking the sandwich she had picked up for him at Po’ Richard’s. He ate like it was his mission in life, like he hadn’t just run a broken woman through an emotional wringer. She snuck a french fry and nibbled on the crispy end, but it was cold and disappointing, like life at the moment. She made a face and put it back in the carton.

  “Either way,” she said again. “Do you really think someone came up to Bayou Breaux to murder their seven-year-old illegitimate child? Did they just suddenly remember—oh, hey, I still have that kid I don’t want?”

  “Maybe he’s already here,” Nick suggested. “Maybe that’s why she came here. Maybe she was more desperate now than she has been before and decided to press for money.”

  Annie sighed, impatient with the subject. She could have been herself a product of rape or of an affair gone wrong. She had no idea who her father was or the circumstances of her conception. Whomever he was, he had never tracked her down and killed her. But then, maybe he was the reason Marie Broussard had come to Bayou Breaux and the reason she had taken her secrets with her to the grave.

  Unconsciously, she crossed her arms and hugged herself.

  “So she came here to blackmail the father of her son, but she lives in a shit hole and is trying to have an affair with her married boss. And the baby daddy decides he’s done with it, so he kills the boy but leaves Genevieve alive.”

  She shook her head, giving her husband a wry look. “Tante Fanchon crochets doilies with fewer holes than that theory. You’re just giving me a homicidal sperm donor theory to cheer me up or to provide a glaringly ludicrous contrast to the theory that Genevieve killed the boy herself. You certainly made a painfully good case for that in there.”

  Nick sat back and wiped his mouth with a napkin, his eyes never leaving hers. “Are you upset with me?”

  Annie heaved a sigh that left her feeling hollow. “No. Not really. That was hard to watch, that’s all.”

  “It was necessary,” he said. “Genevieve is not our victim, ’Toinette. The boy is. We need to get to the bottom of her truth to give him justice, yeah?”

  “Yes, I know. You’re just unnervingly good at it. It was hard not to put myself in her place.”

  “You don’t belong in her place.”

  “Does she?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’ll find out.”

  Feeling the need to either move or crumple, Annie pushed herself to her feet. “Okay. In light of what Genevieve had to say about him, I’m going to go track down Dean Florette, because the prospect of a fourteen-year-old psychopath killing and disposing of his sister is so much more appealing to me. All I can hear in my head now is that little boy chanting ‘I won’t tell.’

  “What’s your next move?” she asked as Nick’s phone began to vibrate on the table.

  He looked at the screen and frowned as he got to his feet. “Me, I’m gonna go get fired, apparently.”

  “Great.”

  “Don’t worry, mon coeur,” he murmured, slipping his arms around her and drawing her head to his chest. She pressed her ear against him and listened to his heart beat. “It won’t stop me doing my job.”

  FORTY

  Cameron paced, afraid to be still. His mind was racing. His heart was racing. His sense of self felt connected to the rest of him by the thinnest of invisible threads, sitting perched high in the eye socket of the body. And the body just kept moving, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other . . .

  He was alone, and he was afraid to be alone. He was afraid Kelvin might come back and kill him or that he would kill himself.

  How stupid was that? He wanted to die, but he was afraid to be killed. That just showed what a loser he was. On top of everything else, he was a coward.

  He walked around and around in the family room with the TV on to try to distract from the voice in his head that wouldn’t shut up. His mother didn’t let him watch TV in the daytime, but what difference did it make now? She was sending him away. Why should he care what she allowed or didn’t allow? She was taking the side of the man who had hurt them both over the side of the son she was supposed to love more than anything in the world. She had said she would fix everything, but what she meant was that she would fix it so that Kelvin would still marry her.

  The local news was showing the story about the search for Nora Florette: the mighty Sheriff Dutrow standing on the Florettes’ front porch, ranting and raving, red-faced and angry, going on about the importance of protecting the children of Partout Parish, going on about what a family man he was. “I cannot abide the thought of harm coming to a child under my watch.” Unless he was the one inflicting the harm, Cameron thought.

  Kelvin Dutrow was nothing but a phony and a hypocrite, and Cameron felt nothing but shame that a part of him still cared what Kelvin thought of him. He felt shame for being inadequate in the eyes of this man, and he felt disgust for feeling that shame.

  He had wanted to measure up. He had wanted the sheriff to like him and to want to be a father to him. But Kelvin Dutrow didn’t want to be his father. He wanted to ship Cameron off to military school and be rid of him. Cameron knew he would never measure up. He was weak and timid and there was something wrong in his head that he even for a second thought he might be able to overcome those things.

  There was something wrong in his head, period.

  One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other . . .

 
If Kelvin wanted a son at all, he wanted a son who was a champion athlete, big, strong, and handsome; a boy all the guys liked and all the cute girls wanted to date. He wanted a son who would hunt and fish with him and not throw up at the sight of guts or cruelty. The only thing Cameron had managed to do to please Kelvin in all these months was to figure out how to row the small boat Kelvin had bought for him.

  It was the one thing Cameron had enjoyed doing since coming to Bayou Breaux—taking the little boat out on the bayou and rowing away from everyone and everything. If he could have rowed the boat into another dimension, he would have. But he could only row the boat out into the swamp to be eaten by alligators, and he was too big a coward to do that.

  One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other . . .

  He watched the television from the corner of his eye. The sound seemed suddenly far too loud—the horrible mechanical insect buzz of the search drones hovering in the sky, the baying of the bloodhounds standing on the porch. Along the bottom of the screen, a headline in big bold type announced that volunteer searchers were gathering in the park between the two schools.

  Kelvin finished his show with his famous line: “We’ve got crime to fight!” Then the picture changed to the park, where people had already begun to gather to find Nora Florette.

  Annoying Nora. Not even her own family liked her. All her mother ever did was yell at her. Her slutty sister accused her of stealing her makeup and clothes. Dean tricked her into shoplifting for him and spied on her in the bathroom. She was clingy and stupid and weird. She still played with dolls, but all she talked about was how she wanted a boyfriend. She talked about sex like she knew what it was.

  Just thinking about her made Cameron uncomfortable. He didn’t like her. She was always hovering around him, touching him, like a hairy, ugly fly that wouldn’t leave him alone. She managed to make him feel disgusted and weirdly excited at the same time. The feeling scared him. He had run away from her once, and Dean had started calling him Spice Girl and the Houma Homo.

  He wished he’d never met the Florettes. He still shuddered to remember how angry his mother had been the day she had come home and caught Nora in the house. He had told Nora over and over he wasn’t allowed to have anyone over if his mom wasn’t home, but she wouldn’t listen. She hadn’t believed him—or hadn’t cared—probably because there were no rules at all in the Florette house. The kids came and went and did whatever they wanted. Their mom yelled at them, but she yelled so much it didn’t mean anything to them anymore.

  Cameron had never seen his mother so angry as that day. She had screamed at Nora. She had screamed at him. She had gone to the Florette house and made a big scene and threatened to press charges. Cameron had thought he would die of embarrassment. His mother had ranted at him for days. How could he be so irresponsible? How could he be so inconsiderate? He was living under Kelvin’s roof, and there were rules, and rules had to be obeyed. Never upset Kelvin. Never embarrass Kelvin. Never make Kelvin angry.

  Stupid Nora. Now half the town was looking for her. Cameron wondered what would happen if he went missing. Would anybody even bother to try to find him? Would Kelvin rant and rave on their front porch and bring in search dogs and drones? Would his mother go on television and beg for his return?

  They would probably be relieved to have him gone.

  Cameron’s gone missing. Oh, well . . .

  One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other . . . Might as well go walk into the pool. No one will miss you. No one will care . . .

  Now the walls seemed to close in on him, and the darkness of the house and the darkness of his thoughts closed in and tried to suffocate him. Fear closed around his throat like a hand.

  I don’t want to be here . . .

  He needed to leave. He couldn’t be alone. He needed to see other people—if only from a distance. Just seeing them might somehow keep him tethered to reality.

  The heat and sun attacked him as he stepped out the front door. Instantly, he felt his pores open and release the sweat from his body. His nostrils filled with the sour smell of it. Cameron imagined it was toxic steam. Maybe it was the crazy escaping.

  All his senses seemed turned up to maximum sensitivity. He squinted hard against the brightness of the light and the hyperintensity of the colors all around him. The sky was too blue. The trees were too green. The sound of the drones seemed right inside his head. He could hear the scrape of his shoes against the pavement.

  One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other . . .

  He walked out of Blue Cypress and over to the block where the Florettes lived, careful to keep his head down, staying on the other side of the street. The crowd on the lawn had dwindled to just a few people standing, talking with a uniformed deputy. Kelvin was gone. The dogs were gone. The drones were gone from sight, but he could still hear them.

  Turning left at the corner, he headed toward the park. When he reached the edge of the park, he fell in step with a wide line of people marching slowly and methodically toward the schools, scanning the ground in front of them as they went. People called Nora’s name as if she might actually answer, while the drones buzzed overhead, and someone in the distance shouted over a bullhorn, the sound tinny and distorted.

  No one paid any attention to Cameron as he walked along with the group, his head down. He wasn’t looking for Nora. He didn’t care about Nora. He only wanted to be among people, not that anyone seemed to take any notice of him. He wondered if he was really there or if he was imagining the whole thing. With his sense of self clinging hard to its eye-socket perch, everything seemed surreal and nightmarish. Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe he was dead.

  One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other . . .

  Maybe he was a ghost or an invisible zombie.

  The searchers were men and women, older people and kids Cameron recognized from school. They worked their way slowly up the park. Gradually, the schools came into view. The person with the bullhorn was standing near the gazebo next to a woman with a clipboard—the teacher who had brought Detective Broussard to them the day before. Mrs. Blynn, Lola had called her. She looked right at him and then turned away, as if she hadn’t seen him at all.

  The person with the bullhorn was speaking again. To Cameron it just sounded like Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah. Then the crowd began to disperse, people going off to the cars in the parking lots, or walking back toward the schools.

  Cameron hung back by the edge of the woods, watching them go, watching the park empty until no one remained and he was all alone. He had no idea how much time passed. He was aware of the silence, of his own breathing, of the heart beating in the chest of the body he occupied. For a long while, he had no thoughts at all. He just stood there until finally his body turned and started back in the direction of home, his gaze on his sneakers.

  One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other . . .

  “Hey, Spice Girl!”

  The voice ran through him like a knife. Cameron looked up, his stomach twisting at the sight of Dean Florette standing on the path, his hands on his hips, a nasty, belligerent look on his busted-up face.

  “Hey, Houma Homo, what’d you do to my sister? Did you kill her and steal her dress?” he asked, laughing.

  “I didn’t do anything to your stupid sister,” Cameron shot back. “What’d you do to her? Kill her and eat her?”

  “Well, you didn’t eat her, that’s for sure, Princess,” Dean sneered, snickering as he stepped closer and closer.

  “You’re disgusting,” Cameron said, moving to his left, looking for an escape route, knowing it wouldn’t matter if he made a run for it. Dean would be on him in a heartbeat, pounding the crap out of him.

 
; “Ooooh, are you offended?” Dean taunted, making a pouting face. “Poor Spicey!”

  Cameron tried to step past him. Dean blocked him.

  “Where you going, Fag Boy?”

  “Just leave me alone.”

  “Or what?” Dean challenged, giving him a shove.

  Cameron stumbled but caught himself. He kept trying to walk forward. One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other . . .

  There was no one else around. All the searchers had left for some other location to look for Nora. On the downward slope of the park, the schools and their parking lots and playgrounds were out of sight.

  “Why are you walking funny, Fag Boy? Did you take it up the ass last night?”

  “Just leave me alone!”

  Cameron tried to shove him back, but Dean just stepped out of the way, making him look like a fool. Anger and frustration swirled inside him. Everything about his life sucked. And now he was going to get his ass kicked once again by Dean Florette.

  “Are you gonna cry, Spice Girl?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Did I hurt your little feelings?” Dean mocked him and laughed.

  “Just fuck off!” Cameron shouted, his voice breaking badly, and as Dean laughed and laughed, to Cameron’s horror, he started to cry.

  “Crybaby! Cry!”

  It was too much. Too humiliating. He couldn’t take it anymore.

  As Dean stood there laughing, Cameron pulled his arm back and fired a punch, hitting Dean Florette square in the nose.

  Stunned, Dean staggered backward a few steps, clutching his face with both hands. As he pulled his hands away and saw the blood, his eyes went black with rage.

  “I’m gonna fucking kill you!”

  As Dean hit him running, driving the breath from his lungs, Cameron half hoped that was true.

  FORTY-ONE

  She made eleven calls to Jeff Avery’s cell phone on the night of the murder,” Dixon said, following Nick down the hall to his office.