The Boy

by Tami Hoag

  She couldn’t even imagine Jojean crying about it.

  Had she cried for KJ today? She couldn’t remember. She was so tired. She felt so stressed, like she was being crushed by the weight of it all.

  Two other residents of the women’s shelter sat right up by the television, glued to the scene. One turned to the other and said, “I’d lose my mind if someone murdered my child.”

  They both cut surreptitious glances at Genevieve.

  She backed out of the room and wandered down the hall.

  The shelter was a big Victorian house on a corner lot in an old neighborhood a block from the bayou. Conveniently located for suicide, Genevieve thought. Evangeline House, it was called. No relation to Evangeline Oaks Center for Assisted Living—just one of many businesses in Acadiana to take its name from the tragic story of star-crossed lovers. Everything from dry cleaners to bakeries to mortuaries bore the name. First penned as an epic poem by Longfellow, the story had been absorbed into Cajun culture and retold in various forms, all of them ending in madness, death, or suicide. The name seemed especially ironic for this house, considering the residence was for women whose husbands and lovers beat them.

  A tall, redheaded female sheriff’s detective had brought her to the house late in the day. A staff member had seen her to a bedroom, promising to introduce her to the other women at dinner. Genevieve had stayed in her room, pretending to sleep. She didn’t want to meet anyone. She didn’t want to see the judgment in their eyes. Now that the story was out, people would judge her for the death of her baby all those years ago. They would look at her with suspicion and wonder if she had killed KJ, too.

  Thunder rumbled, subtly rattling the windows as she went into the front room of the house, an old-fashioned parlor with heavy, formal antique furniture and heavy, elaborate draperies framing the bay window. A single lamp burned in the otherwise dark room. She settled into a rocking chair in the window alcove and pulled her cell phone out of the pocket of the sweatpants that had been provided for her. She went to her contacts and punched Jeff’s number.

  The call went straight to voicemail. She tried the office number, negotiating the automated system to Jeff’s extension, which also went to his voicemail. Either he didn’t want to talk to her, or he was spending the evening at home with his wife and family. She didn’t know which answer was worse.

  She felt so empty, so alone. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be at this house. She didn’t want to be in this town. She thought about taking her GoFundMe money and just leaving. She could go start over someplace new, someplace where nobody knew her as anything other than a young, single woman with her whole life ahead of her.

  If her whole life was ahead of her, why did she feel like she was at the end?

  If I die young . . . The song drifted through her head like a warm, seductive night breeze.

  * * *

  * * *

  “GENEVIEVE?”

  She jumped at the sound of his voice, coming back into the present from some deep thought, her good eye going wide at the sight of him. She flinched as lightning flashed brightly in the big bay window.

  “I’m sorry to startle you,” Nick said quietly as he walked into the room. “I have a few more questions for you.”

  “I’m tired,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I really don’t want to talk anymore today.”

  “It won’t take long, but it’s important that you answer me,” he said, drawing a chair directly in front of hers. He sat and leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs, his knees just a few inches from hers.

  Trapped, she sat back and watched him, frowning.

  “Who died in the park?” she asked. “Was it Nora?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  He had left Annie in charge of the corpse, as much as he would rather not have, for her sake. As her husband, he would have spared her. As her superior, he had to make the smartest choice. She was working the disappearance of the Florette girl. She already knew the girl’s friends and their families. If the deceased was from among that group, she had already established relationships that would be useful in the investigation.

  “I wish I’d never come here,” Genevieve said. “There’s evil in this place.”

  “Evil doesn’t live in a place,” Nick corrected her. “Evil resides in the souls of men—and women. It is a uniquely human attribute. But I’m guessing you might already know that from hard experience.

  “Why did you come here, Genevieve?” he asked.

  “I told you. I needed a job.”

  “You had a job. Why did you leave it?”

  She looked away from him. “It wasn’t working out. I needed to move on.”

  Stokes had reported to him that the dentist Genevieve had worked for in Dulac had all the makings of another Jeff Avery—a reasonably attractive, pleasant man with a good job and a comfortable lifestyle . . . and a wife and a couple of kids . . . He had given Genevieve a glowing review and claimed he didn’t really know why she had left.

  “Why you didn’t get a job in Houma, then?” Nick asked. “It’s a bigger town, more opportunities.”

  “I came to take a job to be near Aunt Clarice.”

  “She’s not your aunt, though, is she, cher?”

  She meant to look surprised at his question, but he could sense the panic. “Why would you say that? Of course she’s my aunt!”

  “Because the office at Evangeline Oaks had only the names of a niece and nephew of Mrs. Marcel’s late husband listed as next of kin. There was no mention of you.”

  “Well, she’s not a blood relative,” she said, scrambling for an explanation. “But she knew my mother, and I always called her Aunt Clarice. And I just thought it would be nice to be near her—”

  “No,” Nick insisted gently. “You didn’t come here to get a job emptying bedpans so you could be close to your aunt Clarice. You applied for a job at the Sheriff’s Office last spring, before you ever went near Evangeline Oaks.”

  “What of it? That would have been a good job, too. That’s just not the job I ended up with,” she said. “Being an aide was only temporary, anyway. Mr. Avery is going to move me into the office, so it all works out.”

  Of course, it wouldn’t work out. Jeff Avery would have to let her go, both as an employee and as a lover. He would choose his family, beg his wife’s forgiveness, and hope to God his bosses never caught wind of the amateur porn video that would live forever on the Internet. He would save his own hide, and Genevieve would be left to fend for herself. Nick chose not to say so. He chose not to tell her about the cameras Roy Carville and Roddie Perez had hidden in her home—for now. That bad news would serve no purpose tonight.

  “Genevieve, I’m not judging you for any of that,” he said. “You’ve had a hard life, and you’re just trying to do the best you can, however you can, however misguided your choices may be. Me, I’m just trying to get to the truth.”

  “You think I killed my son,” she said, tears rising in her eyes.

  “I never said that, but I have to wonder, and I have to ask. That’s my job. I know from experience the truth is not always pretty. It’s often not what we want it to be at all.”

  “No,” she murmured, glancing away, blinking as the lightning flashed again. “It isn’t.”

  He let the silence hang for a moment as she lost herself in thought. Looking back on her own truth, he imagined, and not liking what she saw. Mistake after mistake. Wrong choice after wrong choice.

  She knew what she wanted—a home, a family, a man to love her and value her. It just seemed she could never get there. She was always on the wrong side of the glass, looking in. It remained to be seen if she had done something terrible to her son to ease a burden from her life. Plenty of people would judge her harshly for the choices she had made. But Nick didn’t see malice in her. He saw a yawning chasm
of need. Ultimately, she only wanted what every living soul wanted—to be loved.

  “Genevieve, does the name Keith Kemp mean anything to you?” he asked, dragging her back from her thoughts.

  “No.”

  “Eight years ago, when you were stopped for driving under the influence, Keith Kemp was the officer who wrote you up. You don’t remember that?”

  “No,” she insisted. “But I was drunk at the time, wasn’t I?”

  “Were you? Were you that drunk? The arrest report put you at barely over the legal limit. Tipsy, I would say. You were a long way from blacking out.”

  “It was a long time ago. I just don’t remember, that’s all.”

  “You were what? Nineteen? You’d been out of jail a few months? A year, at most. You’d been drinking. You weren’t supposed to be drinking, were you?” he said. “That’s a parole violation. And you were underage to boot. You must have been scared, getting pulled over like that—in the dead of night, I’m guessing, yeah?”

  She refused to look at him, pretending instead to look out the window.

  “Is there a point to this?” she asked. “I’m so tired.”

  “Genevieve, the man who arrested you that night was forced to resign from that department not long after. There were allegations made against him that he was trading criminal charges for sex. He would, for instance, pull over a young woman who may have had too much to drink, and in exchange for sex, he would maybe look the other way or conveniently forget he might have seen some drugs in the car and settle on a lesser charge.”

  The idea sickened him. A man in a position of power taking advantage of someone vulnerable disgusted him. The idea went against every reason he had gone into law enforcement in the first place. But that was the yin and yang of the job. It attracted people for all the right reasons, and all the wrong reasons, depending on the individual.

  It disgusted him even further that Kemp had paid no price other than giving up his badge. No charges had been filed against him. He had been allowed to resign, and his chief had hired him back to work as a crime scene investigator.

  “Is that what happened to you, Genevieve?” he asked. “Is that why that possession charge disappeared? Did you feel you had to make a deal with the devil that night?”

  She said nothing. If she could have turned her back to him, she would have. Instead, she continued to stare out the window at the darkness. A single tear trickled down from the corner of her eye.

  “Genevieve,” he said softly, “if that happened to you, that’s not okay. What he did was a crime. It was wrong in every possible way, and he should have gone to prison for it. He still could. I would be happy to see to it. All you have to do is tell me the truth.”

  “That’s not what happened,” she whispered. Another tear fell. She reached up to wipe it away with a trembling hand.

  “Tell me, then.”

  “I can’t,” she said, her voice barely audible. She turned her face as far from him as she could.

  Nick leaned forward and took her hand, small and frail and as cold as ice. “Genevieve, look at me. Look at me,” he commanded gently. “Please.”

  She looked at him from the corner of her eye like a skittish wild deer, ready to bolt. She looked down at his hand enfolding hers. She didn’t pull away.

  “You said last night I need to be your hero,” Nick reminded her. “I’ll be your hero, Genevieve, but you have to trust me, and you have to tell me the truth.”

  * * *

  * * *

  GENEVIEVE LOOKED DOWN at the detective’s hand covering hers. He was strong and handsome, but he frightened her with his directness and with the intensity of his dark stare. She felt like he could see straight through her, straight through any lie she might tell. He made her feel naked and vulnerable. She was alone and afraid. She had no one . . . except this man reaching out to hold her hand, telling her he would believe her truth if only she would tell him. And it wouldn’t matter to him if it wasn’t a beautiful story. He didn’t care that she had made mistakes. He only wanted the truth, whatever that was.

  She had spent so many years trying to hide it, ashamed of who she was and what she’d done and what had been done to her. If she told the truth, would it really set her free?

  “Tell me, Genevieve,” he murmured, squeezing her hand ever so gently. “Tell me your truth.”

  Fear swelled up in her throat to choke her.

  “Trust me,” he said. “Take a deep breath and trust me. You’ve got nothing left to lose.”

  Nothing left to lose except the fear, and the shame, and the burden . . . unless she couldn’t really trust him, in which case, she could lose her life.

  The life that had no value. The life she was ready to throw in the bayou and drown . . .

  “Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me your truth, Genevieve. For KJ.”

  She could do this one thing for her son, after all the times she’d let him down.

  Squeezing the detective’s hand as hard as she could, she took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and told her truth.

  FORTY-SIX

  Ulysse Wilson had been the funeral director at Evangeline’s Rest funeral home for about a hundred years, or so it seemed. He had been Partout Parish coroner for as long as Annie could remember. A small, formal, meticulous man, she had never seen him dressed in anything but a tidy dark suit and a bow tie, ever ready to greet the bereaved.

  Maisie Cormier, his assistant for the evening, helped him into his yellow plastic gown, tying the ties in the back with a sense of ceremony. She had come to Bayou Breaux from her native Martinique and was married to a retired marine who worked as a firefighter EMT for the parish. She turned to Annie and offered her a gown.

  “Thanks, Maisie. Sorry you had to come out on a night like this.”

  They had worked in haste at the scene as the storm rolled in, until the pop-up tent had threatened to blow away and the rain had started coming like a hail of bullets. Ulysse had ordered the body loaded into the hearse. Annie hadn’t argued. There was no question as to the manner or cause of death. Better to have the body in a controlled environment than to have any trace evidence that might have been on it blow away.

  “I’m more sorry for the reason, Annie,” Maisie said as Annie tied her ties for her. “It’s so sad the cruelty people do to each other.”

  “Brace yourself for this one,” Annie murmured, still shaken herself, recalling her first look at this victim.

  The body had already been transferred from the stretcher to the old white porcelain embalming table—left in the body bag due to the severe damage to the head and the fear that what was left of the head might not stay attached while moving it.

  The buzzing fluorescent overhead light cast a harsh glow down as Ulysse unzipped the bag and revealed the victim.

  Maisie Cormier made a long, low keening sound of pain, as if she’d been gut punched.

  “Pauvre bête,” she murmured, and she crossed herself and said a prayer in French.

  Ulysse waited patiently and crossed himself at the end of the prayer. It was a ritual they had been through together many times. Then they set about their work, Ulysse taking photographs and measurements, Maisie taking notes.

  Annie stayed a step back, watching with a sense of unreality, trying to convince her brain this body on the table had once been a person. Witnesses often said when they first spotted a human corpse they thought it had to be a mannequin, that it couldn’t be real, even though it was rare to find a mannequin anywhere outside a department store. The mind wanted to reject the idea of death, especially violent death. And the more damaged the body was, the less real it seemed.

  As many bodies as Annie had seen over the years, she still didn’t want death to be reality—especially when the victim was a young person. It never got easier looking at a young person’s body on that slab, knowing everything they could have
been would never be and that every life theirs had touched would never be the same.

  “Mr. Wilson?” she asked, drawing the coroner’s attention. “Could you please run some water through the hair so I can see the color? I have a mother waiting to hear.”

  She had sent Sharon Spicer home with a deputy and a promise she would call as soon as she knew something. She hoped they had arrived to find Cameron at home and that mother and son were together right now. Which would mean some other mother’s son would never see another day. No matter what, Annie would be giving a family devastating news that would change their lives forever.

  Maisie set about the task, softly singing a hymn as she turned on the hose and gently washed the blood and bone fragments and brain matter from what was left of the skull. She did the job with love and care, as if this were her own child she was preparing to send on to eternal rest.

  Annie watched the blood and dirt and bits of leaves sluice down the drain channels on the table. She watched Maisie’s gloved fingers work through the hair, waiting for the color to brighten, waiting for it to turn the red of rust instead of the red of blood.

  According to his mother, Cameron Spicer was suicidal. He was fourteen and sick of a world that bullied him every day. She thought back to the look of misery on Cameron’s face as Dean Florette had called him names and laughed at him. She thought back to the night before and the abject terror in the boy’s expression as Kelvin Dutrow grilled him like a murder suspect because he’d been in the park after school instead of somewhere else.

  “You wanted him gone anyway!”

  How many times did a child have to have it made clear to him he wasn’t wanted, he was a burden, he was a problem, he was a freak, he was a loser, before he decided he didn’t want to be in this life anymore?

  But she wasn’t looking at a suicide here, Annie reminded herself. This was a murder, an act of rage as savage as any she had ever seen.

  Maisie Cormier dried a section of the corpse’s hair with a clean white towel.