Bitter Falls

by Caine, Rachel

  So I take a deep breath and plunge in. “Okay. So, here’s what’s going to happen,” I tell him. “Once the podcast drops, they’ll start getting momentum in a week or two as word spreads. You need to shut down your email account right now and make a new anonymous one; don’t use it for anyone except people you trust. Make another one you’ll put other places where you have to enter an email address, but keep it completely firewalled off. Don’t do anything without logging into VPN first. Ditch your phone and get a new one. And call the people you trust and tell them what’s going to happen, so they’re on guard for any social engineering by trolls who want to get your new phone or email. Our real vulnerabilities come from people thinking they’re doing something harmless.”

  “You’ve put thought into this,” he says.

  “I expected it,” I admit. “The Lost Angels were never going to let you go without punishment. Look, the moment you decided to stay with us, you became a target too; I’m actually surprised it took this long. But they’re coming at you now, and it will not be pleasant. They’re going to say terrible things about you. Me. Maybe about the kids. Anything to spur a comeback from you.” I hold his stare. He’s starting to understand. “They’ll smear your reputation and find people who’ll swear to all of it; you’ve made enemies in your life, and they’ll come crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches when the lights go out.”

  I feel his hands tighten on mine.

  “Sam, I’m sorry. They’re going to take their shot, and it’s going to hurt; you know these people. You trusted them. That’ll make it personal. Likely other message boards and podcasters will jump on the bandwagon and keep driving it hard. And we can only hope it doesn’t go viral, and keep our heads down until the storm moves on. Okay?”

  He lets out a slow breath and blinks. “Okay,” he says. It isn’t. “Sorry. I know there’s a lot of bullshit right now, and you didn’t need this too.”

  “But I need you,” I say, and I mean it. “Sam. You hear me? I need you.”

  He just nods. I come and sit next to him and fold him into an embrace. I wish I could stop it. I’d hoped that once Miranda was gone, the Lost Angels would lose some steam. But someone’s pushing them onward—probably out of a very sincere belief that Sam killed Miranda and got away with it. It’s an ominous sign that behind the scenes, some new leader has taken charge.

  They’re smart to change targets. It’ll throw us all off.

  Especially Sam.

  “I’ll get on that stuff you mentioned,” Sam says, and I can actually feel the effort he makes to shift to another topic. “So, no answer from Remy’s dad yet?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe he’s working late. Maybe he hasn’t been home to pick up the message. Hell, maybe he’s on vacation in the Bahamas.” Sam’s really trying to put his problems behind him and focus on mine. I don’t know if that’s entirely healthy.

  “That’d be just my luck,” I agree. “But I would think—”

  My phone rings. I exchange a look with Sam, eyebrows raised, and pick it up. It’s a Louisiana number, all right. But not the one I called earlier. Cell phone, maybe.

  I hit the button to accept the call. “Gwen Proctor,” I say. There’s a brief silence.

  “You should go on home,” a voice says on the other end. It sounds drunk.

  “Mr. Landry?”

  “You should go on home and tell whoever’s stirring all this up to let it go.” Definitely drunk, slurring words. “Got nothing to tell you, cher. Nothing you can do for my boy now. He’s long gone. Sorry for your trouble.” I was right about Mr. Landry’s Cajun roots. The music of it weaves through his words, however intoxicated he might be.

  “Mr. Landry, why don’t we talk about this in the morning—”

  “No,” he says. His breathing’s ragged. I think he’s crying. “I can’t. Can’t do it. No.”

  He hangs up. I frown at the phone, not so much disturbed as thinking.

  “Doesn’t want to talk, I assume,” Sam says. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll drop in at his office tomorrow,” I say. “He runs a car place, so that’s my best option. Less chance of some kind of scene. If I don’t get much from him, I’ll check with Remy’s friends in the area. I have a list from his social media.”

  Sam nods. “Okay. Sounds like a plan. Do you need me along, or—”

  “I always need you, didn’t I just say that?” I nudge him. “Always. Let’s talk about plans later. It’s late.”

  “Yeah,” he agrees, and turns his head to look at me. His smile is so warm, his eyes even better. “And you’re tired.”

  “Not that tired,” I say, and kiss him, and then we’re falling back to the bed, and we both spontaneously laugh because this bed is hard as a damn rock, but then that doesn’t matter anymore, and I’m able to forget the specter of the Lost Angels coming for us, and the dark, ugly hatred still arriving in my email, second by second, drip by drip until it floods over onto us.

  Trouble’s coming.

  But the only cure for that is surviving it.

  Morning comes early, but it comes with coffee and a decent breakfast. Lanny wants to go with me on my visit; she wants to be my assistant, but I’m not making that mistake again. Sam promises the kids that they’ll do something fun while I’m interviewing Remy’s dad. Neither of my children look convinced, but at least they cooperate. For now.

  Remy Landry’s father has a nice car dealership right on the main drag; it has an inflatable gorilla waving in the breeze and lots of colorful pennons. I park and walk in. I’m greeted by a comfortably padded woman of about forty at the reception desk, and I ask to see the boss. She looks instantly wary. I guess I don’t look like someone in the market for a new ride. “What for?” she asks. “Are you one of our customers?”

  “Just tell him Gwen Proctor is here,” I say, and I walk over to admire a shiny, hulking SUV spinning slowly on a turntable in the middle of the dealership floor.

  I hear his footsteps behind me, but I don’t turn until he says, “I said I don’t have anything to tell you.”

  I turn then, hand outstretched. He takes it, but it’s just instinct; his gaze on me is bloodshot and fiercely unhappy. Like his wife in Knoxville, he looks like an old man. His hair’s gone thoroughly gray, and frown lines groove the skin above his eyebrows and down the sides of his face. They look deep, almost painful. His color’s a sickly yellow under a fading tan. The suit he’s wearing hangs like a sack. For all that, it’s a nice suit, and the tie is neatly knotted to cinch in a gaping neckline on his shirt. A good watch on his wrist, good shoes on his feet. He’s got money.

  Money clearly doesn’t help.

  “Mr. Landry, I know you don’t want to do this,” I tell him. “It’s tough. It’s painful to have this dragged up all over again. I know all that, and I promise you, if you’ll sit down with me for an hour, I will not bother you again. There’s every chance this investigation could bring up news about your son.”

  “I didn’t hire you to do this,” he says. “And I know my wife didn’t either. Who’s paying you to do this? Why?” That last part comes out as a muted cry of pain, and I feel it like a slap. I knew this might be tough, but it’s worse than that. I have a strong impulse to apologize and walk away, but I steady myself.

  “The firm I work for was hired by a nonprofit organization to look into Remy’s disappearance,” I tell him. “I’m sorry this is so painful for you, Mr. Landry. But it’s possible we might be able to find him.”

  “My son’s dead,” he says. It’s flat and dark the way he says it. “I let hope go a long time back.” Still, there’s a flicker of . . . something. And it leads me to continue.

  “I’m not saying I can bring him home alive,” I reply. “But maybe I can help you find some peace, and bring someone to justice.”

  He studies me. Sizes me up like I’m a potential car buyer. Decides I’m worth the trouble. He finally sighs and says, “Let’s just get it over with. Follow me.”
>
  We go to an office and sit. I close the door. As I sit down, I realize this room is a shrine. There are photos of Remy on every wall. There, he’s a small boy grinning at the camera and cuddling a puppy. There, a fresh-faced teen in a tuxedo posing for prom. In yet another he’s wearing a graduation cap. A photo to my left, the largest one, is a candid shot of Remy on a soccer field, scoring a goal. He looks triumphant. He looks vividly alive.

  There’s a sagging sofa against one wall with a neatly folded blanket and a crumpled pillow. It dawns on me that although Mr. Landry almost certainly has a home somewhere, he sleeps here pretty often.

  It feels as haunted as that sad apartment in Knoxville where Remy’s mother keeps her vigil.

  “Okay, I guess you talked to my wife,” Mr. Landry says. “She tell you yet that I’m crazy?”

  “She said you thought you needed to move on, but she wasn’t quite ready to do that,” I reply. But despite his declaration that his son’s dead, nothing about the office says that this man has moved one inch from the moment he learned Remy was missing. Joe Landry seems to be trapped in a windowless coffin lined with the past. “I’m interested in any correspondence you had with him by email or in letters, and anything he mentioned in phone calls that might have struck you as odd. Anything at all.”

  Joe Landry reaches into a drawer and pulls out a shoebox. He slides it across the desk at me. “That’s every letter or card I have from him since he went off to college,” he says. “Emails too. I put it all together for the police, but they never were interested.”

  It’s as complete an archive as I could have wanted. I accept it, and it’s heavy. “I’ll scan everything,” I tell him. “I’ll get it back to you.”

  “I don’t want it,” he says. His gray eyes wash with tears, and he blinks them away. “Maybe take it to Ruth when you’re done.”

  I nod and fold my hands on top of the box. “What about phone calls?”

  “He didn’t call too often,” Joe says. “Mostly spoke to his mother, and mostly on birthdays and holidays and the like. Last time, though—” I see his eyes go up and to the right, tracking a memory. “Last time I talked to him he sure was interested in a girl.”

  I feel an instinct come alive. “What girl?” I don’t want to lead him. I want to follow.

  “Not that girlfriend he had,” Landry says, and a smile flits over his lips for an instant. “Remy liked the ladies, and they sure liked him too. No, this one’s name was Carol. Definitely Carol, I remember because it seemed like such an old-fashioned name for a young woman.”

  “What did he say about her?” I take out a small notebook and make note to check the date of Remy’s last call to his dad. It’s clear that he doesn’t know what his wife insisted: that her son was helping Carol out of a jam of some kind. I don’t tell him.

  “I know he met her at church,” he said. “Good churchgoing boy, Remy. She was real different from the girls at school, he said. I think he was taken with her.”

  “Different from the other girls how, exactly?”

  Landry sits back in his chair. The old leather creaks. “She was evangelical, for a start. Wore long skirts and wouldn’t cut her hair, like that. No makeup. It surprised me he’d go for that, but I think he saw her as . . . kind of pure.”

  I keep my dislike for the pure/impure dynamic forced on women to myself. “Did he tell you a last name at all?”

  “No. Just Carol. But you can check at that church he was going to. Gospel Witness Church up there in Knoxville, Tennessee. Somebody must recall her, even if she ain’t there now.”

  The rest of the conversation goes without much real information; he reiterates things his wife’s already told me, with minor variations. He has no theories about what happened to his son. He doesn’t want to think about it, though clearly from this room he can’t think about anything else.

  When I’m leaving, he shakes my hand a second time. This time I think he means it. The numbed look is still in his eyes, but he seems slightly more . . . present. “You’ll let me know if something turns up?” he asks. It isn’t hope, exactly, but it’s better than the dead apathy I saw earlier.

  “I will,” I tell him, and give him my card. He nods over it and puts it in his coat pocket. “Keep the faith, Mr. Landry.”

  “I’ll pray for you,” he says. Which is as much as I could reasonably ask.

  When I check my watch, it’s been almost exactly an hour. I don’t know if Landry was watching the clock or instinctively timed things right like the businessman he is.

  The receptionist gives me a frown as I leave. Protective. Good for her. Landry probably needs a gatekeeper.

  I put the box of correspondence on the seat beside me and open up Remy’s digital file. There’s a brief note buried deep that he was a member of the Gospel Witness Church in Knoxville, where he sang in the choir. I pull up the web page, and the church seems pretty standard and bland. I call the number and ask for the pastor.

  I get a man with a slow, deep voice who says, “Pastor Wallace, how may I help you today?”

  “Pastor, my name is Gwen Proctor. I’m a private investigator, looking to follow up on the disappearance of a young man named Remy Landry. He was a member of your church, and—”

  He hangs up on me.

  For a second I think my cell phone dropped the call, but no. That was definitely, and deliberately, a hang-up. The pastor doesn’t want to talk to me. Not about Remy.

  Well. That’s very, very interesting.

  12

  SAM

  Gwen’s onto something hot, and she needs to follow it. Driving back isn’t an option; neither is abandoning our vehicle, and besides, we’re supposed to be avoiding the Belldenes. So I volunteer to take her to the nearest airport in New Orleans. We see her off, and the kids and I start the long drive back.

  I end the drive for the night at a nice upscale hotel and get a small suite; the kids each get their own room and bed, and I get the fold-out couch, which is actually pretty comfortable. Good food, movies on demand. As avoiding the Hillbilly Mafia goes, it’s a pretty great escape.

  I make sure everything’s locked down after the kids go off to their own rooms. Connor’s reading a book as thick as my biceps. Lanny’s listening to her headphones, eyes closed. Relaxed and unguarded and happy, they look like the small kids they once were. Vulnerable. Precious. Kids I need to protect.

  I’m worried for Lanny. She’s still jumpy, and I don’t want her on the wrong side of the Belldenes. It isn’t a good place to be.

  Which is partly why I’ve taken the sofa bed: it puts me between them and the door. Just in case.

  I can’t avoid it any longer. I grab my laptop and surf to the Lost Angels tribute site. I helped create this site, back in the early days. Me and Miranda, deciding on layout and colors. She’d drawn the abstract logo, and seeing it hovering there in the corner makes my mouth go dry. I didn’t love her, but we had a complicated, messy history. We knew each other at our worst, our rawest. Never at our best.

  I still would have saved her if I could.

  My sister’s picture sits last in the row of Melvin Royal’s victims. She’s the one who got him caught; I know she’d take some small satisfaction in that, at least. But justice still feels hollow. And always will.

  I’m already dreading it before I click the link that leads to the message boards. It’s secured with passwords, and I hesitate for a long few minutes before I enter my old admin codes and hit the “Enter” key. They still work. Not too surprising—volunteer groups aren’t the best at the little things like that.

  I’d halfway hoped they’d cut me off from access.

  It’s just a message board, I tell myself. Old-school tech that predates modern social media by a decade. Used by old losers like me. It ought to be harmless.

  It isn’t, of course. It’s a boiling sewer of hatred, and I used to swim in it with real delight. I used to believe I was getting justice the only way I could after the courts failed our families. But really
, I’d just been trying to fill up a void inside me.

  Some people turn to drink and drugs. I got addicted to something just as poisonous. It was only getting away from that seductive hatred, and closer to Gwen, that saved me. I’d been planning to hurt her when I moved to Stillhouse Lake, but watching her with her kids broke that spell. Made her a real person to me, not a paper target. Seeing her protect other people—people she didn’t even know—made me realize how bent my compass had become.

  Gwen saved my soul. Not that Lost Angels will ever accept that.

  I start reading posts. The new one pinned at the top is in honor of Miranda Tidewell. It starts as a eulogy, but then it turns, as I expect, to anger. Every topic on this board eventually shifts to rage. Their civility is as fragile as flash paper.

  There’s plenty of violence here aimed toward Gwen, of course. There’s a whole thread that links together even more murdered women on the thinnest of evidence and assigns the role of serial killer to Gwen, not her ex-husband. Because just being an innocent wife of a monster, a victim in and of herself, isn’t an option.

  You started it, asshole. You hated her hard enough to come across the country to torment her.

  I acknowledge that, though it stings, and keep moving. And sure enough, I find a whole new thread about me. It’s massive, more than a hundred pages. It started after it became clear I wasn’t betraying Gwen as I’d intended, and though it begins with reasonable posts about how maybe I was playing out a long game, that quickly disappears. My motives, according to the thread, range from being brainwashed to never having been really part of the Lost Angels at all; some even think I was a plant that Gwen, the master manipulator, had placed to watch them from the start. It’s a fantastically unlikely theory, but they leap right on it and ride it for pages. They gather every bit of gossip they can find in the media and online, piling supposition upon wild leap upon outright lie.