The Gates of Evangeline

by Hester Young

  “Well—good. I hear that’s more satisfying than brainless boy toys.”

  “It’s certainly more complicated.” He steps from the operator’s chair and seats himself beside me as if we’re old buddies. “I’m forty-seven years old, Charlotte. Too damn old to be sneaking around like some nervous schoolboy, but here I am. I don’t know what the answer is.” He glances up at the overcast sky. “I tell you, some nights I don’t sleep at all.”

  With the clouds moving in, it’s getting chilly. I hug myself, glad for the extra layer the life jacket provides. “I don’t sleep so well either,” I confess. “But Ambien helps.”

  Andre smiles. “Jules takes Ambien, too. Myself, I’d rather have a few nightcaps.”

  We bob along, both caught up in our own thoughts. Unlike the bayou, which moves, wanders, flows slowly to a destination, the swamp is still. But it’s a pregnant stillness, like something crouched low, waiting, and I don’t like it. As if to confirm my bad feeling, Andre rises slowly to his feet and points at some nearby brush.

  “Gator,” he says.

  I follow the line of his finger and find a bumpy head peeking out near some weeds. The eyes are olive colored, and they don’t blink. “God, he’s huge.”

  “Four feet, maybe. Pretty small.” He peers admiringly at the creature. “Plucky little bastard. You don’t see a lot of gators this time of year. They’re sluggish in the cold.”

  Andre starts up the engine and urges us deeper into the swamp. The rainfall, I’m told, has been decent this winter, so the water isn’t quite as low as usual. As we skim across the muddy shallows, I can better appreciate the airboat’s ability to seemingly walk on water. With all the random twists and turns we’re making, though, I’m increasingly anxious about Andre’s ability to navigate us back home.

  Eventually he kills the engine again, taking in the view around us as if it’s somehow different from the last fifteen minutes of swamp. I try not to fidget, but I’ve had enough already.

  “So.” He stretches. “Who’s the bad guy?”

  “Bad guy?” My mind is on the sugar mill. I’m trying to figure out why someone would’ve drowned Gabriel in the swamps and then buried him miles away on dry land.

  “Your book,” Andre presses me. “Not a satisfying story if you’ve got no one to blame. And pardon my saying so, but at the point you’re trying to punch holes in Bridgie’s alibi, you must be running pretty low on theories.”

  I’m embarrassed by my inelegant mishandling of the topic at dinner yesterday. As much as I dislike Brigitte, there’s no reason to think she had a hand in Gabriel’s disappearance. “I wasn’t accusing her, I was just trying to understand—”

  Andre chuckles. “A word of advice? Don’t piss Bridgie off. She’s hardly a criminal mastermind, and she had zero incentive to hurt our brother. But she sure can harbor a grudge.”

  “So I’ve seen. She’s still bitter about you missing her sweet sixteen party.” I hunch forward in my seat, trying to concentrate my warmth in a ball. “How’d you wrangle your way out of attending, anyway?”

  “Oh.” He yawns. “My relationship with my family was—strained at that point. So I did what I wanted. Hung out with a friend in the city.”

  “A friend,” I repeat. I brush some hair from my eyes, considering how best to approach this. I don’t think Andre hurt his brother—I doubt teenage Andre really even thought much about Gabriel one way or another—and I want to give him a chance to explain himself. “Agent Schaffer says that he fabricated your friend for reports,” I murmur. “That your father paid him off.” I watch his reaction carefully, searching for signs of panic, but Andre looks tired, not rattled.

  “Yes, well. My father didn’t like the friend I spent the night with. Go figure.”

  “A man?”

  He nods. “From a club. Kyle Komen. I met him that night, but we dated for a couple months after. I guess you could call him my first boyfriend.”

  “You told your dad about him?”

  “Sort of. He read between the lines. He had me tell the officers I’d been with a prostitute, presumably female. Thought it would go better for me that way.” A twisted smile plays across his lips. “Funny, right?”

  “So your father knew you were gay.”

  That’s a surprise. Somehow Neville was the last family member I expected to be in the know.

  “He never acknowledged it, but he knew,” Andre says. “Listen, if your friend in the police department needs to check my story, tell him to talk to Kyle Komen, K-O-M-E-N, in Lake Charles.” He licks his lips. “I trust this can be handled confidentially.”

  “Of course.” I really want to leave now. Not because I’m having some profound psychic impression, but because I detest the swamp. I’ve never liked water you can’t see the bottom of, and this? It’s a watery graveyard for plants and probably animals, a feeding ground for dark, slippery things that feast on decay. Things you can’t see. Things that wait for you to die. I breathe in, trying not to reveal my disgust. “You know, you’re right about me running low on theories,” I tell Andre. “But I’ve got to come up with something for this book. Any ideas?”

  Andre shrugs. “I thought it was done with when they arrested Roi Duchesne. He’d lied to get the job at Evangeline, had a criminal history, and my father had fired him a few weeks earlier. He made sense. And I didn’t like him.” He stares vacantly at the water, and I think how easy it is to imagine a body in it, a human face just beneath the surface, hair fanning out, eyes wide and unseeing. “Life would be simpler, wouldn’t it,” he says, “if guilty people were always the ones you disliked.”

  “It must be awful. Not knowing.”

  “I think about my brother a lot.” Andre’s index finger grazes his lips. “Sometimes I think he was the lucky one.”

  Sensing he’s about to drift into the therapy zone with me, I change the subject. “Do you remember a woman named Violet Johnson? She worked for your family when you were about eleven or twelve.”

  He gives me an apologetic look. “I don’t remember much about the help. Apart from Danelle and the Lauchlins, most of them came and went.”

  “Tell me about the Lauchlins, then. I’m interested in them.”

  “Interested why?” Andre frowns. “There was surveillance on them for months. There was never any sign they did wrong.”

  “I take it you were fond of Maddie and Jack.”

  “Maddie was . . . well, she was my nanny. We kids were her life. Especially Gabriel.”

  Maddie is not who I’m worried about, of course. “What about Jack?” I ask, toying with the strap of my life jacket. “Were you close to him?”

  Andre shakes his head. “I wasn’t his kind of boy. He tried to teach me about car engines once. I told him I’d pay people to do that stuff for me when I grew up, so he shouldn’t waste our time.” He smiles sheepishly. “I was a brat.”

  I hate to ask, knowing how Noah feels about his grandfather, but I have to. “Did Jack spend much time with Gabriel?”

  “Oh, sure. Gabriel followed him around. He liked to watch Jack use tools.” He kneels down at the edge of the boat and, with one hand, shoves away some brush. “He was a handful, that kid. Always trying to stick objects into sockets or toss things in the toilet. He’d run away, too. That’s why they locked him in at nights.”

  Keegan went through a similar phase, but I don’t let myself dwell on that thought. “Did you know Maddie’s son well? Sean?”

  Something in Andre’s face flickers at the mention of Sean. “I knew him, sure, but not well. He’s twelve years older . . .”

  “Brigitte had quite the crush on him.”

  “Did she? I don’t remember.” His nonchalance doesn’t fool me for a second. Danelle Martin was right. Andre had it bad for Sean.

  “He was handsome. I’ve seen pictures.”

  Andre drums his fingers agains
t the metal frame of the boat, a little flustered by my persistence. “You want to know if I was interested in him? Sure. I was a teenage boy. He was nice to me. Of course I was interested. But nothing ever happened. He was completely straight.”

  His agitation betrays the depth of his feelings for Sean, but I don’t push my luck.

  “Was he involved with anyone, do you know?”

  “I didn’t keep track of his relationships. He was very private.”

  Neither Danelle nor Andre knew about Violet, then. Maybe Sean and Violet had no relationship at all, and Noah was the product of a fling. He could’ve been an illegitimate son the Lauchlin family never even acknowledged until Violet died. Unless, of course, she’s the mystery woman Sean wanted to flee the country with. Whatever made him want to run away with her might also have made them hide their relationship from others.

  “You know Sean disappeared just a few months before your brother,” I say. “Don’t you find that odd?”

  “Disappeared?” Andre frowns. “The story I heard was that he left.”

  Could he have come back? Conspired with someone to kidnap Gabriel, hoping to build on his half million? Sean could easily have learned from his unwitting parents when Neville and Hettie would be out of town, and the family dog would’ve known him well enough not to make a fuss. He was a local, likely knew the swamps, and had military training. Gabriel would’ve trusted him. All he had to do was wait.

  “Sean left,” I say thoughtfully. “But maybe he didn’t go so far.”

  “We should probably get back,” Andre tells me, uninterested in exploring my Sean Lauchlin conspiracy theories. “My niece is joining our family for dinner tonight. Wouldn’t want to miss the details of her wild spending spree in Cabo.”

  Brigitte’s daughter is in her early twenties, too young to have been mixed up with Sean or Gabriel, and by all accounts too much like her mother for me to endure. I’m happy to sit this one out.

  On the ride home, Andre’s in his own world, adeptly retracing our course through the swamp and bayou all the way back to Evangeline. I wish I knew what he was thinking, what potentially useful memories he might hold. So many pieces of the truth out there, and everyone trying to conceal their own little part. Not because they’re guilty, necessarily, but because the truth is ugly or uncomfortable or embarrassing.

  I understand. I have my own ugly truths to contend with.

  • • •

  I’VE BEEN ON LAND for about thirty seconds when I feel my phone vibrating. It’s Detective Minot. I left him that crazy text and then forgot to call him. Oops.

  “Hey.” I move away from the dock where Andre is tying up the airboat. “I’m still alive.”

  “Jesus, Charlotte. Don’t send me messages like that. Better yet, don’t run off alone with people you think are gonna—” I lose the remainder of his scolding to poor reception.

  “Sorry. I was freaking out over nothing.”

  “I called you three times.”

  I feel both guilty and relieved that someone in this world is looking out for me. “Thanks. For checking up on me.”

  “I wasn’t just checking up on you,” he says. “I have something to tell you. Can you be at City Park in fifteen minutes?”

  The search. Oh my God, the search. I glance at my watch. Almost five, and they’ve been at it since six this morning. Something must’ve turned up.

  “I’ll be there in ten.”

  • • •

  I FIND DETECTIVE MINOT on a bench by the duck pond. The sun hangs low, and the dwindling light casts everything in melancholy shadows. Even the fat, waddling ducks are depressing, reminders of children who will remain suspended in time. Keegan loved feeding ducks, and I’m sure Detective Minot took Didi here when she was small. Was he different before his daughter got sick, I wonder, or has he always been the serious, brooding type? It’s hard to picture him as someone’s dad, but Justine showed me old photos of him. He looked so normal, carrying little Didi on his shoulders, grinning, smooching his wife. I’m not sure I wanted to see that side of him, to be burdened with knowledge of the man he could’ve been had he never heard the words “acute lymphocytic leukemia.”

  I take a seat beside him on the bench. “Well? What’s your news?”

  He rubs a hand over his stubbly face. “Looks like this whole mess has gotten bigger than the sheriff’s department can handle. The Feds are sending over some guys tomorrow.”

  “Are you serious? The FBI’s getting involved?” My eyes widen. “You must’ve ID’d him, right? They wouldn’t care unless it was Gabriel. Did you match the bone?”

  “It’s not Gabriel,” Detective Minot says gently.

  I wrap my fingers around the wooden slats of the bench, unable to fully comprehend what he’s just said. “But it has to be. You know it has to be.”

  “No. I never thought it was.” His tone is apologetic. “That jawbone we found in the sugar mill didn’t belong to a two-year-old. It was too large.”

  Over on the weedy pond, a pair of ducks begin to squabble. I feel like the air’s been knocked from me. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I whisper. “Why’d you let me think there was a chance when you knew I’d failed?” All my high hopes, all this faith I had in my “gift,” it was all for shit.

  “I think there’s a reason you led us to that sugar mill,” he insists. “It could be part of the puzzle.”

  I’m still smarting from my mistake, but his department wouldn’t have called in the FBI unless this was a big deal. “What happened?”

  “Didn’t take long with the dog this morning, I’ll tell you that. You expect to spend days on this kind of search, but those bones . . . it’s like they were begging to be found.” He looks a little spooked. “The team’s still excavating as we speak, but I think they got the bulk of it.”

  “Did the forensic anthropologist from the university get a look?”

  Detective Minot nods. “He’s overseeing the excavation. Today was mostly just bagging fragments they found, but from what I understand, they got a decent portion of the skull and pelvis.”

  I remember vaguely that these parts are helpful in determining gender. “Male or female?”

  “Off the record, very preliminary, he’s guessing the victim was an adult Caucasian male.”

  The wind rustles my hair, sending shivers up and down my back. I can feel there’s more. It’s like we’re in court and Detective Minot is building his case for me, bit by bit.

  “Looks like there was a bullet hole in the skull,” he says. “They haven’t retrieved any casings so far, and we don’t know yet if there were multiple shots, or if that was the cause of death, but this guy took a bullet to the back of the head.”

  “Point-blank?” I’m imagining a mob-style execution.

  “Probably not. A handgun, most likely, but we’ll have to wait for the report.”

  “Anything else? Clothes? A wallet?”

  “We found a shoe in the same approximate location,” he continues. “Size-twelve tenny shoes. A brand called Raceway. I looked them up, and this particular style was sold for just two years: 1980 and ’81.”

  I don’t speak, just wait. A greedy duck approaches me, his black eyes glassy and alert as he calls for handouts, but I shoo him away.

  “There was one last thing.” Detective Minot pauses, gearing up for his smoking gun. “Dog tags.”

  I’m confused. “There was a dog?”

  “No, no. Military dog tags.”

  “Military . . .” At last it dawns on me. “Oh my God. You think—”

  “I saw the name, plain as anything. It’s him, Charlotte.” The park, the setting sun, the overweight duck strutting around my feet—I see none of it. All I can see is Remy Minot, his look of awe as he tells me in hushed tones that, after nearly thirty years, they’ve found him. They’ve found Sean Lauchlin.

  25.r />
  There’s no evidence that Gabriel’s disappearance is related to Sean Lauchlin’s murder, but that doesn’t stop Detective Minot and me from speculating as we wander the empty park. We pass a couple of sagging picnic tables and a trash can that gives off an unpleasant smell, but no people. Even the ducks have retreated into the long grass at the pond’s edge.

  “Revenge,” I say. “Sean killed Gabriel, and Neville found out. Neville took matters into his own hands and disposed of Sean himself.”

  “Neville couldn’t do that,” Detective Minot contends. “Not with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies breathing down his neck. The minute Gabriel was reported missing, they monitored his every movement.”

  “Neville hired someone to do it for him.”

  “That’s exactly what law enforcement was looking for when they thought he orchestrated Gabriel’s kidnapping—calls and meetings with possible criminals for hire. They found nothing. Anyway, it still wouldn’t explain the half million in Sean’s bank account.” He pauses by an old tree and runs his hand over initials carved in its trunk as if this scar might possess an answer. “You’ve said there’s a sexual-abuse element to this case.”

  I nod. “I felt it when we went to the swamp.”

  “My money’s on Andre Deveau. He had access to Gabriel and no alibi.”

  I fill him in on today’s boat ride. “You should look into this Kyle Komen guy he claims he was with, but I don’t think Andre fits. Someone took the rowboat out and dumped Gabriel in the swamps. I don’t think anyone in the Deveau family had the know-how.”

  “Whoever took the boat put it back. That points to an employee, like Jack Lauchlin.”

  I’m aware that Daddy Jack’s involvement would destroy Noah, but I, too, keep coming back to him. “Jack had access to the boat and to Gabriel,” I concede. “And Jack could easily have gotten the key to Gabriel’s bedroom from his wife.”

  Detective Minot breaks from the path and begins pacing. “He’s from the area. He would know boats, know the water.”

  A couple of streetlights flicker on in the distance. I fold my arms tight against my chest. The New Yorker in me wonders how many rapes and muggings have happened in this park after dark. “Okay,” I say, “Jack could’ve killed Gabriel. But what about Sean? You’re saying Jack killed his own son too?”