by Hester Young
I whirl around and get a good look at his face. “Why? You want to come with me?”
“I dunno.” He’s embarrassed. “You said she didn’t like your ex. I bet he’d look great next to some Texas hick, huh?”
I try to imagine what Grandma would say about Noah. She didn’t like Eric because he was too wishy-washy and always seemed a little scared of her. But my grandmother’s ideal man is Gary Cooper in High Noon. She is no stranger to the allure of a man in cowboy boots. And I’ve already seen what a way Noah has with elderly ladies.
“Actually, I think you guys would get along.” It’s a giant, crazy leap, but what the hell. “Do you want to meet her?”
“Do you want a visitor?” His eyes search mine. “See where things go?”
It’s funny. When I first saw Noah at that awful dinner party, I found him memorable mainly for his poor choice of wardrobe. Now, in the glowy light of a New Orleans morning, I see someone grounded, good-natured, and considerate. Someone strong. Someone sexy. That first night, I reached for him almost intuitively, as if my body knew something my mind didn’t. This time it’s my mouth, answering him even before I know what I’ll say.
“Come to Connecticut,” I say. “Please.”
27.
People have never been a reliable source of happiness in my life. They die, they lie, they disappear. And yet here I am, setting aside my well-earned cynicism, preparing to introduce Noah to my grandmother. Why run deeper and deeper into a relationship that can only end badly? Is it stupidity? Masochism? An elaborate distraction tactic to avoid dealing with Keegan’s death? D, all of the above? Whatever’s going on with me, I’m not ready to walk away from Noah. I want to be with him.
On our last full day in the city, the day before Mardi Gras, I surrender to that desire, however ill advised. I enjoy myself. I imagine happy days ahead.
We meander about the bead-draped city, eat sausage from questionable food carts, pocket shiny doubloons from various krewes, dance each time a marching band passes. At dinner, we plan our trip north like two giddy kids. I know that Noah’s running away, trying to hide from the past, but so am I. If it’s escapism, we’re both guilty. For now, we take pleasure in making decisions that are concrete and immediate. Drive together or separately? If together, what do we do with Noah’s truck? Once in Stamford, where do we stay? My house has tenants for another six weeks, and we don’t want to impose upon my grandmother. Do we find a motel? The plodding details keep us from facing bigger questions.
Now that I can see what’s coming—at least in the short term—I want to leave Louisiana as soon as possible, to put Evangeline and its phantom child behind us. Noah, though, needs a couple of days. He has loose ends to tie up in Chicory, he tells me.
We leave New Orleans on the morning of Fat Tuesday, too tired of partying to make it through the day’s festivities. I’m ready to get back, to say my good-byes. I’m ready to move forward.
• • •
AS WE APPROACH THE ENTRANCE to Evangeline, I get a bad feeling. The security gate is open, and there’s a Bonnefoi Parish police cruiser parked near the guard shack. Noah stops the truck, frowning. He’s said little for the last couple of hours. Almost as soon as we left New Orleans, his black mood seemed to return.
“Uh-oh,” I say. “What do you think that’s all about?”
He shakes his head. “I dunno. But I can’t exactly go in there and find out. They probably got me on some list.”
He’s right. There’s no sense stirring up more trouble with Jules and Andre. “I’ll get out here,” I say. “Are you going to be okay? Where are you off to the next couple of days, anyway?”
“I’ll be around. Just—gotta take care of some things.” He glances uneasily at the police vehicle.
I grab my suitcase out of the back and give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “I’ll call you Thursday morning. We’ll figure out a place to meet.”
As he drives off, I evaluate the scene before me. Did the sheriff’s department officially identify Sean Lauchlin? I thought the FBI had taken over the investigation. I take a few steps and realize the front pocket of my suitcase isn’t fully zipped. When I bend down to fix it, I see why. Noah’s phone. He must’ve run out of room in his duffel bag and shoved it in with my things. I sigh. This will make it much harder to reach him on Thursday.
At the security gate, an officer steps from his car to intercept me. I realize I look a bit peculiar showing up on foot. “Hi . . .” I try a tentative smile. “Can I go in?”
“Who are you?”
“Charlotte Cates. I’m staying in one of the cottages.”
Immediately, he lightens up. “Oh, Miss Cates. Detective Minot said to keep an eye out for you.”
“Is he here?”
“In the house.” He pulls a walkie-talkie from its holster. “Go ahead. I’ll let him know you’re comin’.”
There are two other units parked by the house, plus Detective Minot’s familiar white Impala. This seems like a fairly major police response, especially for Mardi Gras day. What the hell happened?
Detective Minot appears on the front steps and nods when he sees me. “I’ve been looking for you. We’ve gotta talk.” He jogs down the steps and gestures for me to walk with him. “Trouble follows you around, huh?” he observes.
“What’s going on in there?” I ask, anxiety mounting.
“Looks like an overdose.” He doesn’t sound especially impressed. Maybe Chicory gets a lot of overdoses around Mardi Gras. “Jules Sicard. The estate manager.”
“Oh my God. Jules?! Is he dead?”
Detective Minot leads me toward the dock in front where the airboat was tied the other day, keeping one eye on the house as he speaks. “He’s in the ICU over at St. Mary’s. Last I heard, he’s in some kind of coma. Hettie’s nurse found him this morning in the study, lying in his own vomit.”
“What did he OD on?”
“A mixture of tequila and sleeping pills.”
The tequila doesn’t surprise me. But sleeping pills? My eyes widen. “You mean Ambien.” When Jules complained about his missing pills on Friday night, I never dreamed they would kill him just days later. Anyone who’s been prescribed sleep meds knows the risk of combining them with alcohol. And Jules is not stupid. “Did he do it on purpose?”
“Probably.” Detective Minot leans back against a tree trunk, the dappled light of the leaves playing across his face. “Sicard had a prescription for the pills, but he must’ve taken a handful. Looks like he drank at least a half-dozen tequila sunrises. But we still have to rule out foul play.”
I remember mixing tequila sunrises for my father before he started drinking everything straight up: one part tequila, two parts orange juice, and a generous splash of grenadine. They were his prettiest drink. I liked stirring them, watching the red of the grenadine swirl up through the amber tequila and orange juice like an actual sunrise. That may have been the last thing Jules saw as he washed down his pills with drink after hypnotic drink.
“That’s horrible,” I murmur.
Detective Minot looks tired. “Yeah, well. Our homicide unit spends more time investigating suicides and attempted suicides than actual murders. Turns out people usually hate themselves more than each other.”
“I didn’t think Jules was the type.”
“Some people are good at hiding their problems.” He shrugs.
The front door of Evangeline swings open, and a small man in glasses steps outside and approaches Detective Minot, a cardboard box of bagged items in his arms. Must be from the crime scene unit. The two exchange a brief series of gestures, and then the man waves, loads up his vehicle, and leaves.
Something occurs to me, something very sad. “Has anyone told Andre Deveau?”
Detective Minot nods. “He’s at the hospital. Word is he lost it when he found out. Got completely hysterical. My buddy Blake said th
ey had half a mind to put him on suicide watch, too. Helluva way to get outed.” He shifts gears. “So listen. I’ve got to talk to you. This boyfriend of yours.”
“That’s why you’ve been looking for me?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Noah Lauchlin.”
The fact that Detective Minot finds Noah a more pressing topic of conversation than someone nearly offing himself concerns me. “What about him?”
“Was that L-A-U-C-H-L-I-N?”
“Yes . . .”
“Born March 1979 to Violet Johnson, and he’s a resident of Texas.”
“That’s right.”
“So I’ve got some Noah Laughlins, L-A-U-G-H-L-I-N,” he tells me. “But none of them in their early thirties.”
“I just told you, it’s with a C.”
“That’s what I’ve been looking for,” Detective Minot says. “And I’m coming up empty. You know why that might be?” He sounds suspicious, like I purposely led him astray.
“Um . . . I don’t know what state he was born in. Look for records out of state?”
“I did,” he says grimly. “I’ve searched the whole United States. There’s no Noah Lauchlin born March 19, 1979.”
A cold breeze ruffles my hair and stings my eyes. Could I be mistaken? But I’m not, I know I’m not. I remember birthdays, and he told me March 19. And he told me he was thirty-two years old. I would remember that, for sure. A gnawing worry gathers in the pit of my stomach.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I say. “He lives in Texas, and he told me that was his birthday. Did you look for his mother? Violet Johnson?”
“Oh, I found Violet Johnson,” Detective Minot confirms. “Died in 2007. Gave birth in Natchitoches, May of ’79.”
I’m at a loss. “Maybe the records are off?”
“The baby was stillborn,” he says softly. “I don’t know who this guy is, Charlotte, but Noah Lauchlin doesn’t exist.”
• • •
HOURS AFTER PARTING WAYS with Detective Minot, I sit staring at Noah’s phone. I’ve run through the contacts list a dozen times, hoping it might provide answers about the phone’s owner. No such luck. The entries are all one uninformative word, like HANSEN, RJ, and, worryingly, WORM. For a business owner, this seems strange. Shouldn’t he have a long roster of employees and customers? I check the area codes and discover that most, like his, are Texas-based. That much of his story appears to be true.
I don’t know what to make of all this. Did he intentionally leave the phone behind so I couldn’t contact him? Will he be back for me on Thursday, or has he been planning to disappear all along? Maybe the vague issues he had to attend to were just an excuse to bring me back to Evangeline and get rid of me. Where has he gone?
“A family like the Deveaus, they’re gonna attract a lot of gold diggers,” Detective Minot told me after breaking the bad news. “Anybody could get taken in by one of those creeps, don’t feel bad.”
But Noah? My Noah?
The sinking feeling in my stomach is not one of surprise but inevitability. Haven’t I known all along that this man was too good to be true? I remember the fortune-teller in New Orleans, his warnings of a sweet-talking man. He ain’t who you think, RaJean cautioned us. Ain’t who you think at all.
Jules spelled it out the night he fired Noah. Noah—or whoever he really is—is after Hettie’s money. Jules could see it. Andre could see it. But I couldn’t.
He was smart, I’ll give him that. He claimed to be the grandson of two people Hettie loved dearly, both of whom were dead. His so-called father had been safely missing for thirty years, and he cast another dead woman with connections to Evangeline as his mother. No wonder he showed no interest in learning about Violet when I brought it up. She was just a name to him, a convenient stranger. Of course I haven’t found a relationship between Sean Lauchlin and Violet Johnson—there wasn’t any.
Hettie is a vulnerable target. Noah appeared precisely when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, showering her with the attention her own children didn’t provide. Somehow, he coaxed her into signing a contract that offered him almost unlimited funding and no oversight. He probably doesn’t even have a landscaping company. For all I know, he’s just some guy who picked up a few things mowing lawns and faked his way through the rest. The icing on the cake? His being almost the same age as her lost son. He had to know, psychologically, how that would affect Hettie. With the dark eyes and dark hair, he probably even bore a passing resemblance to Gabriel, cementing the connection in Hettie’s mind, unconsciously or not. I remember when Noah and I visited Hettie that rainy night, how she called him Gabriel. I thought she was senile, but perhaps Noah himself planted the idea in her mind.
And where do I fall in all of this? Am I a side note? An enjoyable little fling he deceived right along with everyone else? I’m filled with self-disgust for buying Noah’s bullshit, and yet part of me can’t believe that’s what it was. Not all of it. That night in the hotel room, when he asked me why I liked him, he must’ve been wrestling with his conscience. He must’ve cared.
You don’t even know me, he said, in what may have been our only truthful moment together. There’s so many lies in my life, I don’t even know who I am at the bottom of it all.
I thought the lies he was talking about were someone else’s, not his own.
There were red flags, moments when I doubted him but ultimately looked the other way. They flow in again now like a tsunami. Cristina Paredes, Noah’s lovely “business associate.” Is she in on the scam? Is she his girlfriend, as I originally suspected? He could be a liar and a cheater. And there was the day he stole that photograph of Sean and Maddie from the library. I thought it was a token of his father, but perhaps it was to show Hettie, to “prove” his bogus identity, his fabricated parentage. He certainly did his homework on me, uncovering the son I never told him about. That trip he supposedly took to Texas could’ve been another lie. Maybe that was Noah I saw in the window of the sugar mill.
One way or another, Noah charmed his way into Evangeline, won Hettie’s affection, and gained access to her bankroll. And no one stopped him. Until, of course, Jules stepped in. And look where he ended up.
I start to panic. Could Noah have had a hand in Jules’s overdose? Andre said Jules was the only one who ever drank tequila. If somehow Noah knew that, it wouldn’t have been hard to crush up a bottle of sleeping pills, mix it in with the tequila, and wait for the lethal combination to do its work. He had the opportunity when he went back to the house to get his phone. If he went to get his phone at all.
Did I fall for not just a con man but a killer?
• • •
THAT NIGHT, as if I don’t have enough on my mind, I see Gabriel. I’m not even asleep, but as I lie in bed paging through a book, I feel a pull. It’s not the pull of exhaustion; this is something new, an insistent tugging from somewhere behind my eyes. I don’t resist. I sink into the blankets and give myself up to that now-familiar weightless feeling.
Darkness.
Thin, stiff carpeting against my knees and bare feet.
A small window frames a slice of night sky: moon hanging over a busy road. Headlights, streetlights, a traffic light blinking from yellow to red—all cast a glowing square upon the floor beside me. Inside the square, a boy kneels, his hands pressed together in prayer. My heart leaps as I recognize the shaggy head.
Jo-Jo?
He looks up, liquid brown eyes bright and full of yearning. When his lips part, I see the chipped front tooth.
You comin’ for me? he asks. You gone find me soon?
I have one final chance to get this right.
I’ve been looking for you, I tell him. But I don’t know where to go. I went to the big white house where you used to live. Do you remember that house?
He nods, lower lip quavering, and his body slips into shadow. He made me go.
&n
bsp; Who? I lean close to him. The man who took you?
He’s a bad guy.
I’m not sure what to ask, how to get more than vague, childlike replies from him. His communication skills are admittedly better than those of your average two-year-old, but without a name, a place, what good is this conversation? Where are you now, honey? I say. Where can I find you?
I’m with the bad guy, he whispers, eyes huge. He wanna keep me foreva.
I don’t know what this means, but it’s quite possibly the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard. Serial killers often keep trophies that remind them of their victims. Is some sicko hanging on to Gabriel’s remains? Does that mean his killer is alive?
What’s his name? I ask. You need to tell me who the bad guy is.
He hesitates. You gone get him? You gone make him go away?
I’ll do everything I can, I promise. I know he hurt you.
He said don’t tell. He said he gone kill Mommy.
I know. I don’t tell him that his mother is old now and about to die anyway; it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense to a kid on the spirit plane. We won’t let him hurt your mom. But you’ve got to tell me his name.
As if in reply, the little boy lies down and stretches out flat on his back. He stares upward, unblinking, and I see the light around us lift to gray, feel the walls melt away and the worn carpet go wooden beneath us. A quick, sweeping glance around, and I know where we are. The creepy dock by the boat launch. I peer over the side and see the familiar dark water of the swamp. But something’s off. There are bubbles. Dozens upon dozens of bubbles rise up, and then something neon orange shoots to the surface, bobbing there. Then another. And another.
Goldfish, I realize, unnerved. Not real ones. The crackers.
I turn away from the eerie ring of floating Goldfish crackers and look back at the dock, where Gabriel lies splayed, unmoving.
Are you in the water? I ask. You want me to look for you in the water? It’s too big. You have to tell me where.
His dark eyes search mine, and I watch the hope in his gaze flicker out. He turns on his side and curls up as if preparing to go to sleep. I feel him fading on me.
