by Herren, Greg
The shelf along the back wall was covered in hatboxes, all neatly lettered with the same black Sharpie. Alais was very organized. Do girls still wear hats? I wondered. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a teenager in a hat other than a baseball cap, and couldn’t. I pulled down a box and removed the lid. The hat inside was wide-brimmed and yellow, with the price tag still on it. I replaced the box and took down another. This hat was red, with a veil in the front, and also had the price tag. Alais’s bureau probably had a drawer filled with brand-new, unworn gloves.
If Alais hadn’t left the house all summer, where did all this new stuff come from? I suspected Cordelia had bought it for her granddaughter.
Nothing in the bedroom seemed out of place. My sister Daphne had kept her room neat when we were growing up, but not like this. Of course, we hadn’t had a housekeeper. Daphne had covered her walls with posters of her heartthrobs—the New Kids on the Block, Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise. Cordelia probably didn’t allow posters of heartthrobs. Alais’s walls were pristine. No framed photographs, no posters, no artwork of any kind. The room had nothing personal in it. No stuffed animals, no trophies, no magazines or books that had actually been read. It was like a movie set. Maybe her room at the sorority house was different.
This room would depress anyone. No wonder she ran away. But there had to be other reasons.
I checked the bathroom. It, too, was pristine. The gold fixtures gleamed. The porcelain tub glistened. Everything on the counter was lined up and organized. There was no toothbrush, and no hairbrush, either. Apparently she had left behind all of her makeup, but, like the clothes, there was so much that it was hard to be sure. I opened the drawers and found more—mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, nail polish, nail files, polish remover—all unopened, in the original packaging. Every shelf in the linen closet was packed with towels, washcloths, and rolls of toilet paper. I opened the medicine cabinet, pulled out my notebook and wrote down the medications, wondering what Alais’s therapist had been thinking. Every conceivable antidepressant, antianxiety medication, and mood stabilizer I’d ever heard of was there—and some I’d never heard of before—enough pills for ten people to commit suicide with. The same psychiatrist was listed on every label: DR. ROBERT ENGLESE. I made a note of his name and phone number. He wouldn’t tell me anything, but talking to him might turn up something useful. Someone should report him to the AMA. Again, there were no empty spaces, so it was safe to assume Alais had not taken any pill bottles with her. Unfortunately, there was no way of knowing how many pills were missing from the bottles.
I returned to the bedroom and went through her bureau. I’d been right. The top drawer was filled with pairs of gloves that still had their price tags attached. There were separate drawers for underwear, socks, shorts, and T-shirts, and everything was sorted by color.
I rifled through the drawers of her desk. Everything was meticulously organized, with nothing out of the ordinary and nothing that would be helpful, not even an address book.
A diary would have been too much to hope for.
I sat down and turned on her Apple computer. The screen asked for a password.
“Her password is princess,” a voice behind me said softly.
I spun around in the chair.
Carey Sheehan stood leaning against the doorframe, his slender arms crossed. He was wearing an LSU baseball cap, a sleeveless LSU T-shirt, and a ratty pair of jeans shorts about three sizes too big for him. His feet were bare.
“Thanks,” I said. “You an LSU fan?”
He came into the room and plopped onto the bed.
“Yup.”
“I played ball for LSU.” I typed in the password. The computer’s desktop appeared. “I lettered three years.”
“Cool. When did you play?”
I told him. His face lit up with a smile.
“Two SEC championships and two Sugar Bowl wins,” he said.
“That’s right. You want to go to LSU? It’s a great school.”
He shrugged. His face went blank again.
“If I go to college. I haven’t decided yet.”
Like you’ll have a choice in this house, I thought.
“So, where do you think your sister went?”
“If she’s smart, she got as far away from here as she could.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because that’s what I’m going to do as soon as I’m old enough.”
I opened her Internet browser, studied her bookmarks and clicked on Myspace. Alais’s profile page popped up. It wasn’t a professional photograph, but it was a good one. She was sitting in the gazebo and laughing, her long, thick red hair hanging past her shoulders on either side of her face.
“You’re not happy here?” I asked Carey.
“It’s okay, I guess. Things could be worse.”
“I’d imagine your father’s death was hard on you. I’m sorry about that. Are you doing okay?”
His lower lip quivered. “I’m fine.”
I didn’t want to make him cry, so I turned back to the computer screen.
“Your sister is quite pretty.”
“I took that picture last summer, before she went off to Ole Miss.”
“It’s a good picture.”
I clicked on her friends page and scrolled through them. Alais had over three hundred friends, an almost equal assortment of boys and girls. I wrote the URL address in my notebook, then texted it to Abby with a request that she run down all of the friends.
“You know any of these people, Carey?”
He got up and leaned over my shoulder.
“Some of them are her friends from high school.”
“You think she might be with one of them? Who were her closest friends?”
He pointed to a picture of a pretty girl with dark hair.
“Dana Rivers was her best friend at Newman, but she’s in Europe. Vienna, I think. As for the rest—I don’t know. Alais didn’t see anyone this summer. She never left the house. She hardly left this room.”
“Did she say anything to you?”
“No. She wouldn’t talk to anyone.”
I turned around. “No offense, but I don’t believe you.”
His face turned red. “I don’t care what you think.”
“Weren’t the two of you close?”
“We used to be.” His lower lip jutted out. “But she blamed me, and wouldn’t talk to me anymore.”
“Blamed you for what?”
“Them finding out about Jerrell. But it wasn’t my fault.”
“Jerrell?”
“Her boyfriend.” His lower lip trembled. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know Mom would go through my computer!”
“What exactly did your mother find?”
“I went up there to visit Alais. I took my camera. Her and Jerrell and I did a lot of stuff. I took pictures of them together and I downloaded them into my computer. How was I supposed to know Mom would go snooping? She was pissed when she found the pictures. She made me tell her everything. I didn’t want to!”
“When was this?”
“Back in May.”
Jerrell was murdered in June. “Did your mother tell your father?”
“He wasn’t my father!”
“You two weren’t close?”
“He wasn’t my father,” Carey insisted. “My father lives in Hammond.”
“What happened the night your stepfather was killed?”
“I don’t know. I was in my room.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“I had my headphones on.”
“You didn’t see him that night?”
“I had dinner with my mom and then I came upstairs. I was at my computer with my headphones on. I didn’t know anything happened until Mom came and told me he was dead.”
“You don’t seem too upset.”
“He didn’t care about me. He never came to my swim meets. He never had anything to do with me unless there were other people around. Then
it was all ‘my son this’ and ‘my son that.’ It was just an act. He didn’t care. He was the same with Alais. We used to talk about it. She didn’t like him either. And he wasn’t nice to my mother. He made fun of her all the time. He yelled at her. He used to make her cry. It made me mad.”
“Did he hit her?”
“Not that I know about.”
“Do you know if your mother told him about Alais and Jerrell?”
He gave me a sly look. “She must have. Jerrell’s dead, isn’t he? Alais thought it was my fault, but it wasn’t!”
“Alais thought her father killed Jerrell?”
Carey backed toward the door. “I don’t know what she thought.”
“Did she have a laptop?”
“Yes.”
He bolted through the door and was gone.
But he’d given me an interesting piece of information. I leaned back in the chair, turned to the computer and scrolled to the top of Alais’s Myspace page. She had kept an online diary. Maybe I was about to get lucky.
I clicked on the link. A window opened, asking for a user name and password. I looked at the address for the Myspace page, and typed Miss Alais in for the user name and princess for the password. A little multicolor wheel spun on the screen. The page came up, with a list of dates serving as links to individual pages.
Bingo.
The most recent entry was dated yesterday.
I clicked on it and read.
16 August
The governor called a state of emergency yesterday. I don’t know if we’re going to evacuate but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything anymore. Sometimes I hope it does come here and just blows this house off the face of the map. This horrible house. My grandmother’s family has done some terrible things. It wouldn’t surprise me if all those bad things wound up putting a curse on this place. It’s the only thing that makes sense. The sins of the fathers. There were a lot of sins committed in this house.
I wish my mother were still alive. I wish Jerrell were still alive.
I don’t know why I bother.
Dr. Englese says I need to let go. But if I do that, Jerrell is gone forever. He says life is for the living, but grieving is normal and we have to do it and get free of it before we can move on.
I wish I’d been the one instead of Jerrell. It was my fault. That’s what Dr. Englese doesn’t understand. But I can’t tell him. I can’t tell anyone the truth.
I need to get away.
But I don’t have anywhere to go.
I felt bad for Alais. I, too, had lost someone I loved.
But the entry wasn’t very helpful. It told me nothing, really, other than establishing her state of mind. I clicked on the link for 14 August. The page was empty. I clicked back through the earlier entries. All of them were gone. It was possible she had deleted them, but why would she have done that?
I texted Jeph, Alais’s user name and password, and asked him to see what he could find out about the lost entries, then looked inside the medicine cabinet again.
I had more than a passing acquaintance with many of the medications in there. I’d used them after my boyfriend Paul died, a year before Katrina. They could take the pain away for a short while, but they always wore off and the pain came back. You’d take another pill, holding your breath until the chemicals made their way through your bloodstream to your brain and you forgot. Or you remembered and the chemicals made you not care so much. You just drifted through life, disconnected from everything, not feeling or caring about anything.
Alais was only nineteen.
I turned off the computer and went downstairs to the library. Janna was sitting in the same chair she’d been in before, staring into space, with an open book in her lap. I cleared my throat.
She looked at me, startled.
“What was the problem with Alais dating Jerrell Perrilloux?” I asked.
“I had no problem with it,” she said flatly.
“But your husband did.”
“Wendell would have had a problem with anyone she dated.”
“It had nothing to do with Jerrell being black?”
She turned away from me. “Don’t be absurd.” She waved her hand tiredly. “Did you find anything?”
I found that your stepdaughter lived a really sterile existence in this house.
“I have some leads,” I said. “Are there any friends of Alais’s you think she might be with?”
“I called the ones I know. They’re all away at school or out of the country. I found this in Wendell’s computer. It’s her credit card accounts.”
She handed me a computer printout. I put it in my bag.
“Thank you, that’s very helpful,” I said.
“Will you be evacuating?” she asked.
“I’ll decide later.”
“We won’t be leaving for Baton Rouge until late tomorrow night. I won’t leave without Alais.”
“I’ll do my best to find her before then, but I can’t promise I’ll be successful.”
She turned away from me. “I know.” She sounded exhausted. “I know I should call the police, but Cordelia won’t hear of it.”
I sat in the chair opposite hers.
“Why doesn’t Cordelia want Alais talking to the police? What is she afraid she’ll say?”
“Nothing.”
“Does it make sense that Cordelia would have wiped your gun clean of prints before using it on Wendell?”
“I’ve told you before, Cordelia doesn’t confide in me.”
I gave up. She wasn’t going to tell me anything useful. The only person who could was Alais. All I had to do was find her.
I stood up.
“I’ll be in touch. I assume you’ll take my calls now?”
She waved her hand again. “Of course.”
I shook my head and walked out of the house.
Chapter Eight
With all due respect to the Sheehans, self-preservation was more of a priority than finding Wendell’s killer or Alais.
Had it only been three years since Paige called me in hysterics that horrible Sunday morning and told me to get out of town? I remembered the tense eight hours it took to cross the lake to Slidell, the bumper-to-bumper traffic, the cars pulled over on the shoulder so dogs could be walked. I’d fled to Dallas, driving nonstop because there were no hotel rooms available, and stayed with a guy I was seeing. We’d watched the levees fail and floods from the storm surge annihilate the city on TV. Now it was happening again.
The whole city was being boarded up as I drove from the Sheehan house to Rouse’s supermarket on Tchoupitoulas. Lawn furniture and plants were brought in. Cars were loaded with suitcases and possessions deemed too important to be left behind. Every gas station had a line. According to the radio, I-10 was already heavy with traffic out of the city and hotels were reporting no vacancies; the nearest rooms available were in Lake Charles, and those were going fast. Businesses all over the city were closing early. The radio announcer felt certain that mandatory evacuation would to be called at any moment. The last coordinates of Ginevra still indicated a direct hit on New Orleans. The National Hurricane Center said that the Category 3 storm had moved past Cuba and was now in the warm Gulf waters, leaving devastation and death in its wake. It was predicted to strengthen to Category 5 by nightfall. The Army Corps of Engineers was silent about what the levees could withstand—which told me all I needed to know on that subject.
I was still hoping I wouldn’t have to evacuate, that Ginevra would change course for western Louisiana or the Florida panhandle. But even if she did, I needed to be prepared for losing power. Usually fairly empty on a weekday afternoon, Rouse’s was a zoo. The parking lot was full and the aisles were jammed with people. I managed to get the last two loaves of bread, two cases of bottled water, canned meat and other nonperishables, remembering to grab a manual can opener and hoping it was enough. Batteries and candles were long gone. Who had got there so early and bought them all? I waited in the checkout line for
nearly an hour, along with the other grim, determined shoppers. The air of controlled hysteria was almost palpable. To quell my own panic, I made a list of what needed to be done when I got home: Empty the refrigerator. Fill the bathtub and sinks with water. Gather birth certificate, passport, car papers, bankbooks, in case evacuation becomes necessary. Take as much clothing as will fit in the trunk and backseat of the car. With luck, the batteries I had on hand were still good.
Meanwhile, Rouse’s employees boarded up the store’s windows.
I spent another hour in line at the Shell station at Magazine and Jackson, waiting to fill up my tank. I’d had the oil changed a month ago, so that was good to go. When I was finally ready to head home, I remembered that it might not be safe to return to my apartment.
I pulled over to the Rue de la Course coffee shop on the corner of Magazine and Race, called Abby and asked her to meet me.
A couple of guys were boarding up the windows in preparation for the arrival of Ginevra. The older one, in his late thirties, fitted the plywood, and the younger guy hammered nails into the corners. Across the street, a young couple loaded their car trunk with suitcases. Farther down, an older woman applied masking tape X’s to her windows, unaware that it was a myth that this could prevent breakage.
I sat at a table outside the coffee shop, the only patron. While I waited for Abby to arrive I called Venus for an update, but got her voice mail. I’d tried Blaine, with the same result. Then I called Paige, who said I could stay at her place. I’d slept on her couch plenty of times in the past, and already had keys to her apartment. I was smoking my first cigarette in four years when Abby’s battered Oldsmobile appeared.
