by Amber Stuart
“Huh. I guess I’m glad I’m American then. People think I’m weird enough as it is.”
“I don’t think you’re weird.” Which was true, but again, what did I know about being weird or normal?
Lottie smiled at me, even then with one of those God-she’s-so-sexy-I’d-rob-a-convenience-store-for-her half smirk, half smiles. “Well, I think you’re a little weird, but I like that about you,” she said.
It took me almost three weeks to figure out she had been talking about us getting married and having kids one day.
“Dietrich,” Eric’s voice pulled me back into the present. He was staring at something out on the lake. “Can you get a houseboat or some shit like that out on this lake?”
I followed his gaze. He was looking at a sailboat. “Sure, it’s connected to the Calcasieu River.”
“We’re not that far from the hospital right now.”
“No,” I said slowly, “we’re not. And boats are required to have licenses so they’re easy to identify who they belong to. We’d just need a list of everyone in this area who’s connected to these people.”
“That might be doable. Abram’s still alive.”
“What?” Not many things would have startled me more right then.
Eric just shrugged.
“I thought he might come in handy again.”
“Holy shit, Eric, and you’re just now telling me this?” A passing mother cast a very nasty glare in my direction. I made a mental note that cursing around water parks wasn’t a good idea.
“I forgot,” Eric responded casually.
“You forget to pay an electric bill, you don’t forget someone’s not dead.”
“Hey, I only forgot to pay my electric bill once, and I didn’t want to tell you in front of Lottie because I didn’t know if that would just make her worry even more, and then you started hitting on me in the car…”
“Oh, shut the fuck up.”
My mental resolve not to curse in water parks had lasted less than a minute.
“That’s something they’re already working on. Getting a list, not shutting the fuck up.” Eric said.
I was starting to wonder if his invitation to let me hit him was still good.
“Sometimes, I really do hate you.”
“Sometimes I deserve it.”
I sighed and sank back against the bench. “Well, now what do we do?”
“What other kinds of boats could they hide her on?”
When had I become a boat expert? “There are some yachts around here, a lot of party barges. You’re from Alabama. Shouldn’t you know all this?”
“Eh, I’m not a very good Southerner. I don’t even drink Budweiser.”
“Nobody should drink Budweiser.”
“You’re German. You’re not allowed to have an opinion about American beer.”
“I’m American. I passed the test and everything. Did you have to pass a test?”
“Yeah,” Eric had the most deadpan expression on his face, “I had to be able to keep down a Budweiser.”
I honestly don’t know how our track record showed us to be as successful as we were. “Eric, maybe you should at least call someone and request a list of anyone Abram knows with any kind of boat registered in this area. All the way up the Calcasieu around Leesville. If you’re right about this, we don’t want to miss anyone.”
“Dude, I’d be seriously pissed off if I traveled across the universe and ended up in Leesville.”
“It could be worse. It could be Omaha.”
Eric nodded sagely, and took his phone out. “Let’s walk back to the car. With any luck, we’ll actually have somewhere to go by the time we get there.”
I had to repeat that twice in my head before it made any sense to me. But I got up and started walking while Eric made the phone call. By the time we reached our car, Eric had gotten his wish: a short list of names that had been provided by Abram who had boats registered anywhere in Southwest or Central Louisiana.
“Dietrich, where’s Highway 171?”
I took the phone from him to read over the list of names and addresses. “Not far from here. It runs through Moss Bluff.”
“You know that area?”
I shook my head. “No, I’ve driven through there a couple of times when I had to detour off the interstate.” I scanned the list and found the address he was referring to. “Why this one?”
Eric’s mind was still churning. Other than proximity and wishful thinking, for once, I wasn’t following his train of thought. “It’s the name. I swear I’ve heard it before, I just can’t place where.”
The boat was registered to Donald Cormier. “Eric, this is Louisiana. Do you know how many ‘Donald Cormiers’ probably live in this state? Hold on, I’ll check Google.”
“No, I mean I’ve heard it recently. You’re the one with the photographic memory. I’m guessing you weren’t with me?”
“Afraid not.” I handed him his phone. “But if it seems familiar, we should go. If you’re onto something, I’ll buy you a case of Budweiser.”
Eric groaned. “How about if I’m wrong you buy the case of Bud. It’ll be a fitting punishment for hallucinating shit.”
Despite the past twenty-four hours, I found myself in a surprisingly good mood, mostly because I still believed Lydia was alive, and Eric still just had that effect on me when I wasn’t wanting to kill him for finding out he had tried to kiss my fiancée. I couldn’t imagine ever not working with him. In fact, I was pretty sure I would hate this job if it weren’t for him.
The address we had been given was a business, a small hardware store with clay chimineas out front and a sign with missing letters that read “HURRICNE SESON BE PREPRD.” As if anyone who lived around here could forget that summertime in Louisiana meant massive mosquitoes and the potential for destructive storms. I would have taken the hurricanes over the mosquitoes.
There was a single car in the parking lot. “Who’s it belong to?” Eric asked.
I checked. “Adam Landry. I’ll bet there’s a ton of Adam Landrys in Louisiana too.”
“Shit.”
We’d both been hoping to find Donald Cormier. Sometimes, it really was that easy, despite what movies had people believe.
We parked and went inside, where even more clay chimineas greeted us by the door. These looked like pot-bellied Buddhas. They were creepy as hell. Eric thought so, too.
“What the fuck are these things?” he muttered.
A man in his forties with a scraggly graying beard and long, stringy hair came out from the backroom. In his red plaid shirt and Dickies pants, I couldn’t decide if he looked more like a hippie or a lumberjack. But he smiled, a pleasant smile that reached his eyes and he had the accent of a man who had spent his entire life in southwest Louisiana.
“May I help you boys?” he asked. I wondered if there was rulebook somewhere for Southern mannerisms that could tell me how old I would have to be before strangers stopped calling me a boy.
“We’re looking for Donald Cormier,” Eric answered. Apparently, being called a boy didn’t bother him, even though he was thirty-three.
“Ah, well, I’m Don, what can I do for you?”
Sometimes it really was that easy.
Except Don didn’t recognize us. He didn’t seem alarmed that we were there in his store. He didn’t know anything about Lydia. I decided to ask him about her anyway. “Do you know a young woman named Lydia, about twenty-six, from Baton Rouge?”
Don’s face lit up. “Yes, I…”
His smile faded as realization hit him. He may not have had anything to do with her disappearance but our presence couldn’t be good.
“What’s happened?” he asked, his voice low, gruff. Don looked angry. All of that pleasant salesman lumberjack hippieness was gone.
Eric glanced back toward the door. It didn’t look like anyone would be interrupting us.
“How do you know her?” I asked.
Don’s eyes were all fire. “Where is she?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we’re here. Do you know her friend as well?”
“Lottie? Is she gone, too?”
I didn’t like any of this. Lottie had never told me about Donald Cormier in Moss Bluff, Louisiana who owned a hardware store full of creepy chimineas.
“We need to talk, Don. Now.”
I expected him to argue with me, to keep insisting we tell him what happened to Lydia first, to throw one of the weird Buddha looking chimineas at us – they looked really heavy, but he had the whole lumberjack thing going on, he could probably do it – but he stepped around us and locked the door, then nodded toward the back.
“Let’s go, then.”
There was a small room that functioned as both an office and a break room and we sat at the table with him. He pushed aside a stack of papers, inventory and sales receipts – I wondered if any were for the portable Buddhas with the fire pits in their bellies – and folded his hands in front of him on the table. He still wore that expression of both rage and anxiety, but he waited for us to speak. If I had known how he knew Lottie and Lydia, I might have liked Donald Cormier.
One thing I had learned over the years is that a lot of times, just telling people the truth was the simplest way to get anywhere. Don struck me as the kind of man who would appreciate that.
“Lydia disappeared from work last night. We’re trying to find her. We think Willis McGrath was involved.”
Don didn’t seem to like that.
“What the hell was Willis McGrath doing in Baton Rouge?”
I didn’t want anyone else knowing about Lottie. So far, the only person who didn’t want to kill her for having restored a dead woman’s mind was Lydia, and now she was missing.
“Look, Lottie’s… I think you need to tell us how you know them.”
Eric suddenly sat up straighter in his chair. “Now I remember you!” He leaned toward me, excited that he’d finally grasped this elusive memory. “That day Lydia was telling me all about her past and coming here, she mentioned she’d reconnected with someone. She knew you from back home. You left when she was a kid.”
Don’s eyes widened, but he nodded in acknowledgment.
“How’d you know her?” I asked.
“I worked for Lottie’s family as well. I was very good friends with Lydia’s father. And she was…” Don sighed, a pained, sorrowful sigh, the anguish of a worried and terrified man who loved Lydia like a father. “That little girl was like a bright star. She pulled in everyone around her, and we couldn’t help but be happy with her around.”
“Then what? How’d you end up here? And you know what here I mean. You’re not the same kind of immigrant as me.”
Don shook his head slightly, clearly disturbed by talking about this so openly with strangers, but his love for Lydia won out. “All the boys, Lottie’s brothers, moved out and I was let go. Coming here… well, it’s a business, you know. They advertise. Send out recruiters. They check into your past because they won’t send any troublemakers. They make way too much money. It seems like you people put all your focus into building more destructive weapons; we built this. If people here found out what we were doing, they could shut us down, find out where all the openings are, close ‘em, maybe even get rid of us. I’ve studied history here.”
I squirmed a little in my seat. He wasn’t directing that comment toward me, but I couldn’t help feeling that way.
“Anyway, I had no family and no job and the way they were talking, they made it sound so…” Don sighed again. This time, it was a sigh of regret. “Well, I thought it would be different. I think a lot of us did. McGrath, he worked for them. Way I heard it, he was one of a handful of volunteers for their company who comes over every so often to keep things quiet here. Those guys back home are richer than God cause we have no way of telling anyone they’re lying to us.”
Holy shit. I was speechless. I had always thought of these people as adventurers, explorers, maybe some were more sinister, coming for the control and power they couldn’t have at home. But Don’s story was one of… capitalist greed? Exploitation? Corruption? Some themes really were universal. And Don’s story seemed completely genuine, but he was also obviously jaded.
“Why do you think they’re lying? Maybe they really believe this place is a paradise. If you can’t communicate and all,” I asked. I hated that Lottie had been manipulated like this.
“We can’t communicate. Guys like McGrath can. They came here with the knowledge of how to build whatever they needed or how to do it, I dunno. I’ve never seen it happen. Most of us won’t ever see it happen and they deny it anyway. But we aren’t stupid.”
Goddamn it. I wonder what they had told Lottie, what promises they had made her, what Eden they told her was here. If she had known what it was really like on this planet, would she have still come? Perhaps for women over there, this one was still a better option – at least if they arrived in a part of the world where women were treated with something even close to equality.
I decided I needed to trust him. I told him what had happened to Lottie; about Jackson’s visit; about Abram and McGrath and Lydia disappearing and our theory that they may be holding her on a boat and that’s why we had come to him.
Don listened intently to it all, never interrupting or insisting that Lottie’s resurrection was impossible as everyone else had. When I had finished, Don asked if he could see the list of names of people in the area. Eric handed him the phone.
“I know these guys. And I’d bet my store on one of ‘em being involved. But I wanna come with you.”
I glanced at Eric. It was a bad idea. A really bad one. A rookie kind of mistake to agree to something like that. But I had decided I liked Donald Cormier, and his knowledge of these people might be useful so I spoke before Eric could.
“Ok, but you listen to us, no arguing or hesitating because that can get you killed. And one day, you’ll tell me about Lottie as a child.”
Don tried to hide the smile threatening to pull at his lips. “Deal.”
Chapter 18
We were back in Lake Charles, standing outside a sprawling house on River Road that belonged to a business property investor named Perry Dennison. Across the street was a private slip. The small yacht that should have been docked there was gone.
“This is like the fucking alien mafia,” Eric mumbled.
If Don was offended, he didn’t show it. I’m pretty sure “alien” wouldn’t be politically correct.
“Maybe we should have taken my boat,” Don offered.
I looked out at the lake beyond him and shook my head. “I’m not a goddamned pirate. I don’t know how to board a moving boat. Although Eric was most likely a horticulturalist ninja in his past life.”
Eric liked his new title. Don just looked confused. Eric was going to perhaps bestow a new title on me when my phone vibrated in my pocket; it was Mark. Someone had finally contacted Lottie.
“That David guy, the all-muscle-man, called her. Wants her to meet you in Lake Charles.”
I should have fucking killed him when I was in Waco.
“We all figured they’d know you were there,” Mark continued, “but you’d better wait until some others show up anyway before you do anything. They’re on their way from Houston. It shouldn’t be long now.”
I didn’t want to tell him we didn’t really have anything to do right now anyway.
Instead, I asked, “Can I talk to Lottie?”
The phone went silent as he handed it over, then her sweet, melodious voice, rich like honey, was on the other end. God, I couldn’t believe how much I missed her already. “Dietrich, please come back soon.”
“I will. I met a friend of yours.”
She only had to think about it for a second. “Don?”
“Yeah, probably would’ve been helpful to know about him before we came down here, but you’re so damn adorable, I’ll forgive
you.”
Lottie snickered and I could picture the smile she was giving me now. If I were there with her, I’d be getting laid soon. “Hm, sorry the whole shock of having my best friend kidnapped was messing with my head.”
She wanted to ask about her, but she already knew I would have nothing to tell her. So I told her, “I love you. And I will be back soon.”
We disconnected just as a boat appeared on the horizon.
“Maybe we should get outta here,” Don suggested.
Eric and I watched the boat. It was getting closer. If it belonged to Perry, they were most likely coming back for us.
“Well,” I thought aloud, “it’s a trap, but it’d get us on board without playing pirates.”
Eric joined in. “And it’s an easy way to get in touch with Perry and hopefully McGrath.”
“And with any luck, Lydia’s on board.”
“They’ll search us. If David lays a hand on me, I’ll snap.”
I thought about that. “You don’t think David’s more handsome than me?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Don hadn’t said a word. He had just watched us with a kind of surprised curiosity and apprehension. He probably still thought we were cops.
We could hear the motor of the boat now; we needed to make a decision. “Let’s meet them,” I proposed. “We don’t have to board. No one will do anything stupid while we’re on the side of the street in the middle of the day.”
Eric agreed. Don looked uncomfortable but kept his word to keep his mouth shut and listen to us. We waited in silence as the small yacht pulled into its slip and docked. River Road wasn’t a very busy road. Only a few cars passed us and no one looked twice at the strange group of men, one of whom looked suspiciously like Paul Bunyan reincarnated in the 1960s, standing in front of a gated house like a group of would-be burglars. So much for community watch here.
As the motor cut off, the only sounds around us were the waves slapping against the side of the iridescent white boat and the occasional mosquito buzzing past my ear. Whoever was on board was taking his time. It was part of his game.
