Chapter 12

12

He stood in the upstairs hall just outside the door of his old room, a silhouette in the moonlight. Faceless, but she was sure it was him. She recognized his outline, tall and lean, the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head.

Exhausted, she had fallen asleep in her clothes on his bed. She lay still now, afraid if she moved, he would go. She wanted to hold on to the feeling of relief, to the rare sense that maybe everything would be all right after all. She had thought he was lost, but there he was. The nightmare was over.

“I’m here, Mama,” he said.

“You sound so far away,” B’Lynn murmured.

“I’m right here. With you.”

“I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Come sit down.”

He made no move to come closer. The wind moved through the branches of the live oak in the backyard, and the moonlight coming in through the hall window rippled over him, and for a split second she thought she could see his face and his sad, sweet smile.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“I’ve been right here,” he said.

“No,” she said, not to correct him, but to stave off the fear that was rising in her chest. “No, no, no.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t stay.”

“Don’t go,” she said, her heart pounding. “Please don’t leave me. I want to help you. Whatever it is, we can deal with it, Robbie. You can make it this time.”

“You can’t help me now,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry, Mama.”

He took a step back deeper into the shadows.

“No, Robbie, no. Don’t leave me. Not again. Please!”

“I’m sorry, Mama.” He sounded so far away. Miles away. “So, so sorry…”

She could physically feel him pulling back, pulling away from her, and then he was gone.

B’Lynn sat up with a gasp, her heart racing. She leapt off the bed and ran into the empty hall. The wind blew again, and the dancing branches of the oak tree created a strobe effect with the moonlight in the hallway. She was alone. He was gone…if he had ever been there at all.

It had to be. He had to have been there. She was so sure.

The wind rose again. Something banged downstairs.

“Robbie!” she called, racing down the stairs, stumbling, barely catching hold of the banister to prevent falling headlong to her death. “Robbie, wait!”

In her hurry to catch him, she missed the last step, turned her ankle, and went down in a heap, crying out. She scrambled clumsily to her feet and ran down the hall to the kitchen.

She had left the under-cabinet lights on, bathing the lower part of the room in a warm yellow glow. The room was empty. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator. She rushed through into the laundry room and out the back door onto the porch. There was no one.

“Dammit, Robbie!”

Pulling in a big, deep breath, she launched herself down the steps and ran barefoot, wincing, limping hard, across the cool, damp grass to the gate in the tall privacy fence at the back of the garden. The latch was undone. She pulled the gate open and looked down the alley.

There was no car, though she thought she caught a glimpse of red taillights at the end of the street. Her lungs burning, her legs feeling heavy, she hobbled to the end of the alley to try to see, but if there had been a car at all, it was gone by the time she got clear of the trees.

“Dammit!”

She rubbed at the throbbing pain in the elbow she had banged against the hardwood floor in her fall. A maelstrom of emotions swirled through her—panic, frustration, hope, desperation, doubt.

Had he really been there? she wondered as she walked back to her yard and closed and latched the garden gate. Had he come and gone through this gate, or had the gardener neglected to fasten the old latch? How many times had she scolded Robbie as a child, as a teenager, about making sure that latch caught? Back when they had a family dog that had delighted in escaping the yard to run amok through the neighbors’ gardens.

“Robbie Fontenot, you latch that gate! If Bubba gets out one more time…”

Had she dreamed it? she wondered, pulling back from the old memory. Had she just dreamed the whole thing? It had seemed so real. The sense of his presence, the sound of his voice…the sadness in it, the sadness in his eyes. You can’t help me now…

She pressed a hand to her chest as if her heart physically hurt as she climbed the back porch steps. All the aches and pains from her fall began to make themselves known. She felt exhausted. She felt a thousand years old.

How many times in the past twenty-seven years had she flippantly tossed out the phrase That boy will be the death of me ? When had she started to believe that might be true? The first time he OD’d? The third time he’d gone into rehab? The fifth time he’d called her from a police station? The last decade of her life had been consumed by her son’s addiction. How much more could she stand?

The wind rose again, shaking the oak tree and stirring the wind chimes in her memory garden. A chill went through her as the sweat evaporated from her skin. People liked to say the chimes in a memory garden were rung by the spirits of the lost loved ones being remembered there. B’Lynn wanted to scoff, but she had been born and raised on generations of south Louisiana superstition that even her hard-earned cynicism couldn’t completely erase. Maybe she wanted to believe it. But that thought gave rise to another: Had she been visited by Robbie or by his spirit? You can’t help me now…

Tears rose and crested in her eyes on a wave of dread.

“Stop it. Stop it!” she ordered herself, combating her fear with anger directed at herself. She had to keep her wits about her. Panic didn’t help anything.

“Go inside, B’Lynn,” she muttered. Nothing good would come from wandering thoughts of ghosts and spirits.

Should she call Detective Broussard? And tell her what? That she might have hallucinated Robbie being in her house? That she couldn’t tell reality from wishful thinking? That she might have seen taillights going down the side street? She hadn’t seen the car, if there had even been a car. She couldn’t say it was Robbie’s car if she wasn’t sure there had been a car at all.

As she opened the back door to go inside, she realized it had been unlocked when she came out. She had just pulled it open and dashed out without thinking. It should have been locked. She always locked the doors before she went upstairs at night, always. She was a creature of habit and routine by nature. She had her nightly rituals of checking the doors and turning out the lights. Sure, she’d had a couple of glasses of wine after supper, but had she really missed locking this door?

Robbie had a key…

She made a point of locking it now, staring at the dead bolt as she turned it, trying to imprint the act on her memory. Maybe she was getting Alzheimer’s. Hard to say if that would be a curse or a blessing at this point in her life. There were days when she was just so tired and done with it all. Drifting away into oblivion had a certain appeal.

That thought came with a terrible nip of guilt. Whatever went on with Robbie, she still had a daughter to live for. Lisette was in college. She had her whole bright young life ahead of her. She had yet to go out in the big world and make a career, and fall in love, and have a family of her own. B’Lynn’s life would, presumably, at some point, take on that extra layer of being a grandmother and a mother-in-law. She had another life to look forward to.

She tried to envision herself as one of those “active seniors,” joining clubs and traveling the world with a gaggle of friends her own age. Hard to do, seeing as she didn’t really have friends anymore. She wasn’t good company. The things most women her age talked about seemed frivolous and unimportant to her. And God knew, no one wanted to hear about Robbie’s latest misadventure due to drugs. Most people she knew preferred to keep her at arm’s length, as if her son’s addiction and the trouble that came with it might somehow be contagious.

She couldn’t really blame them. She wouldn’t have wished any part of her struggle now on anyone—except her ex-husband, of course. She was not at all above wishing he could know this misery. But Robert had cut ties long ago and severed himself from all responsibility. How nice for him. The asshole. (Not a word she would have used aloud, having been raised by proper Southern ladies, but she didn’t hesitate to think it.)

She wondered if he had bothered to return any of Detective Broussard’s calls, but she doubted it. Robert had a narcissist’s ability to deny anything that might inconvenience him. He disguised it as being decisive and in charge. Admirable alpha male qualities. It never failed to amaze her how much of his toxic behavior she had taken as a gift wrapped in a big red bow instead of seeing it for what it was: a big red flag. And all of it to the detriment of her children, Robbie in particular. She would never forgive him for that. Or forgive herself for allowing it.

All too late to cry about it now, though she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—let it go.

“Are you gonna take that mad with you to the grave, chère ?” her grandmother would have said. “It won’t keep you warm in the ground.”

Needing to sit down, to gather her thoughts and steady her nerves, B’Lynn poured herself half a glass of red wine from the open bottle on the counter near the stove. She sat down at the kitchen table, on a chair that had already been pulled out.

Had she left it that way when she’d gone upstairs? That wasn’t any more like her than leaving the back door unlocked, but it was something she had corrected Robbie for a million times.

Always in a hurry, he was the kid who left doors open, gates open, chairs pulled out. He was always gone, on to the next moment, the next adventure. What got left behind left his mind. His focus was always forward as he dashed off to football practice, basketball practice, baseball practice, running out the door with half a sandwich in one hand, in too big a hurry to sit down and finish a meal.

As sad as she was, she smiled at the memory. So many good memories from those years in this house.

She sipped her wine and looked around the kitchen and thought of all the family meals she’d made there, the holiday gatherings, the laughter, the love.

She thanked her lucky stars and her maternal grandmother for willing the house to her and insisting it be in B’Lynn’s name and her name only, years before any hint of trouble in her marriage, Mamere Louisa having always possessed a healthy, hard-earned distrust of men in general. When the end of B’Lynn’s marriage had come, she had at least had her home. By Louisiana law, an inheritance was considered separate property, not community property to be divided among the combatants in a divorce. In the end, Robert had packed up his Porsche and gone, leaving her to the comfort of this house and its generations of memories.

It was a gracious old Queen Anne Victorian, built in 1886 with the requisite gables and wraparound porch, located in a neighborhood of similar homes, in the part of town historically populated by doctors and lawyers and successful businessmen. It had been in her mother’s family all that time. B’Lynn would pass it on to her daughter when she died. Eventually, some descendant wasn’t going to want the house and its expensive upkeep, but she would be long gone before that happened. The idea of all those memories dying was too sad to contemplate.

There was enough history in this house to fill a book, and in fact, one of her great-aunts had written one that sold a few copies every year down at the historical society. There was an entire chapter on the supposed ghosts that haunted the place. B’Lynn couldn’t confirm any of the tales herself, though now she wondered if she hadn’t encountered one tonight.

You can’t help me now…

No. She couldn’t think that he might be dead. She’d been on that roller coaster all day, first hearing about the murder victim found outside of Luck, then holding her breath waiting for a call from Detective Broussard to confirm or deny the awful possibility. She desperately needed to hang on to the renewed hope that had come after that call. He wasn’t on a slab in the morgue at Our Lady; therefore, she wouldn’t believe he was dead.

Better to think he’d actually been there and gone tonight than that he was gone and never coming back. But whether he’d been there or not, she wasn’t sure what to do next. If she told Detective Broussard what had happened, what then? Would law enforcement stop looking for Robbie if they believed he’d been to the house? Would B’Lynn admit to the detective she’d taken half a sleeping pill earlier and be accused of hallucinating the whole thing? Would a detective see the bottle of wine on the counter with two-thirds gone and decide she was a drunk? God knew, they probably thought she was unstable anyway after her performance at the sheriff’s office this morning.

No. She wasn’t going to say anything to Annie Broussard about any of it. What difference would it make if Robbie had been there or not? She still didn’t know where her son was. She still needed help finding him. That was the bottom line. It wouldn’t be a lie, exactly, not telling, just a sin of omission, a religious technicality. If that kept the investigation going, that was a good thing.

B’Lynn checked the clock. It was nearly one in the morning. She was exhausted, but the wheels of her mind were spinning now. Even on half a sleeping pill and a glass of wine, she wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. She would lie awake and wonder, if he’d been there, where had he gone? Back to his place?

She rinsed out her wineglass and went in search of her shoes and car keys.

—

Melissa woke with a start from a fitful sleep, her heart racing, her pulse pounding in her ears. She held her breath and tried to listen beyond the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh .

The wind had come up outside, shaking the trees, creating a creepy black-and-white show of moonlight and shadows on her bedroom walls like something from an old Hitchcock movie. She had forgotten to pull the drapes closed over the sheers on the sliding patio door, and now she suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable.

The overwhelming feeling of being watched crawled over her, sending a shiver down her back. She wanted to leap up and run to close the curtains, but at the same time she felt too afraid to do so. What if she went to the window and someone was looking in? What if the sense of a presence was what had awakened her in the first place? And if she turned the bedside light on, she would only be more exposed to anyone standing outside.

Now she began to wonder if the door was locked. She had gone out that door earlier to sit by the small firepit and have a glass of wine with Will. What if she hadn’t locked it when she had come in?

She wished now she had asked him to stay. To hell with how that looked to her nosy neighbors. What did it matter if they saw a strange car in her driveway overnight? She didn’t give a shit what these people thought of her. What did she care if a bunch of Louisiana hicks thought she was a whore, or believed she’d killed her husband, or anything else? She was moving back to Philadelphia as soon as she could manage to make it happen.

If someone didn’t break into her house and kill her first.

She tried to tell herself that was a ridiculous thought, even as she glanced around for something to arm herself with. The story of Will’s sister being raped and murdered in her own home just blocks away from there sat in the back of her mind, stirring her anxiety. Lindsay Faulkner had no doubt thought that would never happen to her, either.

The only thing within reach was her TV remote. Melissa snatched it up and held it in her hand like a club.

The baby monitor on her nightstand came alive, and she startled at the sudden sound of her daughter stirring and whimpering.

Madeline. What if someone had come into the house and was now across the hall looming over her baby in her crib?

The baby began to cry.

Melissa glanced at the patio door, then at the door to the hallway. Her imagination raced to picture herself on the way to Madeline’s room and some black-clad, faceless assailant rushing in through the patio door, running up behind her, knocking her to the floor, her stupid TV remote flying out of her hand, useless.

From somewhere out in the house came a loud Bang! Melissa jumped out of the bed, her heart pounding like a hammer in her chest.

Should she call 911? Where was her phone? She usually charged it on the nightstand overnight, but it wasn’t there. Where had she left it? On the vanity in the bathroom? In the kitchen? Or had she left it out on the patio table? She’d had a little too much wine. She’d been slightly tipsy when Will stood up to go. She might have just left the phone out there when she’d gone to see him out.

Shit.

Tears rose in her eyes as the baby’s cries became louder and more insistent. Was someone right this minute across the hall, lifting her daughter from her crib with the intention of taking her? She wouldn’t put that past Kiki, who had spent half the day and all evening blowing up Melissa’s phone. Where is Marc? What have you done to Marc? Why aren’t you on TV pleading for Marc to come home?

Drunk. Hysterical. Vicious. Lunatic. Bitch. Stealing Madeline from her crib would be just something she would do.

Her instincts overriding her fears, Melissa threw the TV remote on the bed and ran for the door. No one was taking her daughter without going through her.

She bolted across the hall into the nursery, where a night-light cast a warm glow. There was no Kiki, no masked assailant, just Madeline sitting up in her crib, wailing as she tried to gnaw on her tiny fist.

Melissa scooped her daughter up and held her close and tight. Madeline was warm and wet, uncomfortable and inconsolable. She wailed and wriggled in Melissa’s arms, wrenching herself one way and then the other. She’d been fussy for days now as a new tooth worked its way through her sore, swollen gum.

For a moment, Melissa forgot about anything else but her baby’s comfort. Madeline needed changing and some ointment on her gums. She would get her comfortable, calm her down, sit and rock her back to sleep.

Bang!

That fast, she went back to panic mode.

She needed to find her phone. Oh for the days when every house had landline phones in practically every room. She had one device to connect her to the outside world, and no idea where she’d left it.

“I’ll be back, sweetheart,” she whispered to the baby, kissing her cheek and setting her back in her crib.

She went to the door of the nursery and stood there for a moment, trying to listen as the baby wailed behind her. She stuck her head out into the hall and looked both ways, seeing nothing but darkness.

“Fuck this shit,” she muttered.

She went back into the nursery and snatched up the child-size baseball bat Marc had bought in anticipation of having a son. He had insisted on keeping it for Madeline, willing to settle for a tomboy until they could have another baby.

“As if,” Melissa muttered, creeping back out into the hall.

She found the light switch and flipped it on. If she was going to be murdered in her own home, she at least wanted to see her killer.

There was no one in the hall.

Had she left her phone in the kitchen after Will had gone? She had brought their wineglasses in and rinsed them out. Maybe she’d left the phone on the counter. Bat in hand, she walked toward the heart of the house.

“If you’re in here to kill me, I already called the cops!” she bluffed loudly.

She paused at the entrance to the dining room and listened for anyone scrambling to get out a door or climb out a window. She thought she heard a muffled sound, like something shuffling or thumping. Maybe out on the porch that wrapped around the entire house.

She flipped the dining room light on. Nothing. No one.

Bang!

She jumped at the sound, much closer now than it had been before.

Outside, the wind came up again.

Thump, thump. Bang!

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she muttered as sudden relief washed through her.

She knew what that sound was. This had happened once before, back when they had first moved in.

The house, built in the nineties, was done in the Caribbean plantation style, with French doors and windows all around, each of them fitted with a set of shutters. Not the decorative fixed kind, but fully functioning shutters, able to be closed and locked in the event of a hurricane. It seemed a ridiculous expense to her, considering they were miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. Will argued that people there liked the authentic historical details. Touches like working shutters and the wrought iron holdbacks that kept them open set this development apart from the cookie-cutter tract homes of the same era in other parts of town.

When she and Marc had first moved in, one of the holdbacks (called shutter dogs for reasons she couldn’t fathom, like many things in the South) had worked itself loose in the brick wall, allowing the shutter to move with the wind, rattling and banging against the side of the house during a storm. Obviously, the same thing had happened again.

She went to the French doors and turned on the porch lights. There was no one lurking outside the door. The wind came up slightly again, and again she heard the thump, thump, thump. She unlocked the door and stuck her head out.

As the wind came up again, she could see one of the shutters by the living room door moving, the shutter dog clearly pulled quite far out of its mooring in the brick. She would have Will send his handyman tomorrow to fix it. She would ask, at least. If he could find the guy, if the guy wasn’t gone fishing or out killing animals, maybe he would show up in a day or three, or next week, or next month. People there had their own sense of time and their own sense of what was important or necessary or an emergency. In the meantime, she would shove a big plant pot in front of the shutter to hold it back against the wall.

Her anxiety pushed to the back of her mind by her annoyance, Melissa set the baby baseball bat on the dining room table and went out onto the porch. Barefoot, dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, she was instantly cold. Another thing she hated about this place: the weather. It was always too hot or too cold or too humid or pouring rain. She conveniently ignored the fact that Philadelphia had more than its share of shit weather, too, including snow, which she also hated.

As she pushed a heavy planter with a giant fern toward the offending shutter, she wondered where she would be right then if she had chosen to go to college in California instead of at Tulane. Probably sitting in San Francisco, enjoying actual culture, or living in the wine country, married to a successful restaurateur or the scion of a fabulous winery. She sure as hell wouldn’t be in Louisiana, cursing the day she’d married the son of a junk dealer.

This wasn’t at all how her life was supposed to have turned out—nor Marc’s, for that matter. Or so she thought. She thought he had wanted away from this place and these people. She thought he wanted more from life than small-town friends and reliving his high school glory days. She thought he had wanted the life they had been building in Philadelphia. But maybe he’d been miserable all along in a place where no one knew him, where no one cared that he’d led his high school football team to the state championship, where no one in their circle of acquaintances wanted to go hunting or fishing all weekend, and he would never be a headline in the local newspaper for helping out his old coach. Maybe that life had been as much his mistake as this life was hers.

As she stood back and looked at her solution to the shutter problem, one of her father’s gems of sage wisdom played in her mind: Don’t hang on to a mistake just because you spent a long time making it .

The wind came up again, and the big oak tree beyond the patio moaned as it rattled its branches, an eerie, otherworldly sound that scratched at Melissa’s nerves. She stared out into the darkness of the yard that was intermittently illuminated by silver light as clouds scudded across the moon.

The sense of being watched came back to her, and goose bumps raced down her arms. She hugged herself against the chill and stood very still for a moment, her imagination racing. She told herself she was being ridiculous, that she was just on edge and letting her imagination run away with her.

She spotted her phone then, lying face down on the little patio table on the pavers just off the porch. Her heart beat a little faster at the idea of going off the porch to get it. She didn’t want to move away from the house, but she couldn’t leave her phone there, either.

It sat there on the patio table like a piece of bait, waiting for her to step off the relative safety of the porch.

“Just get it, Melissa,” she muttered.

She dashed off the porch, grabbed the phone, and rushed back inside, her heart racing a hundred miles an hour. Her hands were trembling as she closed the door and turned the dead bolt.

“You’re so ridiculous,” she told herself. “Pull it together, girl.”

Even as she tried to tamp down her nerves, the phone rang, and she shrieked and dropped it like a hot rock on the floor.

Kiki, she thought. Goddamn it. Calling at this hour to continue her drunken tirade. Melissa bent down and picked the phone up, turning it over expecting to see Kiki’s info on the screen. But she didn’t recognize the number.

She never answered calls from strange numbers. But a call in the middle of the night…Maybe it was that detective—Fourcade. Or bad news. What other kind of call came in the middle of the night? Someone had found Marc…

She slid the bar on the screen and answered. “Hello?”

There was nothing but silence on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

No one spoke. She heard what sounded like the wind rattling the branches of a tree.

Tears filled her eyes as unease crawled over her skin like a hundred snakes.

She ended the call and immediately brought up her contact list and tapped one. The phone on the other end rang three times before a sleepy voice answered.

“Hello? Miss? Are you okay?”

“No. I’m scared. Will, can you come over?”

“I’ll be right there.”