Chapter 13

13

Marc Mercier never made it to the Corners Sunday morning.

That truth kept replaying in Nick’s head as he scrolled on his laptop looking for any information on Mercier, trying to get a broader sense of who Marc Mercier was.

It was nearly midnight, but the wheels of his mind were still turning too fast for sleep, overstimulated by everything that had gone on during the day, too wound up even to successfully meditate, his usual go-to to decompress.

The lamp on Annie’s nightstand burned low, helping temper the more intense light of his computer screen. The house was quiet, but the wind was up outside, rattling the branches of the live oaks out in the yard. It was the kind of night he liked, snug in his home with his family, knowing they were all safe and healthy and secure, no matter what was going on outside. He couldn’t say the same thing for Marc Mercier, who had never shown up for his scheduled rendezvous with his brother Sunday morning and hadn’t been seen or heard from since.

Where the hell was he?

Favorite son, local hero, man who put his life on hold to help his family and his community…How did that guy go missing? That wasn’t a man who just up and left. Quite the opposite. Even if he wasn’t getting along with his wife at the moment, he had a new baby at home. He had friends. He had people who relied on him. He had made plans to meet his brother. He was driving a vehicle pulling a boat. How did that guy just disappear?

But Marc Mercier had never arrived at the Corners Sunday morning. That was a fact.

Nick and Sos had sat in Sos’s office after supper and gone through the security video from the parking lot. No sign of Marc Mercier or his truck.

The office was cramped but tidy, the desk pushed up against a wall with a large window looking out into the café, speaking to Sos’s need to be in on everything. He couldn’t bear the idea of isolating himself, even just to do his paperwork. He wanted an eye on his business, his customers, and his wife, who was still recovering from a stroke she had suffered in the summer.

“What are we looking for?” Sos asked as he took his seat behind his desk, eager to be part of the investigation, as Annie had predicted.

Even in his early seventies, Sos was fit and naturally athletic. He was built like a shortstop, with strong shoulders and a flat belly. People liked to tell him he resembled the actor Tommy Lee Jones, to his unending delight. He swiveled his desk chair back and forth like a dog wagging its tail.

“A black Ford Raptor towing a boat,” Nick said, pulling a chair around. “Marc Mercier’s rig.”

“I’m telling you, he wasn’t here,” Sos said. “Sunday morning? Mais non .”

“How well do you know him?”

“I know the Mercier boys. I knew their papa, Troy. He was a good man, him, God rest his soul. Give you the shirt off his back.”

“This would have been early,” Nick said. “Between five and six in the morning.”

Sos shook his head. “What you think? I’m laying in bed? Me, I’m up early on the weekends, you know. All the out-of-town sports coming to hunt and fish. They need bait. They need ammunition. They need fuel. They need directions. They need the bathroom. Me, I do every damn thing but wipe their asses for them,” he said with an easy laugh. “That’s the one thing nobody’s ever asked for! Dieu merci! ”

The Corners had been a mainstay on the bayou for decades. Miles from town on the edge of the basin, it had begun as an old-time general store, serving the rural population: farmers, swampers, commercial fishermen. Over the years it had evolved and expanded to its present incarnation as convenience store, café, swamp tour boat landing, with Sos and Fanchon Doucet at the helm for nearly half a century.

“You were busy Sunday?” Nick asked.

“Oh, yeah. You know how it is this time of year. T-Crapaud, he was working Sunday, too. And Sharelle Dupuis, she come in to make the breakfast biscuits. Those are big sellers for us on the weekends, those breakfast biscuits!”

“So, if it was busy and if he just pulled his rig in at the far edge of the parking lot, but didn’t come in to the store, you could have missed seeing him, no?”

“I suppose,” Sos conceded. “But why would he do that? Marc, he would come say hello. He would come get a coffee. Why he would stay in his truck like he don’t know me? Bah! No!”

“He was supposed to be waiting for his brother.”

“I never seen him, neither.”

“Really?” Nick asked. “Luc said he was here. He says Marc was gone by the time he got here.”

Sos shook his head. “Me, I never seen him. And Luc, for sure, he would have come said hello, him. They’re good boys, them boys. They was raised right. Look at Marc, coming home to help with the business when his papa was dying. And he was just in the paper for helping out Coach Latrelle with the youth football.”

“He’d been fighting with his wife, fighting with his brother, might have been hungover. He might not have been feeling social. Especially at that hour,” Nick said, commandeering the mouse and clicking on the icon for the security system. “Let’s have a look and see what we can see.”

“All right,” Sos agreed as Nick clicked on the camera view of the parking lot. “I’m gonna be big disappointed, me, if he’s on here and he didn’t come say bonjour to me that day.”

Nick didn’t bother to say that, in his experience, people were endlessly disappointing. Sos was an eternal optimist. The glass was always half full as far as he was concerned. Even if it was all but empty, just a drop or two was enough to give him hope.

There were times Nick envied Sos his optimism and the cushion it provided from some of life’s sharper edges. It had absorbed the blows of Fanchon’s stroke and buoyed Sos through her rehab. Nick had wished for a fraction of that faith when Annie had been injured, instead of the bone-on-bone kind of pain he had experienced fearing he might lose her in part or entirely. Wasted worry, as it had turned out, but he hadn’t found a way to let go of it, nevertheless.

“Do you do business with the Merciers?” he asked.

“Over the years, sure.”

“What kind of business do they run? Honest? Aboveboard?”

“ Mais yeah,” Sos said in that slightly overly bright tone that told Nick the Merciers were probably just as honest and aboveboard as they needed to be.

Not an uncommon attitude in these parts, where people bristled at government interference or regulation of any kind. If a Cajun didn’t think a rule was practical, then it didn’t apply. That went for the laws of man and the church. The Cajuns had spent 250 years finding a way to make a life in some of the most inhospitable country imaginable. They didn’t need any outsiders’ opinions or approval.

“They baiting gators for their swamp tours?”

Sos shrugged, the picture of innocence. “I dunno.”

He wasn’t going to rat the Merciers out for doing something he was probably doing himself.

“You ever hear of them dealing in stolen copper, cat converters, anything like that?” Nick asked.

“No. Troy, he was an easygoing guy. He didn’t like trouble, didn’t like people who made trouble. And Kiki, she’d run a man off with a shotgun if she didn’t like the look of him. Nobody mess with Kiki!” He laughed. “She’s a pistol. Talk about!”

Still annoyed with Kiki Mercier for pushing Annie, Nick refrained from comment. He kept his attention on the computer screen, fast-forwarding the video from the arrival of one vehicle to another. Truck after truck, SUV after SUV, no black Ford Raptor pulling the Mercier brothers’ boat. People came and went, none of them Marc Mercier or Luc Mercier. Hunting dogs ran in and out of the frame, their owners giving them the chance to stretch their legs before continuing on to their destination for the day.

“I told you,” Sos said. “He wasn’t here.”

“That’s interesting in itself,” Nick said. “Why wasn’t he here? He set it up. He named the time and the place. He’s normally a reliable guy. Where’s he at?”

He went to close the app at the 7:13 a.m. mark when a figure crossing the parking lot caught his eye and made him pause. A bald head the shape of a cinder block. A man the size of a farm implement.

He paused the video. “Do you know who this is?”

Sos squinted at the screen. “Mmmm…Big dude. He might be a Cormier. Them boys all got that side-by-side icebox look about them.”

“He didn’t come in and ask after Marc?”

“Not to me. You might ask T-Crapaud or Sharelle. If that dude came looking for breakfast biscuits, she gonna remember him for sure. He looks like the Incredible Hulk.”

Dozer Cormier, as described by Caleb McVay. Not in a Halloween costume, but dressed in a camouflage jacket, just another hunter stopping by the Corners before heading out for a day of shooting. It might have meant nothing. Luc Mercier hadn’t said anything about anyone else meant to join him and Marc that day. And, for sure, eight out of ten men in the parish were hunters, at least.

Sos had lost interest and was looking out the window into the café. Fanchon and Annie sat at the table where they’d had their supper, Annie hugging the woman who had raised her, resting her head lovingly on Fanchon’s shoulder, both of them smiling as they watched Justin acting out some five-year-old silliness, hopping and dancing, beaming at his chance to be the center of all attention.

“Our girl, she’s doing good, no?” Sos said.

“Fanchon or ’Toinette?”

“Both, I reckon. We’re lucky men,” Sos said with a smile, patting Nick on the shoulder. “I could’a lost my Fanchon this summer, but here she is, gonna be right as rain. And Annie’s back at work. You good with that?”

“Her doctor gave her the okay,” Nick said.

“That’s not an answer,” Sos pointed out astutely.

Nick shrugged. “It wasn’t my choice to make. As you well know, she has a mind of her own. She wanted to go back to work. She was going stir-crazy at home.”

“Time for another grandbaby, I think,” Sos said, chuckling. “That’ll keep her busy. You can do something about that!”

Sos had been lobbying for them to have more children since Justin was still in diapers. Not that Nick was against the idea.

He looked over at Annie now, in bed beside him, curled up with her back to him. They had always planned on having two children, but as logical as the timing might have seemed, he also realized it was the worst possible time to broach the subject. She wanted to be back at work in part because she was good at it, but in part to reassure herself of that fact.

She had made a bad choice for a good reason that night in September. It had been late in the evening, and she had gone to deliver good news to a worried mother. No one could have foreseen the madness that unfolded that night. And yet, he knew she blamed herself for not waiting for him to go with her to that house and for turning her back for the briefest second on a woman she knew to be unstable. She had paid physically for those choices and continued to pay in the form of lost confidence and PTSD.

Nick couldn’t undermine her struggle to conquer those feelings by suggesting she didn’t need to go back to the job or that she wasn’t needed on the job, even if his strongest instinct as her husband was to keep her home and safe. He knew from his own experiences exactly what it was like to struggle with anxiety and self-doubt on the job. He had spent months struggling to climb out of the mental and emotional black hole his experiences in New Orleans had dumped him into. The shadow of anxiety and depression had never completely gone away, visiting him still in his darker moments. He had learned to control it, to head it off at the pass, to work through it, but that shadow never left for good. It hung out on the periphery, like a wolf, stalking, waiting for an opportunity.

He didn’t want that for Annie. He would do whatever he could to help her get to the other side of this experience, conflicted or not. She was his partner, his anchor. They would get through this together and come out stronger for it.

Their marriage had been on a roller coaster this year, with both of them struggling independently over the summer—him dealing with a particularly troubling and difficult sexual assault case and Annie dealing with Fanchon’s stroke and the possibility of losing the woman who had raised her. Both of them had been stressed and exhausted, which resulted in his being exceptionally blunt and short-tempered and Annie being hypersensitive, taking everything he said the wrong way. For the first time in their marriage, it had felt like they had one wheel off the tracks, dragging them toward the ditch. The silver lining of her injury had been to snap them both out of that nonsense. There was nothing quite like a near-death experience to reset one’s priorities in a hurry.

Annie rolled over now with a sigh and looked up at him. “Why are you still up?”

Nick closed his laptop and set it aside on the nightstand. “Just doing some research on Marc Mercier.”

“Learn anything?”

“No. Nothing new. And that’s enough of it for tonight.”

“Was this light bothering you?”

“No, bébé , you know that light doesn’t bother me.”

“I know you say it doesn’t.”

“Because it doesn’t,” he insisted. “I kind of like it now, truth to tell. I can look over and watch you sleeping.”

“In the rare event I do,” she said.

He could hear the strain of frustration in her voice. She had struggled with sleep since her head injury, a primitive part of her brain fighting to keep her from fully letting go of consciousness. The resulting exhaustion only added fuel to the anxiety that never seemed to entirely go away. Keeping a soft light on seemed to help somewhat with getting her to sleep, so that was what they did, but Annie took it as a sign of some kind of weakness and rode herself for it unnecessarily.

“Come here, you,” he whispered, reaching for her. She snuggled in against him, her head finding the hollow of his shoulder. He kissed her hair. “My little puzzle piece,” he murmured, tightening his arms around her. “You were out pretty good there for a while.”

“Yeah. God forbid my brain should let me get away with that for too long.”

“Don’t be so hard on your brain, chère . It thinks it’s doing the right thing, keeping you safe.”

“I keep telling it I’m good now, that I’m not gonna die if I go to sleep. It’s not listening.”

“It’s only as stubborn as you are,” Nick said. “Don’t fight with it so hard.”

“I’m just so tired of it.”

“I know, bébé . But it will pass. You have to be a little more patient with yourself, that’s all.”

“I’m not good at that,” she admitted. “I feel like such a burden, and it’s all my own fault.”

“You have to let that go, ’Toinette,” he said quietly, pulling back and tipping her chin up to look in her eyes. “You can’t blame yourself for something someone else did. That woman made her own choices that night. You don’t need to keep paying for them. She’s the one going to prison. You don’t need to go with her. Let that go.”

“That’s easier said than done,” she whispered. “I made my choices, too, that night.”

“What good does it do to punish yourself?” he asked. “None. No one else is keeping score. What happened happened. It can’t be changed now, and you can’t move forward if you’re only looking back.”

“How’d you get to be so wise?” she asked with a crooked little smile.

“The hard way. The universe had to knock it into my head with a ten-pound hammer,” he confessed. “I’m trying to save you the experience.”

“Thank you,” Annie murmured. “You turned out okay.”

“I married well,” he said, smiling back at her. “It made me a better man.”

She leaned up and pressed her lips to his. “I love you.”

“ Je t’aime, mon coeur. Tu es mon coeur ,” he whispered. “Go to sleep, now, chère . I’ll keep you safe.”

She sighed, and the tension left her body as she slowly drifted off, and Nick fell asleep counting her heartbeats.