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“That’s all right, Valerie,” Annie replied with a phony smile. “I wouldn’t have drunk it anyway.”
Valerie narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together in a pissy line as she turned on her high heel and left the room.
“She doesn’t like me,” Annie confessed casually when the secretary had gone. “I know too much about her sordid past.”
“She doesn’t like me, either,” B’Lynn said as she peeled back the tops on both creamers and dumped them into the coffee. Her hands were still trembling. She wrapped them around the mug and raised it to her lips. “But I did call her a liar and almost knock her flat.”
“She’s been called worse,” Annie said. “She said you wanted to see Sheriff Noblier. Do you know him?”
“I’ve met him. My husband knows him, has supported him in the past. I was hoping if I could appeal to him directly, maybe something would happen.”
“Your husband, he didn’t try to reach out to the sheriff himself?”
“No.”
A short answer with a long story behind it, Annie suspected.
“Robbie’s father isn’t involved in his life anymore.”
“So your son wouldn’t have reached out to him?”
“No.”
Annie wroteDivorced?but didn’t ask the question yet, glancing again at the rock on the woman’s left hand. Remarried, perhaps, not that it mattered.
“This deal you have with your son,” Annie started, trying to pick her way through a minefield of wrong words. Why was a grown man that much under his mother’s thumb? She needed the story withoutputting the woman on the defensive. “Tell me more about that. It seems very formal. Is there a reason behind it?”
B’Lynn frowned and looked away again, considering her answer. Would she tell the truth? Would she tool the truth to suit her needs? It was a straightforward question, Annie thought. There should have been a straightforward answer.
“My son has had his issues.”
“What kind of issues?”
She set the mug down a little too hard and smiled a brittle smile. “Here we go! This is where I tell the truth and you stop listening, and nothing more happens because you’ve made up your mind. That’s exactly what happened with the town police. That’s exactly what happened when I came here the first time.”
“I can’t help you if I don’t know the whole story,” Annie said.
“And when you know the whole story, you won’t want to help me.”
“You don’t know that,” Annie said, leaning forward, resting her forearms on the table. “I’m a mother, too. And I literally came into work this morning because I wanted to be able to help someone. That’s why I do what I do. But I need to have all the facts—good and bad.”
B’Lynn Fontenot stared at her for a long moment, pretending to weigh her options when she actually had none.
“My son has a drug problem,” she began. “He’s had a drug problem off and on for a long time. He’s been in and out of trouble, in and out of jail, in and out of rehab. He’s been clean recently,” she hastened to add. “He’s been checking in with me every day, twice a day. That’s our deal since he got out of rehab this time. I’ll help him out with money, and in any other way I can, but he has to stay clean, and he has to stay in touch.”
“How long has he been out of rehab?”
“Five months, and he’s been doing well. He had a job at the lamp factory, but they had layoffs recently…”
Annie kept her expression carefully neutral. An addict just outof rehab needed stability and little successes to keep them encouraged and moving forward one small step at a time. Losing a job might easily have been enough of a stressor to send Robbie into a depression, looking for an escape, looking for something to numb the pain of his disappointment.
“He was looking for another job,” B’Lynn said. “He was optimistic. He told me he had a line on something.”
“Do you know what?”
“He didn’t say.”
“You heard from him on Halloween at what time?”
