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“You know, the first thing I thought when B’Lynn told me the story of her son was that he was probably dead of an overdose somewhere,” she said. “I thought I was all set for a bad outcome, but now the closer that comes to being true, the less ready I feel to accept it. There’s a part of me that wants to tell B’Lynn there’s still some slim hope. Would that be a bad lie or a good one?”
“Either way, I’m sure she knows a lie when she hears one, good or bad.” Nick brushed her hair back from her face and gave her a sad smile. “I know you want something good to happen for her,chère,but she hasn’t just been down this road before; she’s lived on it for a decade. She knows every monster. She’s followed her son into every dark alley. She has, no doubt, prepared herself for the worst many times. It won’t be your fault if that’s the bad news you end up having to give her. She knows that.”
That was an ironic truth, Annie thought as she drove to the Belle Terre neighborhood—that the woman she wanted to protect from her son’s fate was better equipped to handle the truth than Annie was to give it.
The day had absolutely drained her. A low-grade headache was beginning to throb in the back of her skull, reminding her of the last time she’d made a late-night house call on a troubled mother of a troubled son.
This wasn’t the same thing at all, she knew. The anxiety that idled in the background of her psyche these days began to rise to the fore now just because she was too tired to fend it off, not because B’Lynn posed any threat to her. Fatigue and her brain chemistry were a bad combination.
She parked in front of the Fontenot house and sat for a minute to pull herself together and push the anxiety back in its box. She wasn’t in danger. She didn’t need to be afraid. She wasn’t alone. Nick had followed her in his vehicle—to assuage his own nerves as much as to assure her. They both had their scars to deal with from that night in September.
The neighborhood was aglow with expensive landscape lighting around the grand houses. Across the street, a man was walking his spaniel and talking on his phone. This was just an average night for the above-average people who lived there. Most of them were likely sitting in their living rooms watching TV, their thoughts far removed from drug addiction and police corruption and murder, unless that was the plot of a prime-time cop show.
Her legs felt leaden as she climbed the front steps to B’Lynn’s porch. She wanted to just go sit on the porch swing and not ring the bell, but she pushed the button just the same.
B’Lynn answered the door in leggings and an oversize cashmere hoodie the color of moss, her hair up in a messy bun, a cut crystal glass of bourbon in one hand.
“You look like you could use this,” she quipped, the worry in her eyes belying her tone of voice.
“I just wanted to stop by and give you an update,” Annie said. “It’s been a long day.”
“Coffee, then? Tea?”
“Nothing, thanks. I won’t be long.”
“I saw the story about that police officer crashing in the swamp,” B’Lynn said, leading her into a cozy front parlor with a fire in the fireplace and a pair of comfortable blush pink velvet love seats facing each other on either side of an antique mahogany coffee table that had probably been sitting there for a hundred years. Soft music played in the background. They each took a seat, B’Lynn curling her legs beneath her like a deer, both hands wrapped around her glass as if she took some comfort just holding it.
“That was Robbie’s car he was after, wasn’t it?”
“We think so,” Annie said. “Although the license plate came back to another vehicle.”
“You think the car’s been stolen. Isn’t that what they do with stolen cars? Change the license plates?”
“Sometimes, yes. It’s something to do if you don’t want a car recognized for one reason or another.”
“You don’t think it was Robbie driving.”
“We have reason to believe someone else has been driving the car,” Annie admitted. It was painful to watch the hope come and go from B’Lynn’s face, like a faint little light brightening and dimming as it began to fail.
B’Lynn pulled in a big breath, bracing herself.
“I can’t say who it might be,” Annie said. “We don’t know enough, don’t have any concrete identification, but we’re working on it.”
“Well, that’s more than anyone else has done,” B’Lynn said primly, and took a sip of her drink. “Thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me,” Annie said. “I wish I had something better to report. At this point, I still have a lot of questions and not enough answers.”
“I imagine you didn’t get anything useful out of my ex-husband. He felt compelled to complain in a text that I had sicced you on him, like an attack dog. A mental image that brought a smile to my face, I have to say.”
“He’s quite the perpetual victim, isn’t he?” Annie said.
“Oh, yes. Poor Robert, the star of every tragedy to befall our family. Not to say that he didn’t suffer at the time. He did. We all did. Was he at all helpful to you?”
“No,” Annie said. “He didn’t have anything to contribute.”
“That’s the story of his role as a parent, right there in a nutshell: nothing to contribute.”
“I confess, I have a hard time imagining you married to him.”
