AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“So what was this? Some kind of carjacking?”
“We don’t know at this point,” Nick said. “And I want to be clear, Mrs. Mercier: We don’t know that this is or isn’t Marc. Your husband may be alive and well. I encourage you to keep trying to call him and contact whatever friends you think might be in touch with him if he’s just gone off on his own for a time.”
He placed a business card on her desk. “And call me if you hear from him.”
Melissa nodded and dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. She rose slowly to her feet, still shaky. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to the ladies’ room to try to pull myself together…or just fall to pieces. One or the other.”
“Do you want me to walk you?” Faulkner asked.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Do you want me to get Shavon to go with you?”
“God, no. I don’t need her trying to help me have a great day today,” she said sarcastically. “I just need a moment alone.”
Nick stepped aside to let her pass. Her emotions seemed genuine. Uncommonly honest, he thought. In his experience, people more often than not tried to paint an image of perfect normalcy when speaking to law enforcement, no matter what a train wreck their lives might actually be. They lied, even about things that didn’t matter, because they were afraid of being judged or because they wrongly assumed the cops were out to get them, even when they’d done absolutely nothing wrong. But Melissa Mercier was either honest or one of the better actresses he’d come across.
“Well, this day has certainly taken an unexpected turn,” Will Faulkner said as they followed Melissa into the hallway. She turned left. Faulkner turned right. “Can I buy you a free cup of coffee, Lieutenant?”
“Thank you,” Nick said, following him to another office. If Faulkner had something more to say, he would listen.
“Have a seat,” Faulkner offered as he went behind his desk and busied himself with an expensive-looking espresso machine tucked into the built-in cabinetry. “I don’t want you getting the wrong idea about Melissa.”
“What idea would that be?”
“That she doesn’t care about Marc or that remark about hating it here…I mean, she does hate it here, but not without reason. I don’t want you to hold that against her. This place doesn’t always make strangers feel welcomed, and Marc’s family hasn’t helped with that. They’d just as soon she leave Marc and the baby here and go back to Philadelphia, never to be seen or heard from again. Marc’s mother would swallow him whole to keep him here if she had to. Melissa is the enemy.”
“And what is Marc’s feeling on being here, staying here?”
“I don’t know,” he said, dropping a pod in the coffee maker andpunching a button. “He’s stuck in the middle. This has been a rough year for both of them.”
“You’re good friends, yeah?” Nick asked.
“We all went to Tulane—Marc, Miss, and I,” he said, raising his voice a bit to be heard above the hissing and spitting of the espresso machine. “Of course, I was years ahead of them, but I worked with a group of the business students in a mentorship program when they were there, and we got to know one another. Little did any of us know at the time they would end up moving back here. That wasn’t the plan. They graduated and moved up north, went to work for Missy’s dad. He has an investment firm. I would never have expected them to come back. Then Marc’s dad got sick, and everything changed.
“Cream? Sugar?” he asked.
“Black is fine,merci.”
“I get it, you know?” he said as he handed Nick the steaming mug. “The mixed emotions of coming back to the hometown when you thought you were getting away. You thought the world was your oyster; then suddenly here you are, right back where you started. That’s not easy.”
“That’s what happened for you?” Nick asked, glancing around the room. One entire wall was covered in framed photos and award plaques and civic commendations for good works in Bayou Breaux and around the parish. Will Faulkner had a full life here.
“Yep. You know my older sister, Lindsay, she started this business. She and her partner, Pam Bichon. That’s one sad story after the next.”
“I remember.”
Pam Bichon had been brutally murdered, a case that had taken Nick down a rabbit hole of obsession—the killer’s and his own. Less than two years later, Lindsay Faulkner had fallen victim to a serial rapist and died from her injuries.
“I came back when Lindsay died,” Will said. “I had a good job inNew Orleans, had a life there, but someone had to deal with this business, and our parents were just broken by it all…”
“And you ended up staying.”
“I did. I was back and forth for a while,” he said, dropping another pod in the coffeemaker. “I still have business interests in New Orleans. But I’m from here. My family is here, old friends are here. Bayou Breaux was growing, and I saw opportunities…So I see it from both sides—getting pulled back but wanting to outgrow the place at the same time. Torn between duty and desire,” he said, dropping a pair of sugar cubes into his mug.
“Is that Marc?”
He sighed as if he were long since tired of the subject of Marc Mercier.
