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“How long has she been gone?”
“I don’t know. A month or so,” she said, pacing back and forth behind the worn-out rust plaid sofa that looked like a relic from the eighties. “She used to talk about moving to New Orleans. Maybe she did.”
“Did she take her stuff with her?”
Rayanne didn’t answer.
Annie glanced around the front room, with its furniture that belonged in a landfill. The place smelled of cigarettes, mold, and mice. It was a mess. Dirty drinking glasses and take-out food wrappers sitting around on every surface. An overflowing ashtray on the coffee table. Looking through to the kitchen, she could see dirty dishes and food left out on the counter. The sour smell of neglected garbage drifted in. The place was a cockroach paradise.
On the upside, she didn’t see anything sitting around that might have come from Robbie Fontenot’s house.
“Do you have a job, Rayanne?”
“I got laid off.”
“From where? The lamp factory?”
“Don’t you have someplace else to go?” Rayanne asked irritably, tapping the ash off her smoke into an open beer can.
“Why?” Annie pushed back. “Are you expecting guests or something? I sprung you out of jail. I brought you home. I bought you cigarettes. I think you can answer a question or two. Did you get laid off from the lamp factory?”
“Yeah. So? Who cares?” she complained, pacing. “Shit job. Shit pay. Now I get unemployment. Works for me!”
“Robbie Fontenot worked at the lamp factory. Did you know him from there?”
Rayanne rolled her eyes dramatically and heaved a sigh worthy of a teenager. “I done told you a hundred and ten times already: I don’t know him! Jesus Christ!”
“All right,” Annie conceded. “I’ll let you get on with your busy social calendar. But I want you to call me if you see anything going on next door,” she said, handing her a business card. “Can you do that one thing for me, Rayanne?”
Rayanne took another pull on her cigarette as she looked at the card, frowning.
“And you call me if you need me. For anything,” Annie said. “I mean that.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
Annie let herself out, breathing the fresh air deeply to flush the smoke out of her sinuses. Farther down the street to her left, some kids were riding their bikes around in circles, popping wheelies. Nothing much else was going on. There were no houses directly across the street, so no doors to knock on for possible witnesses to anything going on at Robbie Fontenot’s place. She wondered if that might have been a deliberate choice on Robbie’s part. B’Lynn had said he didn’t want her spying on him, but he might not have wanted anyone else watching him, either.
She walked next door to his house and went around the back. Standing on the sagging porch, she looked across the alley, where another shitty house with peeling paint squatted in a yard full of weeds.
Just looking at it, she couldn’t know if the place was inhabited. The building looked like someone should have pushed it with a bulldozer into a hole. But that was certainly no guarantee that someone didn’t call it home. Not in this part of town.
The curtains were drawn on the back window. The back door was covered with a rusted white security screen door.
Trying to ignore the low-level hum of anxiety in her head, Annie crossed the alley. The windows along the side of the house were covered with weatherworn warped plywood sprayed with randomvulgar graffiti. The front yard was as weed-choked as the back, and strewn with litter. Someone had chucked a blown-out tire into the tall grass to collect rainwater and grow mosquitoes. There were no cars parked out front.
Same as in the back, the curtains were drawn on the front window, and the front door was decked out with a rusty white security door, a twin to the one around back. There were no obvious signs of life. Still, Annie’s heart beat a little faster as she climbed the steps.
She wondered how long before her situational anxiety would wear off. It was only her first day back on the job. She should have been more patient with herself, but the irrational fear that it might not ever go away had taken root in the back of her mind. She criticized herself for that, too.
She raised her hand to knock on the door, pausing as something caught her eye, just to the right of the doorframe—the button for a video doorbell.
That seemed a very odd thing on a house that appeared abandoned. No one could be bothered to mow the lawn, but someone had gone to the trouble of installing a security gadget. Why?
Drug house, she thought. Conveniently located on a block of addicts.
She went ahead and rang the bell, her pulse whooshing in her ears as she stepped to the side of the door and waited. No one came. She made herself ring it a second time, watching for a twitch of the front window curtains, but there was none. Somewhere, someone might have been watching her on an app on their phone, but nothing happened.
A kid of about ten or so cruised past on a bike as she stepped down off the front stoop, staring at her openly as he went by. Annie watched him make a wide U-turn and come back, still staring at her.
