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As the wind came up again, she could see one of the shutters by the living room door moving, the shutter dog clearly pulled quite far out of its mooring in the brick. She would have Will send his handyman tomorrow to fix it. She would ask, at least. If he could find the guy, if the guy wasn’t gone fishing or out killing animals, maybe he would show up in a day or three, or next week, or next month. People there had their own sense of time and their own sense of what was important or necessary or an emergency. In the meantime, she would shove a big plant pot in front of the shutter to hold it back against the wall.
Her anxiety pushed to the back of her mind by her annoyance, Melissa set the baby baseball bat on the dining room table and wentout onto the porch. Barefoot, dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, she was instantly cold. Another thing she hated about this place: the weather. It was always too hot or too cold or too humid or pouring rain. She conveniently ignored the fact that Philadelphia had more than its share of shit weather, too, including snow, which she also hated.
As she pushed a heavy planter with a giant fern toward the offending shutter, she wondered where she would be right then if she had chosen to go to college in California instead of at Tulane. Probably sitting in San Francisco, enjoying actual culture, or living in the wine country, married to a successful restaurateur or the scion of a fabulous winery. She sure as hell wouldn’t be in Louisiana, cursing the day she’d married the son of a junk dealer.
This wasn’t at all how her life was supposed to have turned out—nor Marc’s, for that matter. Or so she thought. She thought he had wanted away from this place and these people. She thought he wanted more from life than small-town friends and reliving his high school glory days. She thought he had wanted the life they had been building in Philadelphia. But maybe he’d been miserable all along in a place where no one knew him, where no one cared that he’d led his high school football team to the state championship, where no one in their circle of acquaintances wanted to go hunting or fishing all weekend, and he would never be a headline in the local newspaper for helping out his old coach. Maybe that life had been as much his mistake as this life was hers.
As she stood back and looked at her solution to the shutter problem, one of her father’s gems of sage wisdom played in her mind:Don’t hang on to a mistake just because you spent a long time making it.
The wind came up again, and the big oak tree beyond the patio moaned as it rattled its branches, an eerie, otherworldly sound that scratched at Melissa’s nerves. She stared out into the darkness of the yard that was intermittently illuminated by silver light as clouds scudded across the moon.
The sense of being watched came back to her, and goose bumps raced down her arms. She hugged herself against the chill and stood very still for a moment, her imagination racing. She told herself she was being ridiculous, that she was just on edge and letting her imagination run away with her.
She spotted her phone then, lying face down on the little patio table on the pavers just off the porch. Her heart beat a little faster at the idea of going off the porch to get it. She didn’t want to move away from the house, but she couldn’t leave her phone there, either.
It sat there on the patio table like a piece of bait, waiting for her to step off the relative safety of the porch.
“Just get it, Melissa,” she muttered.
She dashed off the porch, grabbed the phone, and rushed back inside, her heart racing a hundred miles an hour. Her hands were trembling as she closed the door and turned the dead bolt.
“You’re so ridiculous,” she told herself. “Pull it together, girl.”
Even as she tried to tamp down her nerves, the phone rang, and she shrieked and dropped it like a hot rock on the floor.
Kiki, she thought. Goddamn it. Calling at this hour to continue her drunken tirade. Melissa bent down and picked the phone up, turning it over expecting to see Kiki’s info on the screen. But she didn’t recognize the number.
She never answered calls from strange numbers. But a call in the middle of the night…Maybe it was that detective—Fourcade. Or bad news. What other kind of call came in the middle of the night? Someone had found Marc…
She slid the bar on the screen and answered. “Hello?”
There was nothing but silence on the other end of the line.
“Hello?”
No one spoke. She heard what sounded like the wind rattling the branches of a tree.
Tears filled her eyes as unease crawled over her skin like a hundred snakes.
She ended the call and immediately brought up her contact list and tapped one. The phone on the other end rang three times before a sleepy voice answered.
“Hello? Miss? Are you okay?”
“No. I’m scared. Will, can you come over?”
“I’ll be right there.”
13
Marc Merciernever made itto 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?
