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Favorite son, local hero, man who put his life on hold to help his family and his community…How did that guy go missing? That wasn’t a man who just up and left. Quite the opposite. Even if he wasn’t getting along with his wife at the moment, he had a new baby at home. He had friends. He had people who relied on him. He had made plans to meet his brother. He was driving a vehicle pulling a boat. How did that guy just disappear?
But Marc Mercier had never arrived at the Corners Sunday morning. That was a fact.
Nick and Sos had sat in Sos’s office after supper and gone through the security video from the parking lot. No sign of Marc Mercier or his truck.
The office was cramped but tidy, the desk pushed up against a wall with a large window looking out into the café, speaking to Sos’s need to be in on everything. He couldn’t bear the idea of isolating himself, even just to do his paperwork. He wanted an eye on his business, his customers, and his wife, who was still recovering from a stroke she had suffered in the summer.
“What are we looking for?” Sos asked as he took his seat behind his desk, eager to be part of the investigation, as Annie had predicted.
Even in his early seventies, Sos was fit and naturally athletic. He was built like a shortstop, with strong shoulders and a flat belly. People liked to tell him he resembled the actor Tommy Lee Jones, to his unending delight. He swiveled his desk chair back and forth like a dog wagging its tail.
“A black Ford Raptor towing a boat,” Nick said, pulling a chair around. “Marc Mercier’s rig.”
“I’m telling you, he wasn’t here,” Sos said. “Sunday morning?Mais non.”
“How well do you know him?”
“I know the Mercier boys. I knew their papa, Troy. He was a good man, him, God rest his soul. Give you the shirt off his back.”
“This would have been early,” Nick said. “Between five and six in the morning.”
Sos shook his head. “What you think? I’m laying in bed? Me, I’m up early on the weekends, you know. All the out-of-town sports coming to hunt and fish. They need bait. They need ammunition. They need fuel. They need directions. They need the bathroom. Me, I do every damn thing but wipe their asses for them,” he said with an easy laugh. “That’s the one thing nobody’s ever asked for!Dieu merci!”
The Corners had been a mainstay on the bayou for decades. Miles from town on the edge of the basin, it had begun as an old-time general store, serving the rural population: farmers, swampers, commercial fishermen. Over the years it had evolved and expanded to its present incarnation as convenience store, café, swamp tour boat landing, with Sos and Fanchon Doucet at the helm for nearly half a century.
“You were busy Sunday?” Nick asked.
“Oh, yeah. You know how it is this time of year. T-Crapaud, he was working Sunday, too. And Sharelle Dupuis, she come in to make the breakfast biscuits. Those are big sellers for us on the weekends, those breakfast biscuits!”
“So, if it was busy and if he just pulled his rig in at the far edge of the parking lot, but didn’t come in to the store, you could have missed seeing him, no?”
“I suppose,” Sos conceded. “But why would he do that? Marc, he would come say hello. He would come get a coffee. Why he would stay in his truck like he don’t know me? Bah! No!”
“He was supposed to be waiting for his brother.”
“I never seen him, neither.”
“Really?” Nick asked. “Luc said he was here. He says Marc was gone by the time he got here.”
Sos shook his head. “Me, I never seen him. And Luc, for sure, he would have come said hello, him. They’re good boys, them boys. They was raised right. Look at Marc, coming home to help with the business when his papa was dying. And he was just in the paper for helping out Coach Latrelle with the youth football.”
“He’d been fighting with his wife, fighting with his brother, might have been hungover. He might not have been feeling social. Especially at that hour,” Nick said, commandeering the mouse and clicking on the icon for the security system. “Let’s have a look and see what we can see.”
“All right,” Sos agreed as Nick clicked on the camera view of the parking lot. “I’m gonna be big disappointed, me, if he’s on here and he didn’t come saybonjourto me that day.”
Nick didn’t bother to say that, in his experience, people were endlessly disappointing. Sos was an eternal optimist. The glass was always half full as far as he was concerned. Even if it was all but empty, just a drop or two was enough to give him hope.
There were times Nick envied Sos his optimism and the cushion it provided from some of life’s sharper edges. It had absorbed the blows of Fanchon’s stroke and buoyed Sos through her rehab. Nick had wished for a fraction of that faith when Annie had been injured, instead of the bone-on-bone kind of pain he had experienced fearing he might lose her in part or entirely. Wasted worry, as it had turned out, but he hadn’t found a way to let go of it, nevertheless.
“Do you do business with the Merciers?” he asked.
“Over the years, sure.”
“What kind of business do they run? Honest? Aboveboard?”
“Maisyeah,” Sos said in that slightly overly bright tone that told Nick the Merciers were probably just as honest and aboveboard as they needed to be.
Not an uncommon attitude in these parts, where people bristled at government interference or regulation of any kind. If a Cajun didn’t think a rule was practical, then it didn’t apply. That went for the laws of man and the church. The Cajuns had spent 250 years finding a way to make a life in some of the most inhospitable country imaginable. They didn’t need any outsiders’ opinions or approval.
