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“They baiting gators for their swamp tours?”
Sos shrugged, the picture of innocence. “I dunno.”
He wasn’t going to rat the Merciers out for doing something he was probably doing himself.
“You ever hear of them dealing in stolen copper, cat converters, anything like that?” Nick asked.
“No. Troy, he was an easygoing guy. He didn’t like trouble, didn’t like people who made trouble. And Kiki, she’d run a man off with a shotgun if she didn’t like the look of him. Nobody mess with Kiki!” He laughed. “She’s a pistol. Talk about!”
Still annoyed with Kiki Mercier for pushing Annie, Nick refrained from comment. He kept his attention on the computer screen, fast-forwarding the video from the arrival of one vehicle to another. Truck after truck, SUV after SUV, no black Ford Raptor pulling the Mercier brothers’ boat. People came and went, none of them Marc Mercier or Luc Mercier. Hunting dogs ran in and out of the frame, their owners giving them the chance to stretch their legs before continuing on to their destination for the day.
“I told you,” Sos said. “He wasn’t here.”
“That’s interesting in itself,” Nick said. “Why wasn’t he here? He set it up. He named the time and the place. He’s normally a reliable guy. Where’s he at?”
He went to close the app at the 7:13 a.m. mark when a figure crossing the parking lot caught his eye and made him pause. A bald head the shape of a cinder block. A man the size of a farm implement.
He paused the video. “Do you know who this is?”
Sos squinted at the screen. “Mmmm…Big dude. He might be a Cormier. Them boys all got that side-by-side icebox look about them.”
“He didn’t come in and ask after Marc?”
“Not to me. You might ask T-Crapaud or Sharelle. If that dude came looking for breakfast biscuits, she gonna remember him for sure. He looks like the Incredible Hulk.”
Dozer Cormier, as described by Caleb McVay. Not in a Halloweencostume, but dressed in a camouflage jacket, just another hunter stopping by the Corners before heading out for a day of shooting. It might have meant nothing. Luc Mercier hadn’t said anything about anyone else meant to join him and Marc that day. And, for sure, eight out of ten men in the parish were hunters, at least.
Sos had lost interest and was looking out the window into the café. Fanchon and Annie sat at the table where they’d had their supper, Annie hugging the woman who had raised her, resting her head lovingly on Fanchon’s shoulder, both of them smiling as they watched Justin acting out some five-year-old silliness, hopping and dancing, beaming at his chance to be the center of all attention.
“Our girl, she’s doing good, no?” Sos said.
“Fanchon or ’Toinette?”
“Both, I reckon. We’re lucky men,” Sos said with a smile, patting Nick on the shoulder. “I could’a lost my Fanchon this summer, but here she is, gonna be right as rain. And Annie’s back at work. You good with that?”
“Her doctor gave her the okay,” Nick said.
“That’s not an answer,” Sos pointed out astutely.
Nick shrugged. “It wasn’t my choice to make. As you well know, she has a mind of her own. She wanted to go back to work. She was going stir-crazy at home.”
“Time for another grandbaby, I think,” Sos said, chuckling. “That’ll keep her busy. You can do something about that!”
Sos had been lobbying for them to have more children since Justin was still in diapers. Not that Nick was against the idea.
He looked over at Annie now, in bed beside him, curled up with her back to him. They had always planned on having two children, but as logical as the timing might have seemed, he also realized it was the worst possible time to broach the subject. She wanted to be back at work in part because she was good at it, but in part to reassure herself of that fact.
She had made a bad choice for a good reason that night in September. It had been late in the evening, and she had gone todeliver good news to a worried mother. No one could have foreseen the madness that unfolded that night. And yet, he knew she blamed herself for not waiting for him to go with her to that house and for turning her back for the briefest second on a woman she knew to be unstable. She had paid physically for those choices and continued to pay in the form of lost confidence and PTSD.
Nick couldn’t undermine her struggle to conquer those feelings by suggesting she didn’t need to go back to the job or that she wasn’t needed on the job, even if his strongest instinct as her husband was to keep her home and safe. He knew from his own experiences exactly what it was like to struggle with anxiety and self-doubt on the job. He had spent months struggling to climb out of the mental and emotional black hole his experiences in New Orleans had dumped him into. The shadow of anxiety and depression had never completely gone away, visiting him still in his darker moments. He had learned to control it, to head it off at the pass, to work through it, but that shadow never left for good. It hung out on the periphery, like a wolf, stalking, waiting for an opportunity.
He didn’t want that for Annie. He would do whatever he could to help her get to the other side of this experience, conflicted or not. She was his partner, his anchor. They would get through this together and come out stronger for it.
Their marriage had been on a roller coaster this year, with both of them struggling independently over the summer—him dealing with a particularly troubling and difficult sexual assault case and Annie dealing with Fanchon’s stroke and the possibility of losing the woman who had raised her. Both of them had been stressed and exhausted, which resulted in his being exceptionally blunt and short-tempered and Annie being hypersensitive, taking everything he said the wrong way. For the first time in their marriage, it had felt like they had one wheel off the tracks, dragging them toward the ditch. The silver lining of her injury had been to snap them both out of that nonsense. There was nothing quite like a near-death experience to reset one’s priorities in a hurry.
Annie rolled over now with a sigh and looked up at him. “Why are you still up?”
Nick closed his laptop and set it aside on the nightstand. “Just doing some research on Marc Mercier.”
