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Music was drifting out the open door of the little cabin, some old-school BeauSoleil—“Parlez-Nous à Boire”—a rollicking two-step that seemed overly energetic for a quiet, gray morning. Out infront of the cabin on the broad wooden deck, a plump girl in bib overalls danced by herself, singing along off-key in a garbled mix of nonsensical English and faux French.
Nick stuck his head in the cabin. “Bonjour. Ça va?”
A small older woman with cat-eye glasses and a head of curly black hair looked up from reading a magazine at the counter. “Bonjour! Ça va!” she greeted him, a sweet smile lighting her round face. “Ça viens!”
“Bon. Ça va.I’m Lieutenant Fourcade from the sheriff’s office. You’re Mrs. Orgeron?”
“That’s me!”
“I’m looking for Luc Mercier. Is he around?”
“Mais non. He’s out on the boat, him.”
“He got a tour this early?”
“No. He’s just out doing whatever men do on boats,” she said. “He’s outta my hair, but he said he’d be back soon. He gotta be somewhere at ten.”
Nick checked his watch. “I’ll wait, then.”
“You ain’t found Marc yet?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“This ain’t like Marc to worry people,” she said, shaking her head. “Kiki, she’s sick over it. He come back now, she gonna kill him for making her worry so!”
“When did you last see him?”
“Saturday morning, early, but just from over here. I saw him and Luc in the yard on the other side. We were busy that day. I didn’t speak to him.”
“How’s he been lately?” Nick asked. “He’s got a lot on his plate, no?”
“That’s Marc. He can’t tell nobody no. He’s all the time taking too much on. He always been that way.”
“What’s his mood been like lately? Happy? Down? Upset about anything?”
She frowned a bit. “He got too much responsibility on him. And that wife…” She rolled her eyes. “She’s not from here.”
“I hear she wants to move back to Philadelphia.”
“C’est bon!She should go then, her! Won’t nobody here miss her, that’s for true!”
“What about the brothers? They been getting along?”
She pursed her lips and shrugged. “They’re brothers. They fight like a couple of damncouillons. What’s new?”
“What they been fighting about lately?”
“What don’t they fight about? If Marc says white, Luc says black. They always been that way. That’s nothing new. That’s just how they are. Don’t mean nothing.”
Her cell phone lit up and rang. She glanced over at it, unsure if she should pick it up or not.
“Go ahead,” Nick said. “I’ll wait outside. Thank you for your time.Merci.”
He went out the open door and around to the deck where the girl was still dancing—until she caught sight of him. She stopped abruptly and stared at him, her hands clutched together against her chest, her small almond-shaped eyes as wide as they would go in her round face.
“Bonjour,” Nick said. “You must be Noelle.”
It was difficult to pinpoint her age. She might have been a teenager or she might have been twenty-five. She had beautiful smooth skin and thin, dark shoulder-length hair pulled back from her face with a couple of ladybug barrettes like a small child might wear. She watched him with a child’s wariness of strangers.
