Night Moves: Dream Man/After the Night (30 page)

Most people wouldn’t have suspected murder. Most people wouldn’t now be afraid that poor Mr. Pleasant had somehow run afoul of the same person who had killed Guy. But neither had most people been dragged out of their home in the middle of the night and thrown into the dirt; until Renee and Guy had disappeared, Faith’s life had been predictable, if a bit grim. But that night her trust in the comforting ordinariness of life had been shattered, and she had never regained that sense of security, of obliviousness to things that just didn’t happen to normal people. It was as if a curtain had been torn aside, and after that night she was
acutely aware of all the dangers and what-ifs. Bad things were not only possible; in her experience, there was a damn good chance they would happen. She had held Scottie’s hand as he died, she had identified Kyle’s body in a morgue . . . Yes, bad things happened.

“What are you going to do?” the little secretary asked, automatically accepting that Faith would do
something.

“File a missing person’s report,” Faith said, because it was the only thing she could think to do. Mr. Pleasant had disappeared as suddenly and thoroughly as Guy Rouillard had; he had been asking questions about Guy. Coincidence? Not likely, but neither did she have any evidence that would warrant a criminal investigation. The best she could do was file a missing person’s report. At least that would trigger an investigation of some sort.

She asked directions to police headquarters, and managed to find it with only two wrong turns. A desk sergeant directed her to the proper office, and soon she was seated in a straight-back chair reciting what information she had to a tired detective in a tired suit, who nevertheless managed to seem interested.

“You called the motel where he’d been staying, and he’d checked out?” Detective Ambrose asked, his world-weary eyes warming a bit when he looked at her.

“The clerk didn’t actually see Mr. Pleasant. He said the key was left on the nightstand, and Mr. Pleasant’s things were gone.”

“Had the room been paid for in advance?”

Faith nodded.

“Nothing unusual in that, then. Let’s see. No one has seen him since he left Prescott, the mail is piling up at his office, there’s no answer at his home, and he has a bum ticker.” The detective shook his head. “I’ll go by his house and see what I can find, but . . .” He hesitated, sympathy in his expression.

But probably the old guy’s heart failed, was what he was thinking. Faith hunched her shoulders in misery. She would hate it if Mr. Pleasant had died, and she hadn’t been there to hold his hand or even attend his funeral. She had checked only the current admissions at the hospitals, not whether
he’d been a patient any time in the past week. But he’d known about his heart, had been prepared, had even been waiting to join his wife; she would grieve, but there would be a sense of rightness if he’d gone that way. The real nightmare would be if the detective couldn’t find him. Then she would fear the worst, and have no way of knowing for certain.

She extracted a business card from her purse and handed it across the desk. “Please call me if you find anything,” she said. “I didn’t know him very well, but I liked him a lot. He was a sweet old man.” To her horror, she realized she was referring to him in the past tense, and flinched.

The detective took the card, and rubbed his fingers along the thin edges. “There’s something I’d like to know, Mrs. Hardy. What was he investigating for you?”

She’d known he would ask, and told him the truth. “Twelve years ago, my mother ran away with her lover. I wanted Mr. Pleasant to find them, if he could.”

“And did he?”

She shook her head. “He hadn’t the last time I talked to him.”

“Which was . . . ?”

“I had dinner with him, the night before he left the motel.”

“Did anyone see him after that?”

“I don’t know.” It was easy to see the direction of this line of questioning. At least the detective was taking her seriously.

“Did he seem all right when he left?”

“He seemed fine. I had some unexpected company, and Mr. Pleasant left right after dinner.”

“So you weren’t the only one to see him?”

She gave him a faint smile. “No.”

“Who was your visitor?”

“A neighbor, Gray Rouillard. He came to see about buying my house.” It was amazing how far the bare facts could be from what had really happened. She was becoming an expert at exposing the tip while keeping the rest of the iceberg of truth submerged.

“Gray Rouillard,” Detective Ambrose repeated, tired
eyes lighting with recognition. “Would that be the same Rouillard who played football for LSU, oh, ten or so years ago?”

“Almost thirteen years,” she said. “Yes, he’s the same man.”

“The Rouillards are big stuff in this part of the state. Well, well. So you’re selling your house to him?”

“No. He asked to buy it, but I don’t want to sell.”

“Are you on good terms with him?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh.” He seemed disappointed. Faith stared at him a moment, then her mouth curved in a tiny smile. This was the South, after all. Pro football had made some inroads, but college football still reigned supreme.

“No, I don’t have any influence with him to get tickets to the games,” she said.

He shrugged, and a responding smile twitched his lips. “It was worth a try.” He clicked his pen and rose to his feet, indicating that he had no more questions to ask. “I’ll see what I can find out about Mr. Pleasant. Will you be in town awhile longer, or are you going home now?”

“I’m going home. My only reason for driving down was to see if I could find him.” Gratefully she stood up from the straight-back chair, and refrained from stretching.

He put his hand on her arm, the touch light. “You know my first check will be of the obituaries,” he said gently.

Faith bit her lip, and nodded.

His hand made two brief pats. “I’ll let you know.”

She cried during most of the drive back to Prescott. She had cried very little in the past twelve years, some tears shed for Kyle and more for Scottie, but the thought of losing Mr. Pleasant made her ache inside. She hadn’t had much room for optimism in her life, and she expected the worst.

Detective Ambrose was on the ball. When she checked the answering machine immediately on arriving home, there was a message from him: “I’ve checked Mr. Pleasant’s residence, and there’s no sign of him. The mail has piled up there, too, and the neighbors haven’t seen him.” A pause. “He hasn’t been listed in the obits, either. I’ll keep checking, and get back to you.”

He wasn’t there. The thought echoed around and around in her mind. No one had seen him since he’d left Prescott.

Assuming he had ever left.

Pure rage began to build, and push aside the grief. Her mother and Guy had created a tangle, twelve years ago, that was still wreaking destruction. Faith had to absolve Renee of any involvement in Mr. Pleasant’s disappearance, since her mother hadn’t known the man existed, but she was still part and parcel of the root cause.

For Faith, deed followed closely on the heels of thought. Furiously she picked up the telephone and dialed her grandmother’s number.

She was thwarted, however, by the endless ringing on the other end. No one was home.

She called four more times before she got an answer, and her grandmother’s cracked voice called Renee to the phone.

“Who is it?” she heard Renee ask in the background.

“That girl of yourn, the youngest one.”

“I don’t want to talk to her. Tell her I’m not here.”

Faith’s hand tightened on the receiver, and her eyes narrowed. She heard her grandmother fumbling with the phone again. She didn’t wait for the parroted excuse. “Tell Mama that if she doesn’t talk to me, I’m going to the sheriff.” It was a bluff, at least at this point, but a calculated one. Renee’s response to it would tell her a lot. If her mother didn’t have anything to hide, the bluff wouldn’t work. If she did—

There was a pause as the message was relayed, then more fumbling with the telephone. “What on earth are you talkin’ about, Faithie? What’s the sheriff got to do with anything?” The tone was too bright, too cheerful.

“I’m talking about Guy Rouillard. Mama—”

“Would you quit harping about Guy Rouillard? I told you, I ain’t seen him.”

Faith suppressed the nausea roiling in her stomach, and made her voice more soothing. “I know, Mama. I believe you. But I think something happened to him that night, after you left.” Don’t let Mama think she was suspected of anything, or she’d close up tighter than a miser’s purse.

“I don’t know nothing about that, and if you’re as smart
as you think you are, missy, you’ll stop pokin’ your nose into other folks’ business.”

“Where did you meet him that night, Mama?” Faith asked, ignoring the motherly advice.

“I don’t know why you’re so worried about him,” Renee said sullenly. “If he’d done what he should, I’d’ve been taken care of. You kids, too,” she added as an afterthought. “But he kept puttin’ it off, waiting until Gray was out of school—well, it don’t make no difference now.”

“Did you go to the motel? Or did you meet him somewhere else?”

Renee drew in a seething breath. “You’re like a bulldog when you get something on your mind, did you know that? You always were the most stubborn of my kids, so bound and determined to have your way that you’d do what you wanted, even knowin’ your Pa would slap you for it. We met at the summerhouse, where we usually went, if you just have to know! Go nosing around there, and you’ll find out in a hurry that Gray ain’t nearly as easygoin’ as Guy was!”

Faith winced as Renee slammed down the phone, then drew a deep, shaky breath as she replaced her own receiver. Whatever had happened that night, Renee knew about it. Only her own self-interest could stir her to do something she didn’t want to do, so she had a reason for not wanting Faith to talk to the sheriff. Getting her to admit it, however, would take some doing.

It had to be the summerhouse, of course, Faith thought with resignation. Why couldn’t Guy and Renee have rendezvoused at a motel, in keeping with the American tradition? Faith’s memories of the summerhouse were bittersweet, like everything else connected with Gray Rouillard. She didn’t want to see it again, for doing so would remind her too vividly of the child she had been, of the long hours she had spent lurking at the edge of the woods, hoping for a glimpse of Gray. She had lain on her belly in the pine needles and contentedly watched him and his friends swimming in the lake, listened to their boisterous shouts of laughter, and woven fancy daydreams of one day joining in their fun. Silly dreams. Silly child.

There, too, she had watched Gray making love to Lindsey
Partain. Her stomach tightened now as she thought of it, and her hands curled with an impotent mixture of anger and jealousy. At the time, she had merely thought how beautiful he was. Now, however, she was a woman, with a woman’s needs and desires, and she didn’t want even to think of him making love to another woman, much less see it.

That had been fifteen long years ago, but she could still call up his image in her mind as if it had been yesterday. She could hear his deep, smoky voice murmuring French love words and husky reassurances, see his powerful young body moving between Lindsey’s spread legs.

Damn him. Why had he kissed her, that day in New Orleans? It was one thing to dream of his kisses, and another to know exactly how he tasted, how soft his lips were, how it felt to be in his arms and feel his erection thrusting insistently against her stomach. It was unfair of him to feed her hunger, and then try to use it against her. But then, everything about Gray was unfair. Why couldn’t his hair have thinned over the years, rather than remaining that thick, vibrant mane? Why couldn’t he have put on weight, developed a beer belly and worn his pants slung low under it, rather than honing down to such lean muscularity, even more finely tuned than during his football days? And even if he hadn’t changed, why couldn’t
she
have, altering enough so that he no longer affected her so violently, or her heart would beat normally in his presence?

Instead, in that respect, she was still the adoring girl who had spent hours, weeks,
months
of her childhood lying on her belly in the woods, her eyes straining for a glimpse of her hero. Not even finding out that her hero could be a ruthless bastard when he wanted had been able to shake that painful fixation.

She didn’t want to go back to the summerhouse, to the scene of her youthful foolishness. What could she possibly find there, after twelve years? Nothing.

But no one else had looked at it with her eyes. No one had suspected that Guy Rouillard might have spent the last hours of his life there.

Faith growled at herself. She was tired and hungry, after the long drive to New Orleans and back, as well as exhausted
by worry over Mr. Pleasant. She didn’t want to go to the summerhouse, but she had just given herself a convincing argument on why it was necessary. And if she was going, she should do it now, while the afternoon sun was still strong.

She grabbed her keys and stalked out of the house.

The best way to get there, she supposed, was the way she had gone when she’d been eleven. There was a road from the Rouillard house to the lake, but she could hardly take that route. From her younger days of roaming and spying, however, she knew the Rouillard land as well as she knew her own face. She drove to a secluded spot close to the old shack where she had grown up, but when she reached the last curve before the shack would come into view, she stopped the car and sat for a moment, hands gripping the steering wheel. She couldn’t bring herself to drive around the curve. The shack had probably fallen in by now, but that wouldn’t ease her memories. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to relive the memories of that night.

Pain was a lump in the middle of her chest, obstructing her breathing, making her eyes burn. She didn’t cry. She had cried for Mr. Pleasant, for Scottie, for Kyle. She hadn’t cried for herself since the night Renee had left.

Well, delaying wouldn’t accomplish anything except putting off dinner, and she was already starving. She got out of the car and locked the doors, and dropped the keys into her skirt pocket. Brush grew thickly along the sides of the road, now little more than a track as the vegetation gradually reclaimed the land. She had to pick her way around some briar bushes, but once into the woods, it was fairly easy to walk. She picked up a stick, in case she came across a snake, but she wasn’t at all afraid. She had grown up in these woods, played in them, hidden in them when Amos had been drunk and slinging his fists at anyone who got in his way.