Missing 62
The bakery was called Sucré, which was either charming or pretentious depending on your mood, and my mood on Monday morning was somewhere in the middle.
I'd been up since five. Not insomnia exactly, more like my body had decided sleep was not a serious requirement for the human condition.
I'd lain in the dark for an hour listening to the ceiling fan and thinking about a room full of people I didn't know and a gold charm I couldn't throw away.
Minutes had passed, then turned into hours, and at one point I had given up.
So I waited. Made coffee, opened the fridge, saw nothing that could be swallowed without preparation, and closed it.
Sat down. Watched the Spanish moss behind the window.
At 07:25 I left the apartment because I couldn’t take it anymore.
The charm was in my pocket. I'd put it there, not really knowing where to put it.
Main Street was quiet at seven-thirty. Thibodaux Senior was yawning while unlocking his front door.
Two women I recognized from the congregation were walking with an active pep in their step past us all — waving their hiking poles with enthusiasm I couldn’t understand.
And the heat — the heat — turned out was an early riser — already there, sitting on everything like a cheap voyeur.
I had a list. Coffee (because the first one hadn’t been enough), drop off the August volunteer schedule at the printer, pick up the donation envelopes Darlene had ordered three weeks ago and forgotten about. Ordinary Monday things.
I was two storefronts away from Sucré when I saw her.
On a flyer.
It was stapled to an old telephone pole outside the bakery, between a notice about a lost cat and a flyer for a lawn service, the kind of thing you walked past a hundred times without registering.
But for some, bizarre reason, I did register it.
White paper. A photograph, slightly grainy — taken on a phone and then printed on a home printer, by the looks of it.
A girl. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Dark hair. The flyer said MISSING in large letters across the top and beneath the photograph a name — Celeste Taylor, last seen July 8th — and a phone number.
I checked my phone for the date. It was the 12th today. The flyer was new. And what more, I had seen that face before.
The fundraiser. I remembered the pale dress, the window, the glass that she’d nursed all evening, not daring to touch it. She looked different in the photo but I could’ve sworn that was the girl I’d seen yesterday.
If the flyer said she’d last been seen on the 8th and I had seen her on the 11th—
“You look like you've seen a ghost.”
I turned. Billy was standing behind me with a paper coffee cup in one hand and his sunglasses pushed up into his dark blond hair, looking at me with that expression of his that was always doing at least two things simultaneously.
“This girl was at the fundraiser,” I told him, pointing a finger at the flyer.
He looked at it. Something moved through his face — there and gone.
“I don’t seem to recall,” he mused, narrowing his eyes at the photo. “But then I’d been drinking well before the fundraiser. Can’t remember half of it.”
“She's been missing since the 8th,” I emphasized.
“So the flyer says.” He looked back at me and whatever had moved through his expression was gone now, replaced by that easy charm of his. “Have you eaten?”
“Billy—”
“Because I haven't, and Sucré does a brown butter croissant that is to die for. Besides, you look just sweet enough to enjoy a little morning diabetes.” He was already moving toward the door, already holding it open. “Come on. I'll buy.”
Inside, Sucré was cool, air conditioned, and smelled like vanilla and burnt caramel. We took a table by the window — Billy's choice, which put his back to the street and my face toward it. I noticed it but didn't comment.
He ordered in French, which the girl behind the counter clearly appreciated, and came back with two coffees and a plate that had a croissant on it. And something else besides. A slice of cake — small, frosted, dark red.
“Red velvet,” I said as he set it in front of me.
“You’re really observant, M. Has anyone ever told you that?” He laughed and dropped into his chair before breaking off a piece of the croissant. “So. It’s seven and some change. What are you doing out of bed at this ungodly hour?”
I wrapped both hands around my cup. Outside the window Main Street was waking up, a slow Monday assembly. The telephone pole was visible from where I sat. The flyer still attached.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I admitted.
“Ah. A fellow insomniac.” He shot me a smile, ripping off another piece of his croissant. I hadn’t touched the cake. Couldn’t stomach the red.
“The fundraiser,” I said.
“What about it.”
“It wasn't what I thought it would be.”
Billy considered his croissant. “And what did you think it would be?”
“A fundraiser,” I said, deadpan.
“I’m not following.”
“The cherry,” I said.
The croissant went down. His hands stayed on the table, easy, relaxed.
“A man gave me a cherry and suddenly everything felt… wrong.”
Billy regarded me for a moment, then— “Where is it now?”
“My pocket.”
Something in his jaw twitched. “Show me.”
I reached inside the pocket and felt for the smooth, polished metal. Caught it by the stem and pulled out.
“What does it mean, Billy?” I asked, placing it in between us.
He looked at it for a long moment, and then at me — for an even longer one.
The morning light came through the window and I realized that Billy Arceneaux would have been straightforwardly likeable in a different life.
This one — the one he was living right now, required him to be something more complicated.
“It means,” he said carefully, “that Judah has very expensive taste and extremely poor timing.” He picked up his coffee. “And that you should probably stop carrying it in your pocket.”
“Should I throw it away?”
He didn't answer that.
“Billy.”
“I think,” he said, “that you should finish your cake. And then I'll take you home.” His gaze met mine. “Some questions don't have answers that make things better. You understand me?”
I understood him.
I ate the cake. It was good — dense and sweet with a cream cheese frosting that was doing its best against the heat — and Billy talked about something else entirely, a story about his Aunt Ida and a parish council meeting that had apparently devolved into something requiring an apology from three separate parties.
I laughed where I was supposed to laugh and asked the right questions and watched the telephone pole over his shoulder and thought about Celeste Taylor.
The bathroom was at the back, past the counter and through a narrow hallway that smelled like cleaning supplies and old wood.
I took longer than I needed to. Stood at the sink and ran cold water over my wrists — a thing I did when I needed to think clearly, had done it since I was a teenager — and looked at myself in the mirror above the basin, trying to see what they all saw in me. That old man at the fundraiser. Billy.
Judah.
I thought about the day he’d come over to fix the shower. And then the way he’d acted when I was leaving the fundraiser.
I should’ve asked for a raise for how much I spent out of my day on thoughts about him.
I dried my hands and went back through the hallway and out the front door.
Billy was leaning against the Jaguar. Smoking — one ankle crossed over the other, his face turned toward the street — people watching, one would guess.
I looked back at the telephone pole, to take one last look at Celeste, and realized the flyer was gone. Ripped clear off. How did I know it was ripped off? Because the edges were still there.
“Let’s move it, slowpoke,” Billy called, pushing off the car.
Judah came by at noon with the same toolbox and different hands — or rather the same hands, which was the problem, which I was trying not to think about as I let him in.
I told myself this was a professional arrangement between an employer and an employee and nothing about it was complicated.
Unless you counted his tongue complicated.
I was still deciding on that.
It didn’t take him long to fix the showerhead this time.
I sat on the couch with a book that I was trying to read — and failing — and listened to the silent clink of instruments in the bathroom.
When he came out, his shirt was dry — his hands held nothing but the toolbox and he looked like he was ready to leave right away. I looked at the ink on his forearms and then at the book in my lap.
“Should hold now,” he said. “Pressure's better than it was.”
“Thank you.”
But he didn't leave right away. Instead, he surveyed the apartment. “In daylight this place looks bigger,” he mused. “Would probably benefit from a quick paintjob,” he said, brushing his hand against the wall.
I didn’t want to talk about painting the walls or whatever else he considered casual conversation.
“I was out this morning,” I told him. “Ran into Billy. We went to this bakery on the Main.”
“Sucré,” he offered.
“Yes,” I agreed.
Judah put the toolbox on the counter and leaned against it, arms crossed across his chest. “How is he?”
“Fine.” That’s the word, isn’t it? I was beginning to use it like a true citizen of St. Franc.
He narrowed his eyes.
I'd been deciding since the car ride home whether to say it.
In the car with Billy's cigarette smoke still in the air and the empty telephone pole in my rearview mirror, I'd told myself I wouldn't. I'd told myself it was nothing, it was a flyer, missing persons flyers went up on poles all the time in towns like this — it didn't mean anything.
It certainly didn't mean what the cold specific feeling in my chest was suggesting it meant.