29

Bastian woke up hours later. He’d slept. Thank God! It had been in Bo’s recliner, which was ironic enough to make him chuckle, but he’d finally been able to give his mind and body a rest.

His stomach felt sour. He hadn’t been eating enough and the alcohol had left him dehydrated and shaky. But at least his thoughts were clear. He’d been afraid he was losing his mind, was terrified he’d wind up in an institution, where Remy had long said he belonged. The memories of Lyssa had triggered some sort of mental relapse...

Getting up, he stretched before checking the time. It was six thirty in the evening. Damn. He’d slept for nearly twelve hours. No wonder he was hungry...

Maybe he’d see what was in the cupboards. As far as he was concerned, Bo owed him a meal. The healthy food Ismay had left at the cottage didn’t tempt him. Surely, Bo had some good ol’ processed staples.

He sifted through the cupboards and refrigerator and ultimately took out some hamburger and buns from the freezer to have alongside a baked potato with sour cream.

He got it all started, then wandered around the house, trying to satisfy his curiosity about Bo. Who was he? What made him tick? Why was he content to live alone and stay year-round on the island when it could get so damn lonely?

The bathroom held the usual toiletries. Bastian shaved with Bo’s razor, used an extra toothbrush, and put on his cologne. Then he went through Bo’s drawers and medicine cabinet.

No condoms anywhere. That was interesting.

No drugs. Not even a little pot. No medicines, either. That was interesting, too.

The rest of what he found was pretty standard—and boring. Bo wore boxer briefs. He didn’t have a lot of clothes, but he’d taken some with him, and what was left was folded neatly in his drawers.

Had he been in the military?

Possibly. His Spartan existence kind of suggested it. Bastian was tempted to dump out his clothes and leave them in a mess on the floor, but that was a little too flagrant.

There weren’t any condoms in the nightstand, either—just an e-reader. “Jesus,” he muttered. “Do you care about anything except books?”

Where had he gone to college? Bastian wondered. Somewhere in the south? Apparently, he had family in Louisiana...

The bed had been made, but when Bastian brought one of the pillows to his nose, he thought he could smell Ismay. There was definitely perfume on the pillowcase, but he’d already guessed they’d spent the night together. It’d been all too apparent when they’d walked out of the house this morning.

He was planning to return to the kitchen so he could finish his dinner when he realized what was wrong. Bo had no personal effects. No pictures of his mother, father, siblings, or any family. He had no letters or documents lying around. His house had none of the mementos most people would add, not even a single photograph of him with a dog or a friend.

Beginning to search more earnestly, looking for anything that might reveal some weakness or vulnerability, Bastian used his hand to check under each drawer, in case Bo had taped something there.

Nothing.

He dragged out the weights Bo kept under his bed, so he could search there.

No luck.

It wasn’t until he lifted the mattress that he found something that wouldn’t normally have been there. A wallet had been shoved there, pushed way into the middle.

At first, Bastian didn’t think much about it. It could be that Bo had stuck it there to hide it in case someone broke in. But he’d just left town. If this was the wallet he used on a daily basis, wouldn’t he have taken it with him?

Shoving the mattress farther so he could reach it, he flipped it open. Finally, he’d found pictures, but only a few. One was of Bo when he was about ten with what looked like a little sister, one was of Bo, more recently, with an old man, and the last one was a pregnant woman from possibly the ’90s.

There were also a couple of credit cards and a driver’s license.

Bastian almost closed it and tossed it back into the middle of the bed. He didn’t think it was any kind of big revelation, but then he realized Bo would’ve needed his ID to get on the plane. So why’d he leave it?

He pulled out the driver’s license. It’d been issued in Louisiana and was expired by nearly a year. Nothing unusual about that. Plenty of people held on to an expired license for several months in case they lost their new one.

But then Bastian’s heart began to beat a little faster. Something was up, all right. The driver’s license had Bo’s picture with a different name. It didn’t say Bo Broussard, it said Beau Landry. And when he took a closer look, the credit cards did, too.

Why?

Grand Isle sat at the end of Louisiana Highway 1, about fifty miles south of New Orleans. It was the only inhabited barrier island in Louisiana, and as far as Bo was concerned, there was no other place like it. Some of the families who’d lived here for generations, including his uncle Chester and his grandparents before they passed, claimed they’d never leave.

Today, there were only about a thousand locals on the island, down from thirteen hundred not many years ago, and that number was continuing to shrink. Those who remained were determined to keep fighting the wind and the waves that were slowly washing away their beloved home.

Climate change would eventually win, which made Bo sad. He loved Grand Isle almost as much as Chester did. He was just more pragmatic. Plus, he didn’t want to stay in a place where so many people believed he was guilty of the crime of which he’d been convicted.

Half a dozen chickens pecked in the dirt beneath the weathered stilted shack where Chester had finished raising him. Once Bo got out of his rental car, the smell of the earth and trees brought him back to the days he’d walked around barefoot wearing the same dirty jeans and often no shirt as a young teen. Back then, he’d always had a fishing rod in his hands. His uncle had taught him to fish as soon as he’d arrived on Grand Isle, and he’d loved it.

A calico three-legged mutt Chester had found roaming the island, foraging to stay alive, while Bo was locked up, stood from where he’d been sleeping at the front door and started to bark as Bo climbed the stairs.

“Hey, boy.” At Bo’s suggestion, Chester had named the dog Long John Silver—an ode to the one-legged pirate captain in Treasure Island. “You been taking good care of Chester?” he asked the dog and was surprised to hear a human voice answer from inside the house.

“I’ve been doing that.”

If the weather was warm enough, the door stood open—there was no air-conditioning—and today it was a humid eight-five degrees. The shadows created by the porch were too deep and dark for Bo to be able to see who was talking. But he recognized the voice.

Matilda.

Straightening, he considered driving straight back to the airport. But now that he’d come all the way from Mariners, he had to see the old man. With Chester’s age and failing health, for all Bo knew, it could be the last time. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be here?” he asked.

“Would you have come if you knew?” She pushed open the screen door from the inside and stood in the opening, and he caught his first glimpse of his younger sister in fourteen years. Her face was rounder but she was pretty as ever with her hazel eyes and dark wavy hair falling below her shoulders. She looked older than thirty, though. They’d both had to grow up fast.

“Probably not,” he admitted. “So you baited the trap by acting as though Chester needed me? Why?”

“Because it’s time we made our peace.”

Again, he felt the impulse to walk away. This discussion was fraught with too many emotional landmines he’d sooner avoid. “There will never be a time. What sister turns on her own brother?”

Her knuckles whitened on the door. “He was our father!”

“He killed our mother!” he nearly yelled.

She winced as though he’d struck her. “I didn’t believe that then. Still, more bloodshed didn’t make it right.”

“I didn’t shoot Dad! He deserved a bullet. I won’t say otherwise. But all I did was go over to talk to him, to tell him that even if the police couldn’t charge him, I knew the truth. I knew what he really was. He didn’t like hearing it, but he was alive when I left.”

Lifting her chin, she glared at him defiantly. “So you think someone else came along?”

“I think when he realized he wouldn’t get away with what he’d done, he took his own life.”

“With your gun.”

“It was his gun, Tilly. One of several Mom hid from him when he moved out because she planned to sell them. It was her only way of getting some money, and I took it with me after she died and I moved to Grand Isle. Yes, I brought it back with me, stuffed in my luggage as I hitchhiked to Tampa, and had it at the apartment. But he used it after that. You must believe that now, tricking me to get me out here. Why? What’s finally convinced you?”

She opened her mouth, closed it again, then covered it with a hand as tears filled her eyes. “As an adult, I just... I see things differently—things I couldn’t accept back then. Things Dad did. Aunt Marva has told me more about Mom and Dad’s relationship and how he treated her when they were together—the extramarital affairs, how miserable she was, his refusal to give her the divorce she was begging for, and then how he drained their bank account when he did finally leave. All of it.”

Marva was their mother’s sister, but even she had stood by Tilly during the trial. “If Marva was aware of all that, why’d she turn on me, too? The whole damn family did! Except Chester. He was the only one on my side.”

“We all knew how you felt about Dad, how angry you were. You took a gun to his apartment, for God’s sake!”

“I took that gun because I wanted to give Mom the justice she deserved! But I realized once I got there that going to prison for him wasn’t worth it—which is so ironic now, right? I told him what I thought of him, then I threw the gun at him and left.” Matilda knew that. She’d heard it in court, when she testified to nearly crashing into him as she arrived at the apartment complex and he was tearing out of the parking lot. But this seemed to be the first time she was actually listening.

Closing her eyes, she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I—I couldn’t believe he’d take his own life and leave me when I needed him the most.” Her voice fell to just above a whisper. “I thought he loved me.”

She’d been blinded by loyalty to a man who didn’t deserve it. On some level, Bo had understood that and already forgiven her. He just couldn’t have her in his life. She’d been young, just sixteen, but he’d been only two years older and had never felt more alone. Family, friends, neighbors—everyone—had rallied around her and turned their backs on him, probably because Matilda had stayed in Florida when Bo moved to Grand Isle. With Uncle Chester’s help, he’d spent eight years pressing the police to look more closely at their father, Clint, certain he was to blame for their mother’s death, but unable to prove it.

“The only person he loved was himself,” Bo said. “And I waited year after year for the police to do their job. They knew it was him but couldn’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. The one thing I’d been living for, the one thing that could make the loss we’d suffered tolerable was justice for Mom. And yet I—we—were going to be denied even that.”

“If only I’d come home earlier that night,” she lamented.

“Then you’d know I didn’t do it. But that’s the only thing that would’ve changed. Mom would still be dead, Tilly,” Bo said. “Dad’s where he deserves to be.”

“After that night, I was left without either parent,” she said as the tears that’d been filling her eyes streamed down her cheeks. “I was so hurt, so angry...”

What Matilda had done was wrong, but she’d acted on what she believed at the time. They were both victims of a man who didn’t care enough about them to curb his own selfish desires. All the heartache they’d suffered stemmed directly from the night their father took their mother’s life.

At least Bo had chosen to live with Chester. From ten to eighteen, he’d been as happy as a kid could be, under the circumstances. Although he’d been waiting for closure, he’d run wild and free on Grand Isle, and Chester had looked out for him and treated him well.

Matilda, on the other hand, had chosen to believe in their father, who hadn’t deserved her trust. Clint had had both the opportunity and the motive. A witness could place him near the house the night their mother was shot and killed, even though he’d at first claimed to be out of town. He’d had access to a firearm, even though the police could never find it. Bo had even heard him tell their mother he’d kill her if she ever started seeing another man.

Bo pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand. He’d tried desperately to leave the past in the past.

But he and Matilda would continue paying a price for what his father had done as long as Bo continued to hold a grudge.

“Bo?” Chester yelled from inside. “Bo, that you?”

The old man was shuffling through the living room, trying to reach the front door.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he called back.

“Well, you don’t say!” Chester exclaimed. “It’s about damn time! Tilly, don’t just stand there, invite him in.”

Matilda held the door open, but Bo hesitated. He knew if he went inside, the wall he’d built to keep her out would crumble. She’d become part of his life again.

But maybe that was for the best. Maybe it was time he tried to forgive and forget. Although there was no changing the past, he could change the future.

Hadn’t their father cost them enough already?

The TV droned in the background as Bastian sat on the couch with his laptop. Ever since he’d found that driver’s license tucked between the mattresses in the master bedroom of the bungalow, he’d been digging up information on Beau Landry, and after three hours, he felt fairly certain he’d figured out what was going on.

The links that’d populated his screen were mostly newspaper articles about a young man—eighteen-year-old Beau Landry—who shot and killed his father because he believed the man had killed his mother eight years earlier. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to twelve years in a Florida state penitentiary, but he’d been living in Louisiana at the time he shot his father.

Except for the name, everything fit the Bo he knew. The caretaker his mother had hired was close to or the same age as Beau Landry. He was associated with Louisiana, just like Beau Landry. And he had Beau Landry’s driver’s license and credit cards.

Bo Broussard had to be Beau Landry, but Bastian had yet to come up with a good enough picture to prove it, at least to others. He’d been able to tell from the driver’s license he’d found that Beau was Bo, but that picture was so old it barely looked like him. And the only other picture he’d found so far was of Beau sitting with his lawyers in court, which was partially obscured. It took searching through several more links to find one that was clear enough to determine if the two men were absolutely the same—and then it was unquestionable.

As soon as he found it, Bastian rocked back and laughed. His mother had hired an ex-con—a murderer. She’d been thrilled to get someone as capable as Bo Broussard, and she was naive enough to believe he’d never lie about his past.

“This is too much,” Bastian said, still laughing. He took a screenshot of the picture and grabbed the links of several of the articles he’d found online and sent them to the “fam chat,” which included both his parents and his brother.

It was Remy who reacted first. What is this?

Bastian couldn’t help feeling smug when he typed, Our caretaker.

A message appeared from their mother. Bo has been lying to us?

Bastian steadied his computer on his knees so he could type again. From the beginning...

Bastian relished the opportunity to find fault with their mother. And then you hired him, Mom, he wrote. Didn’t you do a background check?

Mort’s first message appeared. We can’t have a murderer working for us. Only God knows what he’ll do. We need to fire him.

That would teach her for taking Bo’s side over his, Bastian thought. She deserved to be mortified and embarrassed, so he wasn’t going to be too quick to accept her apology.

After the video Bastian had sent his brother this morning showing Ismay coming out of the bungalow with Bo at dawn, no doubt Remy would enjoy being the one to let him go.

His mother put a thumbs-up on Remy’s response before Bastian wrote: Remy, when you fire Bo, tell him I’ll box up his stuff and ship it to Louisiana. That way, he won’t even have to come back here.

As far as Bastian was concerned, Bo shooting his father wasn’t any big thing. Under those circumstances, he would’ve done the same. As it was, he sometimes dreamed of what it would be like to inherit his parents’ fortune early. Then he’d never have to work another day in his life.