Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake)(39)

Money clearly doesn’t help.

“Mr. Landry, I know you don’t want to do this,” I tell him. “It’s tough. It’s painful to have this dragged up all over again. I know all that, and I promise you, if you’ll sit down with me for an hour, I will not bother you again. There’s every chance this investigation could bring up news about your son.”

“I didn’t hire you to do this,” he says. “And I know my wife didn’t either. Who’s paying you to do this? Why?” That last part comes out as a muted cry of pain, and I feel it like a slap. I knew this might be tough, but it’s worse than that. I have a strong impulse to apologize and walk away, but I steady myself.

“The firm I work for was hired by a nonprofit organization to look into Remy’s disappearance,” I tell him. “I’m sorry this is so painful for you, Mr. Landry. But it’s possible we might be able to find him.”

“My son’s dead,” he says. It’s flat and dark the way he says it. “I let hope go a long time back.” Still, there’s a flicker of . . . something. And it leads me to continue.

“I’m not saying I can bring him home alive,” I reply. “But maybe I can help you find some peace, and bring someone to justice.”

He studies me. Sizes me up like I’m a potential car buyer. Decides I’m worth the trouble. He finally sighs and says, “Let’s just get it over with. Follow me.”

We go to an office and sit. I close the door. As I sit down, I realize this room is a shrine. There are photos of Remy on every wall. There, he’s a small boy grinning at the camera and cuddling a puppy. There, a fresh-faced teen in a tuxedo posing for prom. In yet another he’s wearing a graduation cap. A photo to my left, the largest one, is a candid shot of Remy on a soccer field, scoring a goal. He looks triumphant. He looks vividly alive.

There’s a sagging sofa against one wall with a neatly folded blanket and a crumpled pillow. It dawns on me that although Mr. Landry almost certainly has a home somewhere, he sleeps here pretty often.

It feels as haunted as that sad apartment in Knoxville where Remy’s mother keeps her vigil.

“Okay, I guess you talked to my wife,” Mr. Landry says. “She tell you yet that I’m crazy?”

“She said you thought you needed to move on, but she wasn’t quite ready to do that,” I reply. But despite his declaration that his son’s dead, nothing about the office says that this man has moved one inch from the moment he learned Remy was missing. Joe Landry seems to be trapped in a windowless coffin lined with the past. “I’m interested in any correspondence you had with him by email or in letters, and anything he mentioned in phone calls that might have struck you as odd. Anything at all.”

Joe Landry reaches into a drawer and pulls out a shoebox. He slides it across the desk at me. “That’s every letter or card I have from him since he went off to college,” he says. “Emails too. I put it all together for the police, but they never were interested.”

It’s as complete an archive as I could have wanted. I accept it, and it’s heavy. “I’ll scan everything,” I tell him. “I’ll get it back to you.”

“I don’t want it,” he says. His gray eyes wash with tears, and he blinks them away. “Maybe take it to Ruth when you’re done.”

I nod and fold my hands on top of the box. “What about phone calls?”

“He didn’t call too often,” Joe says. “Mostly spoke to his mother, and mostly on birthdays and holidays and the like. Last time, though—” I see his eyes go up and to the right, tracking a memory. “Last time I talked to him he sure was interested in a girl.”

I feel an instinct come alive. “What girl?” I don’t want to lead him. I want to follow.

“Not that girlfriend he had,” Landry says, and a smile flits over his lips for an instant. “Remy liked the ladies, and they sure liked him too. No, this one’s name was Carol. Definitely Carol, I remember because it seemed like such an old-fashioned name for a young woman.”

“What did he say about her?” I take out a small notebook and make note to check the date of Remy’s last call to his dad. It’s clear that he doesn’t know what his wife insisted: that her son was helping Carol out of a jam of some kind. I don’t tell him.

“I know he met her at church,” he said. “Good churchgoing boy, Remy. She was real different from the girls at school, he said. I think he was taken with her.”

“Different from the other girls how, exactly?”

Landry sits back in his chair. The old leather creaks. “She was evangelical, for a start. Wore long skirts and wouldn’t cut her hair, like that. No makeup. It surprised me he’d go for that, but I think he saw her as . . . kind of pure.”

I keep my dislike for the pure/impure dynamic forced on women to myself. “Did he tell you a last name at all?”

“No. Just Carol. But you can check at that church he was going to. Gospel Witness Church up there in Knoxville, Tennessee. Somebody must recall her, even if she ain’t there now.”

The rest of the conversation goes without much real information; he reiterates things his wife’s already told me, with minor variations. He has no theories about what happened to his son. He doesn’t want to think about it, though clearly from this room he can’t think about anything else.