Night Moves : Dream Man/After the Night Read online

  Faith had had trouble absorbing everything at once, there were so many thoughts flying in her head. Jodie had obviously found their mother, but neither of them had made any effort to get in touch with Faith. Renee could have gotten her two youngest children out of foster care, but she had been content to leave them where they were. She hadn’t even asked about Scottie, Faith noticed.

  Then there was the mystery of Guy Rouillard. Maybe he hadn’t left with Renee, but he had left, at least temporarily, and by his leaving had set in motion the events that had shaped her life. Puzzled and intrigued, Faith decided to find out for certain what had happened. At the age of fourteen, she had literally been thrown out into the night like a piece of trash, and she had lived with that pain ever since. She needed to know the end of the story. She wanted to close out her past, so she could get on with her future.

  So here she sat, parked on the courthouse square in Prescott, swamped by memories and wasting time. It shouldn’t be very difficult to find out where Guy Rouillard had been for what was probably only that one day, that one crucial day that had totally altered her life.

  Her first order of business, she supposed, was to find somewhere to stay for the night. She had flown into Baton Rouge that morning, conducted the business she had, then rented a car and driven to Prescott. It was late afternoon, and she was tired. It wouldn’t take long to find out what she wanted to know, but she didn’t want to make the drive back to Baton Rouge if she could get a motel room in Prescott.

  There had been a motel twelve years ago, but it had been slightly seedy even then and might not still be there. It had been on the east side of town, on the road leading to 1-55.

  She rolled down the car window and called to a woman walking down the sidewalk. “Excuse me. Is there a motel in town?”

  The woman stopped, and came over to the side of the car. She was in her mid-forties and looked vaguely familiar, but Faith couldn’t place her. “Yes, there is,” the woman replied, and turned to point. “Go to the corner of the square and turn right. It’s about a mile and a half that way.”

  It sounded like the same motel. Faith smiled. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” The woman smiled and nodded, and returned to the sidewalk.

  Faith reversed out of the parking space and maneuvered the small rental car into the leisurely traffic. Prescott didn’t bustle now any more than it had twelve years ago. In two minutes she reached the motel. It was in the same place, but it wasn’t the same motel. This one looked new, no more than a couple of years old, and much more substantial. It was still only one story, though this one was built in a U around a center courtyard where a fountain bubbled and flowers grew. It lacked a pool, which she didn’t mind. The fountain was much more charming.

  The desk clerk was a man in his fifties, and his name tag read “Reuben.” Memory stirred, and a last name surfaced to go with the first. Reuben Odell. One of his daughters had been in Faith’s class. He chatted as he took her credit card imprint, glancing curiously at the name, but nothing about “Faith D. Hardy” rang a bell in his memory. Faith wasn’t a common name, but probably he hadn’t even known her first name back then, so of course, he wouldn’t recognize it now.

  “I’ll give you number twelve,” he said, taking the key from its compartment. “It’s at the back of the courtyard, farther away from the road so the traffic won’t bother you.”

  “Thank you.” Faith smiled, and removed her sunglasses to sign the credit card slip. He blinked at her smile, his own expression growing fractionally warmer.

  She parked the car at the rear of the courtyard, in front of number twelve. When she unlocked the door, she was pleasantly surprised. The room was larger than most motel rooms, with a love seat and coffee table close to the door, and a king-size bed beyond that. The dresser was long, with the television on one end, and a desk area on the end closest to the bathroom. The clothes rack was adequate, the vanity in the dressing area boasted two basins and was large enough for two people to get ready without continually bumping into each other. She looked into the bathroom, expecting the standard tub, but instead there was a sizeable shower stall with sliding doors. Since she never took a tub bath, she was pleased by the extra room to bathe. All in all, the little motel was a cut above the norm.

  She unpacked her toiletries and the single change of clothes she’d brought, then plotted her course of action. There shouldn’t be much problem in finding out what she wanted to know, as long as no one recognized her as a Devlin. Small towns could have notoriously long memories, and the town of Prescott had belonged to the Rouillards heart and soul, as well as most of its brick.

  The easiest and most anonymous way, probably, was to go to the library and look through the old newspapers. The Rouillards had constantly been in the news, so if Guy Rouillard had returned from his little jaunt and resumed business as usual, she wouldn’t have to check many editions before his name would crop up.

  She checked her watch and saw that she probably wouldn’t have more than an hour to do what she’d come to do; from what she remembered about the small library, it closed about six P.M. during the summer, and in a town the size of Prescott, that wasn’t likely to change. She was hungry, but first things first; food could wait, the library wouldn’t.

  It was odd how selective memory could be; she had never been to the motel when she had lived here, and had often gone to the library, whenever she’d gotten the chance, but she had remembered the motel’s location while she drew a blank on the library. She fished the small phone book out of the dresser and looked up the address, and after a moment remembered the library’s location. Grabbing her purse and keys, she went out to the car and drove back to downtown Prescott. Before, the library had been located behind the post office, but when she got there she was dismayed to find the building gone.

  She looked around, and heaved a sigh of relief. A prominent sign in front of the new building next door to the post office proclaimed it the Prescott Library. The builders had disdained the sleekness of modern architecture and instead used an antebellum style, a redbrick two-story with four white columns out front, and shutters on the six-foot windows. There were plenty of parking spaces, probably more than needed, for only three cars were parked in the lot. Faith brought the total to four, parking in front and hurrying to the double doors. The sign posted on the left-hand door told her that she’d been right about the hours the library was open: nine A.M. to six P.M.

  The librarian was a small, plump, chatty woman who wasn’t in the least familiar to Faith. She went up to the desk and asked where the old newspaper files were.

  “Right over here,” the woman said, coming out from behind the counter. “Everything’s on microfiche now, of course. Are you looking for any particular dates? I’ll show you how the microfiches are filed, and how to work the scanner.”

  “I’d appreciate that, thanks,” said Faith. “I want to start about ten years ago, but I may have to go a little further back.”

  “That’s no problem. It would have been until a couple of years ago, but Mr. Rouillard insisted that everything be put on microfiche when we moved into this building. I declare, the system here was positively antiquated; it’s so much easier now.”

  “Mr. Rouillard?” asked Faith, keeping her tone casual despite the way her heart jumped. So Guy had come back.

  “Gray Rouillard,” said the librarian. “The family practically owns this town—the whole parish, come to that—but he’s just as nice as he can be.” She paused. “Are you from around here?”

  “A long time ago,” Faith replied. “My family moved away when I was a child. I thought I’d check the old obituaries for some of my parents’ cousins. We lost track of them through the years, but I’ve started working on a family tree and got curious about what happened to them.” For a spur-of-the-moment explanation, it wasn’t bad. People trying to trace their family trees always made up the bulk of those using the microfiche machines, at least in her experience. From what she had gather