Page 9 of Nineteen Seventy-Six

She didn’t wait for responses this time. Instead, she called the meeting adjourned and left without joining in the tradition of tea and biscuits. It was past one in the morning, and though her two loves would be asleep when she slipped upstairs, even their slowed breaths were a balm to her tormented soul.

Colleen was happy. For the first time in her life, she understood that happiness wasn’t numbers on a grading sheet, or accolades for achievement.

But she feared admitting to anyone that she was well over her head. That she feared being magistrate, returning to college, all of it, would end up affecting her role as wife and mother, in a way that might be irreparable. Her fears, which had been with her throughout her whole life, reminding her what failure would both bring and take, had never spoken louder than when she had something real, tangible, irreplaceable to lose.

Noah’s soft, warm snuggle as she slipped in beside him was enough to wash away these fears, at least for tonight.

By the time Charles dropped Colin off at home that night, they were both exhausted, both physically and emotionally. They kept their emotions to themselves, letting them live only in the tension cutting the air between them in the car, or the occasional burst of words born of fear and anger. Charles and Colin, two men who loved the same woman, and now, in their own ways, for their own reasons, also hated her.

They’d driven all over New Orleans, visiting anyone at all Catherine knew even casually. Old friends from college, from high school. Her college roommate. Cousins, and even an old boyfriend. None of them had heard anything at all about Catherine. Most hadn’t heard from or talked to her in many years. Colin seemed surprised by this, but Charles wasn’t. Charles, who’d paid attention to who Catherine was at her roots and not just at the surface, understood that she’d never had many real friends. She was too fickle, too unmoored, and her childhood instability led her to think of any relationship in her life as transient, to protect herself. It didn’t make her erratic, on-again, off-again love of Charles any easier to bear, but it explained things.

Jeannie, Catherine’s old roommate, provided the only potential clue, and she’d had the good sense to whisper it to Charles, out of earshot of Colin, as they were leaving.

“Talk to your sister.”

“Which one?”

“The nosy one. The busybody. I forget her name.”

“Colleen?”

Jeannie snorted. “That’s the one.”

“What does Colleen have to do with this?”

“Indeed,” Jeannie said and closed the door.

Colin asked him what that was about, when Charles got to the car, and he had to make something up about Jeannie asking for a hookup on some cocaine. Colin looked appropriately skeptical but didn’t probe. Colin thought he wanted answers, but he didn’t, really.

When they stopped for lunch at Camellia Grill, Charles excused himself to make a call at the payphone. He said he was checking in on Nicolas, but the number he dialed, reaching into his little black phonebook to find, was The Gardens.

He didn’t give Colleen a chance for small talk when she came to the phone. “I need to know what you have to do with Catherine’s disappearance.”

Silence for a moment on her end and then, “I heard about Catherine. I’m sorry. What have the police said?”

“Don’t play coy with me, Leena. What do you know about it?”

“Why would I know anything about Catherine?”

“That’s not a fucking answer.”

“Maybe it’s not the one you’re looking for,” she said. “But it’s the one you’re getting. I don’t have time for your strange whims today, Huck. I need to finish feeding Amelia.”

The phone went dead in his hand. His cheeks flushed with rage, and he started to fish for more coins, to call her back, but Colin staring at him from across the diner gave him pause. The drawn look of pain painting his face was an ever present reminder that Charles had contributed to this mess. He didn’t drive Catherine away—she’d been looking for an escape when she called him that night, months ago. But surely her confused feelings for him played a part in the unhappiness of her marriage, and Colin didn’t deserve any of this.

It was easy, sometimes, for Charles to justify his behavior by marking his friend as insufferable, but Colin was the only person he knew who lived by such a strong moral code that he never wavered from what was right. Good or bad, problematic or not, Colin was the definition of a good man. Everything he did, he did because he believed it was the right thing to do. He may lack the imagination for a wife like Catherine, but that was not the same as being undeserving. If anyone in this world deserved happiness, it was Colin Sullivan.

Charles continued their quest to find Catherine after lunch, even though he knew it was pointless. She was gone. She’d left New Orleans, and their reach and connections dwindled the farther the proximity from the city.

“We’ll find her,” Charles promised weakly, as Colin shifted his weight into the door, to lift himself from the car. His shoulders hung with exhaustion, and Charles found he couldn’t look his friend in the face, for fear of what he might see there.

“Thanks for today, Huck,” Colin said, without turning for a proper goodbye. Charles waited until Colin lumbered into the house and closed the door behind him, before pulling away.

“Where did you go, Cat?” Charles wondered aloud, in equal parts curiosity and anger, as he returned to his surrogate wife and only son; as he returned after having spent the day chasing ghosts, once again lured into the trap laid by his first, and maybe only, real love.

I’m not that man anymore, he thought, as he always did whenever she’d managed to pull him back into the web she’d woven for him and him alone.

CHAPTER 3

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