J. Moreau.
J. Moreau. I stood at the window for a long time. Whoever had written that was dead, or gone, or something worse. The man downstairs had their book.
* * *
Chapter 9: What She Found
I didn't sleep.
I'd gone back to bed after the garden, after the flash drive, after the trembling that I'd observed in my own hands with the distance of someone watching a phenomenon they didn't yet have a framework for. I lay in the dark with the ceiling above me and the book on the nightstand and the flash drive behind the rear endpaper of the book on the shelf, and I told myself that I would process it properly in the morning, after sleep, when my thinking would be cleaner and less subject to the distortions of exhaustion and the strange intimacy of a garden at five in the morning.
By seven I gave up.
I made coffee in the kitchen, Estelle wasn't in yet, the house still in its pre-staff quiet, and carried it back upstairs and took the flash drive from the book and opened it again. This time I was going to be methodical. This time I was going to look at every file in order, read every document, examine every image, and arrive at a complete picture rather than a fragment of one.
This was how I handled things I was afraid of. I ran through them.
* * *
The folder structure, examined fully, spanned from 2009 to 2018, nine years of material, assembled with the patience ofsomeone who had understood from the beginning that what they were collecting would need to be comprehensive to be useful. My grandfather had been a patient man. I had known this. I had not known what he'd been patient for.
I started at 2009 and read forward.
The first year contained thirteen files. I opened them in order, reading each one before proceeding to the next, taking notes on the legal pad I'd moved from the desk to the bed, the same one I used for coursework, which seemed appropriate, given that what I was doing felt like research. Like trying to understand a system I'd been placed inside without being given the documentation.
By the third file I had a name: Thomas Reyes.
He appeared first in a newspaper clipping, the Times-Picayune, from April 2009, digitized and saved. The article was short, the kind of article that got short because the subject didn't have people to push for more: Local musician reported missing. Age twenty-six. A session musician, worked with several jazz bands in the Tremé, was known at a number of the clubs along Frenchmen Street. Had not shown up for a recording session, had not been seen by his roommate in four days. Police were looking into it.
There was a photograph. Young man, dark-haired, laughing at something off-camera. The photograph had the quality of a casual snapshot rather than a posed one, the kind taken at a gig, or a rehearsal, by someone with a phone and no particular intention to document history.
He looked like someone in the middle of a life.
I moved through the subsequent files. Two more newspaper clippings, one noting that the investigation had produced no leads, one, three months later, that had reduced the story to a single paragraph at the bottom of a crime roundup. Then nothing from the newspaper. Then something else.
A handwritten document. My grandfather's handwriting, which I knew from birthday cards and the occasional letter, careful, precise, the letters fully formed, a man who had learned penmanship in an era when it was considered a competence rather than an affectation.
Account of events, April 14, 2009. Recorded by Francis J. Deveraux.
I read it slowly.
My father had been at a warehouse on the eastern edge of the port district. He'd been there because someone owed him money and had agreed to pay it, a transaction of the kind my father had been conducting his entire adult life, informal and unrecorded, in places that didn't show up on maps of legitimate commerce. He had been waiting in the dark of the loading dock when two men arrived with a third.
The third man had not been walking.
My grandfather had written it without commentary, without the softening language that people used when they were writing about things that had cost them something to witness. He had simply recorded what Patrick had told him, in sequence, with the precision of a man who understood that what made a document useful was accuracy rather than artfulness.
At the end of the account, a single line:
Patrick identified one of the men, subsequently, from a photograph I obtained separately. Name: A. Tureaud. Known associate of the Moreau organization.
My grandfather had drawn a line beneath this.
Below the line, in different ink, added later, I thought, from the slight variation in the shade:
Payment records obtained showing remuneration to Tureaud from J. Moreau, dated three days after the event. J. Moreau: Jean-Baptiste Moreau. Father of Edouard. Grandfather of Dominic.
I stopped reading.