Page 86 of Broken Bayou
Her remains had finally been identified. The remains in my mother’s trunk.
I bury my head in my hands.
Rita and I spent hours together, going over every detail. She had extensive notes and recordings. She’d researched everything, even the botched report filed years ago on the stolen barrels, which turned out to be just a clumsy mistake. Nothing at all to do with Raymond. She’d spoken with Travis’s mother. Liv had confessed so much. Like she knew her time was limited. She painted a troubled picture of her son Travis. His obsession with her youngest child and only daughter, Emily. How she was scared for her daughter. Pulled her out of school to keep her close. Wanted to protect her not from the world but from her brother. Liv didn’t mention Emily needed protection from her mother as well. She touched on Emily’s illnesses, but mostly the conversation revolved around Travis and his dislike for her.
Liv confessed she knew about the barrels. She’d seen them in the outdoor shed. She told Rita she believed Travis was using them for something that was none of her business. She never said a word to the police. My guess is at some point, probably when Travis was physically larger than her, the dynamics in that house shifted. Instead of Travis being the scared one, Liv was. And she had good reason.
Rita hadn’t spoken with only Travis’s mother. She’d spoken to his other brothers as well. The ones who moved away. They seemed as oblivious to Travis’s psychosis as the people who lived in Broken Bayou. As me. Or maybe, like me and everyone else, they chose to see what they wanted to see.
I look up from my hands, and Rita is staring at me. “We can do this,” she says.
I nod.
The makeup artist finishes and walks off.
A man behind the camera yells, “Five minutes.”
“We’re covering it all,” Rita says, keeping her gaze on me.
I nod again.
“Even Mabry.”
“Even Mabry,” I say, then add, “Especially Mabry.”
“As harrowing as it is, your story is important. You’ve made the right decision to share it.”
Making that decision wasn’t easy. Hiding away in my high-rise felt much safer, but after long talks with Amy and my therapist, and even Rita, I saw how confronting what happened head on and telling it in my voice, on my terms, would be beneficial. Not only to me but to the people I want to eventually get back to helping. “Help people heal by showing them how to,” Amy had said. And she was right.Good Morning Americahad been the first to call. I turned them down. I wanted to be at home for this.
Another man approaches Rita’s side, and she turns her back to me as she talks with him.
As hard as I try to keep my mind clear and focused, it keeps reeling backward. Keeps going to the two words I know are not helpful but are so hard to avoid: what if.
What if Doyle just talked to me in the kitchen at Shadow Bluff instead of dragging me to that house? What if he told me then that he left the license plate to lead back to Travis, not as some cryptic message to scare me? He didn’t realize by leaving that plate, he set himself up. So many mistakes made. And his ideas of helping me almost got me killed. I squeeze my eyes shut. What if Liv Arceneaux told the police she knew about the barrels?
A breath escapes me with a whimper. Rita, even with her back to me, still has my hand, and she squeezes it again.
Travis grew up in a home filled with abuse. I know enough about forensic psychology to know this is a dangerous setting for a son with sociopathic tendencies. And there’s no doubt, Travis was a sociopath. He fit every mold: A mother who abused him. A father who was neglectful in his own right for not protecting his son from that abuse. His older brothers abandoning him, leaving him in that toxic home. All feeding into a person with an obvious mental illness and a dark, insatiable need for something that could never be satisfied. I read and studied every book on the subject I could get my hands on since coming home. I wanted to know how I missed it. How I could have cared for, given myself to, a boy who was so mentally disturbed? How could I have believed for all these years that he actually cared for me too? I’d laugh if it wasn’t so fucked up.
His empathy, outrage, anger were all so well choreographed. Appropriate reactions at appropriate times. Even the worry I thought I saw in his eyes that day the convertible came out. The nervous energy. I read it wrong. He wasn’t worried for me that day. He may not have even been worried for himself. Looking back, it seems more like he was excited. He wanted me with him on that bayou that day to see what he’d set in motion. Like the game was finally starting. A game he was confident he’d win.
His act fooled me and everyone else in that town. I’m horrified I wasn’t able to identify the monster he really was. But I’d been leaning on my degrees, my years of training, not on the simplest answer staring me in the face.
The badge helped. Rita’s notes described a man who entered the police academy with one goal: to help him kill.
The police surmised he hunted in crowds, starting with the woman at the casino. But her barrel had been found rather quickly. So Travis learned to sink them better. Then he figured out the sand.
Travis kept everything he needed at his mother’s house. Syringes, a prescription pad, and injectable tranquilizers were all found in one of the kitchen cabinets. The best they could figure, he’d pick a victim, approach her, sedate her, and get her back to his truck, drive her to where he kept the barrels. The missing teacher was the only one who didn’t fit his profile. He went rogue with her, broke his method. The police believed she was random. Maybe he came upon her car while scouting the bayou late at night. Maybe she drove upon him getting rid of a barrel. Whatever the case, he had his camera and saw an opportunity to kill. And he dumped her car just like I dumped my mother’s. That’s where things started to unravel for him. Her parents brought in the divers. Maybe that was his way of self-sabotaging, like he knew the game was almost over and he’d be caught soon, so he became reckless. Or even more likely, he was so overconfident that he felt he could get away with anything.
Rita showed up at the Arceneaux house to talk to Doyle about the sand. She believed Doyle was being set up. But Doyle was at Shadow Bluff that day, hiding and waiting for me, so she talked to Liv instead; then Travis showed up, also looking for Doyle, and found Rita. She only remembers coming to on the edge of the bayou, surrounded by paramedics.
I pull my hand away from Rita’s. “I’ll be right back,” I say. I stand and ask one of the techs where the restroom is.
He points down the hall and says, “You’ve only got a couple of minutes.”
In the bathroom, I run cold water and splash it on my face. Every time I think of Travis, my breathing falters just enough to make me panic.
There’s still a running debate on if men like Travis are born or made. I’m starting to think both. People are abused and angry and resentful all the time. But when those traits surface in a person with an underlying psychosis, a person who watched his mother control his sister with poison, it changes everything.
