The Marigny Keepers

Chapter 8

Andy Prejean had decided to spend the summer in the city rather than on the other side of the lake with his parents as a first step toward establishing himself as an adult. During the school year, he lived in Slidell in a part of the attic he had renovated as his own bedroom over the garage. By the end of his freshman year at the University of New Orleans, he had come to realize that the only difference between high school and college so far had been a slightly longer commute. Andy really didn’t mind living with his parents, but he was definitely envious of his friends who had left Louisiana. They’d been emailing him all year about wild campus parties and sorority girls, and he had succumbed to jealousy. Maybe he was the baby of the family, but he couldn’t remain the baby forever.

It was time to live away from home for a few months, to do his own laundry (even though he still drove home at least once a week to visit his parents), buy his own food, learn how to cook, and break some rules.

He had worked alongside his dad, brothers, and uncles every summer since he was fourteen at Prejean Construction, trying his hand at everything from positioning insulation within walls to laying carpet. While he really loved construction and he couldn’t help but suspect he was missing out on important experience by not working for his dad’s company that summer, he knew that it was pointless to move out of his parents’ house and still see his dad and brothers every day out on the construction site. So he had taken a job at The Big Easy to make a clean break from his family from the end of May until the beginning of August. Both of Andy’s older brothers were married, and both had met their wives far from Louisiana when they had gone off to college in other states.

So while Andy was definitely enjoying the freedom of being able to work late and sleep in, he had to admit, he missed living at home a little bit. It was cool living with the roommates he had found through a bulletin board on campus. It had been completely by coincidence after he had signed the summer lease that Kimberly, a girl from his Physics I Survey class, had also ended up signing a lease. Andy was well aware that Kimberly had a crush on him. She had made her interest quite clear the day he had moved in; she had stopped by his room to introduce herself wearing nothing but a towel on her way to the shower.

Under different circumstances, Andy would have been pleased to have indulged Kimberly in a summer fling. She had a great body, and she had made it abundantly clear she was interested in him. But living under the same roof gave him the distinct feeling that Kimberly would expect a relationship far more serious than Andy wanted to offer her, and the idea of playing house with her didn’t really interest him. Kimberly seemed like a nice enough girl, but her smoking habit turned him off. He couldn’t really imagine taking her across the lake to Slidell to meet his parents… but Alene Lafitte was another story.

Alene was so pretty, Andy thought she looked like she had just stepped out of a dream. She almost never wore makeup, but was still the prettiest girl at The Big Easy any night of the week, with those sleepy hazel eyes and long lashes. And he liked that she refused to drink at the bar, even though Jackson would hardly have raised an eyebrow at any of his employees taking a sip once in a while. She was studying art at Tulane, Ginny had told him. There was something else about her, something distant and untouchable, which appealed to Andy. He admitted, with reluctance, she was just a little out of his league. He really, really liked her. And he wished he didn’t.

Because he was pretty sure she had gotten herself tangled up in some kind of evil; he just wasn’t sure how, or what kind of evil. She had made it clear she wasn’t sure if she had any interest in him, and he could respect that.  But she seemed oddly determined to focus on whatever historical research she was conducting all summer. That struck Andy as very suspicious; hot girls did not spend their summers conducting library research. And there had been something else, something intangible when he had driven Alene up to the Tulane library. She had been so lost in thought during the drive that it had been almost as if she was in a trance. She had gotten out of his pick-up truck at the library and had barely even mumbled a thank-you, but he had gotten the distinct sense that Alene hadn’t been raised to be so rude. Something else had completely taken control of her thoughts.