Bayou Blue by Raquel Byrnes

Author:Raquel Byrnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian fiction
Publisher: Pelican Ventures Book Group
Published: 2012-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

15

Unwilling to ask Citrine for any sort of favors, I opted not to wash my muddy clothes at the Lightning Bug. Instead, I hauled everything to the coin-operated laundry in the center of La Foudre. The trip took all of ten minutes. I bought a terribly unhealthy lunch at the mini-mart next door. I settled into an orange plastic seat straight out of the sixties to wait out the machines.

I needed to get out of that house. If I still had to be here in La Foudre after the harvest festival ended, I was moving to the first hotel room that opened up, even if it meant driving to a nearby parish to find one.

I sat in the back of the Mr. Sudsy Laundromat reveling in the smell of breezy-fresh detergent and snack machine junk food. The scents, sounds, and sticky warm air took me back to my college days at University of Washington. I lived in the dorms and hung out, with no greater worry than my next exam. I smiled a little. I still wore the same ratty Star Wars shirt to bed. Not much had changed, and yet everything had changed.

Tipping the extra-large slushie towards me, I sipped the cherry goodness and opened my laptop. Waiting for my programs to start up, I thought about this morning’s visit with Everest and felt more unsettled than before.

He moved in my social circle, often invited to charity balls and events affiliated with some of the causes my parents promoted. I knew him, to nod at him, but not much more than that. His Eco-Warriors were more flashy, more rock-star, as my mother called it, to really be a large part of the more established charities and activist organizations. Something about him put me off. Maybe he was too slick. Maybe he just wasn’t Jake.

Stop it. Jake made it clear where you stand.

The bell over the door jangled and a young man, tubby and vaguely familiar, walked in with a black garbage bag hoisted over his shoulder.

He caught sight of me, nodded slightly, “Red,” he said, and ambled towards the row of washing machines at the other end of the room.

I smiled reflexively, but he didn’t see it. Too busy feeding coins into the mini-detergent box machine to notice.

I took in his uniform and spikey hair and remembered where I saw him before. At Verona’s. He was eating breakfast outside on the lawn when I went in the first time with Jake. Dirty brown hair, freckles across his ample nose, and close-set ice-blue eyes. He looked young.

My program pinged and pulled my attention back to the laptop. I typed in Reyna’s web address, navigated her web page, and punched in the number code she’d given me over the phone.

A text bubble popped up, a message from Reyna.

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