by Hester Young
Then, without warning, the field behind me lights up. Fire, hot and hungry, moves toward me in a wave. Smoke billows up as the flames consume the grassy tops of the plants. I run down the dirt path, away from the smoke, but the fire travels with me, flanking me on each side, leaving only the fat stalks in its wake.
Sugarcane, I realize, shielding my nose and mouth from the smoke. This is a controlled burn.
I turn and see a boy in overalls jogging toward me, framed for an instant by the blazing fields. Black. About ten years old. Barefoot.
Suddenly, as if someone has blown out a candle, the fire dies. Orange embers drift to the ground and flicker harmlessly out. We’re awash in smoke, dark plumes rising up, lifting chunks of ash into the air. When I pinch my nose, I discover the insides of my nostrils are coated in black dust.
The boy continues confidently toward me, unfazed by smoke or fire. As he gets closer, I notice something wrong with his skin. A bumpy, reddish rash that is especially intense around his cheeks and in the creases of his elbows, though it covers much of his lean body.
He smiles impishly and opens his mouth to display a startling crimson tongue. The unnatural shade of red, coupled with an array of little white bumps, calls to mind a grotesque strawberry.
I had the feva, he says, pointing to his tongue. Me and my sista, both.
I take stock of his rash. Is he talking about scarlet fever? Why would anyone in a country with plentiful antibiotics have scarlet fever? I wave away the last of the smoke and draw in a breath of air.
What’s your name? I ask, hoping to avoid the investigative work that my dream about Didi Minot required.
Clifford, he tells me, hands on hips.
And your last name?
Don’ matta.
If I don’t know who you are, I might not be able to help you, I warn him.
You got it all wrong, lady, he laughs. I’m long gone. Ain’t nothin’ you can do for me. I’m fixin’ to help you. He holds up an index finger and moves it in a little circle. Look around yuh.
The tall stalks of sugarcane have disappeared. Only a couple inches of cut stalks rise out of the soil, giving me a clear view in every direction. Now I can make out a distant line of road, a faraway cluster of rusted white buildings with tall, industrial-looking chimney stacks. I begin walking toward the buildings. They feel important.
I been here a long, long time, Clifford says, scampering to keep up with me. I seen things.
Yeah? What have you seen?
You lookin’ for him, ain’tcha? I stop in my tracks, and he nods sagely, satisfied that he’s got my full attention. Nobody found him, but you lookin’. Come on, I’ll show you the place.
A coldness spreads through my body, moving inward from my limbs. Everything’s slow. He’s going to take me to Gabriel. I hunt for a geographic landmark, something I can use later. Apart from the white buildings, though, there’s just open land.
Okay, I say. Let’s go.
Clifford holds out a hand to me. Gone be dark.
I lay my palm across his, grasp his fingers, and then everything vanishes. The farmland, the blue skies.
I’ve lost it.
How could I get so close and walk away with nothing? But it’s not nothing, I see now. The boy is still beside me, holding my hand in the dark. Around us, giant, shadowy structures loom. I reach out gingerly with my free hand. Beneath a layer of dust and grime, I feel metal. Machinery, perhaps? I touch the ground. Concrete. We must be inside the buildings with the chimney stacks I saw before. The only light comes from a broken window to the left, something outside shining in. I think I know where we are now, but I don’t understand how Gabriel could be here. What about the swamp and the boat?
Clifford? I whisper, squeezing his hand. Is this right? Are we—
Some kids come with a dog last night, he says. Been a lotta years, a lotta animals, but one a they dogs found a piece a him. He drug it in here.
I can’t chicken out now. I’m standing in a room with Gabriel’s remains, and I will find them, damn it.
Where is he? I croak. Show me.
You holdin’ him, Clifford says.
Only then do I realize that it’s not Clifford’s hand I’m holding at all. It’s bone.
• • •
I FUMBLE FOR MY PHONE before my eyes are fully open. The lights in the cottage are still on, blindingly bright, and the television plays on mute. I dial Detective Minot’s number without bothering to check the time. He’d better answer or I’m driving over there, throwing rocks at his window, setting off every burglar alarm in his neighborhood.
He picks up on the seventh ring with a groggy “Yeah?”
“It’s Charlie. I need your help.” I can’t remember the last time I asked anyone for help, certainly not in the middle of the night, yet Detective Minot doesn’t hesitate.
“Tell me how.”
I try to get a handle on my shivering. “You know the old sugar mill that the Deveau family owned? The one that closed in the seventies? I need you to take me there.”
“The sugar mill,” he repeats. “You think we’ll find something important?”
“I think we’ll find him.” My stomach clenches as I say the words. “I think we’ll find Gabriel.”
22.
Sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala, I can’t stop shivering. The heater is cranked up and Detective Minot has given me a blanket he normally reserves for shock victims, but I’m still freezing. We’re parked in a lot outside the old mill. It’s four a.m., pitch-black except for the weak beam of the car’s headlights.
“Do you want me to go in alone?” he asks. “Tell me where, I’ll go.”
But I don’t want him to leave. I pull the blanket closer to my body. “Give me a minute.”
“I’ll take you to my house,” Detective Minot says. His voice is calm, but from the way he’s gripping the steering wheel, he’s losing his patience. “You can stay with Justine. Just tell me what to look for.”
I stall for time. “Maybe we should wait until it’s light out.”
“If you saw the place in the dark, this is what you’ll recognize. Which is why I’d prefer to have you with me.”
“Don’t you need a warrant? I mean, aren’t we trespassing?”
He shakes his head. “This land is being leased by Strickland Organics. They’ve called the police department over here a bunch of times. It’s a party spot.”
“Yeah, I heard that.” Even Deacon knew that much.
“Kids are kids. They’ll mess with farm equipment if you give them half a chance.” He shrugs. “Anyway, Deenie Strickland is used to officers checking on the place. She’s asked us to do it.”
I follow the beam of the headlights with my eyes. The graying building in front of us has orange graffiti on its exterior, a broken window, and a cluster of beer bottles on the ground. After thirty years, shouldn’t one of these teenagers have seen something by now?
Why me? Why on this particular night? I can’t shake the feeling that someone—or something—has orchestrated this all.
“Maybe we won’t find anything,” I say hopefully.
“You sounded mighty sure on the phone.”
“Well, now I’m not.”
“You’re just scared.”
His dismissive tone pisses me off. “I have a right to be scared. Maybe you’re used to seeing the worst of people, but I’m not. Maybe I don’t want to see some poor little boy scattered around the—”
“Shut up and listen to me.” In the dark, Detective Minot’s face is especially haggard, his eyes wild. “I don’t know about God, but I know about you. I know you’ve got an ability nobody else has got. I’m sorry it scares you, but you need to go in there.”
“I don’t know,” I whimper.
But he’s no longer listening to me. “Hey.” He turns to me, awed
. “Do you see what time it is?”
I glance at the digital clock on the dashboard. Four sixteen.
“That’s when Didi died,” he murmurs. “Right when you told me. That’s your message, do you understand? Four sixteen. From Didi. Now get out of the damn car.”
I open the door, put a reluctant foot on the pavement. Detective Minot comes around with two huge flashlights and presents me with one. It’s surprisingly heavy, something you could use as a weapon in a pinch. Only moderately comforting when the things you’re most terrified of have no flesh or form at all.
My bad feelings only grow as we approach the main building. I don’t like the fact that Gabriel didn’t come to me himself. Why did this Clifford kid get involved? If he died of scarlet fever, he must have lived in a time before antibiotics. Why suddenly appear to help me? And what he told me is in direct conflict with what Gabriel himself communicated about the swamp and the boat. Something isn’t adding up. I tell myself that dead children don’t set traps for the living, don’t lure them to remote places with evil intentions, but what the hell do I know? Maybe that’s exactly what they do.
Detective Minot leaves his headlights on and walks around the perimeter of the building until he finds a door. I’m on his heels, as near as possible without actually stepping on him.
“Does this look familiar?” he asks. “There’re a few buildings, but this is the biggest.”
“I didn’t see it from the outside. I won’t know until we’re in.”
Detective Minot jerks the door open and gestures for me to go first. I shoot him a dirty look. “Hell no.”
I follow him in and we sweep our flashlights around the space: high ceilings with metal rafters, piping in every direction, stairs and narrow catwalks, and huge, rusted gears. A large but cramped space that must have housed many workers. I make my way through the building, ducking under pipes, my eyes on the ground. There’s rubble, scraps of metal, soda cans, and wrappers. Nothing resembling bone. I’m not even convinced this is the right building until I see a broken window on the far wall, the one we saw from the car. The Impala’s headlights shine through from the parking lot, and I remember this window in my dream, the light shining in, its placement relative to my position.
I grab Detective Minot’s arm. “See that window?” I drag him over to what feels like the right general area. “Check around here.”
We drop to our knees and shine our flashlights in slow lines across the cement floor. The machinery casts odd shadows, making a wadded-up napkin look highly suspicious.
Detective Minot finds something wedged behind a steel post and pulls out a fast-food container. He whips it to the ground in annoyance.
I try to recall exactly what I saw in my vision. I know I was holding bone, but I don’t think I saw it, really. I just knew, I just felt what it was. My mind keeps returning to what Clifford said about a dog dragging a piece of Gabriel in, and I shudder.
Detective Minot is still groping around the floor, totally focused, and I feel a wave of uncertainty. Are we really in the right place? I glance back at the window and my stomach lurches. Detective Minot yells, “Holy shit!”
Someone is watching us through the window. A face I know.
Then he’s gone, so fast I’d think I were imagining things if Detective Minot hadn’t also reacted.
“You saw him,” I whisper. My heart is straining against my rib cage. “You saw him, too, right?”
“Saw who?” Detective Minot aims his flashlight at the door. “You saw someone?”
“At the window! Didn’t you? You screamed.”
“Look what turned up under a McDonald’s bag.”
I can’t see well, but the item in the palm of his hand appears to have a tooth.
“Jawbone,” he murmurs.
“Oh Jesus.” My eyes fill up with tears.
Detective Minot tucks the bone fragment into his pocket and looks over at the window. “Now, are you saying there’s someone outside?”
Is my mind playing tricks on me? It must’ve been.
“I thought . . . I thought I saw a man.”
“Let’s go look.” His hand hovers by his waist, ready to draw his gun, and I realize I’m not the only one who’s totally spooked.
We wind back through the building, squeezing past equipment until we make it to the door.
Back in the parking lot, the Impala is exactly as we left it. Detective Minot checks beneath the car and points his light at the backseat but finds no murderous psychos lying in wait.
“We would’ve heard a car drive up,” he says. “I guess someone could be in one of the other buildings. You wanna look?”
“No,” I say quickly. “I must’ve been seeing things. Forget it.”
“Maybe you were having one of your visions.” He opens the car door for me.
“It was an adult. In the visions, I’ve only ever seen kids.”
“Oh. What did he look like?”
“He looked . . .” Like Noah, I want to say. That expressionless, watchful face looked an awful lot like Noah. But it couldn’t be. Noah’s in Texas. And why on earth would he be roaming around the sugar mill at night? “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just go. This place is messing with my head.”
We say little as we pull away from the mill, but I’m sure Detective Minot is wondering the same things that I am. Did Gabriel die out here, or was the sugar mill just a dump site? What does the location tell us about Gabriel’s killer, and how do the swamp and the boat fit in? Where is the rest of the body? Does the mill hold any other clues? I lean against the car window and watch the stars.
“What will you tell them at the station?”
He’s obviously been working this one out in his head. “That I stopped by the mill to make sure no one was getting into trouble and found a bone. That I want an expert to give it a look, tell us if it’s human or animal.”
“And when it’s human? What happens next?”
“There’ll be a search. If the Deveaus don’t consent, we’ll get a warrant.”
“You can prove that bone belonged to Gabriel,” I say. “A lab could extract the DNA and run the genetic profile against a sample from Hettie.” My time at Cold Crimes taught me a lot about the sorry state of government-run forensic labs. I’m aware that this process could take months, maybe longer.
Detective Minot is about to say something, then thinks better of it. “We’ll see what happens, Charlotte. I’ll let you know how it all plays out.” He pats my shoulder without looking away from the road. “You came through tonight. Thank you.”
We both know I’d never have faced that mill alone, and he was the one who found something, not me.
“Remy,” I tell him softly, “you came through tonight, too.”
• • •
THE SECURITY GUARD at Evangeline is puzzled when I return a little after five a.m. “Didn’t think I’d see you again today,” he says as he logs me in. “You left so early, I figured you had a flight to catch.”
I ignore his unspoken question. Apparently the security personnel, unlike the help, have not been trained to mind their own business. Once inside the gate, I park and hustle back to my cottage. The grounds are especially unsettling this dark morning. He was here once, alive. Playing. Making mischief. And then somebody took him away. Stole him from his bed in the night, brought him to that awful mill, and did who-knows-what unspeakable things before they killed him. He wasn’t even three years old. Now he’s just bone.
I turn on every light in the cottage, but I’m shaking again, can’t stop. I can no longer distinguish between paranoia and well-founded fear. Where is Noah when I need him, damn it? He’s in Texas, I tell myself. He’ll be back tomorrow.
Unless that was Noah I saw in the window tonight. But why would he lie about going to Texas? Why would he be prowling around the site of Gabriel’s body?
; You not gettin’ the whole story with that one. RaJean’s words haunt me. He ain’t who you think.
I can’t be alone right now, I realize. I’ll go crazy. As soon as Leeann arrives, I head up to the house. She buys my story about a nightmare and makes me warm milk with honey and vanilla. The steaming mug proves moderately comforting, and when Benny, Bailey, and the big-bellied Paulette all file in for breakfast, the scene is so normal, I can almost forget what I’ve seen.
Paulette is due March first, just a month away. She no longer walks; she lumbers. I don’t know how she manages to clean the house anymore—at that stage of pregnancy, I was too tired to load a plate in the dishwasher.
From her conversation with Leeann, though, it’s clear she’s more worried about not working. “Bailey, she come two weeks early,” Paulette says. “Lord knows, we can’t afford that again. I’m prayin’ every night this baby stay in. We need those paychecks.”
Benny nods heavily and Leeann mentions some kind of state assistance program she went on after having her son. I listen to their financial woes, grateful my days of sharing crappy studio apartments with a roommate are over. My mother came from nothing, but my father was raised solidly middle-class, and with a college education, I knew that if I could handle some lean years, I’d eventually move onward and upward. But what opportunities do Paulette and Leeann really have? When Hettie dies and Evangeline goes to the historical association, what will become of them?
I choke down some eggs and let Bailey tell me about her baby brother. She will feed him bottles, she says, but she will not share toys because babies break things. She asks why I’m not married. I’m about to navigate the minefield topic of divorce when Jules hurries into the kitchen looking uncharacteristically rumpled.
“I thought I’d give you all fair warning,” he says. “Sydney called. She and Brigitte just left New Orleans. This house needs to be spotless when they get here, so use your time wisely.”
Leeann looks a little queasy. “They stayin’ all week?”
“They’ll be visiting their mother indefinitely,” Jules says grimly. “You’re responsible for weekday meals, as per usual. I suggest you put together a menu before they get here.”