“Please,” she says.
“I understand the mayor’s position,” I say. My voice only wavers a little. “I don’t understand yours.”
She glances over her shoulder at me. “You’re a little young to be cynical.”
“If it were me, I wouldn’t want to lose my home. I don’t think that’s cynical,” I say.
She hums thoughtfully. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m not meeting you out of the goodness of my heart. My position couldn’t be more practical. The neighbors—they’re my constituents, too. And if I owe you the benefit of the doubt, I owe it to whatever you’ve brought, too.”
I pause. The ever-present movement over my shoulder has stilled since I greeted Christie Jones. Like they’re standing at a distance, waiting to see what happens.
“She says you can get rid of it.” I say it so quietly, I almost don’t hear it myself.
She’s still smiling. But her eyes go sharp.
“Well,” she says. “First things first. Why don’t you answer your own question for me. Why are you here?”
I keep smiling, though my back straightens. “What happened to the benefit of the doubt?”
“You’re looking at it,” she says.
“I mean . . .” I say. “You know my car broke down on—”
“You’re clearly very smart, Rose. So I think you know that’s not what I meant,” Christie says. “Why were you on the road? Traveling somewhere?”
My phone shivers in my pocket. Flora Summer, maybe, checking in on me. She hasn’t heard from me in a day, after all. Clearly I must be dead.
My stomach drops. Maybe not the best idea to joke about the d word when it comes to Flora, even in my head.
“Home from somewhere,” I finally manage. “I was visiting a family friend in Vegas.”
“Awfully late to be driving,” she says.
“My AC’s busted. Has been for a year.” Under her stare, I find myself adding, “And I left earlier than I was supposed to.”
She nods approvingly. “Something happen?”
For a second I almost see it, like it’s burned on my retinas: that slouched figure standing in the center of the Summers’ kitchen. There’s a sick, sudden drop when I blink, like I’ve slipped under the floor. The thought of him in that kitchen, looking through their fridge, pouring himself drinks, still prickles like a long, fresh scrape. Gaby’s parents moved after she died, that house wasn’t hers, that kitchen wasn’t hers. But it’s yet another thing Nick would get to see and she wouldn’t.
I shouldn’t have left Flora alone with him. But maybe that’s an irrational thought. It’s not like I left her in a car with him.
I squeeze my eyes tighter, then open them again. I’m in Lotus Valley Elementary School. Not the kitchen. Not Vegas. Not with him.
“Someone else showed up,” I say. “Someone I wasn’t expecting. And I didn’t want to be in the same house with him, so . . . I left.”
“So that was the end of it?” she asks. “This person showed up, and you left?”
I laugh. “I think you’re underestimating how much I dislike this person.”
She suddenly looks very serious, glancing back at me. “Did he hurt you?”
It’s a jolt I feel down to the bones. I’ve known Christie Jones about five minutes. I didn’t expect her to look at me the same way Gaby did once, almost two years ago.
Rose. Tell me what he did.
The echo of it trips me up for a second. Long enough that I’m sure she doesn’t miss it.
“Not . . .” I swallow. “Not me. Specifically.”
She watches me for a moment longer. But eventually, she lets that pass.
“So you left this family friend, drove into the desert,” she says, “and then what?”
I remember that look that May 24 Rose Colter had on her face last night: distracted, maybe, but outwardly calm. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how I look now. But Christie doesn’t trust it. She’s right not to.
“Well,” I finally say, “there was some walking thrown in there.”
“Ah, yes. The broadcast.” She glances into the classroom behind her. “I don’t think you said whose voice it was you heard.”
“I don’t think I mentioned it to you at all,” I say slowly.
She shrugs. “I’d very much like to trust you, Rose. But I don’t think I ever promised that we’d trust you without question, did I?”
I suddenly realize that everything I told Cassie yesterday, Sheriff Jones knows by now. My pulse goes loud and fast in my ears.
“Besides,” she says, “I think the feeling is mutual, isn’t it?”
“Meaning what?” I snap back.
“Meaning you don’t trust me,” she says.
“Would you?” I make myself take a deep, shaky breath. “I get what you’ve been saying. And I can believe that in this town, you’re more used to weird shit than most. But if what’s following me is half as scary as you keep implying, I have to be honest. Mayor Williams says you could stop this if you wanted to. And I don’t understand why you wouldn’t.”
She chews on that for a long moment. Finally, slowly, she sets her parasol against the wall. “Should I explain it to you, then?”
There’s a kind of shift in the air. My foot slides back through the dust.
Her smile softens a little. But the line of her shoulders is still taut. “I suppose this answers two questions at once really,” she muses. “How you can get rid of it, if that’s what you want—and why I’d rather not.”
Her purposeful stride slows as she approaches the windows. As her hand reaches for the blinds, she looks over her shoulder and smiles.
“Try to keep your voice down,” she says. “He startles easy.”
She yanks the cord, and the low angle of the sun fills the room with a burst of light and long shadows. Only, her shadow seems to be a little longer than it should be. A lot longer.
Long enough that it splits in two.
Those two shadows split into twos, on and on until they stretch wall to wall, floor to ceiling, writhing and swarming around the fixed point of her legs. They shiver silently at the base of her feet. She glances down at them, patient but firm. And at length, their movements begin to slow, smooth out. By the time she looks back to me, they’re drifting gently back and forth like kelp on an ocean floor.
Christie Jones, surrounded by a thousand shadows, turns back to me. “You see,” she says. “You’re not the only one being followed.”
Eight
THE LONG SHADOW
NOTE TO SELF: As catchy as it is to say, fight or flight are not the only two options available to you. There is, according to Maurice, door number three: freeze. It’s simple enough. You stand there with your mouth open and do nothing.
Well. I don’t do nothing.
“What the hell is that?” I blurt out.
Christie’s brow creases. “You’re one to talk.”
“Oh God, sorry,” I say automatically. At least my hindbrain is still trying to be polite. “It’s—I’m—How are you doing that?”
“Me? I’m not doing anything,” she says. “Aside from my damn impressive 5K and my, frankly, superhuman mac-and-cheese recipe, I’m pretty normal as far as people go. This”—she gestures to the room, packed to the walls with inky black shadows—“is Rudy.”
“Rudy,” I say faintly.
“It started as a joke,” she says with a shrug. “But he’s never had the words to tell me his name, and I’m not sure he has a language to begin with. So it stuck.”
We’ve been calling it a flood, Cassie had said, because it’s the closest word in our vocabulary for what I saw. I wonder if they ever had a name. I wonder if anyone else ever knew it.
Christie eyes me for a moment. “You don’t seem that surprised.”
“I have a good poker f
ace,” I say faintly.
“You don’t have to be so polite.” She swings her arms behind her back, clasping her hands. The shadows don’t move with her. “This is new to you. I get that. If you have something to ask, ask.”
“Okay . . .” Carefully, to test it, I move my foot into the classroom without touching the floor. The shadows ripple for a moment, as if unsure what to do. Then the tangle of his limbs recedes, creating a bare spot of floor right before my toes.
I laugh and slowly transfer my weight into the circle. Thanks, Rudy.
“So I’m guessing you’d like to start with how,” Christie says.
“And how long,” I say.
“Ten years,” she says.
“Ten—” I swallow the rest of the sentence. “Where did he come from?”
Part of him disconnects from the floor and reaches up—off the ground, the limb rounds out, turns solid and three-dimensional—and comes to rest on her shoulder. She scratches at the underside, and his whole body shivers with delight. When he withdraws, satisfied, the limb flattens and slides to the linoleum, melting back into the maze of shadow.
“Well,” she says. “Not all of us get a prophecy to give us the heads-up. By the time I noticed him, he was already there.”
I shift from foot to foot. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Rudy slide farther back, giving me a little more space. “Were you scared?”
“No more than I already was at the time.” She eyes me, her face impassive. “I was far away from home back then. Far away from everyone who cared about me, with someone I shouldn’t have trusted as much as I did.
“Cassie must have told you that for all the differences between our neighbors, there’s one thing that unites them. They’re born from change—sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always irreversible. But it doesn’t have to be an earth-shattering change. Sometimes it’s just in that moment a relationship drops all pretenses. Becomes as ugly as it always was, deep down.”
She smiles and shrugs. “I’m Lotus Valley born and bred. Some of us go our whole lives without seeing a neighbor up close, let alone have a hand in creating one, but you’re always a little ready for it, you know? So when I stepped out of my building back then and my shadow filled a whole block, it felt like the logical conclusion.”
There’s a sharp crunch. I flinch, Christie doesn’t. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that Rudy appears to be chewing up a takeout container from the trash. So I guess those were mouths.
“Rudy,” Christie says, mildly chiding. “Gross.”
He curls around her ankles, chastened.
“I couldn’t understand him,” she says. “Or make him understand me. But there’s one more thing our neighbors have in common. Like any living thing, there’s always going to be something they need to survive. And like we need food and light and water to live? Rudy seemed to need to protect me.
“He wasn’t violent with my boyfriend, at first. I think he just wanted to scare him.” Christie’s smile drops, and for a moment, I see myself in that car last night, blank-faced and shivering. “Sometimes I think Rudy learned that violence from him. Because when my boyfriend escalated, so did Rudy.”
For a moment, Rudy looks bigger. One of his arms crosses in front of the window, casting the room into brief but total shadow. “I don’t know if I was afraid before,” Christie says. “But I was then.”
“What changed?” I ask slowly.
Catching the look on my face, she laughs. “Believe it or not, I don’t know much more than you do about things like Rudy. I don’t know if they think or feel like we do, or have a sense of right and wrong. For all I know, Rudy wouldn’t have thought much of anything about taking a life. Lotus Valley and the people here, we don’t have any special insight into them, exactly. They’re from everywhere, just like we are. They want different things, just like we do. But the only thing we really have in common is that we’re drawn, in the end, to the same little town.”
She’s thoughtful for a moment. “I know it’s not my fault he exists. But he came from me. So I wanted him to be something good.
“So I left that boyfriend, and that town. And maybe we both felt this place pulling us home, but it was more than that. I felt like whatever we were capable of together, we’d find it here. And on that road I could feel us both getting softer. He liked the car engine. He liked stealing fries out of my bag. And by the fourth motel, I stopped worrying that he was going to hurt someone. When I told him to stop, or calm down, he’d listen.”
She chews on her lower lip. “And he still listens, for the most part. But if there’s a threat that’s beyond my capability to handle . . . it doesn’t leave him much choice.”
“And you never tried to get rid of him?” I say it softly, like there’s any way Rudy might not hear.
She pauses. “Maggie Williams told you about our charter here.”
“To never turn away a soul in need,” I say.
“We didn’t have that charter when I was growing up,” she says. “There was this understanding, like we didn’t have a choice but to try to get along. And not everyone here is like Cassie, you know? Some of us don’t know yet what our particular strangeness is. My family’s been here for so long, we’ve forgotten what drew us to Lotus Valley in the first place.
“I did wonder at first how to make Rudy leave.” She smiles down at the floor. “But welcoming him in—getting to understand him, and understand what we could be if we built something together—it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.”
I hope I’m subtle enough as I take a long, slow breath in.
“And is it always rewarding?” I say.
“Well,” she says. “If you were to ask Alex, he might have a less rosy view than I do.”
“Your intern Alex?” My next question comes a little slower. “What happened to him?”
That careful blankness smooths out her face again. “Sometimes the neighbors are born from something natural, like the flood. Sometimes, like Rudy, they exist because of human actions. Those neighbors—they take a stronger interest in us than others.” There’s a beat. “And just like Rudy was fixated on me, the neighbor that came to Alex was only interested in him. But unlike Rudy, he wasn’t there for anything good. And we couldn’t understand why. Not in time to make a difference.”
She doesn’t elaborate. I swallow down a sudden tightness in my chest. Not only at the thought of what might have happened to Alex. But at the question of why this ages-old force of nature considered me so particularly interesting.
Christie’s eyes flicker briefly to the walls, where the shadows have started to fill the boundaries of the room. “I believe these things have a right to be here. Maybe more right than we do. But that doesn’t mean Maggie Williams is wrong. Intentionally or not, some of them can be dangerous. And if they can’t live with us, then I can’t allow them to stay. And Rudy—well. He’s got a big appetite.”
“He . . . eats them?” I say, a little queasily.
Christie smiles humorlessly. “Let me put it this way. When Rudy first came to me, he had fifty arms. I counted. About a dozen good meals later? I can’t count anymore.”
He trills a little, weaving a long limb in and out of the space between her feet. It’s almost cute. But I can see the way he puffs himself up, just a little, in response to her words. In anticipation. His arms, many more than fifty, visibly twitch.
This, at the sheriff’s feet, is the fate that awaits my unwanted guest.
Well. I guess that’s up to me.
The soft, thoughtful lilt of Christie’s voice hardens, as if she knows what I’m thinking. “You’re going to hear a lot about what you should be doing. You don’t have to agree with me, or with anyone. But this is what I can tell you for sure: Rudy’s never gone against anything as big as what’s following you. I don’t think he stands a chance. This flood isn’t part of you the way Rudy i
s part of me, but they are following you. If there’s a fight, you may be in harm’s way. The way I see it, the best option we have is to talk to them—figure out why they’re here, try to convince them to stop. And that’s where you come in.”
I laugh queasily. “To do what, exactly?”
“Something older than humanity itself took an interest in you,” she says. “That’s not random. There’s something this flood needs to survive, too. Figure out what that is, and maybe you can communicate with them. They may not listen to you the way Rudy listens to me. But there’s a good chance no one’s tried to understand this thing in a long time.
“And on that note,” she says, “let’s talk about why you’re here.”
“Me?” I say. “I don’t—”
“It’s okay. You’re here because of that broadcast, you’ve made no secret of that,” she says, handing me her business card. “Two birds, one stone, honey. This building wasn’t always the elementary school, you know. You’re standing in what used to be the offices of Lotus Valley Community Radio.”
“All this,” I start. “What’s—”
“—the catch?” she drawls. “To get to the broadcast studio, you’ll need to use the basement stairs. I’ve asked someone I trust to wait there with the keys. And once you connect with her, wherever you go in this town, she goes with you. If you’re not with her, you’re with Felix or Alex, and even then, you tell her what you’re doing.”
“So you’re giving me a chaperone,” I say.
“Like I said”—she shrugs—“trust is earned.”
I almost don’t ask the next question. “Okay, so—say I do talk to them. Say I try to understand them. What if there’s nothing to understand? What if dangerous is all they are?”
The tendrils of the shadow start to curl. She, on the other hand, looks very still. “Rudy can help us clear this town in hours if we have to. I taught him to deal with stragglers, how to direct traffic. Hell, I even taught him how to pack a suitcase. I’m prepared to give you as much time as I possibly can. Focus on what you can do before it gets to that point. And try not to worry about what happens after that. That’s my job.”
The Valley and the Flood Page 8