Shadowed Summer

by Mitchell, Saundra

  “I guess,” Ben said coolly.

  I minded my own business. Old pages from the Ascension Citizen flashed by in gray streaks. My eyes flitted back and forth, trying to make sense of the blurs, until a headache started between my brows. Slowing the wheel, I found I could actually skim the headlines.

  Eighteen-year-old baseball scores, wedding announcements, obituaries; the parish president looking for money to repave the roads . . . That one was kind of funny, because Daddy still complained about the roads and how somebody ought to do something about them.

  Collette had just gotten her machine running when I stopped half on a back page, half on a front. I turned the wheel as slow as I could, evening the picture up, then reached over to tug on Collette’s sleeve. “Look, June seventeenth.”

  Craning over my shoulder, Collette read the article out loud with me. “ ‘Landry, seventeen, had just been released from Ascension Parish Hospital when he disappeared.’ ” Collette pushed ringlets out of her face to look at me. “It doesn’t say why he was there, though.”

  Nodding, I skimmed farther down, past the quotes from his teachers that said he was a good student and a nice boy. “ ‘A spokesman for the sheriff’s department said they found no evidence of forced entry during their initial investigation.’ ”

  “How ’bout that,” Collette said, laying her forearm against my shoulders to get more comfortable. “Look, right there. ‘Mr. Nathan Landry and his wife, Babette, are offering a twenty-thousand-dollar reward.’ Did y’all know there was a Mr. Landry?”

  “I guess there had to be,” I said slowly. “I never thought about it, though.”

  Ben slid into Collette’s empty chair. “I knew.”

  “How come you didn’t say anything?” Collette asked.

  “I dunno.” Ben shrugged, his shoulders swimming in his oversized T-shirt. “A couple years after Elijah disappeared, they split up. ’Bout the time Old Mrs. Landry decided God called Elijah home, my mama said.”

  Collette shooed Ben from her chair. “What else do you know that we don’t?”

  Ben laughed. “How am I supposed to know what you know?”

  Hiding a smile behind my hand, I tried not to look overlong at Ben in case I started liking him a little. I didn’t want to hold his hand or anything. He was Collette’s; I wouldn’t like him like that. But when she wasn’t wallowing all over him, he did make me laugh.

  I cleared my throat. “We’re supposed to be reading, not talking.”

  Collette muttered something under her breath but got back to work. The clack and chunk of spools winding started to take on a pattern, regular as a train on its tracks. Adding my part to it, I turned the wheel slowly, getting used to the swipes of gray that turned steady black-and-white when I stopped to read.

  “Says here he was on the football team.” Ben waggled his finger at the screen.

  “My daddy was on the team,” I said.

  “Think he’d tell us anything?”

  I shrugged, as if I hadn’t already considered it. “I dunno.”

  Making her machine whine with a particularly hard crank, Collette sniffed like she’d smelled something bad. “He works the night shift, anyhow. We’d have to be up at dawn or midnight to have a sit-down with him.”

  “Not on the weekends.” I cut her a look for answering for me. “I’ll ask at dinner.” Then I pointed to my screen. “A whole mess of people went looking for him; half the parish, it sounds like.”

  Collette took the pen and paper from Ben. “Well, we knew that. Did they quote anybody?”

  In all, we made a list of six names, mostly folks who’d worked on the search parties, a couple people who’d claimed to be his friends. By the time we’d run out of microfiche, we had pages of clues, some in Ben’s scratchy print, others in Collette’s fat, round cursive.

  Collette and I packed the films away, making sure they got back in the right cases. It didn’t seem right that a whole mystery, a whole summer, could fit in such a small space. The spools clattered when I carried the box to Ben, who was finishing up on his machine.

  Nose almost pressed against the screen, Ben murmured and pointed to a picture he’d found. “ ’S Elijah, look.”

  Most of the articles had used a yearbook picture about the size of a stamp, too fuzzy to really make anything out. This one took up a quarter of the front page, and it made the back of my neck prickle.

  In fuzzy, faded color, Elijah peeked up through a fringe of ruffled bangs. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a smiling mouth I could practically see curving to ask me where I was at.

  “That’s him,” I said. “That’s who I saw.” I saw the spark in the cemetery again, heard his voice coming back so clear he could have been standing right behind me. For a second, I thought he might be, that his hand would curl around my shoulder, cold and steady, to lead me to his last, lonely place on earth.

  When Collette bumped me to get a look, I jumped.

  “You sure, Iris?”

  Nodding, I wrapped my arms around myself, rubbing to try to get a taste of the heat I’d been glad to escape all day. We were looking for Elijah because I had lied, but there he was—my boy from the cemetery—and I didn’t know if that was coincidence or destiny or what, but it sure felt like somebody’d walked over my grave.

  I couldn’t stop staring; by the time Ben and Collette figured out how to get a print, I’d memorized Elijah’s face, down to the crook in his nose and the spray of freckles on his cheeks.

  Even if I’d only imagined my visions, even if we’d all told a lie on the witchboard, I knew when I saw that picture that Elijah wanted me to find him.

  In my heart, I knew he was ready to come home.

  Back at my house, I found a note on the fridge. They’d called Daddy in early to work, and my supper was waiting for me in the oven. A quick peek inside revealed a meat loaf, which meant I would cut off a slice to feed to the garbage disposal, then microwave a frozen pizza.

  Meandering around the kitchen, I wrapped myself in an eerie calm. The first time me and Collette tried talking to the dead, somebody answered. My thoughts had been twisted up in knots. One minute, everything going on was true; the next, it wasn’t. Collette could talk me into believing something, but then I’d turn around and let Daddy talk me right back out.

  I’d stumbled back and forth so much, it was a relief to finally be sure about something.

  Elijah chose me. He’d chosen me. Collette had lain three feet away, working the same spell, but Elijah had said my name. I’d seen him; no one else had. Plenty of other people wanted to know what had happened to him; one of them in particular would be on the church steps come Sunday morning, offering hard candy for prayers.

  But he chose me.

  chapter five

  The day started hazy gray, threatening rain right from the beginning. When I opened my window, the sticky green smell of it rolled in on a warm breeze. The curtains fluttered, blowing out and rippling at the edges, whispering against my desk.

  I hurried to get dressed and start investigating. Me and Collette and Ben had split our list of people quoted in the paper on the subject of Elijah, and Deputy Wood was on mine. The sheriff’s station was right outside town, close enough that I could ride my bike.

  In old pictures, Deputy Wood had stood tall and skinny, with a thick black mustache that waterfalled down either side of his mouth. Having seen him lately, though, I knew that his mustache had gone salt-and-pepper and he’d thickened out in the middle. The blue uniform stretched tight across his chest, and his star didn’t lie flat anymore.

  Most days, he sat in his cruiser just off the highway, cherry-picking the hot-rodders who had nothing to do but drive fast between Ondine and Baton Rouge. Everybody over sixteen hated him, but since I couldn’t drive yet, he seemed all right to me. Besides, I thought folks ought to know better than to speed on his stretch, anyway. Gambling on its being his day off came with pretty bad odds.

  I wasn’t sure if it was against the law to walk up to him w
hile he was working, but I figured the worst that could happen was that he’d send me home with a warning to stay off the big roads. Since I’d be on my bike, he wouldn’t clock me at more than five miles an hour, so I couldn’t get a ticket; I just might be wasting my morning.

  On my way out, I stopped at the Red Stripe to get a soda. Fishing around for the coldest can, I leaned into the refrigerator case and apologized when Mr. Ourso shuffled past with a box of toilet paper nearly bigger than him.

  I felt like I should help him. I knew better than to offer, though, because he liked things just so. Even Ben just opened and unpacked the boxes when he worked; he left everything in the back for Mr. Ourso to put away. Mr. Ourso was particular about everything in the Red Stripe, probably because that was all he had.

  Normally, I wouldn’t have given him much thought, but his name was on our list, too. He hadn’t joined the search parties—my guess was he’d been old even then—but he had donated sandwiches and coffee. Since everybody had met up here, he’d have to know something, even if it was just the places they’d looked and found nothing.

  When I got to the register, I was careful to hold my can instead of setting it down. I didn’t want to get a dirty look for leaving a ring on his counter. Mr. Ourso returned from the back, scrubbed his hands with a dish towel, then threw it over his shoulder when he saw me waiting.

  “Got some salt and vinegar chips that go real good with that,” he said, nodding at my soda as he opened the gate to get behind the counter. “They’re on sale.”

  I hesitated, because I didn’t really like salt and vinegar chips. They were only fifty cents, though, and I thought Mr. Ourso might like me a little better if I bought them. Plucking a green bag from the stand, I turned and dropped it on the counter with a smile. “Now I’m set.”

  Nodding, Mr. Ourso punched a couple of buttons on his register, one at a time. He probably knew how much everything in the Red Stripe cost, down to the penny and the tax, but he always rang it up slowly anyway.

  Since I had him there, I didn’t see anything wrong with asking about Elijah. I did just buy a snack from him I didn’t want after all. “Hey, Mr. Ourso?”

  He answered me with a grunt, the register chiming when he hit TOTAL. “Two sixty-two.”

  I dug the last of my coins from my pocket. Between Shea and Mr. Ourso, finding Elijah had started to get expensive. “You’ve had the Red Stripe a long time, huh?”

  “Forty-seven years,” he said. He smoothed my dollars with the heel of his hand before putting them in the register. I guess he didn’t want the rest of the money getting any ideas about being unruly in the drawer.

  “Wow.”

  He looked up at me with watery blue eyes, but he didn’t nod, or smile, or even frown. He had the stillest face I’d ever seen. Thin lines dug down around his mouth and across his brow, but he seemed made out of paper. I could see the thin blue veins beneath his skin. In fact, I could see his heartbeat, his pulse fluttering at his temple. The quiet scared me more than yelling would have, and I think I might have flinched when he said, “Thirty-eight cents.”

  The change went in my pocket, and I mumbled a thank-you as I slunk toward the door. Tucking the chips and soda into my bike bag, I decided that cracking Mr. Ourso could wait until later. A lot later.

  Sweaty and out of breath, I stood on the side of the highway. There were tire tracks where Deputy Wood should have been; he must have needed some new scenery.

  In my brilliant plans, he was sitting right out in his cherry-picking spot, just waiting to spill terrible secrets about Elijah’s disappearance, if only somebody would come along and ask him.

  I stood there for a long time, like wishing would make his cruiser appear. Funny enough, it didn’t, so I got back on my bike.

  The police outpost wasn’t much, just a cinder-block box with some dingy windows, but it had air-conditioning, at least. The frigid, tinny blast of it went right through my sweat-soaked shirt as I approached the front desk.

  The woman there didn’t look up from her computer. Her fingers rushed along, still going as she asked, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Deputy Wood,” I said. I craned to see if he might be in the back. “Is he here?”

  “He’s on patrol. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, studying her smooth skin and unlined hands. “How old are you?”

  The typing stopped. “Excuse me?”

  Something started bubbling in my chest. “I mean, I was wondering about something that happened a long time ago, and you don’t look very old. . . .”

  The woman typed out four more letters, pounding the keyboard hard on each one before spinning her chair to face me. “Do you have a report number?”

  I shook my head. “No, ma’am.”

  “Do you have new evidence you’d like to share?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Are you an interested party?”

  Drawing my shoulders up, I hesitated. “Well, I am interested.”

  Her voice clipped, she plucked a pen out of a can on her desk and produced a form. “If there’s something you want to claim, fill out your name and address, and to the best of your abilities, describe the object or objects you believe should be returned to you.”

  I shook my head when she tried to hand me the pen. “There’s nothing I want, not a thing I want, I mean. I just wanted to talk to Deputy Wood.”

  She whisked the form off the counter and replaced it with a new one. “Requests for interviews need to go through the Public Information Office.”

  “I don’t want to interview him. I just want to talk to him!”

  The woman drew her fingers across the counter. She spoke slowly, like I wasn’t bright enough to follow her. “About a police matter?”

  “No, ma’am, never mind,” I said, and gave up.

  Waterlogged and weepy, I got back on my bike. Between jerking my head back every time I snuffled and trying to swipe at my face to keep my view clear, it was a lucky thing I didn’t get run over.

  More than anything, I just wanted to be home, curled up in the armchair, rubbing my fingers on the air conditioner. I wanted to be home just like that, right that minute, but I was stuck.

  Daddy didn’t keep the ringer on in his room during the daytime, so even if I’d had a way to call, he wouldn’t have answered. Collette’s mama would have come to fetch me, but I could imagine the way her voice would go up and down all the way home if she had to leave the diner to carry me home.

  The highway was dizzy hot, white waves rolling off the asphalt to make fun-house mirages out of the distance. I kept telling myself I only had to make it to the next sign, but the next sign always looked closer than it was.

  Cars zipped by me, and sometimes, out of pure meanness, they honked. It was a surprise every time, and I kept wobbling off into the gravel to get away from them.

  I wished horrible things on those people. I prayed they’d get a flat tire and have to walk—at least I had a bicycle. And then, when I ran across them staggering toward Ondine, I’d laugh and pedal faster.

  Meanness of spirit was all I had left in me. I was burning from the inside, my legs started turning to jelly, and it got harder to keep myself from sitting down in the tall grass to bawl.

  I hated that woman at the sheriff’s station, her and her dyed red hair that wasn’t fooling anybody; I hated Deputy Wood for being somewhere besides his cherry-picking spot, where he could have written slips for half of Ascension Parish, considering how fast everybody drove past me.

  Just for good measure, I hated Shea Duvall, too, because he didn’t happen past on a whim and pick me up. Me and my bike would have fit in the back of his bronze and primer station wagon just fine, and I had almost a dollar left. That should have been enough for a ride home. Next time I saw him, I planned to call him Horatio, just out of spite—he’d been named for a Shakespeare character, too.

  The sky folded over on itself, new shades of bruise and br
own painting the clouds, but the rain wouldn’t come, no matter how hard I wished it. Road dirt clung to my sweaty skin, and my clothes were soaked through. A good gully washer would clean me off and cool me down, and besides, nobody would be able to tell I had cried all the way home if the rain came.

  I slid off my bike to walk it for a while; as I walked I made mystic signs with one hand, like I was one of those traveling rainmakers who used to come through during a drought. I kept at it until the sky finally opened.

  Whether I had anything to do with it or not, I took credit for the storm. Maybe the secret to making wonders happen was just waiting for the right time to try.

  I left my bike in the front yard, and I’d just started inside when I saw the red and blue lights coming down my street, gliding slow enough that I knew the police weren’t on an emergency.

  The rain dulled everything, even the bright red stripes on the white-paneled sheriff’s car, and it made the tires sound like they had a scrub brush to the pavement.

  My heart jumped, beating hard and happy in my chest. Elijah had decided to help after all, sending Deputy Wood all but to my door. I squeezed the wet from the hem of my shirt, as if that’d make me more presentable, and waited.

  Rennie Delancie came onto his porch with a big aw-shucks smile. His strawberry-blond hair fell into his eyes, and I guessed if you liked the wicked type, Rennie was probably pretty fine to look at. Waving a bandaged hand at me he shifted from one foot to the other, looking like he had to pee.

  Since gawking was rude, I pretended to fumble for my key, listening as Deputy Wood went up Rennie’s walk.

  “No, sir, we haven’t blown up anything for weeks.”

  Rennie lied like most people breathed, natural and smooth. I couldn’t see him, but I figured he had painted on that smile of his until it was permanent.

  Rennie and Deputy Wood went back and forth awhile; the bandage came from a cooking accident, and Lord, no, he hadn’t heard anything out of the ordinary. Deputy Wood took a peek in the garage and around the back of the house, then told Rennie he and his brother needed to knock it off or next time he’d haul them in. They probably heard that once a week, though, so when Rennie said, “Yes, sir, I promise,” I laughed under my breath.