Deputy Wood headed for his car, and I jumped down the steps. I tried to walk fast but not too fast, in case that was suspicious, and caught him as he fit himself behind the steering wheel again.
“Everything all right, sugar?” He hung his hat out the door, shaking the rain off before tossing it onto the seat next to him.
“Yes, sir, but could I ask you a question?”
Deputy Wood turned down the radio on his shoulder. He rested an arm across the steering wheel and grinned up at me. His dark brown eyes sparkled. They didn’t look as old as the rest of him did. “Besides that one?”
“Yes, sir.” I blushed, but I didn’t shy away. “You helped look for Elijah Landry, didn’t you?”
“Well, me and most of the parish, but yes, ma’am, I did.” His smile curled with curiosity, crooked at one corner like his brows. “I reckon that was before your time, though.”
I nodded. “It was, but I was . . . Me and my friend, we’re gonna do a report on local mysteries, and that’s the biggest one we’ve got.”
“I don’t know that it’s much of a mystery,” he said. “Fact is, he probably run off.”
I didn’t mean to shake my head, but I did. Folks ran away from Ondine all the time; it was practically tradition. When you lived in a town as big as a flea, anywhere with a movie theater was a step up. Everybody in town had an uncle or cousin what did that and nobody ever searched for them except maybe their mamas.
So right off, Elijah’s disappearance was different.
“How come you all had that big search party?”
Grinning again, Deputy Wood crooked a finger to draw me closer, then whispered like he was telling a secret. “His granddaddy was friends with the parish president.”
What that had to do with anything, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t say that. “There was blood on his pillow, too.”
“Sugar, if you’ve ever had a nosebleed, there’s probably been blood on your pillow.” Deputy Wood had finished answering questions. Twisting himself to sit proper in the car, he reached up to play with his radio. “How about you write your report on fox fire? I had some follow me half a mile once. Now, that’s a mystery.”
Disappointed, I shook my head. “My daddy says that’s just swamp gas lighting up.” I shrugged and stepped up on the curb, curling a hand against my forehead to keep the rain from my eyes.
For me and Daddy, talking didn’t stop at the end of supper, but the subjects changed. Dinner-table conversation covered news and information; dish-washing talk was sort of philosophical, or maybe just thinking out loud, so it was the best time to bring up Elijah.
“Deputy Wood says Elijah Landry just run off.”
Daddy hummed, the sound lost in plate clatter. “Does he, now?”
“Yup.” Digging into the corner of a pan, I scraped hard to get the last of the cheese off. “He said the only reason folks looked for him was because of his granddaddy’s friends.”
“Well, Mark Wood never did think too hard or too long.” Taking the pan, Daddy glanced at me. “That’s between us; you respect your elders.”
Crossing my heart, I nodded. “Anyway, so what’s that got to do with it? If somebody took me, people would look, right? Even though we don’t know the parish president?”
Without hesitating, Daddy took the next plate with a nod. “Naturally, sugar, but you’re younger than Elijah was. And a girl.”
Daddy usually made things more clear, but with that, he had jumped in with Deputy Wood to complicate things. My questions weren’t hard—“What?” and “Why?” mostly—so there ought to have been simple answers. “So?”
“Elijah was just shy of being grown. It’s not against the law to be grown and leave if you want.” Daddy turned the faucet to his side of the sink, rerinsing glasses before putting them in the tray. “Folks don’t worry about boys as much. It may not be right, but that’s the way it is.”
“Well, what do you think?”
Putting a glass down hard, Daddy chimed it against the rest of them, the whole drainer rattling. Tension tightened his mouth to a thin line. “I think he’s gone, Iris, and that’s the most anybody can say.”
I swallowed, feeling vaguely ashamed, though I didn’t know why. “I’m sorry.”
As if he’d remembered something, Daddy shook his head, and the lines drawn around his mouth faded. “What’s got you thinking about it, anyway?”
“I just wondered.” Then I added, “You knew him, right?” Daddy flipped his towel over. “It’s a small town; everybody did.”
“But he was in your class.”
Stopping for a minute, Daddy turned to me. “What are you after?”
Shrugging, I swiped a plate with my sponge and passed it to him. I couldn’t answer that honestly, partly because it was a secret and partly because I didn’t want him to warn me off of it. “I don’t know.”
Leaving the dish in the sink, Daddy scrubbed his hand dry and put it on my shoulder. “Are you afraid of staying here at night by yourself? Baby, if you are, Mrs. Thacker—”
“No!”
Mrs. Thacker was seventysomething, and she smelled like a house full of cats. Until last fall, Daddy had paid her to come in at night to keep an eye on me. Being a widow herself, Mrs. Thacker grieved for my daddy and for my mama in a way that made me feel sick to my stomach. Her chandelier earrings rang like church bells calling good people to Mass, sending good people to God. She was forever prodding me to talk about Mama so I wouldn’t forget. I hated Mrs. Thacker’s knobby knuckles and her morbid chiming, but I knew it wasn’t polite to ignore your elders, so I made things up to make her leave me alone.
A visit to Mississippi for a cousin’s funeral had kept Mrs. Thacker away for a week last September, and I’d used that week to convince Daddy she was completely unnecessary.
“I’m fine on my own, I promise.”
The quiet went on and on while Daddy thought about it; then he nodded. “All right, then, if you’re sure.”
“I am.” In my head, I added, One hundred percent, absolutely, totally sure, but I kept that to myself. If I sounded too eager, it might make him suspicious.
Returning to my dishes, I twisted the tap to add more hot water to my side. Carefully, I wound my way toward the right subject again. “Anyway, I was just curious because me and Collette read some stories about him at the library. They said he was on the football team.”
Daddy held his hand out for another plate. “He kept track of the equipment.”
That little sentence seemed to sparkle; it was so real, like a direct line to Elijah. “He couldn’t play, then?”
“No, he could.” A faraway gaze settled over Daddy. “He volunteered to be the manager since his mama wouldn’t sign his permission slip.”
Before I could ask why not, Daddy put the last plate in the drainer and changed the subject. “How’d you run up on Deputy Wood, anyhow?”
Lucky for me, I could tell the truth. I don’t know what I would have said if I’d found him on the highway, after all.
My bedroom ceiling had plaster swirls on it, and when I couldn’t sleep, I liked to stare at it and try to make new patterns out of the curls. I followed the shadows with my gaze, waves hitting the trim and flowing back into fancy swirls. Curlicues drifted into ribbons, splaying into butterflies. They flew away over green, green grass, leading me to the creek.
The scent of rich, dark earth tickled my nose, and I pushed tallgrass aside to get to the water. My heart turned over when I finally reached the riverbank. Lying there propped on one elbow, chucking rocks into the water, was Elijah.
Scooping up another stone, he drew back lazily, measuring his mark with his eyes before he threw. Somehow I’d expected him to be skinny like Ben, but he wasn’t. He had a fine shape, with broad shoulders and strong arms.
My shadow fell on him, and he tipped his baseball hat back to look up at me. I’d been right; he had dark brown eyes to go with his brown hair, and creamy, Acadian skin with a hint of peach to it.
&nb
sp; Smiling crookedly, he flicked his rock toward the water. “Where y’at, Iris?”
Swimming awake, I blinked at my desk and my posters. Dark as ever, my room didn’t smell like anything, and I was alone, just like I should have been. Swinging my feet over the side of the bed, I stood up, unsteady because somehow I expected marshy earth under me instead of carpet.
I stumbled to my desk so I could write down the details of my dream. It started to unravel in my head as I yanked my spellbook from the drawer. Flipping past the warning curse and all our other incantations, I stopped on the last half-used page.
Leaning over the spellbook, I slashed the page with ink, my handwriting sloped long like afternoon shadows. My words spilled out. They crashed into each other, and I had to read over them to make sure they were sense and not scribbles.
I flipped through the book once more before I collapsed back in bed. Throwing my forearm across my eyes, I exhaled, waiting for sleep to creep up on me again.
Then, against the blackness of my eyelids, I saw tiny print letters, soft white on dark. They rose like a ghost, chilling me till the hair stood up on my arms.
It’s a dream, I told myself. You’re just sleeping again.
But I heard the crickets singing outside. My nightgown stuck to my skin, and a sour taste bittered the back of my tongue. That was waking; I was awake.
Scrambling out of bed, I tore through my spellbook. I stopped and flattened my hand on the page, the one that had floated up behind my closed eyes. My throat went tight; I couldn’t breathe.
Somebody had written in my book.
My sprawling cursive had been marked out. I didn’t have a spell to go crazy anymore, not according to the new block letters at the top of the page.
I had a spell called How to Talk to Elijah.
chapter six
In Ondine, we were bred with God and superstition in our blood. If we spilled salt, we threw some over our shoulder right away. And we always found wood nearby to knock on when we were graced with good fortune.
That renamed spell was a sign if I’d ever seen one.
The morning after my dream, I went to the cemetery. I closed the gate and counted my paces to Cecily Claiborne’s crypt. I couldn’t do anything about the cloudless sky and the flood of sunshine. Hoping the weather wouldn’t matter, I climbed onto Cecily’s slab.
Just like before, I spread my arms in a cross. I licked my lips, then took a long, slow breath, willing the spell to take hold. This was the spell to talk to Elijah—he was coming, and I would be ready.
The cicadas ticked slowly, the heat too much for them to work very hard. Everything seemed to stop—no clouds moved across the sky, no wind teased the trees. I had nothing but quiet in a place of the dead.
Closing my eyes against the steady sun, I called Elijah to me, repeating his name over and over in my thoughts until the sound of it was a song. It carried and floated, turning and turning until it didn’t mean anything anymore, and I got lost in it.
Elijah, Elijah, Elijah.
A hand fell on my shoulder, and I jolted up. Somehow, all the shadows in the graveyard had gotten rearranged, and it hurt when I moved.
Standing next to Cecily’s crypt, Collette shook her head at me. “Lord, you’re burned.”
Automatically, I touched my cheek, then pulled my fingers away with a hiss. I had a sandpaper tongue, and my skin felt tight and hot, even when I didn’t touch it.
“You better get some aloe,” Collette said. I could tell from her thin frown that she couldn’t figure out why I’d do something so stupid as take a nap in the cemetery.
I slid off the slab and winced when I landed. “I’ve got some.”
Falling into step with me, Collette watched me from the corner of her eye. She thought that made her look witchy and powerful. “What were you doing, anyway?”
“Frog gigging. See my boat?” I said, irritated. She knew good and well what the cemetery was for; she didn’t need to ask me stupid questions. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you, ya think?”
“Well, you found me, ya think?”
Collette lifted her hair from her neck to cool off and rolled her eyes. “Well, if you don’t want to know what I found out, fine.”
“Who said I didn’t?”
Because I did want to know. She had a list of names, too, and we were supposed to meet up after supper to share our research.
“You don’t act like it.” Raising her nose in the air, Collette put on her queen attitude; she didn’t even need a crown to do it. It didn’t last long, though. Her curls bounced and her eyes sparkled, the way they always did when she was fit to explode with something interesting. “Elijah didn’t know how to swim. You know why?”
It took me a minute to answer, because I couldn’t wrap my head around that. If she’d said Elijah only ate pickled eggs, it wouldn’t have sounded as strange. If you lived in Ondine, you knew how to swim.
“His mama wouldn’t let him.” Collette nodded, her eyes gone round and amazed. “She didn’t let him swim or wear shorts or play games where he’d have to touch somebody, because it was a sin!”
At first, I wanted to argue with her, because I’d seen Elijah in shorts. Just like I knew God was real, I knew that once upon a time, Elijah’d lain on the creek bank and chucked stones into the water.
Of course, I wasn’t supposed to sit on my mama’s couch and I did it anyhow, so Collette’s information and mine could both be true.
“Who told you that?”
Collette grinned. “Miss Nan, down at the gas station. I asked Uncle Teddy about Elijah, and he said I should talk to her.” Collette’s grin spread, as she leaned in to whisper, “They were going out behind his mama’s back.”
“She told you that?”
“Yuh huh.” Dancing around me, Collette yanked on my arm and pulled me along. “And she said if we wanted to know more, we could come down to her trailer anytime.”
My sunburn kept me from bouncing, but I wanted to. We had a personal invitation for an interview with somebody who’d probably known Elijah better than almost anybody. “You wanna go now?”
“We should wait for Ben.” Then she made a face at him in his absence. “That way we don’t have to repeat ourselves.”
I made a face, too. “He’s wasting a whole day for us.”
“I know!”
Dust rose under our feet as we scuffed away from the graveyard.
“You hungry?” she asked.
“Just for something sweet.”
Collette’s mama only made us sweep up to pay for our pie, so in spite of my sunburn, it was a mighty fine afternoon.
“I don’t think my daddy wants to talk about it,” I said, sitting on the Duvalls’ back stoop.
Sunset colored the sky with purples and oranges, shades that flattered Collette as she leaned against the porch rail. “How come?”
“ ’Cause he was all cagey when I brought it up.”
Ben wandered the same two squares of sidewalk. Watching the empty window instead of us, he thought out loud. “Maybe if one of us did?”
Piping in, Collette said, “Uh-uh, once her daddy decides something, it’s decided. Besides, we got Miss Nan, and you haven’t even done your list yet.”
Looking toward the house again, Ben lowered his voice. “Mama says you can’t believe anything that comes from Nan Burkett’s mouth. She’s easy.”
I wrinkled my nose. “That doesn’t make her a liar.”
“That’s just what she said.”
Ben stuck his hands in his pockets. “I think we ought to try the witchboard again.”
Collette jumped on that right away. “Oooh, we could ask him who to talk to.”
“We’ve already got a list,” I protested, afraid they would see my eyes and know I’d done most of the talking on the board last time.
“We’ll still do the list. But we should do this, too.” Collette’s voice went up at the end, and I looked back at her, waiting for her next brill
iant idea. “This time we should do it at night. The dead are closer at night.”
“Why is that?” Ben didn’t sound like he expected an answer; he was just filling up space until he thought of what he really wanted to say. “Nighttime’s fine by me, except I have to be home by ten.”
A shadow crossed Collette’s brow. “How come? Shea comes into the diner almost till midnight sometimes.”
“I have to count out Mama’s pills,” Ben said flatly.
She should have left it alone at that, but sometimes Collette didn’t know when to quit. She tried to sound concerned, at least. “Shouldn’t your daddy be doing that?”
His voice flat, Ben answered, “I do it.”
I cut in, trying to save everybody. “Then we can’t, because it should be at midnight.”
“That’s the witching hour,” Collette agreed. Peeling herself off the rail, she bounded down to sit on the bottom step, next to my feet. She folded her hands on her knees and looked up at Ben, serious. “After you’re done counting, sneak out.”
Ben shook his head. “Dang, y’all, she’s right there in the kitchen.”
A little quieter, Collette pressed on. “Look, all you have to do is set your watch for a quarter till, then climb out your window. I’ll take the witchboard home tonight so you don’t have to carry it.”
“What about Iris?”
Collette snorted. “Her dad works nights, remember? She can go anywhere she wants.”
That wasn’t exactly true. My daddy let me roam where I wanted during the day. After dark, though, when the purple sky started going black in the distance, I had to be at home with the doors locked.
Changing sides to help Ben, I said, “If I get caught out, I’ll get switched.”
“You haven’t been switched ever,” Collette said.
Shadowed Summer Page 5