“Yes you are, too.”
I slumped against the wall and sighed. “If that’s what you want to think, I can’t stop you.” I wasn’t mad anymore, just tired. “I’ll be here if you want to watch movies or listen to music or talk about anything, but I’m done acting like we have powers. We don’t; we never did.”
“You just want to keep Elijah to yourself.” Collette’s voice sounded thin and wet, like she’d started crying. “You go on ahead and see if I care, because I don’t.”
Emptied of everything, I sat at my desk, curling one arm into a pillow so I could rest my head. “Nobody said you had to. I’m going to bed now, Collette.”
She sniffled, the line going fuzzy, then clear again. After using that moment to calm down, Collette tried to put on her best queen voice. It didn’t work; she didn’t sound chilly or regal or even hard—she just sounded sad. “Well, then good night.”
“I’ll talk to you later,” I said, then hung up the phone. I sat there for a long time, rearranging things on my desk before going back to bed.
When I told Collette I’d talk to her later, I meant it. I didn’t know how to be a person without my best friend; Collette knew me from the inside, all my dumb details and the good ones, too.
I had to believe she’d still like me without our spells and swords. I had to believe we were more than make-believe.
Elijah walked through my bedroom door and started pulling books from the shelves. His hair looked mossy, his skin mint green and mottled, but his mouth was red as an apple.
Pages flapped when he tossed books over his shoulder. Carefully, he pulled the prayer book Daddy had given me for my First Communion from the shelf and sniffed it. I liked to do that, too; it was bound in white leather, and the pages were edged in gold.
Elijah stroked it for a minute, but instead of just dumping it over his shoulder like the rest, he wound up and threw it hard. It turned into a rock and shattered my window. Still, he didn’t seem to enjoy destroying my things; he frowned and thumped the wall, like he expected it to open or something.
Unsure if this was a dream, I didn’t try to move, but I shuddered when he turned to shake out my desk. He only wore half a face; the other side was bone, gray and dirty, barely held together. His bright lips stopped exactly in the middle, and I could see a black tongue filling his mouth.
“Don’t ask me where I’m at,” I said, wrapping the covers around me tight. “You already know.”
His face melted from green to gold again, from half to whole again, a feathered sweep of hair falling into his eyes. When he leaned back, his jersey shirt pulled tight across his shoulders, showing off fine, sculpted muscles beneath. “You already know,” he echoed.
Shivering, I tried to rearrange the blankets to cover me, but I couldn’t get warm. Rocks filled my bed. Breath frosting in the air, I shook my head. “That’s what I said.”
“You already know,” he repeated, and reached to grab something off my desk. He threw my spellbook toward me, and its white pages rose and fell like a bird’s wings before it landed silently in my lap.
The book flipped over and spread itself open. I closed it and frowned when it popped open again. A red drop splattered in the middle of the page, and I reached up to scrub at my nose as the blood smear crawled across the page and formed neat block letters.
You found me where I’m sleeping.
Reading the blood note, I held both hands against my nose, swallowing the iron tang sliding down my throat. I lifted my head to tell Elijah I still didn’t know what he meant by that, but he was gone.
I threw the covers off when an awful flash of heat swept over me. Humid night air choked me as I struggled free from the tangle of sheets around my ankles. Just to make sure I’d been dreaming, I looked up to find my room the way it had been when I fell asleep.
Outside my window, angry clouds blotted out the moon. I felt the static hum of a coming storm in everything I touched, and fighting a low, sick feeling in my stomach, I rolled out of bed. I needed to get the fan out of the window before the rain came.
As I reached for the fan, something loomed behind me, something that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. More stupid than brave, I looked over my shoulder and almost lost my legs from under me.
A black pool of blood stained my sheets, and a single rock fell from nowhere. Uneasy, I looked down and saw blood on my legs. I could smell it, a dead, heavy scent that turned my stomach. I backed toward the door, touching myself, trying to find where I’d been cut.
Another rock fell, sounding almost hollow as it rolled off the bed and onto the floor. I didn’t know if it was the storm or something else, but papers rustled on my desk, and as I reached blindly for the doorknob, I watched my drawer work itself open.
I screamed when the drawer exploded out, showering my room with crayons and books and pictures and every other little thing I’d tucked away in there.
My door wouldn’t open. I ducked when my spellbook slammed against the wall beside my head. Struggling for another breath I screamed again. Mrs. Thacker was about the worst babysitter in the world if she couldn’t hear this.
I damned her and the television set blaring downstairs. I damned Daddy for working nights, and Mama for driving in the rain, and Collette for growing up, and Ben for coming between us. I damned them for leaving me all alone with this when it wasn’t a dream.
The storm in my room raged for a second; then suddenly the phone rang and everything stopped. Pens and boxes and books began raining down like hail again as I dropped to my hands and knees, crawling through the mess to get to the phone.
“Collette,” I whispered, panicking when a warm, wet stream trickled from my nose. I swabbed at it, relieved that it was snot instead of blood.
The line crackled with soft static, and then a voice murmured, “Where y’at, Iris?”
I threw the phone and scrambled to my feet. With both hands, I yanked at my bedroom door, but it stuck fast. I tore around, searching for a way to escape, and my gaze landed on the window. I pulled the fan free, pushed my screen out, and slung my leg outside.
My bedroom opened onto nothing. Clinging to the sill, I kept telling myself it wasn’t far to the ground; all I had to do was let go. My fingers didn’t care; they dug in hard, and I dangled there with the wind clawing at me until a bright crack of lightning scared me into letting go.
The ground rushed up under me, shoving the air from my lungs when we collided. Eyes crossing, arms spread out wide, I watched the sky go blurry, then sharp above me.
All I wanted was to go to sleep, but spatters of rain hit my face. Those cold little drops jerked me sensible again, and suddenly I knew.
chapter fifteen
With Daddy’s tire iron in one hand, I staggered through the cemetery. The skies split with sheets of cold rain. I felt like I’d sunk into an ice bath; hard, jolting shivers twisted me off balance.
There weren’t any lights at the graveyard, so I made my way by memory and luck. Bad luck, mostly, because I stumbled into low stones that bit my shins, and I nearly fell into the black iron fence that surrounded one of the family plots. Pushing myself away from that, I shuddered when lightning lit up the spikes I’d barely missed.
The Claibornes’ crypts lay farther in than I thought. The white limestone seemed to glow, collecting the brightness of the lightning and holding on to it when the flashes faded. Circling Cecily, I curved a hand on my brow to hold off the rain and examined the seam that ran between the top of the slab and the crypt.
Finding a slightly chipped spot, I forced Daddy’s tire iron between the crypt and the slab and pushed hard. The muscles in my arms screamed, threatening to snap, but I didn’t stop. Grinding my teeth, I pushed again, the ache radiating into my shoulders, then down my back, but the slab wouldn’t move.
I kept at it anyway; then my hands slipped and I crashed headfirst into the stone. Sliding to my knees in the mud, I rubbed the throbbing goose egg rising on my forehead. The pain jangled around in
my head, throbbing until my brain felt too big for my skull.
The stone pulled my hair, yanking strands of it out as I struggled to my feet again. Shaking off the pain, I told myself those little stings meant nothing. I dried my hands on my shirt and shoved the tire iron back into the crack.
Twisting for leverage, I fought the grave as hard as I could. The iron felt dangerous; my hands were cold on the slick metal, and the nub end of the iron pressed into my chest. Even though it was blunt I could imagine impaling myself on it, and I shuddered. But I had to keep going.
The crypt’s soft stone ground each time I pried, sending a nasty, bone-crunching sensation up the metal that made me want to boil my hands in bleach. After another failed push that sent me off my feet again, I sat there for a minute and just stared.
Rain poured down my face, and a strange, warm numbness started through me. It began at my hands and flooded my body with each pulse until I stepped out of my icy skin, hot-blooded and strong
Instead of pushing, I laced my hands together as tight as I could and looped them around the iron. I hung from it, bouncing to use all my weight. Something gave, and for a minute, I thought the iron had bent; if I wasn’t already in trouble, I would have been for destroying Daddy’s tools, but the iron was fine.
Cecily’s slab lifted just a tiny bit, a thin black line that encouraged me to push harder. The gap spread by tiny inches, and I felt like my head might pop from the strain, but I didn’t stop.
I dropped my full weight hard on the iron and pushed the stone just enough to set it askew. As soon as I saw that tiny patch of space, I dropped the tire iron and darted to the other side of the crypt, shoving on one corner, then ducking back around to push the other. The stone rubbed my hands raw, but I couldn’t quit; I was almost there.
A blinding light flashed in my face, and I stopped just long enough to look into it. From the road, I saw the shadow of a car and a man climbing out of it. The police.
I should have run, but I pushed harder instead, beating the slab with my hands, urged on by the man yelling at me to stop, and with a final, great shove, the slab teetered on the edge of the crypt, then fell. It broke into three pieces, waxy, irregular breaks that seemed unreal.
I climbed up the side of Cecily’s grave, desperate to get a look inside. Even without the lightning, I recognized pieces of the jersey shirt, black sleeves and gray body, rotten through in places.
Trying not to gag on the smell that rolled up, I made myself look where Elijah’s eyes should have been. From then to forever, I knew who carried the grave lanterns—long-dead boys with half a face, soft and green with moss.
A thin length of rope lay in a coil beside his head. It must have been white once; it was the kind we used to hang laundry in the backyard, but it had turned black.
Footsteps rushed up behind me, but I held on tight to the grave. Elijah’s body was a horrible thing to look at, but I couldn’t close my eyes. It was real; he was real; the whole summer was real.
I’d found him where he was sleeping, the first place I’d seen him, him and his jersey shirt, him and his torn jeans. Nobody in their right mind could believe Mrs. Cecily Claiborne had been put to rest in clothes like that.
Right before the sheriff yanked me down, I saw an old canvas bag split open at Elijah’s feet. River rocks poured out of it in a heap, all of them smooth and flat just like the one in my pocket, and that was when I started to cry.
The police didn’t come to my house that time; Daddy had to come to them. A nice lady deputy had given me a cup of tea and a dry blanket to wrap around my shoulders, and when I shared an embarrassed whisper with her, she took me to the bathroom and gave me a quarter for the tampon machine.
After that, she left me alone in a big green room that smelled like medicine. I huddled in a hard plastic chair, staring at myself in a wall-length mirror. The door had a window in it, and every so often, someone would peek through it, like I was a new panda bear at the zoo.
I’d heard them buzzing, talking about me as one of the two deputies who’d shown up at the graveyard brought me in. The other one stayed behind, because after I quit fighting and screaming, I convinced them to look inside Cecily’s crypt.
I enjoyed watching their faces go blank when they shone their flashlights inside, because I got the impression they just wanted to prove me wrong so I’d shut up and go quietly. As the deputy walked me to the car, I told him the body was Elijah Landry’s, but I don’t think he believed me.
When the door finally opened, a woman I didn’t recognize walked in. She wasn’t a police officer; she wore a navy blue suit that looked nice with her frosty blond hair, and she carried a thick briefcase that she swung to slide onto the table.
Right behind her came Daddy, still in his work shirt and looking so ragged I expected him to fall down from exhaustion. “This is Billie Jo Camp, Iris. She’s your lawyer.”
“Did anyone try to make you talk about what happened tonight?” Billie Jo asked, snapping open the latches on her briefcase. She had stacks and stacks of folders in there, and she dug through them until she found one that was almost empty.
I shook my head. Actually, I’d been waiting for somebody to talk to me so I could explain who I’d found, but after the lady deputy left, I’d been by myself the whole time. “No, ma’am.”
Waving a pen at my face before uncapping it, she squinted down at me. “Did they do that to you?”
Looking into the mirror, I smiled weakly. My skin had turned papery gray, which showed off the bruise on my forehead. “No, ma’am, I fell.”
The folder went back in her briefcase, and she snapped the lid shut. With a pointed look, she said, “You stay put,” like I had a choice about it, and walked out, her heels clacking on the floor.
Daddy sank into the chair across from me and folded his hands on the table. He kept his head low; all I could see of him was the part in his hair and just how many silver strands had threaded in with the dark.
When he looked up, his face was dry, but a faint shade of red rimmed his eyes. I had never seen my daddy cry. Seeing how torn he was made my heart ache.
He swallowed and swiped at his mouth, shaking his head slowly. “What did I do wrong, Iris?”
“Nothing!” I reached across the table for his hand, but he didn’t stretch his fingers to meet mine. I covered his fist anyway, thinking I should feel guilty then, but instead I felt relieved. It was over, and I wouldn’t disappoint him anymore. “I just had to find him, Daddy, and now I’m done. I promise.”
Working a hand free, he plastered it against his forehead, like his head had grown too heavy to stay up on its own. We just sat there in silence until Billie Jo came back to say we could go home.
Daddy took his vacation to stay home with me. We kept our curtains closed and the doors locked, because the morning after I found Elijah, I was a headline.
I was Local Girl Destroys Historic Grave, Finds Evidence of Murder? The way they wrote it made me want to laugh. I kept that to myself when I saw the look on Daddy’s face.
He didn’t just throw the paper away; he tore it in pieces first and jammed it all the way down in the garbage. He sent Collette away when she came to the door, too. We were locked in and staying put until my court date.
Billie Jo said I’d probably get community service, but that changed after the autopsy on Wednesday. That day’s paper finally told the world what I’d been insisting all along: I’d found Elijah Landry. A discovery like that, even though I’d been caught desecrating a grave, might mean I’d just get a fine. I wondered how many weeds I’d have to pull to pay for that.
The paperboy shoved our copy through the mail slot, so I got to read it while Daddy was in the shower. I shivered when they talked about me without really talking about me—I wasn’t grown, so they couldn’t use my name.
The story said the police planned to open the investigation again, and I snorted when I read that Deputy Wood claimed he had known the body would be found eventually. For four pages, t
he Citizen detailed the disappearance and the mystery and speculated on how Elijah had ended up sleeping with Cecily and how I’d come to find him.
Since Billie Jo did all my talking for me, and all she told anybody was “No comment,” the newspaper reporters made up wild stories instead. I didn’t care, because I knew the truth.
Instead of being embarrassed, I found it interesting to have people camped out on our street, waiting for us to come outside. Daddy chased them off the lawn, but the news vans just parked farther away, the people that came with them milling around like hungry dogs.
On the fifth day, the headlines turned to Old Mrs. Landry. She swore the autopsy was wrong-—God had taken her boy into heaven, body and all. That thing in the Claiborne crypt, it was a lie, maybe a demon, but definitely not Elijah.
That was the day my daddy sat me at the kitchen table to go over paperwork. I had a lot of it, too.
Technically, I was arrested. They only let me go home because Daddy promised to keep me under his thumb. I had a court date the next month and an appointment with a psychiatrist that Friday. No more Father Rey; I celebrated that quietly by myself.
With a cramp in my hand from signing papers I didn’t understand, I slumped on the table in relief when the doorbell rang. Daddy wouldn’t answer it, but he would at least get up to tell them to go away, which gave me a minute to breathe.
Lying my head in my arms, I frowned when I heard soft conversation at the door instead of a curt goodbye. I leaned back in my chair, frowning when Mr. Lanoux and two strange men in suits walked in. Collette’s daddy looked tired, with dark circles beneath his eyes, and he edged closer to Daddy, like he wanted distance between them and the other two men.
Both in brown, the men talked low, so I couldn’t make the words out. When they put their hands in their pockets, I saw badges on their belts.
Shadowed Summer Page 13