Dark and Shallow Lies

by Ginny Myers Sain

  Me.

  The best friend she cut out of her life, just the way someone cut me out of that photograph.

  I’m stuck for a minute, trying to remember what she was laughing about. Staring at Elora. And the space where I should have been. When I finally look up, Honey is watching me.

  “You feel her,” she says. “You’ve always said you didn’t have the gift, but I’ve never believed it.”

  “No.” I wrap the muffin back up and set it aside. “It’s not like that. I just keep expecting her to show up, you know?”

  I want to ask Honey the same question I wanted to ask Evie. I want to ask if she knows—for sure—whether Elora is still alive. But I don’t. I’m afraid to hear the answer.

  Honey is an old-school spiritualist at heart. A true medium. She believes that the spirits of the dead exist and that they have the ability to communicate directly with the living. If they want to.

  For Honey, they communicate mostly through visions. She reads tea leaves and stuff like that, but that’s just for the tourists on day trips down from New Orleans. The real stuff she keeps to herself these days. She says nobody wants to listen to the wisdom of the dead anymore. They just want to know when their boyfriends are going to propose. Or if they’ll win the lottery. And the dead, Honey says, don’t give a shit about stuff like that. They have bigger fish to fry.

  I tear my eyes away from Elora’s frozen laugh, and Honey is still watching me. “Every year you remind me more of your mother,” she tells me, and I know the resemblance she sees goes deeper than our chestnut hair, our big green eyes, and the freckles scattered across our noses. “Always keeping the most important pieces of yourself tucked away somewhere.”

  The little bell over the door jingles, and I look up, thinking maybe it really will be Elora standing there and this whole thing will be over. We’ll rip down the missing posters and toss the flyers in the trash. Then I’ll tell her I’m sorry, and she’ll forgive me. And everything will be the way it’s always been.

  The way it’s supposed to be.

  But it isn’t Elora. It’s Hart.

  And I guess that’s the next best thing.

  I take a few steps back. Because this is where

  everything ends. We both know it now. And that’s when the rain finally comes. The sky splits open and it comes all at once. It comes in buckets.

  Rivers. The kind of rain that washes away

  the blood and carries away the evidence.

  No clue. No trace. No goodbye.

  2

  Before I even have a chance to say hello, Hart’s made it around the counter and has me wrapped up in a hug so tight it hurts. His arms are strong. Familiar. And I finally let myself melt into the safety of home. The soft sound of the bead curtain tells me Honey has slipped into the back room to give us some privacy.

  “Evie told me you were here.” Hart’s voice sounds different than it did last summer. Deeper. Or maybe just sadder. I talked to him on the phone in February, when he called to tell me about Elora. But that conversation had been so weird. Short and confusing. We weren’t used to talking to each other on the phone. And we were both upset. He hadn’t offered a lot of details, and I’d been too stunned to ask questions. As soon as I hung up, it almost seemed like maybe it wasn’t real. Like I’d imagined the whole phone call.

  But now it’s definitely real. This hug makes it real.

  Hart is the oldest of us all. The first of ten. Born in late March, almost three months before Elora and I came into the world on the same day in June. He’s technically Elora’s stepbrother, but the “step” part never mattered to us. And I’ve always thought of him as my big brother, too. Sometimes he played with us. Sometimes he tormented us. Occasionally he kicked someone’s ass on our behalf. But he was always there. Hart’s mama married Elora’s daddy when we were six years old, but in our minds, that only cemented what we already knew—that the three of us belonged to each other.

  Three peas in a pod.

  Three coins in the fountain.

  Our very own three-ring circus.

  Hart and Elora and Grey. Grey and Elora and Hart.

  Hart was just a month shy of seventeen when Elora disappeared back in February, but when he called me that next day, he sounded so much younger. He sounded like he had when we were little.

  He sounded scared.

  “How you holding up?” I ask him. Evie was right. He looks like he hasn’t eaten or slept in weeks.

  “It’s rough, Greycie.” He pulls back to look at me. “How ’bout you?”

  I shrug. “It’s better, being here, I think.”

  I’d wanted to come right at the beginning—I started packing as soon as I got that phone call from Hart—but my dad wouldn’t let me. We had a screaming, door-slamming fight about it that lasted most of a week. I couldn’t afford the time off school, he’d said. Not at the tail end of my junior year, with track season getting ready to start.

  Scholarships, you know.

  Hart moves to sit on the tall stool behind the cash register, and I see him glance at the flyers. He runs his fingers through the wild dark curls on the top of his head, but they’re untamable. I bet he hasn’t so much as touched a comb since sometime in February. His eyes are red, and his fingernails look like he’s bitten them down to the quick. Hart spends most of his life outside, but somehow he looks pale underneath his deep fisherman’s tan.

  He jerks his head toward the stack of flyers. “I took that picture,” he says. “Remember that day?”

  I nod. “I was trying to remember what she was laughing about.”

  “Who knows.” He tries to smile. “Elora was always laughing.”

  I wait for him to correct himself. Elora is always laughing. But he doesn’t. He leaves her in the past.

  “There’s still no news?” I ask him. “Nobody knows anything?” It seems wild to me that someone could vanish like that. No clue. No trace.

  No goodbye.

  How is that possible? Here, of all places?

  Hart shakes his head. “There’s no sign of her anywhere, Greycie. They’ve never found—”

  He hesitates, and I feel sick. I know what he means. I know what they’ve been looking for out there in the bayou. They haven’t been looking for Elora. They’ve been looking for something awful and ugly. A floater. A bloated, decomposing body that’s risen to the surface of the foul black water. A body identifiable only by a bright blue tank top with faded yellow stars.

  Or part of a body, more likely. Gators don’t leave much behind.

  The room starts spinning, and I grab the edge of the counter to try to make it stop. My knees threaten to buckle.

  Hart is instantly on his feet. He takes my arm, and I let him pull me against him again. “Hey, easy, Greycie.” His voice is low and gravelly, and the familiar sound of it soothes me a little. “You’re gonna be okay. Just breathe.” I nod against his chest, feeling guilty for making him comfort me. Especially when I know he’s so broken, too.

  Hart is a psychic empath. Honey says it’s the greatest psychic gift but also the worst. She says it will tear him up if he’s not careful. It’s not just that he knows what other people are feeling. He actually feels it, too. Every bit as strong as they do. It gets inside him somehow. And I know what it costs him, constantly taking on everyone else’s pain. I untangle myself from his arms and move away to give him some space.

  “What were you guys doing out there? That night.” I have so many questions. He didn’t really tell me much on the phone. After we hung up, I called Honey and she told me what she knew. But the details she had were pretty sketchy.

  Hart looks at me and sighs. “You wanna get outta here?” He glances around the shop. “Before the first boat comes? I’m not in the mood to deal with tourists.”

  Everyone in La Cachette has a love-hate relationship with the tourists
. They hate them. But they love their cash. It’s the only thing that keeps most of them alive. That and maybe a bit of fishing. On a Saturday with good weather, a couple hundred people might make the trip from Kinter to La Cachette and back on board the old shuttle boat. Along the way, the captain drones into a crackling microphone, pointing out things of interest on the riverbank.

  Spoiler alert: there aren’t any.

  I stick my head into the back room and tell Honey that Hart and I are heading out for a bit. She nods. “It’s good for you two to be together. Healing.”

  I don’t know about healing, but I know I need to be with someone who loves Elora as much as I do. It doesn’t make her any less gone, but it makes me less lonely.

  Outside, Hart and I both turn left. We walk in silence, and for a few minutes, things feel almost normal. I like the familiar slap-scuff-slap of my flip-flops on the boardwalk. It’s a summer sound—a La Cachette sound—and I know the rhythm of it as well as I know the rhythm of my own name.

  La Cachette is made up of two dozen or so little houses—all of them on stilts—connected by a half-mile stretch of elevated wooden walkway. Every bit of this town was built to let the floods and the tides and the mud flow right underneath us. Down here, there is no water and there is no land. There’s only an uneasy in-between. When it’s dry, we have yards. Sort of. When it’s not, you wouldn’t know where the river ends and the town begins.

  Right now, the tide is coming in and the water is slowly rising beneath our feet. I blink against the glare bouncing off the river. And off the gleaming white paint. The whole town gets a new coat each spring. Every square inch of it. All the buildings. The boardwalk, too. Even the dock. All the same bright white. Living their whole lives a few feet above the relentless muck, everyone down here craves that kind of clean, I guess.

  The Mystic Rose sits smack in the middle of the boardwalk, right across from the boat dock, and Hart and Elora’s place is on the downriver end of town. The very last house. A quarter mile and a whole five-minute walk away. In between, every single structure has a swinging sign hanging from the front porch or painted lettering on the windows advertising a buffet of psychic services—everything from séances to palm readings to past-life regressions. There’s even one lady who claims she can contact the spirits of your dead pets, and that—for a nominal fee, of course—they’ll relay messages to her. In perfect English.

  The sign that hangs out front of the little house where Elora and Hart live is made from plywood cut in the shape of a heart. It’s painted bright red with fancy gold letters that spell out psychic love readings—miss cassiopeia, romance counselor.

  If you bring Hart’s mama something that belongs to a boyfriend or a wife or a fiancé, she can hold it in her hands and tell you if their love is true. I’ve seen her do it a million times, and she’s never wrong. People even send her things by mail from all over the country. A girlfriend’s pencil or a husband’s cuff link. Their front room is papered with wedding invitations from happy customers. I don’t doubt her talent, but her name is Becky. Not Cassiopeia. In La Cachette, the line between what’s real and what isn’t gets blurry sometimes.

  The boardwalk ends just past their house, and that’s where Hart and I are heading. There’s an old pontoon boat rusting away in the mud down there, washed up by some hurricane I can’t remember the name of. Elora’s daddy, Leo, chained it up so it wouldn’t float away in the next flood, and that’s where it stayed. I guess he thought maybe he’d fix it up someday, but he never did. Then, the summer we were all seven, we claimed it as our hangout. And it’s been ours ever since.

  It was our pirate ship that first summer. Evie’s mama sewed us a skull and crossbones flag to fly. Another summer, it was our spaceship. When we got older, that’s where we’d go to sneak cigarettes or pass around a can of beer. Most of us had our first kiss there, too. Some of us more than that. I know for a fact that Elora lost her virginity there with Case the summer we were all fifteen.

  Hart jumps down into the bow of the old boat. It’s not that far, maybe four or five feet below the boardwalk, but my legs aren’t nearly as long as his, so I climb down the rickety wooden ladder to join him.

  “Hey, Shortcake,” he teases. “You think you’re little ’cause you live in Little Rock? Or is that just a coincidence?” I roll my eyes. It’s an old joke—and a bad one—but the familiarity of it feels good, and when I reach the bottom of the ladder and step off into the boat, Hart’s almost grinning at me. I’ve always loved the way his eyes crinkle up at the corners when he smiles, and it makes me happy to see the old him, even if it only lasts a second.

  We sit together on one of the cracked and peeling bench seats. The boat’s canopy is long gone, and I’m grateful for the shade of a single bald cypress tree that rises from the murky water of a pond a few feet away. I slip off my flip-flops and pull my knees up to hug them to my chest.

  “You seen Willie Nelson this year?” I ask.

  Hart nods. “Yup. See him almost every day, seems like. Still big as a barge and ugly as sin.”

  Willie showed up three or four years ago. A monster gator. Probably thirteen feet at least. Somebody probably would’ve shot him for meat by now, except the tourists like taking pictures of him. Sometimes he’ll disappear off into the bayou when it’s flooded out, but soon as the water starts to recede, he comes crawling right back here to this pond. Year after year. Because this deep hole never goes dry. Once, Leo caught us throwing hot dogs to him, and he threatened to beat the shit out of all of us—Willie included. Since then we’ve coexisted in a kind of cautious truce. He sticks to his side of the muddy pit, and we stick to ours.

  Hart leans down and picks up an old nail that’s rusting in the bottom of the boat. He pitches it out into the center of the gator pond, and I hear it hit the water with a plink. We watch the ripples spread across the surface, and for a few minutes, it’s so quiet between the two of us that the angry buzzing of the water bugs is almost deafening.

  Finally, he takes a deep breath. “We were out hunting fifolet. Like we used to do when we were kids, remember?”

  I nod. We all grew up hearing stories about the mischievous ghost lights that appear in the bayou. Strange, eerie balls of floating blue gas. Cajun folklore says they’ll lead you to Jean Lafitte’s pirate treasure, if you’re brave enough to follow. But sometimes the fifolet play tricks, leading people farther and farther from safety until they’re lost forever deep in the swamp.

  I shiver as the old fear creeps through me, and Hart nudges me with his shoulder. “It’s only a story, Greycie.”

  “I know that,” I tell him. But those stories have always scared me.

  “It was the second Saturday of the month, so everybody’d gone upriver to Kinter for bingo. All the adults, anyway. And there wasn’t shit to do. It was Elora’s idea. She wanted to go huntin’ fifolet.” He shrugs. “So we did.”

  I wait while Hart pulls a beat-up pack of cigarettes out of his T-shirt pocket. He shakes one out and lights it before he goes on. “It was really dark that night. Thick clouds blockin’ out the moon. And we walked for a bit, but we didn’t see any lights. Didn’t see anything at all. Didn’t hear anything, even. It was weird. The quiet.”

  I shiver again, imagining that strange silence. Down here, the daytime can be still enough to hear a pin drop. But the bayou is never quiet at night. It’s a cacophony of bugs and frogs and owls and bellowing gators. Sometimes they carry on so loud you can’t sleep inside the house with all your windows closed and the AC humming on high.

  “We had some beer, so we drank that. Evie got freaked out. She wanted to go home. But Case wanted to play flashlight tag.” Hart pauses to take a long drag off his cigarette, then he exhales and stretches one arm over the edge of the boat to flick away the ash. “And nobody really wanted to play. We were over it, you know? But Case was pissed. Half-drunk. You know how he gets. He wasn’t ready to go home yet
.”

  Case has the most gorgeous hair I’ve ever seen. Deep, dark red. And the temper to go with it. He’s okay most of the time, but he can be mean as a cottonmouth when he’s been drinking. He and Elora have been a thing since we were twelve years old. She’ll step out with other guys occasionally, but she’s never had any real boyfriend besides Case. Not true love, she told me once. Not by a long shot. Just something to do.

  Someone to do.

  Hart finishes his cigarette and stubs it out before he goes on. “So we played flashlight tag for a while. Out there at Li’l Pass. Then it was Mackey’s turn to be it, and he found us all real quick. Everybody except Elora.”

  “What’d you do?” I ask him.

  “Called the all clear. But she didn’t come out. We figured she wouldn’t have gone far, so we started lookin’ for ’er.” He runs a hand through his sweat-damp curls. “But this huge storm blew in outta nowhere. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. We stayed at it, though. All of us. Searched out there for hours in a goddamn downpour.”

  I feel sick, remembering that flash of Elora that came to me earlier. That moment the sky split open and the rain came. Just the way Hart describes.

  “I left the rest of ’em huntin’ for her out there at Li’l Pass. Where she disappeared. Came home and got the four-wheeler. Looked everywhere I could think of. Rode all the way back to Keller’s Island, even. Ended up soaking wet. Mud up to my neck. Covered in bug bites.”

  “No way.” I shake my head and swallow my rising panic. “She wouldn’t have gone way back there. She’s scared of that place.”

  We all are. There’s no way she would have gone there. Not in the dark. Not alone.

  Not at all.

  Not to Killer’s Island.

  “I know,” he says, “but, shit, Greycie. She had to go somewhere.”