“Me too.” The words come out in a rush, like she’d been waiting for permission to breathe them out to someone.
Wrynn is the only sister in a house crammed absolutely full of boys. She’s been Elora’s shadow since she was old enough to walk. And Elora has always been so good to Wrynn, paying attention to her and helping her with her hair and playing pretend with her when nobody else could be bothered. Wrynn has a wild imagination, and she always has some game going. Dragons and wizards and princesses.
“Wanna hear a secret?” she asks me, and I nod.
Wrynn leans close to whisper in my ear. She smells like grape soda. I feel her breath on my cheek, and her long red hair brushes my shoulder.
“Everybody wishes dey knew what happened to ’er.” Something shifts in Wrynn’s voice, and she doesn’t sound sad anymore. She sounds afraid. Her words are hushed and breathless. “But dey don’t wanna know. Not really.” She pulls into herself and shudders.
Wrynn’s bottom lip quivers, and she sucks it into her mouth and works at it with her crooked baby teeth. She’s chewing so hard I’m afraid she’ll draw blood. When I put my arm around her, I feel her bones rattling. I’m surprised I can’t hear the sound of her pointy little shoulder blades knocking together, right through her skin.
Wrynn isn’t afraid. She’s scared about to death.
From over at Evie’s house, the sound of wind chimes moves through the night air. Twice as loud as it was earlier.
Insistent.
“Do you have a guess, Wrynn?” I ask her. “About what might have happened to Elora?”
Wrynn looks at me and nods. “Only it ain’t a guess.” Her eyes are dead serious. “I waited one hundred and one days, so I can tell da secret now.” Something skitters in the back of my mind, like a spider. Some bit of a story I’ve almost forgotten.
“What happened to Elora, Wrynn?”
She buries her face against my side. “It got ’er, Grey.”
“What got her?”
“Da rougarou.”
I remember the legend then. The Cajun werewolf. We used to scare each other silly with stories about a snarling wolflike creature that prowled the fog-covered swamplands on two legs. Hart used to tell us that if we left our windows open on full moon nights, the rougarou would come slinking in and rip us to pieces, right in our own beds. Then he’d eat us up. Bones and all. Nothing but blood-soaked sheets for someone to find come morning.
“That’s not real, Wrynn,” I reassure her. “There’s no such thing as the rougarou. It’s made up.”
“It ain’t made up,” she whispers. “It’s da truth. Cross my heart.”
“Wrynn—”
“You gotta listen to me. I saw it, Grey. I saw it dat night.” She grabs my arm, and her sharp little fingernails dig into my skin. Like claws. “I saw it wit’ my own eyes.”
“Saw what?” I ask. Wrynn’s face is pale as death in the porch light. “What did you see that night?”
Her answer is whispered right into my ear, warm and close, so there’s no mistaking the words.
“I saw da rougarou kill Elora.”
Teeth. Nothing but teeth. Teeth piercing skin.
Then muscle. Then bone.
7
Everybody down here knows the story. If you’re unlucky enough to see the rougarou, you have to keep that secret for one hundred and one days. If you don’t, you’ll become the monster yourself. So I guess Wrynn’s been counting down the days.
One hundred and one since Elora disappeared.
One hundred and one days since Wrynn saw whatever she saw. Or whatever she thought she saw. Whatever she imagined.
I push that flash aside—the teeth—and tell Wrynn that she can’t be right. That there is no rougarou. That those stories are no more real than her tales of unicorns and fairies. She looks at me like I’ve let her down, but she doesn’t say anything else. She just takes that jelly jar full of lightning bugs and heads off in the direction of her house, moving barefoot through the tall swamp grass. Silent as an apparition.
Case and Wrynn’s people don’t live on the boardwalk. Their house sits up on a narrow strip of high ground, back toward Li’l Pass. Their mama, Ophelia, is the best cook for at least a hundred miles. They’re pure Cajun, through and through. Real Acadians.
I don’t have a drop of Cajun blood, but I always loved having supper with Case and his family. Étouffée and jambalaya. Homemade pistolette rolls. Giant cast-iron kettles of bubbling gumbo. Enough to feed everyone in La Cachette twice over. After we stuffed ourselves silly, we’d all move out to the front porch and his daddy would play the fiddle or the harmonica and all the boys would sing. Even Case.
Joie de vivre.
The joy of life.
Good food and good music. Good times. Good people.
I feel ashamed for being afraid of Case. Hart is wrong about him. He has to be. Because Case is one of us. One of the Summer Children.
Inside the house, I pull Sera’s folded drawing out of my pocket and tuck it into the bottom of my underwear drawer. It’s a cliché, but I’m too tired to think of a better hiding spot. I barely manage to brush my teeth and pull on a clean T-shirt before I crawl under the covers.
My first night home.
Honey comes to sit on the edge of my bed again. She scratches my back and hums me a song. It’s a ritual that’s been ours ever since I was born, I guess.
“Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the mosquitoes bite,” she tells me. “Love you, Sugar Bee.”
“Love you,” I answer, and Honey kisses me on the forehead before she flips off the light and heads upstairs to bed, closing my door behind her.
But sleep plays hide-and-seek with me, the way Elora used to. No matter how hard I try, I can’t find any way to rest. Maybe it’s those wind chimes of Evie’s keeping me awake. I hear them outside, singing in the dark.
Or maybe it’s more than that.
Maybe it’s the constant ache of the Elora-shaped hole somewhere in the middle of me. Memories of long summer nights spent wishing on stars in her backyard. Or singing along to the radio in Honey’s kitchen while we churned homemade ice cream.
Or it could be all my questions that won’t let me drift off into oblivion.
I keep thinking about that trunk that isn’t there.
And Sander’s drawing. The stranger without a face.
It’s almost two o’clock in the morning when I give up and crawl out from under the covers. I pull on a pair of shorts and tiptoe through the shop. Sweet-N-Low comes waddling out to investigate, but when he sees it’s me, he loses interest and heads back to bed. Then I open the front door nice and slow, so the little bell doesn’t jingle, and slip out onto the front porch.
As soon as my feet hit the slick dampness of the painted boards, I realize I haven’t bothered to put on shoes. And I think of that water moccasin Case killed earlier.
Careful where ya steppin’, chere.
I take a good look around before I sit down on the front steps to stare out toward the water.
Nobody would call the lower Mississippi a beautiful river, but it looks prettier at night than it does in the harsh light of day. And the constant movement of it has always soothed me. I can’t see much of it tonight, though. The fog is too thick.
The night is alive with the sound of wind chimes. When I look next door, I see that there are two of them now, hanging right outside Evie’s bedroom window. I don’t know how she sleeps with all that ringing and clinking.
I’ve only been out there a few minutes when I hear something else, too. The soft sound of someone crying. I freeze and squint into the darkness, in the direction of the dock. And there it is again. Muffled sobbing wrapped in a blanket of mist. The thick, damp air plays tricks, distorting the sound. It seems to come from nowhere in particular. And from everywhere all at once.
&n
bsp; Then it stops.
I hold my breath until it comes again. And this time, there’s something familiar about it. I stand up and take a few steps out onto the boardwalk, and I’m instantly walled in by the suffocating fog.
I turn in a slow circle. “Elora?” I whisper.
The crying stops. A little gasp.
“Elora?” I whisper again. A long sniffle. But no more crying. “Is that you, Elora? It’s Grey.”
And then a voice, like a bony hand reaching through the dark.
“Grey?”
My heart leaps into my throat, and my eyes find something in the darkness. The ghostly glow of a floating orb. Fifolet, my brain whispers. But then I see it for what it is, and I move toward the shine of the lamppost out on the dock. There’s another long sniffle, and I follow the sound around to the back side of a stack of wooden crates. And there she is. Wet and shivering and staring up at me with unblinking eyes.
Only it isn’t Elora at all.
White-blonde hair glistening with fog. Pale blue eyes.
“Evie?”
She covers her face with her hands. Doesn’t answer.
I kneel down beside her. Rough boards against my bare skin. “Are you okay?” Still no response. “Are you hurt?”
Her teeth are chattering. Chin quivering. “No,” is all she says, and I can’t be sure which question she’s answering.
“What’s wrong, Evie?” I wrap my arms around her, but she pushes me away. “What are you doing out here?”
Her face is frozen, like she’s slipped on a mask.
An Evie mask.
“Evie,” I try again. “Tell me what’s going on.”
She scrambles to her feet and backs away from me.
“I’m fine, Grey. I promise. Just leave me alone.” Her voice is desperate. “Please.”
Evie can trace her lineage all the way back to the Casket Girls, the first French women sent here to help populate the fledgling city of New Orleans. They arrived half-starved—filthy, sick, and deathly pale—and they stepped off the ship carrying casket-shaped chests that held their few belongings. The men on the docks were shocked at the ghastly sight of them. “Filles à la cassette,” they whispered. They thought they were vampires.
Now, standing here in the dark and the fog three hundred years later, smelling the damp of the river and looking at Evie—pale and tear-streaked and glassy-eyed—it’s easy to understand why the men were frightened.
“Evangeline?” Evie’s mama is calling to her from their front porch. Bernadette’s voice is hushed. Nervous. “You out there, Evie girl?”
“Evie,” I try again. “If something’s wrong, let me help you.”
Another voice cuts through the dark. Louder. This one is steeped in alcohol, soaked with irritation. “Evie! Get your ass in here, girl!” It’s her uncle, Victor. Her mama’s brother. “We ain’t got time for your shit tonight!”
“You know what’s awful, Grey?” Evie wipes at her face, then she wraps her skinny arms around her chest and shivers hard. “The dead? They lie. Just like the rest of us.”
Then she’s gone, absorbed into the dark edges of the night. And I’m left alone and confused.
I should go inside. But I don’t. Instead, I walk all the way up to the edge of the dock. I close my eyes and stand above the dark, rolling surface of the great, wide river.
Elora is a water witch. She feels the magnetic pull of water in her bones. Lots of times that magic pulls her right back here. To this very spot. To the edge of the dock. To stand above the Mighty Mississippi, arms spread wide, and let its unstoppable life force seep into her soul.
There have been so many summer nights when I’ve woken up long after midnight, for no reason I could ever lay a finger on, and felt myself drawn out onto the front porch. And Elora would be here. Right at the edge of the water. Silver moonlight on long, dark hair. She’d feel me close. Just like I’d felt her, even in my sleep. She’d turn and smile at me, and I’d hurry down to meet her, still in my nightclothes, so we could sit on the dock, pressed close together, and feel the river’s power—Elora’s power—move through both of us.
Those are the nights I felt the most magical.
The least gray.
The sound of Evie’s wind chimes carries through the fog and echoes off the river. It bounces between my ears. After a few minutes, I can’t hear the lap of the water against the dock anymore. Or even the frogs and the bugs. All I hear are those tinkling chimes.
And Elora’s musical laugh.
I open my eyes and try to see the other side of the river. But I can’t. It’s too wide and too dark. The water goes on forever.
I have this idea that if I could just turn my head fast enough, Elora would be standing right there. I feel her so strong. Just beside me. I don’t turn my head, though. Because I don’t want to be wrong.
Then there’s a sharp splintering sound. Suddenly, I’m falling.
The board I’m standing on gives way beneath my feet. I feel it crumble like it’s happening in slow motion. I lose my footing and pitch backward, clawing at the air with my hands as my feet go out from under me. But there’s nothing to grab on to. I go down hard, and it’s a relief when my hip meets the solid wood of the dock with a sharp and painful crack. One leg is dangling over the deep, fast-moving water, and one arm is twisted behind me at an awkward angle. I scramble back and hug my knees to my chest. My heart must be close to exploding. I hear it thumping in my ears. Louder than Evie’s damn wind chimes, even.
Right where I was standing seconds ago, the plank has totally disintegrated, eaten away by rot and termites. When I reach out to touch it, the spongy edge turns to powder under my fingers.
The boards have been rotting away under their coat of pristine white.
I look around. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. This strange feeling comes over me. An odd tingling sensation.
I’m being watched. That’s what it feels like.
I tell myself I’m being ridiculous, but I stand up and move away from the black wood and the black water, back toward the safety of the boardwalk. Honey’s front porch light. Then I turn and head inside. And I lock the door behind me.
All I want is sleep. But when I crawl back into bed, it’s still no use.
I keep feeling that falling sensation.
And I’m trying not to look at the framed photograph on the table. Trying not to touch the little pearl around my neck.
Trying not to think about Elora.
Eventually, I get up again. Four a.m. Maybe this time it’s the tender bruise forming on my hip that won’t let me rest, but it’s the relentless whispering of those wind chimes that calls me to the window. The fog has drifted off, and the moon is out. A full moon, or close to it.
A rougarou moon.
I sweep my eyes across the landscape, scanning the emptiness of the bayou behind the house. Nothing but flat and wet all the way back to Li’l Pass.
Then I see it. And I stop breathing.
A shape blending into the dark.
Someone is out there.
Motionless.
Watching me.
Étranger. A stranger.
He couldn’t be more than fifteen feet away. Only the thin glass of the windowpane and that little bit of night separating the two of us.
The figure looms tall and mysterious. But all I really see are his eyes. They glow with a kind of icy blue fire.
We stare at each other for a long minute. Both of us caught. Still as stones. And I feel half hypnotized. Then whoever is out there turns and melts into the blackness. He moves with the lithe-limbed grace of a night animal.
And I’m alone again.
My whole body is shaking. I slide down to huddle against the wall underneath my window. And I wait for the lonesome howl of a wolf. But all I hear is my own breathing.
>
And the nervous murmur of wind chimes.
I swallow the panic along with the rain and keep running. Blind. Arms stretched out in front of me. Hoping not to feel anything. Hoping if I do feel something, it won’t be him. Not him. Not him. Please don’t let it be him.
8
I spend the next few hours on the floor. Frozen. When day- light comes, I drag myself to bed. My body gives in and sleep finally finds me. It’s close to noon when I wake up. Despite that little jingling bell, I’ve slept right through the first wave of Sunday-morning tourists in and out of the Mystic Rose.
With bright sunshine streaming in the window and the chatter of customers floating back from the bookstore up front, everything that happened last night seems far away. Like maybe it was a dream. Or a nightmare.
But I know those eyes were real. There was someone outside my window last night.
Étranger.
A stranger.
Even with the sunshine and the chatter, that memory chills me all the way down to my bones. It gives me what people down here call the frissons.
In the kitchen, Honey’s left a plate of homemade biscuits on the table for me. But just as I pick one up, that flash of Elora hits me hard. I feel her panic.
She’s running.
I’m running.
Blind. Through the rain. Outstretched arms.
I grab the back of a chair to steady myself until the terror passes, then I offer my biscuit to Sweet-N-Low, and he rewards me with a kiss.
My mouth is bone dry, so I open the cabinet to reach for a glass. But I get distracted by a big picture frame that’s hung on the wall as long as I can remember. It’s the kind with all the little slots for different-sized photos. I’ve seen it a million times, but I’ve never really looked at it.
It’s the picture in the center that I’m staring at now. I’m sitting on my mother’s lap on the front steps of the Mystic Rose. The photo must have been taken not long after Ember and Orli were killed, because I’m wearing a watermelon-pink sundress that Honey made for my birthday that year. I guess I was wild about that dress, because I have it on in almost all the snapshots taken that fourth summer of our lives.
Dark and Shallow Lies Page 6