Dark and Shallow Lies

by Ginny Myers Sain

  “Ember and Orli have been missing three days,” he starts. “No sign of ’em anywhere. Sheriff can’t find hide nor hair of ’em.”

  “Like Elora,” I murmur. And Hart nods.

  “Just like that. So the search party decides to go check out Keller’s Island again. ’Cause everybody knew Dempsey Fontenot wasn’t right. The way he looked at people.” He pauses to glance at me. “So they all head out there. My mama and daddy. Your mama. Bernadette. Leo. All the parents. Victor, even. Everybody in town, really.”

  “Honey?” I ask, and Hart shakes his head.

  “Miss Roselyn didn’t want anything to do with that. At least that’s how Leo tells it.” Hart digs around in his pockets until he finds another lighter. He holds it up like a trophy before he shakes out a cigarette and lights it. Then he goes on.

  “And it’s real early when they head out there. Not even dawn yet. But they find Ember and Orli. Sure enough. Floating there in that pond. And Sheriff had already been out there, but Dempsey Fontenot must have had ’em hid somewhere. Cause there they are. Drowned.” He pauses for a second to breathe in smoke. “And people kind of lost their minds, I guess. They wanted to hang him right there. String him up from one of those big old Live Oaks. They yelled for him to come out of that cabin, but he wouldn’t.”

  “He wasn’t in there,” I say, and I think about Zale’s mama. Waking up to all that. Her there alone. And two little boys to protect.

  “So everybody got worked up, and things got out of control. People were swept up in that moment, you know?” He ashes the cigarette. Hesitates. “And that’s when your mama lit it up.” Hart looks at me. “That’s the story, anyway. Burned it to the ground just by casting her eyes on it.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  He shrugs. “I’ve heard it in bits and pieces over the years. A little from Leo here and there. Even Vic told me part of it one night when he was drunk off his ass.” He inhales smoke again. “A man will tell another man shit like that. If he’s fucked up enough.”

  “Do the others know? Sera and Sander? Case? And Mackey? Does Evie know?”

  Hart shrugs and exhales. “We’ve never talked about it. But I imagine some of them probably know some of it. Or at least suspect it.”

  “Did Elora know?”

  “She did.” Hart flicks his wrist, and ashes scatter across the dock. “I told her back at the beginning of last summer.” He pauses to put the cigarette to his lips again, and I get impatient waiting for him to exhale. “That’s a big part of why she was tryin’ to drive you away.”

  “From her?”

  Hart shakes his head. “From here. No matter what else was going on between the two of you, she didn’t want you comin’—”

  “Why the hell didn’t she just tell me? Why didn’t anybody ever tell me?” I’m so angry that everybody’s been keeping me in the dark. “This is my home, Hart!” I glance up at the houses along the boardwalk and lower my voice to a pissed-off whisper. “Have you guys been laughing at me? All this time? Because I’m so stupid? Because I don’t know? Is that it?”

  “Whoa.” Hart puts out the cigarette under his heel. “Hold up, Greycie. It’s not like that.”

  “Well, how is it, then?” I feel like the world’s biggest idiot. The only one at the party not in on the joke.

  “Elora didn’t tell you because she didn’t wanna give you that secret to keep. She didn’t wanna put that burden on you. That guilt that comes with knowin’ what happened down here.” He runs a hand over his face. “Shit,” he mutters. “What happens down here.”

  “I could have handled it,” I tell him. “She never gave me a chance.”

  “Because that kind of shit changes you. You know what I mean? It messes you up. For life. You can trust me on that.” Hart sighs, and the sound of it is as deep and muddy as the Mississippi. “You keep saying this is your home, Greycie. But it isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is!”

  Hart growls at me in frustration.

  “No! It isn’t! You got out. You left.” I open my mouth to argue again, but he shuts me down. “No. Wait. Just fuckin’ listen.” He rakes a hand through his curls and looks over at me. “Dammit, Grey. You were out of all this shit. Away from it. And sure, you’d come back summers. But you didn’t live here. You weren’t ever here long enough to let the stink of this place soak into you.”

  “That’s not my fault! I wanted to be here. You know how bad—”

  “Stop it! Are you even hearing what I’m saying? We were glad you got away from all this.” He gestures around. To the dock. And the boardwalk. The big black barrel. “We loved you, Grey. Shit!” He grits his teeth like something hurts him. Way down deep. “We love you,” he says. “Elora, especially. It almost killed her, cuttin’ things off with you last summer. Lettin’ it end that way. For a long while, I didn’t know if she’d survive it. But you were gonna come home. Turn eighteen and come back to this. And she loved you too fuckin’ much to let that happen. And me! God. Greycie. I love you so much. But all of us. Every goddamn one of us. We all fuckin’ love you.” He pauses to catch his breath. “So, you wanna know why we never told you any of this? We never told for the same reason Miss Roselyn never told you. Because we love you. And we want you to be okay.” His voice splinters like rotten wood, and he swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. “One of us needs to fucking be okay.”

  My mouth is hanging open, but I can’t seem to make it work. I don’t have the will or the words to respond to that, so I sit there for a few seconds in silence watching Hart search his pockets for another cigarette. When he lights it up, I study the slow burn of the paper.

  And that reminds me of my mother.

  “What happened next?” I whisper. “After the fire?”

  Hart gets up and walks toward the side of the dock. Toward the rotten, crumbling edge.

  “They left it still smokin’. Figured that was it, I guess. They thought Dempsey Fontenot was in there and that he was dead. For sure. So they came on home.”

  “But that wasn’t it. Was it?”

  Hart shakes his head, then takes a few long drags off his cigarette before he goes on. Like he needs to prepare himself for whatever he’s about to tell me.

  “He showed up right here. On the boardwalk. Dempsey Fontenot. That very same evenin’. About nightfall.”

  I keep my eyes on the dark river so I don’t have to look at Hart the way he is now. All hollow and scarred.

  “And I was there for this part,” he says. “Nobody had to tell me about it. I actually saw it happen. I remember it firsthand.” He finishes the cigarette and tosses it into the current. “Dempsey Fontenot blows in here that night like a hurricane. Bellowing like a wounded boar and carrying on like a wild man. And people start coming out to see what the ruckus is. So my daddy, he takes me with him. Just for the fun of it. He wants me to see, I guess. For whatever fucked-up reason. And Dempsey, he’s screaming about how they killed his kid. Murdered his baby. That’s what he kept yellin’. Burned him alive, he said. And nobody would’ve believed it. Because nobody had any idea. About the wife. Or the son.” He corrects himself. “Sons, I guess.”

  “Twins,” I say. “Like Ember and Orli.”

  And Sera and Sander.

  Elora and me.

  Hart nods. “Only we didn’t know that. Shit. I never knew it until tonight. But he had the one kid, Greycie. The little boy. He actually had the kid with him. Had his body.” He stops and looks at me. “What did you say his name was?”

  “Aeron.”

  “Aeron,” Hart whispers. “I never knew his name. But I knew he was my age. Four years old.”

  “Number twelve,” I tell him. And Hart nods again.

  “And Dempsey Fontenot is standing on the boardwalk holding this dead kid. Screaming bloody murder. And this kid is . . . all burned up. You know?”

 
“And you saw that?”

  “I didn’t just see it. I could feel it. I could feel that pain.” He shakes his head. “Strong enough to make me piss my pants. Right there where I was standin’.”

  Evie’s wind chimes are whispering in my ear again.

  “And that’s when the storm kicks up. Out of nowhere. I remember the rain. Buckets and buckets of cold rain. Huge waves on the river. This impossible flash flood on a clear evening. And the lightning and thunder. It was unreal. You could feel that electricity in the air. Strong enough to stand your hair up on top of your head.”

  “The power of the sea and the sky,” I whisper. And Hart nods.

  “I’ve never felt anything like it. That kind of power.”

  I shiver and wrap my arms around my chest. I’m thinking of those flashes I’ve been getting. Of the night Elora died.

  The wind.

  And the rain.

  I remember what Hart said about that night. A raging storm came out of nowhere.

  Like father.

  Like son.

  “Lightning hit a couple big ol’ trees. And they went up.” He snaps his fingers. “Like that. Wind took the roof clean off Bernadette and Victor’s place.” Hart stops and digs through his pocket for another cigarette. But there isn’t one. So he curses under his breath and goes on. “But it’s the hail I remember most. Huge, jagged chunks of ice crashin’ out of the dark. People runnin’. Screamin’. All bloody. And there’s Dempsey Fontenot standing in the middle of it all holding that dead kid, lookin’ up at the sky and grinnin’ like the devil himself.”

  Where was I while all this was going on? I wonder. Inside, I guess. With Honey.

  Safe.

  I don’t have any memory of any of it.

  Hart shrugs. “And that’s when somebody shot him. Blew a hole in his chest big enough to drive a four-wheeler through. And it all stopped. The wind and the hail. Lightning. The rain. All of it. And things were so wild. But I saw who it was. I saw who was holding that shotgun.” Hart turns and pins me down with a hard stare. “And you wanna know who it was? It was Leo, Grey. Leo. Elora’s daddy is the one who killed Dempsey Fontenot. You think that’s a fuckin’ coincidence?”

  Hart is wrong. He has to be.

  “Why Leo?” I ask, and Hart shrugs.

  “Why not Leo? Somebody had to put a stop to it, didn’t they? Before Dempsey Fontenot tore the whole damn town to pieces.”

  “Did Elora know that?” I ask. “What her daddy did?”

  Hart nods. “I told her that part, too.”

  “But Zale couldn’t know it.” I feel like I’m falling. Grabbing for solid ground. The edge of the cliff. A tree root. Anything. But all I get is a handful of air. “How could he possibly know that? He wasn’t even there.” My head is spinning.

  My whole world is spinning.

  Not Zale.

  Please.

  Not Zale.

  I wanted an answer. But I didn’t want that one.

  Hart tips his head back and laughs. He throws his hands up and gestures at the boarded windows. “How could he know that? Are you for real? Jesus. I don’t know, Greycie. It’s the Fucking Psychic Capital of the Goddamn World. You tell me how he knew it.” He looks me dead in the eye. “Maybe Elora told him herself. You said they were friends, right? She was keepin’ that from all of us.”

  Hart’s words are suffocating me. I stand up and try to get a deep breath.

  But I can’t.

  Hart points at the black barrel.

  “So right there’s why your new boyfriend would wanna kill Elora. Why he was probably plannin’ to kill you, too. Hell, Greycie, maybe he was gonna pick us all off one by one. All the Summer Children. That’s some real-life Shakespearean drama, right there. Sins of the father and all that shit.”

  “But Zale really doesn’t know,” I protest. “He doesn’t know what Leo did. He doesn’t know any of that. He’s been looking for his father this whole time. He didn’t even know what my mother did, until I told him.”

  Hart shakes his head. “Why the hell do you believe a thing this guy says? What kind of power does he have over you? We’ve been dickin’ around since you got here—tryin’ to figure out who might want Elora dead—comin’ up with nothin’. Jesus Christ. And you’ve been sittin’ on the answer since literally day one?” He shakes his head, like he just can’t make sense of it. “And you never breathed a word of it? Not even to me?”

  I can’t stand the hurt on his face, so I look away.

  “Any more secrets?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Right,” he scoffs. “Me either.”

  Some kind of line has been crossed. And I know that it can’t be uncrossed. Things will never be the same between us.

  My head is still reeling. I’m sick and dizzy, trying to come up with a reason I never questioned a single thing Zale said. Why I took him at his word, right from the very beginning. Why didn’t I ask more questions? Push him for more details.

  Any details.

  Then I remember what Zale told me about his mother. How she had a gift to calm the soul and settle the nerves.

  With her, it wasn’t just snakes. She had that same way with people.

  All those times he made me feel safe but hazy. Slightly drugged. Or drunk. Peaceful. But off-kilter. Like I couldn’t think straight.

  Did I let him do that to me?

  Had I let him soothe and charm me with magic eyes and an ocean-deep voice and a touch that took my breath away?

  That tingle of bare skin against skin.

  So that I never saw the danger? Like a cottonmouth hidden in the weeds.

  The wind has picked up, and Hart’s curls blow around the edges of his eyes. Elizabeth is coming for us. She’ll be here . . .

  soon.

  The word reminds me of that one-syllable love note.

  “I found something,” I say. “Tonight. Hidden in Elora’s room.”

  Hart’s staring at me. “We tore that room apart lookin’ for clues. Me. Mom and Leo. Sheriff. The boys from the state police. None of us found shit.”

  “You didn’t know where to look,” I tell him. And he laughs that dead-sounding laugh again.

  “What’d you find?” He’s eyeing me warily. Like I’m a strange animal he doesn’t quite trust.

  I pull out the piece of folded notebook paper and hand it to him. “Zale must have given it to her,” I say. And I feel so stupid. I look down at the water, so Hart won’t see the pain in my eyes.

  But I know he feels it.

  Hart unfolds the paper and stares at the delicate gold bracelet with the tiny charm. That little red heart. And the one-word love poem.

  Soon.

  The odd slanting S and those two egg-shaped o’s.

  A fierce wind blows across the dock, and chimes ring out like alarm bells.

  Hart’s face goes hard again, and he looks out toward the river. I follow his gaze, but there’s nothing to see. Without saying a word, he wads up the paper and pulls his arm back. Then he pitches the note and the bracelet as far as he can out into the dark river. And I cry out, because it feels like watching the last little bit of Elora vanish from my life forever.

  “Why did you do that?” I’m close to tears. Everything seems so unfair. “It didn’t belong to you!”

  “It didn’t belong to you, either.”

  “You’re an asshole!” I tell him. And I mean it. “Maybe I wanted to keep it.”

  “Why?” Hart turns his back on the river. “Get yourself another souvenir. The guy who gave her that obviously didn’t turn out to be the person she thought he was.”

  Maybe that’s true. But maybe none of us are the person we think we are.

  “You don’t know that Zale—”

  “Zale killed Elora, Grey.” My heart races and my knees fe
el weak. “There isn’t any other answer. And you know it now as well as I do. He’s the missing piece in all this. He killed her because Leo killed his father. And he was gonna kill you, too.” Hart crosses to me and puts his hands on my shoulders. “For what your mama did that night at Keller’s Island.”

  “This whole town covered it up,” I whisper, and Hart nods. But I still can’t really believe it. “All these years.”

  “That’s the problem, Greycie.” Hart’s jaw is set, and I see the veins throbbing in his neck. “That’s always been the problem with this place. It’s too damn easy to cover things up down here.” There’s something in his voice I can’t put my finger on. Something still unspoken. “All that black water.”

  I think of the bayou stretching back toward Killer’s Island like a dark and shallow sea. How it washes over everything.

  Conceals all our lies.

  Our sins.

  And our twisted roots.

  How it drowns us all. One way or the other.

  “But this is where it ends.” Hart’s voice is strangely calm now. His words are careful. Even. “You need to get to bed. Honey’ll have you up early in the mornin’. Gotta get out before the storm hits.”

  “What about you?”

  He grins at me then, and if I wasn’t already terrified, I am now.

  “I’m goin’ huntin’ tomorrow. Back at Keller’s Island.”

  Hearing him say it makes me feel sick. Something burns in the back of my throat.

  “What if you end up dead?” I ask him. “Like Elora.”

  Because if Zale doesn’t kill him, Elizabeth will.

  Hart shrugs. “What if I do?”

  We duck back under the safety rope, and he walks me up to the porch. He promises he’ll see me in the morning. To say goodbye.

  And he reminds me to lock the doors. The windows. Double-check them all, he says.

  Because the rougarou is on the prowl.

  Then he’s gone.

  When I turn to head inside, I think maybe I catch a flash of movement in Evie’s darkened bedroom window. I freeze and watch for a few seconds, but nothing moves again behind the glass. So maybe I imagined it.