Shadowed Summer (14 page)

“Wait, one more?” I touched his elbow, and he stopped beside me. “Why was he in the hospital before he went missing?”

Uncle Lee paused. “I don’t remember, Iris. It was a long time ago.”

Left alone, I swallowed up my thoughts and turned to look at the people around me. In a corner booth, a brown-skinned woman tried to coax mouthfuls of rice into a baby bent on making a mess instead.

The table closest to me had two older ladies who looked fresh from church. They wore bright red suits and hats to match, and if I leaned right, I could smell their perfume, sweet and powdery.

When the waiter returned, I ordered something chocolate for me and something strawberry for Uncle Lee. The waiter tapped his pen on his order pad as he walked away. After the waiter passed my table, a boy across the way waved at me, and my cheeks went hot. I glanced at my new shirt, wondering how grown I looked, then, curiously, raised my head again.

My lunch turned to stone in my belly. It was Elijah. He sprawled back in the booth, feet up, jeans covering his sneakers. He smiled, and I saw his mouth moving.

I didn’t need to hear to understand him.

“Iris?”

I started, looking up to see Uncle Lee standing beside me, blocking my view. He had a friendly, curious lightness to his voice. “You woolgathering, darlin’?”

I shook my head, and the muscles felt so stiff in my neck I thought they might snap. That would have been something, to have my head roll right across the restaurant floor; the police would have a time trying to explain that.

Uncle Lee settled back, and I could see the table across the way again.

It was empty.

chapter ten

I
might have been done with Elijah, but Collette had other ideas. She fell right into decorating with me like she’d waited her whole life to rearrange my furniture. My desk went to one side of the room and my bed to the other, but the shelves had to stay put. Even empty, they were too heavy for us to lift.

As we climbed on the mattress to tack my canopy up again, Collette tried to sound casual, though her eyes didn’t meet mine. “I was thinking we could go to Ben’s next. His daddy has tons of stuff from high school up in the attic.”

“I know, he told me.” Suspicious, I pressed my hands to the ceiling to hold my canopy in place. “I thought he had a lazy eye, Collette.”

“It’s just a
little
lazy.” She shrugged, reaching down to grab another pushpin. She made herself impressively busy with a handful of them, rolling them in her palm before reaching up again. “Anyway, there might be clues up there.”

I stared at her. “Like what? Class pictures? That’s real helpful.” I made a dismissive sound.

“You never know!”

“I’m pretty sure I do.”

“Ben thinks there might be something.”

Huffing a breath, I forgot to hold the canopy in place. It drifted down, shrouding me in navy blue that I brushed at impatiently. “What happened to you doing better, Collette? Is he back to kissing you or something?”

Collette got quiet, a guilty expression flickering across her fine features. Her dark eyes shifting back and forth, she finally shrugged in defeat, smiling a smile that begged me to be happy about it. By God, Ben Duvall had kissed her, and she wasn’t complaining.

“I thought he smelled like cabbage.”

“You did, not me.”

Dropping to the bed, I let the canopy hang over my face like a widow’s veil and I stewed. It wasn’t fair for her to change her mind like that, not without telling me first. Worse, I already felt like I should apologize to Ben; I’d have to for sure if he and Collette made up.

“I don’t want to look for Elijah anymore.”

“Well, we have to, don’t we?”

She sounded so matter-of-fact that I tugged the gauze back to stare at her. She just looked thoughtful, her mouth pursed slightly, like I’d caught her puzzling over algebra homework.

I shook my head. “Not if we don’t want to, we don’t.”

“Iris, he’s already set loose.” Reaching up, Collette knotted her hair at her neck. “We stirred him up, and we have to put him back down again.”

“
I
stirred him up,” I corrected.

If she was right, I had a whole lifetime of rock showers and handprints on steamed glass to look forward to. One bad spell in the cemetery might have cursed me.

All decided, Collette fanned herself with a folder, leaning over to pick through Uncle Lee’s box. “Ooh, anything good?”

“The shirt I’m wearing,” I said. My room needed airing, so I got on my knees and climbed under my desk to plug in my fan again.

Leaning down, Collette waved a brown book at me. “Look what he put in.”

“Hold on, Collette, dang.” I bumped my head on the underside of the desk, but I forgot the hurt in an instant. One of Elijah’s stones lay in the shadows; it felt cool and heavy when I slipped it into my pocket.

Then, quickly, I plugged in the fan and sat up. “All right, what?”

Collette turned the chair and sat above me, then handed over the book with a flourish. “Look at that.”

Marveling at the neat handwriting on the inside, I took a shuddering breath. The fan’s drone filled my ears, so my voice sounded far away, even to me. “This was my mama’s.”

“I know. How come Uncle Lee had it?”

It was a good question, but I was grateful that she didn’t expect me to answer. It seemed like something I should have known, and I didn’t.

Collette flipped past photos—my parents when they were young, posed on front steps and car trunks, their eyes squinting in the sun. We stopped at a grainy shot of them in front of a Ferris wheel. Daddy and Mama took up the middle, though Mama wasn’t looking at the camera. She had her head tilted back and was smiling at Daddy, her arms around his waist.

Elijah hadn’t been facing the camera, either. Though he had his arms wrapped around a younger, softer-looking Miss Nan, he gazed toward something in the distance.

I murmured in surprise when I realized he was wearing the same jersey he’d worn in my dream. That little sliver of truth felt like ice on the back of my neck.

“What else is there?”

Sliding to the floor to sit shoulder to shoulder with me, Collette spread the book so that half lay on my leg, the other half on hers, and she turned the pages with vicious efficiency. If the pictures didn’t have Elijah in them, she didn’t stop.

There were notes under some of the pictures. One was
Valentine Lake, Summer 1987
—Elijah and Daddy trying to start a campfire. Another showed Mama crossing her eyes while Elijah put bunny ears up behind her head—that read simply
Summer 1988
.

I wanted to trace my fingers over her words, in ink like blood, some living part of my mama suddenly unearthed. And there she was with the boy who was haunting me. Making faces with him. Laughing with him and Daddy.

The last picture in the book had all three of them in it—Daddy and Mama and Elijah, dressed up in church clothes and hats. Underneath it, Mama had written
Easter 1989
.

Leaning my head against Collette’s shoulder, I turned the last page back and forth, gazing at them in their Easter best.

That was the last of them, the end of their saved memories. There were a few blank pages still in the book; Mama must have quit filling it when Elijah disappeared.

An unexpected touch of grief settled on me, and for a minute, I was afraid I might cry, afraid I wouldn’t be able to explain why, either. I sat up too fast and got a deep breath of paint fumes.

Feeling dizzy, I slid to my feet and held my hand back to haul Collette up. “I’m gonna die in here. Let’s go.”

In the shade and quiet by the creek, we ran into Ben. Me on one bank, Collette on the other, we went around the old downed oak and there he was. His bare toes touched the edge of the water; streaked sunlight danced on his golden hair. He had his fishing pole propped between his knees, his dirty fingers working at a tangled lure. Lost in his own thoughts, he didn’t look up.

Collette lit up when she saw him. She ducked around the tree, coming up with a smile on the other side. “What do you think you’re catching down here?”

“Nothing but flies,” he said. His smile dimmed when he looked past her and saw me.

My last words to him rattled in my head, echoing until they got so loud I wanted to shake them right out. I felt stuck, because I really needed to say something, but I didn’t want to do it in front of Collette and give her the wrong impression.

Fortunately, Collette had plenty to talk about. I nodded along while she explained the memory book and how we had to court Elijah back, only carefully this time. In my opinion, she was hinting about the witchboard again, but Ben didn’t volunteer it.

“Anyway,” Collette said, breezing right past Ben’s missed chance to be a hero, “we ought to look at the stuff in your attic, Ben. Maybe he’ll show himself if we find something good.”

I had to talk then. “We don’t need anything. We just need me.” I peeked up and nearly hit Ben’s gaze.

“How do you figure?” Squinting one eye at me, Collette waited for me to squirm, but I didn’t.

“He’s following me.” I stood on certain ground, my heart almost still with the truth of it. “He showed himself when I was out with Uncle Lee. And after y’all left my house last time, he put a handprint on my mirror while I took a shower.”

From the corner of my eye, I could see Ben’s expression turn amazed. He leaned in, shadows from the tree boughs rubbing his skin in restless patterns. “He did?”

I crossed my chest with my fingers, and Collette let out a held breath. At first, I couldn’t tell if she was glad or annoyed.

“And this is all real?” she asked. “You swear?”

I nodded.

“Then I guess we have three questions we have to answer,” she said, counting them off on her fingers. “Why was he in the hospital? How did he get out of his room? And where is he now?”

Smiling curiously at her organization, I reached out and pulled up her fourth finger, because she’d left out the most important question. “And what happened to him?”

Scraping sand from my shoes, I started up the path. “Why don’t we start in Ben’s attic?”

“Hey, look, he signed my daddy’s yearbook,” Ben said, twisting the red volume in his hands to show it to us, then turning it back to read aloud. “ ‘Stay cool, Eli.’ ”