Shadowed Summer (22 page)

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, the
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.

Slowly, I pushed my chair back and wandered to the kitchen door. “Daddy?”

Daddy looked back at me, blank and calm. “Go on upstairs, Iris.”

I knew better than to argue with him. I took my time going up, though, and I stopped three steps from the top to sit and listen.

The detectives had musical voices, rolling like water, with upstate accents that made me wonder how they’d ended up in Ondine. Mr. Lanoux hadn’t said a thing, that I could tell.

“I can make some coffee,” Daddy said, his voice moving from the living room toward the kitchen. The detectives said that wasn’t necessary, their footsteps following Daddy’s.

Sliding down one stair, I strained to hear. Billie Jo had told us to keep our mouths shut, because that was our right. I didn’t understand why Daddy let the police in, let alone why he’d offered them coffee.

One detective sounded bored, the sound of flipping paper punctuating his words. “We’d just like to ask you a few questions about the Landry boy.”

My eyes went wide, and I slid down another step. I knew Daddy knew things, stories he’d never tell me, secrets he planned to always keep, but if the police asked, he had to tell the truth.

A second later, worry took over my curiosity. Daddy had known Elijah was dead all along. It came to me just then that I still didn’t know how. If he’d done something. If he’d seen something.

Panic squeezed me; my thoughts ran fast and hot. The newspaper said
murder
over and over. No matter my visions, no matter what I knew in my bones, my daddy had known Elijah was dead, and everybody was calling it murder.

A cry caught in my throat. Because of me, my daddy could go to jail.

Kitchen chairs scraped, cutting the silence, and after a long time, Daddy cleared his throat. “We didn’t mean any harm. We were young and stupid then, and I reckon we’re old and stupid now.”

My breath faltered. Daddy was going to confess something, something horrible Mr. Lanoux knew about. Snuffling on tears, I missed some of it but shut myself up in time to hear Daddy finish another sentence.

“We were trying to help a friend, sir. That’s all.”

“Well, you can see how we’ve got a problem, Mr. Rhame,” one of the men said. The other one coughed like he wanted to call Daddy a liar but didn’t dare out loud.

The chairs squeaked again, and I heard them heading for the stairs. I yanked myself up by the rail and bolted for my room, closing the door as quietly as I could before throwing myself on the bed. They startled me by opening my door instead of Daddy’s.

“This one, Eddie,” Daddy said, drawing Mr. Lanoux to one of my bookshelves. He didn’t once look at me and neither did Collette’s daddy. The police huddled in the doorway, watching them with sharp eyes.

I wanted to ask what they were doing, but I was afraid of getting Daddy in more trouble. It felt wrong to have all those men in my room, rifling through my things.

Daddy took handfuls of my books down, stacking them neatly at his feet. Mr. Lanoux helped him, and soon the shelves were bare again, as if I hadn’t just spent three days putting my room back together.

Then, with Daddy on one end and Mr. Lanoux on the other, they lifted my great big shelf—the one Elijah’d torn up first in my dream—and pulled it back from the wall. Cottony brown cobwebs clung to the back of the shelf. The paint behind the shelves was an unfamiliar shade; I couldn’t remember my room ever being green, but there was the evidence of it, in a tall, rectangular patch.