Shadowed Summer (3 page)

“I don’t want y’all messing around up in there.”

Frustrated, I put my spoon down heavy. “We weren’t messing; we were just looking at the names.”

“Try the phone book,” he said, slicing into his potatoes. “It’s about the same.”

“Daddy!”

Satisfied he’d made his point, he turned his plate and finally asked, “What kind of something?”

“I don’t know, just something. It was there, and then it wasn’t.”

“Was it a grave lantern?” Daddy asked. “They get restless when a storm’s coming.”

Everybody else called it fox fire, or swamp lights, or
les feux follets
if they felt fancy. It was all the same—a phantom glow that wandered off the bayou on humid, heat-lightning nights. Daddy, though, called it grave lanterns. Just the sound of it made my skin crawl—grave lanterns, like the cold light of an ember carried up from hell.

I shook my head. “No, not that.”

Ticking his fork against his plate, Daddy etched out an uncomfortable sound, his way of thinking out loud. “Maybe a rabbit or a bird, then.”

“It was a
person,
” I blurted out. I dropped my hands on the table so hard that our dishes chattered. “It was a boy, and he said my name, and then he was gone.”

Daddy quirked a brow. “I hope
he
wasn’t pretty.”

“It’s not funny.”

“Iris,” he said, standing to clear his plate. “It seems to me that if there were ghosts, the last place you’d find them is a cemetery.”

Blankly, I stared at him. “But why?”

“That’s a place for the living to go to remember. By the time we put somebody in the ground, their soul is long gone.”

“Oh.”

He made sense. If I’d passed on but wanted to stay, it sure wouldn’t be at my crypt. I’d want to be right there in my own kitchen, listening to Daddy sing whenever I wanted.

“I gotta get going, baby girl,” he said, dumping his dishes in the sink. “Make sure you clean up, all right?”

I stared down at my dinner; the shimmer of grease turned my stomach all of a sudden. “When are we gonna get a new dishwasher?”

“Just as soon as they grow on trees.”

Half pink, half blue, my bedroom was caught somewhere between being little and being grown. Ballerinas danced in watercolor on one wall; magazine posters of pop stars gazed down from the other. Because of them, I had to get dressed in the bathroom.

Tugging my robe closed, I wedged myself behind the white painted desk that had been mine since kindergarten. My knees brushed the underside of it as I searched the mess on top. Hiding with a stack of paperbacks, I found what I was looking for: my spellbook.

Collette had one just like it, spiral-bound with a heavy black cover. We figured nobody’d care about a school notebook enough to look in it. Just in case somebody did, though, we wrote a curse on the first page:
Abandon this book now, or get a bleeding wart on your eyeball for every spell you read.

Part of me hoped the next time I saw Ben Duvall, he’d be wearing bandages and sunglasses.

Uncapping a pen with my teeth, I flipped past the werewolf potion and the potion for everlasting life to find a blank page. I’d planned to write out
How to Talk to the Dead,
but after that talk at dinner, I didn’t want to anymore. Still, I had to mark down something.

Daddy liked to say it was all right to talk to God, but you were a little touched if God talked back. Remembering that made it easy to mark down our latest discovery. I finished it as quick as I could, then shoved the book into the drawer, pen and all.

Unlike the other spells we had, I didn’t reckon we’d be using
How to Make Yourself Go Crazy
very often.

chapter three

T
he sun hadn’t risen high enough to blaze through my window, but it was already strangling hot in my room. My nightgown stuck to me, peeling from my skin with a tickle. I scraped my feet as I walked, trying not to move overmuch.

Sleep held on, calling me back to bed—maybe back to something different and good, like the dream where I could hold out my hands and just fly. As fine as sleeping sounded on a hot day, you could lose a whole summer like that if you weren’t careful.

The frigid prickle of a cold shower felt good for the first couple of minutes. After that, it was just cold. I slipped into my room to grab some clothes, my chilly skin already warming back up to Louisiana humid. New sweat started on my upper lip, and I frowned at my dresser. If it was decent, I would have gone naked. Since it wasn’t, I picked out shorts and an old T-shirt.

As I skulked into the hallway, something nagged at me, like I’d left something behind. Fingering through my clothes, I found everything I needed, but I looked back anyway.

There on my desk, on top of everything, was my spellbook.

In Collette’s house, that would have been a sign to start beating her baby brother—the one we called Rooster, since he up and decided to have red hair when the rest of the family was brunet. I was an only child, though, and Daddy was sound asleep, so something I put in my drawer should have stayed there.

I stood in the doorway, staring. It was long enough that I wanted to dig a sweater from the back of my closet to chase off new goose bumps.

It took me a couple tries to touch the cover, which meant I felt pretty dumb when it felt like a spiral-bound notebook. It could have given me a static shock, at least. Bracing the edge with my thumb, I flipped from the front to the back, making sure it was my book. Everything looked the same.

Wound up tight and afraid of my own room, I told myself out loud, “I’m closing my book in this drawer, and I’m not imagining that.” I took a deep breath and shoved it back in the desk.

Then I ran.

Daddy was going to be awful surprised when he woke up. I’d folded every towel in the house, swept the kitchen, and even mopped a little bit before switching to the push vacuum in the living room.

Whipping myself to a sweat in spite of the air conditioner, I felt my room above me, like it could sink through the ceiling and sit on my shoulders. I didn’t like thinking that someone—some
thing
—had been messing around in there while I was asleep.

I could avoid going up there during the day, but I’d have to sleep in my own bed sooner or later. I had to figure out how to cure a book-moving ghost.

Giving the rug one more sweep, I dragged the vacuum back to its closet and started for the staircase. All of a sudden, it was hard to breathe, and my fingers didn’t even feel like they belonged to my hands when I grabbed the rail. I’d only made it up three steps when the phone rang and nearly made me lose my balance. For a crazy second, I wondered if it would be the boy from the cemetery on the line, asking me how I was, but it was only Collette.

“Meet me at our place in fifteen minutes,” she said, talking fast, like somebody might be listening. “Just bring you.”

I wrinkled my nose and leaned against the wall. “What else would I bring?”

Collette sounded exasperated. “I don’t know. Anything. Whatever!”

“You’re talking crazy, Collette. I hope you know that.”

“Just bring you and get on over there, all right?” A rattly static sound filled my ear. I could hear her talking to somebody but she sounded far away. It got quiet again right after that; then her voice cleared. “It’s
important,
Iris.”

A half hour later, I wandered around Jules Claiborne’s crypt alone, searching for a little bit of shade. I felt like I could have peeled the skin off my shoulders in crispy strips. The puddle of sweat at the small of my back made me shudder.

Collette hadn’t shown up.

Just a touch bitter, I kicked at the edge of the crypt. I should have stayed home in the first place. Haunt in my desk drawer or not, at least the living room was air-conditioned, and Daddy had a case of root beer in the fridge. My mouth went wet just thinking about it.

I’d decided to leave and was at the gate when I saw Collette finally coming down the road. I went to yell something mean at her when I spotted Ben. He straggled along, carrying a box and looking at his sneakers.

Rankled down to my bones, I gritted my teeth and held the gate closed. Fine if she wanted to be late on me, but I wasn’t about to let her bring somebody else to
our
place. “Since when was there thirty minutes in fifteen?” I asked.

“Sorry,” Collette said, slowing to fall in step with Ben. “We had to stop and get something.”

“Hey,” Ben mumbled, hoisting a long white box to prove their errand.

I glared at Collette, leaning into the gate until the notched iron nipped at my thigh. She didn’t even realize I was mad; I itched to slap her. “You coulda said that on the phone.”

“It was a surprise!”

Ben tucked his box under his arm and trailed away from the gate. “Uh . . . I think I hear my mama calling. I’m gonna go see what she wants.”

He didn’t hear her, unless she’d followed him four blocks with a bullhorn, but it was a good excuse. The Duvalls had their faults—they all had a touch of stuck-up, because they had money left over from the Gold Coast days in Ascension Parish—but nobody could call them stupid.

Disappointment ran across Collette’s face, breaking her mouth and eyes to downward curves. A split second later, she wheeled around, growling under her breath, “You tell him to come back!”

“No, ma’am.” To make my point, I rattled the gate between us. She could pick making kissy face with Ben or reaching out for the otherworld with me; it was that simple.