Shadowed Summer (4 page)

Balling her fists like she had to keep them from strangling me on their own accord, Collette leaned closer. “Dummy, he’s got a witchboard! Tell him to come back!”

My resolve unstuck itself right then and there.

Collette’s mama and my daddy didn’t put their feet down much, but they both did when we wanted a Ouija board. Playing with one was too much like Satanism.

Peeling my fingers off the gate, I gave Collette one last, hard look, then stepped aside. “I don’t think that was your mama, Ben. Come on back.”

“You’re not supposed to do it by yourself,” Ben said, unfolding the board between us. “You need at least two, to keep from being possessed.”

Nodding at this wisdom, we watched as Ben shook the pointer out of its red velvet bag. His witchboard was even better than we hoped.

Instead of cardboard and plastic, like the kind that came from the store, Ben’s was made of wood—mahogany, with light pine letters set right into the top. When I touched the pointer, it was warm and buttery. And heavy, too—alive and full of witch fire.

Secretly, I admired Ben a little more for owning something so fine and rare, but only a little.

“Where’d you get this?” I whispered.

“It was my nonna’s,” he said, rubbing the board with a fluffy cloth square. “And it was her nonna’s; she brought it over when she came from Italy.”

Generations of Ben’s family had passed the board on? Most people had only bothered to bring a family Bible over from Europe. That they brought this made me twice as impressed.

“All right, everybody has to promise not to push,” Collette said. She put the pointer in the middle of the board, then tapped the edge with her finger to test it. It took barely anything to slide to the spot on the bottom that said
ADDIO
. Since I recognized
S`
I
and
NO
on the top, I guessed
addio
meant “goodbye.”

“I’m not going to push,” I promised quietly as I put my fingers down.

“What should we ask first?” Collette whispered.

Rolling his head back to stare at the sky, as if the answer would be written in the clouds, Ben thought about it for a minute. “Is anybody listening?”

The pointer didn’t move.

Every second lasted a whole afternoon, and I felt old and wound up when I finally said, “Maybe we should try something else.”

Nudging me, Collette lifted her fingers and rubbed the sweat from them. “You should ask if he’s here.”

“Who?” Ben smiled, his eyes flicking at me, then back at her.

My face went hot. I guess I deserved it, for going out of my way to embarrass Collette at the Red Stripe the day before, but still. If I’d wanted to mention being a little crazy, I would have brought it up myself. “Nobody.”

“She saw a ghost, right here.” Collette nodded toward Claire’s crypt. “Well, over there, really. He came right up close and said her name.”

Ben’s mouth dropped open. “Really?”

Shrugging, I gritted my teeth. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her I must have made it all up, but, selfishly, I didn’t want to give Ben a reason to take his beautiful witchboard home. “Yeah.”

“Then we should try him,” Ben said. His eyes were cornflower blue; I’d never noticed that before.

The pointer slipped around under my fingers, and I watched the tendons flickering in my wrist. Out of curiosity, I pushed real light. Even though the pointer moved, my muscles hardly told on me; Collette and Ben didn’t seem to notice. “I guess we could try.”

Settling in, I took a deep breath. My family had all kinds of haunts. My great-aunt Corinne saw her dead mama in a turned-off television, and Daddy’s cousin Paul always dreamed a white dove right before somebody died.

I knew from a real haunt and what Daddy had said about ghosts and graveyards rolled around in my head, so I didn’t feel bad making one up. We were the living remembering the dead, after all.

Closing my eyes, I whispered in my best magic voice, “You out there? It’s me, Iris.”

Sweat trickled down my back. I waited for a minute before pushing. Peeking through my lashes, I tried to look blind as I slowly guided the arrow to
S`
I
.

Collette murmured in amazement, and Ben whispered, “It’s working.”

I slipped into a medium’s skin, rolling my head around to loosen my neck before picking another question that sounded séance-proper. “You’re here with us now?” I tugged on the pointer, then slid it right back to
S`
I
.

“We should ask something we already know, as a test.” The sweltering heat carried Collette and Ben’s electricity, a little storm of excitement brewing on top of Jules’s crypt.

Collette smacked her lips. She always did when she was thinking. She said, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

Since it was my show and all, I decided my ghost didn’t want to answer Collette. The pointer sat still on the
S`
I
, unmoving until Ben suggested I try asking.

“Maybe they only like you?”

Trying not to smile, I nodded and repeated the question. It was harder to spell out words with my eyes mostly closed, so my ghost said he was a boz instead of a boy, but that was close enough.

Another electric wave flickered through Ben and Collette, and they started whispering questions for me to ask, one on top of the other. I kept my pace slow so I wouldn’t get caught, but I let my ghost answer as many questions as he could, as quick as he could.

He was seventeen when he died, he drowned in Lake Chicot, and it was cold on the other side. The only question I didn’t let my ghost answer was his name, because I couldn’t think of one outside of people we already knew.

It took forever to spell everything out, and even though it was fun yanking Ben’s and Collette’s chains, I was hot and getting tired from controlling all my tiny sneak pushes.

The last thing I spelled out was
over the river,
to answer Ben’s question about where my ghost used to live. We had so many rivers in Ascension Parish that anybody could say they lived over one.

While Collette tried to puzzle out which river, I nudged the pointer toward
ADDIO
, saying goodbye so we could put the witchboard away.

It pained me to think about it being folded up and put back in its box; it was so pretty to look at that I’d have kept it out on a coffee table for people to admire.

“I wish we knew his name,” Collette said.

The pointer veered before I got it to
ADDIO
, and my mouth went dry. Stealing looks at Ben’s wrists, I could tell he wasn’t pushing it, and my body went numb when I realized Collette wasn’t, either. Their hands lay still as a pond, but I could feel the pull as the pointer swirled around the board.

Collette called the letters out, but I knew what it was before she finished. A tight band knotted around my heart, squeezing it painfully as I mouthed the name with no voice at all.

“Elijah.”

Cold just like yesterday’s came over me, icy seeds taking root and growing beneath my skin. Considering how hot it was, it should have felt good, but it ached instead. That was the name I would have picked—his was the only Incident we had. Maybe that fine board could read my mind; maybe I never needed to push.

The pointer slipped back and forth across the fine, polished wood, almost too fast to read, then skidded to a stop on
ADDIO
after finishing one whole sentence.

All three of us stared in silence at the message. It seemed too simple, too plain, to give us the chill it did.

Where y’at, Iris?

I ditched Collette and Ben at the Red Stripe and took the scenic route home. They planned to drain Lake Chicot with buckets if they had to; I didn’t have the courage to tell them I’d made that part up. I didn’t tell them about my book moving, either.

Elijah wanted to talk to
me,
which made it nice and even. Collette got dumb old Ben Duvall.

I wandered the edge of the road, picking butterfly weed to weave into a scarlet crown. The Incident was a haunt to me, a black fairy tale that went like this:

Once upon a time in the ’80s, Elijah Landry went to bed, and when his mama came to wake him the next day, she found an empty room and a blood-dotted pillow instead. They searched all of Ascension Parish, but nobody ever saw him again, and only God or the devil knows what became of him. Amen.

We still had echoes of him, though. His mama decided that God had carried Elijah to heaven, body and all. She bought prayers on the church steps, a hard candy for a lit candle—the end of times was coming, she was sure.

And now that he’d spoken to me, I wanted more. I could’ve made up stories about him if I’d wanted to. Elijah could have been perfect or awful, beautiful or ugly, artistic or athletic, but I wanted to know the truth. Was he friendly? Did he like playing practical jokes? Was his hair dark? Were his eyes darker? He’d been real once; someone had to know the answers.

It didn’t seem right to pester Old Mrs. Landry with questions. In her soft, sad mind, her boy was a saint, and I didn’t think I could bring myself to shake her out of that.

Miles Took at the barbershop told some of the finest yarns around, but he was practically famous for what we politely called “exaggerating.”

Down at the church, Father Rey told nothing but the gospel and the truth, but he hadn’t lived here long enough to know Elijah. Collette’s mama would ask too many questions about why I wanted to know and she’d tell Collette besides. Mr. Ourso at the Red Stripe hated everybody under thirty.

That left Daddy or the Internet, and as I crowned myself with crimson flowers, I decided it would be the latter. Daddy was plenty old enough to have known Elijah, but I didn’t figure he’d care much for me digging around in old graves. He liked to look forward, not back.

Finally home, I closed the front door quietly to keep from waking Daddy. I toed off my sandals and flopped onto the couch in our front living room. The sofa was a wedding present from Mama’s people, light blue and probably silk; it had delicate designs all over it and looked brand-new.

That, and a nameplate on a mausoleum, was all I had of her. Maybe other people kept mementos, but not my daddy. Besides the sofa, my mama’s things were gone, and according to Daddy, the sofa was too fine for sitting.

Which may have been true, but it was the coolest spot in the house. If I wasn’t really supposed to sit there, wouldn’t Daddy have put it somewhere besides right under the air conditioner?

I thought so and settled in.

chapter four