Shadowed Summer (6 page)

“I’m not made of money,” Collette huffed as she handed the hush money over the backseat.

I settled in against plastic seats that had gone soft in the sun and radiated an oily perfume. The engine droned so loud we couldn’t hear ourselves talk. The sound of it echoed in my ears, even after Shea had dumped us in front of the library.

The librarian stopped shuffling magazines when we walked in. Drifting back toward her desk, she looked suspicious, or maybe curious—like she knew we had other places to be in the middle of the summer, so why weren’t we in them? By the time we got to her, though, she just seemed professional again.

“We want to look at newspapers,” I said when she asked if she could help us. “Old ones.”

She picked up a pen and scrawled a note. Offering it to me between two fingers, she said, “Take that to West; he’s shelving in the back.”

Waiting until we got out of her line of sight, I turned the note over and read it to Collette and Ben. “Microfiche, June through July, 1989.”

“How did she know?” Collette asked softly.

I answered with a shrug, leading her and Ben like I knew where I was going. Straight back, and then we rounded the corner to find one of the juniors from St. Amant reading against a library cart.

His plastic name tag said
WEST
—
VOLUNTEEN
—
I CAN HELP!
but with his hair in his face, he didn’t even see us until Collette dipped down and waved at him.

“The librarian told us to find you,” I said, and gave him the note.

He read it, then shoved it in his pocket. Jerking his head to get us to follow, he kept stealing glances back at Collette. “Y’all looking for Elijah Landry?”

Collette smiled. “How did you know?”

I exchanged a quick look with Ben; I almost felt sorry for him. He had this pinched look, and I think he woulda said something if West hadn’t lifted a box from a file cabinet and handed it to him.

“It’s either old people doing their family tree,” West said, handing me a box, “or people who think they’re gonna solve a mystery nobody else did. Y’all ain’t old.”

“Old enough,” Collette said.

Ben shook his box. “How does this stuff work, anyway?”

I’d expected to spend an afternoon sweltering in some back room, wheezing over old, yellow newspapers. Microfiche turned out to be movies, sort of.

West threaded one of the spools into the machine and flipped on a light. He turned the knob, and like a miracle, a whole newspaper page jumped onto the screen.

“You take care,” West said when I turned the knob too hard. “I have to tape ’em if you break ’em.”

Collette shot me a funny look, but I promised we’d be careful. West lingered behind Collette’s chair another minute, until Ben made a specific point of thanking him for his help.

Once West was out of earshot, Collette leaned over to whisper, “He was nice.”

“I guess,” Ben said coolly.

I minded my own business. Old pages from the
Ascension Citizen
flashed by in gray streaks. My eyes flitted back and forth, trying to make sense of the blurs, until a headache started between my brows. Slowing the wheel, I found I could actually skim the headlines.

Eighteen-year-old baseball scores, wedding announcements, obituaries; the parish president looking for money to repave the roads . . . That one was kind of funny, because Daddy still complained about the roads and how somebody ought to do something about them.

Collette had just gotten her machine running when I stopped half on a back page, half on a front. I turned the wheel as slow as I could, evening the picture up, then reached over to tug on Collette’s sleeve. “Look, June seventeenth.”

Craning over my shoulder, Collette read the article out loud with me. “ ‘Landry, seventeen, had just been released from Ascension Parish Hospital when he disappeared.’ ” Collette pushed ringlets out of her face to look at me. “It doesn’t say why he was there, though.”

Nodding, I skimmed farther down, past the quotes from his teachers that said he was a good student and a nice boy. “ ‘A spokesman for the sheriff’s department said they found no evidence of forced entry during their initial investigation.’ ”

“How ’bout that,” Collette said, laying her forearm against my shoulders to get more comfortable. “Look, right there. ‘Mr. Nathan Landry and his wife, Babette, are offering a twenty-thousand-dollar reward.’ Did y’all know there was a Mr. Landry?”

“I guess there had to be,” I said slowly. “I never thought about it, though.”

Ben slid into Collette’s empty chair. “I knew.”

“How come you didn’t say anything?” Collette asked.

“I dunno.” Ben shrugged, his shoulders swimming in his oversized T-shirt. “A couple years after Elijah disappeared, they split up. ’Bout the time Old Mrs. Landry decided God called Elijah home, my mama said.”

Collette shooed Ben from her chair. “What else do you know that we don’t?”

Ben laughed. “How am I supposed to know what you know?”

Hiding a smile behind my hand, I tried not to look overlong at Ben in case I started liking him a little. I didn’t want to hold his hand or anything. He was Collette’s; I wouldn’t like him like that. But when she wasn’t wallowing all over him, he
did
make me laugh.

I cleared my throat. “We’re supposed to be reading, not talking.”

Collette muttered something under her breath but got back to work. The clack and chunk of spools winding started to take on a pattern, regular as a train on its tracks. Adding my part to it, I turned the wheel slowly, getting used to the swipes of gray that turned steady black-and-white when I stopped to read.

“Says here he was on the football team.” Ben waggled his finger at the screen.

“My daddy was on the team,” I said.

“Think he’d tell us anything?”

I shrugged, as if I hadn’t already considered it. “I dunno.”

Making her machine whine with a particularly hard crank, Collette sniffed like she’d smelled something bad. “He works the night shift, anyhow. We’d have to be up at dawn or midnight to have a sit-down with him.”

“Not on the weekends.” I cut her a look for answering for me. “I’ll ask at dinner.” Then I pointed to my screen. “A whole mess of people went looking for him; half the parish, it sounds like.”

Collette took the pen and paper from Ben. “Well, we knew that. Did they quote anybody?”

In all, we made a list of six names, mostly folks who’d worked on the search parties, a couple people who’d claimed to be his friends. By the time we’d run out of microfiche, we had pages of clues, some in Ben’s scratchy print, others in Collette’s fat, round cursive.

Collette and I packed the films away, making sure they got back in the right cases. It didn’t seem right that a whole mystery, a whole summer, could fit in such a small space. The spools clattered when I carried the box to Ben, who was finishing up on his machine.

Nose almost pressed against the screen, Ben murmured and pointed to a picture he’d found. “ ’S Elijah, look.”

Most of the articles had used a yearbook picture about the size of a stamp, too fuzzy to really make anything out. This one took up a quarter of the front page, and it made the back of my neck prickle.

In fuzzy, faded color, Elijah peeked up through a fringe of ruffled bangs. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a smiling mouth I could practically see curving to ask me where I was at.

“That’s him,” I said. “That’s who I saw.” I saw the spark in the cemetery again, heard his voice coming back so clear he could have been standing right behind me. For a second, I thought he might be, that his hand would curl around my shoulder, cold and steady, to lead me to his last, lonely place on earth.

When Collette bumped me to get a look, I jumped.

“You sure, Iris?”

Nodding, I wrapped my arms around myself, rubbing to try to get a taste of the heat I’d been glad to escape all day. We were looking for Elijah because I had lied, but there he was—my boy from the cemetery—and I didn’t know if that was coincidence or destiny or what, but it sure felt like somebody’d walked over my grave.

I couldn’t stop staring; by the time Ben and Collette figured out how to get a print, I’d memorized Elijah’s face, down to the crook in his nose and the spray of freckles on his cheeks.

Even if I’d only imagined my visions, even if we’d all told a lie on the witchboard, I knew when I saw that picture that Elijah wanted me to find him.

In my heart, I knew he was ready to come home.

Back at my house, I found a note on the fridge. They’d called Daddy in early to work, and my supper was waiting for me in the oven. A quick peek inside revealed a meat loaf, which meant I would cut off a slice to feed to the garbage disposal, then microwave a frozen pizza.

Meandering around the kitchen, I wrapped myself in an eerie calm. The first time me and Collette tried talking to the dead, somebody answered. My thoughts had been twisted up in knots. One minute, everything going on was true; the next, it wasn’t. Collette could talk me into believing something, but then I’d turn around and let Daddy talk me right back out.

I’d stumbled back and forth so much, it was a relief to finally be sure about something.

Elijah chose me. He’d chosen
me
. Collette had lain three feet away, working the same spell, but Elijah had said
my
name.
I’d
seen him; no one else had. Plenty of other people wanted to know what had happened to him; one of them in particular would be on the church steps come Sunday morning, offering hard candy for prayers.

But he chose
me.

chapter five

T
he day started hazy gray, threatening rain right from the beginning. When I opened my window, the sticky green smell of it rolled in on a warm breeze. The curtains fluttered, blowing out and rippling at the edges, whispering against my desk.

I hurried to get dressed and start investigating. Me and Collette and Ben had split our list of people quoted in the paper on the subject of Elijah, and Deputy Wood was on mine. The sheriff’s station was right outside town, close enough that I could ride my bike.

In old pictures, Deputy Wood had stood tall and skinny, with a thick black mustache that waterfalled down either side of his mouth. Having seen him lately, though, I knew that his mustache had gone salt-and-pepper and he’d thickened out in the middle. The blue uniform stretched tight across his chest, and his star didn’t lie flat anymore.

Most days, he sat in his cruiser just off the highway, cherry-picking the hot-rodders who had nothing to do but drive fast between Ondine and Baton Rouge. Everybody over sixteen hated him, but since I couldn’t drive yet, he seemed all right to me. Besides, I thought folks ought to know better than to speed on his stretch, anyway. Gambling on its being his day off came with pretty bad odds.

I wasn’t sure if it was against the law to walk up to him while he was working, but I figured the worst that could happen was that he’d send me home with a warning to stay off the big roads. Since I’d be on my bike, he wouldn’t clock me at more than five miles an hour, so I couldn’t get a ticket; I just might be wasting my morning.

On my way out, I stopped at the Red Stripe to get a soda. Fishing around for the coldest can, I leaned into the refrigerator case and apologized when Mr. Ourso shuffled past with a box of toilet paper nearly bigger than him.