Shadowed Summer (8 page)

What that had to do with anything, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t say that. “There was blood on his pillow, too.”

“Sugar, if you’ve ever had a nosebleed, there’s probably been blood on your pillow.” Deputy Wood had finished answering questions. Twisting himself to sit proper in the car, he reached up to play with his radio. “How about you write your report on fox fire? I had some follow me half a mile once. Now, that’s a mystery.”

Disappointed, I shook my head. “My daddy says that’s just swamp gas lighting up.” I shrugged and stepped up on the curb, curling a hand against my forehead to keep the rain from my eyes.

For me and Daddy, talking didn’t stop at the end of supper, but the subjects changed. Dinner-table conversation covered news and information; dish-washing talk was sort of philosophical, or maybe just thinking out loud, so it was the best time to bring up Elijah.

“Deputy Wood says Elijah Landry just run off.”

Daddy hummed, the sound lost in plate clatter. “Does he, now?”

“Yup.” Digging into the corner of a pan, I scraped hard to get the last of the cheese off. “He said the only reason folks looked for him was because of his granddaddy’s friends.”

“Well, Mark Wood never did think too hard or too long.” Taking the pan, Daddy glanced at me. “That’s between us; you respect your elders.”

Crossing my heart, I nodded. “Anyway, so what’s that got to do with it? If somebody took me, people would look, right? Even though we don’t know the parish president?”

Without hesitating, Daddy took the next plate with a nod. “Naturally, sugar, but you’re younger than Elijah was. And a girl.”

Daddy usually made things more clear, but with that, he had jumped in with Deputy Wood to complicate things. My questions weren’t hard—“What?” and “Why?” mostly—so there ought to have been simple answers. “So?”

“Elijah was just shy of being grown. It’s not against the law to be grown and leave if you want.” Daddy turned the faucet to his side of the sink, rerinsing glasses before putting them in the tray. “Folks don’t worry about boys as much. It may not be right, but that’s the way it is.”

“Well, what do you think?”

Putting a glass down hard, Daddy chimed it against the rest of them, the whole drainer rattling. Tension tightened his mouth to a thin line. “I think he’s gone, Iris, and that’s the most anybody can say.”

I swallowed, feeling vaguely ashamed, though I didn’t know why. “I’m sorry.”

As if he’d remembered something, Daddy shook his head, and the lines drawn around his mouth faded. “What’s got you thinking about it, anyway?”

“I just wondered.” Then I added, “You knew him, right?” Daddy flipped his towel over. “It’s a small town; everybody did.”

“But he was in your class.”

Stopping for a minute, Daddy turned to me. “What are you after?”

Shrugging, I swiped a plate with my sponge and passed it to him. I couldn’t answer that honestly, partly because it was a secret and partly because I didn’t want him to warn me off of it. “I don’t know.”

Leaving the dish in the sink, Daddy scrubbed his hand dry and put it on my shoulder. “Are you afraid of staying here at night by yourself? Baby, if you are, Mrs. Thacker—”

“No!”

Mrs. Thacker was seventysomething, and she smelled like a house full of cats. Until last fall, Daddy had paid her to come in at night to keep an eye on me. Being a widow herself, Mrs. Thacker grieved for my daddy and for my mama in a way that made me feel sick to my stomach. Her chandelier earrings rang like church bells calling good people to Mass, sending good people to God. She was forever prodding me to talk about Mama so I wouldn’t forget. I hated Mrs. Thacker’s knobby knuckles and her morbid chiming, but I knew it wasn’t polite to ignore your elders, so I made things up to make her leave me alone.

A visit to Mississippi for a cousin’s funeral had kept Mrs. Thacker away for a week last September, and I’d used that week to convince Daddy she was completely unnecessary.

“I’m fine on my own, I promise.”

The quiet went on and on while Daddy thought about it; then he nodded. “All right, then, if you’re sure.”

“I am.” In my head, I added,
One hundred percent, absolutely, totally sure,
but I kept that to myself. If I sounded too eager, it might make him suspicious.

Returning to my dishes, I twisted the tap to add more hot water to my side. Carefully, I wound my way toward the right subject again. “Anyway, I was just curious because me and Collette read some stories about him at the library. They said he was on the football team.”

Daddy held his hand out for another plate. “He kept track of the equipment.”

That little sentence seemed to sparkle; it was so real, like a direct line to Elijah. “He couldn’t play, then?”

“No, he could.” A faraway gaze settled over Daddy. “He volunteered to be the manager since his mama wouldn’t sign his permission slip.”

Before I could ask why not, Daddy put the last plate in the drainer and changed the subject. “How’d you run up on Deputy Wood, anyhow?”

Lucky for me, I could tell the truth. I don’t know what I would have said if I’d found him on the highway, after all.

My bedroom ceiling had plaster swirls on it, and when I couldn’t sleep, I liked to stare at it and try to make new patterns out of the curls. I followed the shadows with my gaze, waves hitting the trim and flowing back into fancy swirls. Curlicues drifted into ribbons, splaying into butterflies. They flew away over green, green grass, leading me to the creek.

The scent of rich, dark earth tickled my nose, and I pushed tallgrass aside to get to the water. My heart turned over when I finally reached the riverbank. Lying there propped on one elbow, chucking rocks into the water, was Elijah.

Scooping up another stone, he drew back lazily, measuring his mark with his eyes before he threw. Somehow I’d expected him to be skinny like Ben, but he wasn’t. He had a fine shape, with broad shoulders and strong arms.

My shadow fell on him, and he tipped his baseball hat back to look up at me. I’d been right; he had dark brown eyes to go with his brown hair, and creamy, Acadian skin with a hint of peach to it.

Smiling crookedly, he flicked his rock toward the water. “Where y’at, Iris?”

Swimming awake, I blinked at my desk and my posters. Dark as ever, my room didn’t smell like anything, and I was alone, just like I should have been. Swinging my feet over the side of the bed, I stood up, unsteady because somehow I expected marshy earth under me instead of carpet.

I stumbled to my desk so I could write down the details of my dream. It started to unravel in my head as I yanked my spellbook from the drawer. Flipping past the warning curse and all our other incantations, I stopped on the last half-used page.

Leaning over the spellbook, I slashed the page with ink, my handwriting sloped long like afternoon shadows. My words spilled out. They crashed into each other, and I had to read over them to make sure they were sense and not scribbles.

I flipped through the book once more before I collapsed back in bed. Throwing my forearm across my eyes, I exhaled, waiting for sleep to creep up on me again.

Then, against the blackness of my eyelids, I saw tiny print letters, soft white on dark. They rose like a ghost, chilling me till the hair stood up on my arms.

It’s a dream,
I told myself.
You’re just sleeping again.

But I heard the crickets singing outside. My nightgown stuck to my skin, and a sour taste bittered the back of my tongue. That was waking; I was awake.

Scrambling out of bed, I tore through my spellbook. I stopped and flattened my hand on the page, the one that had floated up behind my closed eyes. My throat went tight; I couldn’t breathe.

Somebody had written in my book.

My sprawling cursive had been marked out. I didn’t have a spell to go crazy anymore, not according to the new block letters at the top of the page.

I had a spell called
How to Talk to Elijah
.

chapter six

I
n Ondine, we were bred with God and superstition in our blood. If we spilled salt, we threw some over our shoulder right away. And we always found wood nearby to knock on when we were graced with good fortune.

That renamed spell was a sign if I’d ever seen one.

The morning after my dream, I went to the cemetery. I closed the gate and counted my paces to Cecily Claiborne’s crypt. I couldn’t do anything about the cloudless sky and the flood of sunshine. Hoping the weather wouldn’t matter, I climbed onto Cecily’s slab.

Just like before, I spread my arms in a cross. I licked my lips, then took a long, slow breath, willing the spell to take hold. This was the spell to talk to Elijah—he was coming, and I would be ready.

The cicadas ticked slowly, the heat too much for them to work very hard. Everything seemed to stop—no clouds moved across the sky, no wind teased the trees. I had nothing but quiet in a place of the dead.

Closing my eyes against the steady sun, I called Elijah to me, repeating his name over and over in my thoughts until the sound of it was a song. It carried and floated, turning and turning until it didn’t mean anything anymore, and I got lost in it.

Elijah, Elijah, Elijah.

A hand fell on my shoulder, and I jolted up. Somehow, all the shadows in the graveyard had gotten rearranged, and it hurt when I moved.

Standing next to Cecily’s crypt, Collette shook her head at me. “Lord, you’re burned.”

Automatically, I touched my cheek, then pulled my fingers away with a hiss. I had a sandpaper tongue, and my skin felt tight and hot, even when I didn’t touch it.

“You better get some aloe,” Collette said. I could tell from her thin frown that she couldn’t figure out why I’d do something so stupid as take a nap in the cemetery.

I slid off the slab and winced when I landed. “I’ve got some.”

Falling into step with me, Collette watched me from the corner of her eye. She thought that made her look witchy and powerful. “What were you doing, anyway?”

“Frog gigging. See my boat?” I said, irritated. She knew good and well what the cemetery was for; she didn’t need to ask me stupid questions. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Looking for you, ya think?”

“Well, you found me, ya think?”

Collette lifted her hair from her neck to cool off and rolled her eyes. “Well, if you don’t want to know what I found out, fine.”