chapter four

The air had a funny feel to it, heavier than it was supposed to be, hotter than usual. July got stingy with the wind, and even the birds and bugs kept their songs to themselves.

“We could ask Poseidon to raise him up,” Collette said. Her breath puffed between words as we rode our bikes out to Lake Chicot.

I said, “Maybe there’s nothing left down there.”

Ben stood on his pedals as he coasted down the hill. “We shouldn’t mess with other people’s gods, I don’t think.”

“All right,” Collette said. “We’ll ask the naiads instead.”

I didn’t bother pointing out that the naiads were a river god’s daughters. Why bother? They didn’t need me to have a conversation, so I pretended I was mute.

Ben said, “I think we’ll find something this time.”

“I bet we do,” Collette agreed.

Reaching the pier, Ben jumped off his bike and offered Collette a hand down. I managed to make it to the shore on my own.

“The cattails are thick here,” Collette said. She brushed her hand along the stalks, making their heavy heads bow before her. “Wonder if they fed on his body?”

Ben trailed Collette’s touch with his fingers. “You want me to write that down as evidence?”

“If you would, please,” she murmured.

I peeled off my sandals and sloshed ahead, breathing through quicksand. My chest was full of silt and stone, so I walked quicker. They didn’t need me around for that, either, any more than I wanted to be.

Clinging to the truth of my haunt in the graveyard, I figured I’d let them have my pushed-around lies. My Elijah, my real one, was my secret.

At the edge of the lake, the water didn’t bother moving. When I stepped in, warm algae laced around my ankles. Out toward the middle, it would be deeper and clearer, good to swim in, but I didn’t want to walk home wet.

Voices drew me down the shore. I waved when I saw a couple of girls from our class sunning on the banks. Nikki lived down in the trailers, and Carrie Anne lived right inside the bayou. She was a champion frog gigger, even better than the boys. One time, she caught two on her spear at once.

“Hey, y’all,” I said.

Carrie Anne shaded her eyes with her magazine. “Hey, Iris, what’s up?”

“Nothing. Hot, ain’t it?”

“I know, right?” Nikki sat up. “You going in?”

Sliding my hands into my back pockets, I shook my head. “Nah, just walking with Collette and Ben.”

“Collette’s here?” Nikki flew to her feet, looking past me to Collette “Oh snap, come here!”

Now, maybe I couldn’t hold Collette’s attention lately, but a good talk about French braiding and who knew the fancy twists could. I backed off, sort of embroidering the space around them until I ran into Ben.

“I don’t think they’re talking English anymore,” he said. He pulled out a silver pocketknife and started peeling a switch. Strips of bark came off, baring pale, green wood beneath.

I shrugged. “I could translate.”

“That’s all right.”

I flopped down in the dry, stingy grass. Without looking up, I asked, “You going out for baseball this summer?”

Ben streaked his knife down the switch. “Nah.”

“How come?”

“Shea’s better than me, and the scouts didn’t come to see him, so . . .” He trailed off, shrugging.

I sat beside him. “You got time, though.”

Turning his knife, he pressed the flat of the blade against his lower lip. His gaze turned toward the distance, watching gold spark off the waves. “I don’t know if you know, but my mama’s real sick.”

I didn’t want to, but I felt bad for him. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“So it’s probably better if I ain’t going away to games, just in case.”

Twisting a wood shaving around my finger, I nodded. “Probably.”

Ben folded his knife and leaned forward, dangling it between his knees. He looked tired. All at once, like he’d gathered up shadows to wrap himself in, he blurted out, “What do you do when your mama dies, Iris?”

“I don’t know.”

“Thanks,” Ben said, quietly aggravated.

“I ain’t messing with you, Ben. I don’t remember having one. How could that be the same?”

That satisfied him, I guess, because he settled. “You ever try to call her up?”

“No.” I said it hard and fast. “I wouldn’t, ever.”

Maybe I didn’t remember her, but she wasn’t old bones to me. She was human and sacred and real.

“I wouldn’t either,” Ben said, and I sighed. That meant we had something in common.

It took the breath out of me when Collette pulled out the chair at her own desk to let Ben sit in front of her computer. She leaned against the corner of the chair, swaying, playing with her hair as she leaned over his shoulder.

“Where’re you gonna look?” she asked, like she hadn’t ever seen the Internet before.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, way out in Siberia, I watched Collette “accidentally” rub her arm against Ben’s as he typed. He incidentally grazed his cheek against her hair when he turned to talk to her. Huddled together, they blocked the screen so I couldn’t see, and I sort of expected I wasn’t meant to.

“I’m not finding anything,” Ben said.

Collette reached over his shoulder, typing with one finger. “Okay, hit ENTER.”

Rubbing my thumb into my palm, I considered my escape. It would be too obvious to jump out the window, and I’d have to bump all around them to get out the door. I thought if I wished hard enough, I could just astral-project and go home. My spirit, at least—my body could wait till supper to come home.

“Here’s an Elijah Landry.”

I jerked my head up, but I still couldn’t see the screen. “What did you find?”

Collette didn’t look back. “It’s not him; don’t worry about it.”

“This says there are five people in the whole country with his same name.”

I tried again. “But is he our one?”

Ben said, “Nah,” and went back to typing. They didn’t say anything else. They clicked and clicked, shuffling through Web sites and leaving me on hold.

The window looked better all the time, and I wondered if I’d get to eat nothing but ice cream if I ended up in the hospital with a broken leg.

“It seems like there should be something,” Ben complained.

“You’d think,” Collette said.

“You wanna go back to the lake?”

All off balance, I needed the ground to feel solid under my feet again, so I interrupted. I didn’t look directly at them, but I did raise my voice enough to be heard.

“If we can get a ride to St. Amant, I know a better place to look.”

Mrs. Lanoux looked like Collette, only older, her lines starker and sharper. She kept her hair up, twisted and held fast in a silver wire cage. A few curls escaped, framing her sweet tea-shaded cheeks.

She left a half-moon ring of cranberry lipstick on her glass when she put it down, pointing at us with a yardstick when we came in. “Unless you’re here to work, you can turn right back around.”

No fool, Ben backed onto the sidewalk. I stayed at the door, but Collette, unafraid, walked up to the counter. “Can you put the sign out and take us to the library?”

“I’m running a business here,” Mrs. Lanoux said, then suddenly whipped her head around. “Rooster, if you don’t quit playing in my purse, so help me . . .”

Turning her mother’s glass, Collette stole a drink from the unmarked side, then put it back quick before she got caught. “Nobody’s coming in till lunch. You have time.”

“What do you want to go to the library for, anyway?”

Collette shrugged. “Look at some books.”

Mrs. Lanoux crossed her arms on the counter and leaned forward. “You’ve got a whole room full of books at home.”

“It’s the fifteenth,” I said helpfully. I offered a bright smile and a wave when Mrs. Lanoux turned her attention to me. “They get their new books on the fifteenth.”

Catching the scent of a liar, Mrs. Lanoux arched one thin brow at me. “Is that so?”

I kept my smile going. “That’s what my daddy says.”

With a stretch, Mrs. Lanoux straightened again. “Look now. Y’all want a little, you gotta give a little. I have grease traps that need cleaning and a Rooster that needs minding.”

Collette melted against the counter, groaning. “Mama, come on!”

“How about it, darlin’?” Mrs. Lanoux disappeared behind the pie case, coming back up with her purse in one hand and a handful of Rooster’s collar in the other. She carried on with her thought even as she hustled Collette’s squirming brother from behind the counter. “I could make you work every day, like Patsy does Lonette at the gas station.”

A hand fell on my shoulder and I jumped, startled. Wound up tight, I slowly looked over my shoulder, expecting brown eyes and a laughing Where you at? but it was just Ben.

“Tell her to never mind. My brother’s gonna take us. Come on,” he whispered.

Before I could answer, he bolted off. Left to make up an excuse, I scratched a mosquito bite on my ankle and said, “Collette. Collette!”

She rolled her eyes and her body, twisting around to face me. “What?”

Using all my psychic powers and a good, strong bug-eyed look, I commanded her to play along. “We can go later. I just saw the mail truck, and Uncle Lee said he was sending me some catalogs. You wanna go see if they’re here?”

Collette stared blankly for two seconds, then kick-started. “Oh, those candy ones?”

“It better be candy ones,” Mrs. Lanoux said, turning a place mat over and slapping down some crayons for Rooster to draw with.

Me and Collette had both learned the meaning of the word confiscated when Mrs. Lanoux caught us with one of Uncle Lee’s novelty catalogs. She didn’t think farting piggy banks were too awful funny.

I backed against the door to open it. “They are, swear.”

Mrs. Lanoux waved us off with her yardstick.

As she passed me, Collette said, “Nice save. Now what?”

Cars never died in Ondine; they just got handed down. Shea Duvall’s ancient station wagon wasn’t pretty or quiet, but it ran, and that was all that mattered.

For two dollars each, Shea volunteered to ferry us two towns over to the library, and for one dollar more, he didn’t even ask us why we wanted to go. He didn’t care; he just wanted the extra dollar.

“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.