chapter sixteen

When Ben came to the door, Daddy narrowed his eyes but let him in anyway. Ben shuffled around, stammering, until Daddy said we could go to my room to talk.

“Leave the door open,” he warned.

It was strange inviting Ben into my bedroom. I felt like I was letting him look at my underwear or something, which made me feel bad, ’cause I’d actually seen him in his.

Instead of sitting in the chair at my desk, he held on to it, wobbling back and forth as he peeked at me through his lashes. “Everybody’s talking, Iris.”

I nodded, trying to find a good place to settle, finally choosing the edge of my bed. “I know.”

Ben stopped rattling and slowly turned to look at me. “Did your daddy tell you what happened?”

My stomach dropping, I shook my head. A funny sensation tingled down my arms, and I looked toward my shelf, the one Elijah had torn up twice looking for his suicide note. “Not exactly.”

Just like Daddy, I knew things now that I never wanted to share; if I was lucky, nobody’d ever make me, either.

“I heard my daddy talking to Mr. Lanoux,” Ben said.

I just nodded.

Twitchy, Ben rocked the chair again, then stopped, like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself or how to talk to me anymore. “He said Elijah told them to come over at a certain time. That he was dead when they got there, hanging from a light fixture. He even tied a bag of river rocks to his legs to make sure he did it right.”

Pursing my lips, I closed my eyes against a sudden flash of vivid imagination. I could call up every detail of Elijah’s room. It wasn’t a hard stretch to change that picture, to make his body dangle beside the bed, his shadow swaying across a pillowcase dotted with just one drop of blood.

My chest tightened and I wanted to cry again. I couldn’t let myself slip into the hurt that had dragged Elijah down until he wanted to die. I couldn’t bear to feel it; I didn’t want to.

I pushed it out of my thoughts. “Do you know what the note said?”

“Please don’t let my mama find me like this.” Ben laughed, an empty sort of sound, and ran his fingers through his hair. “I guess she didn’t, did she?”

Forcing my voice to some kind of normal, I looked up and asked, “Ben, do you think they’re going to jail?” I just wanted somebody to say no so I could stop worrying, even if it was only for a minute. Even if it was a lie.

Ben sighed, letting go of my chair. The wooden feet rattled on the floor, then went silent. “I don’t know. I hope not.”

“Yeah, me too.”

It was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I’d gone crazy and torn open a grave that my daddy had gone crazy and closed his best friend up in. Two generations of Rhameses had disturbed Mrs. Claiborne’s rest; instead of going to jail, I should have worried about both of us being sent to an institution.

Neither of us said anything for a minute. I picked lint off my shirt, and Ben coughed a couple times, standing in just the right place to catch an echo in my room. Winding up with a deep breath, he turned to me and said, “So, I vote next summer we don’t look for any more ghosts.”

I let my feet slip to the floor and stood. Our conversation felt close to over, and I thought I should walk him out. “We won’t.”

“Hey, Iris?” Shifting his weight, Ben turned recognizable to me again, a flash of brooding in his blue eyes, and I stepped back because I suspected he intended to kiss me.

It wouldn’t have been unwelcome, exactly. Ben had turned out to be a lot more than somebody in my way; he liked horror comics and making jokes, and that one kiss had been nice. I even thought about it sometimes. Trying to sound friendly, I stepped back again and shoved my hands in my pockets. “Hey, Ben?”

He opened his mouth, ready to say something, but no sound came out. Instead, his cheeks colored a little, and he shook his head, curling his lips in a smile as he started for the door. “Never mind.”

It seemed like a good day for telling all of the truth, and I didn’t want him to leave like that. It would have seemed like there was room to talk about it some more, and there really wasn’t.

“I would have liked you if you hadn’t kissed Collette first.”

Caught, Ben had the grace to look ashamed. “I wish I’d known that before I kissed her.” Then he shrugged, because that was as simple as it got. He sort of waved as he left. “See you around, Iris.”

I sighed and rolled back into my bed, staring at my canopy.

“See you around, Ben,” I murmured when the front door closed downstairs.