A Flicker in the Dark(19)

“I think I found something!”

I glance to my left at a middle-aged woman dressed in white sneakers, khaki cargo pants, and an oversized polo shirt, the unofficial uniform of a search party concerned citizen. She’s kneeling in the dirt, her eyes squinting at something beneath her. Her left arm is waving madly in the direction of the other searchers, her right clutching the kind of walkie-talkie you’d buy in the toy section at Walmart.

I look around—I’m the closest one by several yards. The rest are coming, running in our direction, but I’m here now. I take a step closer and she looks up at me, her eyes excited yet pleading, like she wants this item to hold some kind of significance, some kind of meaning, but at the same time, she doesn’t. She desperately doesn’t.

“Look,” she says, waving me over. “Look right there.”

I step closer again and crane my neck, an electric shock jolting through my body as my eyes focus on the object nestled in the dirt. I reach for it, without thinking—a kind of knee-jerk reflex, as if someone had smacked my shin with a mallet—and pluck it from the ground. A police officer runs up behind me, panting.

“What it is?” he asks, hovering over me. His voice has a strangled quality to it, like his breath is trying to cut through a forest of phlegm. A mouth breather. His eyes bulge as he sees the item cradled in my hand. “Jesus, don’t touch it!”

“Sorry,” I mutter, handing it to him. “Sorry—I, I wasn’t thinking. It’s an earring.”

The woman looks at me as the officer kneels down, chest rattling, one arm jutting out to the side to stop the others from getting too close. He plucks the earring from my palm with his gloved hand and inspects it. It’s small, silver, a cluster of three diamonds at the top forming an inverted triangle, the tip of the triangle attached to a single pearl dangling at the bottom. It looks nice, something that would have caught my eye in the window of a local jeweler. Too nice for a fifteen-year-old.

“Okay,” the cop says, pushing wisps of hair across his sweat-soaked forehead. He deflates just slightly. “Okay, this is good. We’ll bag it, but remember: We’re in a public place. There are thousands of graves in here, which means hundreds of visitors daily. This earring could belong to anybody.”

“No,” the woman shakes her head. “No, it doesn’t. It belongs to Aubrey.”

She reaches into her cargo pocket and pulls out a piece of paper, creased into quarters. She unfolds it: Aubrey’s MISSING poster. I recognize the image from the one I saw this morning, plastered across my TV screen. The single image that will define her existence. She’s smiling wide, that black eyeliner smeared across her lids, pink lip gloss reflecting the flash of the camera. The picture cuts off just above her chest, but I can see that she’s wearing a necklace, a necklace I didn’t notice before, nestled in the puddle of skin between her collarbones—three small diamonds attached to a single pearl. And there, fastened to the lobes peeking out from behind the thick, brown hair tucked behind her ears, is a pair of matching earrings.





CHAPTER TEN




Lena wasn’t a nice girl, but she was nice to me. I won’t make excuses for her; I won’t sugarcoat the facts. She was a troublemaker, a perpetual pain in the ass who seemed to get off on making other people uncomfortable, watching them squirm. Why else would a fifteen-year-old wear a push-up bra to school, twirling her French braid around a bitten-down fingernail as she chewed on the side of her pillowy lip? She was a woman in a girl’s body, or a girl in a woman’s body; both seemed to make sense. Simultaneously too old and too young—a figure and mind beyond her years. But there were parts of her, somewhere, hidden beneath the depths of her slathered-on makeup and the cloud of cigarette smoke that seemed to envelope her each day after the ring of the high school bell that reminded you that she was just a girl. Just a lost, lonely girl.

Of course, I didn’t see that side of her when I was twelve. She always seemed like an adult to me, despite the fact that she was the same age as my brother. Cooper never seemed like an adult with his burping and his Game Boy and his stash of dirty magazines he kept hidden under the loose floorboard beneath his bed. I’ll never forget the day I found those, snooping through his room in search of a stash of cash. I had wanted to buy myself an eye shadow pallet, a nice pale pink I had seen Lena wear. My mother refused to buy me makeup before high school, but I had wanted it. I wanted it badly enough to steal for it. So I crept into Cooper’s room, lifted up that creaky plank, and was slapped in the face with a pair of cartoon tits that sent me reeling back so fast I whacked the back of my head on his box spring. Then I immediately told my dad.

The Crawfish Festival had been in early May that year, the prologue of summer. It was hot, but not too hot. Hot by the majority of the United States’ fragile standards, but not Louisiana hot. That wouldn’t come until August, when the damp breath of the bogs wafted through the city streets each morning like a rain cloud searching for drought.

Also in August, three of the six girls would be gone.

I joke about Breaux Bridge—the Crawfish Capital of the World—but the Crawfish Festival really is something to brag about. My last festival had been in 1999, but it had also been my favorite. I remember wandering by myself through the fairgrounds, the sounds and smells of Louisiana permeating my skin. Swamp pop leaking from the speakers on the main stage, the scent of crawfish being prepared in every possible way: fried, boiled, bisque, boudin. I had drifted over to the crawfish race, my head snapping to the right when I noticed Cooper’s moppy brown hair peeking out from inside a crowd of other kids leaning against my father’s car. He always seemed to be surrounded by people back then—we were opposites in that way. They swarmed to him, trailing him around like a cloud of gnats on a muggy day. He never seemed to mind, though. Eventually, they just became a part of him: the crowd. Occasionally he would swat at them, annoyed. And they would obey, scatter. Find somebody else to stick to. But they never left for long; they always found their way back.