Dark and Shallow Lies(51)

We meet up most every evening when the frogs start to sing and the light begins to change. The two of us sit back there on the rusted-out trailer and talk until it gets too dark to see each other any more.

Mostly we talk about Elora. I tell him how the two of us used to share dreams sometimes. How we’d go to bed curled up together under Honey’s quilts, and then both wake up at the exact same moment, having dreamed the exact same thing.

Zale tells me how no one had ever listened to him the way Elora did, without judgment or expectations. How he’d started to feel like a ghost, but the way Elora saw him – heard him – made him feel real again.

And it feels so good just to be able to breathe Elora’s name out loud to someone. It feels like keeping her alive, maybe. In some small way.

“What if I never find out the truth?” I ask Zale one night. “Elora was everything to me. How do I go on living just the same? Like nothing ever happened?”

With summer more than halfway over, the thought of ever caring about trips to the mall or scheduling college visits . . . or even running track again . . . seems impossible.

Zale takes my hand, and electricity sparks between our fingers. He spins Elora’s ring three times. Like making a wish.

“You don’t go on living just the same,” he tells me. “You have to go on living in a completely different way.”

And that’s the first thing that’s made sense to me in a really long time.

We talk a lot about his daddy, too, and Zale always gets quiet when we come to the morning his mama pulled him from the flames and ran with him through the bayou. Her hand clamped tight over his mouth.

The same morning folks pulled Ember and Orli from the drowning pool.

“All those memories are filled with smoke,” he tells me. “But my daddy wasn’t a murderer. That’s a thing I can say for certain.”

So I try to let my old fear go. To think of Dempsey Fontenot as something other than a killer. To picture him the way Zale paints him in the stories he tells. But it’s hard, because it’s a really strange thing to find out the monster under your bed was never really a monster at all.

And at first, it seems like we need each other, Zale and me, so we can help solve each other’s mysteries. But somewhere during those long, hot weeks, something changes. And we start talking about so many other things.

Because maybe we just need each other.

He tells me more about growing up in Florida. How his mama taught him the names of all the wetland plants, which ones you can eat and which ones are good for healing. And I tell him about why I love to run. How it makes me feel. The freedom I find in it.

And it feels so good to talk to someone. Really talk to someone.

About things that don’t hurt.

And about things that do.

Night after night, we sit out there until the sky goes inky and the owls start to call and I know I’m late for supper. And then some.

But I never want to go in. Because being with Zale makes me feel like maybe I’ll be okay. And the whole time I’m with him, I drink up that peaceful, slightly fuzzy feeling like it’s cold, fresh water. And I’m dying of thirst.

More and more often, he’ll hold my hand. Or brush against my arm. On purpose. And I’ll feel that little shock of electric current. That tiny zap. Skin on skin.

One night he’s telling me a story about the first time he ever tasted ice cream, and he puts a gentle hand on my bare thigh. Just for a second.

And I almost pass out from how good it feels. It makes me curious. Maybe even a little excited.

And that’s a bit of a distraction, but it’s not enough. Because as the summer wears on, I can’t ignore this idea that something is coming. It’s not a psychic vision or anything like that, but with every day that passes, I feel it building.

Gathering around us.

Something that nobody can stop.

Something that’s even bigger than Zale’s search for his dead father or our questions about what really happened to Ember and Orli thirteen summers ago.

Bigger than the mystery of Elora’s murder, even.

Something with the power to sweep us all away.





It’s August 6 when I first hear it on the radio. But I know before that. When I wake up that morning, the air is different. Thicker. But also more alive. The bayou has started to breathe.

It’s waiting.

“Storm warning,” Honey says when I walk into the kitchen for breakfast, and she jerks her head toward the radio sitting on the counter. The weather guy tells us that a tropical depression has formed over the Bahamas, 350 miles east of Miami, Florida. But that’s an awful long way from La Cachette, so Honey isn’t paying much attention. She’s too busy rolling out dough for biscuits. It makes me uneasy, though. I’m supposed to have three weeks left, but if it looks like things might get bad, Honey will send me home early.

But then the ten o’clock boat comes, and the weather forecast gets forgotten. It’s a busy Sunday morning, and I spend most of my time ringing up sales. Then I rearrange the shelves of incense and organize the meditation CDs.

Every time I look down at my ring finger, though, or touch the little blue pearl hanging around my neck, I remember that I only have one mission this summer.

Figure out what happened to Elora.

And I know that I’m failing at it. Failing her. And now I might be running out of time.