Shadowed Summer Read online

  shadowed summer

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Jason and Wendi—

  You make all things possible.

  In memory of Matt and Braden—

  Nothing gold can stay.

  chapter one

  Nothing ever happened in Ondine, Louisiana, not even the summer Elijah Landry disappeared. That was an incident; and being specific, it was “The Incident with the Landry Boy.”

  Since he never was found, it gave me and my best friend, Collette, something to wonder about, and in Ondine, wondering was about all we had to do.

  According to the sign out by the highway, Ondine was home to 346 GOOD PEOPLE AND 3 CRANKY OLD COOTS and was a good place to live, but that was a lie.

  Ben Duvall’s daddy hung the sign out during the evacuation. Ondine was on the way to Baton Rouge, and people seemed to think if we touched up our paint, some of New Orleans’s storm refugees would stay and make this home.

  Nobody stayed longer than it took to get supper, and why would they?

  We had a gas station and a Red Stripe grocery store that rented DVDs for three dollars a night—they didn’t have anything good.

  Collette’s mama regularly lost her temper over the broken grill at the diner. And Father Rey was brimstone enough that even our Baptists would sit in his pews instead of driving a town over to worship, especially if he trotted out the sermons about loving the sinner and hating the sin.

  That was entertainment, and that was all we had.

  When school was in, there was maybe ten of us, and we rode a bus forty minutes to St. Amant. That was different, at least, but come summer, all we had was stale movies from the Red Stripe, extra Masses, and making stuff up.

  Since we couldn’t drive yet, me and Collette did a whole lot of making stuff up.

  Well, we used to, anyway.

  Sometimes we’d be knights. It didn’t matter that knights were supposed to be boys; we could ride horses and swing swords if we wanted to. Sometimes we’d be witches, or elementals, or whatever good thing we thought up or got from our library books.

  We found magic everywhere, in the trees and the wind, in teacups and rainstorms. We were bigger than Ondine, better than the ordinary people who came and went and never stopped to wonder what lay underneath the church’s tiger lilies to give them such bloodred hearts.

  Nobody but us seemed to wonder or bother or ask about anything, and we felt strangled being the only ones. When we were twelve, Collette pricked her finger to make a vow that she’d get us out of Ondine as soon as she got her license. It made me a little dizzy to see the red beading up on her skin, but I let her poke me, too. Anybody could make a promise; we had to bind ours with a spell.

  But that was used-to-be, back when we had a New Orleans to run away to, before the storm, before we turned fourteen. Fourteen changed everything.

  Collette was first; she was born in February. She developed first, too. She wanted everybody to think she was embarrassed when her bra strap kept slipping down her arm, but I knew her better than that. Every time, her dark eyes darted, looking to see who’d noticed.

  I turned fourteen in May, and I was just fine with the way things were. I didn’t need a bra, or want one, either. Ondine wasn’t any bigger, we still couldn’t go anywhere, and driving was two years out yet. Our games suited me fine.

  Collette, though, rewrote them some. We never played only witches anymore; somebody had to have a sweetheart. Or we had to taint apples with twisted love spells. Most important, though, we couldn’t play out where the boys could see us and throw rocks.

  We used to throw rocks back. But making up imaginary worlds was more important to me than arguing with Collette about her being boy-crazy, so I just went along.

  After Mass, we invaded the cemetery row by row, back to the old side of the yard.

  “Where y’at?” Collette asked, and helped me onto Jules Claiborne’s crypt.

  It was just a grayish slab box, maybe six feet long. Its top was pocked from rain, rough and nubbly, and it made our jeans catch on the surface.

  Folding my legs up, I settled on the stone. “I’m fine. How are you?”

  Collette looked down to make her dark curls fall in her eyes. She had good hair. There was a springy kind of coil to it that made me want to reach out and tug it, just to watch it bounce back. I always wanted hair like that, even though she said I didn’t—too much trouble. I’d argue about it, though. She’d never had to suffer straight and stringy dishwater blond.

  “I’m all right. But listen.”

  Collette had a new spell to cast; she glared and threw her hands out to catch lightning, her hair rising like a midnight halo around her head as she tried to call the spirits of the dead.

  I cupped my hands behind my ears and closed my eyes. At first, I smelled more than I heard. Water and stone, over-perfumed magnolias ripening with the heat. A bite of bitter cypress swirled around under that, and my stomach turned before I managed to pay attention with my ears.

  To be honest, I didn’t hear anything unusual: a little bit of wind, some birds, a couple of spring peepers confused about the time of day, and cicadas. Those rattled and hummed, ticking like a windup clock, then exploding with a maraca burst before starting over again.

  But Collette wouldn’t make a point of listening to them. Since I didn’t hear anything new, I faked it. Trying to sound spooky, I barely whispered, “What is that?”

  “They’re trying to talk to us,” Collette said, stroking the crypt top with both hands. “We’re the only ones who can hear them, Iris.”

  I nodded, getting into the feel of something mystical, even if I didn’t know what it was. Possibility prickled at the back of my neck; it made my heart beat fast in anticipation.

  A copper tang spread on my tongue, a taste that made me go all tight inside, waiting for something to happen.

  Still low, I just breathed out, “Ohhh . . .”

  “Can you hear them?” She always insisted that winds shifted for us, winds the rest of Ondine never felt at all.

  “Uh-huh,” I lied.

  Collette pushed up suddenly. Turning like a weather vane, she pointed at the next crypt over and fell into her best spell-casting voice. “We have to cover their bones. You go lay over there.”

  In a second, I’d hopped down from Jules Claiborne’s granite death-bed, and grunted my way onto his wife Cecily’s. My pants caught on the frills edging her slab, but I didn’t even wince when I felt the denim tear. My jeans were already short by a half an inch; a hole in the knee wouldn’t matter much. Besides, the dead were talking; I wanted to listen.

  Spreading myself out, I closed my eyes. “What now?”

  Collette hummed, low and mysterious. “Breathe real slow, only as much as you have to, and wait. You have to feel kind of dead, so they aren’t too scared to come close.”

  My heartbeat rattled in time with the cicada calls, and I could hardly hold still. Those old souls, out of their skins and not quite to heaven, seemed to swarm around us. I didn’t have to work hard to control my breath; fear and excitement did that for me.


  Cecily was coming into my body. She’d use my legs to stand on, run my hands through my hair, and walk off—probably into the bayou. I’d turn up missing, not even a drop of me left on my pillow. It’d be “The Incident with the Rhame Girl.” I’d be trapped forever, screaming where nobody could hear me, right inside my own self.

  The air felt hot and wet but far away, like the warmth thrown off a campfire. Laid out on Cecily’s slab, I should have been sweating and ready for some lemonade, but all I had in me was cold.

  Voices scratched and rattled in my ears; it wasn’t a pretty magic running through my veins just then. It tasted storm-dark. Rain tears wet my skin.

  I managed to turn my head, but Collette didn’t see me. She looked peaceful, floating on a stone that was as still as her body. For a moment, I was sure she was dead. My chest ached, bound with a scream I couldn’t get out, and that was when someone touched my hair.

  A creamy flash passed in front of me, leaving the shadow of a face made up mostly of dark eyes. Wind kissed my ear, cool and soft, and I heard a voice. It sounded like clover tastes, green and new and sweet.

  “Where y’at, Iris?”

  chapter two

  Quick as that, I wasn’t afraid of Cecily Claiborne anymore; she was just a fairy scare, one I conjured up all by myself, but that boy’s voice whispering in my ear—that was real.

  My feet sank into the soft ground before I realized I’d moved, and I scrambled toward Collette. “Did you hear that?”

  Sitting up, Collette made a face at me. “You’re supposed to—”

  “I’m serious!” Grabbing her arm, I yanked her up farther as I craned around, looking for the boy. I didn’t see more than a spot of pale, but it seemed like he should be long and tall, slipping fast through the stones and into the woods.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Collette huffed.

  The sky started to groan, promising rain anytime, but it was still light enough that Collette should have seen him or heard him, and I got a fresh chill when it was plain she didn’t.

  Swallowing hard, I let go of her arm and turned around and around, searching for proof I didn’t have. We’d done so much pretending that I didn’t know how to convince her that this time, something had happened. My daddy would have said that was the curse of a liar.

  Giving up, I said, “It’s fixing to rain; we better go.”

  Collette could fill up a sigh with more disgust than anybody I knew, but she slid from Jules’s slab even as she rolled her eyes. With a flourish, she started for the gate without looking back, as if I wouldn’t have known how put-upon she was without the big exit.

  Anyway, I didn’t care, because my ear still tingled from that secret whisper, and I wanted to go home.

  After we abandoned the cemetery, Collette and I tried to figure out what to do next. For a while, we stood on my back porch and watched the Delancie brothers blow up the creek again.

  Through the trees and scrub, we saw two auburn heads bobbing. They’d stay put for a second, then run off before a wake of white water exploded toward the sky.

  I scratched my cheek and made a guess. “Sounds like cherry bombs.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah, they ain’t as loud as them M-80s they got last summer.”

  The thick air rippled with another explosion. I felt the snap in my ears and on my skin and followed the sound as it rolled away in the rain.

  Way off, a siren started, and the Delancies bolted for their house, cussing. I’d learned some of my best words from them.

  With the show over, Collette raised her umbrella and hopped a step. “Let’s go to the Red Stripe and get some RCs.”

  My stomach sank. “I don’t have any money.”

  Collette shrugged. “I do. I’ll lend you.”

  “Well, I do have some! But your mama gives ’em to us free!” Right out of the fountain at the diner, as much as we could drink.

  “And then we have to bus tables,” she reminded me. “And put up with Rooster and Mama digging into our conversations whenever she wants and taking out the trash and whatever else. I don’t think so.”

  I frowned. “But they’re free.”

  “Uh-uh, they just don’t cost money.”

  Since she’d made up her mind, she started walking. I scrambled after her, circling and dogging her steps. Slow with the weight of dread, I yanked her attention back to the cemetery.

  “I really did hear something,” I said. Sweetening the pot, I added, “I saw something, too.”

  Collette’s brows disappeared under a fringe of frizz. “You did not!” But the rain had washed the snit off of her. I crossed my chest with my fingers three times: one for God, one for Jesus, and one for the Holy Ghost. “Swear I did.”

  “Well?”

  “I saw a boy, and he asked me how I was.” I shrugged, ducking when she whipped around to walk in front of me. “Which wouldn’t be anything, I guess, except then he wasn’t there.”

  “What’d he look like?” Collette sounded exactly like I did when I was just going along, only in my opinion she wasn’t as good at it.

  I brushed past her. “Brown hair, brown eyes. I only saw him for a second, but he was there, Collette. He leaned right in and said”—for demonstration, I leaned, too, trying to imitate the voice still ringing in my head—“ ‘Where y’at, Iris?’ ”

  Shaking the umbrella, Collette stopped in front of the Red Stripe. “That’s a dumb thing for a ghost to say.”

  She knew I could make up better stories than that, and I waited about forever for her to admit it. When she finally did, she didn’t bother saying sorry or anything, she just shrugged and leaned back against the door to open it. “He didn’t tell you his name?”

  I shook my head.

  “He was probably scared,” Collette said, then walked inside.

  The Red Stripe didn’t have any air-conditioning, just an old black fan on the front counter and the back door open all the way. Going in there felt like putting on a cloak of steam and dust.

  I headed down the narrow aisle toward the soda coolers. “Didn’t seem like it to me. He sounded like anybody. I bet he woulda talked more if I hadn’t spooked.”

  With a suffering sigh, Collette followed. Every other step, she raised up on her toes, peering over the tops of tin cans arranged by color.

  The owner, Mr. Ourso, had a lot of time on his hands, so sometimes he’d stack the groceries alphabetical. Sometimes he did them by size—you never knew until you got there.

  “What were you scared of, anyway? It’s not like we ain’t been looking for haunts since we . . .” She stepped up, peeked, then finished her sentence with, “Shhh!”

  “I’d like to see you—”

  “Shh!” Collette plastered her hand on my head to keep me out of sight as she turned the corner. “Hi, Ben.”

  I crabbed away, making faces at a bag of butter-flavored pretzels. Just to be annoying, I called out, “Hey, Ben!”

  She was making goo-goo eyes at Ben Duvall, the whole blond reason we had to come to the Red Stripe. Until he started working there two days a week, the fountain at the diner had been good enough.

  “Hey, Iris,” he said. Then he started telling Collette about his new model.

  I crept to the freezers in back to make sure I didn’t accidentally pinch Collette for being stupid over him. The way she nodded when he talked about his model of the Eiffel Tower, you would have thought he was building a life-sized one in his backyard.

  We’d known Ben all our lives, and he wasn’t that interesting. He liked building models and reading comic books, and he used to pull our hair in church. The only thing worth knowing about him was that his mama named him after a Shakespeare character—Benvolio—and he took the job unpacking for Mr. Ourso when she came down with breast cancer.

  Snatching a couple of Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches, I walked as loud as I could right past them. “Anyway, so I guess we can call up the dead tomorrow or something.”

  A just-smacked blush da
rkened Collette’s cheeks. “Whatever, Iris.”

  “Calling up the dead?” Ben stuffed a box knife into his red work apron and looked back and forth between us. He whispered, just loud enough for us to hear, “Y’all been witching?”

  Collette opened her mouth, but I talked first, and louder. “Nope. We’re psychic. Lost souls talk the loudest in the graveyard.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s just a game we play,” Collette said. She squeezed a can of mandarin oranges so hard her knuckles went pale.

  I waved my ice cream at them as I backed toward the register. “No, it’s for real. She just doesn’t want to brag, is all.”

  Ben wavered; he had sense enough to realize Collette didn’t want to talk about it, but I guess curiosity won. He cut me a glance. “How about you show me sometime?”

  At that, Collette’s blush faded and she nodded. Her voice went soft, and she took a deep breath, the kind that let her bra strap peek from under her shirt when she exhaled. “I will, if you want.”

  “Okay, then,” Ben said, his face lighting with a sudden smile.

  Rolling the mandarin orange can between her palms, Collette drifted toward me, smiling like a debutante. “You should come over to my house so I can teach you the right way to listen.”

  I paid for my ice cream in change and left before she promised to teach him all our secret spells, too.

  A wave of fried green pepper and onion perfume hit my nose as I came in the door.

  Standing over the stove, Daddy held a pan out to keep it from spattering on his crisp blue work shirt. The back read JESSEE’S TOOL AND DIE, and the patch over his pocket said JACK.

  When he made dinner, it was musical. Pots clanged, oil sizzled, and sausages whistled just a little when he popped them with the tip of a knife. Under it all, I could hear him humming.

  Gathering forks and spoons for just two places, I swayed in time to his music. It was just me and him—Mama died in a car accident when I was three. And since he worked graveyard at the machine shop, he was a familiar stranger.