Mackey frowns and runs one hand over the top of his head. His hair is shaved down almost to his scalp. It’s what he calls his “summer haircut,” which means it’s about one-sixteenth of an inch shorter than he wears it the rest of the year.
“We were playing flashlight tag,” he goes on. “And Evie was it. She was counting down that rhyme. About Dempsey Fontenot. You know the one.”
I do know the one. I get a little dizzy when I remember how it came to me earlier. How I felt Elora’s fear of the old taunt.
“And it was pitch black, so I couldn’t see. But then Elora ducked behind this tree with me. And I felt it. Strong as anything.”
“Did you tell her?” I ask him.
“I did. I had to.” He hesitates. “But she laughed it off.”
I picture her, head thrown back, laughing into the dark. Elora could be like that. If she was in the mood to have fun, she might not take anything seriously.
Hart takes one last drag off his cigarette and flicks it out into the murky pond. I see how tense the muscles in his neck are.
Evie is watching him. I pat the empty seat next to me, and she comes to sit in Hart’s vacant spot. Evie’s always been younger than her years, and long legs or not, she’s still the baby. Our baby. Everyone’s little sister. I slip my arm around her, and she rests her head on my shoulder. She smells like honeysuckle, and it calms me, breathing in her summertime sweetness.
“It’s the water that bothers me,” Mackey mumbles. “Drowning. That’s what I felt that night. Death in the water.” I look over at Hart, but he’s still got his back to me. To all of us. “Elora was so pretty, you know?” Mackey’s voice breaks. Another chalk mark next to was. “I can’t stand to think of her dying like that. In the water.”
Sander pushes his hair out of his face – soft waves the color of river sand and copper, just like his sister’s – then puts an arm around Mackey’s shoulders.
“She didn’t die in the water.” Hart sounds drained. Exhausted. “Search teams combed the bayou from one end to the other. River, too. They’d have found something.”
“Yeah,” Mackey says. “Sure, Hart. You’re probably right. Sometimes I get things confused.”
But not very often.
“Ember and Orli were in the water.” My voice sounds funny in my ears. Far away. Everyone turns to look at me. Everyone but Hart. We don’t hear those names spoken out loud very often. People down here don’t like to talk about what happened back then. Thirteen summers ago. Two identical little girls snatched off the boardwalk early one morning, just this time of year. Right under everybody’s noses. “They found them floating facedown, back of Dempsey Fontenot’s place,” I go on. “Back at Keller’s Island.”
Killer’s Island.
“Dempsey Fontenot’s long gone,” Mackey reassures me.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with whatever happened to Elora.”
And it’s true; they never found him. He’d already cleared out. But it’s not really true that he was gone. Not in the ways that really mattered. When we were kids, Dempsey Fontenot was the reason we avoided the dark of the tree line. He was the reason Elora and I ran the distance between her house and Honey’s at night, instead of walking. He was every campfire legend we ever told and every slumber party ghost story we ever whispered. It didn’t matter that nobody ever saw hide nor hair of him again. For the eight Summer Children who were left alive, Dempsey Fontenot was a permanent resident of La Cachette. He walked the boardwalks. Same as we did.
“What if you’re wrong, Mackey?” Sera asks, and for a second I can’t breathe. “What if it does have something to do with Elora?”
I remember what Hart said, about how he went back there that night. To Keller’s Island. Looking for Elora. He must have been afraid he’d find her there, floating facedown in that stagnant drowning pool, out behind what’s left of Dempsey Fontenot’s burned-down cabin.
He must have thought maybe.
We all look at each other, and Sera puts words to what every single one of us is wondering. “What if he came back?”
Hart finally turns around to face us, and I’m waiting for him to say that it’s not possible. That we’re being silly. Like he would have when we were kids.
But he doesn’t.
Behind him, across the pond, Willie Nelson slides into the water without making a sound. Silent. Ancient. Deadly. The kind of predator you would never see coming.