Then there’s a sharp splintering sound. Suddenly, I’m falling.
The board I’m standing on gives way beneath my feet. I feel it crumble like it’s happening in slow motion. I lose my footing and pitch backward, clawing at the air with my hands as my feet go out from under me. But there’s nothing to grab on to. I go down hard, and it’s a relief when my hip meets the solid wood of the dock with a sharp and painful crack. One leg is dangling over the deep, fast-moving water, and one arm is twisted behind me at an awkward angle. I scramble back and hug my knees to my chest. My heart must be close to exploding. I hear it thumping in my ears. Louder than Evie’s damn wind chimes, even.
Right where I was standing seconds ago, the plank has totally disintegrated, eaten away by rot and termites. When I reach out to touch it, the spongy edge turns to powder under my fingers.
The boards have been rotting away under their coat of pristine white.
I look around. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. This strange feeling comes over me. An odd tingling sensation.
I’m being watched. That’s what it feels like.
I tell myself I’m being ridiculous, but I stand up and move away from the black wood and the black water, back toward the safety of the boardwalk. Honey’s front porch light. Then I turn and head inside. And I lock the door behind me.
All I want is sleep. But when I crawl back into bed, it’s still no use.
I keep feeling that falling sensation.
And I’m trying not to look at the framed photograph on the table. Trying not to touch the little pearl around my neck.
Trying not to think about Elora.
Eventually, I get up again. Four a.m. Maybe this time it’s the tender bruise forming on my hip that won’t let me rest, but it’s the relentless whispering of those wind chimes that calls me to the window. The fog has drifted off, and the moon is out. A full moon, or close to it.
A rougarou moon.
I sweep my eyes across the landscape, scanning the emptiness of the bayou behind the house. Nothing but flat and wet all the way back to Li’l Pass.
Then I see it. And I stop breathing.
A shape blending into the dark.
Someone is out there.
Motionless.
Watching me.
étranger. A stranger.
He couldn’t be more than fifteen feet away. Only the thin glass of the windowpane and that little bit of night separating the two of us.
The figure looms tall and mysterious. But all I really see are his eyes. They glow with a kind of icy blue fire.
We stare at each other for a long minute. Both of us caught. Still as stones. And I feel half hypnotized. Then whoever is out there turns and melts into the blackness. He moves with the lithe-limbed grace of a night animal.
And I’m alone again.
My whole body is shaking. I slide down to huddle against the wall underneath my window. And I wait for the lonesome howl of a wolf. But all I hear is my own breathing.
And the nervous murmur of wind chimes.
I spend the next few hours on the floor. Frozen. When daylight comes, I drag myself to bed. My body gives in and sleep finally finds me. It’s close to noon when I wake up. Despite that little jingling bell, I’ve slept right through the first wave of Sunday-morning tourists in and out of the Mystic Rose.
With bright sunshine streaming in the window and the chatter of customers floating back from the bookstore up front, everything that happened last night seems far away. Like maybe it was a dream. Or a nightmare.
But I know those eyes were real. There was someone outside my window last night.
étranger.
A stranger.
Even with the sunshine and the chatter, that memory chills me all the way down to my bones. It gives me what people down here call the frissons.
In the kitchen, Honey’s left a plate of homemade biscuits on the table for me. But just as I pick one up, that flash of Elora hits me hard. I feel her panic.
She’s running.
I’m running.
Blind. Through the rain. Outstretched arms.
I grab the back of a chair to steady myself until the terror passes, then I offer my biscuit to Sweet-N-Low, and he rewards me with a kiss.
My mouth is bone dry, so I open the cabinet to reach for a glass. But I get distracted by a big picture frame that’s hung on the wall as long as I can remember. It’s the kind with all the little slots for different-sized photos. I’ve seen it a million times, but I’ve never really looked at it.
It’s the picture in the center that I’m staring at now. I’m sitting on my mother’s lap on the front steps of the Mystic Rose. The photo must have been taken not long after Ember and Orli were killed, because I’m wearing a watermelon-pink sundress that Honey made for my birthday that year. I guess I was wild about that dress, because I have it on in almost all the snapshots taken that fourth summer of our lives.