“Plus I was so young when we left Louisiana,” he adds. “My daddy died, and I grew up in Florida with my mama. Down on the edge of the Everglades.” He turns in my direction and grins. And it makes me a little dizzy. “So dat’s my swamp.”
“Why come back here, then?”
A few seconds slip by before he answers.
“I guess I just thought it was time.”
“Why stay hidden, though?” I’m still trying to make sense of it all. And Zale doesn’t seem to mind the questions. “Why not let people know you’re here?”
He shrugs again. “It’s a hard thing, knowing who to trust.”
“Then why trust me?” I ask him, and he answers without any hesitation.
“Because of the way Elora talked about you.” He smiles at me again. “It kind of felt like I already knew you.”
I feel like I’m at disadvantage, because I don’t know anything about him. I think maybe I want to, though, because his voice is doing more to soothe my aching head than the Tylenol ever could. It has such a pretty sound to it, but there’s something lonesome about it, too.
Like the call of a mourning dove.
“Were you in love with her?” I ask.
“I definitely was,” he says. “You were, too. Weren’t you?”
I blush, because you couldn’t know Elora and not be in love with her.
“Was she in love with you?” I ask. I need to know if he’s the one who made Case jealous enough to kill her.
But he shakes his head.
“We weren’t lovers. It wasn’t like dat between us.” There’s that familiar music in his voice again. Just a few notes of an old Cajun melody that I know as well as I know my own heartbeat. “We saved each other is all.”
I don’t understand what he means.
“I was out fishin’ one night back in January. Just at the edge of the river. Middle of the night. Nobody awake. And my line got all tangled, so I bent down to sort it out, and when I looked up again, there was this girl standin’ up there on the dock. Right where we were standin’ the other night.”
“Elora.”
I whisper her name like an incantation, and the long grass whispers it back.
“Full moon,” he says.
A rougarou moon.
“And I could see her plain. The kind of beautiful that steals the breath right out your chest. Couldn’t take my eyes off ’er. She was standin’ dere right on the edge.”
“The river was calling her,” I say, and Zale nods.
“Only I didn’t know dat then. So I watched her for a minute. And then she went over.”
I feel that fog at the edges of my brain, and I try to push it back.
“What do you mean, went over?”
“She went over the edge. Into the water.”
I gasp out loud, and my stomach clenches like a fist. It’s a fifteen-foot drop, at least, from the dock to the dark, churning river below.
Deep and fast-moving and treacherous.
“You saved her life that night.”
He shrugs, like it’s no big deal. “When I fished her out of the river dat first time, she cussed me up one side and down the other. Wouldn’t even tell me her name. But I still came back the next night, just in case. And we did the whole thing all over again. And again. And again. And again. I must’ve saved her a dozen times. A dozen different nights.”
“She wanted to die that bad?” I can’t stand to think of Elora like that.
Hopeless.
“No.” Zale shakes his head, and his eyes flash extra bright. “It was just the river she needed. That letting go. So I kept dragging her into the boat. I’d sit out dere in the dark and wait for the splash. Like I was a deep-sea fisherman and her some kind of Mississippi mermaid.”
“Mississippi mermaid.” I like the way the words feel in my mouth, but they sound better in Zale’s ocean-deep voice. Each m is a wave against the sand.
“Toward the end, she stopped fallin’。 Stopped needin’ to, I think. And I didn’t see her near as much after dat. But we’d still meet out on the dock sometimes. After the town went to sleep. Three, four o’clock in the mornin’。 And we’d just sit together till the sun started to come up.”
My heart aches.
I should have been there. I should have been the one to save Elora. To sit with her in the darkest part of the night.
Not this secret stranger.
“Why did you reach out to me?” I ask him. “What is it you want?”