I cover the ground between Li’l Pass and the boardwalk as quick as I can, hoping like heck I’m not in trouble. When I get back to the Mystic Rose, Honey is already out on the dock getting the boat ready, so I hurry inside to trade my mud boots for flip-flops and grab my sunglasses.
Like most people in La Cachette, Honey has a little flatboat with an outboard motor that she uses to scoot up to Kinter and back. You can’t really take a tiny boat like that out on the river, though. The Mighty Mississippi is too everything. Too fast. Too treacherous. Too full of logs and submerged dangers. Too crowded with enormous cargo ships and barges.
You have to go the back way.
Up through the bayou.
I think about my friends in Little Rock and their sweet little grandmothers. Delicate, grey-haired Southern belles with strings of pearls and pastel sweaters dyed the colors of Easter mints. I bet not one of them could pilot a flatboat through the thick of the swamp. But Honey makes it look easy. One hand on the tiller and the other hand on her head to keep her bright blue scarf from blowing away.
On the ride up to Kinter, Honey plays wildlife guide, pointing out the big swamp rabbits grazing in the Bermuda grass and the pink spoonbills feeding at the water’s edge.
I can’t really hear her, though. My mind is too full of Elora.
And Hart.
And Case.
And Zale.
The things I know.
And all the things I still don’t.
I’m so lost in my thoughts that I don’t even realize we’re there until I feel the boat bump against the wooden pilings.
Most everyone in La Cachette pays a few bucks a month to keep a car parked at the bayou dock up in Kinter. So once Honey gets things squared away with the boat, we haul ourselves into Eliza, a dented old Toyota pickup with faded red paint and no air-conditioning.
“This is the truck I bought your mama when she headed off to college,” Honey tells me. Like she does every single time. “Good ol’ Liza Jane.” She pats the steering wheel. “Your mama drove her up to LSU in Baton Rouge that fall. Only eighteen years old.”
And only twenty when she got pregnant and dropped out to come home so Honey could help raise me. Before my mom died, I’d met my dad a handful of times. I can’t complain about him, though. We talked yesterday. On my birthday. And I told him everything was fine.
Dad does the best he can by me, but – even half my lifetime later – Little Rock is just Little Rock.
La Cachette is still home.
Honey parks Eliza outside the Kut and Kurl, and I wander across the street to the tiny public library to pass the time. It’s only been a couple weeks, but it seems like forever since I’ve seen civilization. Not that two-stoplight Kinter really counts. Still, it feels weird to be in the library. The lighting is too bright and the AC is too cold.
I wander through the fiction section for a while, but I already have too much summer reading to do for school. I’m supposed to be slogging through The Tempest, and I haven’t even started. So I can’t commit to anything else. I make my way over to the periodicals section, just to see if I can find something worth flipping through, but I’m not really into Field & Stream or Southern Living.
Then I notice a newspaper tucked down in between the magazines. It’s a copy of the Advocate Times Picayune from up in New Orleans. I figure that’s better than nothing, even if it is dated almost a month ago, so I pull it out.
And there it is, right at the top of the page.
AS THIRTEENTH ANNIVERSARY APPROACHES, STILL NO JUSTICE IN PSYCHIC TOWN DOUBLE CHILD MURDERS
I gasp so loud that some old lady across the aisle shushes me.
My legs are shaking something terrible, so I sink into an ugly orange chair to stare at the color photo under the headline.
I was only four years old when Dempsey Fontenot did what he did to Ember and Orli. I don’t have any memory of ever having laid eyes on him. Definitely not in real life. Not even in a picture, either. In my imagination, he always looked like a monster.
Here he is though, staring right through me in the Plaquemines Parish library. Looking almost normal.
A long, slender neck.
Sun-blond hair.
And the most striking, unmistakable eyes.
They’re ice blue.
Backlit with fire.
My heart stops beating in my chest.
The face is slightly different. But those eyes? They’re the exact same.
When I glance up, Honey is waving at me from the entryway, so I stuff the newspaper back where I found it before we head down the street for lunch at the Lagniappe Café.
Lagniappe is one of my favorite Cajun words. It means “a little something extra,” and the café’s owner is famous up and down the river for her pies.