By the time we clean up, the sky is changing colors. But there’s still a little bit of daylight left. I think about heading out to Li’l Pass. Like I told Zale I would.
I don’t, though.
Because I keep seeing that newspaper photo of Dempsey Fontenot.
Instead I end up sitting at the kitchen table, trying to read some more of The Tempest.
And failing.
It’s just about dark when I decide I need some fresh air. So I push open the kitchen door and step out on to the boardwalk behind the house. Something about the night makes me uneasy. It’s too still. Too empty.
But I’m not afraid. Not really.
Not until I feel the goose bumps come up on my arms. That static charge in the air that tells me he’s close.
“I didn’t mean to scare you, Grey.”
Zale is walking toward me out of evening mist. I see him in silhouette, backlit by fireflies. He’s wearing a T-shirt this time. Faded yellow, the color of butter. Still no shoes.
“You didn’t scare me,” I tell him. But that’s not quite the truth.
Fear licks at my insides. And my stomach is full of rocks.
His thrumming electricity pulses through my brain like a drumbeat. It starts my whole body tingling.
“You didn’t come,” he says. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
His eyes are so beautiful. Warm. And kind. That easy, relaxed feeling rises up inside me.
But then I think about of those other eyes. The ones in the newspaper. And I tense up again.
Zale is watching me.
“You know you don’t need to be afraid of me, right?”
I nod.
But I don’t know that. I don’t know that at all. How could I know that?
Suddenly I wonder what I’m doing out here.
There are things out here. In the almost-dark. Everybody says so. Why the hell am I standing here talking to a strange boy? A boy I don’t even know.
A boy with Dempsey Fontenot’s ice-fire eyes.
I should play it safe. Head inside. Lock the door.
I should. But I don’t.
I can’t.
“I found a picture,” I whisper. “Of Dempsey Fontenot. And he – his –”
The night steals my words.
Zale is still standing down below me. Bare feet planted in the soft mud.
“It’s okay,” he promises. “You don’t need to be afraid of him, either, Grey.”
“He was –” I can’t think straight.
“He was my daddy,” Zale finishes for me. “But he’s been dead a long time. Since dat summer.”
I wish I could make sense of what he’s saying, but it’s all so fuzzy.
My fear is crumbling away like the edges of the riverbank, and all I want is to sink into that warm, peaceful feeling. But instead I struggle back to the surface so I can find the words I need.
“What he did –”
Thunder rumbles long and low off in the distance, and Zale corrects me.
“What dey say he did.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell him.
There’s cotton at the edges of my brain as thick as the dark at the edges of the sky. I try to push it back so I can think clearly. I need to know what happened all those years ago. I sit down cross-legged on the edge of the boardwalk, and Zale climbs the steps to sit beside me.
“I don’t remember much of it.” He leans back on his elbows to study the thick clouds that have rolled in out of nowhere, blocking out the twinkling stars. “I never saw those little girls in the water. But folks came around real early one mornin’ and found dem dere, in the pond out behind our cabin. Drowned.”
“Who came and found them there?” I’m trying to remember how the story goes.
Zale shrugs. “Town folks, that’s all my mama ever said. I don’t have any memory of that part. I just remember the fire.”
Somewhere, way off in the distance, a single bolt of lightning reaches down from the sky to strike at the ground like a snake.
And I feel fear creep back in on me.
“My daddy wasn’t even home that mornin’。 He was off huntin’。 It was just me and Mama and –” He chokes on something. Swallows back some deep hurt. “And all of a sudden, dere was fire everywhere. And smoke. So my mama grabbed me up, and we ran. I can still feel the heat of the flames.”
“Nobody even knew he was married,” I say.
In all our nightmares, the monster never had a wife.
Or a child.
Zale shrugs. “I don’t imagine they ever were. Not on paper, anyway.”
He pauses for a minute, and the air around us is more charged than ever. I hear the sharp crackle of it. My fingers brush one of the copper nails along the edge of the boardwalk, and I get a zap that’s almost painful.