“I remember the two of us running through the bayou,” he goes on, “her hand clamped over my mouth to keep me from yellin’ out. Mama said they’d kill us, sure, if they were to find us.”
“So you left,” I say.
He nods. “Knocked around some till we ended up down in Florida. And I never heard her so much as mention my daddy’s name again.”
I think about that newspaper article. “But they’ve been looking for him. All these years. They’re still looking for him.”
Zale turns those ice-blue eyes on me, and for the first time, I notice the deep sadness in them. “Well, they’re lookin’ for a ghost, then.”
“You don’t know that, though,” I tell him. “Not for sure.”
When he sits up, his shoulder brushes against mine. And there’s that little tingle. It feels so good. Not sharp, like the bite of the charged copper.
“He never came for us.” Zale lifts his face toward the sky. “I don’t care what dey told you about him, Grey. He was a good man. If he’d been alive, he would have come for us. My mama and me.” I hear the heartbreak in his voice. Plain as anything. Real. And true. “He would have come for us. No matter what.”
All these years people have said it was Dempsey Fontenot who burned the cabin to the ground. He lit it up like a bonfire, they told us, before he ran off for good.
But now Zale is telling me that was a lie.
And if that was a lie –
what else was a lie?
“You don’t believe he did it,” I say.
“Killed those little girls? No. I know for sure he didn’t.” More distant thunder. The hair on my neck stands up again. “My daddy was a gentle man. He never hurt a solitary soul.”
“Did Elora know?” I ask him. “Who your daddy was?”
He nods. “I told her the truth, just like I’m tellin’ you now. But Elora said it didn’t matter. She told me everyone has at least one secret that’ll break your heart.”
That’s such an Elora thing to say that I actually hear the words in her voice. Not Zale’s.
“I’m glad you know the truth,” he adds. “I shoulda told you soon as I met you, but I didn’t wanna scare you off.” He looks at me, and there’s something different in his eyes. Something almost shy. “I been lonely, I guess.”
“That’s why you came back here,” I say. “To find out what happened that night.” And Zale nods.
“After my mama passed, I hitchhiked all the way from Everglades City. Did a little work here and there on the way. Picked up a little money to get me by. Been camping out back there, at the old home place, ever since.”
I shiver in the summer-night heat.
“You’ve been staying back there? At Keller’s Island? Alone? All this time?”
He nods. “Bought me a tent and an old flatboat off a guy up in Kinter. It’s beat all to hell, but the motor’s good. And I settled in. Started poking around. Doing some diggin’。 To see if I could find out the truth. To see if I could find him, maybe. If there’s anything left of him to find.”
“You want to know that bad?”
Bad enough to live out there for months? In the bayou? All alone?
“He was my daddy,” Zale says. “Wouldn’t you wanna know what happened?”
“I’m not sure,” I tell him. I’m thinking about my own mother. That photo with the haunted eyes. And about whatever Case did to Elora. “Maybe not knowing is better.” Zale shakes his head.
“Knowing is hard,” he says, “but it’s a thing you can survive. The not knowing will kill you in the end. It’s the secrets that fester.”
A breeze moves through, and I hear the tinkling of wind chimes.
“How do you keep a secret in a town full of psychics?” I ask him, and light flashes bright inside those ice-fire eyes.
“You tell the truth,” he answers. “At least part of it.”
It’s full dark by the time Zale and I say goodbye.
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told Elora, Grey. I’m not askin’ you to keep my secret. That’s too big a burden. If you need to tell about me, I won’t do anything to stop you.”
I think about that, but then I shake my head. “You’re safe with me.”
He told me the truth. And he didn’t have to. He could have lied. Stayed hidden.
I look down at Elora’s ring on my finger.
He didn’t have to give me back that piece of her, either. He could have kept it for himself.