She sits up to look at me, confused. “You know who it was, Grey. I told you.”
“Who killed Elora, Wrynn?” I grab her by her skinny shoulders and give her a hard shake. “Tell me the truth!”
The sound of my own voice scares me, and I guess it scares Wrynn, too, because she stands up and pulls away from me. When she steps out on to the boardwalk, the moon illuminates her big eyes and her pale skin so that she almost glows. Goose bumps cover her head to toe.
“Just tell me!” I beg her. “Please!”
“I already told you,” she whispers. “It was da rougarou.”
Whatever she knows, I’m not getting it out of her. At least not tonight.
“You better get on home,” I say. “Case is hurt bad. He might need you.”
Wrynn stares at me. “Daddy and the boys are out night fishin’。 Way down at Sawdust Bend. Nobody but me and Mama home tonight.”
She starts off down the boardwalk, but before the darkness swallows her up, she turns back to look at me.
“Dat ol’ rougarou? He’s a shape-shifter, sure enough. So you be careful, Grey. He may come right up on ya. Might sit down real close. Maybe even hold your hand. And you won’t ever know it till you see dem teeth.”
Wrynn turns and disappears into the night, but her words float back to me like the sound of wind chimes.
“And by den, it’s too late. You’re already dead.”
The next day is Friday, and I make Mackey bring me his high school yearbook.
“I thought she killed herself,” he tells me when he stops by the Mystic Rose that morning to drop it off. “Threw herself in the river, maybe.” Mackey glances over his shoulder, nervous. “Hart doesn’t like us to say it. But that’s what I thought.”
He has on basketball shorts and worn-out tennis shoes, and he reaches down to slap away a huge fly that lands on his shin.
“I figured that’s why she ignored my warning about death in the water.” His eyes settle on the stack of flyers by the register. The ones with Elora’s picture. “Because she already knew she was gonna die.”
When he leaves, I flip through the yearbook and try to compose a list of every boy I ever heard Elora mention.
Dalton Guidry
Jamal Tilman
Evan Richard
Matteo Arredondo
And on and on.
But it feels hopeless, because there were lots of older guys she ran with, too. And I don’t have all the names. Besides, who’s to say she didn’t meet someone totally new since last August?
I know she had at least one new friend.
I add Zale’s name to the list.
Erase it.
Add it again.
Cross it out.
The truth is, it could have been any boy south of New Orleans and east of Lafayette.
After lunch, I step out on the porch for some fresh air. Evie’s put up a bunch of new wind chimes. I hear them ringing, even though I can’t feel any breeze to speak of.
I wave when I catch her watching me from her bedroom window. But she pulls the curtains. So I don’t get to ask again about what happened last night.
Why she freaked out. Whose voice she’s hearing.
Not that she’d tell me anything.
We stay busy in the shop all afternoon, and after dinner I try to sneak out to meet Zale, but Honey wants to start teaching me the tarot. Now that we know I have the gift, she says, I might as well learn how to use it.
“Don’t fear the Death card,” she tells me when the bone-white face shows up in my first reading. “It doesn’t represent physical death. The skeleton riding horseback foretells the end of something less concrete.”
But I can’t stop staring at those hollow eyes set deep into a grinning skull.
“You know, Sugar Bee,” Honey says, “as spiritualists, we celebrate life by embracing death as a natural part of the cycle.”
“What happens when the death isn’t natural?” I ask her.
“Ah.” Honey reaches over to pat my hand. “That’s another thing altogether.”
That night, when she goes to sleep, I take the tarot deck and sit on my bed for hours. Shuffling. And reshuffling. Sorting the thick deck into three equal piles.
Past.
Present.
Future.
Just like Honey showed me.
But I don’t find any answers in the cards.
The next day is Saturday, and Honey gets Bernadette to mind the store so the two of us can take a day trip up to New Orleans. I know she’s trying to distract me. But it doesn’t work. Because I keep seeing Elora.
On Basin Street and Canal Street and Toulouse Street, beautiful girls catch my eye. Girls with long dark hair and mirrored sunglasses and laughter that sounds like improvised jazz. I see Elora in the crowd at Café Du Monde and among the street artists in Jackson Square.