I shiver as the old fear creeps through me, and Hart nudges me with his shoulder. “It’s only a story, Greycie.”
“I know that,” I tell him. But those stories have always scared me.
“It was the second Saturday of the month, so everybody’d gone upriver to Kinter for bingo. All the adults, anyway. And there wasn’t shit to do. It was Elora’s idea. She wanted to go huntin’ fifolet.” He shrugs. “So we did.”
I wait while Hart pulls a beat-up pack of cigarettes out of his T-shirt pocket. He shakes one out and lights it before he goes on. “It was really dark that night. Thick clouds blockin’ out the moon. And we walked for a bit, but we didn’t see any lights. Didn’t see anything at all. Didn’t hear anything, even. It was weird. The quiet.”
I shiver again, imagining that strange silence. Down here, the daytime can be still enough to hear a pin drop. But the bayou is never quiet at night. It’s a cacophony of bugs and frogs and owls and bellowing gators. Sometimes they carry on so loud you can’t sleep inside the house with all your windows closed and the AC humming on high.
“We had some beer, so we drank that. Evie got freaked out. She wanted to go home. But Case wanted to play flashlight tag.” Hart pauses to take a long drag off his cigarette, then he exhales and stretches one arm over the edge of the boat to flick away the ash. “And nobody really wanted to play. We were over it, you know? But Case was pissed. Half-drunk. You know how he gets. He wasn’t ready to go home yet.”
Case has the most gorgeous hair I’ve ever seen. Deep, dark red. And the temper to go with it. He’s okay most of the time, but he can be mean as a cottonmouth when he’s been drinking. He and Elora have been a thing since we were twelve years old. She’ll step out with other guys occasionally, but she’s never had any real boyfriend besides Case. Not true love, she told me once. Not by a long shot. Just something to do.
Someone to do.
Hart finishes his cigarette and stubs it out before he goes on. “So we played flashlight tag for a while. Out there at Li’l Pass. Then it was Mackey’s turn to be it, and he found us all real quick. Everybody except Elora.”
“What’d you do?” I ask him.
“Called the all clear. But she didn’t come out. We figured she wouldn’t have gone far, so we started lookin’ for ’er.” He runs a hand through his sweat-damp curls. “But this huge storm blew in outta nowhere. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. We stayed at it, though. All of us. Searched out there for hours in a goddamn downpour.”
I feel sick, remembering that flash of Elora that came to me earlier. That moment the sky split open and the rain came. Just the way Hart describes.
“I left the rest of ’em huntin’ for her out there at Li’l Pass. Where she disappeared. Came home and got the four-wheeler. Looked everywhere I could think of. Rode all the way back to Keller’s Island, even. Ended up soaking wet. Mud up to my neck. Covered in bug bites.”
“No way.” I shake my head and swallow my rising panic. “She wouldn’t have gone way back there. She’s scared of that place.”
We all are. There’s no way she would have gone there. Not in the dark. Not alone.
Not at all.
Not to Killer’s Island.
“I know,” he says, “but, shit, Greycie. She had to go somewhere.”
I hug my knees harder to my chest, remembering how Hart used to make fun of Elora and me. How he used to tease us that Dempsey Fontenot was coming for us. But he doesn’t make fun of me now. He just shakes out another cigarette and lights it up, pulling the smoke into his lungs and breathing it out slow and steady before he goes on.
“Then, after midnight, when everybody got back from bingo, the men all went out lookin’。 Airboats and huntin’ dogs. ATVs. Searchlights. All of us callin’ her name till we were hoarse. Clear through till mornin’。” He chokes a little. “And there was absolutely nothin’。 Not a goddamn sign of her.”
He pulls the bottom of his T-shirt up to mop his sweaty forehead, but it doesn’t do any real good. The shirt is already soaked through. I’m melting in shorts and flip-flops. And here he is in jeans and boots. I’ve never seen Hart in shorts, unless we were out swimming.
“So that’s the story,” he tells me. “Leo called Sheriff early the next mornin’。 Pretty soon they had boats all up and down the river. Search teams scouring the bayou. Two hundred volunteers in hip boots wading through inch by inch back there where she disappeared. Just like on TV.” He puts the cigarette to his lips again. Inhale and hold. Breathe out smoke. “Still nothin’。”