Unless you count arson, I mean.
And kidnapping.
Murder.
I close the door as softly as I can and twist the bolt behind me.
All the lights are off in the house, but I hear the radio playing in the kitchen. “Louisiana Blues.” I tiptoe in to get a glass of milk, and Sweet-N-Low stirs on his pillow. His collar jingles, and he whimpers in his sleep.
I open the fridge, and light spills across the linoleum floor. A weather update breaks in over the music, and I pause to listen.
“The National Hurricane Center is predicting that Elizabeth will become a major storm by the time it reaches the central Gulf of Mexico.” The voice on the radio is almost breathless with excitement. “The eye is now four hundred and sixty miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River. Everyone in the listening area is urged to prepare for an extreme weather event.”
The announcer goes away, and the harmonica comes back. Blues guitar.
And that’s when I hear my name. I freeze, afraid that – somehow – the shadow of my dead mother has followed me home from Keller’s Island.
But when I turn around, Honey is sitting at the kitchen table, all lit up in the refrigerator’s glow. She has on her old pink robe. Curlers in her hair. And I wonder what she’s doing down here. Sitting at the table. Listening to Muddy Waters moan “Louisiana Blues” into the dark.
But then I see the picture in her hand. The one of me and my mom. The one I left on the table beside my bed.
The one with the haunted eyes.
Honey looks down at the photo, then back up at me.
“Sugar Bee,” she says, “we need to talk.”
I close the fridge door and start to flip on the overhead light. Then I remember I’m barefoot. With mud up to my thighs. So I leave the light off and sit down across from Honey at the kitchen table.
“Didn’t you want some milk?” she asks, but I shake my head. She’s quiet for a second, staring at the photograph in her hand. “Lots to do tomorrow,” she eventually says. But she doesn’t take her eyes off the picture of me and my mom. “Gotta get the plywood up on the windows. Move everything from the bookstore up to my bedroom, in case the water gets high.”
I nod.
“Leo said he’d help us out. Hart, too,” Honey tells me. “Soon as they get their own place ready.”
I haven’t seen Hart all day. Not since he crawled in my window late last night. And the mention of his name makes me anxious.
“Your dad called this evening,” she goes on. “I told him I’d take you up to Shreveport with me when I leave day after tomorrow. He’ll pick you up there.”
So that’s it, then. One full day left. Not nearly enough time to untangle all this mess.
I stand up and push my chair back.
“Grey. Wait.” Honey finally looks at me. “Sit a minute. Please.”
Heavy dread settles in my stomach, and it pulls me back down into the chair.
“I know you have questions,” she says. “Now that you’re growing up, I know there are things you want to know.” She looks down at the picture again and sighs. “Need to know. About your mama. And I haven’t been great about giving you real answers.”
“My mother could start fires, couldn’t she?”
Honey stares at me like I hauled off and slapped her. I didn’t mean to blurt it out like that. But everything seems so urgent now.
“Your mother could do a lot of things, Grey. I don’t know what all talents she had. I don’t even think she knew. She was still figuring it out.”
“But she burned down the cabin back at Keller’s Island. Didn’t she? Dempsey Fontenot’s cabin.”
Honey nods reluctantly. “She did.”
“Did she know about the little boy? Aeron?” The stricken look on Honey’s face almost makes me back down. But it’s too late for that. “The one she killed?”
“How do you know about that?” Honey’s voice shakes. But she holds that picture steady in her hands.
“Does it matter?” I ask. “What kind of person does that?”
Honey wilts right in front of me. “She didn’t know he was in there,” she says, and it’s like she’s aged ten years in ten seconds. “She didn’t know.”
“Why did she do it?”
“You don’t know how angry this whole town was, Sugar Bee. The grief. How it tore us all to pieces when those babies went missing.”
“Ember and Orli.” I whisper the names like an old prayer.