I smiled gratefully, but I hoped not too warmly. “Thank you.”
Thought: Now, be a good boy and go away.
“God, I can’t believe you’re here!” He moved closer, looked down at my computer. “Are you working on a podcast right now?”
“Finishing one up,” I said, snapping the laptop closed.
“Louisiana, right?” he asked.
I nodded.
“The Honey Island swamp monster,” he went on. “Did you see it?”
I shook my head. “No, but I think I heard it.”
“Did you get a recording?”
“Unfortunately not.”
He shrugged. “Next time,” he said as he rocked back on his heels, smiling at me. Skinny, red-haired, and freckled. I guessed he was seventeen or eighteen, tops. “You’re here about Rattling Jane, right?”
I smiled. “You guessed it.”
“Wanna know what I know?” he asked hopefully. “Interview me? I’ve got time right now.”
“I’d love to.” Though the last thing I wanted to do was encourage this kid, I figured it couldn’t hurt to get a local teen’s take on Rattling Jane. In a place this small, chances were that he knew the girl who’d gone missing.
“Don’t you need your recorder or something?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. I got up and went to the van for the digital recorder and mics, bringing everything out to the picnic table, where I plugged in the mics and set them up on stands for each of us. I flipped everything on and did a little test to check the levels.
When I was satisfied, I gave him the thumbs-up and said, “This is Lizzy Shelley. It’s the twentieth of August. I’m here on Chickering Island with…” I looked at the campground worker.
“Dave. Dave Gibbs, but people here on the island call me Skink.”
“Skink?”
“Yeah, I’m, like, this big reptile guy. I’ve got over twenty lizards.” He was beaming with pride.
“Wow,” I said sincerely.
He nodded excitedly. “Been keeping them since I was a little kid. The first one I got, Norman, he was a blue-tongued skink. I named him after Norman Bates in Psycho. I guess I was kind of a quirky kid. Lizards. Monster Club. Horror movies.” His green eyes twinkled, and a dimple in his left cheek appeared when he smiled.
I grinned back at him, thinking how much my brother would have loved this guy. The young version of my brother, not Charlie.
“So, Skink, what can you tell me about Rattling Jane?”
He leaned in closer to the microphone, looking very serious. “Well, there’re lots of stories. Let’s see, to start with, she comes up out of the lake and is made out of fish bones, driftwood, weeds, and old feathers—she uses whatever she can find in the water to give herself a body to come up on land. When the wind blows through her, she, like, rattles and clatters like a bunch of wind chimes. That’s how she got her name. They say you hear her coming before you see her.”
I shivered. I didn’t like this image, not one bit—a creature with no form of its own, assembled from random bits of detritus. The ghostlike monsters always got to me the most. But I thought fear was a good thing—the day I stopped being afraid and on guard was the day I’d let my defenses down. Fear kept me on my toes.
“If you walk around the island,” Skink went on, “you’ll see sculptures of her, like scarecrows with sea glass and old silverware and stuff hanging off of them to make noises. And they’re all looking out at the lake. It’s supposed to be good luck.”