I stole looks at him while I set the table. He kept his hair slicked back, not so wet that light would shine on it, just enough to keep it neat. His hazel eyes sparkled, and when he stood up straight, I could tip my head back and see nothing but the silver scar on the underside of his chin. It wasn’t like I could forget what he looked like, but it never hurt to make sure. All my mama was to me was a memory of long brown hair and a red sundress.
When I finished setting the table, I sat down and worked on folding our paper-towel napkins into perfect triangles. He shifted pans back and forth; I kept my eyes down. I wanted to ask him about things belonging to the next world, but I needed to start with something solid.
“Collette’s sweet on Ben Duvall,” I said, carefully placing my spoon and knife on top of the napkin. “She says he’s pretty.”
“I reckon if I was Ben Duvall, I’d be insulted.” Daddy rumbled with a laugh, turning to put a big black skillet on the table.
Together we bowed our heads, and Daddy said a short prayer, picking up his napkin after the amen. “I hope you’re not of the same mind.”
I stuck out my tongue. “Nasty, Daddy.”
“That’s my girl.” He scooped a heap of fried potatoes onto my plate, then chased a sausage around the inside of the skillet to catch it for me. “Luke’s going to have his hands full if he ends up with a daughter-in-law like Collette.”
Making another, more horrified, face, I smeared some ketchup onto the edge of my plate. “She doesn’t want to marry him, she just likes looking at him.”
Daddy laughed and changed the subject. “Did you catch yourself any pixies today?”
I stopped, my fork halfway to my mouth, and shook my head. “No, but we weren’t trying.”
“Mind your elbows. It’s probably for the best,” Daddy said. “I’ve got enough cut out feeding the two of us.”
Most days, it made me glad that Daddy went along. I knew he didn’t like the magic games. He believed in God, and the church, and the devil, too, but he didn’t nag about it, not like Collette’s mama did. Course, he didn’t know we’d moved to the cemetery, either.
I finished my bite, then took a drink of lemonade to wash it down. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
Daddy waved his fork. “Everything I’ve ever seen had an explanation, but it’s a big world, and I haven’t seen everything yet.”
That didn’t help. I tried again. “So there could be ghosts. You just haven’t seen any.”
Daddy squinted at me. “What have you been up to?”
“Nothing,” I mumbled, and stuffed my mouth with sausage, taking advantage of manners to stay silent for a minute. “I just thought I saw something in the graveyard.”
“I don’t want y’all messing around up in there.”
Frustrated, I put my spoon down heavy. “We weren’t messing; we were just looking at the names.”
“Try the phone book,” he said, slicing into his potatoes. “It’s about the same.”
“Daddy!”
Satisfied he’d made his point, he turned his plate and finally asked, “What kind of something?”
“I don’t know, just something. It was there, and then it wasn’t.”
“Was it a grave lantern?” Daddy asked. “They get restless when a storm’s coming.”
Everybody else called it fox fire, or swamp lights, or les feux follets if they felt fancy. It was all the same—a phantom glow that wandered off the bayou on humid, heat-lightning nights. Daddy, though, called it grave lanterns. Just the sound of it made my skin crawl—grave lanterns, like the cold light of an ember carried up from hell.
I shook my head. “No, not that.”
Ticking his fork against his plate, Daddy etched out an uncomfortable sound, his way of thinking out loud. “Maybe a rabbit or a bird, then.”
“It was a person,” I blurted out. I dropped my hands on the table so hard that our dishes chattered. “It was a boy, and he said my name, and then he was gone.”
Daddy quirked a brow. “I hope he wasn’t pretty.”
“It’s not funny.”
“Iris,” he said, standing to clear his plate. “It seems to me that if there were ghosts, the last place you’d find them is a cemetery.”
Blankly, I stared at him. “But why?”
“That’s a place for the living to go to remember. By the time we put somebody in the ground, their soul is long gone.”
“Oh.”
He made sense. If I’d passed on but wanted to stay, it sure wouldn’t be at my crypt. I’d want to be right there in my own kitchen, listening to Daddy sing whenever I wanted.
“I gotta get going, baby girl,” he said, dumping his dishes in the sink. “Make sure you clean up, all right?”
I stared down at my dinner; the shimmer of grease turned my stomach all of a sudden. “When are we gonna get a new dishwasher?”
“Just as soon as they grow on trees.”
Half pink, half blue, my bedroom was caught somewhere between being little and being grown. Ballerinas danced in watercolor on one wall; magazine posters of pop stars gazed down from the other. Because of them, I had to get dressed in the bathroom.
Tugging my robe closed, I wedged myself behind the white painted desk that had been mine since kindergarten. My knees brushed the underside of it as I searched the mess on top. Hiding with a stack of paperbacks, I found what I was looking for: my spellbook.
Collette had one just like it, spiral-bound with a heavy black cover. We figured nobody’d care about a school notebook enough to look in it. Just in case somebody did, though, we wrote a curse on the first page: Abandon this book now, or get a bleeding wart on your eyeball for every spell you read.
Part of me hoped the next time I saw Ben Duvall, he’d be wearing bandages and sunglasses.
Uncapping a pen with my teeth, I flipped past the werewolf potion and the potion for everlasting life to find a blank page. I’d planned to write out How to Talk to the Dead, but after that talk at dinner, I didn’t want to anymore. Still, I had to mark down something.
Daddy liked to say it was all right to talk to God, but you were a little touched if God talked back. Remembering that made it easy to mark down our latest discovery. I finished it as quick as I could, then shoved the book into the drawer, pen and all.
Unlike the other spells we had, I didn’t reckon we’d be using How to Make Yourself Go Crazy very often.
chapter three
The sun hadn’t risen high enough to blaze through my window, but it was already strangling hot in my room. My nightgown stuck to me, peeling from my skin with a tickle. I scraped my feet as I walked, trying not to move overmuch.
Sleep held on, calling me back to bed—maybe back to something different and good, like the dream where I could hold out my hands and just fly. As fine as sleeping sounded on a hot day, you could lose a whole summer like that if you weren’t careful.
The frigid prickle of a cold shower felt good for the first couple of minutes. After that, it was just cold. I slipped into my room to grab some clothes, my chilly skin already warming back up to Louisiana humid. New sweat started on my upper lip, and I frowned at my dresser. If it was decent, I would have gone naked. Since it wasn’t, I picked out shorts and an old T-shirt.
As I skulked into the hallway, something nagged at me, like I’d left something behind. Fingering through my clothes, I found everything I needed, but I looked back anyway.
There on my desk, on top of everything, was my spellbook.
In Collette’s house, that would have been a sign to start beating her baby brother—the one we called Rooster, since he up and decided to have red hair when the rest of the family was brunet. I was an only child, though, and Daddy was sound asleep, so something I put in my drawer should have stayed there.
I stood in the doorway, staring. It was long enough that I wanted to dig a sweater from the back of my closet to chase off new goose bumps.
It took me a couple tries to touch the cover, which meant I felt pre
tty dumb when it felt like a spiral-bound notebook. It could have given me a static shock, at least. Bracing the edge with my thumb, I flipped from the front to the back, making sure it was my book. Everything looked the same.
Wound up tight and afraid of my own room, I told myself out loud, “I’m closing my book in this drawer, and I’m not imagining that.” I took a deep breath and shoved it back in the desk.
Then I ran.
Daddy was going to be awful surprised when he woke up. I’d folded every towel in the house, swept the kitchen, and even mopped a little bit before switching to the push vacuum in the living room.
Whipping myself to a sweat in spite of the air conditioner, I felt my room above me, like it could sink through the ceiling and sit on my shoulders. I didn’t like thinking that someone—some thing—had been messing around in there while I was asleep.
I could avoid going up there during the day, but I’d have to sleep in my own bed sooner or later. I had to figure out how to cure a book-moving ghost.
Giving the rug one more sweep, I dragged the vacuum back to its closet and started for the staircase. All of a sudden, it was hard to breathe, and my fingers didn’t even feel like they belonged to my hands when I grabbed the rail. I’d only made it up three steps when the phone rang and nearly made me lose my balance. For a crazy second, I wondered if it would be the boy from the cemetery on the line, asking me how I was, but it was only Collette.
“Meet me at our place in fifteen minutes,” she said, talking fast, like somebody might be listening. “Just bring you.”
I wrinkled my nose and leaned against the wall. “What else would I bring?”
Collette sounded exasperated. “I don’t know. Anything. Whatever!”
“You’re talking crazy, Collette. I hope you know that.”
“Just bring you and get on over there, all right?” A rattly static sound filled my ear. I could hear her talking to somebody but she sounded far away. It got quiet again right after that; then her voice cleared. “It’s important, Iris.”
A half hour later, I wandered around Jules Claiborne’s crypt alone, searching for a little bit of shade. I felt like I could have peeled the skin off my shoulders in crispy strips. The puddle of sweat at the small of my back made me shudder.
Collette hadn’t shown up.
Just a touch bitter, I kicked at the edge of the crypt. I should have stayed home in the first place. Haunt in my desk drawer or not, at least the living room was air-conditioned, and Daddy had a case of root beer in the fridge. My mouth went wet just thinking about it.
I’d decided to leave and was at the gate when I saw Collette finally coming down the road. I went to yell something mean at her when I spotted Ben. He straggled along, carrying a box and looking at his sneakers.
Rankled down to my bones, I gritted my teeth and held the gate closed. Fine if she wanted to be late on me, but I wasn’t about to let her bring somebody else to our place. “Since when was there thirty minutes in fifteen?” I asked.
“Sorry,” Collette said, slowing to fall in step with Ben. “We had to stop and get something.”
“Hey,” Ben mumbled, hoisting a long white box to prove their errand.
I glared at Collette, leaning into the gate until the notched iron nipped at my thigh. She didn’t even realize I was mad; I itched to slap her. “You coulda said that on the phone.”
“It was a surprise!”
Ben tucked his box under his arm and trailed away from the gate. “Uh . . . I think I hear my mama calling. I’m gonna go see what she wants.”
He didn’t hear her, unless she’d followed him four blocks with a bullhorn, but it was a good excuse. The Duvalls had their faults—they all had a touch of stuck-up, because they had money left over from the Gold Coast days in Ascension Parish—but nobody could call them stupid.
Disappointment ran across Collette’s face, breaking her mouth and eyes to downward curves. A split second later, she wheeled around, growling under her breath, “You tell him to come back!”
“No, ma’am.” To make my point, I rattled the gate between us. She could pick making kissy face with Ben or reaching out for the otherworld with me; it was that simple.
Balling her fists like she had to keep them from strangling me on their own accord, Collette leaned closer. “Dummy, he’s got a witchboard! Tell him to come back!”
My resolve unstuck itself right then and there.
Collette’s mama and my daddy didn’t put their feet down much, but they both did when we wanted a Ouija board. Playing with one was too much like Satanism.
Peeling my fingers off the gate, I gave Collette one last, hard look, then stepped aside. “I don’t think that was your mama, Ben. Come on back.”
“You’re not supposed to do it by yourself,” Ben said, unfolding the board between us. “You need at least two, to keep from being possessed.”
Nodding at this wisdom, we watched as Ben shook the pointer out of its red velvet bag. His witchboard was even better than we hoped.
Instead of cardboard and plastic, like the kind that came from the store, Ben’s was made of wood—mahogany, with light pine letters set right into the top. When I touched the pointer, it was warm and buttery. And heavy, too—alive and full of witch fire.
Secretly, I admired Ben a little more for owning something so fine and rare, but only a little.
“Where’d you get this?” I whispered.
“It was my nonna’s,” he said, rubbing the board with a fluffy cloth square. “And it was her nonna’s; she brought it over when she came from Italy.”
Generations of Ben’s family had passed the board on? Most people had only bothered to bring a family Bible over from Europe. That they brought this made me twice as impressed.
“All right, everybody has to promise not to push,” Collette said. She put the pointer in the middle of the board, then tapped the edge with her finger to test it. It took barely anything to slide to the spot on the bottom that said ADDIO. Since I recognized S`I and NO on the top, I guessed addio meant “goodbye.”
“I’m not going to push,” I promised quietly as I put my fingers down.
“What should we ask first?” Collette whispered.
Rolling his head back to stare at the sky, as if the answer would be written in the clouds, Ben thought about it for a minute. “Is anybody listening?”
The pointer didn’t move.
Every second lasted a whole afternoon, and I felt old and wound up when I finally said, “Maybe we should try something else.”
Nudging me, Collette lifted her fingers and rubbed the sweat from them. “You should ask if he’s here.”
“Who?” Ben smiled, his eyes flicking at me, then back at her.
My face went hot. I guess I deserved it, for going out of my way to embarrass Collette at the Red Stripe the day before, but still. If I’d wanted to mention being a little crazy, I would have brought it up myself. “Nobody.”
“She saw a ghost, right here.” Collette nodded toward Claire’s crypt. “Well, over there, really. He came right up close and said her name.”
Ben’s mouth dropped open. “Really?”
Shrugging, I gritted my teeth. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her I must have made it all up, but, selfishly, I didn’t want to give Ben a reason to take his beautiful witchboard home. “Yeah.”
“Then we should try him,” Ben said. His eyes were cornflower blue; I’d never noticed that before.
The pointer slipped around under my fingers, and I watched the tendons flickering in my wrist. Out of curiosity, I pushed real light. Even though the pointer moved, my muscles hardly told on me; Collette and Ben didn’t seem to notice. “I guess we could try.”
Settling in, I took a deep breath. My family had all kinds of haunts. My great-aunt Corinne saw her dead mama in a turned-off television, and Daddy’s cousin Paul always dreamed a white dove right before somebody died.
I knew from a real haunt and what Daddy had said about ghosts and graveyards
rolled around in my head, so I didn’t feel bad making one up. We were the living remembering the dead, after all.
Closing my eyes, I whispered in my best magic voice, “You out there? It’s me, Iris.”
Sweat trickled down my back. I waited for a minute before pushing. Peeking through my lashes, I tried to look blind as I slowly guided the arrow to S`I.
Collette murmured in amazement, and Ben whispered, “It’s working.”
I slipped into a medium’s skin, rolling my head around to loosen my neck before picking another question that sounded séance-proper. “You’re here with us now?” I tugged on the pointer, then slid it right back to S`I.
“We should ask something we already know, as a test.” The sweltering heat carried Collette and Ben’s electricity, a little storm of excitement brewing on top of Jules’s crypt.
Collette smacked her lips. She always did when she was thinking. She said, “Are you a boy or a girl?”
Since it was my show and all, I decided my ghost didn’t want to answer Collette. The pointer sat still on the S`I, unmoving until Ben suggested I try asking.
“Maybe they only like you?”
Trying not to smile, I nodded and repeated the question. It was harder to spell out words with my eyes mostly closed, so my ghost said he was a boz instead of a boy, but that was close enough.
Another electric wave flickered through Ben and Collette, and they started whispering questions for me to ask, one on top of the other. I kept my pace slow so I wouldn’t get caught, but I let my ghost answer as many questions as he could, as quick as he could.
He was seventeen when he died, he drowned in Lake Chicot, and it was cold on the other side. The only question I didn’t let my ghost answer was his name, because I couldn’t think of one outside of people we already knew.
It took forever to spell everything out, and even though it was fun yanking Ben’s and Collette’s chains, I was hot and getting tired from controlling all my tiny sneak pushes.
Shadowed Summer Page 2
