I froze.
Everett scrambled to his feet, breathing hoarsely, and we stood there, him in black and me in white, two chests heaving, both of us splattered with blood. An eternity passed until I whispered, “I didn’t mean to.”
“Shh.” He put a finger in the air, as if testing the wind. Immediately, I stilled—except for my heart, which was still pumping, pushing my chest tight against the neckline of my dress. The whole melody of the swamp opened to me then, the creeping crawling things rustling the leaves and the water dripping from the branches and the birds calling overhead. In the middle of it, faintly, was a thin sucking noise, the sound of a man struggling to breathe.
“He’s still alive,” Everett said, and I startled. I’d forgotten the way his voice sounded, deep but also lilting. He looked at me and I cringed, waiting for his revulsion. It would be what I deserved. I was going to burn for what I’d done. I would never enter Heaven.
But instead of disgust, tenderness flooded Everett’s face. I’d never seen such an expression on him in the years we’d orbited each other. Out of everything, it was what brought chills to my skin, tiny hairs raising like antennae on high alert.
“Give me that,” he said, and held out his hand. He was looking at the rock.
Mutely, I handed it over. My arms were too light without the weight and I shook them. Everett crouched beside Renard and stared at him a moment—thinking what, I couldn’t fathom—then bent and whispered in his ear, too low for me to catch. Renard’s eyes were shut, but at the whisper he gurgled. Then Everett smashed the rock to his temple, one quick hard stroke, and Renard was utterly quiet.
“He was suffering,” Everett said softly. “Like an animal in a trap.” He set the rock on the blanket and rose, swaying a little.
He’d shown Renard mercy. I searched his face as he steadied himself. “Do you need to go to Blanchard?” The hospital was at the farthest edge of town, and I had no way of getting there, but Everett looked like he needed it.
He jerked his head. “No. I’m used to it. Besides, they’ll ask how it happened.”
Our eyes met. And that’s when the weight of it truly hit me: I’d killed a man. Or Everett had. Or both of us together, the shared sin staining our hands the same as the blood. I dropped to my knees in the grass.
“Ruth.” Everett gripped my shoulders. “Not now, okay? Later. Now we have to get rid of him.”
I looked up at him from where I knelt, too far gone to wonder at his touch. Despite everything, his dark eyes were clear and calm.
“Stay here while I get an ax. I think my father has one in his shed. At least a knife.”
“You were hunting in the swamp.” I looked at the dead river rat, my words coming out faded and distant. “And you didn’t bring a knife?”
He squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t move. I’ll be fast.”
He was gone before I could beg him not to leave me alone with Renard, and I tumbled forward on the blanket. In my shock, timemust’ve warped, thirty minutes compressed into five, because he was back too quickly, tugging me up, holding an ax.
I climbed to my feet and joined Everett where he stood, staring down at Renard’s body, at the bloody mess of his head. The chill calm of shock seized me then, emptying me of feeling. The first man I’d kissed had turned out to be no Edward.
Everett’s words were cool. “We’ve got to do it fast, before nightfall. That’s when the swamp is hungriest.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “About any of this?”
“We’ll put him in the swamp, and tie the rock and blanket to him. The gators will find him quick and eat it all. No one will ever know. You’ll be safe.”
Across the empty space, he held out his hand. After a moment, I took it. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. And with our fingers twined together, with the twilight falling, I wasn’t.
We chopped Renard’s body into pieces we could carry to the edge of the water and walked those pieces in up to our knees. Then we waited at the tree line until the smooth placid surface of the water thrashed—quick as lightning, once, twice, water roiling—and then he was gone. It was almost peaceful. We left his truck where it was parked. Everett said that when they found it, they would think Renard had gone off hunting or exploring in the swamp, confident he was enough of a rough-and-tumble Louisiana woodsman to survive.
No one knew about our date, by Renard’s own design. His cheap plastic cell phone had no tracking device. And there was no such thing as DNA testing in a parish poor as ours, with a sheriff’s department of three men. Especially not for a man just passing through, an itinerant construction worker. The very things I hated about life in small, backward Bottom Springs would be the things that saved me.
It happened just like Everett said. News of Renard’s disappearancein the swamp, when it eventually hit, barely made a ripple. Too many other men had died in the untamable wild for the town to be anything but used to it. My father used Renard to start a sermon about hubris one Sunday morning, and after that he faded from town lips. Days of waiting in terror for someone to knock on my door turned into months of quiet disbelief and then years of tentative acceptance, the monotony of so many ordinary days burying this one extraordinary one. Finally, the strangest thing happened: a small part of me started to believe, deep in the furthest reaches of my heart, that maybe what we’d done wasn’t really so bad. I didn’t know whether that was my voice whispering or the Devil’s, but either way, it soothed me.
One thing did change after that day—the most important that had ever happened to me. My third and mightiest rebellion. I might’ve lost part of myself in Starry Swamp, might’ve floated my childhood right off into the dark water with Renard, but in exchange, I got Everett. He appeared outside my window the next day at dusk, waiting for me at the edge of my lawn. After that, he came every day like clockwork. We became inseparable. To everyone’s astonishment, he became the friend I’d always dreamed of, except he was real, alive and vital, not trapped inside a book.
We never, in all the years since, spoke the name Renard Michaels again.
4
NOW
Everett straightens against my doorframe, voice dangerously low. “What do you mean, they found him?”
