I grimace. Because we both know exactly where the people of Bottom Springs go to talk.
6
NOW
The moment we pull up in front of the Blue Moon bar, the summer storm finally arrives in all its thundering, sheet-rain glory. We’re soaked the instant we run from Everett’s car, and by the time we burst through the heavy oak front door, we’re flinging water and half in shock at the cold. Unfortunately, our arrival draws every eye in the bar.
The Blue Moon is packed tighter than I’ve ever seen it. As expected, the whole town—at least everyone willing to set foot in a den of sin—has gathered to talk about the homicide. Even if Everett and I weren’t soaked, even if we weren’t both making a rare appearance, they would stare simply to see us together. The town’s oddest pair. People in Bottom Springs stare no matter where we go, though we’ve been best friends for six years now. I know it’s mostly about Ever and the lore surrounding his father, but sometimes it makes me resentful, like I only blinked into existence the moment he and I became friends.
“Don’t worry about the eyes,” Everett murmurs. He points to the only empty booth left in the bar, in a distant corner. “How’s that?”
The Blue Moon is a dark, dingy hole-in-the-wall, lit by dim red lights that give it the feel of a country bordello, but it’s also an institution. The place has been remarkably resilient over the years, considering BottomSprings is God’s country and the Blue Moon is a breeding ground for sin, as my father likes to say. I’ve always wondered why he’s never run it out of town. Typically, I avoid this place for a laundry list of reasons. First, because no matter how old I get, in the town’s eyes, I’ll always be the reverend’s girl. Second, because the Blue Moon attracts people, and the older I get, the less I like those. And third, because the people who come here most often are the ones I’m specifically trying to avoid. Like Lila LeBlanc, former cheerleader, sitting in front of us on a barstool, looking Everett and me up and down with an almost prurient curiosity.
“You sit,” Everett says. “I’ll get drinks.” He doesn’t need to ask what I want because I rarely drink, and when I do, the only thing I can tolerate is Boone’s Farm strawberry wine cooler, which the bar doesn’t carry. No, tonight, our drinks are props.
I slide into the empty booth, red vinyl slippery against my damp dress, and Everett pushes into the only empty space at the bar. Remy the bartender eyes him warily. Everyone in Bottom Springs eyes Everett warily, but I don’t exactly blame Remy for it, given Everett is the son of the town’s worst drunk. Thankfully, Remy doesn’t give Everett any trouble, just takes his order without comment and turns to someone else.
“Everett Duncan, while I live and breathe.” Even from here, I can hear Lila. She leans as far as she can in Everett’s direction. The women surrounding her—a lot of them Fortenot Fishing wives I recognize from church—go quiet to listen. “It’s been forever since I saw your face.” Lila’s own face is unchanged from high school, wide-set and youthful except for the lines under her eyes, the kind particular to mothers of young children, exhaustion no concealer can hide.
I try to remember if Lila was one of the girls who’d tried to win Everett’s attention back in high school but can’t recall. She seems ready to do it now, though. Although the fishing wives are eyeing her, she plows ahead. “What brings you back to town?”
Everett turns from the bar, holding two beers by their slim necks. “Oh, you know.” He shakes his rain-wet hair and grins at me. “This and that.”
Lila follows Everett’s grin to me, and her mouth twists like she’s sucking a lemon.
She and I have a complicated history. We’re the same age, but she grew up pretty and well liked, the star in church musicals, until she got pregnant out of wedlock and her life was derailed. My mother was vicious behind the scenes, and my father devoted a whole month’s lectures to the dangers of the fallen woman, a spotlight that humiliated the LeBlanc family until they finally got the hint to leave. Lila had been quickly married off to an older man from Forsythe who was supposedly the father—though people continued to whisper other, more scandalous names—and eventually her family started coming back to church. Still, rumors keep spreading about how often Lila can be found at the Blue Moon bar in the company of men who aren’t her husband.
It’s amazing how closely women are watched in Bottom Springs. It makes me think once again that my invisibility has been a protection.
I give her an uneasy nod as Everett plunks our beers on the table and scoots in next to me. She doesn’t nod back. She’s staring at us, completely arrested, like we’re a puzzle she can’t figure out.
“What’s her deal?” Everett asks in a low voice.
I break Lila’s gaze and reach for a beer. “I don’t know.” Maybe Lila hates me because she can sense my guilt over her treatment and interprets it as pity. Or maybe, somehow, she can sense I’ve committed a sin far worse than hers and have never been punished.
“Good old Bottom Springs,” Everett says, knocking my knee. The fact that he’s sitting so close to me that our legs and elbows touch might be another reason people are staring. But touching is just Everett’s compulsion. Ever since he discovered physical closeness could be safe, that it didn’t always come with a sting, it’s been hard to reel him in.
I roll my eyes at his comment, though. This is what Everett does now. He comes back and acts like a tourist. It’s the biggest thing that’s changed about him since he left. My whole life I’ve tried to look at Bottom Springs like an anthropologist observing a foreign land, wanting the illusion of distance. But Everett’s the one who actually achieved it. All the cruelty, the backwardness—he can laugh it off now because he’s just passing through. Except I don’t think that’s an option for either of us anymore. Not with the investigation. Now everything is a threat we must take seriously.
I scan the bar. “I don’t see Barry yet.”
“Hey, Everett.” From a nearby table, Gerald Theriot smirks at us. Gerald is Sheriff Theriot’s nephew and a Fortenot Fishing captain, a tall, wiry man whose skin is prematurely leathery from spending so much time out in the gulf. “Planning on getting in any fights tonight? Should I tell my boys to gird their loins?” The men around him, his crew, laugh.
It turned out the rumors that circulated when we were teens about Everett getting into bar fights were true. Everettwasalways in and out of the Blue Moon. But the reason was one no one in our high school could’ve guessed: night after night, Ever came to pick up his dad from the bar after he’d gotten too drunk to see straight. On more than one occasion, before he fell unconscious, Mr. Duncan managed to piss someone off so bad they were willing to take up the matter with his son.
For Everett, walking into the Blue Moon used to mean walking into a viper’s nest. A place people waited to hurt you; a place where you nevertheless had to go. When he finally told me this, Everett said he was proud that he mostly walked away with nothing more than a black eye. I’d told him next time, he should just let his father rot, and he’d responded that it was funny what you could see for other people that you couldn’t for yourself.
Now I shoot him a warning look, but he’s one step ahead. “I thinkyou’re safe tonight,” he says, tipping his beer at Gerald. His unwillingness to be baited bores the table of men, and they go back to ignoring us.
I start to say something to Everett, but he touches my arm and nods in the direction of the booth next to us. I strain and catch the end of a sentence.
“And wouldn’t you know,” a shrill voice whispers. “She told me what the vandalism was.”
Everett and I glance at each other, then lean closer.
“Vandalism—that’s what the sheriff was investigating when they found the skull, right?” An older woman’s voice.
“Why anyone sets foot in that swamp is beyond me,” whispers a third. “It’s a death trap. What’d you hear?”
