Never Smile at Strangers (8 page)

THE STRENCH OF wet manure hung in the air as the two girls reached the Landry’s porch. Erica bent, trying to work out a cramp in her hamstring.

“Who do you think that could have been?” Haley asked, breathing hard.

The moments that had just passed were only a blur for Erica. She had drunk too much. Had someone been in the woods again, or had it just been an animal?

“Who do you think it was?” Haley repeated.

She shrugged. “Could have been anything. Maybe an animal.”

“With a flashlight?”

“You saw a flashlight?” she asked, thinking even more of the person who had fled when she called out earlier in the week.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“You sure? Could have been the moon. It’s pretty low tonight.”

Haley giggled.

Erica stiffened.
Had she said something wrong?
“What’s so funny?”

Thunder rumbled overhead as Haley broke out in longer, harder laughter. “I don’t—” Haley started, then fought to pull air into her lungs. “I’ve never drank this much. I. . . think I’m drunk.”

Erica slowly relaxed, relieved that the girl wasn’t laughing at her. She peered down at her filthy feet. They were on fire from all the running, but her body was filled with so much adrenaline and heat, she couldn’t feel any pain. She had been buzzed long before she reached the cemetery. If she hadn’t been, she knew she wouldn’t have stayed.

“I don’t
get
drunk. I’m responsible,” Haley insisted. She laughed again. “But this feels
incredible
.” She pushed her damp bangs from her eyes and grinned. Her face was so close, Erica could smell the wine on her breath. Her eyes danced beneath the porch light, more full of life than she’d seen them in a long while. She seemed to have, at least for the moment, forgotten her troubles.

Haley pushed the front door open, and Erica could see two teenage girls and a little boy in the kitchen. All three were staring at them. She turned to go, but Haley grabbed her hand.

“Hay-wee!” the little boy screamed, cutting the silence. He rushed up to Haley, almost bowling her over as he latched onto her. He was a clownish-looking child with several awkward cowlicks and a pair of thick-lens glasses that magnified his eyes. Seeing him, Erica wondered if he would suffer the same fate she had when she entered school. The torturous teasing from not belonging.

Haley laughed at the little boy.

“Why are you so happy? Did they find Tiffany or something?” the teenager with the brown hair asked, looking hopeful, a two-liter of Coke in her hand.

Haley stopped laughing.

Erica reluctantly took a seat at the oak table, next to the other girl. Setting her backpack beside her, she decided she would only stay a few minutes, then she’d go back to the cemetery, get her flip flops and poke around the woods a little bit before going home to work on her new book.

“Wawre’s Teefany?” the little boy asked, his words distorted for a child she guessed to be three or four years old. The boy cupped his hands over his small mouth and began running in crooked circles.

“Erica, this is my sister, Becky,” she said, forming her words carefully and pointing to the girl with the Coke. “Her friend, Seacrest,” she said of the dark-haired girl, “and this little one here is Sasha.” She pointed to the little splotchy-skinned boy who had just fallen on the floor from a dizzy spell. “Becky baby sits him.”

“Hi,” Becky said, a friendly smile on her face. Seacrest just glanced at her as if she were bored.

“Where’d you get the McDonald’s?” Haley asked her sister.

Becky quietly concentrated on pouring Coke into three glasses. She was almost as odd-looking as the little boy. Her features were mismatched. She had stringy, mouse-brown hair, close-set eyes and a nose that was too wide for her face. She looked nothing like her pretty sister.

“Becky?” Haley repeated, when her sister didn’t answer her.

“We got a ride into Chester,” Becky finally said, nonchalantly, handing one of the glasses to Sasha, who was now sitting upright on the floor.

“Who with?” Haley asked.

Becky handed a burger to Sasha. “I don’t know. Just some guy.”

“
Some guy
?”

Seacrest snickered.

“Okay, we hitched a ride,” Becky said, flustered.

“You
what
?” Haley exclaimed.

“What’s heetched, Hay-wee?” Sasha asked from the floor, bread and meat in his mouth.

Erica shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She pulled at her damp t-shirt and chilly air rose between the cotton and her skin. She studied Seacrest who stood out from the wholesome Landrys, not just in appearance but in energy. She was dressed in tight-fitting shorts, a halter top and had a malevolent, unkind air about her. Seacrest must have felt her stare because she turned and threw her a pinched once-over before grabbing a glass of Coke out of Becky’s hand.

The exchange made Erica angry. It was déjà vu of the dreadful years of school. Being sized up. Being judged. But the fact that a girl so much younger could affect her that way left her feeling mostly ashamed of herself. Weak and pathetic. She reminded herself of a quotation that her mother used to whisper to herself after fights with her father:
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
With that as fuel, she straightened in her chair.

“Stop it. It’s no big deal,” Becky pleaded.

“Hitchhiking is no big deal?” Haley snapped. Her eyes looked strange, unfocused. She was definitely wasted. She wavered a little then steadied herself against the table. “Don’t you know Tiffany’s missing?”

“Wawre’s Teefany?” Sasha asked again, this time looking very concerned.

“Seacrest does it all the time,” Becky insisted. She pointed at the girl. “And look, no one’s cut her into tiny little pieces.”

A bunch of excited words spilled out of Haley’s mouth, but only a few were discernable.

Becky gaped at her. “Oh, my God, you’re drunk!
That’s
why you’re acting so weird!”

“What?” Haley asked, fighting for composure.

Erica didn’t want to witness any more. If she wanted family discord, she could get it at her own house. Seeing an opportunity to slip out, she grabbed her backpack and headed to the front door. En route, she heard Becky’s voice rise further, the daggers still pointed at her sister.

“You’re so drunk you can barely talk! And you’re lecturing
me
? What a freakin’ hypocrite.”

HE AWOKE IN a panic, his skin damp with sweat. It was two o’clock on Thursday morning. Five days since his kill and the law still hadn’t shown. Like those times years earlier, they hadn’t a clue.

He thought of the nightmare that had come to him as he slept. Of the night ten years earlier when he awoke to find his mother out in the yard.

His jaw tensed and he lay back against his pillow. . .

He had run from the kitchen window and slipped back into bed. Curling up beneath the scratchy blanket, he squeezed his eyes shut.
He’d been dreaming, he told himself. It had been a nightmare, nothing more. His heart was pounding only because it had seemed too real. His mother was lying drunk in bed where she belonged—not out in the rain—and he was here in his bed, warm. . . and reasonably safe until daybreak.

A branch outside tapped at his window as though it were a frail finger, vying for his attention. Tap, tap. TAP! Tap, tap. He slipped lower in the bed and grabbed his knees.

The bedroom door swung open, slamming into the wall. “You try to lock me out, cher?” his mother snapped, her tone dangerous. “Next time it might help if you lock the front door, too!” She ripped the blanket from his bed and peered down at him, her breath fiery with whiskey. “Get up!”

Cool water dripped from her body, onto his pale face and neck. Bony fingers seized his wrist. “Get up and help me!” She yanked him out of bed.

Out back, the rain fell in sheets, soaking his bare skin and underwear. He peered down at a half-naked man who lay on the ground, his face covered in blood.

The man’s eyes were closed, his jaw opened at an odd angle. He was wearing only a white undershirt, the bottom of his body naked.

His young eyes moved quickly, taking in the hairy, bloated belly, the stumpy legs. Then his gaze returned to the man’s face.

His mother pressed her fingers against the man’s neck, her eyes filled with something evil. After a moment, her head jerked up. “Take off that underwear!” she barked, her Cajun accent as thick as the sticky Louisiana night.

Reluctantly, he slipped out of his wet underwear.

“Now grab his wrist. The left one,” she demanded.

He bent and reluctantly touched the man’s wrist. “Is he dead?”

“I said grab his wrist, boy!”

For the next few minutes they pulled the man the hundred or so yards past the house, to the pond. As they pulled, something warm exploded inside his body. It formed first at his middle, then surged through his veins—a mixture of panic, fear and an odd exhilaration, a feeling that wasn’t entirely bad.

The sky cracked open above them and the man coughed. The boy dropped the wrist and stepped back. “He’s alive!” he screamed.

“What are you doin’? Pick up that goddamned wrist and pull!”

The man went still again, and the two pulled him to the pond’s edge. The rain had let up and the moon began to show through the clouds. Two water moccasins sliced across the murky water and slithered to where the old pirogue rested, belly down.

The boy avoided his mother’s eyes and focused on the snakes. He wondered if they could smell the danger that hung in the air, the stranger’s impending death. Death was a place he had dreamt about, wondering often if it was a better place than the one he’d known throughout his nine years.

“You wait here,” she demanded. “I’ll be right back.” And with that, his mother disappeared into the night.

“Dariah?” the man whispered, his voice hoarse. His eyes opened halfway. “What are you—” he began, then fell silent, his shallow gurgling almost drowned out by the loud croaks of distant bullfrogs.

A moment later, his mother returned out of breath, carrying a shovel. She threw it to the ground, then grabbed the boy by the shoulders and dug her long, red nails deep into his skin.

“Dariah?” the man whispered again. “What’s—?”

She released him and stared at the man for a long moment. Suddenly, she went calm. When she spoke next, she formed her words slowly. “I’m going to the house,” she said, and handed him the shovel. “When I get back, I don’t want him breathing none, you hear?”

An odd light went on inside his head. It glowed brightly then dimmed. The rain felt like popsicles on his bare back as the man started the repulsive gurgling again.

“I don’t want you to think that you can go into town and begin tellin’ stories. You can’t because you’ll be as guilty as me. You hear what I’m tellin’ you? We’re in this together. A grin crept across her face. “If you don’t remember anything else, you remember that.”

“But—”

“But, shit!” she snarled, the calmness forgotten. Rainwater dripped from her chin. “I’m yore mama and you do what I say!” She pointed at the shovel. “You just do what I told you to, and after I gather the things we need, I’ll be back.”

She charged toward the house and he watched on until he couldn’t make out her form any longer against the night. Then he turned to the man, who was still gurgling, his eyes small and frightened.

“Son, you. . . gotta help me,” he managed. “You’ve got to hide me from Dariah. Somethin’s. . . somethin’s snapped in that fool woman’s head.”

His head cocked, he studied the man. His heart pounded so hard he thought he’d topple over. He didn’t want to do it. He didn’t even know if he could. But if he didn’t, she’d make things far worse, and he knew he couldn’t bear anything worse.

He began having trouble breathing.

“Please, boy,” the man pleaded. “Please. I can’t feel my legs. . . and we don’t have much time. That woman’ll hunt us both down. She’ll kill the both of us. You gotta. . . you gotta hide me.”

But he’d already come to his conclusion. It was either the stranger or him, and it would have to be the stranger. Taking short, uneven breaths, he raised the shovel high above his head.

“God. . . please forgive me,” he begged.

His and the man’s screams pierced the night. . . as he did what his mother had told him to do.

His cheeks streaked with tears, he shook the memory from his head and climbed out of bed to get a glass of water. This time, when he moved down the hallway, he didn’t pause outside his mother’s bedroom. There was no need to.

HALEY BLINKED IN the darkness and turned her head so she could see the time: three o’clock. It was already Thursday morning and odds were that Tiffany was still missing.

She wiped beads of sweat from her forehead and untangled her feet from the top sheet. A sliver of light streamed in from Becky’s room and she could hear Seacrest laughing.

She rose and peered through the moth-eaten tarp that covered the spaces in the unfinished wall that separated her room from Becky’s. Shortly after her father’s accident, Tiffany had stood in front of the four by fours and the ribbons of tape. “I think your father was doing a piss poor job with this wall.”

Haley knew Tiffany hadn’t meant to insult her father, it had just been Tiffany’s way. She always said what was on her mind without much thought, an uncouthness that she seemed to always get away with because of her looks.

Since Haley and Becky were getting older and sharing a room in the modest, two-bedroom house was growing uncomfortable, their father decided to build a wall in the middle of the large room to give them each their privacy.

The Saturday of his accident he had gone to the Home Depot in Chester and come back with several two by fours, drywall, and some new tools. A colleague helped him carry everything inside and nail the wood in place.

When Haley left to go to Tiffany’s for the night, the two men were standing in front of the beginnings of their wall, shaking their heads. Her father kept biting his lip and repeating the word “hmmm.”

Seacrest lay on her stomach across the foot of Becky’s bed in only a pair of red panties and a small t-shirt. Her dark hair partially hid her face as she flipped through pages of a magazine. Becky sat against her headboard, also with a magazine. She tapped a finger against her mouth, concentrating on something she was reading.

“No shit,” Seacrest muttered, shaking her head. She giggled. “I don’t care how bad you have to pee, you
always
turn on the bathroom light before sitting on the toilet.”

“Huh?” Becky said absently, still focusing on her own magazine.

“This chick was at her friend’s house and ran into the bathroom without turning on the light. She pulled down her pants and went to sit on the toilet and ended up sitting on this dude’s lap,” Seacrest said, shaking her head again. She rose to her knees and pulled her long hair back. “And she had a crush on this guy. She peed on him. Right on his lap. How stupid is that?”

Becky giggled.

Seacrest stretched and exposed her abdomen. Her full lips parted in a yawn and the emerald nose ring glistened. Haley realized, with a touch of envy, that even when the girl didn’t try to look stunning, she did.

Seacrest turned to Becky. “You said your sister is friends with that girl, right? The one who disappeared?”

Becky laid her magazine on her chest. “Tiffany? Yeah, they’re best friends.”

“Think she’s dead?”

“No way.”

“Then what do you think happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” Becky said slowly. “But things like that. . . they don’t happen around here.”

“I bet she’s dead.”

Becky’s brow furrowed. “Don’t let Haley hear you say that. She’d have puppies.”

But Haley
had
heard it.

“Bet that boyfriend of hers killed her,” Seacrest said. “Happens all the time. Sometimes they don’t find people until years later when they start finding pieces of them in different towns. Fingers, feet, arms. Sometimes their heads. They found a head in that dude Dahmer’s apartment. He was a necrophiliac.”

Haley crawled back in bed, burying her head in her pillow. She didn’t want to hear any more. She wished Becky hadn’t met Seacrest. She was what Mama would call
canaille
, mischievous and wayward. Bad news from the other side of the tracks, or at least the other side of town, Grand Trespass being a town without tracks. Foul-mouthed and a questionable dresser, she was a bad influence for her younger sister Becky, who like the rest of them, still didn’t know quite who she was.

And to talk about Tiffany like that. What right did she have to say she was—

A floorboard creaked in the living room. Haley propped herself back up and saw that both of the girls were still in Becky’s bedroom, silent and reading.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood, pulling on a pair of shorts. She felt grit beneath her feet. Fine sawdust from her father’s work on the wall nearly a year ago. Sometimes she even felt it in her sheets. Feeling it always made her think that her father was close by.

Once, when she was nine, they visited a house that was under construction. Every time Haley got a whiff of the dust, she thought of that big house. The big house they hadn’t been able to afford because her father was a community college professor.

“Educators are damned to modest means, I’m afraid,” Haley had heard her mother say once to Mrs. Perron when she’d asked when they planned to replace the old station wagon. Unlike the Perrons, their family hadn’t invested in Wal-Mart years ago. An investment that landed the Perrons a small fortune.

Opening her bedroom door, Haley saw her mother at the kitchen sink. Wrigley, the eleven-year-old greyhound who rarely left her mother’s side, eyed her drowsily from her place on the floor.

“Mama? Can I get you something?” Haley asked, walking to her.

Her mother shook her head. “No, Possum, I’m just getting a little drink for Wrigley.”
Possum
. Her mother hadn’t called her that since before the accident.

She placed a hand on her mother’s boney shoulder. “Are you sure? I made a gumbo. I can heat some up real quick?”

The older woman’s hair was disheveled and greasy, her eyes just slits. Outside of the nightmares, this was the first time Haley had seen her awake in nearly five days.

“I’m not hungry, darling,” the woman said, shutting off the water. “Wrigley just needed to go out.”

Haley caught a whiff of the odor that clung to her mother. Sour and unclean. She also noticed she held two pills in her hand.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, honey. Just fine.” She placed the pills on her tongue and washed them down with a cup of water. “These are just the sleeping pills Dr. Broussard prescribed for me. They help me. . . get by.”

She walked past Haley with a bowl of water and headed across the living room, back to her room. Her body moved under her tacky yellow robe, not with the feminine sweeps it had before the accident, but as though she were transporting the whole world beneath it. Arthritis-ridden Wrigley grunted as she rose to follow her.

“Tiffany’s missing,” Haley said.

The older woman loosened her grip on the bedroom doorknob and regarded her daughter. “Missing?” Her face twisted with confusion. “How awful. I should call Julia,” she said, referring to Tiffany’s mother. “When did this happen?”

“No one’s seen her since Saturday.”

“Today’s Monday?”

“Thursday.”

“Oh.” The bowl of water trembled in her hand. “Is she with a boy?”

Haley shook her head. “No. She would have told me.”

“Yes, I guess so, darling. But I’m sure she’ll turn up. I’ll say a prayer.”

“Sheriff Hebert came by but you were sleeping. He said he didn’t want to disturb you. There’s a detective going around with him, too. He said he’ll want to talk to everyone in town, so I’m sure he’ll be by again.”

Her mother nodded. “How’s your sister?”

“Fine.”

“Good. That’s good.” she said, and flashed a weak smile. Haley noticed her teeth had yellowed in the last several months. “And you, Haley?”

“I’m doing good, too.”

“How’s school?”

Concerned that it would only worry her, Haley hadn’t told her mother that she didn’t sign up for summer classes. Her original plan had been to take them to somewhat catch up for her lost first semester. “Good,” she said.

“You having any trouble getting back and forth to Lafayette?”

Haley shook her head.

“Good, good. I need to get me a little rest now. Goodnight, darling.” She and Wrigley went into the room. The door closed behind them.

Haley stood next to the door for a long moment. “
C’est l’heure du lit
,” she whispered, remembering Nana’s soft words at bedtime. “Goodnight, Mama.”

***

HALEY OPENED HER eyes for the second time that night. She sat up and peered at the clock radio. It was almost four in the morning. What had woken her this time?

She heard it again. Someone was screaming. She bolted out of bed and ran into Becky’s room. The overhead light was on, and Becky was crouched in the corner behind her bed, dried pimple cream caked across her nose and chin.

“Someone’s outside the window,” a voice behind her whispered. Haley turned and saw Seacrest kneeling against the side of the dresser. Her face was also dotted with pimple cream, and she was pointing to the window.

“Becky, go to my room,” Haley whispered.

Becky didn’t move.

Someone tapped softly at the glass and Haley’s heart raced faster. A hushed voice was calling out from the other side. Then a face was at the window, but she couldn’t make it out.

Holding her breath, Haley took a step forward. “Who’s there?” she called out. “Tiffany? Is that you?”

The voice called out again: “No, it’s Charles.”