The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (23 page)

“No,” David said, and Laurel jumped. He’d gone so quiet that, driving down this old road with her sister, she’d forgotten he was there. “She would have left a note.”

“I bet she did,” Laurel said. “It’s probably behind the bed or under her dresser, tucked barely out of sight so that it looks like it fell naturally. But Bet moved it.

“Bet can’t let me talk to Shel. She doesn’t know we already went down to Stan’s. She only knows Shelby will say that she never saw Molly going in there. If I talk to Shelby, Bet’s whole house of cards falls down. And Bet can’t bear that. She can’t bear for me to know the awful thing she did. Don’t you get it?”

Thalia and David shrugged in tandem, and Laurel said, “God, can’t you see? The reason I kept going on so hard about Stan Webelow is that every damn time I started to look in other directions, Bet Clemmens pulled me back to him. She told me when I came to get you, Thalia, that she’d seen him with Molly. She’s the one who said Shelby saw Molly going in his house.”

“Yeah, and?” Thalia said.

“She saw,” Laurel said, giving Thalia the same small words the Ouija had given her. “She saw, and she decided. She stood there and let Molly drown.”

Thalia shook her head. “What did she have against Molly?”

“Nothing. She couldn’t care less about Molly. It’s me. My life, the one you think is such a nightmare, looks pretty damn good to her. Bet loves me.”

“That makes even less sense,” David said.

“It was dark outside,” Laurel said. “The porch light was off. A storm was coming.” She could see them, first David and then Thalia, groping their way to her conclusion.

Kneeling on Shelby’s empty bed, Bet looked out the window. The only light came from below, diffused and softened as it shone up through the water. Shelby wasn’t in her room, and Bet had not been privy to her plans with Molly. Bet saw a slim little blonde sitting out on the diving board. Bet went downstairs to join her and saw her slip and fall, saw her roll into the water and sink.

Bet didn’t see Molly Dufresne. She saw Shelby, the girl who lived in the space Bet wanted to occupy. Laurel’s life was so full, she never really looked at Bet. As Bet watched Shelby drowning, she must have seen it as an opening she could slip inside. She could find herself forever in that lovely place, take the seat beside Laurel, who smelled like Bet knew mommies ought to smell.

“Bet can’t afford to let me talk to Shelby,” Laurel said. “Not ever.”

The temperature in the car seemed to drop three degrees.

Thalia said, “I’m not going fast enough,” and jammed her foot down on the gas.

CHAPTER 18

T
hey were close. The Burger Kings and Wal-Marts fell away, replaced by pawnshops and check-cashing outlets. They passed a final Piggly Wiggly, and then the only chain stores were three different places that would take a car title as collateral on a small high-interest loan.

The last of these was on the end of an otherwise boarded-up strip mall. After they passed it, there were no businesses at all, no buildings, nothing on either side of Highway 78. No trees, no kudzu, even. The trees had been ripped out for their wood, and the land had been peeled back to the shale for its metals. They had entered a wasteland.

It looked uglier to Laurel than it had at Christmas when she came with her family. Even with the distant trees providing a line of color on the horizon that was absent in winter, it looked immeasurably worse. Bleaker. The only difference was that her mother wasn’t here. DeLop looked softer when Mother was along, as if it were being filmed through cheesecloth. Mother’s blindness was so powerful, so catching, that Laurel hadn’t seen DeLop this baldly even when she’d driven here alone to check out and return Bet Clemmens. It was as if she were seeing it for the first time, through David’s fresh, shocked eyes as well as her own. Her daughter was somewhere up ahead, unprotected in the badlands.

Thalia exited onto a narrow two-lane road that hadn’t had a street sign for so long Laurel had forgotten its name. Here, there were new woods, the trees six and eight feet tall, each as slender as a forearm. Choking brush grew up around them, and in most places, they were already heaped high with kudzu in summer’s full, deep green. Had they ventured out of the car, they couldn’t have walked four feet off the road without a machete.

The road forked, and Thalia banked right on Arnold Street, heading uphill. The asphalt was so old it was the soft gray of cigarette ash. On the right, almost grown over with brush, stood the familiar sign that had once said
WELCOME TO DELOP
. The edges had rusted away long before Laurel was born, and the right third of it was folded over and rusting down the seam. The ghosts of its red letters showed through a coating of thick grime:
WELCO TO DE
.

They passed it, and Laurel felt it like a border crossing. They had left behind America, even the disposable Wal-Mart culture of regular American poverty. In DeLop, nothing was disposable, because nothing was ever replaced. Everything was saved and stored and kept in decaying heaps. Shelby was here. Laurel could feel her heartbeat traveling through the ground, coming up through the tires, reverberating so strongly inside Laurel that her hands, when she held them up, look palsied.

There was no commercial building or store of any sort for over seven miles. They passed an access road that led down to a played-out strip mine. With no one to dredge it, it had filled with stagnant green water that raised and lowered itself depending on the rainfall. A long rusted chain hung between two metal poles, blocking vehicle access, as it had for over half a century. There was another, larger mining gash almost in the center of the town. It was a deep scar, the size of a small football stadium. The houses and mobile homes in DeLop were clustered in small pods, mostly south and west of the strip mine. The Folks still called it the mine, though no coal had come out of it for seventy years. Aunt Moff, who lived closest, called it the Frog Hole.

The first building they came to after the access road was Billy Eaver’s single-wide. He was Mother’s half brother; the Eavers and Clemmenses and Foleys were all Mother’s people. Billy’s place sat in a dirt patch with the scrub trees and brush rising around it, the kudzu leaning in, looking for a toehold on the heaps of trash and the skeletons of stripped cars that rested in the yard. Two flat-eyed pit bulls with alligator mouths and heads as big as boot boxes stared through Billy’s front gate. He’d chained about four different types of salvaged fencing into a makeshift barricade with barbed wire laced through it and running along the uneven top. Faded signs hung along the fence; three said
NO TRESPASSING
, and one said
BEWARE OF DOG
.

David pointed at the last sign and said, “No kidding.” His voice sounded thick. “Is it safe up here?”

“Safe-ish, for us,” Thalia said at the same time Laurel said, “No.” Then she glanced at Thalia and agreed, “Yes, for us.”

“I meant Shelby,” David said.

Neither Thalia nor Laurel had a good answer for that, so they said nothing.

“I didn’t expect the fences,” David said as they drove past another mobile home so hemmed in by split rails and barbed wire that it looked barricaded. “I can tell by looking, they don’t have damn all to steal.”

Now that they were here, Thalia had slowed. Laurel was looking back and forth, searching the yards and the roadside for Shelby.

“Some of them have drugs,” Laurel offered. “But even the ones who don’t are very territorial. They live in their own world. They don’t like people from down the hill. I’m scared Bet is going to get Shelby out somewhere, here in the middle, and then leave her.”

Thalia nodded. “That’s what I’d do.”

They were passing between two more double-wides, both so decayed that they looked like they were melting slowly into the landscape. Moff’s girl, Della Foley, lived on the right with her sister and her sister’s man and his mother; they had three babies between them. Della had cobbled together a playground out of scrap. She’d hung a tire swing, and beside it, she’d buried a length of rusty sewer ladder deep enough to stand upright. An old metal slide was soldered onto it.

In front of the left mobile home, Raydee Eaver and his brother, Louis, were messing around in the guts of an old truck. It had no hood, and they were bent over the exposed engine. Louis had a wrench and was jerking hard at something. Neither had a shirt on in the late-afternoon heat, and with their flossy blond hair, narrow torsos, and long sinewy arms, they looked like young male Thalias. They raised their heads and stared as the Volvo came even with them, their matched-set green gazes as flat as the dogs’ had been.

“Do you know them?” David asked as Thalia braked to a stop.

“Yes, but they don’t recognize this car,” Laurel said.

At Christmas, Daddy drove them in the Buick, and last week Laurel had picked up Bet in David’s SUV. An unknown car in DeLop was something between an event and an invasion. Strangers nearly always turned out to be either someone from the sheriff’s office still-hunting, or a parole officer, or some churchly good-doer, coming up to save them with tracts and blankets and canned peas. A while back they’d “caught a social worker,” as Enid had put it, making the poor woman sound like a rash. She’d wanted to track the children, the ones with Social Security numbers and school records, anyway, and try to get them back in a classroom. “Took her most of a damn year to peter out,” Enid had said.

The Eaver boys were walking toward the car. Raydee led from the hip with his center of gravity so low Laurel knew immediately that he was stoned to his gills. Louis swung the wrench lightly back and forth as he walked, as if it weighed nothing. The sunlight gleamed off its silver. There was something in the set of his muscles that seemed coiled, his body readying itself for violence.

Thalia scrolled down the window and leaned out, calling, “Hey, Raydee. Hey, Louis.”

Louis slowed a hair, and the springy, ready way he’d held the wrench changed in some subtle way, rendering it innocuous.

“That you, Thalia?” Raydee called.

“Who’s that with ya? Larl?” Louis asked.

That’s how everyone said Laurel’s name up here, one compressed, gargling syllable that had hardly a vowel in it.

“Yeah, and her husband,” Thalia called. “Her daughter’s up here, too. You seen her?”

Thalia didn’t bother to describe Shelby. There were maybe sixty mobile homes and trailers and another ten or twelve actual houses in DeLop. The remains of what had once been a company store stood near the middle, a cinder-block building that had been stripped of every detachable piece of itself, so it no longer had even wooden windowsills or doors. A place this small, everyone knew everyone else, and most of them were interrelated. Strange to think that when Mother was Shelby’s age, she had belonged here. She’d walked down these streets knowing no others, part of the landscape, but Shelby would stick out as brightly as a new penny. If Raydee or Louis had seen her, they would know.

“Naw,” said Louis.

Raydee said, “You brunged Bet home already?”

Thalia said, “Yeah. You seen Bet?”

She looked at Raydee as she asked, but he only knitted his brows, puzzled. Louis stepped in and answered, his tone cool. “Naw, but Sissi’s car come by a while back. Afore that, the sheriff’s deputy been driving through. Aunt Shirl said he got out at Sissi’s and banged her door. You know why’s that?”

“Nope,” Thalia said, but Louis’s gaze did not warm, and he cocked a skeptical eyebrow. Thalia went on. “Listen, you see Miss Shelby, can you bring her on to Sissi’s? We got to start the drive home.”

She was echoing his diction and his accent, structuring her sentences the way they all did here. Raydee had gone easy in his body as she talked, watching his brother have a conversation with Junie Eaver Gray’s girl. But Louis, sober, or at least less messed up, knew better. If Mother had been with them, he would have invited them in, maybe offered them a cold drink. Mother had been born here, and she was a part of this place in a way that her daughters, raised with television and indoor plumbing and fresh milk down in Pace, had never been.

“Sure thing,” Louis said.

Raydee added, “I’ll tell her she’s gon’ get her behiney paddled, she don’t get home.”

He tipped his baseball cap at Laurel and then stretched his arms up over his head, his torso elongating so that his ribs stuck out. Louis turned away, and Raydee followed him back toward the truck they’d been messing with. Thalia drove on.

“We should have asked how long ago they saw Sissi’s car,” David said.

Thalia released a scoffing chuckle. “He said ‘a while,’ David, and it’s not like either of those boys owns a watch.”

She drove the most direct route to Harold Street, leaving the paved roads twice to scoot through narrow gravel paths between mobile homes. Laurel scanned the lots, looking for Shelby’s bright hair.

Sissi’s trailer was one of the few places in DeLop that didn’t have some version of fencing. Her broad-shouldered brindle dog, Mitchell, was on a chain by the door. He was lying under one of Sissi’s raggedy pinwheels. The afternoon was so still that none of the gaudy wheels moved, and the wind socks hung limp. Mitchell lifted his head and stared at them as they pulled up.

As they were getting out of the car, Sissi opened the door and stood framed in it, glaring at them.

“She said she had alla y’all’s permissions,” Sissi said, preemptively defensive. “Bet and her both looked me in my eye and tole me. Now Shirl and Ruby come over, tellin’ me the sheriff done drived by twice’d now, pullin’ into my yard. Why’s that, is what I’d like to know.”

“Are they here?” Laurel said, striding angrily across the stretch of dirt and trash and gravel Sissi had instead of a lawn. Mitchell stood in a single fluid motion. He was probably eighty pounds, with a deep chest and a back end so skinny she could see the cut, lean muscle under his dirty coat. She felt his gaze, yellow and assessing, on the skin of her bare neck. She forced herself to stop and turned to him. “Hey, Mitchell. There’s that good boy.”

“Down, Mitchie,” Sissi hollered at him, and he sank to his belly, shoulders still tensed.

“Is Shelby inside?” Laurel said.

“Is that sheriff coming back?” Sissi countered. “Do I need to maybe pick up a little?”

Laurel felt her hands clenching. “Sissi,” she began, but Thalia interrupted, talking smoothly over her.

“I’d tuck things away, Sis, but I don’t expect there’s any need to go getting rid of anything. We weren’t sure Shel had come up here until now. We’ve got people looking all over Florida, not just up here.”

“Well, she ain’t inside,” said Sissi. “Bet’s showing her around.”

“Oh, God,” Laurel said. She needed to sit down. Her blood had gone thin and cold, and it couldn’t get good oxygen to her. David had come up behind her, and now he put one arm around her, shoring her up.

“How long ago?” Thalia asked.

Sissi shrugged and said, “They can’t have got far. No place to go, anyways. Bet wanted Shelby to get her cards read over to Moff’s. Try there.”

“This is my husband, David,” Laurel said. “He’s going to stay here in case the girls get back, okay?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Sissi said. She and Mitchell stared David down together, equally suspicious.

Thalia said, “If the sheriff comes again, he’ll be wanting to talk to David, not you. If David’s here, he could go on out and square the sheriff away. Sheriff wouldn’t even need to come inside.”

Sissi’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded. David opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again.

They’d decided in the car who would do what. Without Mother along, Thalia could do a better job of blending here. She could mimic posture and speech patterns, and The Folks were often more at ease in her company than in Laurel’s, so Thalia would go to their relatives’ houses. Laurel would do a circuit of DeLop, hitting all the small back roads and dead ends, looking for Shelby outside. David was to stay at Sissi’s. He hadn’t been happy about it, but nothing else made sense. He didn’t know the landscape or the people.

“Call me as soon as you find her,” he said, and walked slowly past Mitchell. The dog watched his every step.

Sissi scootched over a molecule to let David get past her into the trailer. “Don’t you feed him any?” she called to Laurel.

“Throw me your keys, Sissi,” Thalia said. “Be faster to drive to Moff’s.”

DeLop was small, but the houses were spread thinly around two sides of the Frog Hole, with close woods and wilderness between the clumps.

Sissi leaned into the trailer to grab her keys, then threw them across the yard in a bright arc that came nowhere near Thalia. They landed in a heap in the dust, and Sissi cackled as Thalia went to retrieve them.