Darkness

“Mommy? What’s wrong?”

Barbara, wiping away the tears that had overwhelmed her when Tim Kitteridge had told her the news, hugged Jenny close.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about, sweetheart,” she said, not knowing whether she was trying to reassure her daughter or herself. “Michael just went off by himself while everyone was looking for Kelly, and now they can’t find him, either.”

Jenny gazed worriedly up into her mother’s face. “Are you scared?”

“No, darling, of course not,” Barbara lied. Forcing a tiny, shaky smile, she added, “Well, maybe a little.”

“But Michael knows all about the swamp,” Jenny told her. “He goes there all the time.”

“I know, honey,” Barbara sighed, sniffling and wiping her eyes with the Kleenex Mary Anderson had handed her. “I’m just being silly. Your daddy’s out looking for him, and by now they’re probably all together again.” She eased Jenny off her lap and stood up. “And if you don’t go back to bed, you’re not going to want to get up in the morning. Come on.” With an apology to the two officers, and a promise to be right back, she led Jenny back up to Kelly’s room and tucked her back in the bed. “Now I want you to go back to sleep,” she said, leaning over to kiss the little girl.

Jenny frowned up at her mother in the darkness. “Is something bad going to happen to Michael?”

“No,” Barbara insisted, putting a conviction into her voice that she wished she felt. “He just went the wrong way, and now Daddy has to look for him. That’s all.” Barbara kissed Jenny again and gave her a final tucking in. “Try to sleep, honey. All right?”

“All right,” Jenny replied, turning over and closing her eyes. But as soon as her mother was gone she sat up, slid out of the bed, and crept back out to the landing so she could hear whatever was going on downstairs.

“I don’t understand why you’re not out there with them,” she heard her mother saying.

“Mrs. Sheffield, there are still five men out there, but searching that swamp at night is like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“But our children—” Mary Anderson began.

The police chief cut in. “Believe me, I know how you feel, Mrs. Anderson. And whether you believe it or not, we’re doing everything we can. By sunup Marty and I are going to have enough men out here to search the swamp inch by inch. But that takes some organization, and I can’t do that and be out there in a boat, too.”

“I know,” Barbara sighed, determined not to give in to the fear that was threatening to overwhelm her. “Just let us know what’s going on.”

“You can count on it. And try not to worry. Michael knows the swamp, and Kelly just might walk out anytime.” His gaze shifted to Mary Anderson. “If she was as mad as it sounds like, it seems to me there’s a pretty good chance that she doesn’t want to be found. I have an idea she might just know exactly where she is, and come back home once she cools down.”

“Or she might do something else,” Mary replied, her voice trembling. “If she believes her father thinks she’s crazy, she might try to kill herself again. But we can’t even find her to tell her that no one’s mad at her.” She shook her head sadly. “And even if we could, I don’t think she’d believe a word any adult said to her.”

Barbara managed a sorrowful, wry smile. “Maybe we sent the wrong people out to look for her,” she said. “Maybe Jenny and I should have gone.”

As her mother and the policemen started toward the front door, Jenny silently darted back into Kelly’s room, quietly closing the door behind her. But instead of getting back into bed, she pulled off the pajama top and began putting on her clothes. She put her underwear on backward in the darkness, but didn’t notice it, then got into her jeans and pulled her T-shirt over her head. Shoving her bare feet into her shoes, she fumbled with the laces, but finally got them tied.

As she carefully opened the outside door and stepped onto the landing, she felt a pang of fear.

What if she got lost, too?

She gazed apprehensively at the swamp in the distance and almost changed her mind. But then she saw the path along the edge of the canal, and the bright pools of light that flooded from the lamps that lined it every hundred feet. If she stayed on the path, nothing bad could happen to her. And she could call out to Kelly from there. And if she actually found Kelly—

She felt a surge of excitement. The last of her fear evaporated as she set out on her adventure.

• • •

Kelly felt as though she was drowning in a sea of blackness. It was all around her, pressing down on her, constricting her. She had to struggle, had to free herself from its grip. She tried to move, but it felt as if she was mired in quicksand. But then, far off, there was a faint glimmer of light. If she could reach it — bring it into focus — she’d be all right. But it was so far away, and she was so tired.

She moaned softly, and then felt her arms move.

The light brightened, and she realized her eyes were open.

The moon.

It was the bright crescent of the moon she saw, and, as she came slowly back to consciousness, she began to remember.

Running through the swamp, her terror growing every minute.

The alligator attacking her. The shot exploding only a few yards away from her.

The hands lifting her out of the mud, pulling her into the boat.

The face.

The swamp rat’s face.

Her breath caught in a gasp of sudden fear. Almost involuntarily her eyes shifted from the bright light of the moon to the face of the man who sat at the center of the boat.

Not a man.

A boy.

A boy she’d seen before. And then it came back to her.

“I know you,” she said. “I saw you the first night I was here. You were at the edge of the swamp.”

Jonas nodded. “I was watchin’ out for you.”

Kelly frowned. “But I was looking for you. I couldn’t find you.”

Jonas pulled at the oars, and the boat slid silently into a narrow passage between two islets. “Don’t matter. I was there, and made sure nothin’ happened to you. Like tonight.”

Kelly’s frown deepened. “You mean you were looking for me?”

“Didn’t have to look. I knowed where you was at.”

“But—”

“There’s lots of other folk lookin’ for you, too. But they didn’t know where you was.”

Kelly fell silent, studying the boy in the faint light of the moon. His clothes were little more than rags, and he looked half starved, with his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes.

If she’d seen him in Villejeune, she knew she would have been afraid of him.

And yet now, in the middle of the night, in the swamp, she felt no fear of him at all. Indeed, she felt as if she knew him.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she asked.

Jonas gazed at her with his strange, empty eyes, but said nothing. Instead he silently kept rowing the boat, guiding it effortlessly through the tangle of waterways.

Lights began to glimmer here and there, the soft, warm glow of oil lanterns. They were passing the strange, stilted houses of the swamp rats now, but although the boy did not say a word, Kelly was certain that wherever they were going, it was not here.

It was somewhere else, somewhere even deeper in the swamp.

They moved on, Jonas handling the oars with such skill that not even the faintest splashing betrayed their presence. When they were gone, only the rippling of the water from the boat’s bow gave evidence that they had been there at all.

And only Amelie Coulton, sitting silently on her porch, saw them pass.

Something stirred inside her as she watched the small boat move slowly through the bayou, and she rose up from her sagging chair, then climbed down from the porch into the worn skiff that was tied up to one of the pilings.