Teardrop

Bill laughed under his breath. “I’m getting jealous of this guy. I kind of hope I never find him.”

That makes three of us, Eureka thought.

When Cat said “He has pale skin, blue eyes,” Eureka had had enough.

“We’re done,” she said to Cat. “Let’s go.”

Bill closed his notepad. “I doubt there’s enough information here for me to run a search. Next time you see this kid, give me a call. Take a picture of him on your phone, ask him for his last name.”

“Did we waste your time?” Cat folded down her lip in a mini pout.

“Never. I’m here to serve and protect,” Bill said, as if he’d just collared the entire Taliban.

“We’re going to get banana freezes.” Cat stood up, stretching so that her shirt drifted above her skirt, showing off a band of smooth dark skin. “Want to come?”

“Thanks, but I’m on duty. I’m on duty for a good while longer.” Bill smiled and Eureka took the hint that was meant for Cat.

They waved goodbye and headed for the door, for Eureka’s car, for home, where there waited something known as Rhoda. As they passed, the elderly couple rose from their seats. Eureka suppressed her instinct to jump backward. Relax. They were just moving toward Bill’s desk.

“Can I help you two?” Eureka heard Bill ask behind her. She stole one last glance at the couple, but saw only the gray backs of their heads.

Cat reached for Eureka’s arm. “Bill …,” she sang out wistfully as she pressed the metal bar on the front door.

The air was cold and smelled like a trash can fire. Eureka wished she were curled up in her bed with the door closed.

“Bill’s nice,” Cat said as they crossed the parking lot. “Isn’t he nice?”

Eureka unlocked Magda. “He’s nice.”

Nice enough to humor them—and why should he have taken them seriously? They shouldn’t have gone to the police. Ander wasn’t an open-and-shut stalking case. She didn’t know what he was.

He was standing across the street, watching her.

Eureka froze mid-slide onto the driver’s seat and watched him through the window. He leaned against the trunk of a chinaberry tree, arms crossed over his chest. Cat didn’t notice. She was teasing her bangs in the sun visor mirror.

From thirty feet away, Ander looked furious. His posture was rigid. His eyes were as cold as they’d been when he grabbed Brooks by the collar. Should she turn around and run back into the station to tell Bill? No, Ander would be gone by the time she stepped through the door. Besides, she was too afraid to move. He knew she’d gone to the cops. What would he do about it?

He stared at her for a moment, then flung his arms down at his sides. He stormed through the brush that edged the Roi de Donuts parking lot across the street.

“Feel like starting the car anytime this year?” Cat asked, smacking glossed lips together.

In the instant Eureka glanced at Cat, Ander vanished. When she looked back at the lot, it was empty except for two cops walking out of the donut shop with to-go bags. Eureka exhaled; started Magda; blasted the heat to fend off the cold, damp air that had settled like a cloud inside her car. She didn’t want a banana freeze anymore.

“I’ve got to get home,” she told Cat. “It’s Rhoda’s night to cook.”

“So you all have to suffer.” Cat understood, or she thought she did. Eureka didn’t want to discuss the fact that Ander knew they’d just tried to turn him in.

In the sun visor mirror, Cat practiced a human highlight reel of the doe-eyed expressions she had just used on Bill. “Don’t be discouraged,” she said as Eureka turned out of the parking lot and started winding back toward Evangeline, where she’d drop Cat at her car. “I just hope I’m with you the next time you see him. I’ll squeeze the truth from him. Milk it right on out.”

“Ander is good at changing the subject when the subject is himself,” Eureka said, thinking he was even better at disappearing.

“What teenage boy doesn’t want to talk about himself? He’ll be no match for the Cat.” Cat turned up the radio, then changed her mind and turned it all the way down. “I can’t believe he told you you were in danger. It’s like, ‘Hmm, should I go with the tried-and-true Does Heaven know it’s missing an angel? Nah, I’ll scare the crap out of her instead.’ ”

They passed a few blocks of dilapidated duplexes; drove by the drive-through daiquiri stand, where a girl stuck her big chest out the window and handed gallon-sized Styrofoam cups to boys in souped-up low-riders. That was flirting. What Ander did this morning, and just now across the street, that was different.

“He isn’t hitting on me, Cat.”

“Oh, come on,” Cat sputtered. “You have always, like since the age of twelve, put off this sexy-broken-girl air that guys find irresistible. You’re just the kind of crazy every boy wants to wreck his life.”

Now they were out of the city, turning onto the windy road that led to Evangeline. Eureka rolled down the windows. She liked the way this road smelled in the evenings, like rain falling on night-blooming jasmine. Locusts sang old songs in the darkness. She enjoyed the combination of cold air brushing her arms and heat blasting her feet.

“Speaking of which,” Cat said. “Brooks interrogated me about your ‘emotional state’ today.”

“Brooks is like my brother,” Eureka said. “He’s always been protective. Maybe it’s a little more intense since Diana and … everything else.”

Cat propped up her feet on the dashboard. “Yeah, he asked about Diana, only”—she paused—“it was weird.”

They passed dirt roads and old railroad tracks, log cabins chinked with mud and moss. White egrets moved through the black trees.

“What?” Eureka said.

“He called it—I remember because he said it twice—‘the killing of Diana.’ ”

“Are you sure?” Eureka and Brooks had talked a million times about what happened, and he’d never used that phrase.

“I reminded him of the rogue wave,” Cat said, and Eureka swallowed the bitter taste that came every time she heard those words. “Then he was all, ‘Well, that’s what it was: she was killed by a rogue wave.’ ” Cat shrugged as Eureka pulled into the school parking lot, stopped next to Cat’s car. “It creeped me out. Like when he dressed up as Freddy Krueger three years in a row for Halloween.”

Cat got out of the car, then glanced back at Eureka, expecting her to laugh. But things that used to be funny had darkened, and things that used to be sad now seemed absurd, so Eureka hardly ever knew how to react anymore.

Back on the main road, heading home, headlights lit Eureka’s rearview mirror. She heard Cat’s wimpy honk as her car swerved into the left lane to pass her. Cat would never criticize how cautiously Eureka drove these days—but she also wouldn’t get stuck behind her at the wheel. The engine gunned, and Cat’s taillights disappeared around a curve.

For a moment, Eureka forgot where she was. She thought about Ander skipping stones, and she wished Diana were still alive so Eureka could tell her about him.

But she was gone. Brooks had put it plainly: a wave had killed her.

Eureka saw the blind curve ahead. She’d driven it a thousand times. But as her thoughts had wandered, her speed had increased, and she took the bend too fast. Her tires bumped over the grooves in the center divider for an instant before she straightened out. She blinked rapidly, as if startled from a sleep. The road was dark; there were no streetlights on the outskirts of Lafayette. But what was …?

She squinted ahead. Something was blocking the road. Was it Cat playing a joke? No, Eureka’s headlights revealed a gray Suzuki sedan parked across the middle of the road.

Eureka slammed on the brakes. It wasn’t going to be enough. She spun the wheel right, tires screeching. She swerved onto the shoulder, across a shallow ditch. Magda came to a halt with her hood five feet deep in sugarcane.

Eureka’s chest heaved. The smell of burnt rubber and gasoline fumes made her want to gag. There was something else in the air—the scent of citronella, strangely familiar. Eureka tried to breathe. She’d almost hit that