Read Chapter 11: Other Beds

The chapel sat on a knoll of high ground that the swamp had never managed to swallow, a whitewashed plank building gone gray with weather, its steeple listing three degrees off true. Caleb had known it since childhood as a place the old women went to pray when the fishing was bad or the fever came round. He'd never been inside until now.

Elodie pushed the door open and stepped over the threshold without asking permission. The air inside was cool and still, heavy with candle wax and the faint sourness of old hymnals. A dozen pews sat in neat rows, and someone had left a spray of plastic lilies on the altar rail, the petals faded pink by sun through the windows.

"Nobody'll look here," Caleb said, though he wasn't sure that was true. The marsh had a way of knowing where people went, and whatever had been sounding that horn the past two nights seemed to know a good deal more than it ought.

Elodie dropped her bag on the front pew and ran her hand along the back of it, leaving a faint streak in the dust. "You sound like you're trying to convince yourself."

"I'm trying to think." He moved to the window and checked the yard—empty, the grass tall and unmown, the road beyond it a pale ribbon in the last light. "Landry's enforcer knows my face. The sheriff's office might as well be his front parlor. And whatever came up through my father's floorboards isn't going to respect a church roof."

"Then why did you bring us here?"

He turned from the window. She stood in the aisle, arms crossed, watching him with those steady eyes. He'd known her barely a week and already she'd lied to him, nearly cost him everything, and then handed him back a piece of himself he hadn't known he was missing. He didn't know what that made her. He only knew he didn't want to be alone in this.

"Because it's the last place my mother brought me before she went into the marsh," he said. "I thought maybe she knew something about holy ground that I don't."

The words sat between them a moment. Elodie's arms uncrossed, and she sat down heavily on the pew, sudden as a dropped sack. The boards creaked under her weight.

"You never told me she came here."

"Didn't seem relevant until a dead thing wearing my father's face left a child's shoe on my table."

She pressed her palms flat against her thighs. Her knuckles were pale. "I should tell you something. Before we go any further down whatever road this is." She lifted her eyes to his. "You asked me once why I was really here. I told you Remy hired me to watch the sale. That was true."

"But not the whole truth."

"No." She took a breath. "I have a sister. Ava. She's twenty-six, two years younger than me. She worked as a paralegal in New Orleans, and two years ago, she came up here on her own time to look into something—she never told me what. She was interested in land records, old claims on the bayou. I thought it was a hobby. Something to do on weekends."

Caleb felt his chest tighten. "She went missing."

"Disappeared. No body, no note, no trail. Her car was found at a pull-off on the parish road, keys still in it, doors locked." Elodie's voice held steady, but her fingers had gone white where they gripped her thighs. "The sheriff's department spent six weeks and found nothing. I spent two years and found less."

"Landry."

"Remy called me six months ago. Not with information. With leverage." She finally let go of her legs and folded her hands in her lap. "He said he knew people who could tell me where Ava went, people who only talked to him. He said if I took the contract on your father's estate and kept him informed, he'd make those introductions."

"You believed him."

"I didn't have the luxury of not believing." She met his eyes. "He gave me details about Ava's last days that the public record never contained. Where she ate lunch. What she ordered. The name of the gas station clerk she asked for directions. He knows where she went, Caleb. I'm sure of it."

"And you're still working for him."

"Not anymore. I walked away from his money at your place two nights ago." She smiled a thin, tired smile. "So I'm either free now or I've signed my own death warrant. I haven't decided which."

Caleb lowered himself onto the pew across from her. His legs felt strange, disconnected. He'd spent three years away from this parish, building boats for men who paid on time and never looked at the water sideways. He'd thought he'd left the swamp's logic behind. But the swamp had a longer memory than he did, and it had been waiting.

"You think Ava got into the covenant. The Broussard covenant."

"I think she got too close to something that didn't want to be found." Elodie's voice dropped. "She was researching the families named in the old ledgers. The ones who paid the bride price."

Caleb's stomach turned over. The ledger sat locked in his truck outside, wrapped in oilcloth with the moss doll and his mother's letters. He hadn't opened any of it since that morning. He wasn't sure he could.

"Then we go to the sheriff," he said. "Together. We tell him what we know about Landry and the dredging contract and the timing of my father's death."

Elodie shook her head slowly. "You think I didn't try that in the first year Ava was gone?"

The parish sheriff's office was a squat brick building off Main Street, its sally port rusted and its flagpole bent from an old hurricane. The desk sergeant looked up when they came through the door, recognized Elodie, and buzzed them back without a word.

Sheriff Boyette was a man of sixty-odd with a neck like a bullfrog's throat and eyes that had gone flat from looking at too much of other people's trouble. He didn't stand when they came in. He closed the folder on his desk, folded his hands on top of it, and waited.

"This is becoming a habit," Boyette said, looking at Elodie. "Two years ago, you were in that same chair, telling me your sister didn't wander off. I told you then what I'll tell you now. Swamp sickness."

"Swamp sickness." Caleb heard his own voice come out hard. "That's what you call it when a woman walks into the marsh and never comes back?"

Boyette's gaze shifted to him. "I call it that because that's what the death certificates say. Every single one." He pulled open a drawer and took out a stack of paper thin as onion skin, held together with a rubber band. He tossed it onto the desk. "That's every official death report filed in this parish in the last thirty years related to the Atchafalaya basin. Farmers, fishermen, surveyors, two tax assessors, a deputy named Landry, and one pastor who went out to deliver last rites to a dying man and never made it. Every one of them lists cause of death as misadventure or exposure. Swamp sickness."

"And everyone who pressed a claim about the Broussard land?" Caleb asked.

Boyette's eyes flickered. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You do." Caleb set his palms on the desk. "My father died in that marsh. My mother went in before him. And I've got a feeling you've signed off on both of them without ever looking at the water."

Boyette pushed back from the desk. For a moment, something moved behind those flat eyes—a memory, maybe, or the shadow of one. He picked up the folder he'd been reading and opened it. Inside, yellowed forms, their letterhead old and their ink browning.

"Your mother," he said quietly. "Liliane Broussard. I was the deputy who took the report when she went missing. I walked the marsh line for three days with the search dogs. Dogs wouldn't cross the waterline." He looked up. "Not a single one would set paw in that water. They'd been trained for swamp work, and they wouldn't go in."

"And you filed swamp sickness anyway."

"I filed what the parish coroner told me to file." Boyette closed the folder. "He was dead within a year. Heart attack. He was fifty-one and ran marathons." He stood, and the weight of the room settled onto his shoulders. "I'm telling you right now, because you've come into my office and because I knew your father. Whatever you think you've found out there, whatever you think you know—there is no one in this parish who will help you press it. There is no agency in this state that will touch it. And there is no force on God's green earth that will make me write your name in that ledger of deaths before your time."

He walked around the desk and opened the door. "The chapel on the LeBlanc road has a bell rope. If you're in trouble, you pull it, and somebody will come. But that's all I can give you. That and a piece of advice."

Caleb waited.

"Seven generations. That's how long my family has been in this parish. And I can tell you every Broussard bride that ever went into that marsh came from somewhere else. Every one of them was an outsider. And every one of them who tried to find out what happened to the ones before her ended up in the water herself." Boyette's jaw worked. "You're Broussard blood. That makes you a paymaster, not a payment. Leave while you still count as the former."

The chapel was dark when they got back, the last of the light gone violet through the windows. Caleb found a box of candles in the vestry and lit three of them on the altar rail. They made a small pool of light that didn't reach the far corners.

Elodie laid out their sleeping bags between the pews, back to back, walled in by wood on one side and their gear on the other. She'd told the sheriff her story, and Boyette had listened with a kind of heavy patience that meant he'd heard it before. He hadn't offered to reopen Ava's case. He hadn't offered to look into Landry. He'd given them direction to a chapel and a warning to leave.

Caleb lay awake for a long time, listening to the wind move through the cypress outside, the rustle of palmettos, the distant creak of boats at anchor on the river. The foghorn hadn't sounded since sunset. He didn't know if that was a good sign or the quiet before whatever came next.

At some point he slept, because he woke to gray light through the windows and the smell of coffee ground fresh somewhere outside. He sat up, stiff-necked and cold, and saw Elodie already awake at the far window, a tin cup in her hands, looking out at the yard.

"You sleep at all?" he asked.

"Some." She didn't turn around. "Caleb. Come look at this."

He got up, wrapped the sleeping bag around his shoulders, and crossed the plank floor to stand beside her. Her cup trembled slightly as she lifted it to her lips.

He looked where she was looking. The ground outside the chapel door was soft red clay, still dark from the rain two nights past and the heavy dew that rolled off the marsh every morning. And crossing it, from the tree line to the chapel steps, a double line of footprints.

Bare feet. Small. The print of a woman's arch, a delicate heel, toes that pressed deep where their owner had been moving fast.

They were wet. Somewhere a few hundred feet away, the marsh's edge glistened like a mouth opening.

Caleb looked at the prints, and then he looked at the door, and then he looked at the ground inside the chapel, where a track of wet bare footprints crossed the threshold and stopped in a circle around where their sleeping bags had been laid, each print distinct in the dust and still shining.

No one was there. The chapel was empty. The prints went in a circle—one, two, three times—and then they stopped.

Elodie's cup rattled against her teeth as she set it down on the sill. "They went around us," she said. "Three times. While we were sleeping."

Caleb looked at the circle of prints, and he thought of his mother's letters, still sealed in oilcloth in the truck outside, and he thought of a woman small enough to leave footprints like a child's but heavy enough to press through the dust of a church floor.

"Whoever she is," he said. "She knows where we are."

The coffee in Elodie's cup had gone cold, but she drank it anyway. Outside, the marsh was starting to wake, birds beginning their calls, the water stirring with the first touch of sun. The footprints were already drying, the wet sheen fading into the clay.

They didn't speak again until the sun was fully up, and by then the prints were gone, as if they'd never been.