Read Chapter 21: The Whistle of Drowned Men

The social worker’s name was Mrs. Thibodeaux, and she had the crisp, unyielding posture of a woman who had already made up her mind before she walked through the hospital room door. She wore a beige pantsuit that smelled faintly of mothballs, and she carried a manila folder like a shield.

“Mr. Broussard,” she said, not looking at Elodie, who was cradling the infant against her chest. “I understand you’ve had a difficult week. But you cannot seriously expect the state to release an unidentified child into the care of a man living in a houseboat with no running water.”

Caleb stood between her and the bed. His shirt was still stiff with dried swamp mud. He hadn’t slept in two days. “The water’s running fine. I fixed the pump this morning.”

“And the structural integrity of your dock?”

“The dock’s been standing for a hundred and twelve years.”

Mrs. Thibodeaux opened the folder, though she didn’t look at it. “And the fact that this child has no legal parents, no birth certificate, and no known origin?”

“She has an origin. She just doesn’t have paperwork.”

Elodie shifted the baby, who made a soft, gurgling sound. The child had been quiet since the spectral woman had vanished into the marsh grass. Too quiet, almost. The doctors had run every test they had, called in a specialist from Lafayette who’d shrugged and called it “a miracle of hydration.” Now the baby’s eyes were open, dark and wet, tracking the fluorescent lights with an intelligence that made Caleb’s skin prickle.

“The child will be placed in temporary foster care,” Mrs. Thibodeaux said, closing the folder with a snap. “Pending a full investigation. You’ll receive visitation rights, of course, assuming you comply with the home inspection.”

“No.”

The word came out harder than Caleb intended. The social worker’s eyebrows rose.

“Excuse me?”

“She stays with us.”

Mrs. Thibodeaux’s lips thinned. “Mr. Broussard, I understand you’ve formed an attachment. But this is not a stray kitten.”

Elodie stood up, the baby pressed to her shoulder. Her voice was quiet but carried steel. “This child came out of the earth beneath our feet. She was left for us. You can’t just—take her.”

“Ma’am, with all due respect, the state has procedures for situations like this.”

“Has the state ever had a situation like this?”

The social worker didn’t have an answer for that. She wrote something in her folder, then looked at Caleb. “I’ll give you until four o’clock this afternoon to produce a lawyer. After that, the child goes into temporary placement. You’ll be notified of the hearing date.”

She left without waiting for a response. The door swung shut with a pneumatic hiss.

Elodie looked at Caleb. Her eyes were red-rimmed, exhausted. “What do we do?”

“We get a lawyer who knows how to pull strings.” Caleb pulled out his phone. “I know a woman in Baton Rouge. Ruby LaFleur. She got my father out of a contract dispute with Remy’s grandfather back in ’09. If anyone can stall the state, it’s her.”

---

Ruby LaFleur was a fifty-something woman with a silver bob and a voice like cracked gravel. She met them at the parish courthouse annex at 3:15, took one look at the baby, and said, “Jesus Christ, Broussard. You don’t do things by half, do you?”

But she was also a pragmatist. By 3:55, she’d filed an emergency motion, called a judge she played cards with every Thursday, and gotten the placement hearing moved up to 9 a.m. the following morning. What she couldn’t do was stop the temporary placement.

“It’s just overnight, sugar,” Ruby said, patting Elodie’s arm. “I’ll make the case tomorrow. But right now, there’s a foster family two towns over with an open bed and a clean record. The judge won’t budge on that.”

“Which family?” Caleb asked.

Ruby glanced at her notes. “A couple named Arceneaux. They run a little crawfish operation off the parish line.”

Caleb’s blood went cold.

“The Arceneaux place,” he said slowly, “borders the marsh on the north side. They’ve got a stretch of open water that feeds straight into the old cypress grove.”

Ruby frowned. “Is that a problem?”

Caleb looked at Elodie. The spectral woman’s words echoed in his head: *Keep the baby away from the water. Away from the old cypress.*

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

---

The visiting hours were short. The Arceneaux house was a low, sagging structure on stilts, surrounded by a moat of damp lawn that smelled of dead fish and wet wood. The foster mother, a tired-looking woman with a sharp jaw and kind eyes, took the baby without asking questions. She held the child the way you’d hold a ticking package, wary but professional.

“We’ll take good care of her,” she said, but her eyes flicked toward the marsh, and Caleb saw something in them. A flicker of recognition. Of fear.

Of course, he thought. Everyone in this parish knows what lives in the water.

They drove back to the boatyard in silence. The sun was low, bleeding orange and purple across the sky. The swamp that had been dry for three days was still a cracked, dead basin of mud and white-painted stumps, but Caleb couldn’t shake the feeling that it was watching him.

He didn’t sleep.

He sat on the edge of the boatyard dock, a thermos of cold coffee beside him, listening to the night. The crickets had started to return, tentatively, probing the dry air with their song. But beneath that, there was something else.

A whistle.

It started low and thin, a curl of sound that wound its way through the dead cypress. It was a tune—old, familiar, the kind of melody you’d hear drifting from a church window on a Sunday morning. But there was something wrong with it. A second note hanging underneath, like a harmony sung by a throat that didn’t quite open properly.

Caleb stood up. His hands were shaking.

The whistle shifted, resolving into a pattern. Three notes, then four, then a long falling phrase that had no root in any scale he knew. And then, as if the swamp were forming words out of the air itself, he heard a name.

*Celestine.*

That was his great-grandmother. The one who’d gone into the water in 1931.

The whistle shifted again. A new tune. A new name.

*Yvonne.*

His father’s sister. Drowned in 1954, or so the story went. The family had always said it was a boating accident.

The whistle kept going. Names rolled past him, carried on that impossible melody, each one a stitch in the fabric of the Broussard line. *Marie. Odette. Suzanne.* Some he recognized from the covenant ledger. Others he didn’t, buried deeper in the family’s history, in branches that had been cut off and forgotten.

And then, at the end, the whistle changed. It turned sharp and urgent, a single repeated note, like a finger tapping a windowpane. Three times. Then silence.

Caleb stood there for a long moment, cold sweat trickling down his back. He counted backward from the last name he’d heard. Seventeen names total. Seventeen brides.

The whistle had been counting down.

He pulled out his phone and dialed Ruby. She answered on the third ring, groggy.

“Ruby. The foster placement. The Arceneauxs.”

“What about them?”

“I need them to give the baby back. Tomorrow. At the hearing.”

“Caleb, that’s not how the system works—”

“The whistle,” he said. “It’s a countdown. I heard seventeen names. Seventeen. The last one was my grandmother’s sister. And then it stopped at three.”

There was a pause. Ruby’s voice was suddenly very awake. “Three what?”

“Three days. That’s how long I have to adopt her and sever the covenant. After that, the water comes back. And when it does, it’s going to take her.”

The silence stretched. In the background, he heard Ruby’s bedsheets rustle.

“You’re not crazy,” she said slowly. “I’ve seen the reports from the parish hospital. The footage. I believe you.”

“Then help me.”

“I’ll do what I can. But Caleb—to adopt an infant in the state of Louisiana, you need a birth certificate. You need a legal name. You need a paper trail.” She let out a breath. “This child has none of those things.”

“Then we make one.”

“You can’t just—”

“We find the envelope,” Caleb said. “The one addressed to ‘the next bride.’ It was in the cradle. Whatever’s inside, it might have answers. A name. A date. Something that makes her real.”

The line was quiet. Then Ruby said, “I’ll meet you at the courthouse at seven. Don’t do anything stupid before then.”

She hung up.

Caleb stood on the dock, staring out at the dry, dead swamp. Somewhere out there, beneath the cracked mud, he could hear the faintest trickle of water moving. The entity was stirring. Waiting.

Three days.

He didn’t have time for stupid. He had time for impossible.