Read Chapter 7: A Visit from the Ladies

The diner smelled of grease and old coffee, the kind of smell that soaked into the walls and never left. I’d come in for lunch—a po’boy and a cold drink—because the house felt too quiet, too full of echoes. Elodie had gone back to the store after we’d pulled the trunk from the camp, and I needed a few hours with my own thoughts before the next move.

The bell over the door clattered, and three women walked in.

They moved together like a flock of blackbirds, all dark dresses and gray hair pinned tight, their faces lined like riverbeds. I didn’t recognize them, but I knew the Broussard look when I saw it—the same wide cheekbones, the same deep-set eyes that caught the light wrong. Kinfolk. Distant, maybe, but kin.

They didn’t stop at the counter. They made straight for my booth, and the oldest of them—a woman with a mole like a speck of mud on her chin—slid into the seat across from me without asking. The other two flanked her, standing like sentinels.

“You’re Caleb,” she said. Not a question.

“Ma’am.”

“I’m Adeline. These are my sisters, Ruth and Mary-Beth. Your daddy’s cousin’s girls, twice removed.” She nodded at the diner around us, as if that explained everything. “We heard you was back. Saw you down at the boatyard this morning.”

I set my sandwich down. “You came to say hello?”

Adeline’s lips pressed thin. “We came to say a few things. You’ll listen.”

The waitress drifted by, and Adeline waved her off before I could order for them. Her hands were knotted with arthritis, the knuckles swollen, but they held steady on the tabletop. She leaned forward.

“The ledger you found. You been reading it.”

I didn’t bother denying it. The whole parish probably knew by now.

“It’s a promise, boy,” Adeline said, “not a suggestion. You understand the difference?”

“I understand a ledger tracks payments. I’m not sure what it promises.”

Ruth—the one on the left—made a sound like a wounded bird. Mary-Beth just stared at the floor, her lips moving silently.

Adeline’s eyes didn’t leave mine. “A debt gets paid every spring. Has been since before the grandmamas of our grandmamas. Your family kept the marsh safe, and the marsh kept your family fed. That water gives you boat timber, fish, crawfish, everything you ever needed. And in return, you give—what’s owed.”

“A bride,” I said.

The word hung between us like a stone dropped in still water. Ruth’s hand flew to her throat. Mary-Beth finally looked up, and there were tears already spilling down her cheeks.

Adeline didn’t flinch. “It ain’t a nice word, but it’s the true one. A girl of the blood. Broussard, or close enough that the marsh can’t tell the difference.”

“My mother.”

She didn’t answer. But something passed across her face—a shadow, a flicker—and I felt the floor shift beneath my boots.

“My father,” I said, “he was supposed to come back. The ledger says he died, but you’re saying he wasn’t the one meant to—what? Pay? Receive?”

Adeline’s jaw tightened. “Your daddy was supposed to make it right. He was the last one who knew the terms, who—” She stopped herself. Looked at her sisters. Some silent argument passed between them.

“Who what?” I pressed.

“He was supposed to find the way out,” she said finally. “Not run from it.”

The word *run* landed like a slap. My father had stayed in that house his whole life, worked the boatyard till his hands bled, never took a vacation that lasted more than a day. But the way she said it—like he’d been fleeing something all along, in place, year after year—that stuck.

“The girl in the photograph,” I said. “Liliane LaFleur. She was one of them.”

Adeline’s face went slack. For a moment I thought I’d lost her, that she’d shut down the way old women do when you touch something they’ve spent a lifetime burying. But then she did something I didn’t expect.

She laughed. A dry, cracked sound, like leaves skittering across pavement.

“Liliane LaFleur.” She shook her head slowly. “Boy, you are missing the entire point.”

“Then tell me the point.”

“The point is that Liliane *came back*. She’s the only one—ever—who came back from that water. And when she did, she weren’t right in the head.” Adeline tapped the table. “That’s why your daddy hired her granddaughter. Wanted to keep an eye on the bloodline, make sure nothing else crawled out of the bayou wearing a LaFleur face.”

The room went cold. Not the air-conditioning cold—a deeper chill, the kind that settles in your bones when the ground gives way beneath you.

“Elodie,” I said. “He hired Elodie because she’s Liliane’s granddaughter. Because of what her grandmother was.”

“Liliane was a bride,” Adeline said. “And the marsh let her go. Why? We never knew. But whatever made it let her go, it’s still in that bloodline, waiting. You think it was coincidence your Elodie was at the camp when the *things* were stirring? You think it was luck she knew where the trunk was hid?”

My hands were shaking. I put them under the table so they wouldn’t see.

“She’s not a part of this.”

“She’s been a part of this since before she was born,” Adeline said. “Same as you. Same as all of us.” She pushed herself up from the booth, the joints in her knees cracking like dry twigs. Her sisters moved to flank her again, obedient as shadows.

“Five days,” she said. “Your daddy bought you five days when he died. That’s all the time that marsh is willing to give before it comes collecting.”

“Three,” I said. “I’ve burned two already.”

Adeline’s face softened—just for a moment, just enough to show the girl she’d once been, the girl who’d watched brides go into the water and not come back.

“Then you best decide what you’re willing to pay, Caleb Broussard. Because that ledger don’t accept excuses. And it don’t accept substitutes.” She turned, then paused, reaching into her sleeve. She pressed something into my palm—a scrap of fabric, soft and worn. “Your mama give this to me the night before she went out to the marsh. Said to hold it till you come home.”

She was gone before I could open my hand.

At the table, I uncurled my fingers. A black ribbon, the same kind that bound the crate of letters I hadn’t yet opened. Tied in a knot so tight it might as well have been a fist.

Outside, the wind had picked up, and the first fat drops of rain began to spatter against the diner window. The sky had gone the color of a fresh bruise.

I shoved the ribbon in my pocket and threw a bill on the table, already moving for the door. There was a crate in my house with a hundred letters tied in black ribbon, and I had a feeling—cold and sharp as a gar’s tooth—that Adeline had just told me exactly whose hands had tied them.