Aileen was the sweetest woman in New Iberia—and the only woman Eureka knew whose sweetness wasn’t saccharine. She wore heels to do dishes but let her hair go naturally gray, which had happened early, raising two boys by herself.
“No, Aileen’s not involved,” Ander said, as if incapable of recognizing sarcasm. “But she is worried about Brooks. Last night she searched his room for drugs.”
Eureka rolled her eyes. “Brooks doesn’t do drugs and he and his mom have a great relationship. Why are you making this up?”
“Actually, the two of them had a screaming fight last night. All the neighbors heard it; you might try asking one of them if you don’t trust me. Or ask yourself: Why else would his mother have stayed up all night baking cookies?”
Eureka swallowed. Aileen did bake when she was upset. Eureka had eaten the proof a hundred times when Brooks’s older brother had become a teenager. The instinct must have come from the same place as Dad’s need to nourish sadness with his cooking.
And just this morning, before first bell, Brooks had passed around a Tupperware of peanut butter cookies in the hall, laughing when people called him a mama’s boy.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She meant: How could you know these things? “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I can stop Brooks. I can help you, if you’ll let me.”
Eureka shook her head. Enough. She winced as she dove in among the branches and clawed her way through, snapping twigs and tearing at the moss. Ander didn’t try to stop her. From the corner of her eye she saw him wind up to skip another stone.
“You were a lot cuter before you started talking to me,” she shouted back at him, “when you were just a guy who hit my car.”
“You think I’m cute?”
“Not anymore!” She was bound up in branches, thrashing hatefully at everything in her path. She stumbled, gashed her knee, pushed on.
“Do you want some help?”
“Leave me alone! Right now and going forward!”
At last she shoved through the final layer of branches and stumbled to a stop. Cool air stroked her cheeks.
A stone whizzed through the gap in the branches her body had created. It skimmed the water three times, like wind rippling silk; then it ricocheted upward, into the air. It sailed higher, higher … and smashed into a window of the planetarium, where it left a jagged, gaping hole. Eureka imagined all the artificial stars inside swirling out into the true gray sky.
In the silence that followed, Ander said: “If I leave you alone, you’ll die.”
18
PALE DARKNESS
“I feel like a narc,” Eureka told Cat in the waiting room at the Lafayette police station that evening.
“It’s a precaution.” Cat held out a short tube of Pringles from the vending machine, but Eureka wasn’t hungry. “We’ll throw out a description of Ander, see if it sticks. Wouldn’t you want to know if they already had a file for him?” She rattled the can to slide out more chips and chewed contemplatively. “He did make a death threat.”
“He did not make a death threat.”
“ ‘If I leave you alone, you’ll die’? He’s not here now and you’re alive, right?”
Both girls looked at the opposite window as if it occurred to them simultaneously that Ander might be watching them. It was Thursday, dinnertime. It had taken less than five minutes after leaving Ander under the oak tree for Eureka to breathlessly share the details of their encounter with Cat over the phone. Now she regretted opening her mouth.