Carolina Moon

She was limp as the dead. Shaken as much by her utter stillness as the story she’d told, he carried her away quickly. He thought, hoped, if he got her away from that spot, that place, she’d be better.
    Even as he bent to lay her back in the car she stirred. When her eyes opened, they were dark and glazed.
    “It’s all right. You’re all right. I’m going to get you home.”
    “I just need a minute.” The queasiness came on, and the chill. But they would pass. The horror would take longer. “I’m sorry.” She shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry.”
    “For what?” He skirted the hood, got back behind the wheel. Then just sat. “I don’t know what to do for you. There ought to be something I could do. I’m going to get you home, then I’ll come back and … I’ll find her.”
    Confused, Tory stared at him. “She isn’t there now. It happened a long time ago. Years ago.”
    He started to speak, then stopped himself. Alice, she’d said. A young blond girl named Alice. It stirred his memory, and a kind of sickness in his gut. “Does it always come on you like that? Out of nowhere?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “It hurts you.”
    “No, it wears you out, makes you a little sick, but it doesn’t hurt.”
    “It hurts you,” he said again, and reached down to turn the key.
    “Cade.” Tentatively she touched a hand to his. “It was … I’m sorry to bring this back to you, but you have to know. It was like Hope. That’s why it came so strong. It was like Hope.”
    “I know it.”
    “No, you don’t understand. The man who killed that poor girl, left her there in the trees, it was the same man who killed Hope.”

Progress

Would you realize what Revolution is, call it Progress; and would you realize what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.
— Victor Hugo

11
    I didn’t want to believe it. There were—are—dozens of rational, logical reasons why Tory is wrong. Small points and major ones that make her claim about the teenager killed along the roadside impossible. The girl couldn’t have been murdered by the same monster who killed my sister.
    Little Hope with her flyaway hair and eyes full of fun and secrets.
    I can list those reasons here in a straightforward manner, the way I couldn’t seem to relate to Tory last night. I know I let her down. I know by the way she looked at me, by the way she slipped back behind that barricaded silence of hers. I know I hurt her by the way I turned aside her claim, the way I suggested, no, insisted, that she let it alone.
    But what she told me, what she let me see through her eyes, the horror she relived right in front of me, and later spoke of with such quiet restraint, brought it all back. Brought me back to that long-ago summer when everything in the world changed.
    Maybe it’ll help more to write of Hope than of that doomed young girl I never knew.
    As I sit here at my father’s desk—for it will forever be my father’s desk in everyone’s mind, including my own—I can turn back the days and months and years until I’m twelve again, still innocent enough to be careless with people I love, still seeing my friends as superior in every way to family, still dreaming of the day when I’m old enough to drive, or to drink, or to do any of the magical things that belong to the coveted world of adulthood.
    I’d done my chores that morning, as always. My father had been a stickler for responsibilities, and for hammering what was expected of me into my head. At least he was before we lost Hope, I’d gone out with him, midmorning, to look over the fields. I remember standing, looking over that ocean of cotton. My father stuck mostly with cotton, even when many of the neighboring farms turned heavily to soybeans or tomatoes or tobacco. Beaux Reves was cotton, and I was never to forget it.
    I never did.
    And that day it was so simple to see why, to stand and look out over that vast space, to see the magic of the bolls burst open by the straining lint. To watch the stalks bend with the weight—some of them carrying what must have been a hundred bolls, all cracked open like eggs. And that late in the year, with the fields so rich with it, the very air smelled of cotton. The hot smell of summer dying.
    It was to be a good harvest that year. The cotton would spill into the fields, be picked and bagged and processed. Beaux Reves would go on, even with those who lived in it little more than ghosts.
    I was set free shortly after noon. While my father expected me to work,