Carolina Moon

up the stairs. Faith was in her room, putting some fancy dress on one of her pack of Barbie dolls. I know because I took the time and trouble to stop at her door and sneer.
    I had a shower, as I had, shortly before, decided baths were for girls and old wrinkled men. I’m sure I put my dirty clothes in the hamper, as Lilah would have twisted the lobe of my ear if I’d done otherwise. I put on clean clothes, combed my hair, likely took a few moments to flex my biceps and study the results in the mirror. Then I went downstairs.
    We had chicken for supper. Roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, and the peas that were fresh from the garden. Faith didn’t care for peas and refused to eat hers, which might have been tolerated, but she made an issue of it, as Faith often did, and ended up sassing Mama and being sent from the table in disgrace.
    I believe Chauncy, Papa’s faithful old hound who died the next winter, got what was left on her plate.
    After supper, I poked around outside, devising a way I would talk Papa into letting me build a fort. Thus far my efforts in this area had been a dismal failure, but I thought if I could locate the right spot, one that would conceal the proposed structure so that it wouldn’t be the eyesore Papa imagined, I would succeed.
    It was during this reconnoiter that I found Hope’s bike where she’d hidden it behind the camellias.
    I never thought of tattling. It just wasn’t the way we worked as siblings, unless temper or self-interest outweighed loyalty. It didn’t even concern me, though I imagined she planned to sneak out and meet Tory somewhere that night as they were thick as thieves all that summer. I knew she’d done so before, and didn’t blame her. Mama was much more strict on her daughters than she was on her son. So I said nothing about the bike and set my mind on the fort.
    One word from me, and her plans would have been shattered. She’d have shot me one of her hot, angry looks under her lashes, and likely have refused to speak to me for a day, two if she could hold out.
    And she’d have been alive.
    Instead. I went back into the house around dusk and planted myself in front of the TV as was my right on a long summer night. Being twelve, I had a powerful appetite and eventually wandered out to hunt up some appropriate snack. I ate potato chips and watched Hill Street Blues and wondered what it was like to be a policeman.
    By the time I went to bed, with a full stomach and tired eyes, my sister was already dead.
    He’d thought he could write more, but he couldn’t manage it. He’d intended to write down what he knew about his sister’s murder, and the murder of a young girl named Alice, but his thoughts had veered away from the facts and the logic and had left him steeped in memories and grief.
    He hadn’t realized how completely she would come alive for him if he wrote of her. How the pictures of that night, and the horrible images of the next morning, would run through his mind like a film.
    Was that, he wondered, how it was for Tory? Like a movie playing in the mind that would not be stopped?
    No, it was more. Did she know that when she’d been caught in that vision the night before she’d spoken to the girl rather than about her? Perhaps the girl Alice had spoken through her.
    What kind of strength did it take to face that, to survive it and build a life?
    He picked up what he’d written, started to lock it in a drawer of the old desk. Instead he folded the pages, sealed them in an envelope.
    He would need to see Tory again. Need to speak with her again. He’d been right on that first day when he’d told her the ghost of his sister stood right there between them.
    There would be no going forward or back until they’d each come to terms with what they’d lost.
    He heard the old grandfather clock call the hour with its hollow, echoing bongs. Two lonely beats. He would be up again in four hours, dressing in the pale light, eating the breakfast Lilah would insist on fixing, then driving from field to field, eyeing the crops with all the faith and fatalism every farmer was born with, checking for pests, studying the sky.
    Despite, or perhaps because of, all the science he studied and implemented, Cade’s Beaux Reves was more plantation than the farm of his father. He hired more laborers, stuck with more handwork than the generation before him. He put more effort, and more of the profits, into the ginning and the compression and storage and