Two officers hovered like flies in the kitchen; a third sat in the living room, his enormous backside sinking into the oversized chair across from Elena. The woman answered his questions for what felt the thousandth time, her body so hollow, her nerves so frayed that she couldn't even focus on the brick-of-a-face before her. None of this could actually be happening. It couldn't be. Why was Tomás trembling as he offered her the cup of tea—? No, it was in her hands, now; she was the one trembling. Tomás stood near the front window, alternately watching the pouring rain beyond it and side-eying her. How long ago had he given her the mug? Was the tea even warm, now? Was it tea at all? She glanced down. No. Not tea. It was coffee, but surely it was undrinkable at this point; a sort of film skidded across the liquid, visible when it rippled. Who'd even made coffee? She certainly hadn't. The hours had moved, both sluggish and quick, dragging painfully yet somehow folding time so that every moment that passed between when the thing had happened and the eventual holding of her little boy in her arms (because surely she would, again, surely!) felt like five.

Needles. Everywhere needles, pricking from the outside as well as the inside. Elena was desperate to move, to scream, to wail—and yet the outer needles held her back.

The officer's thick, infuriatingly calm voice screwed through the bubble in her head. Father? He was saying something about . . . Eddie's father?

Elena blinked and found herself in her living room. "Wh-what?"

"The boy's father," brick-face reiterated without missing a beat. "You sure you have no address, no number for him?"

What did Jonathan have to do with any of it? "No, no. I have no idea where—I have no information about him. He doesn't exist, for all I know."

"Nothing, Mom?" That was Tomás, from the window, where he looked as if he were drowning as the water ran in falls down the glass behind him. "You got nothing for him? You think Grandma and Grandpa—"

"No!"

The mug slipped from Elena's fingers, thumping to the carpet and soaking the shag with tepid brown liquid. The officer pulled his feet back (unnecessarily, as he was plenty distance from the mess).

"Oh, God. I-I'm sorry." Shaking, Elena leaned off the sofa, looking for something to clean up the mess, but Tomás ordered her to stop and went into the kitchen to grab a towel.

When the young man returned, he was more angry than warranted to find the officer sitting idly by, quiet, as if he were the one being put to the test. "What about the message I saw? That has to mean something," Tomás insisted, crouching to his knees to sop up the coffee.

"Not necessarily," the man sighed. "But maybe. We're looking into it."

The silence that followed, the two pairs of watchful eyes on his back as he cleaned up his mother's mess, so got under Tomás's skin that after a moment, he flung the rag aside and stood up. "Well aren't you all going to do more? Why are you still here, when you should be trying to find my brother?"

At his outburst, the two kitchen-officers ended their muted conversation and entered the living room, exchanged questioning glances with their seated peer.

"You keep asking my mom the same questions when she's already answered them! Can't you see she's tired as hell? If you'd do your jobs—"

"Tomás!" Elena rose unsteadily; her son hurried to grip her arm, to help her stand. "I'm fine, all right? Don't yell at these men."

The teen tightened his mouth, held back words as he met the eyes of each officer before helping his mother toward the hall.

"I need to lie down," the woman muttered as she left the room, forcing out some other random, rote pleasantries for the sake of the strange men in her home. When she and Tomás were relatively alone, having put a little distance between themselves and the officers and by entering her bedroom, she turned toward her boy.

Tomás had never seen his mother look so haggard. Her face was puffy from the tears she'd shed off and on over the past twenty-four hours since hearing of Eddie's disappearance, and she'd not showered or changed, was still in the maid's uniform she'd worn when cleaning the St. James house.

Gripping the boy's shirt, clutching at something she couldn't quite grasp, Elena twisted her face into an ugly knot. Her lower lids glistened. "Find Eddie," she groaned. "Bring him back."

"Mom, I—I don't know what I can do! I'm sorry I wasn't there, I—"

"Tomás!"

The boy startled at the woman's sudden cry, her wild expression.

"He asked me about Eddie! If I had . . . He—just the same day, and—"

"Who, Mamá? Who are you talking about?"

"At the house! The—the house where I was working."

Tomás leaned out the door, a little into the hallway toward the living room where he knew the officers were gathered, discussing whatever it was they thought of things. Then he quietly looked back to his mother, asked, "Someone was talking to you about Eddie? What were they saying?"

Elena released her grip on her son and fell onto her bed. She rubbed her forehead, pressed her palms into her eyes. For a moment she forgot what she'd been trying to say and shook her skull as if to rattle her thoughts back into place. "The—a man. At the house yesterday, where I was cleaning. He asked me about Eddie."

This was news to Tomás, would've been news for the officers, too. How his mother had forgotten such a detail was perplexing. "What do you mean? What exactly did he say? Exactly, mom. Exact words."

"It was . . . he . . ." Her shoulders dropped. "Just asked me whether I had any . . . kids."

Tomás sank down beside her. Unlike his mother, his limbs, his core were electric, thrumming with an energy as of yet unreleased. The urge to do something, to get out of the house and—and he didn't know what, but something—it was sucking at him. Rationally, he knew his mother's words meant nothing. People asked about other people's kids all the time, but he saw purpose; he saw a task. He saw a way to escape the building mania, if only for a half hour or so. "The person that lived in the house?"

"I don't know if he lived there. It was the—the hometowner's son. Tony—or Trey, I think, was his name. No, no! Trent?" Yes, it was Trent, Elena knew, her fumbling a façade. "He was . . . cleaning the pool." And it was the way he said it, the look he gave me, she thought, the deep unease she'd been unable to shake afterward. The rest of her time at the St. James house had been unmemorable save for that interaction as she'd gone about her business of cleaning. She'd been on her way home when Tomás had called, frantic.

Thunder rumbled, rolled in steady like slow-motion hoofbeats. "Try to get some sleep, all right? I'm going to go see about it."

"No, Tomás. Tell one of the officers—"

Rising, ignoring his mother, Tomás went to the door. In his room, he located a pair of sandals and grabbed a jacket. The only other comment he made was to the police, his assertion that he was heading out to the drugstore to pick up some meds for his mother. The officers should've had no need to stay, and yet Tomás knew they were shy of running out into the pouring rain. He, however, relished the sensation of cool water driving downward against him, pelting rather than falling, purgative in its utter soak. Since making that call to his mother a day earlier, rattling off his fear that something had happened to Eddie, that the backpack had been there but so had some weird message, he'd suffered intense guilt. If only he'd been there on time! If only he'd controlled the stupid lust he'd wanted to indulge by staying late in the library! If only . . . if only . . .

But he'd screwed up, and now something had happened, and whatever it was, he feared it wasn't going to go anywhere easy.

Elena had told Tomás to stay where he was, told him she'd be there as quickly as possible and to call the police. Those moments of waiting, Tomás had filled with scouring the area, calling for his brother, trying to see if maybe he'd been wrong, if Eddie had just wandered off a little farther than normal. But when an officer had arrived (more quickly than his own mother had) and seen the writing on the wall, she'd called in reinforcements. Everything afterward was still a blur to Tomás. He'd mostly stayed at his mother's side as the two of them answered questions and Elena wept. Tomás had tried to give useful information, but between his mother's reprimands about arriving late and the flurry of activity—photographs and notetaking and hushed conversations amongst the police—he'd been distracted and virtually useless. When the rains had begun to fall, to wash away the red words against the concrete, he'd driven his mother home. They'd spent a terrible night, restless and yet unable to do anything in the downpour, unable even to leave the house as two officers stayed until the late hours questioning them only to return early the next afternoon. For Tomás, the waiting was torture. Every moment that passed gave him reason to worry Eduardo might be trapped and drowning in the drainage channel or—worse—at the mercy of some pervert. He'd been torn between staying with his mother and seeking his brother, but now that things had somewhat calmed, now that Elena looked as if she would have to sleep, that the rain had somewhat lightened, he could take some action, even if it were small and ultimately useless.

Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? What had it meant? Tomás pondered the question as he sloshed into his car and started the engine. Washed in the blood of the lamb. It sounded somehow religious, though he wasn't one to comment on such things. He hadn't been to church since his mother had stopped trying to force him, and even when he'd gone, he'd never paid much attention to anything that happened there. Pontificating pastors and that inevitably oppressive, holy singing that accompanied them—not for Tomás. Nor were the overtones of sin and the overbearing love and justice of some man in the clouds. If he recalled properly, though, Jesus was often referred to as a lamb. Or maybe he was the shepherd that watched the lambs . . . ? Or was it just that there was some story about a lamb that got separated from the flock, and someone went to find it . . . ? Well, sacrificial lambs. Shedding blood. That sort of thing—it had some kind of meaning to it, and the message had looked like it was written in blood. It had been. Someone had sampled and tested it. It was blood but definitely not Eddie's. That they knew for certain. It'd been some kind of animal blood. What sort, Tomás didn't know; no one had told him or his mother that part. And how long it'd been there was debateable, as well, though it'd looked to be relatively fresh, gleaming, before the rains washed it away. The officers had implied that maybe Eddie had done it, been grafitting the channel wall before running off for fear of getting in trouble, but Tomás knew that couldn't be right. His little brother was a rule follower. And besides, where would he have gotten animal blood? To Tomás's knowledge, no dead animals had been found near the scene, and besides, those letters had been big and the words long . . . it'd taken a hell of a lot of blood to write them.

With each passing hour, the live wire inside Tomás had grown hotter, begun sparking more. The police weren't reacting the way he wanted them to, the way he expected them to work based on all the movies and television he'd watched growing up. And his mother was about to sink into the swamp of her own increasing misery. So even though this "Trent" person at the St. James house likely had zero answers, confronting him was something to occupy his mind.

The rain began to lighten somewhat, though the sky itself seemed darker, the clouds a bleak charcoal indicative of more thunder and lightning. Tomás drove through town, away from his suburban neighborhood where mostly elder homeowners resided and toward the city center, the charming main street lined with its cafés and shops. He passed St. Basilio's Catholic Church, where the bells were tolling six o'clock (Tomás at first mistook their ringing for a rather melodious peal of thunder). Through winding streets and out onto a two-lane road that led to the less-picturesque but more realistic Target and Walmart, the Dollar General and the chain grocery stores, the cinema and the fast food joints, he followed the general direction of the river that flowed at some distance beyond the entire town of Luther. Tomás knew it was back there always, winding its way through black and hanging veils, silent and still even as the rain filled it. The aquatic and semi-aquatic creatures there were a constant, lurking and waiting, and though the Flores family had been in Louisiana their whole lives, they were as of yet unfamiliar with this backwoods swampiness that fed into the Atchafalaya basin. They'd been in Luther only a short while.

Tomás's wipers whipped back and forth, unable to keep up with the torrents that returned with a sudden crack of lightning. He himself was dripping wet, having sustained the downpour as he ran from his house to the car. His feet slipped against the gas and brake pedals; his hair dripped into his eyes. The road was nearly empty as it left the shopping centers and headed back behind the main street, toward the old quarter where the huge estate houses, the ones with their "Century Home" plaques, stood solid against the hanging moss and magnolia trees. Even in this weather, in this dimming evening, the columns and porches and balconies of the houses shone fiercely within their hollows.

Just as Tomás was about to pull over, to search the St. James house address in his phone after realizing he had no notion of which particular building it was, a streaming white figure appeared from the mist and whisked toward the center of the road. Even though he'd begun to slow the car, Tomás crushed the brake in his shock.

Seconds ticked past; the boy became aware, suddenly, of his own heavy breathing, mingling with the rainfall against his windows and the rub of his wipers. Had that been . . . a person? He was sure it'd . . . yes. The way it'd looked at him! He was sure the flowy white thing—a girl? in a dress?—she'd turned toward him, at the last moment, and . . . and her face! The eyes had been dark as holes in her head, voids against the pale wateriness of her cheeks and forehead, and her mouth was open as if in a howl or cry but he'd not heard it, and he'd . . . he'd hit her! But, the car. Tomás would've felt the impact, wouldn't he? And . . . and he'd not. He'd just stopped the car. It'd skidded a little, but it had stopped. There'd been no impact. He hoped . . .

Shaking so much he struggled to grab the handle, Tomás opened his driver's side door and stepped hesitantly into the mist and showers. He'd left the headlights on, left the car running; steam rose in condensing clouds through the beams of yellow light as he inched toward the front of his car. He was sure something had caught in his throat.

But his terror died as quickly as the child had stepped out. No person or animal or any creature at all lay on the pavement or beneath his tires. There was no sign, in fact, that anything had been there, and though Tomás was indeed relieved to find he hadn't run over someone, he was just as unsettled to consider that he might have hallucinated the ghostly vision. Only after bending over and dry-heaving his fear onto the hood of his car was the young man able to return to the vehicle and continue toward his destination, though for a moment, he'd forgotten why he was headed there at all.