The woman that answered the front door must've been somewhere in the realm of twenty-five, though Tomás was not the best judge of age, especially when it came to women. What caused him to fumble his words, though, was not the age of the woman but the familiarity of her.

"Mag-Miss Mag—"

The brunette widened her eyes in anticipation of his purpose, but she quickly realized the young man was too flustered to make sense of himself. "Are you the delivery boy?"

Tomás's mouth moved but no sound emerged.

"I expected you at the side door, but if you have the stuff, you can bring it in here, I guess."

The boy finally managed to swallow his nerves. "No," he sputtered at last, pushing his hair back from his forehead. He'd nearly forgotten why he'd come to the place, but the moment his shock subsided, his body flushed with heat and he was grateful to realize she had no idea who he was. "I'm looking—I was wondering—do you live here?"

Laughter echoed from within the building, and the woman glanced over her shoulder then back at Tomás, perplexed. "Come on. Let's talk out here." She slipped from the doorway and onto the porch, closing the house behind her.

Rain poured in sheets beyond them; the hanging plants swayed gently from the eaves, and a fine mist permeated the atmosphere. Tomás noticed the moisture immediately embrace Maggie's cheeks, the tip of her nose, like a thin film. He remembered his own soaked state, having stood on the road to examine the front of his car for a good few minutes.

"I don't live here right now," Miss Maggie explained, sweeping her straight, dark hair to her back. "Right now I'm working."

Tomás's bewildered expression urged her to clarify.

"My family owns the house, but we rent it out to big parties. Wedding parties, family reunions, stuff like that, and I help out. Just make sure things are running smoothly, get whatever they need, that sort of thing." She narrowed her eyes. "You . . . do look kind of familiar, actually, but I'm pretty busy, so . . ."

"Oh, yeah. I—I was wondering if you knew someone—a man—he would've been here yesterday, cleaning the pool, I think."

"That was probably Trent. My brother."

"Is he—"

"No. He's not here. If you give me your name and number, I'll pass it on to him."

Tomás shook his head, the bashfulness beginning to fade as thoughts of Eddie surfaced and strengthened. He couldn't return home, couldn't go back to his mother, with nothing. "My mom was here, cleaning. He talked to her about my brother, and he—my brother—he's missing, now. He went missing yesterday after school. I really need to talk to him—to, to Trent."

Something in Tomás's words struck Maggie, whose expectant features dropped into severity. "Eduardo Flores—is that your brother?"

"Yes—yes! Have you—"

"I don't know where he is. I can't help you."

"But your brother, Trent—"

"He won't know anything, either." Maggie turned back to the glass-panelled door, gripped the handle.

Irked to have been cut off, sensing this woman knew more than she was apparently willing to admit, Tomás suddenly reached out and took hold of her forearm. Touching the person he'd been surreptitiously eyeing for weeks in the school library, whose skin he'd imagined brushing with his fingertips, whose body he'd desired pressed against his own, sent a tingling sensation through his core. He nearly lost his purpose, again. "Please—"

"Let go of me!" Maggie snarled, glaring at him as she tore herself from his grasp. "And get off the porch before I call the police!"

Tomás fell back, startled by her venom and ashamed of his own effrontery. Before he could say or do anything else, the woman slipped back into the building and shut the door behind her. A void of sound and thought formed around Tomás. The blood between his ears rushed; his face burned. He had no idea what'd just happened. To think he'd been crushing on the woman, thinking she was nice. She had been nice, at least at the school, in the library! He'd been watching her interact with other students (too nervous to speak to her himself) for the past several weeks, and she'd been nothing but sweet. Friendly! No way he'd ever call her friendly, now. She'd grown a lot uglier in his estimation.

Rage and humiliation filled the young man, but he didn't know where to put his feelings. After all the horrible speculation that'd been filtering through his thoughts the past twenty-four hours, watching his mother suffer, nearly thinking he'd hit a girl on the road and now this rebuff, his emotions were hyper-charged, but all he could think to do was leave. She'd said she'd call the police, and Tomás didn't want to stick around to find out whether she meant it.

Still, he wasn't ready to head home. Clearly, his mother had caught onto something, here; Maggie's reaction to discovering he was Eddie's brother was abnormal, to say the least. Even the fact that she'd known their surname was enough to convince him something was up.

So Tomás left the porch, swatting angrily at a hanging flower basket as he descended the stairs and entered the relentless sheets of water to head around the side of the house. The building was massive, huge stately columns in the front, a menagerie of windows and outcroppings of varying sizes along the outer wall. As the boy slipped along the side of the house, he reached the end of the gardens and had to jump down a stone wall into a packed side drive. Multiple cars were there; he didn't know why and didn't care. Tomás wasn't really sure what his plans were, only that he didn't want to leave this place without exhausting his opportunity for information. Perhaps there was something weird around the pool, or—or about the house in general. His mind even raced to places so wild he considered they'd kidnapped Edddie, these people, whoever they actually might be. Or that Eddie was within the house. Tomás had no idea, and yet just as his mother had indicated something odd had been in the man's interaction with her, he felt that Maggie's interaction with him had been equally unsettling.

Crossing the little parking lot, Tomás climbed up the stone wall at the other side of it and plodded through the mud that in drier weather was a carefully landscaped garden. He had no thought, anymore, of his soaked attire—he knew he looked as if he'd just crawled up out of the very pool he spotted at the back of the house. The only difficulty he had was in wiping the rain from his eyes as it ran in continuous streams down his forehead across his face.

Just as he was about to step foot onto the back patio, a stretch of glimmering, blue-gray cobblestone pavers surrounding that stone-rimmed inground pool, Tomás heard the squeal of a spring door open and slam shut right above and to the left of him. Immediately pressing his body against the wall of the back deck and crouching, the boy unnecessarily slowed his breathing and splayed his hands against the wooden slats behind him. The pouring rain muffled any sound he might've been making, would've drowned out the young woman's conversation, as well, had she not been so bursting with anxiety she was nearly shouting.

"I swear, mother! He's here right now! What am I supposed to do?"

Instinctively, Tomás knew two things: the woman who'd stepped out onto the screened porch above him was Maggie, and she was on her phone.

"No, I didn't say anything. But it's his brother, isn't it? The kid who's gone, this time?"

She paused, and in her pause Tomás felt certain his stomach had dropped from his body. What was he hearing?

"Why didn't you tell me— . . . really? You didn't know? Don't lie to me!"

Tomás inched along the side of the building as Maggie's words flared and dulled, as her footsteps indicated she was moving toward the other side of the house. He needed to hear her; he'd do anything to hear her. There were several long pauses, bits of muffled speech, and the boy strove to take in what was said, even turning and trying to pull himself up over the ledge of the back deck. But then all at once Maggie appeared right above him, her upper half visible in the screen as she gazed of toward the next nearest house in the distance, nestled somewhere in a batch of tupelos, the trees masking the encroaching swampwaters.

Her words trembled from her lips as she rubbed her forehead, said, "I can't do this again, mom. It's your promise—not mine. Not ours."

Tomás tried his best to disappear into the wall, to merge with the slats at his stomach, at his face, as he slid back down to the ground. Surely she'd been unable to see him, hindered as she was by the screen. He wanted her to talk longer and reveal her hand, to tell him more about Eddie, but the conversation ended abruptly when someone called from inside the house, and Maggie's gait traversed the deck before the squeal of a screen door cut her off altogether.

Left alone again in the dismal weather, Tomás realized his mouth was hanging open only when enough water had filled it to cause him to sputter.

Something was definitely wrong, here. He had to find out what; Eddie's life could depend on it.

Backbone realigning itself within him, he pulled away from the wall and proceeded across the patio, to the pool, its surface a crystal aqua blue lagoon currently in constant motion from the hammering rains. The deck chairs had all been covered with plastic, and the outdoor bar beneath its prim matching roof had had its shutters pulled across its sides. Tomás didn't know what he was looking for. Should he go back up to the house? Demand Miss Maggie talk to him? As nervvy as he felt at the moment, he was unsure he could face her again. But what, then? His mother had said the man she'd spoken to had been cleaning the pool, and yet nothing looked out of the ordinary here. If anything, the backyard was beautiful, many of the azaleas holding their buds despite the pounding storms, and the whole back deck and patio lit with twinkling party lights strung all around the area as if waiting in anticipation of revelers who were most definitely not going to arrive.

His clothing stuck to him like wet towels, weighing down his legs and arms. Tomás had a sudden inclination to remove his shirt, if for no other reason than to let his skin breathe, but his stray thought was abridged when footsteps thudded down the deck stairs and he spun to see Maggie coming toward him, allowing her jeans and red t-shirt to succumb to the pouring water. Within seconds her hair hung in strings around her pale face and she'd pulled her arms tight around her torso as if cold, but she never took her gaze off of Tomás as she approached him.

"I'm sorry," she admitted intensely, inches away from him. Both of their bodies steamed against the rain. "I'm sorry I yelled at you, and I'm sorry about your brother."

"It's okay," the boy said stupidly, knowing nothing was okay but unable to say anything else.

"This is—"

But Maggie, who'd been casting her glance left and right as if looking for someone to help her explain, suddenly stopped, fixed her gaze past Tomás and toward the cypress forest beyond the patio, beyond the grassy expanse that served as a yard before it met the trees and eventually sunk into the bayou.

Momentarily nonplussed, Tomás turned and looked in the same direction, and he immediately caught sight of something gleaming white against the black of the storm-darkened foliage. Whatever it was, the thing was difficult to make out at such a distance; it appeared to hover mid-air in a hollow created by a gap in the treeline, immobile, and it surely didn't belong there.

Nostrils flaring, fists tightening, Tomás set off across the flagstones, unconcerned about anything at all but discovering what that pale mark could possibly be. He paid no attention to whether or not Maggie followed him, didn't care about her at all anymore. The pool glimmered beneath a stray bit of lightning, sparkling an almost neon blue, and the expected roll of thunder chorused across the sky. The rains had been persistent but not violent, not windy or electric, but it seemed, now, that bolts frazzled sideways at a greater frequency than before, lacing the gray like the veins of some pale deep-sea jelly. The plot of land separating the St. Jameses' pool and patio from the forest beyond was a mere twenty or so yards, but the entire tract had become a sea of saturated grass. Tomás's feet squelched and sucked against the mud with every step, as if the very earth were attempting to pull him down into it, as if it didn't want him to know what hovered in that hollow in the fringe.

But moments after he'd started out, the outline of the thing hardened, sharpened, and before he was even near it, he knew exactly what it was. Sickness flit through his gut, sadness in close competition with it. Tomás's steps began to slow out of a strange sort of reverence mingled with caution, but he couldn't stop his feet from leading him right to the thing, and when he stood directly beneath it, gazing up into the tangles fo leaves that shielded him from some of the rain, dread overtook him.

The thing's white coat, visible even though it hung too far above for him to reach it even if he jumped, was made up of tight coiled curls. Its front legs ended in hard, clean hooves, and its head, pointed toward the ground along with those forelegs, was swollen, likely from hanging for an indefinite time in its position. The thing's eyes were gone, likely a meal for hungry birds, and its tongue dripped bright red between its yellow teeth. The possibility that the lamb may have gotten there by some phenomenal mistake was erased with one look at its hindlegs, around which a thick rope was wound and knotted. The end of that rope disappeared somewhere up in the overhanging branches.

"What the fuck?" It was a whisper, and yet he didn't expect any answer to it, let alone what the woman who appeared beside him said:

"Eduardo!"

Blinking, Tomás dragged his attention from the lamb and aimed it at Maggie. "What did you just say?"

She appeared to be struggling,though she kept her eyes on the dead animal, which was suddenlt backlit by bright light, causing it nearly to glow. Tomás began to be sure he'd misunderstood her, but once the thunder had passed, she repeated herself: "Eduardo. Poor, poor boy."

Tomás scrutinized the small frame of the person before him, noted even in his agitated state the curve of her breast, the flat of her stomach, beneath her rain-soaked clothing. He swallowed, puffed a condensed breath into the earthy air. "What the hell are you talking about? It's—that's—I don't know what sort of shit you all are into, but that's—it's fucking disgusting!"

In no way upset at his scolding, Maggie stared at Tomás with so much pity he could hardly bear it. "I'm so sorry. So, so sorry."

"What? What are you talking about? If you know something about my brother, you'd better goddamned tell me, or I'll bring—"

Spinning sharply, Maggie focused her gaze back toward the house. Headlights had just made themselves visible coming up the drive leading to the side lot.

Tomás felt as if he were going insane. "What's going on here? Just talk to me!"

But the woman only shook her head slowly, absently. "That'll be the priest, then," she said with all the gravity of resignation.