The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,107

Bet had urged her to come, Shelby would have been thinking of Thalia’s Disney version of DeLop, freshly stocked with clean-scrubbed orphans and friendly old Aunt Enid.

Laurel had gone around in almost a complete circuit without seeing any evidence of Shelby’s passing. She checked her cell phone and saw that she had two bars of reception. If Shelby had returned to Sissi’s, David would have called. He hadn’t, and neither had Thalia. It was tiny here. There were no businesses, no public buildings except the church where the older Folks still gathered to sing most Sundays. There were only so many places Shel could be.

Laurel was on her mother’s old street now, Jane Way, approaching the burned ruin of the house where Mother had spent her early childhood. Laurel stopped the car and shifted it into park. Would Bet have brought Shel here? Surely Shelby would want to see this place.

Laurel got out, leaving the door open and the engine running. There wasn’t much to see. The house had burned to its foundation and was nothing but a concrete slab and three scrolled wrought-iron posts that must have been part of a porch.

She stepped up onto the concrete, breathing deep, as if trying to catch a scent. The filth seemed undisturbed. If Bet and Shelby had passed this way, they’d left no indication. There was no sign of the years Mother had spent here, either. That genteel lady who spoke in a TV southern accent had once called this place home. That seemed important somehow. Laurel was missing something, some obvious clue, but anything the fire had not destroyed had long since been stripped away and carted off for use in other places. Mother had lived mostly at Poot’s until Daddy had come with his church youth group in their old bus, bent on good works, bringing ham and brown bags full of hand-me-downs.

Laurel saw it then. She went to her knees on the concrete as if she’d been knocked there. Mother came back here Christmas after Christmas, bringing all the same things Daddy once brought her. To Mother, it wasn’t a Christmas trip. It was a rescue mission. Once a year, she left her ordered life, the one she had created and kept peaceful at all cost, to foray here, into squalor, the enemy territory. It was more than the high school graduates who had gotten out had done.

But Daddy had come back to DeLop because he’d fallen in love with Mother, not to bring her ham. He had been warm and avid, coming out of Daddy-land to look at her. Mother could not see the difference. A cold offering of shoes and good manners was like throwing bricks to drowning people, thinking they were ropes. Still, it was the very best she could do. Laurel put her hands flat on the filthy concrete and accepted it. Everything. Looking at this place baldly, seeing it for what it was, Laurel knew: Mother had done the very best she could.

This had once been Mother’s town, but she had left it, and she no longer chose to understand it. She had made herself an outsider, and she had raised Laurel to be one as if it were a gift. Laurel had been thinking like an outsider ever since they’d gotten on the road. They all had. But now, hands on the filthy slab, knees aching, Laurel saw inside DeLop.

Thalia had said if it were her, she’d wind Shelby around in the streets and leave her. But to Bet, these people weren’t scary. They were as familiar and regular as the kudzu pressing in around this lot.

If Bet meant Shelby harm, she wouldn’t expect it to come in the form of Raydee and Louis or even dogs like Mitchell. They weren’t dangerous to Bet. But she had brought Shelby here for a reason. There was something here that Bet must think was dangerous. Something she could use.

Laurel remembered the drowned uncle Bet had found, his face “et” by the crawdads. Remembered Molly floating in the center of the pool. And then Laurel knew.

She was already up and running, leaving the car where it was parked, because she couldn’t get there by car; there was a chain over the access road that had once let the coal trucks come and load. But there was still a footpath that was open, up behind Enid’s house, two hundred yards or so down the road. Laurel was fumbling her cell phone out of her pocket as