“Hiram was in the passenger seat of the truck when we was driving out back to the strawberry fields. He was two years younger than me and four years younger than Rose. She was just turned sixteen that summer. Rose almost run the whole farm by herself. Hiram was mad he couldn’t be the man in charge but had to sit with his sister at the wheel. Hiram dared not say one word to Daddy for fear of the horse whip on his back. He surely did go on to Rose about how it weren’t fair. He’d never take a turn in the back or stand alongside the passenger side of the cab on them running boards. That’s where Hiram made the dirt-poor kids stand who came to work on the farm. July is always such a hot month and you’d kill for a ride even just twenty feet.

“They held onto the truck with one hand and their hats with the other so the wind wouldn’t steal them away into the woods. “I remember how Elmore was standing on the running board outside the passenger door, the window rolled down, and Hiram talking his bullshit about how he was this expert farmer, like he was lord of the strawberries. Strawberry pickers all over the truck. Elmore was there one minute, ducking from Hiram who was teasing him, and then he was gone. Hiram said the truck bounced and Elmore lost his footing. Hiram swore he was reaching his arm out the window to steady Elmore, not pulling his arm back in from pushing him.

“Daddy took the whip to Hiram until Rose came home from visiting Elmore’s grieving mother. Hiram’s back was bleeding. Rose got out the gun and held it at Daddy ’til he saw her and then he dropped the whip. He was afraid of her after that. And our brother Hiram was afraid of what Daddy would do to Rose. All spring Hiram said Daddy was planning something terrible. He was worrying Rose would spread lies about him.

“And sure enough, come the summer, a year after Elmore fell and hit his young head on the hard dirt, Rose vanished. It was the end of August, as it is now. We looked all over them roads and through the fields and forests and down on the beach. But no sir, we didn’t find her, only her shoe and her straw hat in the woods by the stream. People said it all started with Elmore’s death, how it all went bad after that. But it went bad long before.”

The sun had come around in the sky. It was late in the afternoon.

The old woman was impervious to the heat. She was like an animal, perfectly acclimatized to her environment. Part of Ondine wanted to leave, but a bigger part of her couldn’t stop listening.

“Sometimes people leave and you never have no answers. That’s what my father said, after the police stopped coming around a year after Rose went missing. At first he raged how someone killed her. Next he raged she took off like her filthy whore of a mother. We did not talk of Rose after that first year. Daddy would not allow no more speculation or discussion. He went quiet like something was coming for him. He got stranger in his mind. He heard things calling in the dark. Keep away the night birds, he’d yell. Don’t go near the stream running down through the woods. Don’t answer if anything comes knocking at the door. Close it tight and bolt it. Put down the windows and put rags around the crack at the bottom of the door. Don’t let the mist seep in.”