yes. He brought them along, these...”
“Artifacts,” Rebecca repeated with careful precision, feeling the tequila. “He lays them out on the dining room table and studies them for, like, hours. He has a microscope and all kinds of tools.”
Diana was intrigued.
“Truly? He sounds very dedicated. What sort of artifacts are they?”
Rebecca made a hand-waving gesture of dismissal.
“Creepy old dead stuff. From wherever Daddy has to work. All over the world. From New Orleans, this bunch anyway. They were moving graves after that stupid storm?”
“Katrina?”
“Yeah. That. It was like years ago, but now they’re doing something about flood protection, so the graveyards have to be built up. You know the way they bury people in New Orleans? In those concrete churchy-looking little stone houses?”
“Crypts,” said Diana. “They have to be aboveground because the water table is so high.”
“Daddy says they just stuff new bodies into the crypt and shove the old ones to the back of the...whatever...the...?”
“The vault.”
“Yeah, the vault, so that whoever was buried there a hundred years ago gets all crammed up with the new people and it’s all mixed up in a jumble.”
“So your father is trying to sort out who was who, now that the bodies have to be moved?”
“Yeah, although it’s only temporary, ’cause they’re putting them back when the work is through, but he has to figure out which bits belong where, and then there’s all the jewelry.”
“You mean, like gold bracelets and rings and that kind of thing?”
“And lockets and brooches and stuff,” said Karen, not really interested in whatever her daddy was up to. They both felt a spreading warmth moving through their bodies as the tensions of the trip receded and Diana’s silky voice seemed to pull them into a conspiratorial circle. They were too young to notice the voltage that the word locket had sent pulsing through the woman’s body.
“Well, it sounds as if your father is doing the Lord’s work,” Diana said, changing the subject. “You should be proud of him.”
“Oh, we are,” said Rebecca, feeling that they were sounding disloyal. “I mean they’re good people and all that. It’s just this whole Christ thing. Christ this and Jesus that, all the way down from Florissant. It was all, like, so...lame.”
Diana gently disagreed.
“But there’s a true power there, girls. In Jesus. Do you know about the Shroud of Turin?”
This was something important to Diana. They could both feel her...chemistry...change. In spite of their reflexive dislike of the subject, what she was saying—or rather how she was saying it—got their attention.
She was talking about the Shroud of Turin, the moment of Christ’s Resurrection, when His Spirit had flashed out, shimmering so brightly inside that darkened sepulchre...
“A shimmer so powerful that it actually burned itself into the burial cloth he was wrapped up in,” said Diana, leaning in close and placing a soft warm hand on Rebecca’s knee.
“Can you imagine what that must have been like? And Jesus teaches us that that very same Shimmer is inside each of us. That divine spark shines inside us all, waiting to be...released. How beautiful.”
Rebecca found she liked the feel of Diana’s hand on her knee, but the subject of Jesus Christ’s Light Bulb Moment was not nearly as interesting to her, at this twilight hour, as the particular hazel-and-gold colors in Diana Bowman’s eyes and the spicy scent that was coming off her body. From the look on her sister’s face, she was feeling the same sort of sensual pull.
Rebecca felt a warmth rising on the skin of her belly and flooding up to her breasts, her throat, her cheeks. She’s gay, Rebecca was thinking. And she likes us. Both of us.
Diana drew back, smiled at them.
“But it’s getting dark, and you two need to be going back to your room, don’t you? Your parents will be worried, no?”
Rebecca looked at her cell phone.
There were three text messages, all in the last few minutes. She had felt the phone buzzing but ignored it, knowing what they were about but feeling that, where Mommy and Daddy were concerned, it was easier to get forgiveness than permission.
Mommy: We’re going out to get something to eat. Coming?
Mommy: Leaving in five?
Daddy: Girls?
After a moment’s thought, as Diana watched her with some amusement, Rebecca texted back.
Becca: We’re at the Chapel for Eventide. So pretty here. Can we stay?
A pause. The resort was fenced and gated, studded with security cameras and patrolled by armed guards. And it did have a little chapel beside the tennis courts.
Daddy: Okay. But home by midnight. Pinky swear.
Becca: Pinky swear. Hugs.
Daddy: Karen got her puffer with her?
Rebecca tipped the phone to Karen, who read the message, fumbled in her pocket and came up with a small silver canister with a little plastic mask attached—her rechargeable puffer. Karen had asthma, usually caused by stress.
Becca: Yes, Daddy, we just checked.
Daddy: Okay be good love you both.
Rebecca put the phone away, looking up to catch a strange, almost hungry expression on Diana’s face, a kind of pale yellow light in her green eyes.
But then Diana smiled and it was gone.
“Was that your parents, Rebecca?”
“Yes. They’re going out to dinner.”
“So late? Without you?”
“Yes,” she said. “They like to eat late. Alyssa won’t go to sleep unless she has something later on in the evening—”
“She’s so spoiled,” said Karen.
Rebecca ignored that. “We can stay for now, but we have to be home by midnight.”
Diana looked at her watch.
“That’s a while away. Perhaps we can have a quick dinner? Room service? In my suite?”
The words were innocent, but both Karen and Rebecca understood what wasn’t being said.
“We’d love to,” they said in one voice.
“How perfect you both are,” said Diana, taking them in. “How simply...delicious.”
As soon as the three cops disappeared back into the tree line, she surfaced. She was two hundred feet away, in the heart of the swamp, neck deep in the stinking water, hidden behind an island of seagrass, her face coated in lagoon muck.
She slowly lifted her head up, her black hair matted to her skull. She had a pretty good idea of what had happened back there at the Walkers’ truck, what the gunshots really meant, why the cops had bolted, and it warmed her through and through.
The girls had done what she had asked them to do. Well, they had done what Diana Bowman had asked them to do, but she was no longer the woman called Diana Bowman. She was Selena.
* * *
She had never actually