“Have you seen him, too?”
“No, but I’ve heard about him.” She switched off the engine and turned toward me. “Didn’t your father ever tell you about harbingers?”
Harbingers, she explained over an early lunch at Flo’s, are signs of things to come.
“Not everyone sees them,” she said. “I don’t. But your father has seen the blind man twice, and it sounds as if you’ve inherited him.”
“The blind man in Glastonbury.” I remembered my father talking about seeing the man in England, not long before my father was made a vampire. I’d seen the man in Sarasota; the next day, the hurricane hit and our condominium caught fire. Of course, he couldn’t be blind. He drove a van.
“But who is he?” The mere thought of the blind man made me uneasy.
“Your father thinks harbingers are Jungian shadows.” She took a bite of her grouper sandwich.
I’d read only a smattering of Jung and Freud. My father had treated their essays as fiction, by and large. “Do you mean they’re not real?”
“They’re very real to those who see them.” She took another bite and chewed it slowly. “Jung thought shadows were visions of our own unconscious selves, which we repress.”
“But I saw the man in the van.” I knew he was more than a shadow. “So did Autumn and Mysty.”
My mother believed me. “Yes, you saw a man in a van. But was he really blind? You saw what you most fear: someone full of malice, someone with an absence of vision. He’s your shadow man.”
I asked, “Do harbingers always mean bad news?” Flo’s was unusually noisy that day, and I had to raise my voice to be heard.
“For your father, yes. But not for everyone. Dashay’s harbinger is a black bird, a grackle, that swoops at her. It happens when change is coming, for better or worse.”
The concept of a harbinger didn’t make much sense to me.
Logan, the bartender, came over to our table—a rare occurrence, since he liked to stay behind the bar. “Heard you were visiting the sheriff this morning,” he said to Mãe.
One aspect of living in Citrus County that I never liked: everyone knew everyone else’s business. Someone had spotted Mãe’s truck and lost no time spreading the word.
Mãe said, “Yes, and why were we there?”
He grinned and pointed at the TV set over the bar. The Tampa station was broadcasting a photo of Mysty, then shots of two distraught-looking people; the caption read PARENTS OF MISSING GIRL.
“Only one circus in town this week.” Logan looked at me. “So you knew this Mysty?”
“I knew her,” I said. “But not well.”
“She and her friend looked like trouble waiting to happen. Still, it’s shameful when a girl disappears.” Logan turned to my mother again. “Remember the last one?”
She nodded, her eyes on me. “There was another one?” I asked.
“Over the years there have been a few,” Logan said. “The worst one was the last one, two years ago. They found the little girl buried in her neighbor’s yard—”
“You have customers.” Mãe tilted her head toward the bar. She didn’t want me to hear the details. She didn’t want me to be further upset.
But in the days to come I heard all sorts of details, things that I’d never imagined. While I was growing up in Saratoga Springs, sheltered from TV and newspapers, learning about philosophy and mathematics, people were disappearing all over America—all over the world, really. Every year, tens of thousands of people vanish—most of them adult males. But the media attention tends to go to pretty girls and children—about three hundred children are abducted every year and never return. More than a million teenagers run away from their families every year. Most return home within a week, but roughly seven percent—seventy thousand teenagers—are never heard of again.
It was hard for me to believe such things happened at all, let alone with such frequency. I felt as if the world I lived in was only a façade—that beneath its skin, a darker world raged and rampaged. I’d glimpsed that world before, but I’d never known how vast and malignant it might be.
Afterward, whenever we drove in Mãe’s truck, I noticed teenagers wearing music earbuds or talking on cell phones, paying no attention to either world—to the posters of Mysty, or to strangers who might be watching them. I wondered who would disappear next.
When we returned home, Mãe and Dashay burned the trays of the beehives. I didn’t help. I didn’t want to see them burn. The acrid air came into the house and lingered for days.
For dinner that night I made a salad, but none of us ate much. Mãe excused herself and went off to have a bath. Dashay and I played Crazy Eights, but we both were thinking of other things and played poorly. The game dragged on.
When the front gate buzzed, Dashay said, “It’s that girl again.” And a second later, Autumn’s voice came through the intercom.
When I went down to the gate, she was waiting for me. She wore sunglasses, tight black jeans, and a tank top with one word printed on it: NOT.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I unlocked the gate and beckoned her inside.
“Cell phones can be traced. Or bugged.” She wheeled her bicycle up the driveway.
We sat in the moon garden. Even though the sky was growing dark, Autumn kept on her sunglasses. The air stayed hot and humid. It didn’t bother me, but Autumn wiped her forehead with her hand from time to time. “I hate Florida,” she said.