The heavy glass door of the Veridian Sheriff’s Department swung shut behind me, its wheezing sigh a pathetic echo of the scream trapped in my own throat.
The air outside didn’t just hang; it clung, a wet wool blanket woven from humidity, decay, and the cloying perfume of too many magnolia trees.
It was the same air I’d run from ten years ago, and my lungs, now accustomed to the dry, anonymous sprawl of Los Angeles, seized in protest.
My hand trembled as I jammed the key into the ignition of my rental car.
The engine whined to life, and I cranked the air conditioning until it blasted arctic air against my sweat-slick skin. It did nothing to cool the fire Ben Carter had just lit under my ribs.
Sheriff Ben Carter.
It was still so wrong to see him like that.
The starched brown uniform and the heavy, important weight of the badge on his chest had replaced the faded denim and soft cotton t-shirts of the boy I’d loved.
The easy, sun-kissed smile that used to make my stomach flip was gone, hardened into a tight line of professional concern. A concern that felt less like protection and more like a warning.
“Let it lie, Cal. For your own good.”
His voice, a low rumble that had once whispered promises against my neck, now delivered condescending orders. He had looked at me with those familiar hazel eyes—the ones that used to hold galaxies of affection—and all I saw was pity.
And something else.
A flicker of the old heat, quickly extinguished and banked behind a wall of duty.
It was that flicker that stung the most. It told me he remembered everything, and had chosen to bury it.
Just like everyone in this godforsaken town had chosen to bury my sister.
My knuckles were white on the steering wheel as I pulled away from the curb. I drove aimlessly, the tidy town square giving way to cracked pavement and houses whose peeling paint looked like sunburnt skin.
Each corner held a ghost.
There was the chipped curb where Hannah had fallen off her bike, scraping her knee so badly I’d had to carry her home piggyback, her teary hiccups hot against my ear.
There was the ancient oak tree we’d tried and failed to climb a hundred times, its branches now draped in a funereal shawl of Spanish moss.
This town wasn’t a home; it was a mausoleum. And I was the ghost who’d forgotten she was dead.
Ben wanted me to leave. He wanted me to pack up my grief and my questions and take them back to California where they couldn’t cause any trouble.
He’d called me by my childhood nickname, Cal, the syllables a casual caress meant to soothe and disarm. But it felt like a brand, a reminder of the naive, helpless girl I used to be.
The girl who had trusted him. The girl who had believed the official story.
Accidental drowning. A tragic misstep on a dark night by the bayou.
Bullshit.
Hannah knew that bayou better than she knew the back of her own hand. She was nimble, cautious.
She wasn’t a girl who just…slipped.
The memory of Ben’s dismissal made my foot press harder on the accelerator.
He’d treated me like a problem to be managed, a loose thread in the carefully woven narrative of Veridian’s peace. He was protecting the town. He was protecting his job.
Was he protecting me? Or was he protecting a secret? The thought was a venomous snake, coiling in my gut.
I ended up at a cheap, soulless motel on the highway, the only place in town where no one knew my name. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and industrial cleaner.
I kicked off my sandals, the gritty carpet abrasive against my feet, and collapsed onto the lumpy bed. The floral comforter was hideous, a riot of faded pinks and greens that seemed to mock the vibrant, living color that had been stolen from my life.
Pulling out my phone, I opened the email for the tenth time. It had arrived three days ago, a cryptic grenade lobbed into the carefully constructed quiet of my life.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Hannah didn’t fall.
The words still made my heart hammer against my ribs.
They buried the truth with her, Callie. The official story is a lie to protect the people who should have protected her. They didn’t look close enough. The swamp remembers what this town wants to forget. Find the Gravedigger. He knows what the bayou keeps. Don’t trust the badge.
Don’t trust the badge.
Ben’s face swam in my mind, his expression a careful mask of authority. He was the badge. The anonymous sender was drawing a line in the sand, and I had to decide which side I was on. Ten years of numb acceptance warred with the fresh, sharp sting of Ben’s warning. For a decade, I had let the grief lie, just as he’d asked. I had swallowed the official report, choked down the platitudes of the townspeople, and tried to build a life on the rubble of my family.
But this email… this email was a seed of doubt that had taken root and was now cracking the foundations of that fragile peace.
“The Gravedigger.”
I said the name aloud to the empty room.
It sounded ridiculous, like something out of a pulp horror novel. A character created to scare teenagers away from spooky old cemeteries.
It was probably a prank, a cruel joke played by someone who knew my history.
But what if it wasn’t?
My fingers flew over the phone’s keyboard, my thumb hesitating over the search bar. What was I even looking for? I typed it in, feeling foolish. “The Gravedigger” Veridian, Louisiana.
The results were sparse, a collection of digital whispers and local folklore. A few hits on a parish message board, posts from years ago.
They spoke of him in hushed, fearful tones. A name associated with bar fights, illegal poker games, and the kind of trouble that happened on the murky edges of town.
One post, dated two years back, was more specific.
“Stay away from The Swamp Devil if you know what’s good for you. Guidry is back in town, and that place is trouble. Heard they call him the Gravedigger ‘cause he’s the one you see when you’re about to end up in one.”
Guidry.
A new search. Nash Guidry, Veridian.
This time, a grainy photo appeared, a mugshot from seven or eight years ago attached to a public record of an aggravated assault charge. The charges had been dropped.
The man in the photo was young, maybe early twenties, but his eyes were ancient.
Dark, furious, and shadowed by a life I couldn’t begin to imagine. His jaw was a hard, unforgiving line, his black hair untamed.
He looked like a storm condensed into the shape of a man. The article mentioned he’d taken over his family’s failing dive bar on the edge of the cypress swamp: The Swamp Devil.
A cold dread mixed with a volatile, unfamiliar excitement trickled down my spine.
This was a man who lived in the shadows, a man who, according to a ghost in my inbox, knew things. Things the clean, respectable Sheriff of Veridian either didn’t know or didn’t want known.
Ben’s warning was the voice of reason, of safety. It was the voice of the boy I once loved, begging me to stay on the path, to not stray into the overgrown darkness where monsters might lurk.
But Hannah was in that darkness. And if I had to walk through hell to find out how she got there, I would.
I stood up, the motel room suddenly feeling like a cage. My reflection in the dark television screen was a pale, determined stranger. The girl who had fled Veridian was gone.
She’d died somewhere on the I-10 West, suffocated by unshed tears and unspoken questions. The woman standing here now was different.
She was tired of being managed, tired of being warned, tired of being afraid.
I found the address for The Swamp Devil on my phone’s map.
It was exactly where I expected it to be—a dead-end road that bled directly into the Atchafalaya Basin, miles from the manicured lawns and watchful eyes of the town square. A place where secrets could be spoken, or bought, or beaten out of someone.
Outside, the sky was bruising, turning a violent shade of purple-grey. The air grew thick and heavy, charged with the electric promise of a storm.
A low, distant rumble of thunder vibrated through the cheap windowpane, a growl from the heavens.
It felt like a fitting soundtrack. I was done listening to the living. It was time to go talk to a ghost.