Chapter 2 Chapter 2: Marsh Dogs

Sade's POV

The voice on the speaker kept saying my father's name, and my father kept not answering it. I knelt on the tile, picked up his phone, and took it off speaker.

"This is his daughter. Who is this?"

"Ma'am, this is Sergeant Ray Dominguez with the Port Sable Police Department. I'm real sorry to be calling at this hour. Is your daddy able to talk?"

"No. Talk to me."

"There was a single-vehicle accident on the Causeway Road bridge over Marrow Sound, around eleven-fifty tonight. Your brother's car went through the guardrail. Divers got him out a little after one. I'm sorry, ma'am. He was gone before they reached him."

Eleven-fifty, I thought, and looked down at my wrist, at the pink ring under the silver.

"What was he doing on a bridge at midnight? He had curfew."

"Wet road, a young man in a hurry, a new car."

"Jalen drives like a grandmother. He uses his blinker in parking lots."

"I hear you, ma'am. But there's skid marks on that bridge that say he was moving."

"You said it was raining."

There was a pause, long enough for me to hear wind and water slapping metal behind him.

"We'll go over all of it when y'all get here," he said.

Dad took the phone, said "We'll be on the first flight" in a voice like a recording of himself, and hung up. Then he filled the kettle and stood at the stove holding it without turning on the burner. I packed both our bags.

We flew Dayton to Atlanta to Savannah and drove the last forty minutes in a rental that smelled like vanilla air freshener. Port Sable was flat and wet and green, all salt marsh and live oaks dripping gray moss, and to the west the pine forest went on forever, a black wall of trees under a white sky.

"That's Red Hollow," the girl at the rental counter had said when Dad asked about the drive. "Don't take the Hollow road after dark, hon. Deer, mostly." She had smiled like it was a joke. "And worse."

Every few miles, a billboard showed a Ridgemont player mid-sprint in a red jersey, gold letters underneath: Ekwueme Biotech. Recover Like a Hawk. Jalen was on one of them. His face went past at sixty miles an hour, grinning, and the leather creaked under Dad's hands.

The GPS took us over the causeway. I hadn't known it would, and neither had Dad. One stretch of guardrail on the bridge had been replaced with orange barrels, and when we passed it, the tide was out. Down in the gray mud below the gap, a line of tracks ran along the waterline toward the marsh grass.

They were paw prints, and each one was bigger than my spread hand.

"Dad, look at the mud."

"I see them." He pressed the gas until the rental shook. "Marsh dogs. Don't look."

The medical examiner's office was a low brick building behind a hospital parking garage. Two people from Ridgemont were waiting in the lobby.

Coach Grant Whitaker had a silver crew cut, a red polo, and a hug that lasted too long. "That boy was the heart of my locker room, Pete. The heart." Then he squeezed my shoulder with a hand like a catcher's mitt. "And the little sister with the left foot. The boys watched your clip on the bus this morning. Jay would have lost his mind."

Jalen had not watched it. Jalen would never watch it.

The woman beside him waited until he was done. She was slim and calm, with a gray cardigan and reading glasses on a beaded chain.

"Vivian Crane, team physician." She crouched in front of my chair so she wasn't looking down at me and took my hands in both of hers. Her fingers were cool and smelled faintly of tape adhesive. "I taped your brother's ankles every morning for four months. He talked about you through all of it."

Her thumb slid across my wrist and touched the bracelet. She pulled her hand back so fast it was almost a flinch, then shook it and laughed.

"Static," she said. "These old buildings. Can I ask you something, sweetheart? Did Jalen ever mention any health history? Anything on your mother's side, anything that runs in the family? There was something in his last bloodwork I wanted to understand."

"Nothing runs in our family," Dad said from across the room, before she had even finished. "Nothing."

Dr. Crane looked at him for a moment, then nodded. "Of course."

They didn't let me in for the formal part. I stood at the narrow window in the door at the end of the hall and watched the back of my father's head. When he came out, he looked at me through the glass and nodded once, and that was how I found out it was really my brother.

The police station was the next morning. Sergeant Dominguez was a tired man in his forties with a thick mustache and a pack of nicotine gum on his desk next to an actual pack of cigarettes, as if he hadn't decided which one he was quitting. He slid a property bag across the desk: Jalen's wallet, his keys on a Hawks keychain, one shin guard, and a hoodie still damp in the folds.

"Where's his phone?"

"Not recovered. The window was busted out, and the Sound's got a current."

"And his bracelet? It's silver, on his left wrist. It was our mother's."

He ran his finger down the inventory sheet. "No jewelry recovered."

I read the sheet upside down while he talked. Near the bottom, someone had typed: Hair fibers, animal, canine, driver door seal. Not retained.

"What's that?" I put my finger on it. "Canine?"

"Marsh dogs," Dominguez said, and he and my father said it almost together. Dominguez glanced at Dad, surprised. "Causeway's crawling with strays. Big ones. They come out of the Hollow when the tide's low. Probably sniffing round the car after."

"After it was underwater?"

"I'm filing this one this afternoon as an accident, Mr. Holloway," he said to Dad, not me. "Speed and weather."

"It's been two days," I said. "Let me see the scene photos."

"No, ma'am. Not those."

"No," Dad said. "That's the end of it."

Dominguez walked us out to the side lot. His car was an old gray Crown Victoria with a dented rear bumper and the old-fashioned lock knobs that stick up from the door like little pegs. He lit a cigarette without taking out his nicotine gum, which seemed like cheating at both, got in, and cracked his window an inch. A brown folder lay on the passenger seat with a tab that said Holloway, J.

"I'll be at the memorial game tomorrow night," he said through the gap. "Department likes to show a presence."

That night, in a hotel room on the edge of the marsh, I typed Port Sable howling into my phone. The first page was a local news clip with the same wildlife officer from the radio. The second was a neighborhood forum where somebody called RiverRat912 had written: It ain't dogs and everybody knows it ain't dogs. My granny says the Ekwueme family owns the Hollow and whatever runs in it, and you leave them be on a full moon. Under it, forty people had replied with laughing faces, and one person had replied: delete this. I screenshotted the whole thread before I could tell myself it was stupid.

Around midnight, a howl came across the water around midnight. It was long and low and rose at the end like a question. Then, much farther off, in the direction of the pines, another one answered it.

Dad got out of bed, pulled the curtains shut, and went into the bathroom. He turned on the fan.

The fan was loud, and Dad wasn't careful. I stood beside the door in my socks.

"...it's gone, do you hear me? Jalen's silver is gone. You swore to me, you swore on her grave, that if they kept the silver on, no pack on this earth would ever smell them."

A pause. Somebody was talking back.

"Don't tell me to calm down. My son is in a drawer. Don't you tell me to calm down."

Another pause, and then my father said something that made the hair on my arms rise.

"No. She doesn't know what she is. And she never will."

The fan clicked off. The bathroom door opened before I could move.