“It ain’t like that. Being crazy is waiting for Connie to stroll on home on her own. The police don’t know her. I know her. She’d never keep us worrying like this for so long.”
“You said to tell you.” Saul flapped his shirt by the collar to air it out, releasing a tart, tangy boy smell. “I know how you get.”
“Your brother goes into swamps all of the time.”
“Dally knows what he’s doing.”
“Just help me get into his truck before he drives to the swamp. We could borrow his boat once he’s done fishing. We’d take good care of it.”
“We could borrow his boat? How are we going to do that?”
“I’ll go through the swamp by foot if I have to. I don’t need you to help me once I’m there.” My chest was heating up. “You weren’t there, you didn’t see her. Connie just walked out of the house with her eyes fizzed out like television static. I’d never seen her look like that before.” I heard the notes of my voice slipping out of place, and a springing sensation in my eyes like blood vessels popping. “When does your brother go fishing next?”
“I’m not telling.” Saul held the photograph between his fingers like he meant to rip it. I snatched it away from him. “You should chunk that thing right in the fire,” he said. “I mean it. I’ll do it for you.”
“Then an awful lot of help you’d be. I ain’t chunking anything. My best friend in the world and you won’t help me?”
Saul pressed his palms flat against his cheeks. “Dally’s behind on a shipment. He had a bad catch and needs to replace it, so . . . he might have to go back out this week.”
“Will you find out for me?” I asked.
He rested his forehead in his hand, masking his expression. “It could be like we wanted last summer, I s’pose — filming monsters.” We had wanted to film shots of Louisiana bayou country with Saul’s new Straight Eight camera, and use them for a movie on elusive swamp creatures. “I could sneak the camera out, and” — his tongue poked the parched corner of his mouth, eyes aimed low around my ankles — “you’ll see your sister’s never set foot anywhere near that swamp.”
Chapter 5
I STOOD AT the edge of the den holding Jane Eyre. It was an antique copy my father had found for me in a store with doors of driftwood along the coast in River Ridge. It was an odd source of comfort, a tale of burning Gothic homes and madness locked in chains, but it filled me with a calming sense of order to hold it in my hands, with its beginning, middle, and end — perfectly controlled and contained between two binding covers.
I brought the book to my nose and sniffed the dusty old pages. Maybe that was all Abelia Fay’s account of the Bellrose family was, a story, some gruesome fairy tale. I had heard all variety of ghostly folklore meant to warn children away from playing in the swamps. Had Mama not said, when we were young, to keep our feet snug under the blankets, or a woman with boil-covered hands would drag us underneath the bed by the toes? I paced the parlour. I had read the same paragraph three times over, eyes swimming back and forth over a tangle of words. Saul would be calling shortly. Early afternoon, he had said.
It was well into the afternoon. I swung my arms impatiently and pressed Brontë hard against my forehead. If only I were like Connie, able to drift away from a needling preoccupation and cozy into some languid hobby or television show. I circled the parlour again, thinking its sealed-off air had taken on the taste of the antiques it roomed: bric-àbrac passed down over several centuries, from glass ladies with anaemic complexions to ornate gilt-bronze clocks that Mama said had not run since the days of President Loubet. I was not supposed to be in the parlour at all, but I ignored this rule routinely and nobody ever seemed to notice.
My head was low as I watched my feet move in pale blurs against the rosette patterns on the carpet. When finally I slumped onto the bench of our grape-black Wurlitzer piano, the one modern clock on the wall read 3:35 p.m.
“What are you doing?” Fritzi asked, hunched over the stairwell banister.
I started. “How long have you been standing there?”
“A while. Why are you in the parlour?” Her features were greyed in the hallway’s dimness, the curtains drawn over every window to soften our mother’s headaches. Only lamps, with dusty shades in crowded corners, offered intermittent flares, like streetlights or fireflies burning away the soot of the night.
“I like it in here,” I said. “Why’ve you ruined your muffin?”
She was poking her fingers through a muffin, sprinkling crumbs over the banister onto the hallway floor. She had reduced it to a soggy clump of oatmeal.
“I’m dissecting it,” she said. “I think it’s rotten. Look at the centre, it’s all runny like an egg.”
“It can’t be rotten, Miss Alice brought it over with the cold tater salad this morning.”
Fritzi slinked down the staircase and approached the piano, her arm outstretched, presenting the torn muffin with a look of grand displeasure. “People are stupid to be sending pastry baskets.”
“It’s a gesture of sympathy, Fritzi.”
“Connie’s not ill.”
“You ate the salad.”
“Of course I did. It’d be plain ol’ rude if nobody brought over tater salad.”
I broke off a piece of the muffin. As I held it up to analyze, I noticed Fritzi’s collarbone peeking up from her blouse, with a far deeper lining of shadow, a more pronounced curvature of bone. The blouse itself had been worn the previous day. “Weren’t you wearing that yesterday?” I asked.
“What do you care?”
Fritzi stared into the piano’s shining dark oak. Her reflection was warm in the brassy light falling from the chandelier, yet cold and distant beneath the dust. There was dust everywhere. The parlour was a stuffy room for want of company, but it was not supposed to be a filthy one. Fritzi was to cook breakfast, I was to sweep, and Connie was to dust. Those were our chores, since the moment we could tie our own laces and braid our own hair. Our father had suggested a dozen times that we hire a maid, like the Lafleurs with their maid Heloise, an old lady who wore a blue dress the shade of Dorothy Gale’s farm dress in The Wizard of Oz — but Mama would web her hands over her eyes and shake her head, muttering: Strangers in the house, Cyril? Of all the dreadful things, strangers?
Connie had not been missing long enough for such a uniform fall of dust. Fritzi ran her finger through it. “Lazy thing. She must have stopped dusting weeks ago.”
“She isn’t lazy, Fritzi.”
“All the food’s gone bad, too.”
“Don’t be dramatic.” I placed the piece of muffin back in its liner. “I ate some oranges at breakfast and they tasted fresh.”
I had eaten the oranges mechanically, absorbing the flavour more than tasting it — and their freshness did taste false to me, as if the fruit were performing, obligated to be fresh but without any love for it. But they certainly had not been rotten.
“Food hates me, then.” Fritzi slid onto the bench beside me. “All my years of lumpy cooking.”
As she spoke, I held one eye on the telephone, nestled on a doily on the entryway table. It never looked so deathly stoic as when I wanted it to ring. “What do you make of that necklace she was wearing?”
“I don’t make a thing of it.”
“What about that journal she got so upset about? Will you show it to me?”
Fritzi’s finger grazed a piano key, lowering and lifting it without a sound. “You don’t need me to find it.”
“I mean the other one.” I could see the stern face of our mother in Fritzi, a restraint like rubber pulled thin, until her own far milder expression shook back into place and she began to play a cheerful staccato.
“Oh. I don’t know where it is. She must have taken it with her.”
“She might have hidden it in the house,” I said.
“Well, if she did I wouldn’t know.” Several fine muscles flickered along Fritzi’s jaw. “Listen, Bonnie, it’ll be all right,” she said, placin
g her hand over mine on the bench.
A half-smile dimpled one side of her mouth, but as comforting as it should have been, it was not right on Fritzi. She was kind, to be sure, but she had spent too many years playing unwitting mother to me and Connie, and all of her childhood sweetness had crusted over. She rose from the bench and walked up the stairs, forgetting the rotten muffin on the piano. I sniffed it, and when it gave off none of the piney musk of rotten food, I placed a crumb in my mouth. It tasted of ripe cranberry and cinnamon oats.
I peered into the soundless hall. A feeling of apprehension ran all through my body, squeezing down to my ankles. I had been big talking with Saul the day before, though I would never have admitted it.
I walked up and down the hall, as if to remind the telephone of my presence. I looked into the kitchen, where the sink was full of dishes sitting dirty and neglected in green, boggy water, and fruit flies had collected on the cupboards with an air of decay. They made it look as though the house had died.
I had the direst sense that our fixed point was being shaken out of place. I looked again at the clock. Quarter to four and still not a chirp from the telephone. It would have been easier if Fritzi had simply pried like she always did, coerced a confession out of me by squeezing a clump of my hair, with a pretty cringe on her face as I explained the fantastic details of my investigation. She would have locked me in our bedroom closet until I swore on our grandmother’s grave not to do anything foolish.
I paused and drummed my nails against the door frame. Foolish. A word for the absurd and unreasonable. I thought of an old Ouija board my sisters and I had received as a gift from our great-aunt. Our father had called it foolish, meaning either the method by which to reach ghosts or the effort to reach ghosts at all. Investigating a ghost story was certainly foolish, but so was my father blustering about the police precinct day in and day out. What results had he yielded by being reasonable?
I stared up at the door in the ceiling which led to the attic, where the Ouija board was stored. Great-Aunt Gaelle had sat at our kitchen table the night she brought it. She was visiting all the way from Collonges-la-Rouge, the commune composed entirely of dusty red sandstone wherein my mother was born. There was a box on her lap, covered in a long silk scarf. With her watery eyes and red-flushed skin, as if the red of the town had imprinted itself on her cheeks, she almost glowed as she swept away the scarf to reveal a brittle wooden board. “If you could speak to any ghost,” she asked us, “who would it be?”
If you could speak to any ghost. My sisters and I had asked each other this a hundred times. We had tried to contact the ghost of Charles Dickens — Who really killed Edwin Drood? And Merlin, a fictitious amalgamation, we knew, but there was some fun in it. A slew of spirits had followed, but nobody spoke back, not really. The pressure of our fingers was the culprit, or Fritzi trying to trick us, the deviously pleased crinkle in her mouth obvious even in the dark.
I tugged the ladder down from the ceiling and climbed into the attic. Our father had hardly left the shed in the backyard all week, and our mother was lying on that lousy hammock again, but still I was careful to slide the steps back in place without so much as a creak. Great-Aunt Gaelle’s board lay folded on a musty armchair in the far corner of the attic. The dust was thick and floated visibly in the light from the oeil-de-boeuf window, like the last trickling flakes in a snow globe. There were stacks of furniture and boxes of breakables, and I moved slowly, feeling my way past rolled-up rugs and nearly tripping over my grandmother’s knife chest.
I picked up the Ouija board and set it on the floor. A waft of dust flew up as I unfolded it, and caught in my lungs. It had been several years since my sisters and I had opened it. I wrapped my sleeve over my hand and swept the surface clean. I ran my fingers over the wood’s bristly grain, the sun and moon inked in the corners, the lonely Goodbye at the bottom.
“A Ouija board is never to be used inside of the house,” Connie had told us. “Negative energy could follow you and infiltrate your home. It could sneak into your head and make you crazy.” We had been safe then, curtained by the golden chain tree in our backyard, its yellow flowers falling like loose pollen.
I heard Connie’s warning now as I sat alone in the attic, but there was no stealing unnoticed through the halls with a large wooden board under my arm. Fritzi would have only snatched it from me, protecting me from the dangers of my own imagination, furious at Connie all the more for feeding it.
I set the planchette on the board, thinking that I would try to speak with the older ghost, Parnella Bellrose. Of course it would lead to nothing. I would tell Connie, in a day or two once she was home, how I tried to speak with ghosts to find her, and she would squeeze me, call me funny pet.
I placed my fingertips on the planchette. “Spirit?” I asked. My voice filled with echo and travelled high up into the rafters. It sounded frailer than it felt. “Parnella Bellrose, may I speak with you?”
Connie had also told us, with great severity, never to use the Ouija board alone, and the memory of her gentle voice, always wrapped around a whisper, drifted into my ears. “I’m very serious, Bonnie,” she had said. “I know you’ll stare up at that attic door all night, positively vexed that you can’t use the board alone, for no other reason than I told you not to. But you must listen to me.” Her arms had been crossed as she said it, her high ponytail spilling over her shoulders in the lemony spring light. That purse of a smile, pinched at the corners in an untouchable smirk.
I closed my eyes and let the sounds rumbling up through the attic floor, and the creaks in the walls, grow dull. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and felt the planchette move. No more than a centimetre, with a tingling pressure in my fingertips.
“Will I find my sister in Red Honey?”
The slide of the planchette curved, dragged down, the slippery item moving from the weight of my hands. I snapped them away as if it meant to bite me. I stared at the little heart-shaped piece of wood resting on the board. Lowering my hand to it, I stopped, brushed it with my nails. It did not budge. I positioned myself again, arms outstretched and meeting on the small piece. It moved again with the pace of my breaths, barely in inches, rolling its clear eye over the letters. After a minute it had formed a clear loop, and then another beside it, like a bow. A sign of evil, Connie had said, a bad spirit.
I flung the planchette across the floor and slammed the board shut. In the silence the telephone rang far below in the downstairs hall. The sound vibrated through my whole body and I ran for the attic stairs, lowering them so fast they banged out of their slots and knocked against the floor in a rickety crash.
“Bonnie? What are you doing up there?” Fritzi stood at the bottom of the stairs with the telephone pressed against her shoulder. “Did you break something?” The curious wrinkle in her brow smoothed flat and disapproving when she saw me. “Tell me what you did.”
“Is it Saul?” I hurried toward her and reached for the telephone.
“What are you up to?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing always means something. You could have at the very least thrown together a passable lie.”
“I need to speak with Saul,” I said. “Hand it over before Mama sees.” Our mother disliked spontaneous calls she had not vetted and approved; she called them vulgar.
“Mama’s never noticed the phone ringing in her life.” Fritzi extended her arm toward me, carelessly dropping the telephone into my hands. She then strolled over to the den and seated herself in our father’s reading chair, one arm wrapped around her torso, her forearm propping up her elbow. Her fingers curled against her lips.
“Saul? Are you still there?” I turned away from Fritzi. “Do you know when?”
“We’re not supposed to hide things from each other,” Fritzi reminded me, and I missed what Saul was saying.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Dally’s heading to Red Honey tomorrow at noon,” he said. “You can meet me at my house in the morning, if you
’re sure about this.”
“You know I’m going to find out,” Fritzi said, picking at a cuticle.
I glanced up the stairs at the open attic door. It stared back at me, a square of confined yet boundless darkness, as if to climb into it would lead only to the bottom of a well, over which the same dark riddle hung.
Fritzi tapped an impatient rhythm with her foot.
I cupped the receiver close to my mouth. “Tomorrow morning,” I said, and placed the telephone back in its catch. I did not look at Fritzi as I walked back up the stairs.
Chapter 6
THE MORNING BLISTERED. The heat stuck like gum to my skin. Through the window above the Chiffrees’ kitchen sink, I watched Dalcour load dip nets and mesh-wire traps into a truck with a licence plate plucked upward like a bucktooth.
Connie had been missing for eight days.
“Finally learnin’ the ropes,” Saul said. He squinted at a colourful mass of thread sprouting from a tiny tin fish.
“A full dollar says you don’t know what that is,” I said.
He dangled the tail of string up to his eye. “I think it’s a tackle. One of the fancy ones.”
“It would be a good tassel for the rougarous costume,” I said, letting him bounce the threads against my open palm. We wanted a rougarous — the French werewolf — to rival another beastly creature in our movie, though our costume for it was far more Mardi Gras than monster, with all of the birthday streamers and patchwork we had tacked on.
“Your brother looks about ready to go,” I said, peeking through the sink window. With a bright blue tarp rolled under his arm, Dalcour circled the vehicle, a small Coca-Cola delivery truck from the ’30s, which the late Mr. Chiffree and his boys had refitted with an open rear bed long enough to haul a dinghy. Dalcour began fastening the stiffly billowing tarp over his fishing equipment and a small boat turned upside down, with sun glints sharpening against its hull.
Bonavere Howl Page 4
