“It’s as much my room as yours.” I turned on our lamp and the waltzing couple sprang to a luminescent red. “Did you hear something?”
“Hear what?” she asked.
“A moment ago. That little click.”
“Probably a rat in the wall.”
She was lying. It would have been obvious enough to anyone, but she had the same tell as our mother, at once consumed with the act of appearing preoccupied. Fritzi’s notion of making her bed, on a good day, meant propping her pillow against the headboard and patting down her crumpled blanket, and yet here she was tucking her sheets into the mattress in a neat, crisp manner.
“Talk a minute?” I asked.
“We’ll talk before bed, I’m busy right now.”
I walked over and sat down on the edge of her mattress. “Oh, yes, I can see that.”
Fritzi jerked her bedspread out from under me. “Don’t be a pest.”
“I need to speak with you.”
“Well I’m not in the mood to be spoken to.” She dropped her quilt into a heap at her feet and slammed the door on her way out, the sound and swiftness of her outburst like a shock of cold water.
For a moment I let it sit. What had she been up to before I walked in? I lowered myself onto my knees and clapped my palms around the floorboards between our beds, trying to find the source of the quiet click. The wood was sticky with old dust and had grown soft enough to carve in your name with your thumbnail. I saw with a sharp pang that Connie had known this, too. A crooked C-O-N-S-T-A-N-C-E had been dug into the dull oak. I smoothed my hand over the floorboards, and peered under my bed, but there were only drifts of lint and a wispy tangle of long brown and blond hairs.
Fritzi did not return to our room until well into the night, waking me with her icy feet as she crawled into bed. My calves were warm with sleep and she shoved her toes between them.
I jolted. “Knock it off, Fritzi.”
“I can’t sleep if my feet are cold,” she said. “It’s my bed.”
I buried my face in the pillow, a shiver running up my body, and clamped down on her skinny icicle toes.
When her breaths drew long, and carried with them the faintest whistle, I rolled onto my side to face her. I tilted her jaw to the side to quiet her, and then watched. Asleep was the closest state to calm I had ever seen her. She worried constantly about me, and even more about Connie. Always an arm out in front of me when crossing the street, because I did not bother to look both ways once, when I was eight, and a streetcar nearly struck me right in front of her on Charles Street. I rolled my eyes when she reminded me to brush my hair and change my socks and shower before school, but if she had ever stopped, I would probably have forgotten. Fritzi never forgot. She remembered everything, about me and Connie, and Mama and Daddy, our needs following her, descending on her, picking at her down to the bone.
A white peacock stood before me, fire leaking along the vanes of her snowy feathers. She was the white of the spectre in the swamp, a dusty glow that blew into my eyes like staring too long at the moon. I had to squint to watch her, but I needed her to know that I was there. Her eyes were black, with a glassy translucence, like night-water.
When I looked away I saw Fritzi, crouched on the floor and peering into a hollowed gap in the wood. Branches drenched in moss broke through the window and blew around her. My sight darkened at the edges, and curled like burning paper, as hot wisps of smoke pinched at my ankles. The great white bird screeched, a sparking metal sound, blowing its fire toward Fritzi, who had only time enough to turn and tell me: Go back to sleep, Bonnie. You’re only dreaming.
I started up cold.
Darkness filled the room, thick and fuzzy like a blindfold. A darkness heavier than darkness, a without lightness.
My sight slowly adjusted and time shifted into place. I gripped the blanket to my chest and listened to my own disordered breaths. It was Monday night, I remembered. There would be school in the morning for most of the girls in the city, but not for us. There was a faint hint of ash in the air and I crawled to the iron post at the corner of Fritzi’s bed to lean out and spy down the hall.
I sniffed. “Fritzi, do you smell that?” I reached over to shake her ankle as a curl of smoke, like a will-o’-the-wisp, escaped from underneath the bathroom door at the end of the hallway, past our mother and father’s closed room. “Fritzi, look. Fritzi.”
I felt around in the dark until it became clear the lack of slender form beside me. Instinctively I traced Connie’s necklace through my nightgown. For whatever reason I worried constantly that I had lost it, as if the silver chain had broken loose or the small stone had plucked itself from its wire frame.
The white wisps continued to wind up from under the bathroom door. I followed them down the hall as they thinned, holes opening in them like moaning ghosts.
“Fritzi, are you in there?” I knocked on the door and cracked it open.
“Shh, shut the door.”
I stepped inside, the tile as chilled as Fritzi’s toes, and closed the door behind me. “What are you doing in here?”
She raised her eyebrows, her cigarette.
“Mama’s going to smell that in the morning, you dunce. You know she’s got a nose like a wolf.”
“I’m blowing the smoke out the window,” she said. “Don’t really know why. Could probably blow it right in her face and she wouldn’t know it.”
I glanced around the wreck of cosmetics covering the bathroom counter. Pots of cream like whipped butter, pinepungent cologne samplers ripped from magazines, Connie’s special rolled-up tube of tooth polish for sensitive teeth. I leaned across the counter to grab it but Fritzi snatched it first.
“Don’t touch that,” she said, throwing it into her makeup drawer. “Don’t throw it out.”
“I wasn’t going to.” I waved my hand in front of my face and coughed. “Your smoking is such a dirty habit, Fritzi.”
“You do it, too.”
“Only sometimes. It’s not a habit if it’s only sometimes. It’s going to make your teeth look mangy.” The smoke held a coppery note, as well. “And you’ve been drinking when you said you wouldn’t.”
“Good grief, Bonnie.” Her arm fell slack to her side. “Don’t be such a pill.”
It was rare lately that I found Fritzi awake at this solitary hour, and clear enough of mind. She tended to pass soundly from one medicated sleep to another, and during the day Mrs. Lafleur kept her groggy-eyed and sipping mugs of ancient valerian and lemon balm teas. Mrs. Lafleur had proven a constant hovering presence, monitoring our meals and keeping one eye in watchful orbit around the door. “You see that Theodore Zimmerman here for even one instant, ladies,” she had warned us, “you pick up that phone and you call the law.”
I sat on the tub’s rim, shivering against the cold porcelain through the thin fabric of my nightgown. The walls were a queasy clamshell pink that never looked quite dirty or clean. I toed a puddle of water from my sister’s late-night bath. “I like you better like that,” I offered, pointing to her hair. It was wet and slicked back, and gave the illusion of her usual pixie cut, so carefully sculpted by Connie in the early morning hours before school. “I tried to talk to you earlier.”
She rubbed her chin, a tick of discomfort, but did not respond.
“Daddy and I saw a body in the swamp.” My hand twisted around my wrist, chafing the skin red. “The police said not to tell anyone, so it wasn’t me keeping it from you, I really wouldn’t. But Mama knows. She isn’t supposed to, but Daddy must have told her, and it doesn’t feel right, you being the only one kept in the dark.” I realized my foot was sitting flat in the cold puddle. “We found Suzanna.”
Fritzi looked as though a hook had been swung into her chest. She held onto the windowsill, as a breeze caught in her hair and nipped the ends against her cheek.
“A man came into the swamp. Not like the wild woman I told you about. Saul saw this one, too.”
For some time, she said nothing, until finall
y she asked, “Did you get seen?”
“No. No, he didn’t see me.” I did not know how to tell her about the auburn-haired girl looking me dead in the eye.
The cigarette crinkled and shrank with every thirsty inhale. Fritzi blew out the window, but the draft dragged the smoke back inside in soft whiffs about her face. She looked red-eyed and rotting from the inside out. She knelt onto the tile and placed her cold hands on my knees, leaning in so close that I almost tasted the murky, malty stench of her breath. Her voice was hoarse, as if a flame were crackling in her throat. “Tell me everything about him.”
I was dizzy. The smoke filled my head, made it swell tight and bloated like the circulation had been cut. “I didn’t see much of him. He was tall. His voice wasn’t low, or high, more right in the middle.” I tried to lean away from her polluted stream of breath. “He had a kerchief over most of his face and he was wearing a hat, but his hair was red, I’m certain of it.”
Fritzi went bone-rigid. Her cigarette burned too low and bit her fingers, and without alarm she let it drop onto the tile.
I grabbed her shoulders and tried to read her, but my eyes watered from the smoke, the hot ester running off her lips. She pushed away from me and retrieved the scorched stub. When after a dozen feverish tries she saw it was too damp to spark, she threw it and her silver lighter in the trash.
PART THREE
Marigold Man
Chapter 16
I REMEMBERED WATCHING him during one of my parents’ parties, from the landing in the stairwell where it turned and tucked me and my sisters out of sight. He was the upper years’ history teacher. He wrote for the Times-Picayune, articles of his travels around the world. I had read some when Fritzi brought home the copies he handed out in class. His explorations of the rainforests of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, and the South of France, and an ancient Greek city where white houses wound upward in mountainous mazes, and parts of the sea glowed neon blue.
Abelia Fay had suggested that I speak with him weeks ago. Married into the family through Apollina Lasalle. I had never much registered him the occasional times I saw him in the crowded halls of Ursuline Academy. He had always seemed harmless, even skittish for an adult.
Fritzi said his name was Dorian Fields.
One luminous evening, when I was small, he attended a New Year’s celebration thrown by my mother and father. My sisters and I always spied on guests from the stairwell, huddled in our different shades of matching nightgowns, our strangely aphotic house turned shivering with light. Fritzi, all of twelve, had moaned that evening as if her organs were stretching, and stared off looking drunk with her cheek sloping down her fist.
“Dorian teaches at the school I’ll go to next year,” she informed us. “I was sure to ask Daddy about all of the guests.”
“Yes, but you only listened to what he said about Mr. Fields,” Connie said.
In all of my eight-year-old cleverness, I pointed out that he was much too old for her. Fritzi turned to me then, regal in her floor-length cotton nightgown, the collar up to her throat and the bow down to her naval. Aging ten years for one sweeping moment and looking frighteningly like our mother, she said, more seriously than I had ever heard her, “You don’t know a thing about love.”
Connie was howling. Her peppermint gum almost fell out of her mouth into her hair. “He’s as old as Daddy!”
“I know for a fact that he isn’t,” Fritzi said.
“How do you know? You haven’t even met him.”
“I can see him, can’t I? He’s a much younger man.”
“Oh, please, what do you know about men?”
“About as much as you.”
“I know nothing!”
I told them both to keep it down. There was a creak in the floor beneath us and we looked down to find the marigold head of Mr. Dorian Fields.
His eyes were lightless grey, hiding behind pale lashes. Everything about him appeared diluted but for the red beard running like fire along his jaw, gathering in a fresh flame around his head.
“Little mamzelles.” He said it to all of us, but his attention collected solely on Connie. Even sitting next to her I felt the heat of it, and how she shook, not visibly, but deep inside where her bones knocked together.
Unsettling as the memory was, it had all but faded over the years.
I shifted uncomfortably in the hot passenger seat, where the sun pierced between the jammed windshield wipers. I lifted my hand to cover my eyes. “Abelia Fay said he was married to one of the Lasalles. Some dancer.”
Fritzi’s fingers bounced against the steering wheel. “He married that ballet dancer who got hit by a streetcar when we were kids. Mama did a costume for her.” The muddled look in her eyes had sharpened to a crystal bite. “Apollina Lasalle. Long dead in the ground, but Mama liked her. Not sure what that says.”
We were parked across the street from the police station on Royal. Our father had taken our family’s blue Coupe to work, so Fritzi made me wait outside in her delinquent friend Theodore’s yard for a full hour, while she asked to borrow his clunky old car and doped up — as if I did not know — causing her to endlessly slap her hands in the driver’s seat to an inaudible rhythm, some jazz aneurism only she could hear.
“Would you calm down? You’re making me dizzy.” I grabbed my sister’s arm and lowered it onto her lap, feeling the nervous vigour buzzing through her. My cinnamon gum candied the smoke filling up the car and I felt my skin turning a sticky green colour. I rolled down the window and spat the gum onto the road. “We should have walked. I can’t breathe in here.”
“I told you, we need the car.”
“But why?”
Fritzi ignored me, mulling quietly to herself. “We need to figure out what we’re going to say.”
I opened the passenger door and stepped into the clean open air. By the time she caught up with me, I had already reached the black iron-spire gates in front of the station.
“We’ll tell them the truth. It’s simple,” I said.
“Nothing about this is simple.”
Fritzi had told me the previous night how she never liked the way Mr. Fields looked at Connie, ever since that night at our parents’ party. She and her peers would file in for history class after Connie’s, and Connie would be standing at his desk, her foot arched and toes twisting against the floor.
“These are detectives,” I said. “They’ll want some explanations from Mr. Fields as much as we do.” I took my sister’s arm. She had gone bloodlessly pale since we left the house. Her flesh was the sweaty white of a sliced onion. “She’ll forgive us. We can find her now.”
We walked up the steps and past the imposing columns barricading the station entrance. Once inside, the heat hit like a fist. Before us the walls were an aged yellow, lit with old brass fixtures and wide-open windows letting in a warm, lazy breeze and the rising sounds of Royal Street traffic.
Fritzi’s cheeks and neck had flushed red.
“Take off your coat,” I told her. “You’re going to give yourself heatstroke.” She was wearing our grandmother’s white cocoon coat, a sweeping silk remnant from the ’20s.
“I’m cold,” she said. There were feverish rims around her eyes.
“Because you have no insulation.” Her meatless arms poked loose as I coaxed the coat off her. “This coat belongs in a silent picture. Nobody will listen to us if you look like an insane person.”
“Looks like nobody’s here to listen to us, anyhow.” She leaned over the front desk and drummed her fingernails. “Hello?”
After several minutes a woman approached from around the corner. She had a tired, unwholesome pallor, the humidity springing her batty hair out to the sides.
Fritzi gathered the cocoon coat in a bundle over her arm. “We’re looking to make a statement, ma’am.”
The woman looked me up and down. With the heat I had left most of my cuts exposed, needing them to breathe and rinse of sweat. I became suddenly aware of them: the bumpy reddened p
atches on my elbows and knees, the long yellowing bruises with bright splits at the centre, the thin clawing of branches swept on either cheek.
“As regards what?” the woman asked.
“The missing girls,” I said. “We’d like to discuss, with a detective if you’re able, the death of Suzanna DeClouet.”
Palm fronds spiked across the windows, clapping the glass in the breeze. The woman’s eyebrows pinched together. “Y’all the Fayette girls, ain’t ya? You know your daddy’s been here already, and we told him the best thing he can do is wait at home and let the detectives do their jobs.”
“Yeah, well, he doesn’t know what we know.” Fritzi casually slid her elbows onto the front desk. “Another girl goes missing, you’ll hear us hollerin’ outside your station about how we came to y’all offering up vital information and got turned out like a couple of street urchins.”
We were led down a short marbled hall, the batty-haired woman in front, and Fritzi beside me with her ridiculous cocoon coat bunched in the crook of her arm. My fingers kept loosely twitching as I tore into the skin around my thumbnail. We were close. The police would gather at Mr. Fields’ door, and he would be made to tell them all that he knew, whatever part he had played in my sister’s disappearance. What choice would he have?
“Keep up,” Fritzi said under her breath. I felt weightless, falling behind her, a shadow pushed along by the light.
The room wherein the woman left us boasted no more than a table and four steel-legged chairs. It was a stranded place, with blunt toothpaste-blue walls like a drained pool. Without knowing what else to do, we dragged two chairs close together and sat with our arms tightly linked and our stomachs in our chests.
Chapter 17
“GATOR TRAPS,” SAID the detective. He scrawled a pen across a pocket-sized notebook.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And you know him, the man you saw.”
“Not well,” I said. “I know who he might be, I mean.”
Bonavere Howl Page 11
