There came a knock on the door. Before Latimer could stand, it brushed open.
“Who are you talking to?” a voice asked. Latimer hurried to the door and stopped it from opening any farther. “Darling, what are you doing out of bed?”
“I heard voices.”
“She’s just leaving, dear. Please, back to bed.”
“I don’t want to. I want to see.”
Latimer whispered through the gap, shaking his head, before closing the door and returning steadfastly to the sitting area. “My wife. I’m afraid she’s fallen rather ill.”
I was determined to prolong the conversation. “Something she caught while travelling?”
“No, no, I travel alone, meet new people. It’s how I met Dorian, actually. Mr. Fields. He would be your teacher now.” Sunlight broke gently through the window and slid along the cane hook. “You mentioned Ursuline earlier.”
“He was my sisters’ teacher,” I said. “Both of theirs.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
My mind snagged on Dorian’s name. “Were you on safari back then, too? When you met Mr. Fields?”
“Bangladesh,” Latimer said. “We were at the same reception. Peculiar spectacle, a child bride’s wedding, as a matter of fact. Her father was an associate of mine.”
“A child can’t be married,” I said in disbelief.
“Most certainly they can,” Latimer said. “Whether or not they should is quite a different matter.”
My sisters and I had staged a wedding once, when I was four. I wore my father’s dress shoes and had to tilt my head to see out from under his best Stetson hat. Fritzi showered a laughing Connie in hydrangea petals and placed the sheerest of our dinner linens over her hair.
“How old was she?” I asked. I thought perhaps he meant a girl Fritzi’s age. Fritzi was not so much a child to me, but she very much was to our father.
“Well, let’s see. About eight, I reckon. Dorian was teaching there for several years. Private sessions with Bangladeshi aristocracy. From what I heard she required classes far away from other children, so rather a severe circumstance, as it were.”
“Was she so ill?” I asked.
“Miss Fayette, she was hysterical. Rather twisted around. Dorian has a soft heart for that sort. The lost souls. He spent a good couple of years working with the direst of cases in Bedlam, off in London.”
I thought of Candice Pyke stored beneath her uncle’s garden, as lost a soul as any.
“Bedlam?” I asked.
“Quite the notorious name, I know.”
“But it’s a place of torture. It’s medieval, I thought.” The subject of countless horror stories, causing nightmares that roused me from sleep and brought Connie to my bunk to ask me why, why I would ever read such horrible things.
For an instant the room shifted, as if split in half and sliding apart; I saw the tortures in those old stories, the madhouse experiments in films Saul and I watched with our hands over our eyes, peeking through our fingers and wishing we had not. The cracking and bleeding of skulls, the scarring of frail limbs, the shoving of frightened men and women, girls and boys, against hard tile walls to be hosed with water torn from the dead of winter.
I doubt I could have moved had the ceiling begun to crumble. My knees froze and poured through my legs all at once like melting ice.
“It was a proper hospital by the time Dorian arrived,” Latimer said. “None of those ghastly procedures. Leeches and hoses . . . the stuff of darker ages.” He shook his head, his face clearing. “I can assure you of its respectability. Dorian is a Lasalle, after all.”
Never had I been so certain of the need to speak with Amy Bellrose. Surely the doctors, the wards, the secretaries could not know the names of all of Amy’s family — though I could not simply walk in, claiming without proof to be some Alabaman cousin.
But I was so distraught over the condition of my poor cousin, I was so terribly nervous, I didn’t think to bring identification.
I scoured the parlour from the edge of the sofa. “What happened to her?” I asked, juggling my words and speeding gears, what could I use, what could I say. “The little bride girl, I mean.”
Latimer’s shoulders fell. “Married off, I’m afraid. To an insufferable brute, no less. She was just a little thing, too. I attended the reception, but not the wedding, when I saw the girl’s age. I had Amy with me, you see. I didn’t want her to witness a girl that age in such a position. We still have a little toy elephant she found in the market from that voyage, oddly enough. The only belonging of hers I never moved to the attic.” He gestured, wanly, toward the corner behind us.
I followed the weak flourish to a table crowded with gargoyle-capped bells and family portraits, and a strawberry-jade elephant about as tall as my thumb. As I walked toward it, one of the photographs prickled into focus, the only one not cast in the rain-weather shade.
“This photograph,” I said.
“Ah, yes, I’m quite fond of that one. I imagine it must be somewhat strange to see an esteemed teacher as such a young, roguish man.”
I stiffened before it. In the frame stood Latimer and Emma, with Dorian Fields and Apollina Lasalle sitting childishly cross-legged at their feet. The men were both dressed in suspenders and straw hats, the women almost matching in striped dresses and daisy-lined sunhats, but for a dazzling brooch on Emma’s breast, and — resting now underneath my cardigan, coldly reassuring against my heart — the bloodstone around Apollina’s neck.
I followed the swoop of shadow beneath Apollina’s sunhat, where her face beamed out from behind the glass. Finetip nose and playful smile, her low-spiralling curls the soft brown of milky coffee. Her eyes were made brighter by the camera’s flash, but they were darker than those of the others, whose pale eyes swallowed the light. I only dwelled on this a moment. Among the trinkets and photographs lay, too, Mr. Bellrose’s wallet.
I could hear myself, with all the air of assured authentication: My uncle Mr. Latimer Bellrose, Amy’s father, couldn’t drive me today, so he sent me, you see, with his driver’s licence.
“He looks the same,” I said. It was with great effort that I kept the tremor from my voice. “One of those boyish faces, I reckon.”
The wallet hovered beside me, a blur of dark red. I had never stolen a thing before. I had taken from my sisters, a blouse or book or bracelet here and there, but always I gave it back. And I would give the wallet back, too, that was without question. A knot bulked in my stomach. I dug my thumbnail hard behind a cuticle. Someone knocked on the door a second time.
“There’s a call for you, sir,” said the maid.
Mr. Bellrose peered around the high back of his armchair. “A call?” he asked, visibly perturbed.
It was obvious enough that he wanted to be left alone, by me, by the maid, by the world at large. “Is it a matter of much importance?” He began to turn back around, and as he did time slowed into one long, loose moment aflutter with the soft thump of my pulse, the tightening of the knot. I nearly drew back, but for the picture in its sterling wire frame. Dorian Fields’ arm wrapped around a girl with my sister’s face, his hand resting intimately on her hip. Without another thought I grabbed the wallet and shoved it into the pocket of my skirt.
“I’m afraid I have to take this,” Latimer said, lifting from his chair. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Bonnie Fayette.”
“A pleasure, sir,” I said.
Chapter 25
DARK, GNARLED OAKS and willow trees surrounded the Bellrose property. Voices from inside the three-tiered house fell faint onto the entrance steps where I stood in the dwindling rain. I wanted Fritzi to be standing beside me, with her arm around my shoulder and a bitter word.
I faced the grand black door, so shiny that it glared a pink haze of my reflection. I walked down a few steps to take in the house’s full view: a modern day mansion, comparatively, and entirely white, ghostly in its sparseness, more like the plaster cast of a home long demolished.
I watched my shoes splash through the puddles on the path winding toward Jackson Street. I had told Fritzi that morning that I would arrive home again with answers, straight from Amy Bellrose’s mouth, but I could have filled the Cabildo with all I did not know.
Now pneumonia had struck. Dr. Falgoust had made a house call early that morning, considering my mother’s condition and my father’s increasing absence. His hand to Fritzi’s forehead, his stethoscope glinting two mercurial threads from his ears, the doctor had said that her immune system was weakened, that one did not catch pneumonia from a chill, or the rain.
I reached the front gate and rested my forehead against its bars, the wet iron soothing in the humidity. The bottom spires dug into the newly freshened mud, and I leaned my weight against the gate to shove it open. There was only the faintest sliver of rain; apart from that, the street was silent, and were it not so eerily still I might have missed the small voice calling out to me.
“Is someone there?” I asked.
It was a voice of thin porcelain, calling from the ashy green falls of an old willow.
“You. Young girl.” A figure dressed in white stepped out from behind the willow’s trunk. Her hair was shaved to the scalp and gauntness shadowed her face. Her bare feet were stark against the grass. “You were speaking with my father. Don’t run,” she said, reaching out as I backed away. The sound and look of her were far removed from the wild woman in Red Honey.
“Mr. Bellrose said you were in Gentilly State.” I ducked beneath the willow, but stopped with several feet between us.
“He wants us to be left alone.” She wiped the back of her hand against her cheek. Her gaze drifted over me. “I heard you. Speaking, the two of you. Your sister is missing.”
“For a little over a month,” I said.
“Do you know who?”
I knelt on the grass, where Amy had burrowed herself into the willow’s densest shade. As I leaned in close to her I saw how the scar on her mouth had been powdered, how it caked and cracked. “Your uncle,” I said. “Will you tell me what he did to you?”
Amy rose and pulled my arm toward the garden along the side of the house, staggering listlessly like a woman halfasleep.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
She put her finger to her lips and whispered, watching the silhouettes behind the windows. “It’s foggy, my memory. I remember sounds . . . and a hollow look, like she couldn’t see anything in front of her.”
“Your sister,” I said. “Parnella.”
We pushed through leaves and the decayed odour of cold earth, until we came upon a terra cotta birdbath wrapped in vines. It was circled by a fairy ring of browned mushrooms.
“Parnella hid this in the roof of our dollhouse, but — ” Amy paused, touching the stubble along her temple. Someone had tried to make a pretty show of it, but the dark hair ran an uneven prickle, with patches baring her sun-pinked scalp. “We were visiting our uncle after our aunt Apollina died. She had toys in one of the old abandoned rooms . . . we sneaked in to play, he let us sometimes, and these toys were, you see, she loved old things, so they were toys from olden times, wooden horses on wheels and tin trains . . . and there was this doll with a cracked wax face.”
Between the garden trees and the side of the house dripped the last clinging bulbs of rain. It had grown quiet on the other side of the wall. No clip of shoes or rush of movement from the open windows. Amy was sinking her fingers into the dirt around the birdbath, unplugging the mushrooms and clawing up dark, cold mounds.
Dirt sprinkled onto my skirt as I sat next to her. “What are you looking for?”
“I couldn’t leave it in the dollhouse, with Emma snooping around up there since I got back. She means to sell everything, she keeps saying fresh start, but I know she just thinks she can erase Parnella. She always wanted to erase everything that ever came from my mama. But I took it, from the dollhouse roof.” Her hands stopped their digging, elbows deep in the dirt. “Nobody would find it here, not in a hundred years,” she said, forcing a burgundy travel journal up from the hole in the ground, its cover cracked like stone.
It looked just like Connie’s. I nearly ripped it from Amy’s hands. “Why do you have that?”
“It was my sister’s. I saw her hide it the week everything happened. Maybe it can help you find yours.” Amy placed the journal on her lap, and her eyes shrank as she ran the tips of her fingers over the cover. “I was playing in one of the closed-off rooms,” she said, receding into the memory. “In the closet, with the wooden horses.”
A clothesline rocked loosely beside us among the witch hazel, whose spindly shadows crawled across the linens, and clung to Amy’s dress.
“I haven’t ever spoken about it. Seen it a thousand times, though,” she said, and I knew there was a difference. However much Connie’s absence permeated my every thought, I had never once said so out loud. Never recounted to anyone the lost, dark-edged hours, knowing that the words themselves, the weight of them in my mouth, would be like drowning, and all at once her disappearance would cease to be a series of frantic flashes, scattered in ungraspable ether. It would be linear. It would be a thing that another person told another person.
The stone was freezing against my bare calves, as if we were in a deep, dripping recess of a cave.
“You see, I don’t know what they were doing. He was talking nice and pleasant like he always did, and I heard her trying to drink something while she was lying down, but she started coughing it up, and saying such strange things about our mama, like she was right there, when really she died when we were little.” Amy’s eyes darted, chasing the memory. Her voice was clear and high and glided like a stone skipping across water. “Uncle Dorian kept talking her through it, saying things that just didn’t make any sense, telling her . . . speak to her, follow her, bring her closer. Now why would someone ever do a thing like that?”
“Amy?” called a woman’s voice. “Where have you got to?”
My heart gave a thud. “Who’s calling you?”
“Amy?” The voice sharpened with a note of panic. “Your daddy and I are lookin’ for you, young lady.”
The colour fled Amy’s face. “My stepmother, Emma.”
“Tell me what happened. Where did he bring you?”
Her eyes lingered on the bay window over the garden, as two curtains parted, and a long black column of interior darkness formed.
“Please,” I said. She lowered her head to her hands, snatched it away again. “These sounds, like she couldn’t breathe. I looked out from the closet, but I saw only her legs . . . they were shaking, and he was kneeling on the floor right beside her . . .” Footsteps scuttled back and forth behind the bay window curtains. We sat motionless, staring at the jasmine-vine and brick. I felt the closeness of the rain and the cinder scent of the dead-leaf brush.
“Black coat,” Amy said, more quietly. “White, white fingers . . . long like threads, and . . . they carried my sister through the house, and covered my mouth.” She pushed the journal closer to me. “My stomach burned, and there was a haze before darkness.”
A sour burn rose in my throat. “You were poisoned?”
“When I woke up all I saw were trees and stars, and I felt water coming up under my clothes, until my uncle Dorian lifted me and set me on the mud, and I couldn’t move my fingers or toes. Why did he do that?” she asked me. “Why would he put me in the water, then take me out?” Silky light through the rain clouds rinsed a startling, clear gloss over the ashy trees, and the garden paled into a bright blank space, an empty enormity with all the air in the world but so thin you could tear it in half.
Neither of us had heard the footsteps tramping through the garden. She was simply there, with vaporous grey eyes and scorpion-black rings crawling along her fingers. Dressed all in black she wired out against the white house like a crack in the brick.
“You dare come into my home and steal from my husband.” Emma Lasalle seized my wrist with the snap of a snakebite. “Give it h
ere.”
“Give what?” I asked.
“You little criminal.” She lay her hand out. “The wallet.”
I reached slowly into my pocket. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I was going to give it back.”
“This what your mama taught you? Harassin’ decent families — oh, yes,” — she nodded fiercely, her sleet-grey hair shaking out of form — “Leopold told me all about you nasty little Fayette girls, with your sordid family laundry, you and your backwater friends picking fights in the streets with him, trying to diminish a respectable family’s good standing.” She pulled my arm in the direction of the front yard. I pulled back and the indignation in her face shivered through her body like a spasm. She turned a strange witchy pale but for her black blouse and skirt, the two coal smudges at her temples. “You wicked thing. Leopold said as much, what a wicked little thief you were.”
I swept the journal off the ground and held it tightly to my chest. “I only wanted to speak with Amy. I have to, you don’t understand.” I looked over my shoulder to find Amy cowering in a tight ball, and when I turned back around, my cheek met with a fiery smack.
Emma straightened, tugging the bottom of her blouse in place where it tucked into her skirt. Tension spread through her shoulders, up her neck and through her jaw. “You will not embarrass my family. You have a taste for scandal, is that what this is?”
I ran the back of my hand across the corner of my mouth, where a fleshy rawness leaked blood between my teeth and coated my tongue. “Ma’am, my name is Bonavere Louise Fayette. My daddy teaches at Tulane, my mama worked with your late sister, ’bout seven years ago.” I held one hand up, waiting to be struck. “I’m here askin’ for your help.”
“Who you are is of no consequence to me, Miss Fayette, but I assure you — who I am is of consequence to you.”
I had a taste like a mouthful of pennies. I could not stand another swallow of blood, and my body acted before my head as I spat a faint red spray onto the white jasmine. I was afraid to look up, certain of Emma Lasalle’s astonishment.
Bonavere Howl Page 17
