A shadow shifted back and forth in the hacked-out gaps. All of the room’s colours flooded together.
“Bonnie?”
The knob swung unhinged with the keyhole a dented mess on the floor.
I dug my face into the cradle of my elbow. “Don’t touch me!”
The shadow dropped the axe and grabbed me, its sharp nails digging with a familiar pang.
“Get up,” it said.
I clawed through the shadow’s hair like I meant to tear it out. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”
“Stop it, Bonnie!” The shadow fought with me, dragging me out from under the bed until it started coughing sparks. “Bonnie — Bonnie, please just — stop it, you need — will you shut up for two fucking seconds, what do you mean it isn’t me?”
A figment of Fritzi, who could not have been Fritzi, panted on her knees. She was pulling me out by the elbow, coughing into my hair. Her eyes looked crazed, glassy red and fractured like she was listening to something soundless in the air. “Do you hear anyone?” she asked. “Are there people here aside from Mr. Fields?”
I crawled out from under the bed. She paled at the stain on my skirt and grabbed me by the jaw.
“Bonnie — baby, what did he do to you?”
I did not understand her. “Leeches,” I said.
Her grip was too tight and I tried to shake out of it, but she only held on harder. “What does that mean, leeches? What do you mean by that?”
I touched my skirt. “He put leeches on me.”
Her voice carried a curl of revulsion. “Why would he do that?” she asked, not me but quietly under her breath, over and over, as she checked my arms and legs.
She smelled of lemongrass like the kitchen soap at home, and stale cigarette. “You smell like my sister.”
“I know, baby. We have to go, though. Okay?”
I let the shadowy figment help me up off the floor.
“Hold my hand,” she said, coughing into her shoulder.
I grabbed her whole arm.
“Can you walk?” Light slap to my jaw. “Bonnie, can you walk?”
“Are we going home?”
“Yes,” she said, “but we need to move quickly. Can you do that for me? Careful, watch your step.”
The long stairwell dropped below us, and the musty windows burned with light.
At the bottom of the stairs, the figment stopped.
“Sit here,” she said.
“Are you leaving me?”
“No, baby, I’m just going to get something. Stay put.”
“Don’t.” I reached out and grabbed the pocket of her jeans.
“Bonnie, please. Will you stay? If I go outside for just a moment, will you stay right here? You won’t move?”
I looked to either side of us in the large foyer. An open door with its hasp chipped off led into the kitchen, where a shattered window peered out onto the orange grove. The figment of Fritzi hurried toward it, barreling into the backdoor. She twisted the knob and stared bewildered when it did not open. She wrestled with it for a moment longer before crawling onto the kitchen table, pausing only to catch her balance. She lowered herself one leg at a time through a hole in the window so small that her ribs grazed the craggy glass along the edges. She was gone several minutes before returning with a rusted jug like a giant tea kettle.
“What’s that?” I asked. My head was clearing, a cool water pouring cleanly over the fog.
“I saw it in the shed when I grabbed the axe,” she said, with a dreamlike matter-of-factness, as if no other logic could be needed. She pinched my chin between her fingers and examined my eyes. “What did he give you? Did he say?”
I shook my head. “I’m all right. I think I’m all right.”
“Doesn’t matter what you think. What did it look like?”
“It was white. In a capsule.”
“But you don’t feel sick?”
“A little foggy now,” I said. I pointed to the jug, recognizing it from the shed, shoved in the corner with yard tools and a cobra-coiled hose. “What are we doing with that?”
Fritzi wrapped one arm around my waist and picked up the large tin jug with the other. It smelled like the exhaust pipe at the back of our Coupe. I thought to ask her what we needed with gasoline, but with a start I saw where she was leading us. The hidden door to the greenhouse was propped open, held in place by a yawning lion statuette.
“We can’t go in there,” I said. My heels dug against the floor. “Fritzi.”
“Don’t scream. You don’t have to go in.”
A malodorous waft rolled over us from the gaping greenhouse. “Mr. Fields goes in there, Fritzi, I saw him.”
“Trust me, it’ll be all right.”
I pulled her arm with any drained hysteria left. “Don’t go,” I kept saying, lowering my weight to drag her down.
She remained calm and squeezed my hand. Her eyes were the soft blue of butane flames. “He’s not going to hurt us. Look at me — Bonnie, look at me. I need to hear you say it. You won’t follow after me.”
I was too confused to argue further. “I won’t follow.”
When my sister reached the greenhouse door, she looked at me from across the hall, tiny in her cocoon jacket, with her wild inkblot of hair. A breeze crept in from a high, unreachable window, and carried with it the smoky pink of early sunrise.
Chapter 34
FRITZI HAD NOT come back. I stood outside of the greenhouse, listening in as sounds glugged and splashed behind a fleet of sharp palms. I craned my neck to see what she was doing, but branches hid her from every angle. I was forced onto my toes, peering between flanks of age-torn trunks, as sunlight bounced between the leaves and I saw a flash of orange hair.
Fear rushed over me. Without a thought I sprinted into the greenhouse, banging my knee against the statuette and shaking the leaves into a frenzy.
“Fritzi, get out!” The words had only just left my mouth when the sight of Dorian fell in front of me.
I stopped cold.
Dorian sat, his back against a tree and his legs splayed out in front. Peculiar purple fluid covered his shirt, several greasy smudges of it through his hair that made his own colour look artificial, a shoddy dye job. His chest lay still with a dark slash through the centre. The drizzly, grey light that had once coated his eyes was gone.
Daybreak had begun to brighten the greenhouse, and there was a cracking scree of birds against the glass. Along with the blood, there were oily wet patches on Dorian’s clothing, and countless driblets trickling from the leaves.
“Stay outside,” Fritzi ordered.
I watched Dorian lying still against the oak tree, a shock of white under sticky pools of blood. He seemed so lifeless that I nearly tripped over my feet when his head rolled up from his chest. I blinked uncontrollably, my eyes wet and hot and stinging as if a gust of cinder had blown into them. The leaves shone wet overhead, and shivering beads flung up into the air ahead of me. The greenhouse smelled of gasoline. I looked back at the door and for a moment could not understand the simple truth of our predicament. In knocking the statuette I had dislodged it from its perch, and the wooden panel had slid back into place. Nothing more than another immovable plank in the wall.
Fritzi emerged. “I told you to wait.” We both glanced at the sunken body, the encircling black-red pool, the jug of gasoline. None of these disassembled pieces fit together, though I knew their sequence, I understood their logic; it was like staring at an unfathomable math equation, knowing the answer but not how to solve it. I waited for Fritzi to explain, but she said nothing.
“The door is locked,” I told her, but she did not seem to hear. She was looking at Dorian, barren of expression. The emptiness of it sank, freezing, into the pit of my stomach as she watched his fingers twitch. It flickered away at the smell of smoke.
“Can’t you hear me, Fritzi?”
Her jumpy eyes snapped still. “What did you say?”
“The door is locked,” I said. It had n
ot yet sunk in, or perhaps it had and my body could do little more than offer high, helpless, breathless laughter.
Smoke mounted into a punch of heat as flames sharpened around the trees.
“It can’t be locked.” Fritzi ran to where the door had been and could no longer find it.
A snap of fire raged up the trunk of the nearest oak. I ran to the wall Candy had led me to, my fear hard as stone. The door. The door. Everything inside of me dropped away, nothing left but movement, a sinking dread, the door, the door. “Candice said there was another exit, here in the wall.”
“Where?” Fritzi asked.
“In the windows. One of the larger ones opens, we can climb through.” Stringy vines crawled over me as I worked my way down the windows, digging my fingers along the edges. “It’s on this side, she said so.”
“I can’t find anything.” Fritzi loped ahead, her silhouette fading in the smoke.
My coughs ripped through me. The air had a burnt edge, choking with heat. Ash crawled in at the corners of my eyes, and they watered to shield themselves, blurring into fiery rings.
The smaller trees were already crumbling. Red had sparked up in fast sweeps and flashes, charging up trunks and streaking jagged from branch to branch. Ash filled the smoke and cut into my lungs. The heat pounded against my body and all I could think to do was keep going, window to window, calling for Fritzi though she had stopped calling back, and I could no longer make out her shape. She had gone to the end of the wall, where a rippling yellow veil of smoke clung to the glass.
I found her lying in the dirt with her leg too close to a sprout of fire, the surrounding plants disappearing under a growing red tide. I pushed off from the glass to run to her when I felt an irregular shape in the frame’s metal. A latch. I marked it in my memory — third window from the end of the wall.
The fire had caught Fritzi’s jeans and her bare leg bubbled. I lifted her upper body and wrapped my arms around her torso from behind, dragging her with my fists balled against her chest, her heat-stripped leg licking up soot.
Third window from the end of the wall. Third window from the end of the wall. I found the latch in an instant — one swift swing and it clicked open. Smoke rushed under my feet, rolling up and through the window and onto the grass in the yard. I heaved my sister up, pressing my weight against her to hold her balance, her back to the glass and her head heavy on my shoulder. The gap in the windows started too high for me to push her out.
“Fritzi, you have to help me,” I said. She twisted against my shoulder, moaning. Heat snapped at the back of my neck. I grabbed one of her legs and lifted it, heaving her partly through the open gap as smoke charged between us. She fell over the edge and landed, mangled, on the other side. I started after her, and I could not be sure what possessed me to look over my shoulder, but when I did I saw, between a crook of broken branches, Dorian’s orange head looking about, drowned in smoke.
I shouted out the window to Fritzi. “Mr. Fields is still alive in here!”
“Constance . . .” he called.
At my sister’s name I lowered myself from the window. The smoke sparkled a starry fog. What did he mean by calling her name? I brushed through the mossy tangles, each a hot coil to the touch. Dorian had not moved, but the tree he rested against had cracked and the pond beside it was coated in ash. His sunken body jerked in its efforts to cough against the smoke.
“Why are you saying her name?” I wrapped my arm around my mouth and fell against the breaking oak. My head was hot, delirious, as if caught in a fever-soaked sleep. “Do you know where she is?”
I could swear he nodded.
“Get the hell away from him!”
I looked back at Fritzi, who was pulling herself up the glass by the edge of the open window, her seared leg limp and weighing her down. She screamed at me to follow her voice, shouldering her way back into the fire.
The spot where Dorian lay was not far from the glass wall. I could drag him, or help him stand, drape his arm over my shoulders. I leaned against him, pawing at my eyes with the back of my wrist. “You’ll tell me? If I help you, you’ll tell me where she is?”
I was on my knees now, the smoke thick as a wall in front of me. I could see only Dorian’s hand, resigning itself to his chest where he clutched his wife’s necklace. I had the faintest sight of his mouth pleading for her, shaping her name.
Overhead, heavy cracks broke through the branches as they fell, bright with flame. The unreal sound, the immensity of it, sparks like gunshots shooting up from landing bark.
Fritzi’s cries crashed all at once into my ears.
Running my elbows against the hot ash, I turned from Dorian and crawled in the direction of my sister’s voice. The wall glinted fire in its reflection. When I reached the glass, I clambered for the bottom of the window. Fritzi’s hand was there to grip my arm, and I hauled myself up, falling against her, smoke spilling over us in a singed froth.
She shifted underneath me. I watched her mouth move but could not hear her. My ears swam in silent astonishment, coughs clinging to my throat in dry convulsions. Fritzi leaned on me and we crawled to the far edge of the yard where the smoke could not reach us and the plot overlooked the pier and the Mississippi River lay sterling with indifference.
Fritzi pulled my hair out of my face. “Can you breathe?”
I pressed my forehead against hers. When I was sure the breaths were coming, I nodded.
We gasped for air like we were bobbing up from under water. Sirens spun in my ears, from a distance, and beside me Fritzi vomited her spit onto the grass. Ash flecked the air in a hellish snowfall over the glowing yard. The house cracked and peeled, raw as an open wound. Clouds turned deep strokes of brown and orange, beneath the big red burn of rising sun.
Chapter 35
I SAT IN a different room than the last time I was in the police station. There was none of the storage locker isolation, but wood-silled windows and cabinet drawers the same metal make as in my father’s campus office, and a motel-beige lamp and a bowl filled with milky-sheer mints grotesquely stuck together.
My head ached. I felt a strange sedation, drained blank yet filled with a vicious, relentless stream of thoughts, and all with too much behind them, too much to give meaning, to give order.
Fritzi was worse. She had not spoken in days. Not once since the firefighters carried us from the pier. She was sitting in another room with our father, who was speaking to an officer the way our mother was doing with me.
“You heard my daughter. What more do you want? She didn’t see what happened.”
“But she saw the fire, ma’am,” the officer repeated. We had established this, more than once. Each time, he read it from his notebook, and delicately scratched the hairline of his hedgy crew-cut with his pen. “You understand, Mrs. Fayette — ”
“Holly,” my mother interjected.
“Holly. You understand why it’s difficult for me to accept two young girls wandering alone, miles from home at the crack of dawn, on the outskirts of a crime scene, and move on from that no questions asked.”
“A crime scene.” She gave a pinched smile, her way of laughing at someone without laughing. “We’re criminalizing fire now?”
“Mrs. Fayette — Holly.”
My mother sighed. “Forgive me, we have not been like usual,” she said, her elegant, broken English directed at her pocketbook, as she rummaged for her cigarette case.
“Of course. All of us at the station sympathize. A lot of us have got kids of our own.” The officer was gentler than the last one. He pulled his own lighter from his pocket as my mother’s flat, steel case popped open and she slid a stout cigarette between her lips. “Nobody would be themselves,” he said. “I understand that. Maybe y’all can shed some light on things, that’s all I’m asking.”
Mama’s cigarette sloped toward me from between her ringed fingers, like a microphone into which I was meant to speak.
“Tell me, Bonavere,” the officer said. “What exa
ctly were you and your sister doing?”
“We were looking for my sister Connie,” I said, honestly. “She used to sit by the water when she was upset.”
“And you thought maybe, all of these weeks later, she might be sitting there, waiting, right by the pier?” The officer, whose name I heard a dozen times that day but did not once retain, was not speaking in a mocking tone, but with conspiratorial frankness, a tense brow and tilt of the head, as if to say: Bonnie, come on now, you look like a nice girl.
Mama’s pillbox hat cast a veil over one eye. The other bore into him, cold and dicey as weak ice. “I’m sure Bonavere was indulging her sister. Friederike has been half mad with pneumonia. Riddled with it out of grief.” Smoke snaked around her dark head. “Not one word is she speaking, Friederike. Has the child not been through enough? And you scare my youngest with your questions. You say such gruesome things in front of children.”
“Mrs. Fayette, a man is dead.”
“A man is dead,” she said. “My daughter — can you tell me where she has gone?”
Gilded bars of light fell in from the window, and drifted across my mother’s face. She smelled too strongly of jasmine, and still could not utter Connie’s name.
I was supposed to say something, but I could not fathom what would placate the officer without possibly implicating Fritzi. I glanced around, my thoughts in slippery skids. The heat shrank the room as the officer waited, tapping his pen against the table. What could I have said, anyhow, had I intended to say anything? Already my memories of what happened were freezing up, sinking behind locked doors, burying themselves in the most reclusive parts of my mind. A nightmare I remembered less and less the more I tried to grab hold of it.
The sun beat into the room, encroaching on its borders until there was only a sapping yellow blaze. My heart sped up. “Is an officer still speaking with my sister?” I looked at the frosted window in the door. What were they asking her? What was going through her mind that she would not say out loud?
My mother squeezed my shoulder. I realized that the monotonous boom in my ears was directed at me.
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