But this problem was far smaller and less consequential than the ones plaguing the world, so Madeline put it behind her, as she did with any qualms troubling their household.
She continued her mission of searching for money, safe in the knowledge her mother would be gone at least another couple of hours. She was convinced Irish Colleen had socked cash away in any number of places. She was of the old-fashioned generation, the blue collar Irish Channel crowd who didn’t trust the government—any government, as their own in Ireland had failed them in any number of ways as well—which included the banking system, and had never broken the habit of putting her money in socks and stockings. Even when August insisted their money was safe, her mind couldn’t be put at ease.
The trouble was, they spent so little time at Ophélie anymore that Madeline couldn’t be sure her mother had any cash on the property. Most was probably back home, untouched and waiting for the family to return. Condoleezza would know, but even hinting at it with the old maid would lead to a world of trouble.
Madeline couldn’t get access to her trust for another few years at least. Twenty-one was the legal rule written into the estate. There were provisions made for college, but no Deschanel would ever have to worry about paying for their education, not when they were behind millions of dollars in donations to higher education each year. Twenty-one was so far away… might as well be a lifetime. She could hardly stomach the idea of starting her senior year and managing through another nine months, but without money, she wouldn’t get far.
She’d promised Augustus, but she’d already let him down, so, in some ways, this wouldn’t be so bad. She’d ripped the bandage off already. Hell, he was probably expecting it.
Madeline knew these lies were hollow, but they sustained her. Augustus had been the only tether to the world she was a part of and the one she wished to be, and if she could convince herself that tether was severed, leaving would be as easy as slipping out and never returning.
Well, as easy as slipping out if she had the cash to sustain her.
“You shouldn’t be in here.”
Madeline nearly ate her heart at the unexpected sound of her little sister’s accusatory voice. “I’m just looking for something, Liz. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“I know what you’re looking for.”
She never knew how to read the strange things Elizabeth said. Even her empath senses couldn’t land on anything specific. Elizabeth was always as cool and still as an evening on the lake. “And just what is it you think I’m looking for?”
Elizabeth’s small, soft hand reached out and clasped Madeline’s forearm. “It isn’t too late, Maddy. You can still turn back from this path.”
Madeline’s hand began to tremble. She ripped her arm away and stared at her sister, without words, without quite knowing how to feel.
“Have you ever tried to slow a moving train, Elizabeth?” Madeline replied. She didn’t know why she was engaging, or explaining herself. Maybe the words weren’t for her. “It only stops when it hits a solid wall.”
Even after Elizabeth left her alone, her ominous words put a damper on Madeline’s determination. Suddenly, searching through her mother’s drawers felt dirty, rather than empowering. She needed to step away from the feeling before it consumed her.
On her way to her room, she picked up on the elevated voices from some of her siblings. She stopped and leaned over the railing. This was no simple spirited debate. Colleen and Augustus’ stern voices competed with Maureen’s wailing, and Madeline couldn’t make out a single word to piece it all together.
She should stop and listen. Figure out what was happening to cause such distress all around and go offer to help. That’s what family did.
But Madeline found she could only muster a vague detachment for whatever was happening downstairs, with a family she hardly knew anymore, in a home that wasn’t home.
She padded down the hall and returned to her room.
* * *
Maureen could not believe this was happening. It wasn’t. It was patently impossible. There was simply no way they could truly know about her and Peter, because Peter had said the secret was safe, and Peter never lied.
Colleen looked so reasonable with the folder on her lap, but Maureen knew better. Her eldest sister was a self-righteous bitch who lived for these moments, when she could cast judgment on someone while holding herself up as the pillar of goodness.
And Augustus… why, he was no better! More subtle, perhaps, but he enjoyed his moniker of “the good son,” and wore it with sanctimonious pride.
They had the nerve to sit there and accuse her as if… as if they knew anything at all! Oh, how her blood boiled! She couldn’t wait to find something she could use against them, something to reveal they were not nearly as perfect as they pretended to be.
“Maureen, we’re trying to help,” Augustus said. Hands folded, the portrait of self-control. “What happened isn’t your fault. You were taken advantage of by someone you trusted.”
“We’re not judging you. We love you,” Colleen added.
“It’s not true!” Maureen screamed. Her voice echoed across the wood and creepy plaster friezes, and she wondered if it had carried up the stairs. The last thing she needed was her other sisters joining the party against her. And Irish Colleen would be home soon…
Colleen fidgeted with the folder in her lap, which she’d had yet to open. She shared a nervous glance with Augustus. Maureen tensed. What was in it? Why hadn’t she opened it yet?
“Thing is, Maureen, we know it’s true.”
“You don’t know anything at all!” Maureen’s heart beat so hard she put her hand across her chest to see if it was literally bursting away from her skeleton. It wasn’t, but she could certainly feel the pulsing of the rapid thump, thump, thump through her flushed skin.
“I don’t want to upset you even more,” Colleen said. Her finger pulled at the corner of the folder. “But we have to get to the bottom of this.”
“We’re trying to help,” Augustus said again, a broken record of useless promises.
“This whole conversation is upsetting because you two don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” Maureen’s eyes pricked with dark spots. Her heartrate was off the charts. What was happening? She’d begun to realize their accusations were too specific to be guesses, but she couldn’t guess what might happen next. She searched her mind for any way out of this, any way to convince them this wasn’t true, that whoever had told them this was a liar.
Colleen finally opened the folder. She paused and exhaled before rifling through the stack. The seconds felt like minutes to Maureen, who really thought she might pass out at any moment.
Colleen found what she was looking for and held it up.
A rush of blood and adrenaline hit Maureen like a brick and the world went dark.
* * *
She awoke to her siblings leaning over her. Colleen had a wet rag in her hand, held off to the side, as if she didn’t quite know whether to use it. Augustus fell back on the couch in relief.
What had happened? Maureen started to ask, but there was only a momentary delay before it all came back.
Colleen had shown her a picture. That night, at the dock, on the lake. Where Maureen had feared how exposed she was, despite Peter’s assurances. Where she’d been right all along.
“It’s not what you think,” Maureen said and then burst into tears.
They knew. There was no calling anyone a liar anymore, not when they had pictures. They knew, and now they would do everything they could to tear her and Peter apart, and Maureen’s heart was no longer in danger of bursting but exploding into a million little pieces.
Her life was over! Over, over, over, over…
Colleen and Augustus held her as she cried. They didn’t understand her tears. They couldn’t comprehend that she was crying for a future that was now extinguished under the prying eyes of some meddling spy. Some terrible person who had ruined her entire life.
<
br /> “Who?” Maureen asked. Her voice wavered. She leaned back and rolled her hands over her tear-stained eyes. “Who gave you that?”
Colleen and Augustus exchanged another look. “Charles suspected something was going on with you and asked someone to confirm,” Augustus said.
“He spied on me!”
“Spying isn’t right,” Colleen agreed carefully. Ever the diplomat. “But I’m glad he did, in this case. Maureen, this man is taking advantage of you. I know that’s hard to see… it’s hard to take a step back and see it how we do, but he’s preying on you.”
“Peter loves me!” They didn’t understand. Of course they didn’t! How could they? “He’s going to marry me!”
“Oh, sweetie,” Colleen said, and Maureen hated her in that moment.
“Where the hell is Charles, anyway? I want him to tell me how he could betray his own sister by spying on her!”
Augustus frowned. Colleen tried to catch his eye, but he didn’t look up. “He was supposed to be back so we could all talk to you together. I’m sorry, Maureen. You do have the right to ask him questions.”
Colleen checked the grandfather clock in the corner. “He was supposed to be back thirty minutes ago.” Her eyes lingered there several moments longer, and her mouth twisted in thought. “He seemed like he wanted to be here. This was his idea. He’s the one—”
“Where did he go? What could be more important than ruining my life?” Maureen demanded, but a sick feeling had begun to grow deep within her. She pushed it aside, further down, afraid of what it might mean.
My Sweet Maureen. I am ill with this knowledge. Is this true?
Go away, Daddy!
How I wish I could follow you when you aren’t here, but I am bound to the properties of our ancestors. I failed to protect you. I failed you.
Go away, go away, go away!
“What’s important now, Maureen, is we help you through this. We need a plan. Mr. Evers needs to be held accountable for what he’s done. We’ll be with you every step of the way, I promise.” Colleen’s words all ran together, a blend of unhelpfulness. “We’ll do everything we can to make this as painless as possible for you. We know you’ve already suffered enough.”
Maureen hardly heard any of it. Not her father. Not Colleen. Something had shifted in the room, and she turned to register it.
Augustus stood at the large bay window of the parlor, looking out. Waiting.
Ten
Huck, What Have You Done?
Charles didn’t get out of the car right away. He pulled it around the back of the Big House at Ophélie, to the old covered building that had once been a livery for horses, in some long ago faraway time he couldn’t even comprehend.
He wanted to stay in this moment, wedged between past and present, uncommitted to either. The last hour was a blur, because he needed it to be. For it to be any clearer would send him into madness. But he could no more face the next steps ahead of him, for undoubtedly the truth was written in his face no matter how he tried to distort it into hazy obscurity.
This unclear thing, he didn’t regret it. Charles could largely only live with himself because of his innate ability to forgive his tendency to act on impulse; told himself this impulse was actually just an extension of his instinct, and one must always trust their instincts.
He should have called Colin. This was often his first thought after a bad decision, but he knew it was only his way of convincing himself he’d done wrong, instead of trusting his judgment. Colin was inevitably the counterpoint to everything Charles did; the entire opposite end of the pendulum swing. If Charles wanted to jump into a river, Colin would suggest instead finding a pool, preferably one with a lifeguard on duty. If Charles suggested a night of strippers and China White, Colin would come back with an idea to grab a six pack and crash on the couch for a movie night.
Colin was ultimately the voice of his conscience, and hot on the heels of what he’d just done, Charles needed validation, not censure.
In the end, this reminder that a man who stood by his beliefs would have no trouble facing them was what got Charles out of the car and into the house.
* * *
The scene in the parlor shattered his confidence in a single instant. Maureen huddled alone and crying in the chaise lounge. Colleen perched awkwardly behind her, poised as if ready to either hug her or slap her, or quite possibly, both.
Augustus pounced no sooner than Charles stepped through. “Where have you been?”
The daze from the car returned. Charles was again standing on the bridge two or three miles off I-10, that spot his father took him when he was very little, deep into the Maurepas swamp. Weary from having twice his body weight a moment earlier. Weary from… the rest of it, everything leading up to him driving through the weedy-heavy trail with his low-rider Trans Am, somehow more stressed about bottoming out his baby than what caused him to turn down that road to begin with. Arms ached, burned, with the shift in mass. He felt almost weightless, but that wasn’t true, or quite right, because he would never again be weightless. Some things a man could not turn back from.
“What’s the matter with you? Are you on drugs?” Augustus had him by the shoulders. Charles felt his body sway with the movement, but he was no longer entirely anchored to his physical form. He floated somewhere to the left.
“No,” Charles managed. He didn’t know where to go from here. He took a step forward, but something else pulled him into the floor, and he looked down to see Maureen pulling at his pants, face peeled back in some fresh agony. Her mouth moved, but he couldn’t make out words.
Colleen approached with a horror-stricken look, and somehow this was what pulled him back a little further into himself, and the unfolding moment.
“Huck, what have you done?”
Ahh, so it was Colleen who asked the right question. The first one to understand it was less important where he’d been.
Maureen’s shrill cries pierced through, and now he understood she was asking this question, too, over and over and over. What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?
Charles let her hang there and looked at Augustus and Colleen with hollow eyes. He turned them on his siblings when he couldn’t find any words.
“Huck?” Colleen repeated. “Where have you been? What have you done?”
Huck. Huck was such a silly name, really. It started when he was little, and one of his cousins, one of Blanche’s brood, maybe Luther, couldn’t say Charles. Their mother told them to try Chuck instead, but all they’d managed was Huck. Everyone thought it was so funny, everyone but Charles, who knew of only one other Huck, and it was a character in a book he’d never read.
“Huck!”
Charles snapped back to the moment with the sting of Colleen’s slap. He again looked at her, at Augustus, but something in his gaze melted the look from both their faces, from anger to understanding.
“Stop asking him,” Augustus said, some version of the truth coming over him as the words rolled out of his mouth. “Stop, Colleen. Don’t ask anymore. If we don’t know, we don’t have to lie.”
“Are you…” Colleen gaped at her older brother with something like disgust.
“I did what I had to do,” Charles finally managed. He shrugged the shrieking Maureen from his leg and stepped away from her, from them all. “I did what I had to do.”
Maureen rolled her head back and keened like an animal in its final death throes. He could muster nothing more than vague disinterest in her plight. This was her fault. He had saved her life, and yet she cried, and cried, and…
Augustus knelt down and lifted Maureen into his arms. She melted like a wilted flower, burying her face in his flannel shirt. He blew his cheeks out, eyes wide, and all he had left to offer was a shake of his head. He carried Maureen up the stairs.
Charles turned to Colleen. “Don’t you dare fucking judge me. Don’t you dare.”
“I’m not.”
“No? It’s your specialty.”
/> “I won’t ask anything more. Augustus is right. But I wish you had told me first.”
Charles laughed, an old, hard sound. “So you could stop me from doing what needed to be done?”
Colleen laid a hand on his shoulder. “No. So I could have helped.”
FALL 1970
* * *
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
Eleven
Disappearing
Maureen wished they were all dead.
All of them.
Every last member of her unsupportive, uppity, unrelentingly unfair family.
At the same time, she didn’t wish this at all, for she knew even in death she couldn’t escape them. Her father was proof of this, evidence that even mourning wasn’t really real, only a macabre tradition that faded to something far more sinister.
And now Peter, who plagued her in the halls of school, standing at her locker, running beside her in gym. He looked over her shoulder as she pretended to focus on a test, and watched with a vacant expression as she ate her lunch alone.
“Why, Maureen?” This was all he would say, like a broken refrain that kept skipping back to the start. “Why, Maureen?”
Why? Why? Well, she had no answer for that, and Charles still denied any wrongdoing. Colleen and Augustus turned on a blank look when asked about that night, one that wouldn’t have fooled a fool. It was as if in refusing to speak of it they denied all their lives changed because of Charles’ impulsiveness. Why Colleen and Augustus would side with him over Maureen was part of why she hated them, and all the others. Family first, Colleen liked to say, just like their mother, when what they really meant was protecting the family name came first, even at the cost of the happiness of the members.
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