Two. Four. Ten. Fifteen. Evangeline went through the motions, until she was nearly out of her mother’s secret stash. Never mind that Irish Colleen would eventually, maybe soon, notice the cash missing. But where would Evangeline get more when it was gone?
When they asked for fifteen, and Evangeline had less than half that left from the food stash, she accepted that this arrangement was no longer sustainable. This also meant her personal danger was great.
Cassidy would never know she’d saved Evangeline. Cassidy was one of Ethan’s groupies, but had peeled away before he disappeared. She ran into Evangeline as she was leaving the dangerous group one night and seemed genuinely happy to see her.
“Please tell me you’re not still hanging with Ethan’s crew,” Cassidy said in a low voice.
Evangeline shrugged.
“Come with me.” Cassidy smiled and tugged at her arm. “A bunch of us got away and made our own crew. You can call us Life After Ethan, but really we just like to hang and be cool and not worry about anything. Chill out, smoke out. You know.”
“Yeah,” Evangeline said. “Cool.”
“Well, you’re good people, Ivy, so you’re in. That is your name, right? Ivy?”
Evangeline had nodded, because she was nothing if not adaptable, and anonymity was safer.
“And don’t worry. None of his asshole friends know about this place. You’re safe from his controlling.”
“Don’t you know? He’s gone. Disappeared.”
Cassidy laughed. “Let’s hope it lasts.”
That was a month ago, and Evangeline still didn’t really know any of the kids in Life After Ethan, and she was good with that.
“I gotta go. My mom is going to be flipping her wig,” Cassidy said, shooting furtive looks at the door where the last of the kids filtered out. “She can give you a ride, you know.”
“It’s cool. I’ll get one from my brother.”
“If you’re sure…”
“I’m sure.”
Cassidy blew her a kiss and skipped out of the old warehouse. The last one out, except Evangeline.
Outside, the rain started. It didn’t mean much, only that the outer bands were active. No danger yet. Evangeline checked her watch. Augustus would be out of class in thirty minutes, which meant he would be at the office in just under an hour. The locks were in now, so she couldn’t come and go without him anymore. He’d meant to make her a key, but they’d both forgotten, and so she just timed her arrivals with his.
Evangeline closed her eyes. The room was devoid of sound other than the light mechanical clicks and clunks from the buildings nearby. She could think of so few times in her life when the world around her had been truly quiet.
She awoke to cold steel pressing into the soft flesh of her neck. Her pulse throbbed, and each movement was a pierce of pain.
“You didn’t think we’d find you?” Serenity said. “You don’t get to blow us off, Deschanel. We don’t just go away.”
“I don’t have any more money,” Evangeline managed, through the pressure on her windpipe. She was afraid to move… she understood there was no room for error.
Serenity made a little hmph noise that was almost sweet. With her free hand, she signaled. A shuffling of feet came next, and then Evangeline saw, through her limited view, three men appear in the arc of her vision. She knew two of them.
“If you don’t have money, then we’ll take what you do have,” Serenity said.
* * *
The taxi seat was cold, which should have been soothing against the bruises on the back of her thighs. It wasn’t. The smell of the old, peeling plastic made her nauseated, and she nearly threw up. Only the absence of anything left to vomit stopped her.
The taxi driver checked three times with her if she didn’t want to stop at a hospital instead. She didn’t trust him, either, didn’t trust anyone anymore, not him, not her brother, not anyone. He was likely more concerned with being pulled into an investigation than anything else, and Evangeline had nothing left for him.
“No. I want to go home,” she said, and he reminded her that a taxi all the way to Vacherie was going to cost a lot more than she probably had.
Evangeline still had the last of the money she’d stolen from her mother in her knapsack. Amazingly, Serenity and her friends hadn’t thought to look there after… after…
“You don’t know what I have.” And you don’t know what I’ve lost.
The tears dried up by the time the I-10 turned into I-310. But the pain was not as forgiving. She sat sideways in the bench seat, her legs bowed outward. She said a silent prayer, though she didn’t believe in God, that she wouldn’t leave blood behind for the taxi driver to clean up. Not to do him any favors. The thought of evidence of that night might exist anywhere else horrified her.
He didn’t say another word the rest of the ride, though his eyes traveled to her bloodied, huddled form in the rearview. He wanted to ask. He didn’t.
* * *
Evangeline slipped into sweats and a heavy sweater after her short bath. She craved the cleanliness of the water, but she couldn’t bear the pain for long. She washed off as much of the night as she could manage, and then hobbled to her room.
“Evangeline?”
Colleen’s voice. Why was she addressing her? Colleen hated her. Had hated her since the incident with Rory.
“Where have you been? Augustus was worried sick. You were supposed to come home with him.” She pointed to the window at the end of the hall. “There’s a hurricane coming, you know.”
Evangeline winced as she released the handle of the door. How could Colleen not know, not sense her suffering? Had they drifted so far apart?
“I don’t want to talk tonight,” Evangeline said without turning.
“You never do, when someone wants to hold you accountable.” Colleen stepped closer, and Evangeline cringed, curling into a standing fetal position. “I know who you’ve been hanging out with.”
The tears took Evangeline by surprise. She’d thought they were dried up, like whatever else inside her made her human. “Not tonight, Colleen.”
“Ethan Summerland. Evangeline, you’re smarter than this.”
Evangeline winced as the pain buckled her knees. “Please, leave me alone.”
“Whatever happened between us, I’m still your sister. I don’t want to see something happen to you.”
Yeah? Too late, Colleen.
Evangeline forced herself to stand straight. Her head turned, and the spot where the knife had broken the surface of her neck screamed at her. “Talk to Charles, then. Ask him what happened to Ethan Summerland.”
She rushed through the door and locked it behind her, safe, finally.
No, not safe. She’d be safer outside, in the coming storm.
She’d never be truly safe again.
FALL 1972
* * *
VACHERIE, LOUISIANA
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
Eleven
Prepare For the Worst
The envelope didn’t look like much. Plain and white, with nothing printed on the outside to suggest the interesting contents within. Only the return address—Scotland—betrayed the potential.
Potential was all it was for the time being. The packet contained the information Colleen had been waiting weeks for: a brochure singing the benefits of the medical program at the University of Edinburgh, and an invitation to submit up to two years out.
The timing was right. Colleen had just started her third year of undergrad in New Orleans and would need to make decisions soon. That she was determined to go to medical school wasn’t up for debate, but where was.
There were other schools in the stack. Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Yale, Case Western. Applying to any of these was pointless; if she wanted in, she’d get in. She was a great, but not exceptional, student, but a Deschanel would never have to knock hard to open any door.
But Scotland was different. The Deschanel name didn’t carry as much weight in Europe,
outside of France, and something about the rolling green hills of the Highlands called to her in a way nothing else ever had. Colleen didn’t romanticize much in life, but her notions of what this ancient land held in store for her were the height of romance, inducing a side of her she was surprised to learn existed.
It was away from New Orleans and her responsibilities, but she’d begun to wonder if she might lead this family better with some space first. None of her siblings except Augustus wanted anything to do with her. They couldn’t see through their anger at her perceived meddling to understand why she stepped up and made the family business her own.
An hour later, Colleen dropped the completed application in the outgoing mail stack. As an afterthought she slipped it into the middle of the pile. She felt dirty, somehow, like even putting in the application was an act of betrayal. The sting was only somewhat lessened by the knowledge her siblings, and maybe even her mother, would be glad to be rid of her for a while.
All the phones in the house started ringing. They stopped after the first ring, before she could answer the one in the downstairs office. Soon after, Condoleezza came shuffling down the stairs at a pace faster than Colleen had ever seen the woman move.
“Colleen, thank goodness! You’re still here!”
“I was on my way to class. What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
Their head housekeeper shook her head and kept shaking it. “Child, you need to get yourself to Charity Hospital. Miss Ophelia has taken down with pneumonia, and at her age, that might not be ailing her long.”
Colleen’s heart seized in her chest. Condoleezza was still talking, something about Blanche and Eugenia, but she couldn’t pull her focus around the words. Ophelia was in the hospital, and she wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t anywhere near ready, hadn’t done a thing to prepare herself, and now the moment was upon her.
The housekeeper excused herself and returned moments later with an amber pan filled with cake. “Take this, child. For Blanche. It isn’t much, but it’s what I’ve got on short notice.”
Colleen nodded. She didn’t remember accepting the pan, but noted that it was in her arms, with her cardigan.
She’d never put much faith in signs, but she couldn’t ignore the timing of this news, just as she’d been daydreaming of leaving all this behind.
One day, a day that will not be so very far in the future, you’ll be sitting in my chair, Colleen. You’ll be leading this family…
“I’ll find your mama and she can get the rest of the children down there. Lord can pray it won’t be too late.” Condoleezza crossed herself and scuttled off, as quickly as she’d made her appearance.
* * *
Colleen embraced her Aunt Blanche with two brief kisses. Blanche, who, even at home, always wore her Sunday church dresses, looked as if she were late for a ladies’ luncheon, if not for the heavy rim of red around her eyes.
“She’s stable now, God bless, but we all know this can’t go on forever.” Blanche dabbed at her eyes. “Eugenia and Wallace said they’d move into The Gardens to see after her, but the tomb of a dying woman is no place for children.”
“Now, Mama, that’s a touch dramatic, don’t you think? My boys love their Tante.” Eugenia appeared beside her mother, slipping her arm around her tiny waist. “Hi, Colleen. It’s good of you to come.”
Blanche pulled a satin handkerchief from the waist pocket of her paisley dress and sniffed. She had always been a picture, and still was, now in her sixties. She’d left behind more broken hearts than she’d satisfied, with her first two husbands dead under mysterious circumstances. Colleen always remembered this fact, above all others, when she thought of Blanche, whose cold eyes regarded the world behind her spidery lashes and neat appearances.
“My mother and the others may be on their way as well,” Colleen replied, though she didn’t know if they were, or if they loved Aunt Ophelia as she did. Many in the family thought her an old kook and paid little mind to her.
That wasn’t entirely true. Evangeline loved her, too, and Colleen knew her sister was home when the call came in. She should have taken her.
“She’s given us a scare, but the doctors say she’ll only be here a few nights,” Eugenia said pleasantly. “Tante Ophelia is a tough old bird. It will take more than this to knock her down.”
“Is she awake or resting?”
Eugenia smiled. “Supposed to be resting, but we both know how she felt about that order.”
Colleen nodded at them both and moved past them in a daze, toward the room. Nurses rushed past her, going about their business, as if the matriarch of New Orleans was not among their many patients. Machines beeped. The competing scents of disinfectant and cigarette smoke were so strong they almost broke her from her stupor. Pierce and Cassius huddled nearby, and both looked up to acknowledge her, then returned to their thoughts.
Colleen slipped past a nurse exiting her aunt’s room. The smell of smoke grew overwhelming when she stepped in, and she realized, with horror, that Ophelia was smoking.
“You have pneumonia!” Colleen cried. She rushed to her aunt’s bedside and tried to take the offensive thing, but her aunt leveled her with a hard look.
“At my age I can have pneumonia and still enjoy my vices,” she rasped. “And you won’t do a thing to stop me, Colleen Deschanel.”
Colleen gasped lightly at the rebuke. She settled into a chair by the bed and didn’t attempt it again, but she made her disgust known by waving the smoke from the air. “You’ll kill yourself doing that.”
“And if I do, I’ll still have outlived almost every last Deschanel on record.” She erupted in a coughing fit. When she was done, her yellow smile appeared through the smoke. “Look that up for me in your research, will you? I do believe I am a bona fide record-breaker. I can’t die without knowing.”
“You might if—”
“Yes, yes. You’ve made your point, Colleen. That isn’t why you came to see me, though.”
“I thought you were dying!”
“Well, I am, child. I’m ninety-four, for the love of Christ.” Her shaking hand brought the ash-laden cigarette to her lips and she drew a deep drag. “Just not today.”
Colleen’s breath hitched as her emotions caught up. “You make jokes about something that isn’t funny. It isn’t funny at all.”
“It’s my choice whether the subject of my own death brings me comic relief, is it not? Have I not earned that?”
“Tante!”
Ophelia’s phlegm-filled laugh was more cough than humor. “You’re cross with me again, but I can’t fathom the reason. I gave you my greatest advice, and you’ve not followed it a whit.”
“What do you mean? I’ve tried to make things right at home… I’ve given up on Rory. What else was I supposed to be doing?”
“Half-hearted attempts at both, and at most,” Ophelia replied. “But I’ll not be cross with you in return, Colleen. It is, after all, your life. Your choice. One can make mistakes once or a thousand times, that is the beauty of choice, if one sees beauty in such a malformed light.”
“I didn’t come here to talk about me, Tante.”
“No?”
“I came because I was terrified for you.”
“And, as you can see with your eyes, I’m still breathing and making my own choices. Still possessed of all, or most, of my faculties.”
“Why do you joke about these things?” Tears tickled her cheeks.
“It’s healthier than obsessing over the inevitable. I’ve been waiting to die my whole life, and here I am.”
“Have you seen it?”
“What, child?”
“Your death. In your visions.”
Ophelia transferred the cigarette to her other hand. She patted Colleen’s. “You won’t tease such information out of me, no matter how you go about it,” she said, but was smiling.
“But have you?”
“I won’t ever say!” she declared. “But since you are in a state, and I know you won’t l
et this go, I’ll tell you I did see your father’s death. And I told him about it.”
“Why?”
Ophelia’s eyes closed for several long seconds. The wrinkled flesh fluttered open again. “Because what has been seen cannot be changed. And I was fully aware my nephew had two daughters at home, capable healers, who would blame themselves when they failed to save him. I wanted him to spare you this agony.”
“But…” Colleen puzzled over the right words. “His cancer was curable by a healer.”
Ophelia nodded. “Except I’d already scryed his future, and his future was set in stone. His future was one where he opted not to be healed.”
“That’s a circular argument! If you hadn’t told him this, he would have let us heal him and would have lived.”
“No, child, because in the future I saw his fate had already been determined.”
Colleen shot out of her seat. She could hardly breathe, for all the deception and pretty language. “And this, Tante, is why I will go to college and study what we are. I’ll study death and premonitions, and I’ll prove that the future can be changed.”
“And you’ll be wasting your time,” her aunt said evenly. “Yet you’ll do it nonetheless.”
“I won’t apologize for trusting science over instinct.”
“I’d never expect such a thing from you.”
“You’re taunting me.”
“No,” Ophelia said. “Simply pointing out a truth we are both already painfully aware of.”
* * *
Colleen fled from the room while her aunt was still talking; still spewing the nonsense Colleen thought she was above, and immune to. She didn’t know if it was senility, regret, fear, or something else, but the woman in that room was not the one she’d sought out for counsel so many times over the years.
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