Evangeline stopped breathing. The revelation was the last thing she expected, though now that she considered it, what else could it have been? “No.”
“No? That’s what you have to say to me telling you I might be getting married?”
“You’re not marrying her.”
Augustus pulled his shoulders back. “Not up to you, Evie. You’ve made your feelings about Ekatherina known. I don’t need to hear them repeated.”
“But she said no! What are you gonna do, tie her down and hold a gun to her head while she says her vows?”
He sighed again. “I won’t dignify that with an answer.”
“But why her, Aggie? You could have anyone in the world, anyone!”
“That’s not how life works, Evangeline. If it did, our brother would be marrying Catherine instead of Cordelia. And if you really wanna know? I’ve never met anyone else I wanted. Not Carolina. No one.”
“It doesn’t mean you won’t!” she cried. She was desperate to get through to him, before he, too, made a great mistake. It was hard enough watching Charles prepare to throw his life away. But not Augustus. Not him.
He threw his arms out. His jacket came up. “Look at me, Evie? What do I have to offer anyone? Money? I don’t want a woman who is only looking for that, and yet what can I give a woman who wants more? Ekatherina is… well, she’s like me. She knows who she is, and she’ll do what she needs to in order to get by. Who else do you know like that?”
Evangeline pressed her lips tight and didn’t answer him. He was right, but he was also very wrong, and she didn’t know what to say.
Augustus lowered his arms, and when he clenched one of his hands, Evangeline could see it was trembling. “I don’t know why I’m this way, but I am, and it won’t change. Maybe I could be happy, too. Maybe there’s someone right in front of me who won’t need more than I can give, and we can be happy together.”
“Aggie…”
“If you can’t support me on this, then say nothing,” he said and climbed the stairs.
* * *
Evangeline called Colleen. There was no way Colleen would let Augustus go through with this, and she’d have better words and better ideas to get through to him. Evangeline wanted him to be happy, but not like this. He was selling himself short, and there was a woman out there worthy of Augustus Deschanel, but her name was not Ekatherina Vasilyeva.
But Colleen was a mess herself. She’d discovered the professor was precisely the man Ophelia implied he was, and rather than being angry at him for the deception, she was woefully disappointed in herself.
“I’ve let myself down. I’ve let the family down. What good am I to anyone like this?”
“You’re feeling sorry for yourself,” Evangeline said. “As you should. He’s an asshole, Leena. You deserved better than that.”
“I’m not, though. I’m not sorry for myself, I’m… angry at myself. My judgment is compromised, and I can’t be trusted.”
Evangeline rolled her eyes. When Colleen was in self-loathing mode, no logic would pull her back out of it. “We can commiserate on this one later, I promise, but we have a big problem that needs our attention now.”
“He hasn’t even called me, Evie. Not once. He could have cleared all this up, with just a phone call.”
“You know why he hasn’t called, Leena.”
“I compromised my personal values for this man, thinking I could trust him and who we were together. I did… I did cocaine for this man.”
Evangeline’s bushy brows shot up. “We’re definitely coming back to that. But right now I need you to come talk to Augustus about this Russian situation.”
“He’s living his life,” Colleen said, and that’s when Evangeline knew this conversation was a lost cause.
“Sorry about Philip. I can bring over beers tomorrow if you want.”
“Sure. Maybe.”
“I’m going for a walk. Night.”
“A walk? It’s past midnight!” Colleen repeated as Evangeline cradled the phone.
Evangeline chuckled a bit to herself that she could still be a surprise to others. They each had their roles to play in this family, and Evangeline’s had never involved physical fitness. She was born with limited energy, and as she aged, she preserved it the way one might save a fine wine for a special occasion.
She wasn’t walking for her health, though. Not physical, anyway.
Evangeline loved science because it gave her more than an explanation. It approached the world with boundaries, and as long as there were boundaries, you were safe. Water was two parts hydrogen, and one part oxygen, and that was true regardless of the weather, the time in history, the time of day. The world around her hummed to a precise and largely unchangeable set of calculations.
That, she could understand.
The burning sadness in her heart she understood less, because it seemingly had no boundaries. No edges… no end. She pretended to be okay, because she supposed that was what others around her needed. She had a physics teacher who said that intelligent people did not always possess strong emotional intelligence because of this expectation that emotions should behave in the same ways as the fixed rules and theorems of science. What he didn’t say was how to overcome this.
She liked to imagine that one day she’d wake up and the things that had happened to her would hurt no longer. She’d smile at the sun coming through the curtains, stretch her hands over her head, and have an amazing day.
But this was the problem with being smart. Evangeline knew better. And so she walked, every night, when the cicadas sang softer, and the evening breeze cut through the humidity enough to send the scents of the Garden District into a curling perfume for the senses.
Even the safest neighborhood in New Orleans wasn’t precisely safe in the middle of the night, so she’d tucked Augustus’ Smith and Wesson Model 19 into the back band of her jeans. She didn’t know why he had the gun; she’d stumbled upon it by accident, and he certainly never mentioned having one. Evangeline would be surprised if he knew how to handle it. But she did… one of her only productive takeaways from the Dauphine crew. A friend of Ethan’s, Dalton, had some family land out by Riverbend, and they would go shoot at bottles and cans. Ethan sometimes aimed his pistol at a bird, and the girls would scream until he stopped. Evangeline wondered if he did this to make the girls scream, or if he really did want to shoot birds but didn’t want his groupies to see him for the monster he was.
This was a serious gun. Police issue, she thought, from her limited knowledge of such things. The commitment in owning such a gun made Augustus’ motives even more curious to her, but she would never ask him. He was a man of his swirling secrets.
Evangeline had a few paths she took. Sometimes she would meander up and down the fifty or so square blocks that made up the Lower Garden District. Other times she’d walk the length of Prytania from where Magnolia Grace sat at Eighth, west until she saw Touro Infirmary, and then, if she really needed out of her head, all the way until she hit Audubon Park. She considered that a dead-end for Prytania, even though it continued on for a few more blocks beyond the park, before hitting the river.
Then there were the nights she wanted to be closer to the pulse of the world, and she’d jump up a few blocks to St. Charles Avenue, which slowed but never slept. The mechanical hum of the streetcar was as soothing to her as a mother’s voice to others, and she skipped along the neutral ground, in the grass between the east and west tracks, hands deep in her pockets. Sometimes, if the streetcar was empty when it passed by a stop, she’d jump on and ride it from Carondelet to Carrolton until someone else hopped on, breaking the anachronistic spell of her pull to the loudness of silence.
Tonight was quieter than usual. The students from Tulane and Loyola, who lived peppered throughout the smaller apartments of St. Charles that were squished between the assuming Greek Revival, Italianate, and Victorian mansions that held court, were asleep, with early morning classes awaiting them.
Evangeline
closed her eyes as the streetcar from the west ambled by. It was a slow, lumbering beast, but enough to send a soft breeze passing over her, and this always calmed her. When the machine was gone, she opened her eyes, and, startled, saw someone else walking.
She rarely encountered another person walking in the middle of the night. She’d be amongst a plethora of drunks and die-hards if she were doing this in the Quarter, but not here. Evangeline squinted—she needed glasses, but was holding out as long as she could—and saw it was a young woman, around her age.
The woman, on the south side of the avenue, stopped as well and waved. She tugged at something, and Evangeline saw she had a small dog on a leash. Evangeline hoped that little yippy thing wasn’t her protection, because a mild wind would punt that thing ten blocks to the river.
Evangeline checked both ways and then jogged away from the neutral ground and across the street.
“I don’t normally see a lot of people out this time of night,” she said, by way of introduction.
The girl threw her long blond hair over one shoulder. It covered half her pale blue tube top, which she filled out nicely. The hand not walking the dog was shoved deep in the pocket of her miniskirt. “I like the quiet.”
“Yeah? Me too.”
The girl pulled her hand from her pocket and held it out. “I’m Amnesty.”
Evangeline took it. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Cool name.”
“Yeah. Yours?”
“Evangeline.”
“That’s a cool name, too.”
Evangeline shrugged. “Named for my Catholic grandmother, whom I’ve never once met.”
“So, you live around here?”
Evangeline was suddenly embarrassed to say she lived in Magnolia Grace, one of the most photographed homes in the Garden District. So she said, “Yeah, on Prytania. You?”
Amnesty seemed taken aback by the reciprocal question for a brief second. “Here, on St. Charles.”
“Do you normally walk at night?”
Amnesty shook her head. Her gold hoops bobbed in her ears. “No, but it seemed nice. You know?”
Evangeline nodded. “It is nice. Feels like the city is mine alone this time of night.”
Amnesty smiled and threw her head back. “Ours now.”
“Oh. Yeah, ours.”
“I’m headed back home. Walk with me?” Amnesty looped her arm through Evangeline’s without waiting for an answer.
Evangeline spun with Amnesty, returning the way she’d come. She still had some walk in her, but this was strangely more interesting. More alluring.
“Do you go to school?” Evangeline asked.
Amnesty shook her head. “I take care of my sick grandfather. It’s just the two of us in that big house. When he dies, I’ll be all alone there.”
“Where are your parents?”
“They died in a crash when I was little.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Amnesty shrugged, and Evangeline saw how soft and pale her shoulders were. She had the strange urge to cup her hands over them and feel the down against her palm.
“And you, Evangeline? What’s your story?”
Despite her inexplicable inclination to tell this young woman everything, Evangeline held back. “I live with my brother right now, while I’m going to school.”
“You have a big family?”
“Seven... I mean six siblings.”
Amnesty marveled at this. “I can’t imagine. Do you love it?”
“I suppose.”
“It’s nice to be alone, too. No one to tell you what to do, or how to do it. There’s so much freedom in living your life.”
“What about your grandfather?”
“Oh, him? He doesn’t know anything about me.”
“You don’t feel like your life is on hold, caring for him?”
Amnesty shook her head. “Only if you think college is the single path for a person. I don’t. We get one life, Evangeline. I want to feel every single moment, and I never forget it could be the last thing I feel.”
What a strange answer, thought Evangeline.
“This is me.” Amnesty stopped in front of a set of tall wrought iron gates. Beyond, only glimpses of the mansion could be seen behind the carefully planted flora. “Tomorrow, then?”
“What?”
“We’ll walk again.”
“Sure. I mean yes.”
Amnesty’s smile lit up the night around her. She poked her head forward and kissed Evangeline square on the mouth before unlatching the gate and disappearing beyond.
Evangeline didn’t move for another minute. Her hand hovered over her mouth, not quite landing.
She waited for the familiar sound of a door closing, to make sure Amnesty was inside safely, but when it didn’t come, likely masked by the heaviness of the plants guarding the home, Evangeline made her way back down St. Charles toward home.
Amnesty. A strange girl with a strange name. But no, strange wasn’t the word Evangeline was playing with in her mind.
Free.
Amnesty was an unusual girl, like she’d been dropped in from Narnia or some other far off place.
Evangeline smiled in the dark, cool air, relieved to know this wasn’t the last time their paths would cross.
WINTER 1973
* * *
VACHERIE, LOUISIANA
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
Sixteen
The Attempt
Maureen had a special disdain for libraries. When she was younger, they were touted as some magical place, where one could disappear into foreign worlds, love stories, adventures, and anything else one might be in the mood for. All Maureen found in a library was a sea of things beyond her reach and potential.
No one knew why she couldn’t focus. Worse, no one cared. They chalked it up to an over-taxed mind that refused to settle. Sometimes she was called lazy. But Maureen was neither of those things, and the lack of definition on her problems only made them more frustrating.
Great Expectations had been the first book she’d ever been able to make it even halfway through, and she didn’t know why Miss Havisham had grabbed her attention so soundly. Or why she’d both loved and loathed the perfectly devious Estella, who she fancied herself after in her more darker moments.
But her love of one book did not make her a bookworm any more than eating pizza made her Italian.
Yet, if she was to find her usefulness in this family again, she must push past her annoyance. She had half a mind to go back to Charles and tell him he should kill the Hendrickson patriarch after all, but if Elizabeth’s visions were true, and they always were, then the man would die next year by his own hand, which seemed a more poetic victory. In the meantime, he must suffer for what he did to Elizabeth, and for the future Charles had signed up for, for reasons no one bothered to explain.
Maureen had all but promised Charles she could do this, when she had no idea at all if that were true. One of her greatest resentments over being a necromancer was that she knew ultimately nothing about it. She knew none of the rules… none of the limitations. She had no means to control it; to enflame or subdue the strength of it. At times, she wanted nothing more than to be truly alone, but there were others when she enjoyed talking to her father, or Maddy. Sometimes she even enjoyed taunting Mr. Evers.
At no point had she ever summoned the dead. Every single one of her specters came of their own will, or whatever they possessed in the afterlife. She didn’t ask for them. She didn’t invite them.
So how, now, was she going to invite the dead Daisy Mae Hannaford to come talk to her?
Chelsea Sullivan, who was not quite the innocent thing she wanted everyone to believe, once told her about these books she checked out from the public library. You can’t get them at the school, she’d said, and then explained she’d been promptly grounded for having them in her room. There’s a whole world out there, girls. Witchcraft! Love spells! Summoning demons! You have no idea!
/> Maureen wanted to wipe the ingratiating smile right off Chelsea’s face by giving her a full accounting of what the Deschanels could do without checking out damn books from the library, but she had learned enough from Elizabeth’s bullying what not to say to her peers. Besides, Chelsea knew about the Deschanels. Most of the Sullivans did.
She didn’t have the faintest idea where to find books like this, though, and suspected that asking the librarian might yield a call to Irish Colleen. So she wandered the aisles for almost an hour before she found the section entitled Occult. There wasn’t much to it… no more than a dozen books… and she almost missed it altogether.
Maureen waddled to a private table in the back of the library with her precariously stacked eleven books, every last one of the Occult titles. They all had fancy, gothic titles, like Necromancy at Midnight and An Encyclopaedia of Twelfth Century Practices of Samhain. What was the difference, she wondered, as she opened the first tome, between a witch in these books and what she was? Was she more of a witch, because she was born one? Or were these women, who had poured centuries of knowledge onto pages for posterity, who had earned their place, the ultimate of all witches?
Most of what she read sounded like a bunch of bullshit. Swirl together the eye of a crone and belladonna, and burn incense at the full moon. Right. She didn’t know any crones whose eyes she felt like taking, and that sounded like far too much work for a ‘maybe.’
The last book she opened, which was smaller and the cover less flashy, caught her attention. It was a diary of a woman named Hopestill Wolfe. The foreword of the book, written by the publisher who found the diary, said that Hopestill, or Hope to her family, had been a mild-mannered and subservient housewife to Obadiah Wolfe, a blacksmith and farmer, in the late 1700’s Appalachia. No one knew, exactly, where they had lived, except that it had been in a small community, far from any big town, and that when they moved there, their fortunes took a downturn due to Obadiah’s inability to find work. They’d moved from Williamsburg, Virginia, due to unknown circumstances and came north, to what was believed to be what is now Upstate New York. One by one, the seven Wolfe children began to die of unexplained, mysterious deaths, and after the loss of the third, after prayer failed, Hopestill was believed to have fallen in with some of the native mountain women who practiced a different brand of faith. The publisher called this witchcraft.
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