“My apologies, Mr. Fields,” I said, “but may I use your restroom?”
“Certainly, Miss Fayette. Eighth door on the right.” He gestured to the desolate hall.
Fritzi flinched as my chair dragged against the tile. She pinched my sleeve when I walked past her.
I entered the hall and the grandness of the house slid out of its shell. The vibrancy parlayed by its exterior — the sugary blue brick and swarms of icy magnolia — vanished into domestic decay. A fusty odour coated the air, and it was only after twenty paces or so that I reached enough light. It fell from a trail of chandeliers like small iron birdcages, with low-burning electric light that filled the hall with an archaic glow.
At the end of the hall, light cracked through a single door. On either side the walls were lined in doors, all of them dark when I opened them, most gutted to their drywall and pipes. I stood a moment before the lit room. It had a starchy, sour odour, same as Saul’s bedroom. I gave the door a light push.
Anarchistic would have been the word for it. It gave off the immediate filthy, tin-glinting impression of junkyard clutter, which soon domesticated itself into decadent but age-spoiled cake trim along the ceiling, and rather drab peach walls, and heaps of unwashed clothing and spilled records and the smooth tinfoil wrappings of cigarette packs littering the bed and floor. Along the windowsills were sun-baked scatterings of dead insects and neglected plants browning at the tips. The furniture was timelessly anachronistic, built for a fashionable Edwardian child, but given the mess and the tattered posters of Elvis and Howlin’ Wolf yowling from the walls, I figured it must be Leopold’s bedroom. I reached for Connie’s necklace in my pocket, running my thumb over the comfort of its smooth surface.
It was an aimless search, tearing through that room. Fritzi and I had not mapped out what to find, where to search, and maybe there was some heedlessness and some scorn in the desire to do what the detective should have done himself, but we had stalked up the stone path to this colonial mausoleum thinking there was some obvious evidence to be found, some damning truth waiting for us inside.
We were wrong, it seemed at first. I might have abandoned the search altogether were it not for the curtains, lifted by a facile breeze, tousling the edge of the wardrobe. All day the heat had been stiff, uncompromising; now it shouldered cool and iridescent through the sheer white curtains. I walked over to the wardrobe and wrapped my hand around the knob. It was loose in its socket, but with a little twist it fit into place and the door opened slow and dreamlike.
I gave a start. From the darkness of the deep wardrobe floated a pale face. Black fabric hung off the back of its head, and a cloak fell from its neck, where the rest of its body should have been.
A mask for a costume. My heart slid back into place, pounding. I traced the dull black sockets, the cheeks adorned in aching detail. I had seen costumes like this before. They paraded down streets from morning to night, bone-bare or in lavish capes and hats. Mardi Gras skeletons. Every year I had watched them pass in hordes below our old apartment on Bourbon. My sisters and I would crowd together at our bedroom window with the Campana sisters who lived in the apartment next door, their faces painted like sugar skulls.
I held my hand to my stomach. The knot inside pulsed against it. I tilted the mask’s chin, startling it from the hanger. It dropped and I grabbed at it but caught only shadows, sinking in them, swallowing them until they filled my mouth.
Connie’s face floated up from dark water in the back of my mind.
I stepped away from the wardrobe. The curtains were still. I opened my mouth wide, giving space for all the shadows to pour out, but nothing came. Instead the room’s colours cracked loose and rushed into one another. There was a creak, and fast footfalls, and a streak of fire falling from a girl’s head in the distant corner of my eye.
Blackness came on swift and heavy, but the moment before everything stopped I felt a calm presence behind me, and I knew that it was safe to fall.
Chapter 19
THE MARDI GRAS spectacle came on as grand as always. Skeleton krewes weaved their way down Bourbon, as did a parade of harlequins on stilts and mermaid floats and goblin-faced jesters throwing strings of beads into the crowds, so that it looked as though the Vieux Carré’s auroral colours had been swept from the buildings to flood the street.
Fritzi and I watched from the balcony of the Fleur-de-Lis Café. I was feverish; my forehead was a burning slate and I could nearly feel the sinewy touch of the smoke rising from the glass ashtray on the table. The night before, I had lain on my side, staring listlessly out my bedroom window. Fritzi had sat at the edge of her bed in stiff blue shorts and a large, ratty T-shirt smelling of men’s cologne. She dabbed a wet towel against my forehead and neck, uttering a haze of apologies while I slipped in and out of a thin, damp sleep.
She told me they had found me in the hallway, though I was certain I had collapsed in Leopold’s room. The gardener had come to the front door for a glass of water, and was telling Fritzi of that dear late lady of Dorian’s, the poor dear sweet girl who brought him lemonade and dug her hands in the soil to help him when his knees were stiff, when they all heard the crash from down the hall. A vase I had knocked off a console table when I fainted, found in pieces around me.
“That gardener sure wanted me out of the kitchen, I can tell you that,” Fritzi had said. “And Mr. Fields played friendly as anything. He carried you to the car, touched your forehead to check your fever.” She dragged the cloth across my collarbone. “Like he has any right to touch you.”
Instinctively, I had slipped my hand into my dress pocket, searching for Connie’s necklace, clawing for it, digging into the seam when it became evident that the pocket was empty. My mind spun in every direction at once; where could I have left it? The light from our bedside lamp burned incessantly, and as I watched Fritzi in my feverish fog, I felt a sick sense of déjà vu. The lamp’s yellow light spilled down my sister’s black hair like fire igniting oil.
“There was a girl,” I said. “I saw a redheaded girl. She ran by me with fire blowing down her back.”
On the café balcony, Fritzi folded her hands under her chin, elbows at attention on the table. Her eyes roved the crowds gathered in the streets below, scouting for Leopold. She had heard from Theodore that Leopold had joined a skeleton krewe, and the costume with the skull mask confirmed it. “The house will be dead empty during the parade,” she had said, chewing gravely on her fingernail, when I told her what I had found. “We’ll talk to that redheaded girl. She’s trying to help you, must be a reason.”
The breeze on the balcony only drew the heat closer, lapping the sun against my bare, tender skin. Hanging baskets of wildflowers dappled the table with shadows but offered little cover.
“I thought she ran away, you know.” Fritzi picked an ice cube from a glass of water and touched it to her wrist, the soft corners below her jaw. “That’s just how Connie is. She’s up in her head.” In the month since Connie had vanished, Fritzi’s unkempt hair had regrown some of its curl and wound about her head in spidery tangles. Under her eyes, she was bruised blue with sleeplessness.
“Nobody could blame you for it, Fritzi. You didn’t know.”
“You did,” she said curtly. “You knew. All that crazy talk of yours, but . . . well, Connie is crazy. Crazy could be how we find her.”
“She’s not crazy, Fritzi.”
Fritzi glanced over the railing, and shrugged.
The crowds had thickened on both sides of the street, and the first elaborate floats of the old krewes had already rolled past.
“I still don’t see him,” I said.
“Just keep your eye on the grandstand. Mr. Fields watches the parade from that grandstand every single year, he ain’t stoppin’ now. Theodore says his mama’s been trying to reserve it for five straight years.”
“If he comes too late we won’t have enough time.”
“It’s still early,” Fritzi said.
I looked into the
steely web sprouting across her forehead. She itched at a bead of sweat.
“You’ll smudge it,” I said, slapping her hand. I had spent a painstaking hour getting it right that morning, the painting of Venetian masks being Connie’s favourite part of our yearly ritual. “How long do you think Theodore can sit waiting for us?”
“Long as he has to,” she said. “He’s oddly reliable when you need him to be.”
We were a one-car home, and though our mother remained in the den most days, our father had returned to teaching at Tulane. I crossed my arms over the burning terrace. The sun had heated the red iron and it scolded my skin. The day was impossibly bright, and I felt misplaced staring down at the array of fiery, festive ardour and showering doubloons and floats as elaborate as Italianate frescoes, as if I had never seen any of it before. Music pulsed through the ground and up the building, all along the terrace railing until its brassy bray vibrated into my arms. I watched it all as if it were someone else’s life, as if my own life had always and only been a swelter of absence like a crater on the moon.
“Fritzi, look.” I grabbed her sleeve. “Look over there, I see him.”
Dorian Fields ascended the grandstand across the street. He smiled from the platform, shaking hands with several pit-stained men in straw hats and pale checkered suits, and women blotting their chests with handkerchiefs. We hurried down the steps and through the café into the street.
“Stay close,” Fritzi said, pulling me along. “Yank my arm if you get stuck behind someone.”
A wall hit us as we walked down the street: a beery, sweaty stench, which sharpened into tree bark damp and sticky from an early belt of rain, and the salt of mothy dogwood sprawling the length of the café.
We pushed through the crowd.
“Do you see Theodore?” I called, squishing up against Fritzi’s shoulder.
She pointed to the familiar Lincoln, parked beneath purple, green and yellow Mardi Gras flags. We walked over to find Theodore asleep with his head against the wheel.
Fritzi banged on the glass. “Snap out of it, Zimmerman.”
He bolted up, curls wriggling about his face.
I will admit that I liked Theodore Zimmerman. Not like my sister did, and certainly not as a romantic match for her, but he had a sort of slow burn charm that grew on you. His dark curly hair shadowed his eyes so that I could never determine their colour — a sharp snap of black one minute, gold-glazed brown the next — and there was a purring quality to him like a sweet, twitchy alley cat.
“Thank you for your help, Theodore,” I said, as he slogged his way out of the car. “Don’t mind the paint, we won’t get it on the seats or anything.”
He examined the blue and gold patterns feathering my cheeks and around my eyes. “I like it,” he said, turning to Fritzi. “Keys are in the ignition, by the way, if you want to drive.”
“I don’t. You drive. My hands aren’t steady.” She cupped one hand with the other and held them both close to her chest.
“As you wish,” Theodore said, with a light tug of my braid. “Bonnie-baby, what are you doing here, anyhow?” He turned back to Fritzi. “Seriously, Fritz. Don’t drag your little sister into things, come on.”
“You don’t know what we’re doing.” She pulled her address book from her pocket and handed it to him. “Fields. The man you’re watching today. His home number is on the first page. Don’t ask,” she said, as he opened his mouth. “After you drive us, come right back here and call that number if you see him leave the parade.”
Theodore fixed a hard look on us. “I take it you’re going to be in his house?”
“None of your business,” Fritzi said.
“You robbing him or something?”
“None of your business.”
He opened the door to the backseat and waved me in. “Glad to be of service, I guess.”
The roads were elastic as we drove, stretching far out in front and snapping back with a sudden curb or sharp turn appearing directly ahead. Theodore was high on dope, that much was obvious. His eyes were wide awake now, despite the early hour; there was an ecstatic flush mixed in with the sour-milk pallor of his skin, and a sleek shine of sweat along his abundant deep black curls. He was rambling only somewhat cogently over the local radio station’s riverboat jazz, and Fritzi kept glancing at me, trying to read my understanding of the situation.
It was not until I felt a sharp jolt through my fingers that I realized I was crunching them between my knees.
“Why would somebody want to burn a house down?” Fritzi asked. He had been telling us all about the delinquents he knew back home in New York.
“In a pinch? A real pinch?” Theodore shrugged. “Good way to make evidence disappear. Right, Bonnie-baby?” He laughed and winked at me in the rearview mirror.
“Watch the road, Zimmerman,” Fritzi said. She reached over to light the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. The flame wavered under his nose until he manoeuvred the slender white stick upward like a toothpick.
The drive took forever and no time at all. I watched the windshield, my breath stuck in my throat, until the large blue house emerged behind its wide plot of oaks and fanning palm fronds, its shimmering blanket of magnolia.
We pulled over to the side of the road. As we climbed out, Fritzi squeezed Theodore’s arm. “Will you come get us one hour from now?”
He agreed, though with a look of reservation at the house in front of us. His car drove off until it was as small as the black-fleck flies sticking to the air; we jumped through them over a narrow, watery ditch and started for the second time toward the Lasalle estate.
“It’s called Parisot,” Fritzi said, looking ahead at its shuttered windows. She pointed to another house down the byway, with yellow walls framed in bold pink and blue trim. “That’s a Louisiana Creole plantation. Daddy drove me and Connie up here when she brought home that Fats Domino record, remember?”
A passing car slowed to take in Parisot’s columns and winding outdoor staircase, far at the end of an arching tunnel of oaks. The large side addition to the house, painted a distinctly darker blue, was well over a hundred years old, and was where the Lasalle family lived. The front of the house was of the antebellum era and reduced now to a closed-off series of rooms never used but for cotillions and galas. Branches thick with moss lurched overhead as Fritzi and I walked down the yard through flickering ponds of shade. The whole plantation was so quiet I could hear the tremor in her breath and the small birds brushing against the leaves. Not one window was open to let in the tired breeze aimlessly circling the porch. The white staircase led to the second floor colonnade, but there the doors were boarded up and most of the shuttered windows locked with thick wooden slats.
“How do we get in, you think?” Fritzi asked. A family of tourists had begun stretching and pacing by their car. “They’re going to be poking around taking pictures.”
There was no time to wait them out, and there were always tourists stopping along River Road; once this family had their fill of sugar-money tycoons and finger food, they would cram back into their car and another would come along.
The breeze whipped the leaves overhead into the fresh rolling sound of the riverfront. “We could climb the fence,” I said. “Nobody will see us trespassing if we’re in the back-yard.”
“I’ll climb over while you stand watch, then.” Fritzi looked at the tourists gathering around their picnic basket, and then started for the fence.
I ran up beside her. “You can’t climb that thing. You’re all withered away.”
“I’m not withered.”
I pinched the flesh by her spine, startling her. “Give me a boost and I’ll grab hold of the spikes.”
“No, Bonnie, if you get hurt I won’t even be able to see you from out here.”
“It’s no safer for you.”
“It’s not happening. Think of something else.”
“There isn’t anything else. How am I going to get hurt? I reckon if there
were guard dogs waiting on the other side, we would’ve heard them by now.” I gave her a look of such obvious practicality. “Fritzi, we don’t have time for this.”
She breathed in through her nose with a long hiss. “You’ll come right back out,” she said, swinging her finger back and forth, her chest, my chest. “We switch places, understand? You open the gate, then stand watch behind one of these trees.”
We reached the back fence and I stared up the length of the tall wooden planks. The fence was not from the house’s original days; its wood was a sleek, modern yellow pine. The heat was thicker here, away from the shade of the oak tunnel, but a balmy electricity ran through my sweat and cooled my neck.
Fritzi hoisted me, slowly, up against the planks, her face nestling into my back. I felt a woozy rush of weightlessness. My nerves tipped back and forth like unsteady water, but I was too scared to know it. I grabbed onto the biting hot spears lining the top of the fence and dragged myself farther, rolling onto my stomach as their dull tips sank into my skin. The fence seemed higher than it had appeared from the lawn. I closed my eyes and thought of Connie hollering at me to jump off the diving board at the Audubon Park swimming pool, and the giddy terror of my feet flying through the air with only a misshapen shadow waiting to catch my fall.
The impact rang through my bones when I hit the ground. Fritzi was calling my name. I turned away from her to the yard, rolling out acres of wild green grass and milky-pink gardens. Tucked among the trees were Medusan statuettes with chipped, anguished faces; fountains of patina-green birds with dry, rounded mouths meant to spit water into dirty basins; vast swaths of shrubs bordering a small, groomed orange grove. It was quiet and idyllic, yet undercut by a dreamy obscurity, as if it somehow was not real.
The fence door fell away behind me. Oak leaves flared with sunlight, crinkled gold with burned edges like thousands of old maps. I moved to the far edge of the grove, drifting, until my foot hit a sharp wooden corner. I had been looking up and all around me, and did not see the two small doors built into the ground. They pitched up on a slight tilt between thick sprouts of red sorrel weeds.
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