I retrieved the newspaper and rounded the corner of Pirates Alley and Charles, huddling beneath the café’s high open window. With my back pressed flat against the wet brick, so old it felt as though it might crumble from the damp, I unfolded the paper to find the last face I might have imagined staring up at me from the black-dot ink.
I should have taken the paper and run. Darted all the way down Charles through Jackson Square, to the mossy cat’s claw and hibiscus still writhing in stringy sweeps across my house. It was right that I stayed, given what was to come, but it was not so much a choice of logic as it was my instincts rolling over one another in a backwash of bewilderment.
Around the corner, shoes padded through the puddled stone, but it was only the smoking woman in the gauzy black skirt. I watched her round the intersection and looked at the paper on my lap. My pulse spiked. My chest flooded with heat, flaring up to my cheeks, and I struggled to sort my breaths and keep my eyes from glassing enough to read the article.
In the centre of the page was Amy Bellrose, scowling with her sister dressed in polka dots and flopping bows. Emma Lasalle stood stern beside them, hand clamped on Amy’s shoulder — a formal grip, a warning to behave much like my mother’s, with some nail to it, visible even in the grainy print.
If the article’s account was true, Amy Bellrose had tiptoed up to a group of fishermen along the Pearl River, dressed in her muddy garb, a wild look to her like she had been raised by wolves, and seated herself in the middle of their skiff. The fishermen had apparently been terrified. I continued reading until I came upon the name Gentilly State. A dent dug so firmly into my brow that I rubbed my hand against it like a stain. Gentilly State, the asylum. Connie had once been carted off to this place, the same towering illusion: the stately affair of its exterior, its rolling green acres and white pillars and polished stone steps, while inside weak, watery light swam on plastic tile, blinkering in and out, and the draft slugged through the odorous, colourless, humourless halls.
The café door swung open. Footsteps skipped through the sizeable puddles before the entrance, and into the dry indoors. They stopped at the open window above me.
“He’s in the back washin’ dishes.” It was Leopold. He leaned close to the window, and his voice fell clear through the box of violets over my head.
“You seen him?” Dorian asked.
A wispy grunt. “Rudy says he saw ’em here moppin’ up. Every Tuesday since the fight.”
“A group of y’all jumpin’ someone in the street with his back turned ain’t a fight, son.”
Leopold laughed, a one-beat note of indignation. “He’s makin’ a little roughhousin’ out to be more than it was. And you’re no better, if it’s all the same to you, worryin’ about a complaint no decent cop’ll take seriously. They ain’t even spoken to me about it. They’ve probably grilled him worse for bleedin’ all over the sidewalk, makin’ a mess for everybody.”
I clutched the newspaper, afraid of the draft rustling its pages. I stared down at it, as if it were collecting Leopold’s words into its ordered black columns.
Dorian pressed his voice into a thin pinch. I had to tip my ear up to hear it. “Boy, you look at me and look at me good. Maybe a month ago nobody would’ve listened, but that ain’t goin’ to stick if enough people’ve got somethin’ to say.”
Leopold snapped his fingers. “Hey, you there, boy. Come over here.”
There was an abrupt halt of footsteps, and a scattered approach to the window, with chairs screeching against the floor and a heavy object landing with a thump and jingle of dinnerware. I pressed my cheek against the cold brick.
“Your name, young man?” Dorian asked.
“Pardon me, sir, but who’s looking to know?”
The sound of his voice pinned me.
“I don’t mind tellin’ you,” Dorian said, “that we’ve spoken already to your employer.”
“Courtesy ain’t a part of their language,” Leopold said. “They’re tricky like that.”
“Never you mind my son, young man. Saul Chiffree, is it?”
Saul remained silent.
“Do you recognize my son here?” Dorian asked.
Saul cleared his throat. “No, sir. But if he’s your son, and you’ve only got the one of ’em, I know well enough who he is.”
“Excellent,” Dorian said. “I’m terribly sorry that you’ve taken up work for your brother, ’cause of what my son here did. With school and all, and your daddy passed, as I’ve heard — that’s a lot for a boy. I hear you’re a real ace in the maths, no? Thinkin’ of bein’ a mathematician one day?”
Saul’s voice came out hoarse. “A film director, sir. Like Elia Kazan. Goin’ to buy a big house for my family in Los Angeles and get plenty far from here.”
Dorian requested a moment outside with Saul, though a request from a man like Dorian left little choice. I ducked into the stoop of the shop next door; it was threaded with vines, and I peered through the gaps to see the ruddy disorder of Dorian’s hair disappear under his straw hat. Leopold threw his arm around Saul’s shoulders and flicked the long bow of his apron.
The wet stone of the alley gave off an evening-blue sheen. The streetlamps were lit, and the many wooden shop signs hung dripping and still. The three of them were against the café wall now, Dorian and Leopold and Saul. Dorian spoke so softly it was almost suffocating. I could not hear what he said, but I saw how it lowered over Saul.
“Even if I could convince my brother, the complaint’s been made.” Saul’s hands were slick with dishwater and he dried them nervously on his brother’s large, loose apron.
I tore free the newspaper page on Amy Bellrose and shoved it into my pocket. I stepped out from behind the vines, fuelled only by instinct, when a handful of patrons spilled from a bar into the alley.
“There any trouble out here?” one of them asked.
It was Leopold, then, who shoved first. I think he had spent his whole life being the first to shove, the first to yell, the first to cry at retaliation. Saul did not shove back. He looked to the crowd of pale, heat-rosy people, and raised his palms. “No trouble,” he said.
Leopold struck him again. Saul pushed away the blows until, desperate, he grabbed at Leopold’s ribs and shoved him off.
“Did you see that?” Leopold shouted. His face was smeared with sweat, and had turned a deep tantrum-red. “He attacked me just like his brother did, ’cause I ain’t afraid to say the truth. I ain’t afraid to say the second we started mixin’ the races, our girls started disappearin’. I saw him tryin’ to kidnap one of the Fayette girls myself, I saw it!”
Saul was hunched against the café wall, the side of his hand to his nose. Two men were holding Leopold back as he waved his arm about, shouting how he saw Dalcour drive my sister home from school once, how he was sick like an animal for her.
“He attacked me!” he continued to shout.
I ran toward the gathering crowd.
“I never hurt anyone and neither did my brother, not anyone!” Saul took his hand away from his nose and I saw that he was bleeding.
I squeezed my way through, several men grabbing to pull me back. “Let me through, let me see him,” I said, jerking my arm free. When I reached Saul I turned my back against the wall and faced the crowd. Several women were fanning themselves with folded social flyers, shaking their heads and ticking their tongues. I looked up at the sweat beads spotting Saul’s forehead, the glistening forks down the side of his face.
“You ain’t goin’ to intimidate me, Leopold Lasalle,” Saul said. “Not you, not your daddy, y’hear? My brother’s got a broken rib ’cause of you and he ain’t withdrawin’ his complaint.” Saul glanced quickly at me and looked away. He kept his distance.
I swallowed a rock of anger and stared into the crowd’s flushed, buggy eyes. “Saul didn’t do a thing to me.”
Saul’s voice shook. “My family ain’t never hurt anyone.”
The crowd began to dwindle when no fight broke loose, and at
Dorian’s insistence. Leopold hung around to save face, I reckoned, but Dorian had managed to slip away unseen. Perhaps worse than losing track of him, I had made my stalking known. He would be a fool not to guard his movements now, and bring disorder to his once carefully groomed routine.
Saul walked back into the café without a word to me. Some shred of sense told me to mind my own and shut my mouth. I checked the torn piece of newspaper in my pocket to ensure that it was still there, and thought the name Amy Bellrose the whole walk home.
Chapter 24
THE TALL FIGURE of Latimer Bellrose circled the parlour, with all of the pendulum-timed vigour and easy authority of a high-ranking military officer.
“I like a fast rain. Slows everything down,” he said, peering out the window. The glass ran high and arched up to the ceiling. Outside, a heavy February shower fell on the cobblestone walk. He turned to face me, his imposing posture softened by the red glitter of sunset through the rain beads over the window. “It’s rather comforting, really. I’ve always found a hard rain to draw a sort of warm attention to one’s surroundings.”
I had never seen a man who looked quite like him. His handsomeness was almost foul, shadowed by years of mistreatment. There was a glassy, grey polish over his teeth, and his unkempt beard, moustache, and eyebrows tangled up the smoothness of his tanned face. His left incisor was gold-capped, carrying a soft glint of sun in the corner of his mouth, and matched his gold ascot and the brassy undertone of his white seersucker suit.
“But let’s get to the matter at hand, Miss Fayette,” he said. “Nobody comes around here much anymore, and certainly not to discuss the weather.”
Five whole weeks without Connie had squeaked by so quickly they could be consumed in a blink, like a cold smattering of stars. Yet the days were somehow slow, a meandering fog, until suddenly they stretched out long behind me.
I did not know how to read my own mind anymore. Nothing was rooted, always that dream-like sensation of objects floating, blurred, not quite finished or defined. Each night I sat up unable to sleep while the dogs of the French Quarter grew restless for one another. Barking and howling, wrestling against their chains. Fritzi would lie next to me, wasting away, skinnier by the day like she was sweating out her body mass. I would look out onto the neighbourhood oaks and willows and the bristling linden, the empty sidewalks.
The barking both spooked and calmed me. I would watch the wind, listening to the far-off howls reach up to the clouds. Reliving the same thing again and again — my sister in her tranquil trance down the hallway, the sound of the creaking door. Reminding myself that I could have, I really could have done it differently, and saved everyone from everything.
My fingers twitched for Fritzi’s protective hand as I stood alone at the edge of Latimer Bellrose’s chilly parlour. It was discomfiting to know she was not there.
Mr. Bellrose had drawn back all of the curtains, letting in a delicate grey light that now blushed pink and red with the setting sun. I opened my mouth to speak, but he turned away and proceeded to light a series of oil-lamp sconces, wheezing like a man beyond his age as he continued to circle the room, insisting upon further brightness, clearer light, chasing away the shadows like they were spiders spilling from holes in the walls.
“There,” he said. There was a pin-sharp focus in each eye as he twisted the last of the lamps. The glass swelled a pale yellow. “Warm as June.”
I watched each flame, cupped in its sconce, lick up to the rim with the anaemic energy of an old snake. Warm as June would not have been my choice of words.
“I can’t thank you enough for agreeing to speak with me, sir,” I said, though I was agitated not to find Amy in the parlour with him.
“Not a trouble, Miss Fayette. Always a pleasure to meet my neighbours, however far they may be.”
A dusty draft wound through the halls and down the stairs, brushing against my calves. It had been cool that afternoon, with the rain, and I had meant to cover Fritzi with the spare blanket from the linen closet, the blue wool with the baby-pink trim. She had been shivering in the breeze from the open window. Had I closed the window? I had intended to, I was sure of that. I remembered grabbing the wool blanket from the closet and meaning to unfold it over her, but I must have set it on the desk and forgotten it completely in my hurry to reach Jackson Street before nightfall.
The parlour’s décor gave it a shivering aesthetic — fine silk-lined chairs and marble table tops swept with an aged paleness as if bleached by the sun. It was like the old French court illustrations I had seen of Versailles, with ebonized harpsichords and courtiers in powdery wigs. The walls were a lifeless white and blue, with frosty scrollwork and ice pink swags, every detail, in every corner, as cool as crystal. It was too sparse, too white. The weight of my filth and grief bore down on it, and with each step I thought the floor might crack.
A week had passed since I lost Dorian Fields in Pirates Alley, and somewhere between the gliding shifts of day and night, I had slept — I must have — but I could not distinguish when, or for how long. When had I last eaten? A day ago? Two days? I drifted in and out of Latimer’s voice, listening instead to the clink of fine china, the frail bristle of his chafing suit pants. I watched his finger brush the baby lilac in his breast pocket.
“Don’t you agree, Miss Fayette?”
I realized with a start that he was looking at me. “Yes,” I said, not knowing to what.
“Well, surely I should have gotten here sooner, before they brought my dear girl to that backwards hospital. But I was on safari, you see. I think the town sees me as some shut-in, but I’m quite the traveller. It took some time to finally catch up with me.”
“Pardon, sir — when again did you say I might speak with her?” I wrung my hands and had to wrench them apart, hide them behind my back.
“Well — ” He signalled to the dour-faced woman who had let me in, a courteous that will be all. “Amy is in a precarious state, as I’m sure you realize.” With mechanical swiftness he poured himself a glass at the bar cart and downed it. His face maintained its grave daze as he shook his head. “I have spent the past decade a dead man, Miss Fayette, a ghost parading around in a suit. That even one of my girls is safe, and here again with me. After all of these years, her scent, her face.” His eyes closed, then sparked back open. “Lilacs, like her mother Evelyn, you know.” He looked at the vases bursting with lilacs on the mantel. “I asked her, ‘Darling, what flowers will you have when you come home?’ Lilacs! Without a beat, she asked for lilacs.”
“How lovely for you, sir,” I said.
“All of this time . . .” He cupped a lilac on the mantel. “Naturally, her well-being is my primary concern. You surely understand. Revisiting that place, those wretched memories.”
“I surely do, sir. I only mean to speak with her a moment. It’s a matter of great importance.”
Latimer placed his glass on the bar cart. “You seem like a sweet girl, Miss Fayette, and your devotion to your family is much like my own. But we don’t know you, Amy and I. We don’t know your family, however deeply I sympathize with what y’all are enduring at the moment. There’s no telling whether or not Amy even remembers your . . . encounter. Much of her memory is scrambled at the moment, reshaping itself on medication.”
He rubbed the grey stubble along his jaw, his stern countenance receding, slightly, into the few but deep-set wrinkles on his brow. “You must understand, as well, my dear girl, that it’s not entirely up to me. Gentilly State has rigid policies over which my usual influence has very little impact. I could have us driven there now, right this instant, but that simply doesn’t guarantee that her doctors will allow you on the visitors’ list. Now please, Miss Fayette, have a seat. I can’t have you standin’ there like the room is on fire.” He undid the last button on his suit jacket and lowered himself into a chair.
I seated myself on the edge of the white silk sofa nearest the door. Small sun pools rested stiff on the walls like pinned moths. I picke
d up a teacup the dour woman had prepared for me and held it in both palms, trying to harbour its heat.
“Let us try to discuss what’s to be done, then, dear girl.” The skin around Latimer Bellrose’s eyes was inflamed, each startling blue iris quarantined in the centre. He reminded me of Fritzi, somehow manically restrained, like a button about to pop. He tilted his chin upward and lowered his gaze over me. “Given my daughter’s fragile state, I’m happy to answer, in her place, whatever questions you might have.”
“Thank you, sir, but I think only Amy — ”
He lifted his hand in resolve. “I can speak with her doctor on the matter. See if there’s a degree of flexibility, but I assure you, the hospital’s policies are in place for good reason.”
“She left the swamp shortly after we met,” I said. “Why would she do that? Her doctor should want to speak with me.”
Latimer dug his cane into the unblemished, soap-white carpet — an ornate iron cane, like a sorcerer’s staff. “I’ve followed your family’s circumstance,” he said. “My Amy was taken to that swamp, but you went of your own accord, and with a little pickaninny boy from what I heard. What about your judgment am I supposed to trust, Miss Fayette?”
“You mean Saul.” I placed the teacup loudly onto its saucer. “I was trying to help my family, the way you must have wanted to help yours. My sister Constance has been missing and I think Amy — ”
“My Amy doesn’t have a thing to do with it.” His eyes cut across me. He gripped the brass hook of his cane handle.
“I think that Amy has something to say, sir, and that’s why she wanted to be found.” I stared at him, pleadingly, waiting for him to recall a shred of pity, to reach over and offer me a tangible, measly scrap of help.
In Latimer’s silence, my desperation grew self-conscious. I let it hang over him, his cane digging deeper into the carpet. But he surprised me. His fingers loosened around the hook. He sighed. “Poor girl . . . if only — ”
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