by Rhodi Hawk
“She’s going to come find me. With that snake and … I’ve got to get home.”
“Ain’t no snake, it isn’t.”
“Can you help me get home?”
“Help ya?” He wiped the back of his neck, looking at her as though she had brought a fine new pox into his home. “I’ll help you stay alive, that’s all. Trouble is that’s precisely what she wants!”
Madeleine straightened. “What she wants?”
“Why else would they stick you out there on my fishin float? She knew I wudn’t gonna sit pretty and watch you die.”
He looked down, his expression furious, and then he threw his bowl through the opening. It hit a branch and fell with a splash.
Madeleine said, “I don’t understand.”
“Miss Madeleine, what do you think is gonna happen to you once them scratch poisons wear off, those poisons?”
Her mind was so fogged. But she concentrated as best she could.
“I … I’ll have a withdrawal reaction, I think. Won’t I?”
He cocked his head. “I have no idea what that is, but if it means you ain’t gonna be sleepin, you won’t. You’ll be awake for days. And your river devil down there is in a fine froth by now to drag you off somewhere far away. You think you wanna go home? You ain’t gonna have any idea where home is. That ole witch wants somethin from that briar and she been spending the past week communing with the river devils to make sure she gets it.”
The truth of his words hit hard. Madeleine could say nothing, only stare.
He said, “She been communing with mine, too. Been takin everything I got to keep the thorns out of my head.”
“But why?” Madeleine asked. “Why would she want you and your river devil involved?”
“Because now I’m keepin you alive. They can’t send no one else to bring you food or you’d pigeon’m, not anyone else. But then if we both fall into the briar traps, then what happens to our bodies? Anything they want. Your ghost wanders off, then your body is a cart with no horse on a downhill slope. It’ll get lost or even hijacked. I know this place, it don’t matter if I wander off. But if you wander off you’ll get lost and die. Unless they save you.”
“Which means they have all the power.”
“And whatever hidey spell she got on you, it’s up to her whether she keeps that up, too.”
Madeleine clutched her belly, suddenly unsure whether she was going to be able to hold down her meal. Her head was swimming. Sweat dripped from her face.
Gaston’s expression relented some. “What is it she said, or was it they?”
“They.”
“What did they say they want?”
“They want me to find a baby.” Her throat closed on that final word, but she went on. “My brother fathered a child before he died. A little boy named Cooper. What will they do to him?”
Gaston frowned at her but did not reply. The answer to her question was obvious. They were out in this bayou, far from any other human, completely at Chloe’s mercy.
She said, “But if I refuse to tell them I can just…”
“They will kill you, Miss Madeleine. They will kill you, they will kill you, they will kill you.”
She let out her breath. Everything he’d said sounded true.
He said, “Only reason you alive now is because they want that briar baby.”
“But why do they want him? What do they gain?”
“Access. To the briar. Maybe they tried to get it through you and you ain’t been accommodatin, you haven’t been.”
“Have they tried it with you?”
Gaston gave her a half-hearted smile. “Tried and succeeded. These days, though, I’ve had a change of heart.”
Outside, a blue heron called out from somewhere over the bayou.
Shocked as she was, Madeleine’s brain was trying to shut down and go to sleep. The wood that surrounded them seemed to be wavering like a wall of water.
Gaston lifted his bone-thin arm and set his chin on his palm. “Put it in the pot. Let it have a rot.”
“What did you say?”
“Gonna have to let it alone for now. You gonna fall asleep whether you want to or not. Me, I don’t know. I may have an idea how to work this.”
forty-four
NEW ORLEANS, NOW
ETHAN SAT WITH HIS hands on the steering wheel, thinking of that early morning not so long ago when Madeleine’s wanderings had led them to the levee. But instead of Madeleine, Bo was now asleep in the passenger’s seat. Kid slept with his eyelids open.
The street was dark but for the gaslight flickering on the porches. No stars tonight, and no moon. Just a sparse drizzle.
Ethan had at first considered whether Madeleine had gone on the wander. Maybe when she’d gone to see Chloe she’d gotten sucked in by Severin and was now somewhere at large. At this point it would mean relief to him. He’d searched everywhere, of course—St. Jo’s, the levees, downtown, even went back to the mobile park. Cheryl had promised to call if she heard anything. But she hadn’t heard anything. No one had heard anything.
And he knew why. Because Madeleine hadn’t wandered off. And Zenon hadn’t gotten to her, either. It was Chloe. Chloe had disappeared at the same time Madeleine had.
He’d filed a missing person’s report for Madeleine, and then filed one for Chloe. The police were accommodating but lacking in any real results. Privately, Ethan had approached Vincent, a friend on the task force, and asked if he could find out whether Chloe had made any credit card or bank card transactions. Or maybe there were recent phone records.
“I ain’t exactly assigned to the case,” Vin had said. “I can’t just dig out information on people just cuz I’m a cop. But they got everyone lookin, man. They takin it serious.”
And Ethan believed it. Though it would be nice to think that NOPD always worked diligently on cases such as these, this one had gone high profile the moment the missing person’s report had been filed. Madeleine was already notorious from the whole mess with Zenon’s murder trial last year. E-mails to the Web site had come flooding in. Reporters were calling, and Ethan answered their questions in the hopes that public interest would keep the pressure on the search. But public interest was fickle. Now many days had gone by.
Ethan had already broken into Chloe’s old house once. He found nothing, of course. He hired a private detective who had made some calls and also found nothing. Ethan had him turn his attention instead to Emily Hammond and baby Cooper up in Nova Scotia.
Now, Ethan was staked out in front of Chloe’s place for the third night in a row. The old bat knew where Madeleine was and he was going to see that she gave it up.
A car approached. Ethan slouched and watched. It slowed in front of Chloe’s but did not stop. And despite the darkness, Ethan recognized at once that the driver was Oran—the African features on albino skin tones, the yellow-orange hair. Oran pulled past and down to the end of the block, then turned. Ethan was about to switch on the ignition and follow when he realized from the pattern of headlights around the corner that Oran was pulling over. He was probably parking around the corner so as not to be discovered.
Ethan gingerly opened the door.
“Where we goin?” It was Bo.
“Wait here,” Ethan whispered.
“I gotta come with you.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“But what if the devil come to get me?”
The kid was right. Zenon was much deadlier than Oran. Ethan hadn’t let Bo go to school since the night Mare had gotten pigeoned, and it was probably more risky to leave Bo alone than to bring him along.
“Alright, come on. But no sound, and definitely no clicking.”
“But…”
“And stay out of sight.”
“How I know I’m staying out of sight if I can’t click?”
“Just … keep the clicking to a minimum … and hold my hand.”
They got out of the Lexus without making any noise, then ran hand-in-hand across the
street to Chloe’s drive. Ethan could hear Oran’s car door slam around the corner. They slipped down the side and in through the back gate. The gardens here were overgrown, the path uneven. Ethan led Bo carefully around to the back. An old fountain stood in the center of the enclosure, cracked and dry. He pulled Bo behind it and sat him in a crouch.
“Don’t move, and no sound,” he whispered.
Bo slipped his hand in Ethan’s and signed, “OK.”
Kid’s a natural at this, Ethan thought, wishing the same could be said for himself.
Because here he was, a scientist and an academic, lying in wait to shake someone down for information. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to do when Oran showed up.
Already he could see movement at the bottom of the drive where the mailbox stood. Oran’s hair was visible above the fence, looking like an orange tabby in the darkness. Ethan moved as silently as he could, edging sideways toward the gate, and obscured himself among the vines at the corner fence line.
The gate opened and Oran stepped through. He had his head down, looking at a bundle of envelopes. The gate clicked closed behind him. Ethan lunged forward and grabbed Oran by the shirt, slamming him against the clapboard siding.
Oran made a garbled cry, the mail fluttering from his hands to the ivy below.
Ethan gripped his shirt and leaned in, nose-to-nose. “Where is she?”
Oran gaped at him, eyes wide.
“You tell me where Madeleine is, or so help me…”
“I don’t know!”
“You’re lying.”
“No, sir.”
Ethan yanked him back toward the gate and threw it wide. “No? Fine. Then you can explain that to the police.”
“Wait!”
Oran put his hand on the gate. “I’m telling you the truth. I’ve seen her. I helped … hide her. But even so I don’t know where she is.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She has been blessed with a hex that will hide and protect her from the person she wished to avoid. But it deliberately confuses things so that even though I saw where she is, I have no idea how to get there.”
Oran gave a pleading look. “You must understand, if I could find her, anyone could. Madame Chloe only gave what she asked.”
“You gonna have to do better than that.”
“All I know is that she is surrounded by water. It helps her to hide.”
“Oh, yeah? Well then where’s Chloe?”
Oran stared at him a moment, his jaw tense, his eyes rolled like a spooked horse.
Ethan shook him. “Tell me where Chloe is!”
Oran said, “Madame Chloe is dying.”
There came a chirruping sound from the patio. A cricket. Ethan looked, remembering that he and Madeleine had once told Bo to use the cricket call if he sensed “that devil” was nearby.
But in that moment of distraction, Oran clocked Ethan across the jaw, and Ethan went down to all fours. He heard the gate slam and knew that Oran was gone. He rubbed his jaw. Oran certainly didn’t look like he had it in him, but he threw one powerful punch.
The mail was scattered in the ivy around him. Ethan grabbed a handful of envelopes and ran back to the cracked fountain. That damn limp, times like this he could really do without it.
“The devil comin!” Bo whispered much too loudly.
Ethan scooped him up like a sack of beans and ran for the Lexus.
forty-five
LOUISIANA, NOW
TIME FLIPPED BY FOR Madeleine in snapshots. Sleep. Gaston carving on a bit of wood. Sleep. A gecko crawling by. Sleep. Severin’s voice, a little closer now. The smell of meat smoke.
Between the sleeping and the briar light she lost all sense of whether minutes were passing, or hours or days. Gaston muttered to himself incessantly and when he wasn’t muttering he was addressing his river devil, railing or even shouting. A wonder she’d ever thought him mute. She played possum and let him rail. Didn’t want to reveal that she was awake because she didn’t want to commit to being awake, which was a state of appalling agony from the ankle, the bladder, the ear. The pain invaded her sleep, too—she dreamed a moth had flown into her ear canal.
Twice the bladder infection forced her to awake and attend. She made it across the way to the outhouse the first time but on the second, she found she was too weak.
“Don’t think nothing of it, Miss Madeleine, not anything. I got two sisters.” And he helped her over and across the limbs.
“Where are your sisters?”
“Not far from here really but it might as well be a million miles.”
He positioned her so that she could manage the rest on her own. “Holler when you ready for me.”
She was grateful to him for his help and his discretion. Grateful, too, that her hands were free and she could get in and out of her jeans without turning it into a yoga session. Her fingers were flexing more easily now. The latrine itself was a low hanging limb that had been somehow notched and braided so that it formed an oval opening over which she could comfortably sit.
In fact, though her body had weakened, her mind was now brighter, and the willow tree outhouse seemed pretty darn genius. She’d assumed he’d just outfitted something that had been growing there naturally. But the willow was growing from a hollowed cypress stump that had been filled with dirt. A deliberate planting. The place where she sat had been carefully notched and woven in such a way that it formed a sturdy bench. The trunk had been trained into a C shape so that the bench was positioned directly over the wide, hollow stump-planter. The waste fell roughly three feet below to open-air soil, not in the bayou, and yet there was no odor. The umbrella shape of the willow’s limbs formed a cool, sun-dappled green privacy tent for her.
She looked at the trunk. A spirit face had been carved into the tree, and its nose was a sucker limb with sprouts of fresh green leaves at the end. The face looked ridiculously joyful. Madeleine laughed despite the painful contraction her bladder made at the end of its release.
But then she realized the strangest part of all—that this tree must have taken years, maybe even decades to mature. The bench itself would have to have been trained in the early life of the tree, which was now a full-sized willow. Gaston didn’t look a day over seventeen.
She redid her jeans and attempted to make her way back, but that just wasn’t happening. In fact she was almost tempted to lie down and sleep right then and there.
“I’m ready,” she called instead.
The limbs parted and Gaston sprung through them and was by her side, not so much lifting her as yanking her along. “Alright then. We’ll eat again and then we got to get.”
“Get where? You said yourself we can’t hide from her.”
“No, but some places we go she can’t follow so easy. Not even with her river magic.”
“How far is it?”
“Far, as the crow flies.”
“And we aren’t exactly crows.”
He pulled her over to his hollow cypress and she staggered inside, so exhausted and in pain she wanted to curl in and cry herself back to sleep. “I don’t think I can make it, Gaston. The poison must still be in my system.”
“Miss Madeleine, when the scratch poisons work their way out it’ll be too late. Your river devil will be waiting.”
She couldn’t imagine making a journey. She looked at her ankle, hot and empurpled.
Gaston handed her a bowl of something that looked like it had feet sticking out. She knew frog legs when she saw them. Choked them down out of desperation many a time when she was a kid, and she’d sworn to never eat them again. But her stomach rumbled, and she accepted the bowl with gratitude.
Gaston had grilled them with leftover duck fat while she was sleeping, and he served them to her with swamp mushrooms and some kind of fry bread. A dish she might not ordinarily touch but now she ate each as though her life depended on it.
“You eat like this all the time?”
He shrugged. “I guess this is a l
ittle special, you bein a guest and all.”
“What do you usually eat?”
“Fish, crab. Just about ever day.”
She smiled, swirling her bowl. “Fish and crab are good.”
He looked up. “You don’t like frog legs?”
She felt sheepish, ungrateful. But Lord, those feet hanging out!
And then he burst with a gurgling sound that sounded like kee-he-he. It took her a moment to realize he was laughing. She laughed, too, more out of shock at him, and he slapped his leg.
She asked, “Where you do your cooking, is it…”
And then they both said simultaneously, “Another tree.”
She looked through the opening toward the woods, unsure which of them would be his kitchen tree, and smiled. The sunlight had turned rosy red. The mists of the briar were still present, but weak. And then she noticed a carving just above the opening to the doorway, very similar to the one in the willow tree.
“Did you do that?” she asked him.
He looked. “Yup. Did most of them.”
She realized, then, that much of the inside of the tree had been whittled upon somehow. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before. Perhaps the sunset had lighted it for her just so. She slumped against the inner wall, her eyes so heavy she had to fight to keep them open, and gazed at them—images of spirits, words like “Pointe au Chien.”
She said, “I wonder if I’m related to you, somehow.”
He nodded. “I’s figurin on the same thing.”
“My father’s name was Gaston.”
“That right?”
She nodded.
“Well mine wasn’t.”
She looked at the images again and smiled. Daddy Blank—the name most folks knew Madeleine’s father by—wasn’t a carver. She had wondered if Gaston was yet another long-lost half-brother like Zenon had turned out to be.
“No you don’t,” Gaston said.
She’d fallen asleep again. Some of the contents of her bowl had spilled onto her jeans.
“Come on, time to go.”
“What, now? Honestly Gaston, I don’t think I can make it.”
“Well little lady you gonna have to. Here, this is for you.”