A Twisted Ladder (70 page)

“The briar patch is ruled by your pain, Rosie. Those spirits you see, they live inside of you, they are your pain, and they make more pain for you just to keep themselves in existence.”

“You don’t know!”

“I do know. I’ve spent my entire life watching Papa, and Maman too. She treats him like an otter. Sends him deep into that wild to fetch back secrets. She wants to do the same with us. Worse. Sometimes I wonder if she wants . . .”

The words halted at her lips. She was staring at something beyond Rose’s shoulder. Marie-Rose turned. Their mother was standing in the doorway to the pantry.

Chloe’s eyes bored into them. Marie-Rose wondered how much her mother had overheard. Chloe walked toward them, boots making slow clicks across the wooden floorboards, and switched the radio off. Patrice lowered her gaze.

Chloe said, “Marie-Rose, you were going to look for your father.”

Marie-Rose gaped at her, suddenly both excited and frightened. Patrice said nothing.

Chloe said, “Go, then. Tell us where he is.”

Patrice kept her gaze on the silent radio. Marie-Rose wished she would look at her, give her some sign as to what to do.

“I’m waiting,” Chloe said.

“Yes ma’am.” Marie-Rose closed her eyes again.

The vines returned, curling, black, with dark tiny leaves. Creatures were skittering in there. And river devils. Lots of them, Rose knew. Maman had said one day she would have a river devil too. Rose wondered which one. They were all scary. Maman had said it was better to seek them out first.

She moved through the tunnels, trying to be silent, trying to go unnoticed.

The sound of a chair moving, and then her mother’s voice: “No Patrice! You stay here.”

“I will not sit and watch while you send her into that place!”

“You obey me!”

Rose tried to adjust so that she could see her sister, but she could no longer see anything in that world. She’d already gone so deep, so fast. She tried to concentrate on Papa. If she had a river devil of her own she could have found him immediately. Tormentors in the physical world; guides in the bramble.

Suddenly, water enveloped her, and she gasped. It felt thick like fresh milk, and smelled foul. The vines opened up to a place she did not recognize, but she knew it from an internal sensing that comes easily in the briar. The Locoul Plantation. She saw an older woman and a younger man with an ugly scar that criss-crossed his throat. Papa was not here.

Patrice and Maman, so distant were their voices, but Rose could still hear them.

“Then let me go instead,” Patrice was saying.

“No! She should go on her own.”

Patrice pleaded, “Rosie’s too young. What if they find her?”

“They will find her eventually. All of you. It’s part of who you are.”

Rose turned away from Locoul Plantation and followed a pull that led elsewhere. In the bramble, places did not follow rules of location. This was also true of time. Things existed outside of linear patterns.

A new tunnel opened up, at once vast and spreading and yet still contained within the thorny maze. Unlike in the physical world, here things appeared as they were, not as they looked. The river imparted her true nature—a concentrated energy that was not really alive, but somehow had a life force. She’d grown tired of the structures meant to tame her, had shaken loose and arisen, crushing all to her bosom, leaving mud-silken trails of her caresses.

Papa was close. Marie-Rose dipped down beneath the surface, feeling the fetid water envelop her, but she could see nothing but blackness and could only hold her breath for so long. She lifted her head above the surface again.

Rose knew she was looking at Glory Plantation though nothing was recognizable. All of it underwater. A hog, long dead and puffed into a grotesque balloon, lay wedged atop some rubble. The levee stretched long and otherwise solid, but a crater bisected it. The water seemed still as glass. Like a sleepy bayou where rooftops rose instead of cypress trees. And yet Marie-Rose felt the power of it. A steeple rose above the surface. It stood tall and pious on a plane of glass, no hint of the small chapel supporting it.

But as Marie-Rose watched, the steeple groaned and then leaned away from the breach in the levee. It burst into splinters. The water boiled around it for a moment, the steeple’s cross bobbing momentarily before being dragged under, and then: silence and stillness again.

Rose knew her father was very close. And yet, the feeling was different from what it ought to be. A sense like Papa, but not quite the same.

Hands closed around her wrists. She gasped. A woman rose from the water, eyes silvery and shining, teeth sharp, her hair black, long, and thin.

“You wish to see your father, you ought not be looking up here.”

Rose tried to shake loose from the grip, but the woman held tight. And then she dragged her down beneath the surface. Marie-Rose screamed. She felt the water, tasted it as it filled her mouth, and yet she was letting loose clear screams in her physical body, she knew. She could feel the hands of her sister and her mother on her, but the river devil had the strongest grip.

She couldn’t breathe.

“I’ll show you where he is,” laughed the river devil.

She went down, down into that unholy water. All silver and shining. It felt like she was inside a pool of mercury. It might have been pitch black to her eyes, were it not for the river devil. Marie-Rose kicked, trying to free herself. But she knew she was coming close to the place where Papa was. She felt her strength waning. The river devil dragged her into the depths, silver eyes shining with the river itself, her grin wide and hungry.

Hungry for what, she didn’t know, but the river devil seemed to delight at Rose’s panic.

And then she saw Papa. The husk that had once been her father. He was that same ghastly silver-gray as the water and mud, illuminated by nothing but the river devil’s whim. His body lay wedged in a window. He was not recognizable beyond the knowing sense that comes inside the briar. He looked as though he’d become one with the river, his clothing and skin streaming like the green, feathery coontail that roots itself to the river bottom.

Marie-Rose flailed. She tried jerking away from the river devil. She felt herself growing weaker. Warmth at her seat—perhaps in her physical body she had wet herself. And with Maman looking on.

But her vision here did not dim. It only grew brighter.

Even through her panic, she wondered what had happened to the rest of her father. The part of Papa that had nothing to do with his physical body. She could still feel that sense of him somewhere.

“Breathe, Rosie! You can breathe down here!”

Patrice. She was there, gripping her by the waist, right next to the river devil. But Patrice was wrong, Marie-Rose couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t fill her lungs with that thick, silver water. And she could no longer move. Couldn’t fight.

Patrice pressed her lips against Marie-Rose’s and blew. Rose saw bubbles flash before her eyes. But her sister’s breath did enter her lungs. Thin with oxygen, but it calmed her. They were moving up again, toward the surface: Patrice, Marie-Rose, and the river devil.

NEW ORLEANS, 2010

M
ADELEINE PUT A HAND
to her forehead as she stared out the window of the Mercedes. What would they find at Terrefleurs? Were they even looking?

She’d begged Severin to shed some light on what had happened, to give some scrap of information to use against Zenon, and it had backfired. Should they find nothing in the pigeon house at Terrefleurs, then she was publicly exposed as a raving lunatic, continuing the madness handed down from generation to generation.

And yet, if they uncovered a severed finger from the pigeon house the way Severin had showed her, what did that mean? To Madeleine, it meant further evidence that whatever was happening was something beyond schizophrenia. But to the rest of the world, it was evidence that incriminated her. Zenon would be free to kill again, and Madeleine would go to prison for the murder of the two girls.

In a closed courtroom tomorrow the judge would rule on whether or not to grant Joe Whitney his mistrial.

She ran her finger along the dark upholstery. Oran was driving. It occurred to Madeleine that this might be the first time she noticed any color at all to his skin. As she sat behind him, his ears were red.

If she hadn’t had to fight her way through the bramble and the equally daunting reporters, Madeleine might not be sitting next to Chloe in the backseat of the old Mercedes. She’d have escaped the courtroom with Ethan and Sam. But the reporters were everywhere. Those pointed questions. Mrs. Salazar’s appalled stare. Madeleine had felt sick after her disastrous testimony when she’d spotted Chloe’s Mercedes waiting outside the courthouse. She might as well have chosen a cannibal’s stew pot as a getaway car. But no choice, and no time to find Ethan. The reporters had been so voracious she would’ve probably accepted a ride from Joe Whitney himself just to evade them.

Her cell phone was turned off. She hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone. But it wasn’t fair to just leave Ethan and Sam hanging. She powered it up and called Ethan.

“Hey,” she said. “Just wanted to let you know I’m OK. Had to get out of there.”

“Where are you?”

“In Chloe’s car. I’ll let you know when and where I land.”

“You sure you’re OK?”

“Yeah, all things considered. Look, I’m going to probably turn my phone off again. Reporters.”

He let out a long breath. “All right. I was worried. Sam was too. I’ll tell her you’re OK.”

“Thank you.”

“And Maddy . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you called. I wondered if you were just going to disappear.”

She nodded, even though she knew he couldn’t see her nodding, but her throat was too tight to say anything.

Ethan said, “Just let me know where to meet you, OK?”

“I will.”

“Love you, Maddy.”

“Love you too.”

But when she hung up, she felt such a stark flash of self-loathing that it made her stomach roll. She saw herself as she must have looked on the stand. All the strangeness and humiliation. Hated that Ethan had seen it. She let the feeling run through, and then run out of her. Ethan had said he was up to the task. This would be his chance to either reaffirm or rethink his loyalty.

Madeleine took a breath and said to Oran, “Why don’t you let me off at the next corner.”

“Oran will drive you home,” Chloe said.

“My place will be crawling with reporters.”

Chloe waved a hand. “Then you come to my house.”

And Madeleine felt the tug. But this time, there was no mistaking its origins. She gave a harsh laugh.

“What are you doing, Chloe? You think you can use that trick to manipulate me?”

Madeleine threw her gaze at those burning red ears in the front seat. “Oran, stop the car right now!”

He pulled over and slammed on the brakes. And his response was so sudden that Madeleine knew he was reacting to something deeper than the vocal command. Chloe teetered in her seat belt, and Madeleine instinctively grabbed her shoulder to steady her.

Chloe placed a hand over Madeleine’s as she regained her balance. “What I do, I do for the better. A mother tells a child to stay away from the stove when the pot is boiling over, and that is not manipulating.”

Madeleine shook her head, marveling. “You trick people for the better? The better of
what
?”

Madeleine was shaking now. “You knew! All this time, this entire time, you knew Zenon was my brother, and you wanted me to
make a child
with him!”

“Do not believe in cultural superstitions. He is right for you to make a child. You have your own devil now, Madeleine.” Chloe flung her arm at the window, beyond which stood the quiet homes of the Garden District. “Do you think you can live like them? Marry some foolish bull and breed mundane babies? You are nothing like them.”

“I’m the only one who knows what’s right in my life.”

But Madeleine did feel a sense of loss as she looked upon one of the gracious, stately homes beyond the window, its green shutters and white columns almost drowsy in the afternoon heat. A bicycle with streamers on the handlebars leaned against the porch, and along the sidewalk stood a wrought-iron gate, closed with a pretty latch.