Bonavere Howl Read online

  I picked up the bloodstone from my quilt. It was cold, as if fresh out of the ice box, and I looked down at it resting in my hand. “Where d’ya reckon she got this?”

  “Probably found it in a dirty ol’ puddle,” Fritzi said. “Throw it in the jewellery box.”

  I walked to the sterling silver jewellery box on our bureau. It was where Connie kept a collection of lost trinkets she found in ponds or trees, or in the grass or baking on the sidewalk. I lifted the lid and looked inside. On the blue velvet lining rested the square face of a lady’s wristwatch, a little knit fanchon hat meant for a doll, a broken piece of a gold-and-pink teacup, and a neatly folded ballet slipper with its laces tied into a bow. The necklace did not belong with them. Connie’s trinket box emitted the warmth and orderly care of a well-tended bird’s nest, but the necklace was cold in spite of the heat.

  I squeezed it and placed it in my pocket. I looked at Fritzi. “Why do you always have to push it an inch too far?”

  “Eros, c’est la vie. She’s in a mood,” Fritzi said, but she continued to stare into the empty hall.

  We packed our grandmother’s clothing back into the trunk in silence. Gingery doo-wop played on the radio from underneath the coat we had not bothered to pull off. The mid-sky sun flooded through the window and pressed hard against my cheek, flat and overcooked and ringed in white like a hard-boiled egg. I wrestled with the notion of reporting to our mother and father what had happened, that Connie had left the house when she was not allowed, but it was too daunting, the task of navigating through a barrage of stiff, swishing dresses, everyone so strangely elegant and spritzed in metallic floral clouds, only to be scolded by Mama in front of her guests, all of them cocktail-drunk and horrible by now.

  I ignored my uneasiness at the door squeaking open, clapping shut. I let the feeling trickle in a thin stream from my chest to my stomach, like the sweat down my back.

  The evening wore on. I read all of our favourite scenes in Frankenstein, and lay for so long on my stomach that it hurt. When I realized it was dark, I looked up to find Fritzi with her forehead low against her fingertips. She was standing in the one spot untouched by the marmalade light of our lamp, and the night had collected over her like an overhanging shade. “I shouldn’t have let her run off in a huff like that.”

  “She’ll be back soon, it’s almost bedtime,” I said. The backdoor, clipping against its frame, sounded a draughty echo through my ears. “She’ll want to be home before Mama sees and throws a fit.”

  I rose and leaned against the windowsill beside Fritzi. We stared down at the winding path leading to our house. The sounds of the party travelled out the open front door, between the fluted columns rounding the porch, and blew up to us with the garden’s wild bergamot mint and the dawning nostalgia of dead tobacco. Fritzi rested her arm on the windowsill. Her cigarette was clipped absently between her fingers, and spilled its smoke into the air, weaving long, pale furls over the darkened yard. I looked at my sister. She would not lift her eyes from the empty path, almost taunting now in its bareness, where the light that once fell sylphic from the paper lanterns lay cold beneath the old live oaks.

  Chapter 2

  “HYPNOTIZED,” ABELIA FAY said, raising a finger. “Maybe your sister was lured out in a trance. She’s a little loopy anyhow, right?”

  Below a squat palm tree in the shadowed courtyard of Ursuline Academy, I ate my lunch with Abelia Fay, daughter of my mother’s oldest friend, Mrs. Lily Lafleur.

  “My sister’s not loopy,” I said, “and she wasn’t in a trance.” I had no desire to discuss Connie leaving, least of all at school, and especially least of all with Abelia Fay.

  “You said she suddenly looked struck? Dazed, maybe? Seems an awful lot like a trance to me.”

  I brushed the hair out of my face. “Goodness gracious, don’t be ridiculous. Hypnosis isn’t real, it’s what magicians do.”

  “It most certainly is real. It happened plenty during the war.” Abelia Fay’s glassy-grey eyes gave off a vacant sparkle. “My daddy said two girls were hypnotized and plumb disappeared.”

  “Then it was probably the Germans,” I said. Grandma Gerta had never stopped fearing a knock on the door, or any hard-eyed man in her periphery, even well after the war’s end and she had left her haunted Parisian arrondissement for America. “My grandma said that people would disappear all over Europe and you would know it was the Germans. The Russians, too.”

  “It wasn’t the Germans,” Abelia Fay said. “These girls disappeared from here. They were called the Bellrose sisters. You listenin’? They got hypnotized and lured by ghosts all the way out to Red Honey Swamp. That’s what people said.”

  I coughed a little half-laugh. “What people?”

  “People. You know. All sorts.” With fair hair and skin as pale as greasepaint, Abelia Fay was a dandelion ghost of a girl. Sunlight bounced off her face as she leaned out of the shade, her eyes levelling seriously with mine. “It was a very gruesome affair, Bonnie. Mr. Latimer Bellrose has been an utter recluse since it happened.” Her nose pricked upward. “They all lived in the house my daddy just bought. He says we’re a part of local history now.”

  My head slacked. “Oh, are you?”

  Fritzi and Connie and I had been fascinated with the lore of Red Honey since we were small. The Scarecrow Witch of colonial days, or the silver-skinned oysters with eyes popping out of them like pearls, or the Blind Fisherman who lost his way one night in a blizzard of fog. We knew every spectre and ghoul, had used them to scare each other with uncanny tales and then snatch each other’s ankles, running and squealing through the purple aster bushes in the yard. There had never been a breath uttered amongst us of the Bellrose sisters, and besides, none of these old stories were true.

  “I’ve been hearing stories about Red Honey since before I could walk,” I said, “and I’ve never once heard of this one.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have. The papers were all about the war back then.” A single eyebrow pinched up Abelia Fay’s forehead. “Important parts of history have to be rediscovered, sometimes. That’s what my daddy’s doin’ with our house. Not to mention the Lasalles’ influence in all of this, of course. They’d never have let a scandal like that get around town. Mr. Bellrose’s second wife is Emma Lasalle, you know.”

  The Lasalle name sounded both familiar and dreamy — as if rooted deep in a cloud of childhood obscurity, the name of an old babysitter, a forgotten teacher or friend. I did not want to give Abelia Fay the satisfaction of having caught my attention. I did my best to look distracted and fiddled with a dead strand of grass, splitting it down the centre. Three girls strolled by with matching braids and lunchboxes. They linked arms and eyed me darkly.

  “How many people know Connie’s missing?” I asked.

  “I might have mentioned it to a few,” Abelia Fay said. “But no more than that, just a few or so.”

  I looked down at the small heap of grass I had torn without realizing. I brushed it away with an irritated slap. “Who are the Lasalles?” I asked. I figured she might as well tell me if she was in such a sharing mood.

  Abelia Fay gawked at me. “The Lasalles are one of the oldest families in Louisiana.”

  I remained silent, taking a little rotten pleasure in ignoring her indignation. I tipped open my lunchbox and stared down at the food inside. I had not taken a bite out of the sandwich Fritzi packed for me when she saw that I had not bothered to make a meal. She had held my shoes hostage in the kitchen until she was finished, thrusting my lunchbox toward me with all the humour of a drill sergeant. “Starving yourself won’t make her come home any faster,” she had said, though I saw no such lunchbox readied on the table for herself.

  I peeled the tinfoil and found that Fritzi had packed my favourite sandwich — M&M’s and peanut butter — despite having always thought it incredibly childish. It was rotten of me not to eat it. My hunger felt like a dry towel being twisted for water, but even the basic principle of eating seemed alien, the gre
asy fuelling of corporeal machinery. I stared at the sandwich on my lap as its pressed lips grimaced up at me like some mud-dribbling monster I might find under my bed.

  “You know, Bonnie,” Abelia Fay said, “you should have a word with Mr. Fields, the upper years’ history teacher. Was his nieces who disappeared.” She bit into her own sandwich and continued with a mouthful of mayonnaise. “He married into the family through Apollina Lasalle — you remember, that dancer who got hit by the streetcar on Canal way back.”

  I recalled the name Apollina. My mother had designed her dress for Giselle, gave it a feathery gown like a white peacock tail. It still hung in her work shed. “I heard she stepped in front of the streetcar.”

  “The Lasalles insist it was the driver’s fault.”

  I was baffled by the scope of Abelia Fay’s gossip. “Why do you know all of this?”

  “Certain social circles are simply aware of each other, Bonnie. We’re the ones you need to talk to about what happened, bein’ privy to that sort of talk and all that. Matter of fact, my daddy says that we’re livin’ in the most gossiped about house in all the South, and only the most elite even know it.”

  “Connie ran away,” I said. “She’ll be coming home any day now, my daddy’s already said as much. Trying to scare me with some Halloween story is nothin’ if not cruel.”

  Her nostrils scrunched, twitching several times like a bunny’s. “It ’s not a Halloween story. It’s New Orleans history, as much as my house.” She flung her hair from her face and it fell in a sheer white spray against her shoulder. “All’s I know is gator hunters found one of ’em sisters floatin’ in the water. Her clothes caught in the trees, too. Way up high. Now the ghosts of the two sisters wander the swamp, searchin’ for one another forever.”

  “You best just shut up, Abelia Fay.”

  “Ask Miss Audet,” she insisted, as if the word of our rumour-milling math teacher gave her nonsense an air of authority. “Was her daddy who saw ’em, strollin’ off like sleepwalkers. Prolly hypnotized by some crazy witch doctor. You should talk to that coloured friend of yours about that.”

  “Don’t talk about Saul that way.” I glanced around to see who had heard her. “And keep that voice of yours down. You know the trouble he’d be in if my daddy found out?”

  Abelia Fay rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Nobody’s goin’ to find out about your little backwater beau. Just sayin’ he might know about some things, his family spendin’ so much time in that dirty swamp and all. People are found in Red Honey all the time. How it got its name. He’ll say so, too, ask him.”

  I snapped my lunchbox closed. “It’s called that ’cause some drunk settler thought he found Himalayan honey bee hives in Louisiana. Everybody knows that story.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “No, it ain’t. It ain’t named for that at all. It’s ’cause if you go far enough the forest turns red. Whenever someone dies out there the blood sinks into the soil, makes the cypress seeds bloom into black gum.”

  “How could anyone possibly believe that?”

  Abelia Fay blinked at me, unmoved. “Fine. Believe what you want. But you better know it’s where that Bellrose girl was found.”

  There was always a pinch of amusement at the corner of her mouth when she was teasing, or mocking, or telling a lie. I examined her closely as she pressed the neat folds of a napkin over the rest of her sandwich, brow cross with concentration as the corners fluttered in the breeze through the palm leaves. There was no pinch. No trace of humour or satisfaction for a finely tuned trick. She looked as blank and cold as a slab of clay.

  Chapter 3

  THAT AFTERNOON I sat at the edge of Fritzi’s bed, watching the neighbourhood through our window. The view was largely veiled by the green shag of the old live oak. The sun shone bright against the leaves and strained my eyes as I looked through the forks in the branches. The Hattons, the elderly couple who lived opposite us, were sharing a tray of shortcake on their lawn. They sat on a bench below a whitepicket arbour, admiring the hanging lilac and the fresh skeins of lemon-scented geraniums in their garden. I stared coolly at them. I had been watching them for well over an hour, though it displeased Fritzi. She was tending to the laundry now, but when she had come upon me earlier she warned me not to be so obvious with my spying.

  “It isn’t spying if you don’t suspect they’ll do anything,” I said.

  “Who told you that? Makes it no less rude, either way.” She leaned over to rest her chin on my shoulder, and stared for a moment out the window with me. “Careful not to spook them. You probably look like a ghost-child in the window of a haunted house, and I heard Mr. Hatton’s got a bad heart.”

  I moved closer to the glass. “Do you suppose their son could move his car, for goodness sakes.” Beau Hatton drove up from Baton Rouge once a month and parked his key lime roadster, gaudy with glistening chrome, in such a way that leaked a shadow over a picture Connie had drawn in the cement.

  “You’re not to ask him to move it,” Fritzi told me, tucking the tag of my shirt back in place. “You should make yourself useful. Obsessing over all of this won’t do a lick of good.”

  Usefulness had occurred to me, without Fritzi saying so, but I had finished my schoolwork and chores shortly after getting home. I had even searched for Connie in every room of the house. I checked her favourite nooks three times over, as if she might still be sleeping in her bunk, or sitting in plain view, and somehow none of us had noticed. And all the while I took small measures not to make matters worse. I was careful never to touch an item while having a bad thought. If the words trapped or hurt pushed forward while I took a glass from the kitchen cupboard, I set the glass back in place and grabbed another one, had a better thought. Such carefulness could tighten itself around any drifting danger, keep it contained like an elastic band.

  Fritzi saw my finicky handling of things and did not approve, but I had been keeping an eye on her, too. Twice she fixed her bedding, both before and after school. She unlaced and retied the black-ribbon bow on her collar four times, and she was on her third load of laundry, cleaning even the untouched kitchen linens folded and dusty in the hallway closet.

  A lawn mower started up outside. I found the violent sound oddly soothing. It jerked about the grass until there was noise enough to chew through the queasy hush that filled our house. I wanted the mower and the Hattons and the ugly key lime roadster to cloud my head and bury one particular thought: that it would have been the simplest thing, telling Fritzi how uneasy it made me when Connie left, how my nerves rustled under my skin when the backdoor sounded its curious, broken c-click. And I almost had. I had almost told my sister, my mother. I had almost done something, and yet somehow, almost unbelievably, that great swell of intention made no difference.

  I stared into the messy throng of moss over the window. Fritzi was right. It was useless to worry. I was letting in all the strangeness of what Abelia Fay had told me. People did not get hypnotized, nor lured into swamps by some bayou pied piper.

  The sun filtered through the leaves of the live oak, and brightened the silvery moss nests. It slanted along our floor and I stared down at it paling my skin, feeling as though I were split in two — the Bonnie who could feel the sun, and the Bonnie who could only see it, separate from any feeling at all. I looked up at the old Westminster chime clock on our bureau. Watching the time made me think of death, but I could not stop seeing it. I knew now that it was halfpast five and I would know when it was a quarter-past six and five-past seven until all of the minutes were neatened and slid perfectly, numbly in place.

  I had forgotten to breathe again, all week it had been happening. I took a long breath now and stretched out my arms. I had not noticed myself scratching, but there were freshly pink scrawls all the way from my shoulder to my elbow. I wrung my hands together and rose from Fritzi’s bed. The only thing to do was call on Mama. I had avoided my mother lately, shifting out of sight at the sound of her light footsteps. But she knew the city, t
he people in it. She made costumes for the New Orleans Ballet, attended galas and fundraisers and all sorts of dreary black-tie affairs. If the Bellrose girls had in fact existed, if they had vanished into the gloomy tresses of Red Honey, my mother would have heard.

  I found her lying in the hammock on the porch, her arm slung over her face.

  “Mama?” I let the screen door smack behind me, loud enough to wake her.

  Her arm dragged down and away from her face until her elbow made a sharp point and her fingers nestled limp against her collarbone. “Lily came over. Said she wouldn’t leave unless I” — she shook her languid fingers toward the sky — “got some sun.”

  She was wearing a beige summer dress printed in red flowers, with a button in the wrong hole around her midriff. In the sticky heat the whole front yard smelled of soot. Cotton Miller’s kitchen next door had caught fire the previous week, and the scent of damp ash and debris still clung to the air, even days after they hosed it down.

  I sat in the white wicker chair nearest the hammock. “Mama, I need to ask you something.”

  She sighed. “Not now, Bonavere.”

  I twisted my hand out toward the vacant lawn. “Are you busy?”

  “I have a headache,” she said. Her voice floated out with all the dullness of a moan.

  “Mama, it’ll only be a moment, you can manage that much.” I approached the hammock and looked down, my shadow falling over her. The sun had beaten her face into a pinked mask, and her breaths were long and easy, as though she were in a deep sleep. “Have you ever heard of the Bellrose sisters?”

  Her brow dipped at the centre.

  “Somebody told me they disappeared during the war,” I said.

  She opened her eyes, slowly, and squinted against the sun. “What could possibly be your interest in that?”