Bonavere Howl Page 3

  “Nothing really,” I said. “Just something I heard today, about Red Honey.”

  “Dear, not these old swamp stories again. I thought you girls outgrew that dreadful nonsense.”

  “I heard it wasn’t a story, though. It’s just that nobody talks about it because of this one family — the Lasalles?”

  My mother’s soft stillness went rigid. She stared at me with such a look of consternation that I glanced over my shoulder to see if it was directed at someone else. I found Fritzi sitting on the lawn before the porch, somewhat hidden by tall, blue shoots of delphinium. She was drawing in her sketchbook with her bare legs outstretched in front of her. To my shock she was openly smoking. White curls laced from her nostrils and neither she nor Mama seemed to care.

  “Who told you as much?” my mother asked.

  “Abelia Fay,” I admitted.

  “Well,” she said, with a satisfied laugh, “that certainly explains things.”

  “Stay away from that little monster,” Fritzi piped from the lawn. “I saw her kick her maid Heloise’s shin at the market.”

  “Darling, the incident Abelia Fay means really isn’t for girls your age to know about,” Mama said.

  “So you do know about it?”

  I waited several moments for her to speak, watching the leafy shadows wash across her face, moving in the breeze like dark moths.

  “I know nothing of the sort,” she said at last. Her birdsong accent, a remnant of southwestern France, sharpened at the end of each word. She moved to lift herself but her elbow slipped through a gap in the hammock and she set herself rocking in a clumsy swing. “Bonavere,” she said, her fingers against her forehead.

  I rushed to still the sway of the hammock. “Where’s Daddy, then? I’ll talk to him.”

  “You will not, Bonavere. Your father is with the police right now; he hasn’t time for this.”

  Fritzi turned so quickly she drove her shoulder into the delphiniums. “Why’s he talking to the law again? They already told us Connie ran away.”

  My mother’s fingers spread in a shaky sprawl across her temple. “Yes, but they can get her home sooner. You know your sister. Constance gets very lost, sometimes.”

  “Thought she was done getting lost.” Fritzi struck a jagged line down the page of her sketchbook.

  It was not the first time Connie had disappeared. Usually to some solitary spot, or her friend Suzanna DeClouet’s basement for a day or two at a time.

  “They should search Suzanna’s house,” I said. “Is that why Daddy’s talking to the police?”

  “Connie’s probably told the DeClouets some horror story about us,“ Fritzi said. She spoke with her usual dryness, but there was a weariness in her face that I was certain only I could see, visible in the faintly downturned corners of her mouth.

  “Friederike, don’t you dare start,” our mother said.

  Fritzi slapped her sketchbook onto the grass. “Connie’s already started it.”

  My hands squeezed and twisted around each other. I looked between my mother and sister, unsure which temper to settle first.

  “Look how you upset your sister,” Mama said.

  “She’s upset because you’re dancing around her questions.”

  “I’m not upset.” I broke my hands apart and straightened them at my sides for them to see.

  “Why must you insist on agitating your siblings, Friederike?”

  “You mean actually pay attention to them.”

  Everything took on a sudden sickness. The scent of ash grew stronger and dried out all of the jasmine in the breeze. Ash covered the porch in soft grey speckles I had not seen until now. It had blown over the fence, onto the planks, down the front steps of our house.

  I felt cold all over. “Mama, what if Connie isn’t coming back on her own?”

  My mother’s hand wrapped around a knot of rope. “Why would you say such a thing?” She lifted her head, her hair falling forward in dark plumes over her sunburned brow. “Your father is speaking with the police at this very moment. We’ll not say another word, not another word, until he’s home.” With a sliding glance she rolled onto her side, leaving her back to me and her hair dripping like oil between the hammock rope.

  I rinsed the ash from my feet but could not wash away the feel of it. In the bathroom mirror I eyed the burn-stripes on my back and midriff. I had turned the shower knob as hot as it would go.

  I buttoned my nightgown and curled next to Fritzi on her bed, leaning against the wrought-iron headboard, and let my damp hair soak through the fabric over my shoulders.

  “Your pyjamas won’t get wet if you braid your hair back.” Fritzi walked over to our bureau and pulled open the top drawer, removing our mother’s silver heirloom comb. “You know that as well as I do. You’re being forlorn on purpose.” She sat again on her bed, turned my back to her, and gently ran the comb’s slender teeth against my scalp.

  I turned to face her, but she nudged my head back in place. “Can’t stop thinking about Connie. You heard Mama.”

  “You heard Mama, too.” She pulled my fingers away from peeling the skin around my thumbnail, and set my hand on the checkered bedspread. “Daddy’s talking to the police for a little extra help, that’s all. Connie will be in a heap of trouble after the fuss she’s caused and I’m sure she knows it. I wouldn’t be racing back home, either.” The comb lightly snapped my head back, snagged on a knot. “We can’t always let ourselves get sucked into Connie’s histrionics. You ought to get out of the house a little, Bonnie, stop dwelling.”

  But I liked being in our home, the smallest, oldest, loveliest house on Toulouse and, as far as we were concerned, in all of the enchanted French Quarter. Ever since the three of us first saw it, the walls of deep mahogany and the darkest purples and reds called to us, their elongated lines of Victorian fashion so beautiful and unnerving. We loved the dentil-frilled arcade of powdered lavender, hung with sweeping hibiscus and milky Louisiana iris, and the ambitiously pitched roof forgotten to a state of mossy cat’s claw that Daddy set out to clear, but Mama argued to keep. We were protective of it, as if it were a sentient mass of brick and vine and clapboard listening in on our every word, for it was the place to which we all came back at the end of the day, a fixed point like the glint of the Mississippi River.

  Fritzi yawned and her breath was sour with wine.

  “Are you drunk?” I asked.

  “Having a drink doesn’t make you drunk.”

  “You just had the one,” I said.

  “Are you starting a tab?” When I did not laugh she said: “I had a little wine with Theo. I’m not taking from Mama’s cabinet anymore, if that’s what you’re so slyly suggesting.”

  I suspected it was more than a little. The strokes of the comb were sharp and without rhythm, and her offer to comb my hair at all was strange. It was a thing Connie might do.

  “Fritzi,” I said, “why wouldn’t Mama talk about the Lasalle family?”

  “Not much to say other’n they’re a spoiled rotten bunch. I’ll side with Mama on not giving them much mind, though you’re never to breathe a word of that.” The silver comb stopped and hung in my hair, its teeth sharp against my neck. “You’re more like Daddy every day.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Means you can’t ever let anything rest.”

  The comb swept too close to my face, gathering the hair at my temple. Fritzi curled the ends between her fingers and braided them with sharp tugs. I watched her in the window, donning a black dress scavenged from the attic and two decades out of fashion. The dress and her short black hair blended with the night beyond the glass, reducing her to a floating white mask and dancing hands.

  “Best not to worry right now,” she said. “Worrying will eat you alive if you let it.”

  “It’s not like usual this time.”

  “Maybe this time she doesn’t want to be found.”

  “You don’t mean that,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t
say it if I didn’t.”

  When she finished braiding my hair, I pulled her thin quilt over our legs. I was unwilling to sleep in my own bed below Connie’s empty bunk. “You’ll remember to get out of bed on the right side this time?”

  “Bonnie, please don’t start up with that.”

  “Just until Connie’s home.”

  Fritzi gave a sigh I knew to mean yes, but don’t tell anyone. It was an ancient Roman superstition that getting out of bed on the left side, the death side, brought misfortune. Now was not the time to laugh at superstitions.

  I rolled over and faced our reflections in the moonflooded dark, a perishable glow to them like frost. “Do you forget that she’s not in her bed when you wake up? I have to remember it fresh every morning.”

  Fritzi slid my braid around my shoulder. I could feel her lying stiff behind me. “Go to sleep, Bonnie.”

  She did not take long to drift off, and in her sleep her arm fell loosely over me, and her chin tucked itself against my neck. I pulled her arm closer and breathed in her scent, squeezing my eyes tight. I had not noticed the caramelized sugar on her breath, beneath the wine. She must have eaten a stale praline from the stash Connie and I had been keeping in a tin under the bunk. Fritzi did not like sweet things, and I could almost see her sitting on the floor by the bed, taking small, unpleasant bites as if to torment herself, the way Connie and I held peppermints in our mouths to burn our tongues.

  Chapter 4

  SAUL CHIFFREE AND I were crouched on a shaded stoop along an empty street in the Esplanade. The store to which the stoop led — a blue and yellow antiques shop in the last little dwindling patch of business before downtown gave into the river levee — had been abandoned for months: cardboard over the windows; plaster crumbles on the steps; a spooky warehouse look to it when you peered through a small clear space by the window’s ledge.

  The street was isolated enough on weekday afternoons that Saul and I could go unseen. We would cool off under a store awning’s shade after biking back, tired and sunwoozy, from the gritty unused trails that stretched out toward the Mississippi. When we were younger it was easier; we would carry kitchenware and linens in our schoolbags to the densest recesses of Couturie Forest, and wear pots like a knight’s armour, or tablecloths like a sorceress’ cape, and duel it out among the slash pines. Saul was King Arthur, with his sword fashioned from cereal box cardboard; I was the evil Morgana with a twig for a wand. But the older we got the more insidious grew the fear of accusation; what would people think — or worse, say — if we were caught alone together?

  Saul once told me he knew exactly what, but he would not say it aloud.

  January skies were warm that year, turning gold as apricots in the late afternoon. Sunlight ran along the glass of the gift Abelia Fay had sneaked from her attic, and slipped into my desk at school with an indignant “See?” scribbled on a note underneath. It was a photograph from the ’40s with her custard-brick, camellia-lined mansion staunchly in the middle, behind two girls in tropical-flowered skirts and sleeveless tops. The older girl had sugar-white hair, but the little one’s hair was like Fritzi’s — a vital black that snatched the light and slicked it around like pomade.

  I told Saul the Bellrose story.

  “You’re worried about something Abelia Fay said?” A washboard row of wrinkles narrowed in the centre of his dark forehead. He and Abelia Fay had been unable to stand each other ever since Saul and I met at the comic book shop seven years earlier. We had both been looking for the latest issue of The Vault of Horror and discovered a shared love of all things monstrous and make-believe.

  “Whatever Abelia Fay says, best always to believe the opposite.” Saul slung an arm around my shoulders, shook me a little. His dimples dug deep into his cheeks. “Girl’s got a head full of molasses. Don’t let her scare you.”

  “I’m not scared,” I said.

  “Ever think your sister might have run off with a beau?”

  “ A beau?” I would have laughed had I not been so appalled on Connie’s behalf. “Not in a hundred years.” I knew the look, for starters. I had watched Catherine Deneuve dash across the screen, along the Cherbourg cobblestone and into her teenage lover’s arms, and Anouk Aimée with her coy, cocked eyebrow. I knew the playful vanity and the fans of eyelash on the face of a girl in love, the dreaminess of lying in bed with a swell in your ribs. I knew from sharing a bedroom with Fritzi, hearing her whines and sobs and reading her diary, that Saul could not have been more wrong. “Really, Saul,” I said. “Connie can hardly stand to be touched. I think Fritzi’s just about the only one who can touch her by surprise without making her jump out of her skin.”

  “Just somethin’ to chew over.” Saul leaned forward, scratching the damp curls tight against his head. He tapped the glass over the photograph. “So this is them? The two sisters?”

  “Must be,” I said.

  “Here, flip it over. My ma always writes names and dates on the back of pictures.”

  We unclasped the picture from its frame and found, in letters scrawled as fine as thread-work, the names of the Bellrose sisters — the oldest, Parnella, and the youngest sister Amy’s name written in larger, lopsided letters, presumably by her own hand.

  “The younger one here, she was never found,” I said. “Abelia Fay said their ghosts are lost in the swamp just trying to find each other.”

  “Bonnie Fayette. Don’t tell me you’ve been reading up on this.” Saul pulled the frame from me and poked his finger against my temple. “You’re letting Abelia Fay get inside your head, and that’s the last place she should ever be. You know she’s just trying to feel all important.”

  I swatted his hand away. “As if I don’t know.”

  “Then I’ll keep the photograph,” he said. “If you know there’s nothing to it.”

  I pulled the picture back so that it rested between us. “What’s the harm in it?”

  “It’s just no good, you got to listen to me. With Pa, I — ” He paused and trailed off. “It’s easy to get carried away is all I’m sayin’.”

  I ran my thumb around Amy’s face. She was plump and doughy as a pastry, sinking into unshed infant chub on the knee of her sister, who had her arms crossed over the much smaller body in her grip, the way Fritzi and Connie had often held me.

  “Of course it’s just a picture,” I said.

  But the sisters’ faces had begun to linger in the corner of my eye. I had a plan reserved, but I had not built up the nerve to explain it to Saul, or ask him for the favour he would almost certainly refuse to give.

  “What’s that on her face?” he asked. A severe split was visible in Amy’s upper lip, as if a hasty paintbrush had swept in the wrong direction.

  “It’s a cleft lip,” I told him. “My great-aunt Gaelle had one.”

  “Never seen one before.” He remained hunched, growing mildly curious. “Something in her hand, too. You see it?”

  I lifted the picture and saw an item tangled in Amy’s fingers, somewhat hidden by her sister’s hair. I peered closer: green beads along a silver string, with a pendant being tugged from the older girl’s neck.

  “I’ve seen this before.” I touched the glass and felt the shivery bite of an electric shock.

  “How come you know it?” Saul asked. I shook the shock out of my hand and lowered the picture onto the stone step. “Bonnie?”

  “Connie has a necklace like that,” I said. “The other day she called it a bloodstone.”

  “What does your sister know about veve?” Saul pointed to the lines on the necklace. “The engravings, see? They’re called veve. They’re Voodoo. I’ve seen ’em on dolls and candles in Babin’s hutch.”

  “I thought Connie bought it at the flea market.”

  “Ain’t nobody buying that at the flea market.” His brow furrowed as he rested his elbow against his knee. “Wonder how she got a hold of it.”

  The day was sticky with heat and the sun skimmed his sweaty upper lip. His energy was draining; soon h
e would be tired and humourless, as he grew on any day thrown off tune, and there would be no breaching the subject of favours.

  I stared into the picture until its lines blurred and its grey and white patches floated out of place like loose clouds. “Reckon it means something?”

  “What’s it gonna mean?” he asked, almost making fun. He was dragging a twig across the pavement in listless strokes.

  I paused, preparing for the snap of his head in my direction, the look of plain disapproval. “If I went to Red Honey” — I saw him opening his mouth to interject — “if I went, I could see what sort of place it really is.”

  “See the rest of your marbles kick away from you, that’s for sure.”

  “But then we’ll know, won’t we? We can tell Abelia Fay her talk ain’t amountin’ to a hill of beans.”

  Saul tossed the twig into the street. “All ’cause of what some snotty brat said.”

  “Not just ’cause of that. My mama was acting awfully strange yesterday when I asked her about Red Honey. You should’ve seen her. She wouldn’t so much as listen.”

  “Well, tell me this. How on earth do you expect to get all the way out to the swamp?”

  “See, that’s the thing. Your brother fishes there, doesn’t he?”

  Saul glanced at me from the corner of his eye. “So?”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  He began scuffing out the chalk strokes with his shoe. “You’re not thinking Dalcour will let you ride along in his boat with him.”

  I didn’t answer, but he read it across my face.

  “You’re thinking you’ll go alone?” He laughed. “You’ve never been in a swamp in your life. You’ll drown before a gator has the chance to eat you.”

  A bicycle whirred into view from around the corner. I gripped the picture in front of my face, quickly straightened my skirt hem to hide that my legs were as sunburnt-white as a watermelon rind.

  When the bicycle had rolled out of sight, Saul looked tentatively in both directions, then stared into his arms crossed over his lap.

  “You said to tell you if you’re ever sounding crazy. Your grandma — ”