“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 greasy 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.