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 he 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 — ”
“It ain’t like that. Being crazy is waiting for Connie to stroll on home on her own. The police don’t know her. I know her. She’d never keep us worrying like this for so long.”
“You said to tell you.” Saul flapped his shirt by the collar to air it out, releasing a tart, tangy boy smell. “I know how you get.”
“Your brother goes into swamps all of the time.”
“Dally knows what he’s doing.”
“Just help me get into his truck before he drives to the swamp. We could borrow his boat once he’s done fishing. We’d take good care of it.”
“We could borrow his boat? How are we going to do that?”
“I’ll go through the swamp by foot if I have to. I don’t need you to help me once I’m there.” My chest was heating up. “You weren’t there, you didn’t see her. Connie just walked out of the house with her eyes fizzed out like television static. I’d never seen her look like that before.” I heard the notes of my voice slipping out of place, and a springing sensation in my eyes like blood vessels popping. “When does your brother go fishing next?”
“I’m not telling.” Saul held the photograph between his fingers like he meant to rip it. I snatched it away from him. “You should chunk that thing right in the fire,” he said. “I mean it. I’ll do it for you.”
“Then an awful lot of help you’d be. I ain’t chunking anything. My best friend in the world and you won’t help me?”
Saul pressed his palms flat against his cheeks. “Dally’s behind on a shipment. He had a bad catch and needs to replace it, so . . . he might have to go back out this week.”
“Will you find out for me?” I asked.
He rested his forehead in his hand, masking his expression. “It could be like we wanted last summer, I s’pose — filming monsters.” We had wanted to film shots of Louisiana bayou country with Saul’s new Straight Eight camera, and use them for a movie on elusive swamp creatures. “I could sneak the camera out, and” — his tongue poked the parched corner of his mouth, eyes aimed low around my ankles — “you’ll see your sister’s never set foot anywhere near that swamp.”