I SLAPPED THE heavy book on the garden table. Crimes and Cults of the Deep South. Miss Elva, the librarian whose starchy paleness gave a gruesome quality to her ruby lips and nails, had given me such an eye when she read the cover earlier that afternoon. She had not said a word, though, treating me delicately, like everyone of late. She said no more than: “Now you send your mama my regards, hon,” before sending me on my way.
A chalky blue dusk settled over the yard. I had been sitting there, staring at the cover of the library book for an hour. My fingers would graze the edge, then curl back, retreating to my lap under the table. I loved nearly every sort of book, but never this one, never the stories of real horror.
I read of German laboratories and piecemeal monsters, vampires in Austrian forests. I stayed up at night reading by the glow of a tiny camping flashlight under my covers. I would jump ahead of the heroes and try to solve the puzzle myself, too impatient and frightened to let it unfold on its own. I dissected the mysteries with an investigative eye, like Hercule Poirot, splitting words down the spine and feeling for a pulse in the paper. They gave rise to brutal nightmares of fire and blood-thirst, maidens in mazes, bridal-white and without footsteps. It roused a giddy thrill, that fear, made my heart bounce with delighted terror.
I cracked open the cover, turned to the index, ran my finger down the columns. The lines blurred, crawling beneath my hand like ants.
All of those people who had really died.
All of those people who had not wanted to be scared.
Saul could not be involved in this. I saw it now, and were I still too foolish to see it, Fritzi was there to hammer it in. Don’t you dare let me catch you near that family again, Bonnie. This ain’t their problem to fix. I could have banged my head against the wrought-iron table at the thought of Dalcour’s bloody eye.
I had biked straight to the library from his house, scouring the criminology aisles and history aisles for anything that might guide me if I was to do this alone.
I looked down at the open page. Lasalle had reared again that day in the Chiffree house, and here it was in the stark columns of the index, along with yet another familiar name.
Page 205: The Bellrose Sisters.
Not as tucked away in the city’s unconscious as Abelia Fay thought.
In 1943, surgeon Latimer Bellrose moved his medical practice from Blue Springs, Alabama, to the vibrant Big Easy, in order to avoid suspicious controversy over the death of his wife Evelyn. With him he brought his two daughters and second wife, Emma Lasalle, eldest daughter of Southern sugar magnate Audric Lasalle and Dutch heiress Sylvia de Vries.
Square in the top right corner of the page was a grainy photograph of Emma Lasalle, a slate-eyed Dutch debutante with a stiff pompadour and one eyebrow raised higher than the other. Beneath it were the two girls from Abelia Fay’s picture, Amy smirking and leaning into her sister, Parnella pallid and dour with the stone intact around her neck. I slipped the necklace from my skirt pocket and ran my thumb over it, resting my forehead in my hand. “What on earth were you doing with this, Connie?”
I turned the page and a girl with dark skin and deep dimples bore into me. 1950, Claudia Campanel was discovered along the shore of the Mississippi River. The picture beside her showed another girl, pale with foggy tumbled-glass eyes. 1952, Loretta Ashby was found wandering the river’s neighbouring forest. Here were two more girls lost in the swamp, years after the Bellroses’ disappearance. They were each located after weeks of searching, alive yet edging toward starvation. They had been missing for months, but lost alone in the Atchafalaya Basin for no more than a week. Both claimed to have been following ghosts.
I folded my hands over the open pages. I looked ahead of myself into the menacing caper of ghost orchid falling over our fence from the neighbour’s yard. Fear snapped away in my stomach. The breeze rocked against my skin in hot waves, but everything remained still, the leaves and the icy white orchids and my own limbs, unwilling to move.
There was somewhere else, somewhere before the swamp. A separate place these girls had been before they were abandoned, left to wander the cypress until they were rescued half-sunk in lunacy.
I held my throat like my stomach might pour out of it. For a swift moment I did not have breath enough to cry. Suzanna had not been found in time. What would she have said if they had saved her, like these other girls? She was the only dead body I had ever seen. I had caught a glimpse of Grandma Gerta in her casket, around her a sickly, radiant haze of lemon drop blooms and rose-gold portrait frames. Passed away. My grandmother had passed away. Suzanna looked like the life had been cut out of her.
From the other side of the yard came the clang of the iron gate. My father staggered around the corner of the house, his face inflamed and blood bubbling in a veined pulse at his temple. He was drunk, or suffering a stroke; his wobbling look of determination suggested the former.
There was no heat left in the table’s iron, cooled down with the easing of the sun, but I craved it against my hand, the calming cut of it through my nerves. He was drunk. He had been drinking. Is that where he thought we would find Connie, in some bar lit like a carnival’s haunted house, crammed somewhere on Bourbon Street?
He headed for my mother’s workshop between the evergreens, what we called her Wendy house, wherein she stored her dressmaker mannequins and fabrics and an industrial nineteenth-century loom to whom I occasionally heard her speak. It was not a space that was privy to anyone but her, my father included. So strict was this rule that my mother carried the key in her dress pocket, when it was not carefully stored in a little locked chest. And yet my father had been visiting the workshop all week, and to my disbelief pulled from his pocket the long iron key I had never so much as touched, with its small serrated comb of teeth glinting on one end.
The golden chain tree formed a frail curtain around me, and I sat still behind it until my father closed the Wendy house door.
At first, through the dusty window, all I saw were cotton-scalped mannequins and fabric rolls leaned against the walls. The contours of these shadowed objects were only faintly visible in the isolated light of a single struggling light bulb swaying overhead. My mother had not stepped inside of her workshop in two weeks. Her costume gowns and theatre doublets waited unfinished, and a collective dust settled over everything like a sleeping spell.
My father’s shape curved forward in the dimness, breaking into the musty yellow fog of light. He was sitting on a wooden stool too small for him. His shoulders sank into a hunch.
I pushed open the door. I was greeted with the strong scent of cedar and clove, my mother’s perfume absorbed into the workshop’s wood. It stuffed up my nose and I scrubbed my wrist against it. I looked at my father, who had not looked up.
“Daddy? What are you doing in here?” I leaned my shoulder against the door to prop it open.
He ran his thumb and forefinger under his eyebrows, until they pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s quiet,” he said, gesturing toward me. “Close the door, darlin’.”
“The whole house is quiet.” Soundless. Not a shuffle or creak in any room. “You hiding or somethin’?”
He tugged at his collar, already unbuttoned. His necktie was shrivelled and untied. Whenever the bulb ticked over him, his weariness showed, his shirt spattered in sweat and scrubby blond mop left uncombed. His bright blue eyes were drained to dishwater. “Ain’t a place in the world to hide from this, or I’d be there.”
It was not cedar and clove alone. I sniffed. Along with the woody sweetness was the sour tinge of alcohol. I stepped closer, my hand firm against the open door. Around me my mother’s art deco designs cut up and down the walls in geometric labyrinths, glittering and industrial as the inside of a machine. Only it was not right; the machine was broken. Bottles buried her drawing board, alarming in volume and sparkling emptiness. Maps and newspaper clippings were pinned to the wall, with lopsided circles and x’s dashed over faces and names. My father’s diligent hand spiralled into ravings run loose and frantic.
Connie’s face, in the centre, split my chest in two. There she was, beaming from her most recent yearbook photograph with her elfish smile and her coffee hair spilling over her shoulders and down her cardigan, the red one that brought out the pink in her cheeks. I had not seen her face since the day she vanished, and her presence pressed in on me in splintering waves, as if she were close enough to touch.
“You know she’s not coming home,” I said. “You never thought she would, did you?”
The night had fallen and a strip of moonlight pooled over my father’s shoulders. He picked up a bottle from the floor and fumbled with the label. “I think I thought I could bring her home,” he said, scratching absently down his throat. “Bring her home before you girls knew.”
I flattened my skirt underneath my legs and sat on a stack of fabric boxes. I leaned my elbows onto my knees, folding my hands together against my chin, readying myself. “Daddy, Suzanna’s dead. In this family, you know that, and I know that. No one else. Don’t you think we ought not to keep secrets?”
He looked at me as if my voice were rotating uselessly in his ears. He did not so much as blink.
“Suzanna’s dead,” I repeated, “and Connie’s missing.” Heat rushed up my neck into my cheeks. “Did you know other girls have turned up in that swamp?” I leaned over to the drawing board and gathered some of the bottles and crooked cigarette stubs into a pile. “Five, with Suzanna, but I’ve just started.”
My father took a kerchief from his pocket. He folded it over his hand, slowly, and wiped the back of his neck. “Your mama told me Lily’s girl was really getting to you.”
“Nobody’s getting to me, it’s in city records. You can read it yourself, if you’ll bother to.” I took the bottle out of his hand and added it to the collection on the table. “She’s not just going to waltz home on her own, I know you see that.” I gestured to the array of mania stuck to the walls. “Why can’t you look me in the eye and say we’re on the same side? I need someone on my side, Daddy.”
My father tilted his head slightly backward as he exhaled. “You know,” he said, “they told me Suzanna died from blunt force trauma. The police. You ever heard of that?”
“Pretty obvious what it means.”
“Blunt force trauma to the head.” His lips rolled inward as he nodded.
“Daddy, there’s no reason to think the same thing happened to Connie.”
He gave me such a look of entreaty. “Bonnie. Why would a stranger be out in the swamp with Suzanna?”
I pulled my cardigan tight across my chest and crossed my arms. “Why would a stranger do any of the sick things strangers do?”
“Not everybody is seein’ it that way, baby.”
I stood up from the stack of boxes and shifted uneasily, until it hit me what my father was implying. “Those people are idiots.”
The kitchen was unlit. I carried my book and a jumble of bottles between my fingers to the sink, the ash-coated stubs cradled in my palm. A slender shape sat deepening the shadows at the table. A speck of orange light floated in the darkness beside her like a lone, lost star.
“Fritzi?” I asked. The messy clangour of the bottles as I set them in the sink was so jarring, such a strange crack of sound in all the quiet, that it startled me.
The little orange spot travelled in a long arc, landing at a tilt over the table’s edge. I sniffed the air. It had the scent of cloves and the smoke of French Gauloises.
“Mama? Is that you?”
“Darling, don’t turn on the light.”
I lowered my hand from the light switch. We had not done laundry in nearly two weeks and my mother’s clothes still carried her cold perfume through the house, so that it lingered as a ghostly fragrance.
“Do you want something to eat?” I asked. “I’m making toast.” It was all I was able to stomach. Toast for breakfast, toast for lunch, toast for dinner.
Mama tapped the orange dot of her cigarette over an ashtray. “Non. Non, je n’ai pas faim.”
“D’accord,” I muttered, watching the lines of her ribs ripple through her robe. “Daddy’s out there drinking in the Wendy house.” I took two slices of stale bread from the bread box and dropped them into the toaster. “In case you were wondering where your husband had gotten to.”
“Your father is trying, Bonavere.” She took a long drag and held the smoke in her throat until it seeped out, almost breathlessly, in a veil of fog.
“You consider that trying?”
“Your sister is a very sick girl. You’ve always known this.”
“What does her being sick have to do with anything?”
“What if we find her? With Suzanna dead?” Her words stuck together, barely discernible.
I rolled my eyes and turned back to the toaster. “You’re all doped up, aren’t you? I can’t talk to you like this.”
“No, you tell me. What happens to her if we find her? How does she explain what happened?” My mother looked up at me from the table. Her mouth was somewhat crooked, her eyes a smear of bleary blue.
“The police can’t possibly think that Connie killed Suzanna.”
She blew into her dissipating smoke, fanning it from her eyes. “It’s just a theory. They’re working through a number of them.”
“You actually think she could do that. You think that’s something she’s capable of.” I felt the twist in my face, my head shaking. My mother and father had never understood Connie, not in the least. When she was fourteen they sent her to a place of blizzard-white walls and dirty hair and shuffling feet, where locked rooms echoed buzzes and bleeps like out of a science fiction novel. Gentilly State, a hospital in the rural outskirts of town. I had to run past the doctors, with wards chasing after me, patients thrilled and laughing, and sprint through a labyrinth of winding halls, calling for Connie, because what had she done to deserve being here? What were they going to do to her?
Whatever my mother and father might have thought then, and were thinking now, was not true. Nothing more than fabrications woven of their failure to understand. Not everyone truly saw Connie, but I did. Dragonflies, moths, blue copper butterflies hovered by her hands and shoulders, a little lost winged creature here and there, drawn to some exuded gentleness, an instinct that informed them she would not swat. She was not crazy; it was only that her heart could not keep itself from breaking. She was too soft, too open, something from a storybook, a sea-sparkling sylph disguised as a girl.
I wrapped my arm around my mother’s waist and helped her to the sofa in the den. Her head sank into the pillow, her long hair catching like cobwebs against the silk. Above her hung large paintings of willowy trees, their reflections violet and shape-shifting in misty water.
I tapped my mother’s wrist. “Mama? Are you awake?”
Her chest lifted and lowered with the ease of shallow waves. “Sweet dreams, darling,” she mumbled into the pillow. “Tell Constance to please make her bed.”
A deep soreness bloomed in my chest, and I could not bring myself to drape a blanket over her, or lift her other leg onto the sofa.
Soft light from the streetlamps sifted through the curtains, washing the walls in a blue glow. It gave my mother the look of a mermaid broken from the prow of a ship, left to lie alone at the very bottom of an ocean.
On my way upstairs to bed, I stopped at the telephone table in the hall and turned on the parlour lamp. Above the table hung a large round mirror, and I looked at myself thoroughly for the first time in days. I resembled a ghost, eerily white with a lantern glow, as if lit from the inside. Shadows crept under my eyes and along the sides of my face, a deep hollow at the dip in my collar. Bruises reddened my cheeks and everywhere my skin was dashed in bites and scabs. A corner of my mouth was swollen and caused a wince at the mere tap of a fingertip. If I leaned in close, I caught my eyes in intermittent vibrations, and a soft pulse twitching at the high curve in my cheekbone.
This was a losing battle, trying to find my sister on my own. I needed someone — to believe me, to decipher and deliberate with me. I sank in front of my reflection; there were petals from the yellow chain tree caught in my hair. I wanted to scream for someone to please help me, but I might as well have shoved my head in the river to shout it for all anyone was hearing. There was only one person who might listen, though she had not been willing so far. She was struggling not to fade entirely, worse possibly than my mother, but she was the only other person who understood even the faintest glimmer of Connie.