THE MARDI GRAS spectacle came on as grand as always. Skeleton krewes weaved their way down Bourbon, as did a parade of harlequins on stilts and mermaid floats and goblin-faced jesters throwing strings of beads into the crowds, so that it looked as though the Vieux Carré’s auroral colours had been swept from the buildings to flood the street.
Fritzi and I watched from the balcony of the Fleur-de-Lis Café. I was feverish; my forehead was a burning slate and I could nearly feel the sinewy touch of the smoke rising from the glass ashtray on the table. The night before, I had lain on my side, staring listlessly out my bedroom window. Fritzi had sat at the edge of her bed in stiff blue shorts and a large, ratty T-shirt smelling of men’s cologne. She dabbed a wet towel against my forehead and neck, uttering a haze of apologies while I slipped in and out of a thin, damp sleep.
She told me they had found me in the hallway, though I was certain I had collapsed in Leopold’s room. The gardener had come to the front door for a glass of water, and was telling Fritzi of that dear late lady of Dorian’s, the poor dear sweet girl who brought him lemonade and dug her hands in the soil to help him when his knees were stiff, when they all heard the crash from down the hall. A vase I had knocked off a console table when I fainted, found in pieces around me.
“That gardener sure wanted me out of the kitchen, I can tell you that,” Fritzi had said. “And Mr. Fields played friendly as anything. He carried you to the car, touched your forehead to check your fever.” She dragged the cloth across my collarbone. “Like he has any right to touch you.”
Instinctively, I had slipped my hand into my dress pocket, searching for Connie’s necklace, clawing for it, digging into the seam when it became evident that the pocket was empty. My mind spun in every direction at once; where could I have left it? The light from our bedside lamp burned incessantly, and as I watched Fritzi in my feverish fog, I felt a sick sense of déjà vu. The lamp’s yellow light spilled down my sister’s black hair like fire igniting oil.
“There was a girl,” I said. “I saw a redheaded girl. She ran by me with fire blowing down her back.”
On the café balcony, Fritzi folded her hands under her chin, elbows at attention on the table. Her eyes roved the crowds gathered in the streets below, scouting for Leopold. She had heard from Theodore that Leopold had joined a skeleton krewe, and the costume with the skull mask confirmed it. “The house will be dead empty during the parade,” she had said, chewing gravely on her fingernail, when I told her what I had found. “We’ll talk to that redheaded girl. She’s trying to help you, must be a reason.”
The breeze on the balcony only drew the heat closer, lapping the sun against my bare, tender skin. Hanging baskets of wildflowers dappled the table with shadows but offered little cover.
“I thought she ran away, you know.” Fritzi picked an ice cube from a glass of water and touched it to her wrist, the soft corners below her jaw. “That’s just how Connie is. She’s up in her head.” In the month since Connie had vanished, Fritzi’s unkempt hair had regrown some of its curl and wound about her head in spidery tangles. Under her eyes, she was bruised blue with sleeplessness.
“Nobody could blame you for it, Fritzi. You didn’t know.”
“You did,” she said curtly. “You knew. All that crazy talk of yours, but . . . well, Connie is crazy. Crazy could be how we find her.”
“She’s not crazy, Fritzi.”
Fritzi glanced over the railing, and shrugged.
The crowds had thickened on both sides of the street, and the first elaborate floats of the old krewes had already rolled past.
“I still don’t see him,” I said.
“Just keep your eye on the grandstand. Mr. Fields watches the parade from that grandstand every single year, he ain’t stoppin’ now. Theodore says his mama’s been trying to reserve it for five straight years.”
“If he comes too late we won’t have enough time.”
“It’s still early,” Fritzi said.
I looked into the steely web sprouting across her forehead. She itched at a bead of sweat.
“You’ll smudge it,” I said, slapping her hand. I had spent a painstaking hour getting it right that morning, the painting of Venetian masks being Connie’s favourite part of our yearly ritual. “How long do you think Theodore can sit waiting for us?”
“Long as he has to,” she said. “He’s oddly reliable when you need him to be.”
We were a one-car home, and though our mother remained in the den most days, our father had returned to teaching at Tulane. I crossed my arms over the burning terrace. The sun had heated the red iron and it scolded my skin. The day was impossibly bright, and I felt misplaced staring down at the array of fiery, festive ardour and showering doubloons and floats as elaborate as Italianate frescoes, as if I had never seen any of it before. Music pulsed through the ground and up the building, all along the terrace railing until its brassy bray vibrated into my arms. I watched it all as if it were someone else’s life, as if my own life had always and only been a swelter of absence like a crater on the moon.
“Fritzi, look.” I grabbed her sleeve. “Look over there, I see him.”
Dorian Fields ascended the grandstand across the street. He smiled from the platform, shaking hands with several pit-stained men in straw hats and pale checkered suits, and women blotting their chests with handkerchiefs. We hurried down the steps and through the café into the street.
“Stay close,” Fritzi said, pulling me along. “Yank my arm if you get stuck behind someone.”
A wall hit us as we walked down the street: a beery, sweaty stench, which sharpened into tree bark damp and sticky from an early belt of rain, and the salt of mothy dogwood sprawling the length of the café.
We pushed through the crowd.
“Do you see Theodore?” I called, squishing up against Fritzi’s shoulder.
She pointed to the familiar Lincoln, parked beneath purple, green and yellow Mardi Gras flags. We walked over to find Theodore asleep with his head against the wheel.
Fritzi banged on the glass. “Snap out of it, Zimmerman.”
He bolted up, curls wriggling about his face.
I will admit that I liked Theodore Zimmerman. Not like my sister did, and certainly not as a romantic match for her, but he had a sort of slow burn charm that grew on you. His dark curly hair shadowed his eyes so that I could never determine their colour — a sharp snap of black one minute, gold-glazed brown the next — and there was a purring quality to him like a sweet, twitchy alley cat.
“Thank you for your help, Theodore,” I said, as he slogged his way out of the car. “Don’t mind the paint, we won’t get it on the seats or anything.”
He examined the blue and gold patterns feathering my cheeks and around my eyes. “I like it,” he said, turning to Fritzi. “Keys are in the ignition, by the way, if you want to drive.”
“I don’t. You drive. My hands aren’t steady.” She cupped one hand with the other and held them both close to her chest.
“As you wish,” Theodore said, with a light tug of my braid. “Bonnie-baby, what are you doing here, anyhow?” He turned back to Fritzi. “Seriously, Fritz. Don’t drag your little sister into things, come on.”
“You don’t know what we’re doing.” She pulled her address book from her pocket and handed it to him. “Fields. The man you’re watching today. His home number is on the first page. Don’t ask,” she said, as he opened his mouth. “After you drive us, come right back here and call that number if you see him leave the parade.”
Theodore fixed a hard look on us. “I take it you’re going to be in his house?”
“None of your business,” Fritzi said.
“You robbing him or something?”
“None of your business.”
He opened the door to the backseat and waved me in. “Glad to be of service, I guess.”
The roads were elastic as we drove, stretching far out in front and snapping back with a sudden curb or sharp turn appearing directly ahead. Theodore was high on dope, that much was obvious. His eyes were wide awake now, despite the early hour; there was an ecstatic flush mixed in with the sour-milk pallor of his skin, and a sleek shine of sweat along his abundant deep black curls. He was rambling only somewhat cogently over the local radio station’s riverboat jazz, and Fritzi kept glancing at me, trying to read my understanding of the situation.
It was not until I felt a sharp jolt through my fingers that I realized I was crunching them between my knees.
“Why would somebody want to burn a house down?” Fritzi asked. He had been telling us all about the delinquents he knew back home in New York.
“In a pinch? A real pinch?” Theodore shrugged. “Good way to make evidence disappear. Right, Bonnie-baby?” He laughed and winked at me in the rearview mirror.
“Watch the road, Zimmerman,” Fritzi said. She reached over to light the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. The flame wavered under his nose until he manoeuvred the slender white stick upward like a toothpick.
The drive took forever and no time at all. I watched the windshield, my breath stuck in my throat, until the large blue house emerged behind its wide plot of oaks and fanning palm fronds, its shimmering blanket of magnolia.
We pulled over to the side of the road. As we climbed out, Fritzi squeezed Theodore’s arm. “Will you come get us one hour from now?”
He agreed, though with a look of reservation at the house in front of us. His car drove off until it was as small as the black-fleck flies sticking to the air; we jumped through them over a narrow, watery ditch and started for the second time toward the Lasalle estate.
“It’s called Parisot,” Fritzi said, looking ahead at its shuttered windows. She pointed to another house down the byway, with yellow walls framed in bold pink and blue trim. “That’s a Louisiana Creole plantation. Daddy drove me and Connie up here when she brought home that Fats Domino record, remember?”
A passing car slowed to take in Parisot’s columns and winding outdoor staircase, far at the end of an arching tunnel of oaks. The large side addition to the house, painted a distinctly darker blue, was well over a hundred years old, and was where the Lasalle family lived. The front of the house was of the antebellum era and reduced now to a closed-off series of rooms never used but for cotillions and galas. Branches thick with moss lurched overhead as Fritzi and I walked down the yard through flickering ponds of shade. The whole plantation was so quiet I could hear the tremor in her breath and the small birds brushing against the leaves. Not one window was open to let in the tired breeze aimlessly circling the porch. The white staircase led to the second floor colonnade, but there the doors were boarded up and most of the shuttered windows locked with thick wooden slats.
“How do we get in, you think?” Fritzi asked. A family of tourists had begun stretching and pacing by their car. “They’re going to be poking around taking pictures.”
There was no time to wait them out, and there were always tourists stopping along River Road; once this family had their fill of sugar-money tycoons and finger food, they would cram back into their car and another would come along.
The breeze whipped the leaves overhead into the fresh rolling sound of the riverfront. “We could climb the fence,” I said. “Nobody will see us trespassing if we’re in the back-yard.”
“I’ll climb over while you stand watch, then.” Fritzi looked at the tourists gathering around their picnic basket, and then started for the fence.
I ran up beside her. “You can’t climb that thing. You’re all withered away.”
“I’m not withered.”
I pinched the flesh by her spine, startling her. “Give me a boost and I’ll grab hold of the spikes.”
“No, Bonnie, if you get hurt I won’t even be able to see you from out here.”
“It’s no safer for you.”
“It’s not happening. Think of something else.”
“There isn’t anything else. How am I going to get hurt? I reckon if there were guard dogs waiting on the other side, we would’ve heard them by now.” I gave her a look of such obvious practicality. “Fritzi, we don’t have time for this.”
She breathed in through her nose with a long hiss. “You’ll come right back out,” she said, swinging her finger back and forth, her chest, my chest. “We switch places, understand? You open the gate, then stand watch behind one of these trees.”
We reached the back fence and I stared up the length of the tall wooden planks. The fence was not from the house’s original days; its wood was a sleek, modern yellow pine. The heat was thicker here, away from the shade of the oak tunnel, but a balmy electricity ran through my sweat and cooled my neck.
Fritzi hoisted me, slowly, up against the planks, her face nestling into my back. I felt a woozy rush of weightlessness. My nerves tipped back and forth like unsteady water, but I was too scared to know it. I grabbed onto the biting hot spears lining the top of the fence and dragged myself farther, rolling onto my stomach as their dull tips sank into my skin. The fence seemed higher than it had appeared from the lawn. I closed my eyes and thought of Connie hollering at me to jump off the diving board at the Audubon Park swimming pool, and the giddy terror of my feet flying through the air with only a misshapen shadow waiting to catch my fall.
The impact rang through my bones when I hit the ground. Fritzi was calling my name. I turned away from her to the yard, rolling out acres of wild green grass and milky-pink gardens. Tucked among the trees were Medusan statuettes with chipped, anguished faces; fountains of patina-green birds with dry, rounded mouths meant to spit water into dirty basins; vast swaths of shrubs bordering a small, groomed orange grove. It was quiet and idyllic, yet undercut by a dreamy obscurity, as if it somehow was not real.
The fence door fell away behind me. Oak leaves flared with sunlight, crinkled gold with burned edges like thousands of old maps. I moved to the far edge of the grove, drifting, until my foot hit a sharp wooden corner. I had been looking up and all around me, and did not see the two small doors built into the ground. They pitched up on a slight tilt between thick sprouts of red sorrel weeds.
I set my hand against the wood. It was beaten and sooty with weather and age. A splintered edge snagged the loose threads of my dress as I leaned my knee against it. The steel handles were peeling with rust and bolted shut from the other side.
I ran back to Fritzi. “There’s a storm cellar.”
When she did not answer I drew close to the fence, trying to see her through the slits. “Fritzi, where y’at?”
After a pause, she asked: “Is it locked?”
“Yes . . . but the wood is awful weak.”
I instructed her to keep a lookout as I ran back, the faint sound of her calls to me fading in the yard’s uncanny quiet. I began kicking against the cellar doors, weighing them down enough to crackle and bend, oddly pliant. I scoped the yard for a helpful tool. My face paint was melting, mingling with sweat, and ran sticky down my neck. I looked at the long, sweeping grass around my feet, where Connie might be waiting underneath while I faltered, again; it was this ever-tightening knot that drove my body; it swung my arms up and weighed my fists so that they fell in pounding, bruising blows. I fell back onto the grass and caught my breath. The dull drain of futility made the yard loud, the heat stiff.
A cold draft touched my cheek, and fell away. I turned and saw the ruddy tin roof of a gardening shed jutting between the trees. Its door was partway open when I reached it. I nudged it and the wood dragged against the floor with a dusty scrape. It was the same shape as Mama’s Wendy house, but bleak with disuse and devoured by dark fungus.
I buried my nose in the crook of my elbow. My mother had warned me never to go near black mould, but a steelheaded axe hung by a thick cluster freckling the wood. I stepped in, the door closing behind me, and all of the day’s light snapped off. I felt around the wall for the axe’s handle. It was all blackness in front of me. My hand found a smooth wooden grip and pulled it from its hold. Its weight surprised me and I dropped it, the blade clanging against the floor by my feet, and I fumbled around to find it, dragging it out of the shed and through the thorny shrubs across the yard.
Fritzi was still calling for me. She was kicking the fence, the iron lock jangling like an alarm bell.
“Fritzi. Fritzi, shut up and calm down.”
“You stopped answering.” Her breaths were so loud I heard them through the fence. “You don’t — you don’t think sometimes.”
“I found an axe.”
“Unlock the fence.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Unlock the fence, Bonnie, or I’ll scream my damn head off, I’m not joking around.”
I set the axe on the ground and stretched onto my toes to reach the latch. “If we get caught, you remember I said we needed a lookout.”
Fritzi pushed through the door and startled me by wrapping her arms fiercely around me. “You scared the life out of me.” She pulled away and brought my hands together, looking at the torn flesh along the outer edges. “What did you do to yourself?”
“Tried to open the storm cellar.” I pointed toward the orange grove. “It’s over there under the big tree.”
I led her to the cellar doors, but they proved harder to cut through than anticipated. The wood was thin, but the axe’s blade was dull, and it took some time for us to split a hole wide enough through which to crawl. I felt along the splintered ends of hacked pine and peered in.
“Stay put a minute,” Fritzi said. She lowered herself into the hole backwards, gripping my arms as the wood’s ragged edges dug into her sides. The bones of her torso were defined even through her blouse, and I held my breath terrified that the many sharp, protruding angles would slide right through the soft hollows between her ribs.
I could not see a thing beyond her — not a light bulb, a floor, the stairs under her feet. She wavered as she found her bearings, and lowered herself onto her knees as I came in after her, guiding my feet to the first low step.
It was a difficult descent in the dark. The steps were spaced too far apart and my foot continuously hung in panic, searching for the landing with an uneasy wave of suspension until Fritzi’s hand reached out to mine and she whispered: “Follow my voice. We’re at the bottom.” We stood in the dark. I felt Fritzi moving away and reached out for her.
“Where are you?”
“I think I found a lamp,” she said. There was a clink and a bulb sprang on, flushing the cellar with light. She was on the other side of the room, pinching the chain of a fluorescent kitchen lamp. I hurried over to her. “Looks like a fallout shelter. Remember Daddy wanted to build one? He said we could set a tunnel up from the basement.” The shock had not left Fritzi’s face. I knew it looked the same on me. “Not sure what kind of fallout shelter this is supposed to be.”
It was unlike the pictures I had seen in the war films and brochures presented at school. A stout canopy bed reached all the way to the low, curved ceiling, with misty pink drapes like a wedding gown train. Beside it was a bureau bordered in gold trim, and a vanity with silver combs and cut-glass bowls filled with pins and coils of velvet ribbon. The vanity’s mirror did not match its table; it was newer, a modern piece one would order from a department store catalogue.
Below our feet the dank bunker floor had been covered in tufted scatter rugs, but I could feel the hard cement through my sandals.
“What do you reckon it’s for?” I asked. Though built in the fashion of civil defense, it had the doted upon quality of a nursery. Neither did the silence fit; the air had pulsated with a fresh reverberation of sound before we had begun to speak, a hum I felt along the inside of my ears and that grew stronger in the direction of the canopy bed. I reached into the warm yarn of my pocket for Connie’s necklace, remembered that it was no longer there, and drew open the curtain.
I fell back against Fritzi, whose arms locked around me. A girl sat on the far corner of the bed, blinking out at us from between strands of oxblood hair.