A Twisted Ladder (3 page)

“It goes against my upbringing to take advantage of someone’s hospitality,” Ethan had said. “Come on, Daddy Blank, let me treat ya at Willie Mae’s. And then we can treat your daughter here another time.”

“It’s all right,” Maddy had said, mollified. “I’m just going to put out some sweet tea and then I’ll leave y’all to it.”

And that’s when she discovered a tree frog in the sugar bowl. Nearly broke the china when the thing leapt out at her.

Daddy’d guffawed and slapped his leg. She had no idea how he’d managed to slip a frog in there without her catching him. But once she regained composure, Madeleine had given in to a good laugh herself. Poor Ethan, unaccustomed to Daddy Blank’s antics, looked positively ashen—like he feared Madeleine might swoon. As if she was some fainting belle who had never worn pigtails and caught tadpoles in the mud flats.

The shock on Ethan’s face, that appalled get-the-smelling-salts-and-begin-the-rites-of-contrition look of horror, had sent both Daddy Blank and Madeleine into shuddering, tear-streaked, belly-cramping hysterics.

Daddy’d abused his chance to score a glass of sweet tea, but Maddy did pour some Coca-Cola for all of them, and had even ladled herself a plate to eat alongside her father and Ethan Manderleigh. She’d settled in, thinking a few minutes’ indulgence wouldn’t hurt.

“Well, at least you’re not afraid of toads,” Ethan had said.

“Gray tree frog, actually,” Madeleine replied. “
Hyla versicolor
. Or so the field guide calls it.”

Ethan raised a brow. “A woman who knows her amphibians. You sound like you have a scientific mind. Are you in that line of work?”

“Actually,” Daddy said as he slipped a piece of boudin under the table for Jasmine, “you two are kind of in the same business. Madeleine’s a head shrinker and Ethan here is a head cutter.”

Madeleine looked at Ethan. “What on earth is that man talking about?”

Ethan said, “I’m a neurologist.”

“Oh. Where do you practice? One of the hospitals here in town?”

Ethan shook his head. “On staff at Tulane.”

“I am too. In the Department of Psychology.”

“So I heard. I also heard you’re an activist.”

Madeleine smiled. “Not really. Daddy and I are gonna testify before the House Ways and Means Committee, but it’s hardly activism. Just trying to get funding for a special cause.”

“What cause is that?”

She’d shrugged, but Daddy said, “It’s all right honey, he knows.”

Madeleine said, “It’s what I call cognitive schizophrenia. The same condition Daddy has. But the testimony will be broader. We’re just trying to get as much support as we can for our organizational affiliate, the Association for Psychological Discovery.”

“Cognitive schizophrenia,” Ethan said. “You know, I’ve actually read about that. There was an article in
The Window Inside
a few months back.”

Madeleine nodded. “That was mine. I’ve been trying to get the word out as much as possible before the testimony.”

When they’d finished their sausage and couche (and Maddy’d rinsed the wretched frog and put him outside by the courtyard pond), she’d been surprised at how much time had passed since she’d hung up with Marc.

Now she was drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, playing over in her mind how she would tell her brother about the stunt Daddy’d pulled with the frog in the sugar bowl, so that Marc could have a laugh, too. He’d throw back his head and have a big old laugh. For some reason, it seemed ever so important to rehearse this scene in her mind, to see her brother throw back his head and have his big old laugh. With that image she could squash that strange trickle of dread that had seeped beneath the phone conversation. That odd crimp in his voice.

“You sure you’re all right?” she’d asked.

“It’s fine. Just fine.”

Fine. She would pretend to believe everything was fine. She’d stay overnight and they’d have a nice, long visit.

SHE PULLED INTO THE
drive as the sun was shooting slants across the bayou, bending with the golden reeds in the Gulf wind. Even before she switched off the truck’s motor she could hear Marc’s radio blaring from inside the tiny cottage. She made her way up the steps to the front door, under the hip roof above the porch.

She hesitated, looking back over her shoulder. Nothing behind her but a spread of bayou. Muffled, booming music came from within the house, so loud she couldn’t even hear the creak of the porch swing as it fidgeted beside her in the breeze.

She knocked on the door.

She waited.

She knocked again, then opened it.

“Marc?” she called, but her voice was swallowed by the music and the blackness within.

The only glow came from the back, where the bathroom sat opposite the kitchen. She groped for a light switch or radio switch and found the latter first, and suddenly there was silence. And in this newfound quiet, visibility also improved, as if the radio had not only monopolized her ears but also her eyes.

From the bathroom, she could hear the sound of the tub filling.

“Marc? You there? Daddy got me good!”

She picked her way over dark shapes of odds and ends now visible all over the floor.

“You’re gonna have to help me think of a way to get even. That sneak put a frog in my—good gracious, baby, when was the last time you cleaned up?”

She reached the kitchen and waved her fingertips along the wall until she found the light switch. “Marc? Did you hear me? I had to dump out all that sugar!”

The light came on with a click of her fingers.

Beyond the windowsill, blackbirds called in alarm. Maddy blinked at the kitchen, trying to untangle her mind from what she saw. Piles of papers were lying strewn about; it looked like the library after the hurricane: records, books, newsprint. Most of it seemed old, and none of it had been treated with respect. A quilt sat folded on the stove. Dirty dishes littered the sink and cemented themselves to the papers, and caterpillars of mold floated in coffee mugs and open cans of potted spaghetti. She picked up the nearest slip of something—what looked like an old will—and saw her surname written time and again:

Chloe LeBlanc.

Rémi LeBlanc.

Patrice LeBlanc.

She wondered who all those people were. Relatives, obviously, but beyond her grandparents she knew little of her ancestry. Marc must have hauled all this stuff down from the attic. She folded the will and looked at the counter, spotting one of the names, Chloe LeBlanc, penciled in Marc’s hand on the back of a torn envelope. He’d also written an address and phone number, along with yesterday’s date and the letters “LM,” Marc’s notation for “left message.”

The name Chloe sounded familiar. Some distant relation, Maddy was sure, but she couldn’t place exactly where she’d heard it.

“Marc!” she called, louder this time, still scrutinizing the paper as she walked to the bathroom. She lifted her hand to rap on the door, but stopped when she heard a splash at her sandals and felt tepid water between her toes. She looked down.

A broad, half-inch-deep wave was stealing from the bathroom to the floorboards of the kitchen.

Her pulse began to buzz. Her breathing grew shallow, lips parting, and her mind finally pulled a curtain to the obvious: Something was very wrong.

She swung the bathroom door wide. No sign of Marc.

Crystal sickles of water were leaking over the rim of the tub. She took a tremulous step, stretching her chin to see inside. A small part of herself, the part that liked to jab needles of panic, half-expected to find him lying under the surface.

But no, the tub was too small. And yet she did see something. She saw her brother’s tools: a screwdriver, a stud finder, a level, other things. Even coils of wire. All heaped in dark reefs under clear ripples.

“Sacrebleu,”
she breathed.

She lunged for the faucet, turning it off and then sidling backward with her wrists pinned to her chest. Rushing bathwater disappeared to the gurgle of the overflow drain. Her jaw muscle seized. The water could not have been flowing very long. Probably made its first spill as she’d entered the kitchen.

She searched the house, flipping on lights in every room. In the bedrooms, blankets had been draped over the curtains as if guarding against the possibility that any light might filter through. She regarded the paper still clutched in her hand, the LeBlanc will, and returned to the kitchen. Beyond the sill, blackbirds ruffled their feathers to hasten the end of daylight.

She paused, not sure what to do, and lifted the scrap of envelope that bore Chloe LeBlanc’s name. As she did, something rolled out from beneath it. It wobbled off the counter and Madeleine tried to catch it before she even realized what it was, but she fumbled and it dropped. She reached down to pick it up. But when she saw it, her legs grew weak, her knees softening under her. She sank to the floor.

A shotgun shell.

She stared, wiping her hand as if she’d been petting a rat. Her mind cramped over this thing on the floor, its tarnished brass tip the same color as the wood boards beneath it. That it had no more business lying there than a green plastic cigar. That it was not locked away in the closet.

“Marc?”

She closed her eyes, and when she did, she saw herself as she was, kneeling on the kitchen floor of the Creole cottage. But she saw her brother too. His silhouette approached her silently from behind. And in his arms he carried—

She stopped breathing. She didn’t dare open her eyes.

She saw a glistening trail down his cheek. Tears. She watched him raise the shotgun.

She squeezed her eyes tighter and buried her face in her hands. She could feel him. Could hear the heart of her brother reaching for her. See the gun form a plane beginning at his shoulder and tapering to an end at her own skull.

Still kneeling, she curled in tighter, her breath frozen. Waiting.

The blackbirds flew from their bough near the window.

She opened her eyes, turning to look over her shoulder and seeing no one there.

And then she saw the front door that still gaped, where those sideways reeds of golden light had already diffused to gray. The setting sun now offered no color, no shadow; only a withdrawal of light.

His presence lingered. She felt his need to turn the gun on himself—and his need to kill her. And his desperate, abject loneliness.

He was out there. Not in this house. Outside somewhere in Bayou Black.

She twisted to her feet, her legs sluggish as she made her way to the door. Gripping the jamb, she could see that the tiny skiff was not tethered at the boat slip. She trotted across the St. Augustine grass to the bank. The bayou stretched in a broad mirror, reflecting double-ended trees already turning black. No boat nearby. Not on the water, not at the slip. The nearest craft would be at the neighbors’ place, the Thibodaux who ran the café.

She strode and then jogged the half-mile to their property, and pounded on their door. An evensong of frogs and crickets was just beginning to pulse.

“Thibby! Nida!” Maddy called.

She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead. The yard was still but for the intermittent blaze of a firefly. Nida’s old white Caddy was gone, which meant they weren’t home. But Madeleine knew where Thibby kept the keys to his skiff.

She retrieved them, hands stupid and fumbling, and it occurred to her that she should have called Sheriff Cavanaugh for help. Too late now. She broke into an all-out run, feet quickening across crabgrass and then thumping over the dock. She climbed into the skiff, and as she untied the knot a snake unwound itself from the coil of rope and darted across to the other side, disappearing soundlessly into the bayou mirror.

It’s their time now
.

She and Marc had always associated the snakes with twilight. She pulled the starter cord and moved the skiff into the bayou, remembering how she and Marc used to play with their friend Zenon who’d lived nearby. The children ruled the daylight, fishing or swimming in the steaming afternoons while the serpents coiled themselves into lazy piles on rocks, storing up reserved heat so they could hunt in the evening. When full darkness fell, the alligators would rule Bayou Black. But that in-between time, that colorless screen that wasn’t day and was not yet night, that belonged to the snakes.

The skiff rumbled through the smaller artery and turned into the broad shipping channel. Thibby’s vessel was fast, but it still nodded through the swamplands with agonizing lethargy. It slurped and coughed, and finally rounded the bend and down a narrow waterway, and then an even narrower one.

Gray receded, allowing black to steal forth, and Madeleine snapped on the guide light. She knew where to find her brother. Perhaps when he saw her, Marc would lay that thing down and shake off whatever fog had consumed him, a fog that had in some way woven tendrils into her own lungs, enough to convince her that her brother was out here, in their secret cove of Bayou Black. He was lying in wait for her, waiting to die.

The skiff entered their old secret burrow within the cypress forest. She switched off the light. Better in the dark. Her brother was there. Her dear, sweet brother. She knew he was waiting for her.