A Twisted Ladder (36 page)

Madeleine sat up. “Jasmine?”

Nothing.

“Jazz!”

She heard her galloping up the stairway. Jasmine bounded through the door and leapt up on the bed and stuck her paw into Madeleine’s eye.

“Shit!” Madeleine flailed as Jasmine dodged away and spun around, whining and growling.

“What is it!” But even as she groped for a bathrobe, Madeleine caught a whiff of something not quite right. Smoke.

“SHIT!”

The smoke detectors pierced all sounds in a sudden burst.

She jumped out of bed and ran to the stairs. An orange glow flickered at the front downstairs wall.

“Shit shit SHIT!”

She was pinto-bean naked, stumbling, looking for a bathrobe. Her hands seemed to have lost their dexterity and she could not form a coherent thought with the smoke detectors screaming. She managed only to stagger and curse.

“Closet!” she said aloud.

Her body followed the command and retrieved a terry cloth robe. A crashing sound downstairs. Madeleine wrapped herself in the robe and made it to the landing again when another sound caused her to pause.

Over the hysteria of the smoke detectors, she heard her father’s voice calling her name from downstairs.

“Daddy?” she yelled back.

And then she clapped her hands over her mouth, because she realized what was happening. That
he
had set the fire.

She backed toward the bedroom again, but he was already coming up the stairs.

She felt completely vulnerable. An image of the shotgun flashed through her mind, locked in the cabinet downstairs. A terrible means of protection against her own father. She would have to get down to the living room to reach it.

Then he appeared at the top of the stairs, reaching toward her. “Baby girl!”

She raised her hand in a
stop
gesture. “Don’t come any closer!”

His eyes were wide. “Honey, we got to get out of here. This house is a vehicle of death.”

Madeleine’s back stiffened. But he clearly recognized her.

Jasmine approached Daddy with her tail tucked under, and he scooped her up. “We have to go out the back to the courtyard. The front door’s swallowed up.”

“We can use the balcony off my room.”

“No good. We could make it outside but we’d have to crawl over a wall of fire to make it to the ground. Back balcony, honey, follow me.”

He headed toward the opposite direction of the corridor.

Below, flames ballooned up the drapery in the foyer and with sickening, coiling beauty, the middle floor became entangled. Flames rolled and tunneled. Black banshees of smoke swirled toward the center of the house. Even as she staggered forth, bright flames were disappearing under curtains of black. It had been only a minute or two ago that the smoke alarms had begun sounding.

She staggered after her father, who turned again and called to her.

“Come on, honey!”

They covered their mouths with their clothing and dropped, creeping along the passageway, moving as fast as they could on all fours. Madeleine’s lungs cramped. She felt her way along the hall, winding, following her father until visibility shrank to sheer black and she could no longer see him. She realized the hall runner ended beneath her hands and knees, and she felt only floorboards. How could she have lost her way along the wide, straight hall runner? She flung out her arms but felt nothing, not even a wall, only the flooring and the sense of fire folding itself toward her.

She rose in panic, but the smoke immediately netted her. She collapsed back down on her belly.

“Honey! Madeleine!”

“I’m here!”

Their hands found each other. They touched faces. She could feel Jasmine’s fuzzy head just below her father’s chin. She saw nothing but senseless blurs that scorched her vision.

She moved alongside him, keeping her body close to his as she crawled on her elbows in a side-to-side scrabble like an alligator.

Glass panes in front of them. The rear balcony. Then all at once they were outside, gulping fresh air and stumbling down the fire escape.

Daddy set Jasmine down when he reached the courtyard below, and she vaulted up into Madeleine’s arms. Madeleine clutched her tiny, trembling body.

“Baby girl,” Daddy said, patting her hair. “Madeleine, you all right, honey?”

Madeleine felt a rush of comfort at the sound of him speaking her name, and realized she was shaking.

“Daddy, what happened?”

“I had to bust in to get you. Didn’t have my key on me.” And then other hands were on her, and the courtyard filled with firefighters.

“This way, ma’am,” someone shouted. She allowed herself to be led out into the street. She and Jazz clung to each other as if they each held one end of a winning lottery ticket. Madeleine wobbled, and someone steadied her, and she vacantly registered that she was walking barefoot on filthy pavement as she climbed into the back of an ambulance.

Madeleine cleared her throat and voiced the ridiculous announcement that her house was on fire. An oxygen regulator clamped down over her face.

“Ow,” she said into the mask and touched the plastic over the knot on her cheek.

But the air inside that apparatus tasted divine. She breathed in, tried to pull herself together.

Daddy sat with her at the rear of the ambulance, his hand on her knee and an oxygen mask over his own face. He watched the firefighters struggle against the raging house. An EMS worker took Madeleine’s pulse, and spoke calming words like “you’ll be all right” and “shallow breaths.” Jasmine made herself disappear into the terry cloth. All around, flashing emergency lights competed with the shimmering glow of the burning. Madeleine’s home. The same place she was supposed to fill with her heart.

She felt something condense inside her. Emotion and hope purifying to basic survival.

Madeleine lifted the oxygen mask from her face. “I’m all right, now, thank you.”

The EMS guy began to protest, but then a policeman’s uniform came into view, and Madeleine saw that it was Vinny.

“Daddy Blank! Madeleine! Lord Jesus.” He looked into her ragged face, eyes wide with concern.

Daddy peeled his oxygen mask away. “I did it. You can haul me away.”

They gaped at him.

“Daddy,” Madeleine said carefully. “Shut up.”

“I burned it. And y’all oughtta just let it burn. That house was gonna kill us. You can just go ahead and cart me off.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying, Vinny, he’s . . .”

Madeleine’s words trailed off as she noticed the fire chief standing beyond the doors of the ambulance, staring at them. Dangling from his hand was a dented gasoline can.

“He’s sick. He’s schizophrenic.” Madeleine’s voice broke on the word. “He only sounds lucid now because he’s a cognitive . . . a cognitive . . . and that’s when . . .” She gulped. “Vinny, tell them, he can’t help what he does.”

Vinny’s hand was on her arm. “Madeleine, it’s all right. We’ll sort this out.” He and the chief looked at each other. “Samantha’s on her way here now.”

“He doesn’t know . . .” she insisted.

Daddy kissed her good cheek. “Don’t worry honey.” He waved his hand in the general direction of the jail. “I been in that place a thousand times.”

The fire chief took Daddy Blank’s arm and said something to the EMS about taking a sample of Madeleine’s blood. Then he, Daddy, and Vinny all disappeared into the insane disco lights and shadows. Madeleine was vaguely aware of a rubber tourniquet cinching her arm. She thought about the horde of spiders earlier that evening—it seemed like ages ago now—when she just couldn’t keep from picking at the layers of paper to see what lay beneath.

At least I don’t have to deal with that awful spider wall now
.

She laughed aloud; a bursting, nervous, insane person’s laugh. The paramedic regarded her with a tolerant smile and stabbed her with a needle.

HAHNVILLE, 1916

R
ÉMI HELD THE GLEAMING
hook between his teeth as he finished running the line through loops along the rod.

Little Ferrar watched with wide round eyes, one of which was still darkened with the bloodburst of years ago. His skin had welted into a permanent X at the base of his throat as if he had been marked with stigmata. Other than these scars, however, he showed no lingering effects from the day he nearly died. Chloe’s incision had missed the voice box so he was able to speak like any other child. But as Rémi worked, he kept stealing glances at the strange shimmer that seemed to emit from deep within the boy. A golden shimmer Rémi could only see when he looked with the inner searching. The kind of searching that revealed Ulysses. Rémi had seen this phenomenon before—in young Laramie, the gardener’s son.

Rémi tied the hook in place and handed it over to the boy, who whooped and made at once for the swamp.

He was followed by a gaggle of smaller Locoul children, all wanting to touch the rod and reel. Not a homemade fishing pole, but a real one purchased at a store, and none of the children had ever had one like it. The older boys looked on wistfully from where they stood painting the austere Creole house.

“Merci encore, Monsieur LeBlanc,”
Fatima said.

She explained how her son had made a quick recovery after they rescued him years ago, and the doctor had told her that Chloe had saved Ferrar’s life.

Rémi listened politely, speaking to her in her own soft, sleepy Creole French. They walked along the banks while the Locoul house’s many vibrant colors disappeared to a homogeneous white. Even the wooden shutters were painted white, and Rémi felt a bite of annoyance.

Fatima thanked him again and praised Chloe’s medicinal abilities, which were widely recognized among the bayou farms and plantations. Rémi asked her how Chloe had come to be notorious among the people who worked the lands, and Fatima replied that everyone knew the story of how Chloe had cut her son’s throat and given him life through a river reed.

Rémi smiled, and reminded Fatima that she had known of Chloe before that. In the boat, she had recognized her and begged her to save her son.

Fatima seemed nervous and was wringing her hands, but Rémi gently prodded her as they strolled away from the main house.

“She was starving when she came to us,” Fatima finally said.

She went on to recount a story that at first paralleled the one Chloe had told him; that Chloe had escaped from Elderberry Plantation, far to the south. The plantation was notorious for its ill treatment of workers. When slavery had been abolished years ago, the plantation owners resisted the change, and kept the people working under fear of violence. Still, more and more workers drifted away, usually under cover of night, and sought work at other plantations or traveled to faraway cities such as Chicago.

“We have a field hand here named Jaime,” Fatima explained in rough Creole. “He escaped from Elderberry and when he spied Chloe, he made the sign of the devil. Said she was born of an Indian woman and a black man. That she’s a conjurer. She uses black magic to heal and to curse.

“Our folks weren’t about to take her in. I think they were afraid of her power in the river ways. Thought she’d bring trouble. They sent her to the kitchen and filled her with supper, then sent her on her way.”

Rémi nodded. This much he already knew. “And so? After she left?”

Fatima kept her gaze fixed at a row of alders. “She left. And so, she left.”

“Come now, that was not the last you heard of her.”

Fatima cut a nervous glance toward Rémi, eyes glassy.

“You have nothing to worry about,
chère
. What happened after Chloe left?”

When Fatima spoke again, her voice trembled. “After she left, the day after, the overseer came here.”

“From Elderberry Plantation?”

Fatima nodded. “He came looking for her. He knew Jaime, and made Jaime tell him where Mademoiselle Chloe had gone. Jaime didn’t know. But the overseer gave him a thrashing and Jaime told him that she’d been here, and he told him which way she was heading when she left. The overseer, he took off after her.”

Rémi listened carefully as Fatima continued, “We all gave Jaime an earful on that. He shouldn’t ought to have told that man. The overseer was on horseback and Chloe barely even had shoes on her feet. We thought that would be the last we would ever hear of her.”