A Twisted Ladder (5 page)

“You do?”

“You are Dr. Madeleine LeBlanc, my great-granddaughter. Your father is hounded by a river devil.” Mrs. LeBlanc lifted a sparsely whiskered chin. “Now you have come to find out about me, eh?”

Madeleine’s jaw dropped. “You already know, then?” She blinked, groping for understanding. “You know, I think I’ve seen you before. Around town. How long have you known I was your great-granddaughter?”

“I was notified the day each of you were born. Marc Gilbert was named for one of my sons.”

Hearing this woman speak Marc’s name sent a wave of shock through Madeleine’s spine. Though it had only been weeks, it felt like a thousand years had passed since Madeleine had found Marc’s body in Bayou Black. She recalled sharing couche-couche with Daddy and his friend, Ethan, not realizing her life was about to change.

“Marc is dead. Just recently. He killed—out on Bayou Black, he, he committed . . .” Madeleine’s voice trailed off.

Mrs. LeBlanc gave a very small nod. Apparently she already knew about this too.

Madeleine’s blood rose. She recalled the times she had glimpsed this shadowed old woman around New Orleans—at her grandmother’s funeral, or when her father was first incarcerated—and she’d thought nothing of it. The same strangers on the street of the same neighborhood of the same town.

But the whole time, Chloe LeBlanc knew I was her great-granddaughter. And she never once spoke to me
.

“Well, great-grandmother,” Madeleine said, opening her hands. “I’m surprised. I never even knew you existed until a few weeks ago. I found some reference to you among my brother’s things and thought I’d found a missing piece of my life. But here you knew about me and Marc all along.” Her voice took a sarcastic edge. “All this time we could have been baking
cookies
and going for
walks in the park!
”

Chloe smiled, and in it a hint that perhaps Madeleine’s anger was what she sought. “I do not think we would have done that, Madeleine. My daughters wanted nothing to do with me, nor did they want their children to have anything to do with me.”

Madeleine folded her hands. “I see.”

Chloe continued: “But I had an attendant who would go out to Houma and look in on you, and report back to me. I knew all about the three of you, from the time you were born until now.”

Madeleine stared at her, absorbing that Chloe LeBlanc had just admitted to spying. The strangeness of the situation settled over her as if it lived within the very dust of the drawing room.

“Wait a minute,” Madeleine said. “When Marc and I were kids, our mother abandoned us. And Daddy—” She waved her hand. “He was just
gone
. He suffers from schizophrenia and is prone to just wander off. Marc and I were basically left alone to raise
ourselves
.”

Chloe nodded.

“Oh, of course,” Madeleine said, her voice growing acidic. “Excuse me for repeating myself. You knew that too. You had
an attendant
looking in on us. May I ask, did it ever occur to you to intervene? Like when Marc and I were spooning mustard out of a jar because that’s all we had to eat?”

Chloe’s face did not change expression. “You each got along, and you’re stronger for it. If you had been pampered and coddled while you were growing up you would never have survived all this. Look at yourself, Madeleine. They rely on you. You’re able to stand alone. You can do that because you are strong.”

“My brother most certainly did not survive. He went out to the bayou and put a shotgun in his mouth.”

Laughter echoed from beyond the hall. Madeleine turned toward the sound, aware that her own throat felt like clay. She saw the albino black man watching through a reflection in the hall mirror. He looked away quickly and disappeared down the corridor. But his face was serious; he hadn’t been the one laughing. The laughter sounded like a little girl’s voice. Eavesdropping, tittering. Something about that voice gave Madeleine a chill of déjà vu.

Suddenly she had to get out of this place. Away from these people. She grabbed her bag as if to leave, but her hand trembled. Speaking Marc’s name had caused a weakness in her legs. Despite herself, she remained fixed in her chair.

“You say my father is hounded by a kind of devil. Well you’re wrong. Over the years he’s come to handle his condition with dignity, and I’m proud of him.”

The old woman replied with a thin sneer. “My husband had a river devil, and it drove him mad. It turned him into a puppet. For your father it is the same, Madeleine.”

“I beg to differ, Mrs. LeBlanc,” Madeleine said through clenched teeth. “I made psychology my life, and have been studying since I was eighteen years old. We have medications nowadays. Hospitals, support systems. Loved ones who
pull together
. Not relatives who spy on their own family!”

Chloe sat rigid.

Madeleine’s anger crumbled to resignation, and she rose from the stiff drawing room chair. “Well, Mrs. LeBlanc, I think I’ve taken up enough of your time.”

She turned and strode for the door just as her eyes began to glisten. Didn’t want the old woman to see her tears.

Chloe said, “You can tell your father
you
came to see
me
, eh? I did not come for you!”

Madeleine shook her head as she reached for the door.

“Wait, Madeleine.”

Mrs. LeBlanc wrested herself from her chair, and as Madeleine turned and saw her, she fought the urge to take that frail arm and help her up.

“It was for your own good. You had to be strong.” Her eyes glittered black from her gnarled oak body. “Don’t coddle your father. Get rid of his pills. He’s no use to us as a
somnambule
.”

“No use to us as a sleepwalker? Who is
us
?”

“You waste your time with your studies and hearings. Just to keep him in his box.”

And then Madeleine’s voice escaped her, realizing that this bitter crone knew about the testimony in D.C. as well, the vie for funding. Chloe had invested an awful lot of energy into her spying. It made Madeleine want to go home and draw the curtains. A burning radiated from Chloe LeBlanc, an intensity that belied her age. Madeleine tried to discern whether it came from anger, or fear, or madness. Or something else.

“Who are you, exactly?” Madeleine asked.

“
Je suis seulement t’arrière-grand-mère
,” the old woman replied.

Madeleine’s throat constricted upon hearing the French words for “great-grandmother.” It made her long for her
mémée
, her grandmother. Hard to imagine that warm, gentle Mémée had been the daughter of this woman. Mémée had once taught her how to tie dolls out of corn husks. She passed away when Madeleine was still a little girl.

Madeleine said, “With Marc gone, I thought Daddy was all I had left. When I found out I had a great-grandmother, I came here looking for answers. Maybe even . . .”

Madeleine swallowed. She did not finish the words: a family. Instead, she lifted her chin and willed the emotion from her voice.

“I don’t know why my brother did what he did. I came here thinking maybe you knew something that could shed light on all this. Because he’d tried to call you the day before and . . . Whatever was going on with Marc, I assure you, I’m going to find out.”

A shadow flickered across Chloe’s face, and her demeanor changed. “Madeleine,
ma p’tite
, but I want to find out too. I will help you in this.”

Madeleine took a step backward, her heel grazing the door. Chloe raised her knuckles to Madeleine’s hand. Not a motherly touch, more like a merchant offering a bargain.

Her eyes shone. “We begin from nothing. There is no past. You learn me and I learn you, and together we seek to understand, yanh?”

Madeleine stiffened. Her gut told her to walk out backward. Erase having fixated on a few scraps of paper that her brother had left behind, this dubious trail that had led her to Chloe. The old woman was too angry, too removed. Too . . . something. How could she possibly be of help?

But a cobweb settled over Madeleine’s mind, a fragile silken thread that tugged at her, pulling her toward Chloe. After all, the request seemed so simple and clean. Innocent even.

Let her in
.

The faintest tug. It almost seemed like a thought outside her own mind.

“All right,” Madeleine said, and even as she uttered the words her heart sent forth a bloom of hope. “We’ll start fresh from nothing. And we’ll find out what went wrong with Marc.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. 2009

T
HE MAN IN THE
video was, unquestionably, a lunatic.

Madeleine’s hands were damp as she scanned ahead, making sure all the stops were in place. On the small monitor, the subject grew agitated and paced the room, making threats. He had been placed in treatment against his will, a danger to himself and to others.

That marked the first stopping point in the video. Here she would say a little something about that day two years ago when it had been filmed, and then she’d move on.

As the next frames advanced, the object of the lunatic’s agitation became clearly visible: Madeleine. First Madeleine, then some unseen tormentor. The video showed the subject lunging at her. She had shoved her hands deep within her lab coat at that point, and did not bring them up to protect herself. She did not cringe. Instead, the video showed how she turned to the side and leaned back. She had known the orderlies would restrain him, and they did. She had been certain he could not harm her.

Another stopping point in the video.

“Twenty minutes, Dr. LeBlanc,” an aide said, and Madeleine jumped.

“OK,” she murmured, but the aide was already walking away.

Her stomach rolled.
It’s just a few words. Make the introduction, explain the video, then hand over the microphone
. The back of her hand went to her forehead.

The aide paused and looked over his shoulder, then joined Madeleine where she hovered over her laptop. “You OK, Dr. LeBlanc?”

“Just a little stage fright.”

“Don’t worry. Mr. LeBlanc will do most of the talking.”

Calling him “Mr. LeBlanc” sounded strange. In New Orleans, everyone called him Daddy Blank. The “daddy” part was natural because of his fatherly way with people, but they called him “blank” because of the last name, and also because his madness often caused him to “blank out.”

The aide moved on.

The door to the screening room opened and Madeleine looked out into the federal amphitheater, then gave a start. Sitting among the onlookers, hand on her cane, was Chloe LeBlanc.

They’d spoken twice since that strange initial meeting, and Chloe hadn’t expressed any intention of coming all the way to Washington, D.C. for this. As the door swung shut again, Madeleine saw that Chloe was sitting with the houseboy and on the floor by the old woman’s knees sat a little blond girl who looked about eight or nine. She wondered whether this was the same child she’d overheard laughing in Chloe’s drawing room. The eavesdropper’s laughter, bottled in girlish innocence, and yet malicious when Madeleine spoke of her brother’s suicide.

Madeleine hoped her father wouldn’t notice Chloe’s presence until afterward, if he even recognized the old woman at all. When Madeleine had told her father about Chloe LeBlanc, all he’d done was shudder and say, “Keep her away from me. That woman gives me the willies.”

Madeleine’s gaze darted to where her father stood about six feet away in the screening room. Obviously he hadn’t spotted Chloe because he was watching her, his face warm and proud. He winked.

She blushed.

From the time she was a little girl, her father’s smile had always given her butterflies. And now he looked so dignified in his three-piece suit, right down to his pocket watch. Another man of the same age might look old with such a thing. But on Daddy Blank it was elegance in full summer bloom. And that’s exactly what the congressmen were supposed to see: That lunatic in the video and this dignified gentleman standing before them were one and the same.

Madeleine advanced the video, trying to tune out the low babble from the people, all in suits, milling about the screening room.