A Twisted Ladder (25 page)

Jasmine galloped inside and dove for the moldering laundry, then took off like a remote-control race car, zooming through the house, eyes wild and tongue streaming. Her glee induced Madeleine and her father to take those first shaky steps across the threshold.

Daddy said, “We oughtta pay somebody to come do this.”

Maddy shook her head. “Wouldn’t do us much good. We have to sort through everything anyway. Look at this.” She picked up a stack of papers. “Here’s a farm ledger from sixty years ago, and here’s a flyer for a
fais do-do
.” She lifted her shoulders. “And this one’s an old tax lien. What do we keep and what do we throw away? It’s not really something we can hire out.”

Daddy looked at the ledger in her hand, then stared past it toward a stack on the coffee table below. “Terrefleurs. My God, look.”

He picked up a folded, yellowing document from the coffee table. She scanned it over his shoulder.

The heading,
PLAT MAP AND TERREFLEURS PLANTATION
stretched across the top in scripted block letters. Beneath that,
LEBLANC.
The delicate paper had worn through at the folds. It showed a single oblong plot of land bordered by the Mississippi River at one end and a stretch of bayou at the other. Though Madeleine could not discern the size of the plot, from the scale she guessed it covered hundreds of acres, if not a thousand.

Madeleine said, “Wow. That was our family’s plantation? Who owns it now?”

He eyed her and set the paper back down on the coffee table.

“We ought to go see it,” she said. “After we’ve cleaned everything up.”

He frowned. “It’s a long ways away. Probably all boarded up and fenced off.”

“But it looks like it’s near Hahnville. Two hours, tops. It’d be fun, even just to drive by.”

He grimaced, rubbing the back of his neck. “Where did Marc get all this stuff, anyway?”

Daddy unearthed Marc’s old radio and switched it on, and they both jumped at the booming volume. Madeleine remembered how it had been blaring when she arrived the day Marc died. She and her father glanced at each other, and he turned it down.

She opened the curtains. Roaches and silverfish of all shapes and sizes, having taken over like a pack of squatters, darted for cover as light flooded the room. Absolutely every article of clothing Marc owned was strewn about the floor.

“I wonder how long he was like this,” Daddy said.

Madeleine shook her head. She had been so caught up in research and preparation for the House Ways and Means Committee that she had failed to visit her brother in the weeks before he died.

She checked her father’s face, thinking about the battles he had fought with his own mental state. As hard as she tried, she just couldn’t rule out the correlation with Marc.

Daddy’s deterioration had begun long before she could remember, intensifying just before her mother walked out and never looked back when Maddy and her brother were about nine and ten years old. Not long after, Daddy started disappearing and reappearing at odd intervals, and when he came home Marc and Madeleine clung to him for some sense of stability. But he was often out of his mind, and sometimes prone to violence, and his children began to regard his visits with both longing and dread.

So many things needed to be discarded: Marc’s reading glasses; his favorite baseball cap; his cell phone. Madeleine wondered if it even worked. She found the charger and plugged it in.

When they’d come of age, Maddy and her brother had learned of the living trust their father had formed. After growing up in poverty in Houma, they could barely comprehend what seemed like unlimited wealth, not to mention ownership of the grand old house in the Quarter and the warehouse on Magazine. Madeleine had moved into the mansion and enrolled at the university, and had taken to city life like a bee to clover. Marc, however, had been suspicious. He was comfortable with the safe life they’d built out on the bayou. He took an apprenticeship as an electrician, not wanting to touch the family money. Soon he became a journeyman, and then a master, and finally had started his own modest electrical contracting business. He’d led a simple life; a satisfied life. Until the accident.

He had been on a commercial job with a journeyman who worked for him. A miscommunication, a careless error; a small explosion. His employee had been electrocuted—burned so badly that his cell phone had fused to his hip—and he was no longer able to father children. Marc blamed himself.

But Madeleine sensed that it wasn’t just guilt that had led to Marc’s suicide, that she was still missing something important about her brother. She and Chloe had both resolved to find out what had gone wrong with Marc, and Madeleine felt the strange occurrences of late had something to do with it. How, though, she wasn’t sure. Everything seemed murky and oblique, like having glimpsed movement just below the surface of the bayou, and straining to see whether it was a fish or a turtle or even the tip of something larger, like an alligator. The only way to tell for certain was to wait quietly and see what it would do. Or dive in after it. It was the possibility of the alligator that kept her from diving.

THEY’D BEEN CLEANING FOR
hours. Madeleine watched her father as he discarded relics from a lifetime, setting Marc’s things in sacks or boxes depending on whether each item should be dumped or salvaged. They had decided to hold off going through any paperwork until tomorrow. Madeleine wondered why and how Marc had unearthed all these documents.

She dragged another Santa sack of garbage to the living room, then opened the front door, and gave a start. At the bottom of the steps, hand on cane and elbow supported by the pale, yellow-haired Oran, stood Chloe LeBlanc. Her black Mercedes sat next to Madeleine’s truck in the driveway.

Madeleine stepped out onto the porch. “Chloe. Hi.”

“Have you found something in there? Something to know about Marc Gilbert?”

Madeleine sighed, hand to hip. She looked back at her father who was peering at Chloe through the window. He made a wave of disgust and shook his head, then shrank back toward the hall.

Madeleine turned back to face them. “Hello, Oran.”

He nodded.

Madeleine said, “Won’t you both please come inside?”

“You found something?” Chloe asked.

“No, Chloe. Heaven’s sake. A lot of old documents. But from the looks of things, Marc was just plain depressed. That’s why he killed himself. End of story.”

The old woman frowned and turned away from the door. “Then I have no need to go back in there. I found nothing of substance either.”

Madeleine glanced over her shoulder again, and then returned her gaze to Chloe. “Go back? You . . . you’ve been inside the house?”

Chloe gripped the cane and looked toward the great oak tree near the bayou, where the family had always hidden the key.

Madeleine felt invaded. She hadn’t lived in the little house in years, but she didn’t like the idea of Chloe breaking in and rummaging through Marc’s things.

“Chloe, you need to tell me when you want to come to the house. Otherwise it’s trespassing.”

Chloe harrumphed, her voice creaking as she took a step down from the porch. “Banned from it, am I? Your grandmother wouldn’t let me in either! And what for? Nothing in there I haven’t seen already! Nothing new to know!”

Oran still held Chloe by the elbow, and Madeleine stepped down and took the free one. The last thing she needed was for Chloe LeBlanc to pitch a fit on her doorstep and break her hip.

“Nobody’s banning you, Chloe. There’s no need for dramatics. All I ask is that you notify me when you want to come. And before I forget, is Severin with you?”

Chloe’s eyes pinched into a dour sulk, and Oran watched Madeleine’s face as if he feared what she might say next.

“Never you mind about that now, Madeleine. Never you mind.”

“I want to help that poor girl, Chloe. It’s important.”

Chloe puffed an expulsion of breath, and if Madeleine could believe the old woman capable of laughter, this might have been it. “You can see it any time you like!”

It?
A sour ripple shifted inside Madeleine’s stomach at Chloe’s choice of words. She thought quickly. “Tuesday then?”

Chloe flicked her gaze from Madeleine to the porch swing, and gave the slightest nod.

“Is that a yes, Chloe? I’ll see her on Tuesday?”

Annoyance on Chloe’s face. “As you like.”

Chloe panned the lawn and gestured her cane toward the dock. “Take me to the water now. Just Madeleine.”

Maddy gritted her teeth. Oran immediately fled to the car, sliding behind the driver’s seat before Madeleine could even answer, leaving Chloe swaying under Madeleine’s grip. It almost seemed as though Oran feared Madeleine. Skittish thing.

“All right then, Chloe,” Madeleine said. “Let’s go.”

Chloe shuffled, her cane pounding dimples into the delta soil between patches of St. Augustine. Madeleine was surprised at the strength in the old woman’s arm. Her bone density and balance might require her to use a cane or a wheelchair, but other than that Chloe was healthy as a spring grackle.

“If you don’t want to come inside the house, Chloe, why are you in Houma?”

“Oran said you left a message that you were coming. I thought I might check in on my great-granddaughter face-to-face.”

Madeleine raised a brow at the old woman’s companionable demeanor.

Chloe scowled. “You look at me with sass.”

“Just seems like a sudden change. I didn’t know you were looking for that kind of connection with me.”

“I am a human, eh?”

Chloe coughed, working her cane with measured steps. “A very long time ago when I was still a girl, almost grown, I was all alone. I had nothing. There was a woman who took me in. She was good to me. But there was a flood and she was persuaded to drink poisoned water, and she died.”

Madeleine frowned. “That’s terrible. Who would persuade someone to do a thing like that?

“Her choice to listen. When she died, I knew I had to be harsh to survive.”

Madeleine was trying to follow, unsure what Chloe was driving at or why she was telling her these things. But she wondered if perhaps a softer person lived underneath that hardwood exterior after all.

Chloe said, “You are going back to the university?”

“Yes,” Madeleine replied.

“What is this, cognitive schizophrenia you talk of?”

“It’s not really widely recognized in the scientific community yet.”

“Tell me,” Chloe said. “This is like your father’s devil, yanh?”

Madeleine sighed. “It’s not a devil, Chloe. It’s a form of schizophrenia where the subjects don’t exhibit the rambling, disordered thought patterns of typical schizophrenics. They can clearly describe their hallucinations. And they’re not as nervous. More to it than that, but that’s it in a nutshell.”

“You are leading this research, then?”

Madeleine nodded. “As long as I can. Funding is tough to get. I’ve only seen a handful of patients who were affected this way. I suspect there are lots of others out there who are undiagnosed. I want to see that they all get the treatment they need.”

Chloe sneered. “Is that so? What is it that they need?”

Madeleine was taken aback. “They need special therapy and medications.”

“You look through a microscope glass, you see creatures. I look around and I see no creatures, so I say you are crazy. But with your microscope, you know they’re there. You know they will still be there even if you pretend not to look. Senses don’t need treatment, Madeleine.” The old woman crooked her finger as she shuffled toward the banks. “You hear, and if you don’t like what you hear, do you choose to go through life with stoppers in your ears? The madness comes because the river devils are jealous and they demand attention. To see them is not sickness. It is a gift.”

Madeleine regarded her from the corner of her eye. “You use the word ‘devils’ and then you call it a gift.”

“If you could see the unwelcome guests that live in your house, the termites, ants, toads, mice. Would you pretend not to see them? Does that make them go away? Listen to me,
p’tite
. Maybe you take notice and you learn what you can do with them. A clever person can take the venom from the throat of a poison toad and use it for other purposes.”

Madeleine said, “You mean like making medicines?”

“That is one small way.”

“I hear you, Chloe. But sometimes people see things that just aren’t there. It’s confusing and upsetting for them. Those are the people I’m trying to comfort.”

Jasmine trotted out to the end of the dock and stretched in the sun. The thin banks were aflutter with dragonflies and a single blue heron.

“Chloe, did you and my great-grandfather live outside Hahnville? Because Daddy and I came across a plat map for a plantation called Terrefleurs.”

“Stay away from that place.” Chloe’s words were firm, but they came in a drift as if she were merely thinking aloud. “Dangerous to you, in that place.”

“What do you mean?”

Chloe’s nostrils flared as she panned the bayou, almost as though she was sniffing the air like a bloodhound. Her gaze rested back on the old house.