A Twisted Ladder (69 page)

“Is there a history of schizophrenia in your family?”

Schizophrenia. Well, Madeleine was no longer convinced of that. As long as she was going to be compelled to speak the
whole
truth, she might as well tell it all.

“No,” she said. “I don’t believe that’s true now.”

“You mean to tell me your father was not diagnosed schizophrenic?”

“Yes, he was diagnosed as having schizophrenia. Improperly diagnosed. As a licensed psychologist, I now believe that diagnosis was an erroneous—”

“Please just answer the questions, Dr. LeBlanc. So you are having conversations about death and violence with an invisible little girl. And you also just happened to be present at the scene of two murders. Would you say that was a fair statement?”

“It didn’t happen the way you’re implying!”

“Dr. LeBlanc, have you yourself engaged in any violent acts over the past year?”

“No, I have not! I am not a violent person!”

Ethan stared. Sam was ashen. Chloe, even Chloe, looked on with anxiety. Madeleine caught the look in their eyes, and her last words hung stiffly in the air.

“Dr. LeBlanc,” Whitney said, leaning in. “Did you know a man named Carlo Jefferson?”

Oh, no. How could this be? How could he know all of this?
She covered her face.

Ms. Jameson cast futile objections at the judge, and once more the two lawyers approached the bench and whispered furiously. It all seemed so conspiratorial. Half the courtroom was lost to bramble. The judge once again directed Madeleine to answer the question.

Severin grew bored again, and lowered herself so that she was hanging from the molding. She reached her arm up and walked herself along the rail, swinging as if she were on a set of monkey bars, though her agility defied gravity. She swung in close to Madeleine and jumped, landing near where Joe Whitney stood. A grimace on her face.

“I knew of Carlo Jefferson, yes.” Madeleine said softly.

“Did you attempt to shoot Carlo Jefferson the night of November fifteenth of last year?”

Madeleine said nothing.

“Were you aware that Carlo Jefferson died of gunshot wounds on that night?”

This couldn’t be. Madeleine trained her thoughts with pinpoint focus.

Severin, help me!

“Are you aware,” Whitney growled, “that you were seen carrying a gun near Carlo Jefferson’s residence on the very night he was killed?”

The courtroom erupted, and the judge was livid. Madeleine wished he would make good on his promise to clear the court.

Severin, do something!

“What do you wish on me to do?” Severin asked.

Tell me something that will help put Zenon away! They’re going to blame it on me!

Joe Whitney was shouting. “Tell me about the gun you were carrying the night Carlo Jefferson was killed. Was that the same gun used to kill your brother, Marc LeBlanc?”

“That was a suicide!” Madeleine sobbed.

“Zenon does right,” Severin said. “Why should I help cage him? You’ve never sent one single person through. You never listen to anything I wish on you.”

Madeleine could barely absorb what Whitney was implying. Worse than anything she had feared. But it was too late. She had now told so many lies that she could hardly remember what was the truth. She wept with horror and humiliation.

Ms. Jameson was valiantly raging at the judge and Whitney, trying to salvage the situation, and the judge was banging the gavel again, calling for order.

Severin
. Madeleine formed the thought carefully and deliberately, and looked directly at her.
If we can get Zenon convicted, he could get the death penalty. That means they will send him through
.

“Dr. LeBlanc,” Joe Whitney was saying, had been saying, and he waved his hand in front of her eyes to get her attention. “Hello? Dr. LeBlanc, did the invisible little girl instruct you to shoot Carlo . . .”

The courtroom disappeared. All around was bramble and nothing more. Madeleine began to feel an unnatural sense of motion, and below her, a tunnel of thorns yawned open. She gripped a witness stand she could no longer see. Severin laughed and dove down the center of the tunnel. Madeleine was slipping after her, falling, and then the bottom of the tunnel fell away to an openness that seemed to stretch forever. It looked as though she were tumbling toward the earth. It lay in azure sparkles, land and sea. Above her was bramble where there ought to have been clouds. Her stomach dropped.

The great river was below, drawing nearer. It stretched in a long, thin, snaking line from far beyond where she could see, and then spread into a fan as it greeted the ocean. She felt herself fall deeper toward one of the arteries. She was closing in without feeling the cold, but she could smell the thin ionic atmosphere. She could see trees now, and swampland, and she could smell pine and moist earth. She had to grip the witness stand to maintain balance. A plantation below, and she recognized it as Terrefleurs on River Road.

“. . . Jefferson?” she heard Whitney say from a distant corner of her psyche.

She realized that time in the briar didn’t sync with time in the real world, as the fugue felt like it had already been transpiring for several minutes though it could have only been seconds. Joe had only just finished stating his question,
Dr. LeBlanc, did the invisible little girl instruct you to shoot Carlo Jefferson?

“It’s not schizophrenia,” Madeleine said aloud, keeping her eyes focused on the plantation house. “I’ve had clairvoyant experiences. They’re not hallucinations.”

Whitney was blathering in protest, but she ignored him. She felt as if she were dropping toward the plantation house, and the scene moved so rapidly she gasped, sure she would feel the impact of the roof as she careened toward it. But at the last moment she swooped forward and rushed past the main house to a tiny structure just beyond. A miniature building with several rows of round holes in it, pegs positioned below each hole. The pigeon house. She saw inside the hole. Saw clearly though it was pitch black in there. Pink nail polish and blood that had turned black with time, and a glimmer of precious metal.

It was what she needed to know.

Take me back, Severin!

Back in the courtroom. And though the briar still corroded the veneer of the physical world, she could see Joe Whitney and most of the others.

She looked Joe straight in the eye. “Zenon Lansky murdered Angel Frey at the house on River Road. And after he killed her, he took a keepsake.”

Whitney opened his mouth and Madeleine could hear him suck in wind as he was about to bellow.

She trained her eyes and balled her focus onto Joe Whitney.

You. Keep. Still
.

She thought this without speaking aloud. The same focus and direction she used with Severin. Whitney’s open mouth froze, and no words came out. He held motionless for a moment.

She turned and threw the same gaze at the judge, and he paused with that cursed gavel in midair.

She knew she had one moment, and for that moment, the room belonged to her.

“If you look inside the pigeon house at Zenon Lansky’s property in Hahnville, you will find Angel Frey’s finger, along with her ring.”

She wrenched her eyes from Joe Whitney and searched the crowd until she saw Sheriff Cavanaugh, who looked appalled. “You’ll have to clear away the brush to get to it,” Madeleine said. “Please look, Sheriff.”

Whitney released the frozen breath that had caught in his lungs.

“Ob-JECTION, your honor!” The sound reverberated from deep within his jowls. “I call for an immediate mistrial, and I demand that you place Dr. Madeleine LeBlanc under arrest for the murders of Anita Salazar and Angel Frey!”

HAHNVILLE, 1927

T
HE TWINS HAD SUPPOSEDLY
gone out to help with the refugees, but more likely they’d taken a slingshot and frog gig and headed for the woods. Mother was back from New Orleans and was speaking to Francois outside. Marie-Rose huddled with her older sister in front of the rolltop desk.

“Patrice,” Marie-Rose whispered. “But what if Papa is dead?”

“Don’t talk that way. We don’t know what’s happened, and until we find out we must continue to hope.”

“I can find out.”

“No!” The vehemence of Patrice’s reply caused Marie-Rose to jump.

“But—”

“Don’t you go looking.” Patrice switched on the radio.

The announcer was droning with no emotion. Rose tried to listen, but he spoke of what was happening in faraway places, no mention of her father. The man was saying that the Cabin Teele levee had burst, and the water now covered everything to the west. The river had also claimed McCrea, and then the Glasscock levee above Baton Rouge, and with each breach the water had stretched a hundred miles or more into the land. Several miles of the levee at Bayou des Glaises had crumbled, flooding the area they called the sugar bowl. The river had swallowed the homes of more than 100,000 people there.

“But what about Papa?” Marie-Rose said.

“Hush.”

The announcer spoke of levees that folded even as workers were stacking them with sandbags. In Melville, the surge from the Mississippi collided with that of the Atchafalaya. Together the two waterways had devoured the town.

Marie-Rose said, “I don’t understand. What’s happening?”

“People thought they could tame the river. Now she’s gotten up from her banks and she’s out there walking the earth.”

“She’s walked the earth before!”

“But now she’s hungrier.”

The announcer continued to speak in an even tone, as though reading nothing more engaging than a harvest forecast. With the crest of the river looming ever closer, New Orleans had lobbied to dynamite the levee at Saint Bernard in order to divert the water flow away from the city, but the residents of Saint Bernard and Plaquemines took up arms in protest. Miles away, a molasses tanker had rammed the levee at Junior Plantation. An investigation was underway to determine whether this had been an intentional act. Many believed that the destruction of the Crow’s Landing levee had also been deliberate.

Rose and Patrice looked at one another. Marie-Rose knew that the Crow’s Landing levee bordered Glory Plantation, where Monsieur Chapman lived. Patrice’s clear blue eyes shifted away. She was sitting in the window, the sunset washing over her dark skin, and she looked like a living statue of tarnished brass.

The people of Plaquemines and Saint Bernard had posted guards at the levee to prevent their New Orleans neighbors from taking matters into their own hands. When a skiff had drawn too close to the Saint Bernard levee, guards had fired upon it, killing one of the pilots. Residents had also fired upon another skiff carrying a reporter and photographer from the Associated Press.

Marie-Rose closed her eyes.

The announcer said that now, New Orleans has secured the government support it needed, and officials were planning to dynamite the levee. The residents of Plaquemines and Saint Bernard had only forty-eight hours to clear out before their homes would be sacrificed to the river’s flow.

The man on the radio was saying nothing about Papa. Rose pushed his voice to the far corner of her mind, drawing on the skill she’d learned. She let the vines come forth.

“Rosie, stop it!”

Patrice shook her until she opened her eyes.

“The lady said—”

“Don’t you listen, Rosie! They trick you to go chasing in there, and one day you’ll find out you can’t come back.”

“I can come back!”

“You might think so. For Papa it got harder and harder. Now sometimes he’s in there for years at a time.”

“It’s not fair. I finally learned how to do it. Maman says we’re supposed to go in there and bring back secrets.”

Patrice lowered her voice. “Never you mind what Maman says.”

“But she says we could all die.”

“Not die. Become extinct. It means our lineage won’t continue.”

“Creole?”

Patrice shook her head. “No. People like us who can work the river magic. But Rosie, you mustn’t trust what Maman says.”

“I just want to find Papa.”