The Casquette Girls (30 page)

I’m not sure what I had expected to happen next, but nothing else did. I flipped it over and over, trying to understand what I was missing. “Come on…”

I slammed the case closed.
Ug
h
.

* * *

As I stepped into the den, looking for Isaac, I accidentally sent a piece of a clarinet rolling across the once-beautiful wooden floor, which was now warped like a roller coaster. It only stopped rolling when it smacked into a twisted tuba. The room contained enough musical instruments to supply a small orchestra, or at least a couple of Second Lines. I sucked in a big breath – the air in this room was much clearer than it had been in Brooke’s – either that or I was just getting used to the Storm stench.

I put down the trumpet case and stood, frozen, staring at the graveyard of brass. It was heartbreaking. The golden records, awards, and other recording paraphernalia that had once decorated the walls were now wrecked, and thousands of sheets of music had been strewn about the room. Most had dried into crisp leaves while others had been pulped into giant lumps of papier-mâché. Most of the melodies and lyrics had washed away from the papers, but hopefully they were still stuck in the head of Alphonse Jones and not lost forever.

No wonder he had said there was nothing left for them here.

Guilt washed over me, and I struggled not to completely break down.
How could I have fought with Brooke? How could I have acted like such a brat?

I suddenly realized Isaac was standing next to me. My throat clenched when I tried to talk, and the bandana slipped down to my neck. My muscles began to shake as I used every ounce of strength not to cry.

He looked me in the eyes, and for the first time I saw sympathy in his.

Even in all
the chaos, the way he looked at me made my stomach flutter.
What the hell?
And that was all the emotion I could contain—my bottom lip started to quiver—but before the first tear could escape, he leaned in and kissed me.

The world stopped as Isaac lingered for a moment.

“Breathe,” he whispered, breaking away just a couple of inches.

My heart rate soared as he brushed away the hair that had slipped in front of my eyes. I nodded and inhaled.

My hand moved to his face as if I no longer had control over it, and his arm snaked around my waist, pulling me closer. His touch made me forget about all the bad things that had been happening. My nose brushed his, and I paused, intimidated by my own behavior. He must have sensed the limit of my forward actions because he moved the last couple of inches to meet my lips.

My eyes closed. I couldn’t think about anything else as he kissed me – as I kissed him back. I couldn’t hear anything else, smell anything else. Only him.

For a moment, I felt like I was floating, like we were floating.

Like two joined feathers.

I pulled him closer, and a whimper escaped the back of my throat, followed by a pang of self-consciousness. He kissed me again, but this time a little voice in the back of my head screamed,
What are you doing!

My body reflexively tensed
.

It had
only been for a fraction of a second, but it was enough for him to pull back. Suddenly we were back on solid ground, back to reality. I opened my eyes, a little terrified of having to face him.

I wanted to slap myself for giving in to him, and then I wanted to slap Isaac for taking advantage of such a vulnerable situation. And yet, I was desperate to pull him close and go back to that moment where I had felt nothing. That moment where all of the pain went away.

“I’m sorry,” he said, flustered. “You just looked so sad. I didn’t know what to do.”

I couldn’t keep my eyes from opening wider, nor could I get words to come out of my mouth
. What had I just done? I don’t even like Isaac – not like that. Right? Why is it taking every ounce of my strength not to close the distance between us?

I took a step backwards without thinking – a protective reflex I immediately regretted when I saw how the small move stung him.

My entire being ached for comfort. Right then, I wanted nothing more than to feel his strong arms around me again.

Do not cry.

Then I cracked.

Tears began to drip from my eyes. He moved towards me. I didn’t have the will to take another step back, and I knew in that moment I might do something I’d regret later. A squeak of protest came out of my mouth, but he calmly shushed me, moving his bandana to wipe the tears from my cheeks.

My eyes nervously followed his mouth.

The second I prepared to give in to him, he pulled me into his chest and continued to whisper soothingly into my ear. With my face hidden, I couldn’t stop crying. He wrapped his arms even tighter.

In his unlikely embrace, I cried even harder for Brooke, Klara and Alphonse Jones. I cried for their neighbors. I cried for all the displaced people of New Orleans. I cried for the man with the blue eyes and for all the others who had died. I cried for myself, because I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it. Pressed up against him, I could feel the pulse of his heart, and it made me feel safe.

And there we stood until I ran out of tears.

I began to feel lightheaded, again like I was floating.

A breeze brought my mind back to the present.
Breez
e
?
I blinked twice to remove the last of my tears and gasped.

Hundreds of pieces of paper were floating in the air around us, slowly spinning in a clockwise turn. It was as if we were standing in the middle of a slow-motion cyclone. Only… we weren’t standing at all. We were levitating four feet from the ground, in the center of this whirlwind of faded music. My heart plummeted with vertigo, while my arms circled tightly around his neck—

“Oh, my God. What the… Am I doing this?”

His eyes opened. He looked down at me with a serene expression, and then up at the ruined leaves of paper dancing through the air around us in a symphony of rustles. He barely managed to whisper:

“No, I’m doing this.”

“It’s beautiful.”

* * *

In the car, neither of us spoke another word about either incident. We were both in too much shock.

I felt him steal a glance. I looked away, out the window, and my stomach clenched into a knot.

My fingers touched my lips.
It was just a desperate act of loneliness.
Righ
t
?

I quickly removed them, but my eyes fell to his hand on the stick shift. I suddenly had this desire to crawl under his arm and tell him all of my secrets. I understood how Adeline must have felt with Cosette and the Monvoisin sisters. I wanted to show him these tricks I had no explanation for.

But I couldn’t
move.

We pulled up to
the house, and before he could even cut the engine, I jumped out the passenger door and darted for the front gate.

He scurried around the hood of the car. “Adele, I am really sorry about before.”

“Don’t wo—” I started to say, but was cut off by another male voice.

“Always apologizing,” Niccolò said, emerging from our neighbor’s stoop across the street. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

“Hey!” I was a too little overenthusiastic for the interruption – and maybe because it was Niccolò. “I was wondering when you would show up.”

“
Ciao, bell
a
,
” he said quietly and kissed my cheeks, which were now burning.

I turned back to Isaac. “Thanks again for the ride and for making sure the roof didn’t fall on my head. See you later.”

I caught the stunned look on his face as my attention returned to Niccolò with an embarrassing quickness. “Hang on a minute. I’ll be right back.” As I leapt into the house, I felt guilty about the way Isaac and I were parting, but I really couldn’t handle the two of them together.

When I returned a minute later with Niccolò’s jacket, Isaac, of course, was still there, looking peeved – Dr. Jekyll was gone for the night.

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Niccolò, passing him the soft leather jacket, which I may have worn on a couple of extra occasions. “I was so caught up in Ren’s theatrics that night I completely forgot I was wearing it.”

“
Nessun problema, bell
a
.
It gave me an excuse to come see you.”

Isaac made no effort to hide his contempt for the soft-spoken Italian while he placed my father’s keys into my hand.

“Adele, how is the cut on your face?” Niccolò asked, carefully annunciating each word as he looked dead-on at Isaac. It was the second time he had mentioned the wound but directed the commentary at him. The night of the tour, I didn’t understand why his question had sounded like a threat, but just as my thoughts started to accuse him of being a jerk, the absurdity all came crashing together. The cut on my face, the feathers, the wind, the levitating.

The crow.

(translated from French)

11
th
April 1728

Secrets are a peculiar thing, Papa. Time after time, I have seen secrets tear people apart. Secrets cause scandal and distrust. But sharing this secret brought us together in such a way that I know I will never doubt our friendship. I trust Cosette, Minette and Lisette Monvoisin with my life.

After my little reveal, Lise told us she had seen a man going into sleeping cabin number seven. “But not just any man,” she said. “The same man we met on our last night in Paris
, who asked Cosette about her dowry
cassette
from the King… The same man who also showed up at the dock the morning of our departure.”

My heart nearly stopped at the thought that my rendezvous with Monsieur Jean-Antoine Cartier had been merely one of many for him, and that perhaps he had visited all the girls readying for this voyage. But when I asked, Lise described him as garish, boisterous, and blond – quite the opposite of my salon escort. Regardless, the parts of their tale identical to mine were certainly enough to cause alarm.

According to their story, on their final night in Paris, the three girls were whisked off to a brothel near the docks immediately after the curtain had fallen to the stage floor.
The King’s mistress had arranged their stay, knowing that no one would find them in such a place. Their voyage was supposed to have been of the utmost secrecy, since their safety depended on it, but somehow the blond man knew of their plans to travel to
La Nouvelle-Orléans
. He first inquired about purchasing the girls, to which they gave him a very fir
m
n
o
. Then he offered to accompany them and protect them from the dangers of the New World, which the sisters laughed off as absurd, just as I had when made a similar proposal.

Cosette said,
“The strangest part of our conversation was not his question, but the way he looked at me when he asked if we would stow him aboard in my
cassette
. It was as if he was trying to play some kind of mind-trick. That is when Minette realized who he was—”

“Rather,
what
he was,” corrected Minette.

“I do not understand,” I said. “What was he?”

“A
strigoi
,” said Minette.

“A child of the night,” whispered Lise.

“
Un vampyre
,” said Cosette.

Nervous laughter escaped my lips, but then their silent stares made my heart seize. Not at the notion of the existence of vampires, but at the notion of a
vampire
being aboard this ship with us, in the middle of the ocean, thousands and thousands of leagues from land, from an escape route, from safety.

12
th
April 1728

I cannot really say the existence of vampires shocks me. How could it, Papa, knowing the secrets that our family keeps? However, this realization has heightened every moment on board the ship. Every creak, every shadow piques my curiosity. This can be extraordinarily unnerving given the constant bob of the ocean causes everything to shift all day and all nightlong. This morning I struggled not to fall asleep in my porridge.

From my table with the DuFrenses, I overheard Cosette asking about the empty chair at their table. When one of the girls casually mentioned the missing girl had woken with seasickness, Cosette sprang out the doorway. I went after her, ignoring Madame DuFrense’s remarks about my disgraceful behavior.

In sleeping cabin number seven, we found the missing girl, pale as a ghost, shivering, and too nauseous to get out of bed. It was easy to see why her bunkmates had dismissed her symptoms as seasickness.