The Tangled Bridge (5 page)

Emily was turning in a circle, her eyes searching. “Madeleine! Madeleine LeBlanc!”

Madeleine looked at her.

“I know it's you, Madeleine. You're his only aunt. I remember when we were in school. You were just like any other kid. You wouldn't have hurt anyone in those days.”

Madeleine wished she could tell her,
I'm not here to hurt you.
But that would be a lie.
This
was hurting her.
This
was hurting little Cooper. Just by knowing where he was, it opened him up to the briar where knowledge flowed in the collective.

“Leave us alone, Madeleine!” Emily cried. “All you people, you leave us alone!”

And then she rushed for the stairs, knocking the baby gate aside.

Madeleine stepped toward the railing. “Don't!”

But Emily was descending much too fast for the steep, narrow stairway, and with little Cooper clutched in her arms.

Emily's feet slid out from under her and her head knocked back against the third step, the one where Severin had left droplets of blood.

Emily made a guttural sound, her arms protecting Cooper's head. But she rose and pulled open the door at the base of the stairs. Blood on her hair and shirt. Madeleine listened as her footfalls descended the second set of stairs and out the front door.

Severin was still smiling.

 

six

NEW ORLEANS, NOW

ZENON LAY WITH HIS
hospital gown gaping enough at the neck to expose a few clusters of chest hair and a sharp collarbone. He'd lost weight, Madeleine thought. His face looked slack except for the eyes—they seemed to be smiling … almost. An oddity of the human brain that certain facial muscles created recognizable patterns, such as joy, even when the lips or cheeks couldn't form a smile. In Zenon's case, not only was a true smile impossible, he wasn't even able to blink for a yes or no response. That meant he was either oblivious to his surroundings or unable to communicate. Or both.

Zenon's current state was the result of Madeleine's first awkward attempts at pigeonry. It had happened after Madeleine found out that Zenon had committed murder. She had gone to the police, testified against him, and afterward he'd sworn he would kill her. His briar skills were already honed sharp—much more than hers—and she'd understood that the only way to escape him was to kill him first. And so, she'd used her newfound skill of pigeonry to send a fellow prisoner after Zenon in the facility where he was incarcerated. What Madeleine had intended was that Zenon should die. Instead, the other prisoner she'd used to attack Zenon had broken his spine without killing him. An implanted thought often changed once inside a “pigeon's” mind.

As a result of the attack, Zenon would live out the rest of his life like this, staring at the ceiling, unable to speak. Possibly not even able to think.

The stark hospital room bore no sign that Zenon existed as anything other than an extension of that institutional bed. No personal effects. Not even the quilt she'd once brought him. Even the thick curtains were drawn as though natural sunlight might bear some contaminant.

Madeleine opened the curtains and let the sun fill the room, washing over the sterile fluorescent lighting and causing her to squint. She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. She'd at least managed to change her clothes since dealing with the matter at the levee and then going into the briar with Severin. By the time she'd returned to her body, Ethan had already finished talking to the police and had brought her home. She must have been in a rambling state before she came to. Hated to think of Ethan seeing her like that all the time.

A short blond nurse appeared in a shapeless pink uniform that looked like it was made from the same material as the bedsheets.

“Hi there!” the nurse called out as if addressing an auditorium full of people instead of one single woman and a catatonic man. “Looks like we have a visitor today! You family?”

Madeleine shrugged. “Half-sister.”

“That's real good. I'm Vessie. We're taking real good care of your brother here.”

Madeleine nodded as Vessie reached for the IV hook and took down an empty plastic bag.

“He looks like he's smiling,” Madeleine said.

“Probably because he's happy to see you. He wishes you'd come to visit more often.”

“I doubt that.”

“He does! Everyone loves visitors.”

Madeleine took a step closer to Zenon as Vessie replaced the empty IV bag with a full one. That ghost of a smile on him—and it wasn't an illusion—was probably just a response to what he saw in his own private dream world. Maybe he was even somewhere in the briar tunnels. Unlike Madeleine, Zenon might actually like it in there.

She narrowed her eyes and touched his hair just above his right ear, pulling off a curled, dried bit of something. “What's this?”

Vessie widened her grin. “Oh, ha ha! Looks like a leaf!”

“He's confined to his bed. Where would he have ever been near a leaf?”

Vessie shrugged. “I thought he needed a little fresh air.”

“You took him out?”

“Just around the grounds.”

“Isn't that against policy?”

Vessie's grin slipped a fraction. “That's just red tape. If it's in the patient's best interest, hon, they'll look the other way. I'm just trying to give him the best care possible.”

Madeleine looked back toward the window. Cars in the parking lot, on the streets. People.

Vessie was folding back Zenon's sheet to reveal his legs had grown thinner and paler since he'd become bedridden.

“You can't take him out again, ever,” Madeleine said.

Vessie looked up. “What?”

“If he weren't in this hospital he'd be incarcerated, awaiting trial for multiple murders. I'm serious about this. He can't go out.”

Vessie's lips parted, her brown eyes wide and livid. “You can't be serious!”

“I'm very serious.”

The nurse gawked for a moment, then flung her arm in the direction of Zenon's shrinking body. “Well just look at him! He can't even go to the bathroom on his own! What do you think he's gonna to do, rob a bank?”

“I understand that you meant well. But if you take him out again I'm going to have to report it.”

Vessie huffed, drawing herself up a notch. “Fine.” Her hand swept up and tucked a cropped blond curl behind her ear and then reached down to seize Zenon's leg. She started moving it in bicycle circles.

Madeleine's cell phone buzzed inside her bag, and she turned toward the window to take the call. It was Ethan.

“How you holdin up, sweetheart?”

“I'm alright. I'm here at the hospital in Zenon's room.”

“Good God, baby, why'd you go there of all places?”

“Chloe insisted on meeting me here.”

Silence, then, “You couldn't just get some sleep and wait until tomorrow to talk to her?”

“No, considering what happened at the levee last night, I think it's important to talk to her immediately.”

“But they got the old woman, Alice.”

“Yes, but…”

She glanced over her shoulder where Vessie was pressing Zenon's knee to his chest and then straightening it again, Zenon's ghost smile still in place. Vessie laid down the leg with exaggerated care and moved to the other side of the bed.

Madeleine lowered her voice and turned back toward the window. “You know good and well there was something else going on. Something about the way that woman Alice acted.”

The windowsill was dotted with husks of flies. Two live ones were popping against the glass. In the reflection, Madeleine caught Vessie watching her. She was slowly rotating Zenon's arm.

It occurred to Madeleine that Ethan had been silent a beat too long.

“Something wrong, baby?” she asked.

He said, “Well, I'd checked in with your buddy Vinny on the task force like you asked me to. Said they had two other murders last night. Unrelated. Both suspects confessed on the spot and got taken into custody.”

She considered this. “In New Orleans? That doesn't seem that unusual.”

He paused. “Yeah, well, Vinny said the other two suspects were homeless folks, too. So were the victims. Homeless on homeless, three totally unrelated in the same night. No fights, nobody stole anything from anybody else, no motivation anywhere to be found. That's never happened before.”

Madeleine tightened her grip on the cell phone. “Oh.”

“Didn't want to tell you just yet, but I figured you'd be hot if I didn't.”

“I appreciate it.”

Ethan cleared his throat. “Well, St. Jo's is doing a roundup, trying to bring everyone in off the streets and keep'm safe.”

“Good.”

“You gonna get some rest once you finish up with ole Chloe?”

“No baby, I'll just wait til tonight.”

He grunted. “What are you gonna do?”

“Better head over to St. Jo's, see if I can help with the outreach.”

“Now listen up, Madeleine, you ain't gonna be no damn good to no damn body if you don't get a little sleep.”

“Not going to require too many cognitive reasoning skills. Just bringing some hard luck folks in off the street.”

“Any way I can talk you out of it?”

“'Fraid not.”

“Figures.” He sighed, then, “I'll go with you.”

“No need, baby, you got too much work to do there at the clinic.”

“And let you run around blight buildings by yourself so you can gather up all the street folks?”

“I—I just figure you got labs.”

“I knew you'd be hardheaded and I already cleared my schedule.”

She chewed her lip. Bringing Ethan along could either be a good thing or a bad thing. But beneath it all, she'd be relieved to have him. “Alright then.”

“Meet you at St. Jo's in an hour.”

“Sounds good. And Ethan?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

“You're welcome. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

She hung up. She could still see Vessie working Zenon's arm in the window's reflection. Those two other killers—she wondered if they were people she knew. And she wondered if she knew the victims. Either could have been friends of her father, or former patients from when she'd still carried on her practice at Tulane. Now she was living off what was left of her dwindling estate while she volunteered for St. Jo's and tried to figure out how to regroup after her lost career. It had been almost two years but it seemed like a whole other life—before the river devil had made it impossible to be a psychologist.

Before she'd used the pigeon game to strike Zenon down.

Before Daddy had died from an overdose in an abandoned building in Iberville.

Before before before. So much had changed in such a short time.

Vessie laid down Zenon's arm and picked up his other leg.

Madeleine thought of those black woods at dawn. That clicking sound.

*   *   *

“MADELEINE.”

She turned to see her great-grandmother, Chloe LeBlanc, entering through the doorway.

Chloe's iron hair was puffed into a knot at the nape of her neck, and she gazed at Madeleine with black eyes and ancient dark skin, a paper napkin rumpled in her fist. Despite the heat, a white cotton quilt lay folded over her knees. Pushing her wheelchair was her attendant, Oran, an albino black man.

Madeleine looked back at the bed where Zenon lay, and saw that each time Vessie raised his leg to complete the bicycle rotation she exposed his genitals.

“Vessie, could you please continue his exercises another time?”

Vessie's eyes snapped, her lips in a tight white line. She opened her hands with a melodramatic flourish, dropping Zenon's leg as if it were a rotten ham bone. The room was quiet. Vessie moved for the door but then halted.

“Likes'm closed,” she said, and darted back to the window, snapping the curtains shut.

The room went dark. Where the two panels met, a white line of sunlight glowed.

Madeleine, Chloe, and Oran watched as Vessie strode out of the room. Oran shifted on his leg as though he wasn't sure what to do with himself.

Chloe thrust a finger at the blanket on her knees and Oran took it and unfolded it over Zenon.

Madeleine recognized it. “That's the quilt I'd brought him. The one from the cottage on Bayou Black.”

“We cleaned it,” Chloe said.

Madeleine took a corner of it and helped Oran spread it over Zenon, pattern side down. Oran moved quickly as though he wished to get it over with.

He spoke to Chloe in a whisper. “Shall I wait outside, then?”

“No. You stay here,” Chloe replied, then said to Madeleine, “What is this you must discuss? You've thought again about learning your devil?”

Madeleine eyed her but didn't answer immediately. The two flies vibrated in the space between the window and the blackout curtains.

“Not really,” Madeleine said. “We have a bargain now. Severin and I. Seems to be working.”

Chloe's face drew to a sneer, and before she could say anything, Madeleine added, “I want to know if there are any others. Something happened last night. Led me to believe that someone was using the pigeon game.”

Chloe was watching her with fascination. “Is this true? How do you know?”

“I can't be sure. It's why I wanted to talk to you. Do you know of anyone with these abilities, outside our family?”

Chloe spread her hands. “The only two living are right here in this room.”

Chloe didn't know about little Cooper, Marc's son, of course. Madeleine let her gaze fall on Zenon. She didn't like that smile in his eyes. She wished he'd close them and go to sleep.

Chloe said, “Madeleine. You pretend so much. Why you come to me with stupid questions? You can learn answers to much better questions, in a way that no one else in the entire world can. You alone can exist in the briar with your river devil. This is a gift you squander.”