the rum.
He offered us each a bedroom for the night and Ray accepted. I asked if I could stay where I was and bed down by the fire. I didn’t know whether it was the hurricane or the anxiety of finding Star, or both, but I was dog- tired with fatigue. I knew we were close. I knew we’d found a flaw in the Fleur-du-Mal’s plan. What I didn’t know or understand was the possible presence of “Razor Eyes.” He was a cold-blooded murderer and his arrival, for whatever reason, put Star in twice as much jeopardy.
Isabelle brought me a pillow and a pink goose-down blanket. I welcomed both. We all said our good nights and I stretched out by the fire.
Outside, the hurricane never slept. The wind rose and fell in swells and the rain pounded through the night, constant and hard. I stared at the fire. I waited for sleep. I waited.
I heard a voice. I was being called. summoned.
I was with some others. We were walking toward the opening in a cliff, the mouth of a cave. We were invited. We were the painters, they expected us. They were taller than we were. They led us deep into the cave with tiny lamps held in their palms. They stopped and said we would know where to go from there. We went on, we knew where to go. We set up our scaffolding and brought out our rubbing cloths and ochre. We painted the beasts as they ran through our minds. I went ahead. I saw a light and heard a thundering roar. They told me to stop, but I went ahead and the light became another opening and the roar was a waterfall in front of it, blocking what lay beyond from view. I put my hands in it. I spread the curtain of water and instead of a river below, there was another opening to another cave. I walked through the space in the water and there was a fire inside the cave. It was a small fire that had been burning for days. The ashes were spilling out of the pit. I saw something in among the ashes. I reached in and flicked it out, watching it tumble and roll on the floor of the cave. It was a skull, a child’s skull. It was not Meq.
“Z!” the voice shouted. “Wake up, lad.”
It was Captain Woodget standing over me with Ray leaning in at his side.
Ray said, “You look pretty good in pink, Z.”
They were both fully dressed. It was still raining and there was little light, but I could tell it was morning. Where I’d been I didn’t know and there was no time to think about it. It was September 20, 1906, and the hurricane raged on. Even the captain said he’d never seen anything like it. “Most of them move on in a few hours,” he said. “But this one’s in love with Louisiana.”
We discussed our options for getting to “The Vines” and there were none. The roads were completely washed out. Our only chance was by water — up a low backwater river that was already out of its banks, in a hurricane, on a half-sized sailing ship that had never been used. The captain said he could do it.
At the dock, Ray and I fashioned rain slickers out of scraps of canvas and the captain wrestled with the scaffolding. Eventually, we had to tear it down entirely in order to get the
Amazingly, there was traffic. Mostly fishermen in small craft, making a dash for home or helping the stranded. We saw one barge that had no choice but to go on and try to make it to port and one steam-driven trawler with no lights burning, traveling in the opposite direction at a reckless speed. As it passed, I had a strange sensation, a buzzing in my head, like static on a telephone line. I looked over at the trawler, but the distance and the rain between made it impossible to see any faces.
We pushed on, tacking often at severe angles. We couldn’t hold a good line for longer than a few minutes, but the captain remained steadfast and the rain never bothered him.
After three tight, difficult bends in the river, he waved to me, pointing at a dock on the opposite shore and shouting, “The Vines.”
It took all our efforts and another half hour to turn the ship against the current and secure it to the dock. We walked up to the main house on a wooden walkway with missing boards and broken railings. The cypress trees on both sides had taken a beating and still were. The wind tore at them from every direction and the rain never let up.
The house was dark as we approached, except for a light in one of the back rooms. It was a big house, an old plantation mansion with columns in front and a veranda all around. It looked as if it wouldn’t make it through the storm.
We watched and listened.
Suddenly, faintly, somewhere between the rain and wind, I heard music. I turned to Ray and the captain.
“Do you hear that?”
They both looked at me and then at each other.
“Hear what?” Ray asked.
“Lily Marchand. It’s her, it’s her voice. She’s singing.”
Neither Ray nor Captain Woodget could hear what I heard. My “ability” had awakened. I concentrated and pinpointed her voice to one of the front rooms, one of the rooms in the dark.
We walked up a short rise and stepped onto the veranda. I could hear something else behind the singing, a hum or a churning, maybe a small engine. The door was wide open and the rain was blowing in, soaking the floorboards of the entryway.
We passed into a hallway that was dark except for a light at the end, the one we’d seen from outside. There was no furniture. Ray found some candles against the wall and gave us each one. Captain Woodget had matches and lit the candles. Two rooms appeared off the hall. The one on the left was completely empty, but the one on the right was filled with sofas, chairs, rugs, lamps, and, most of all, phonograph players. There must have been fifty of them, stacked and squeezed into every niche and corner of the room. And one of them was playing Georges Bizet’s
They were gone. We’d missed them, I knew it. I looked around and found the phonograph player, the one I wanted, easily. I followed the hum, which was a generator supplying the phonograph player with power until it ran out of gas. I took the needle off the disc and there was silence in the room.
Captain Woodget said he was going to check out the room in the back, the one with the light. Ray and I stayed and looked around.
We saw plates and dishes with food still on them, saucers and coffee cups, all recently used. Phonograph discs and pornographic studio portraits were strewn everywhere. Sadomasochistic contraptions and devices, things I’d only seen in places like Emma Johnson’s, were lying about. In the corner of the room, there was a giant cage or playpen. Inside the playpen, on top of two Persian rugs, was a mattress and a small blanket. This was where he kept her. This was where she slept.
Suddenly there was a loud crash and Captain Woodget was shouting, “Holy Trident and dammit to hell!”
Ray and I ran down the hall, toward the light. We pushed through the door and Captain Woodget was standing over a wine decanter he’d knocked off a long wooden table, a table similar to Carolina’s.
He’d stumbled into it when he saw the man and woman sitting at the table, across from each other, their faces flat against the wood, their arms and hands splayed out on either side. Their throats had been slit. The table was covered in blood and pools of it swirled at their feet. The man’s shirt had been ripped open, as had the woman’s blouse, and both their backs were covered with a bloody rose, carved into the skin with the point of a stiletto.
I knew it was Lily Marchand and most likely her brother, Narciso. I looked up and Ray’s face was frozen with disgust and disbelief. I remembered that neither of us had seen the Fleur-du-Mal’s handiwork and unmistakable signature since Georgia and Mrs. Bennings.
“We missed him,” I said. “He must have known. He must have known we were coming.”
“You better come down here, lad,” the captain said. He had regained his balance and was standing at the other end of the table. “There’s another one — a Chinaman.”
“A Chinaman?” I bolted for the end of the table and looked down to see what the captain had found. I expected to see “Razor Eyes.” I saw Li instead.
He wasn’t stripped and carved up like the others. He’d been stabbed just below the heart and his throat was partially slit. There was a green ribbon stuffed in his mouth. I had no idea where he’d been or how he had got
