The Heavens Rise

seen a damn thing for eight years. But the new girl, Emily Somethingorother—the little blonde who’d watched too many TV shows about hospitals on her daddy’s flat-screen and was always asking them silly questions about their mission—was so upset about the dead squirrels she hadn’t managed to peel her hands from her mouth for the entire time it had taken Arthelle to walk outside. Tammy Keene, the other nurse who’d discovered the gory scene, finally gave in to the girl’s histrionics and curved one arm around Emily’s shoulders while she gave Arthelle a pointed look that said, If I’d wanted to deal with children today, I would have stayed home and looked after my own.

“Some of these new nurses,” Arthelle had said to Tammy earlier that morning, “they make it hard to tell who the patients are.” The joke hadn’t been one of her best. If they had been working at a real hospital, it might have earned her a cackle or two. But here at the Lenox Hill Long Term Care Center, it was always possible to tell the nurses from the patients, because none of the patients could walk or speak. A high-end vegetable garden; that’s how Arthelle had heard more than one visiting physician refer to the place. And it was a pretty apt description: a place for the rich to stash their brain-dead invalids until pneumonia or a virulent infection did them in for good. Of course, the brochure didn’t word it quite so succinctly.

Arthelle dropped the stick she’d been using to prod the carcasses when she realized the other end had sunk into exposed brain matter. The squirrels hadn’t tucked their heads underneath their bodies as she’d first assumed. Their skulls had been smashed in. By what exactly, she had no idea. If it had been a tool wielded by a man, the blows were amazingly precise. The poor guys weren’t that big, and the rest of their bodies were undamaged.

Not smashed. That’s not right either. Exploded.

Childhood horror stories about seagulls being killed by Alka-Seltzer pellets swirled in her head, but it was the stomach that got blown out in that scenario, wasn’t it? Not the skull. Not the brains. And from their respective poses, it looked like the squirrels had been crawling straight for the window when the event in question had reduced each of their heads to little mounds of gore. And it didn’t look as if it had all happened at once. Some of the poor little guys . . . well, they looked fresher than the others.

There was a perfectly logical explanation, she was sure of it; gruesome, to be sure, and a very valid reason to get the hell away from the furry little devils and report the whole mess to security, but logical nonetheless.

God knows, they didn’t need any more weirdness around Marshall Ferriot. That was for sure.

Spend your day working around mannequins and you were bound to believe one of them had turned its head in your direction when you weren’t looking. This was normal, and to be forgiven. But it was also to be contained and dealt with responsibly. This was the lecture Arthelle gave Tammy Keene, Emily New Girl and the other nurses who had joined them for dinner that evening at one of the malls in Buckhead. The squirrel slaughter was common knowledge by then, and Arthelle figured the last few women who had invited themselves along were after gruesome details, not comfort food.

For a moment or two, it seemed as if her lecture had worked. Arthelle’s fellow nurses responded with bowed heads and the dull clinks of spoons hitting cast-iron skillets as they all devoured their macaroni and cheese.

“He killed them.”

It was Emily who’d said it, of course; Emily, with her doe eyes, and that squeaky, cartoony voice Arthelle just knew was an act designed to get men to take care of her. Little Emily New Girl, her head full of childish ideas that would never provide her with a grown-up life. And even though she looked away quickly from Arthelle’s fearsome glare, the sight of it wasn’t enough to keep her mouth shut.

“He can make you do things . . . he can. If you look into his eyes, he can make you . . . And when it’s over, you don’t remember doing any of it.”

No one said anything until the waiter brought the check.

•   •   •

The bird was next. It happened early in the morning and, while no one saw the event itself, everyone who was on the wing at that moment heard the loud thwack the crow made as it flew right into Room 4’s window with enough force to crack the glass in two places. And because there had been no witnesses, no one could tell if the bird’s compact skull had cracked open during the collision or just moments before.

And even though there was no evidence that young Marshall Ferriot had been disturbed by the event—or any other event that had taken place in his immediate vicinity for the past eight years, for that matter—he was moved to another room later that afternoon, this one featuring a view of a barren service alley with a Dumpster tucked at the far end.

“Somebody better pop the lid on that Dumpster a couple times this week,” Tammy Keene said after she and Arthelle had tucked Ferriot into his new bed. “Make sure the rats are doing okay.”

“Hush your mouth, girl,” Arthelle whispered. “I’m tired of this nonsense.”

Sick to death of the whole subject was more like it. The poor boy was a vegetable, for Christ’s sake. And she was coming to hate how quickly the women in her life would give their heads over to superstitious gobbledygook. Sisters, in particular. Almost every girlfriend of hers from childhood had grown up to be some crazy Bible-thumping church lady. Arthelle sometimes felt like the only black woman in the South who wanted to live a life of the mind.

There was also the fact that she didn’t feel like telling Tammy, or anyone else for that matter, about how badly she’d gone off on Little Emily when she caught the girl rooting through Ferriot’s file that morning. So some trust based at a New Orleans bank paid for the boy’s care? So what? None of it was proof that the boy was some kind of witch or warlock or whatever else little Emily was making him out to be to the other nurses.

He was a patient just like all the others and, if he gave Emily the creeps, she should stay out of his goddamn room and stop making trouble. Otherwise, Arthelle would have her ass fired.

They had a job to do, and it wasn’t to make up stories. 

4

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

APRIL 2005

After they crossed Lake Pontchartrain, Marshall used his fake ID to buy them a milk carton full of frozen strawberry daiquiri and, when they were passing through Madisonville, a tiny hamlet that sits right at the spot where the Tchefuncte River slides free of Lake Pontchartrain’s northern shore, Marshall reached across the gearshift and took Nikki’s hand. For several agonizing seconds, her 4-Runner thudded over the steel girders of the town’s tiny drawbridge before she closed her fingers around his. And even though she wouldn’t look at him, he sprouted a painful hard-on in his jeans.

“Watch out for snakes!” Nikki said as they walked up the oyster-shell driveway to the property. It was the third time she’d warned him about a possible reptile encounter since they’d stepped from her car. Snakes didn’t bother him much, but they sure as hell got to her. He found himself taking note of this fact, lingering over it, wondering if perhaps he could put it to some kind of use. For her own good, of course. If I can cure her of a terrible fear, just think of the things she might let me do to her.

Like most children who’d grown up in Louisiana, she’d probably heard that old story about the water skier on the bayou who lost his balance and started screaming, “Help, I’m in barbed wire!” Only, according to the story, it wasn’t barbed wire. When the boat circled back, the friends pulled the man from the water to find him festooned with thick, black serpents. An entire school of water moccasins! Maybe if he told her that he’d found the story listed in an anthology of debunked urban legends or that, while water moccasins were certainly aggressive, they had terrible aim when it came time to bite, she might like him even more.

He followed the beam of her flashlight, which she kept angled on the mud underfoot, across the broad lawn that sat between the house and the dark, gurgling rectangle of the swimming pool. The entire property was plated in deep darkness that became impenetrable at its wooded borders, and the fact that she wasn’t leading him into the house, or in the direction of any shed that might contain light switches, sent shivers of delicious anticipation racing up his spine.