CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Lure
The notebook had been on the shelf over the sink for a month, between a jar of gray-wash and a coffee tin of dead pens, because Maren had not been able to look at it and had not been able to throw it away, which were the two things she did with everything of Lark's now.
She took it down on the third morning after the river.
Rowan was making coffee in the little galley behind the shop with the unhurried competence of a person who had decided to simply keep existing in Maren's vicinity until told otherwise, and Maren sat at the front counter in the gray early light and opened her dead girl's handwriting for the first time since the week she died.
She had read it before. She had read it the night she found it, three weeks before the end, when she'd come home and Lark had shut a drawer too fast and there had been a name half-said into the phone and a door that had taken to being locked, and Maren, frightened in the old abandoned-child way, certain Lark was drifting toward someone else, had gone through the drawer like a jealous fool looking for a lover's letters and found this instead.
Names she didn't know. Dates that ran back the better part of two hundred years.
A margin sketch of a ring of small marks around a circle that she'd taken for a doodle and now knew for a ring of women standing round still water.
She'd put it back and said nothing, ashamed of her snooping and more ashamed of her relief, because a notebook of old names was not a lover, and she had let herself believe the danger was that small.
Reading it now, with Vesper's words in her and Odette's and a month of the cult's grammar learned the hard way, she understood that she had been holding the proof of everything in her own two hands since before Lark was cold, and had not been able to read a word of it.
It was not a diary. Lark had not written down what she felt, which was the cruellest thing about it, that even here at the end there was none of her voice, only the work.
It was research. Page after page of the old water-families, the Vaudrys and three or four others, copied out of deeds and parish records in Lark's quick slanting hand, with the marriages and the drownings marked, and the drownings were too many and fell too neatly across the generations, every twenty or thirty years a daughter gone into still water and ruled misadventure, and Lark had seen the pattern and circled it.
She had been doing exactly what Maren was doing now.
She had been hunting the same thing. Maren sat with that for a while and did not drink her coffee.
There were things in it that undid her in passing, not because they were sad but because they were so exactly Lark.
A grocery list halfway down one page, milk and chalk and limes, set down in the middle of two centuries of drowned daughters because Lark had grabbed the nearest book to write it on.
A bird in a margin, four careless lines and the thing was alive.
The hand getting harder and faster as the pages went, the pen pressed deeper, a woman working past the far edge of her own patience.
Lark had never finished a book in her life.
She read the backs of cereal boxes and was proud of it, learned the world by touching it, could not sit still for the length of a chapter.
And she had sat in a fluorescent room week after week copying deeds out in her bad cramped concentrating script, hating every minute, and the only reason on this earth she would do a thing she hated that much was that she was afraid, and the thing she was afraid of was for Maren.
"She found it before I did," Maren said. "All of it. The families, the water, the every-thirty-years. She had the whole shape of it in here and she never told me one word."
Rowan came and stood at the end of the counter, not too close, reading the page upside down.
"To keep you out of it," she said. "It's what they all do.
The ones who love somebody and find the thing in the water.
You go quiet so it can't reach back along you to them.
" She said it without any weight on the all, but Maren heard it land on Rowan herself, and on Lark, and on her own three weeks of saying nothing about a drawer shut too fast, the whole chorus of them keeping their terrible silences to keep each other safe, and getting each other killed by it.
The last pages were different.
Maren had not got this far the first time.
She had stopped at the old names, satisfied of her own foolishness, and put the book back.
The last filled pages were not deeds. They were newer, the ink pressed harder, the hand less careful, and they were not about the Vaudrys two hundred years gone.
They were about the bind. Lark had been trying to understand her own tattoo.
There were small frantic diagrams of the ribs, the placement, arrows, a question underlined twice, can it be cut, and a list of churches and a name Maren did know, V.
Calder, written and then crossed out and then written again with a question mark, a woman Lark had been trying to find in the last weeks of her life, the woman who had married them, because Lark had worked out that whatever had been done to them at nineteen could be undone, and she had gone looking for the one person who might know how to undo it.
She had been trying to get them out. Both of them.
She had been three weeks ahead of Maren the whole way and running the other direction, not deeper into the cult but for the door, and she had nearly reached it.
"She wasn't drifting," Maren said. Her voice had gone strange.
"All those weeks I thought she was leaving me.
She was trying to save us. She'd found the cage and she was looking for the key and she didn't tell me because if she told me I'd have made it about losing her, which is exactly what I'd have done, and so she carried it alone to keep me out of the water.
" She put her hand flat on the page. "And it got her anyway. "
Rowan did not say anything kind, which was the kindest thing she could have done.
They went to the library that afternoon because the notebook ran out before the answer did.
The Main Branch sat over on Loyola in the long flat shadow of the downtown towers, a midcentury slab a world away from the wet green edge of the city, and the drive in from the Bywater took them up through the Marigny and across into the grid of the Central Business District where the streets went suddenly tall and gray and bank-fronted and ordinary.
Maren felt the old vertigo of doing it in daylight.
There was a security guard and a water fountain and a man asleep over a newspaper, a children's corner with a felt board and a bin of beanbags, and somewhere in among the genealogy stacks and the smell of warm dust and old carpet she was hunting a thing that drowned women, and the two facts would not stay in the one head at once.
Rowan put a field-survey placard on the dash that almost certainly wasn't meant for a downtown loading zone and said nobody ever ticketed a truck that looked like it belonged to the state, and they went up together in the slow lift.
Lark had come here, again and again, in the weeks before the water, and it was Lark's own footsteps Maren walked in across the third-floor reading room.
The local-history room. The City Archives and the Louisiana Division, the deeds and the sacrament rolls and the parish records, the old newspapers spooled onto reels that still hissed when you wound them.
This was where Lark had spent the afternoons Maren had spent imagining a lover.
A tired kind woman at the reference desk, glasses on a beaded chain not unlike Odette's, had been there twenty years, and she remembered Lark when Maren described her, the copper hair, the gap-toothed way she thanked you for the smallest thing.
People remembered Lark. She had gone through the gray world touching it, and it kept the memory of her the way a hand keeps warmth off a cup.
"She was in near every week through the spring," the woman said.
"Sweet girl. Always the water-land out east, the old families, and then toward the end she got onto the church records.
Sacraments. The little devotional societies, the sodalities, who belonged to which.
I pulled the rolls for her myself." She tilted her head.
"She was looking for somebody's name on a list, I think.
She found it, too. I remember, because she went white and she thanked me and she didn't come back after that. "
Maren stood very still in the cool hum of the room.
"What list," she said.
But the woman couldn't say, it was months ago, a hundred patrons since, only that it had been one of the old sodality rolls, one of the respectable little societies of devout women that the city was thick with, ladies who did good works and kept a chapel and were no trouble to anyone, and that the sweet copper-haired girl had run her finger down it and found a name she knew and gone the color of paper.
And then had not come back. Because three weeks later she was dead.
Maren drove them home with her hands too tight on the wheel and the shape of it assembling in her against her will.
Lark had found a name she knew on a list of the Drowned, or near enough, a name on the rolls of one of the cult's respectable masks.
Not Vaudry, not a stranger, not an old water-family two centuries dead.
A name she knew. A name that turned her white in a public library on a spring afternoon.
And three weeks later she had gone out into the dark, alone, just out, I'll be back, and walked of her own free will down into the one thing on this earth she feared more than dying, the still black water past the Rigolets, calm and trusting, following someone, because Rowan had seen her go in like a woman being led somewhere safe by a hand she'd held her whole life.
Maren made herself say it on the Claiborne overpass with the city sliding by red in the late light.
"She didn't go out there for a lead. She went out there for a person.
" She heard how bare it came. "She found a name she loved on that list, and instead of running, because that's not her, she's not a runner, she did the Lark thing, the thing that got her killed, she decided she was going to pull them out.
The way she was pulling us out. She went to save somebody.
Somebody phoned her that night with a story, I'm in trouble, come, don't tell Maren, don't tell anyone, and she went, because the one thing my Lark would walk into deep dark water for is somebody she loved telling her they were drowning. "
Rowan had gone very still in the passenger seat, and when she spoke it was from a long way down.
"That's how they took Nessa," she said. "Not a stranger in the dark.
Her own cousin. Somebody she'd have followed off a roof.
That's the whole craft of the thing, the part nobody outside ever believes.
A cult doesn't come for you as a monster.
It comes wearing the face of the person you'd never once think to be afraid of, because they spent your whole childhood teaching you that the people who love you have the right to ask you for anything, and that the asking is itself a kind of love.
" She rubbed her thumb across the old scarred-over mark on her forearm without seeming to know she did it.
"I keep thinking I'll stop being surprised by it. I never do."
Rowan was quiet a long moment then, watching the red water of the sky go by.
"Who'd she love that much," she said. Gently. Already, Maren thought, knowing the answer and making Maren be the one to find it, the way Odette did, the way the good ones did. "Other than you."
And Maren, who had spent a month learning to be lied to by her own grief and would not be lied to about this, made herself walk the short and only road the question left her.
Lark had cut every tie to the family that couldn't love her color, the chapel-strict Aldous house out in Metairie where she'd been adored like a possession and never once let be herself.
She had walked out of it at eighteen and barely looked back.
But you did not stop loving the people who raised you just because you got free of them, Maren knew that better than anyone, she who at twenty-two still dreamed of the mother who walked out on her at seven.
Blood did not let go that clean. And there had been one face at that graveside, one mourner among the cold respectable Aldous black, who had stood apart and gone gray and almost, almost said something to Maren across the open ground, before the family closed around her and took her away.
Maren had turned that face over more than once since the burial, in the idle aching way you turn over the people at a funeral.
The elder sister. Bryony. She'd stood a little off from the parents in a black coat too heavy for the heat, not weeping the way the mother wept, dry and rigid and gray, with something working behind her eyes that Maren had read at the time as the awkward grief of a family that did not know how to hold its own dead.
She had come three steps across the cut grass toward Maren with her mouth opening on a word.
And then Mr. Aldous had put a hand on his daughter's arm, only that, a hand, and Bryony had shut her mouth and let herself be turned and walked away, obedient, the way she did everything, and Maren had thought nothing of it, one more stiff Aldous keeping the queer widow at a distance.
She thought a great deal of it now. A woman with a word in her mouth for the grieving, and a father's hand on her arm to stop it coming out.
The only people Lark Aldous had ever trusted enough to follow into deep water in the dark, Maren understood, going home over the canal with the night coming down, were the people who had claimed, her whole life long, to love her.