CHAPTER 25
HéLèNE'S THINGS
POV: NOEMI
"Don't touch anything," Remy says. "He'll know."
He cuts the zip tie off my wrists with my own knife and pushes me into the room and shuts the door, and I hear a key turn in an old lock, heavy, and then his footsteps going away down the hall.
I stand in the middle of the room with my wrists burning.
It's blue.
Everything. The walls are pale blue silk, faded in stripes where the sun has come in for years.
The curtains are blue velvet, and the rug is a blue so dark it's almost black, and the bed is covered in blue that has gone grey with dust. The whole room is the color of the river at noon, when the sky is on it.
And it's full of her.
A rack of dresses along one wall, in plastic bags.
Pale colors. Linen, silk, a green wool coat with a fur collar.
Shoes lined up under them in pairs, narrow, a size smaller than mine.
A vanity with a round mirror and a silver-backed hairbrush and a row of crystal bottles with the perfume dried to brown in the bottom.
A missal on the nightstand with a blue ribbon marker.
A rosary hook on the wall above the bed, empty.
A prie-dieu in the corner. The velvet on the kneeler worn through to the wood in two places.
Two knees. Every day. For years.
And by the window, a chair. Blue velvet, turned to face the glass. And through the glass, past the lawn and the dark line of the levee, the lights of a tug moving on the river.
I don't go near the chair.
***
I touch everything.
I don't care what Remy said. I walk along the rack of dresses and put my hand on every one of them through the plastic. I open the drawers of the vanity. Stockings, folded. Handkerchiefs with an H embroidered in the corner. A dance card from 1981, with Augustin's name written on every line.
I pick up the hairbrush.
There's hair in it. Dark. Long. Wound around the bristles and gone dull with dust. Ten years. Nobody has cleaned it. Nobody has thrown it away. Somebody has kept it here, exactly as it was, the way you'd keep a relic in a reliquary.
I think of a velvet box in the bottom drawer of a desk on Prytania Street.
A pencil stub. A satsuma peel. A button.
My hand is shaking. I put the brush down.
On the vanity, tucked into the frame of the mirror, there are photographs.
A wedding. A girl in white on the steps of a church, laughing, with her head thrown back and her veil blowing sideways in the wind.
She's beautiful. She's barely older than I am.
Beside her, a tall young man with silver-blond hair is looking at her like she's something he's just bought and can't believe the price.
Another. The same woman, older, thinner, on a little railed platform on top of a roof with the whole city behind her. The belvedere. She's holding a little boy on her hip. Five, maybe six. Dark hair. A serious face. They're both looking out, away from the camera, at something far off.
At the river.
The boy's eyebrow isn't split yet. That comes later.
I take the photograph out of the mirror frame.
I look at it for a long time. The boy's face. The way his hand is holding a fistful of his mother's collar, tight, like he's afraid she'll go over the rail.
I fold it once, carefully, and put it inside the front of my dress.
***
The difference is the door.
I understand it standing in the middle of Hélène Valcourt's blue room with her son's photograph against my skin.
Augustin kept her things. Every dress, every stocking, every hair in her brush.
He keeps them in a room nobody lives in, behind a lock only he has the key to, and he comes in at night and sits in her chair and turns her ring on his finger.
He kept her things because he kept her. And when she was gone, the things were all that was left to keep.
Gideon keeps my things too.
But his lock is on his side of the wall, and I walked through it. I walked through it with a knife in my hand, and then I threw the knife across the room and walked through it again.
Hélène sat in that chair and waited for somebody to open the door.
Her son walked past.
Every woman in this family has waited for a monster to come and open the door.
I'm not waiting.
***
At seven, the key turns, and it isn't Remy.
It's the woman from the kitchen. The one at the stove who didn't turn around when they brought me through.
She's sixty or so, in a grey uniform with a white collar, and she has a cup of tea on a saucer in one hand and a basin of water with a cloth over the rim in the other.
A man with a rifle stands in the hall behind her. He doesn't come in.
She sets the basin down on the vanity. She wets the cloth. She comes to me without a word and starts to wash the blood out of my hair.
I let her.
Her hands are gentle and quick. She doesn't look at my face. She parts my hair at the place where Remy slammed my head into the window and dabs at it, and the water in the basin goes pink.
"You're Madame Odile's sister," I say.
Her hands stop.
I don't know how I know. The shape of her mouth, maybe. The way she folds the cloth. The way she didn't turn around in the kitchen, exactly the way Madame Odile doesn't turn around in the house on Prytania when there's something she's decided not to see.
"Clothilde," she says quietly. Not a question. A name. She glances at the man in the hall. He's lighting a cigarette, his back half turned. "She told me about you. On the telephone. The girl in Madame's room."
"This is Madame's room too."
"Yes." She wrings the cloth out. "He keeps it like this. Every dress. He comes up at night and sits in the chair." Her voice goes lower. "She used to call for the boy. From behind the door in the other house. Odile says she'd call his name."
"I know."
"He'll come." Clothilde's eyes flick to the window, to the dark lawn and the levee and the river beyond.
"Mr. Augustin has all his men out front, on the oaks.
He thinks Mr. Gideon will come up the drive.
But when he was a boy, Mr. Gideon used to climb the old gate by the kitchen garden, down by the levee.
Every summer. His daddy beat him bloody for it and he climbed it anyway.
" She puts the cloth in the basin. "A boy who climbs a gate like that doesn't come up the drive. "
She picks up the basin. She puts the tea in my hands.
"Drink it," she says. "You'll want your strength."
At the door, she stops.
"There's a man who brings the trays at night," she says, without turning around. "He's big and he's stupid, and he likes to stand too close." She looks at my hair, coming down, held with my hairpins. "Odile says you cut people."
She goes out.
The key turns.
I stand in Hélène's room with the tea going cold in my hands, and I take the pins out of my hair one at a time and look at them.
***
The window is painted shut. I try it anyway, with my fingernails in the seam until two of them break. Below me, on the lawn, a man walks slowly along the edge of the house with a rifle over his shoulder. He looks up. I step back.
The door is solid oak. The lock is old, a mortise lock with a big iron keyhole under the knob, the kind we had on the sacristy door at Saint Veronica's before the new roof.
I know those locks.
The pins are lying in a row on the vanity where I put them, next to Hélène's hairbrush.
I pinned my hair with them this morning, at six, in the priest's room at Saint Casimir's, with my own hands.
Plain steel pins with black glass heads.
The sisters buy them by the hundred from a supply house in Metairie.
Six of them. The same kind he took out of my veil one by one on the altar step, the six I left shining in the offering dish.
I put five back in my hair, loosely. I bend the sixth straight between my teeth.
Sister Perpetua is the only one who knows I can do this.
The first winter, she locked herself out of the linen closet and cried because Mother would scold her, and I was nineteen and had grown up in a house where you learned to open doors your father locked.
I opened it for her in two minutes with a hairpin.
She made me swear on the Blessed Virgin never to tell.
I kneel in front of Hélène's door and put the pin in the keyhole.
It's slower than a linen closet. My hands aren't steady. I can hear things outside. Cars, a long way off, at the end of the avenue. Engines idling. Men's voices on the front lawn, calling to each other. Something is happening at the front of the house.
The pin catches something.
I turn it, slow, and feel the first lever lift.
Footsteps in the hall.
I pull the pin out and stand up and back away from the door so fast I nearly fall over the prie-dieu.
The key turns.
***
He's big. Bigger than the man on the roof. A tray in one hand, a plate on it with a covered dome, a glass of water. A pistol in a holster on his hip. He comes in and kicks the door almost shut behind him with his heel, and looks at me.
"Supper," he says. "Mr. Augustin says you're to eat."
He puts the tray down on the vanity. Next to her hairbrush.
A tray. Brought to a locked door.
Your tray, Madame.
"Mr. Augustin has a sense of humor," I say.
He grins. He has a scar through his lip.
"Mr. Augustin says his wife used to get her trays in this room.
Every day. Says it's tradition." He looks me up and down.
At my hair coming down. At the blood on my dress.
"So you're the one. La sainte au couteau.
" He laughs. "Don't look like much without the knife. "
"I don't have it anymore."
"I know. Remy's got it. Showed it round the kitchen. Little thing." He holds up his thumb and finger an inch apart. "Barely a knife."
Outside, a man shouts something on the front lawn. Another answers. Engines. Headlights sweep across the ceiling of the blue room and away.
The big man looks toward the window, frowning.
I sway.
I put one hand on the back of Hélène's chair and let my knees go. It isn't hard. I haven't eaten since breakfast and there's still blood drying in my hair from the car window, and the room tips when I let it.
"Hey." He comes toward me. "Hey. Don't you pass out on me. Mr. Augustin'll have my—"
He takes my arm to hold me up.
He bends close to do it.
I put the hairpin in his eye.
***
I don't decide it. My hand decides. It knows exactly how thin the pin is and exactly how deep a keyhole goes. It goes in the way a pin goes into a lock, straight, all the way, and his head jerks back and he screams, a high sound, like a woman.
He lets go of my arm. Both his hands go to his face.
I go for his hip.
The holster has a strap across it. I don't know how it opens.
I pull at it and it doesn't give, and he's staggering backward, screaming, one hand clawing at the pin in his eye, and his other hand comes down and hits me across the side of the head and I go into the vanity.
The crystal bottles go over. Glass everywhere.
Hélène's perfume, old and brown, splashing across the tray and the dome and the floor, sweet and rotten.
I get up.
The strap has a snap. I see it now. My fingers find it. The gun comes out in my hand.
It's heavy. It's so much heavier than I thought. Black and cold and ugly, and I've never held one, never once in my life, not even to hand one to somebody.
He's coming at me.
One eye streaming blood, the pin still in it, his hands out, his face gone animal. He's between me and the door. He's so big he blots out the lamp.
I hold the gun out in both hands the way I've seen on television and I pull the trigger.
Nothing happens.
It doesn't move. I pull harder. Nothing.
He's almost on me.
There's a little lever on the side, above my thumb. I don't know what it is. I push it down with my thumb because it's the only thing I can see, and I pull the trigger again, and the gun goes off.
It kicks back into my face like a living thing. The sound fills the room and fills my head and keeps going.
He stops.
He stands there in the middle of Hélène's blue room with his hands out and a hairpin in his eye and a hole in the front of his shirt. He looks down at it. He looks at me.
He sits down on the rug.
He tips over sideways, slowly, like a man lying down for a nap, and his head comes to rest against the foot of the prie-dieu, against the velvet worn through by two knees.
He doesn't get up.
***
I stand there.
The gun is still up in both my hands. My ears are ringing so loudly I can't hear anything else. The room smells like gunpowder and rotten perfume and blood.
Outside, everything has changed. I can't hear it, but I can see it: lights through the window swinging wildly, men running on the lawn, a flash, another flash, from the back of the house, from the levee. The man with the rifle on the lawn is gone.
The door is open. The big man kicked it almost shut, but not quite, and now it's standing open a hand's width, and past it, the hall is dark.
I should run.
I should go out that door and down whatever stairs I find and out into the dark and down to the river.
I don't move.
Because I can see something through the gap in the door. At the far end of the hall, where there's a narrow stair coming up from below, a shape is coming up out of the dark. Tall. Fast. Coat gone. Shirtsleeves. A gun in one hand.
He doesn't call my name.
He doesn't have to.
He comes down the hall toward the blue room at a run, and he shoulders the door the rest of the way open, and he stops in the doorway like a man who's hit a wall.
He looks at the big man on the rug with the pin in his eye.
He looks at the gun in my hands.
He looks at me.
When he finds me, I'm already standing over a body.