The Vines Page 6

  The smell is gathering strength now—bread and semen and dirt lashed by rain and turning to mud—and with its growing power, a darkness is crowding in at the edges of her vision.

  She feels her hand tense around the wicker love seat’s arm. But when she looks down to make sure this isn’t a trick played by the nerves in her arm, the hand she sees is black and callused. Her stomach lurches. The angle suddenly seems all wrong.

  A name slices through her, as if it’s been whispered in terror by a dozen guardian angels perched in the next room.

  Virginie . . .

  . . . When they take the blindfold off her, she sees they have brought her to a clearing where the trees are freshly splintered and some sort of foul-smelling chemical has been poured into hollows dug into their trunks. The horse beneath her shudders and takes several halting steps. On instinct, she jerks her bound wrists against her lower back, but it’s no use. She is forced to steady herself by clamping her thighs down on the horse’s flanks.

  The overseer has his hand on its bridle, and he’s staring up at her with as much fear as hate in his bloodshot eyes.

  Beneath the light of a half-moon lies ample evidence Felix Delachaise’s men have tried their hardest to turn the area around them into a desert. But in southern Louisiana, where land and water are often one and the same, it is not possible to make a desert even with the labor of a million men. But these men have tried. The mud looks plowed, roots torn up, perhaps by hand, only the shredded detritus left behind in a scrum that looks like sawdust.

  She is, in ways she wishes she was not, startled by their bravery. They have seen only a glimpse of her power, when she brought the vine out of the oak to halt the overseer’s whip because it looked as if Big John was near death from the flogging. For all they know, she could cause great roots to rise up from the soil and tear them apart.

  And she could, perhaps. But it would kill her for sure, or cause a pain so bad death would be a mercy.

  She speaks to the ghosts in the soil, and sometimes they need to be convinced. Coaxed. Charmed. And what is easiest for her is coaxing the fruits of the earth into quick and confident growth. Eruptions like the one she triggered the other day, the one that sent the overseer into a sputtering, red-faced rage, makes a pain like knives in her gut. But she can’t let these men know that.

  It takes her a few minutes of blinking into their lanterns and torches for her to count how many are there. The overseer and three men she doesn’t recognize, probably white folks from a little ways downriver. And then he steps forward into the light, Felix Delachaise, the master of Spring House. He has a forehead like one half of the temple roofs she’s seen drawings of in stolen books, and his lips always appear to be peeling away from his face.

  “No need for more fear at Spring House, witchy woman. Plantation life is hard on all of us. We are all a slave to the land here.”

  “Then, every now and then, we should all get the whip.”

  An angry shudder at her impertinence moves through the other men, but Felix just stares. It’s a terrible risk, speaking to them this way, but she cannot let them know how severely they have limited her power by plowing this field. She cannot let them know how much it would require for her to unleash a true massacre.

  “Don’t remember you being punished so,” Felix says.

  “Don’t much imagine I will be now.”

  “If you had the power of the Devil in you, you’d be gone by now, Virginie Lacroix. What makes you stay, working your trickery on my overseer?”

  The very question she must avoid; to answer in any way would reveal the limitations of her gift, and oh, how those limits have caused her to lie awake nights cursing the God who gave it to her. Why? Why such a tiny drop of power and not the might needed to frighten the white man into seeing the Negro as brother and sister?

  “Can’t have no hanging tree when there’s no trees,” she says.

  “No hanging is planned,” Felix answers.

  “Set me aflame then? Burn me like a witch?”

  “Are you a witch?”

  “They’s ghosts in the soil. I can talk to them. That is my story.”

  “And you can make them dance. We’ve all seen that. Scared my poor wife half to death, that’s for sure.”

  And there it is. His wife. She had seen some evidence of Virginie’s gift over the years, seen the roses she’d brought back to life with a whisper and a touch. Kept the secret to herself as long as it gave her nice flowers. But the other day, she’d been on the second-floor porch, watching Big John get whipped as if it were a nuisance on par with a mosquito in the bedroom, watching the great vine come free from the oak branches like a snake. And now Virginie is in the dark with men who rape her kind without a second thought. Men who have, at present, made no move to immolate or dismember her.

  “What else can you do?” Felix asks, closing the distance between him and the horse that holds her a strange kind of prisoner.

  “Kill me and be done with it,” she says.

  And then I’ll let all hell break loose, ’cause I’ll know I’m dying. I’ll know for sure the pain won’t last forever, she thinks, so I’ll push it as far as I can, and I’ll bring justice from the earth like the other slaves are always begging me to.

  “I have no interest in your death, Virginie. I have brought you here for other reasons.”

  “Name them or be done with me.”

  “A trade, witchy woman,” Felix says. “That’s all. A trade.”

  Blake can see her from where he’s standing on the front porch.

  She’s on her feet inside the solarium, her back to him and the broad, bustling avenue just beyond the house’s fence. There is a strange, diseased-looking slouch to her posture, like she is staring down at something that threatens to draw her so far forward she will lose her balance.

  He has texted her several times—for some reason this feels less intrusive than ringing her doorbell. He hates the thought that his brief, exploratory messages—U OK? Do u need anything? U home?—are what she’s studying with such paralyzed intensity. The longer he watches her and the more she doesn’t move, the harder it is for him not to ring the doorbell a second time. He gives in.

  The doorbell is actually part of the intercom system, and after he hits the button on the brown box next to the front door, he’s forced to stand there and listen to the gentle two-tone electronic chime that’s now emanating from every telephone inside the house.

  He steps back and looks up again. The house has always looked to Blake like a fat, sweating wedding cake. As a child he had recurrent dreams in which its dormers sloughed off like moist icing. Tonight it is lit up with its typical showplace precision behind the short decorative wrought iron fence that marks the quarter of a city block on which it sits, a proud landmark of the avenue, now sheltering a young woman who appears to be in the throes of some sort of nervous collapse . . . and then she collapses for real.

  Years in the ER have familiarized Blake with the speed and intensity of her fall. The back of her hand does not flutter theatrically to her forehead; there is no last-second grab for any hard surface; up one moment, down the next. Total, stone-cold blackout that could be caused by anything from anemia to an aneurysm.

  It is that same experience that springs Blake into action, the past six months of silence rendered irrelevant by a split second.

  He is slaloming down the side yard of the house, past the concrete-framed swimming pool lined with enormous planters and crowned with a sleek chrome-and-concrete waterfall.

  The kitchen and breakfast room have soaring paned windows that reveal the shadowed darkness within. With both hands he lifts the edge of a ceramic planter that once housed geraniums but is now filled with a multicolored arrangement of glass beads. His strength is considerable—it has been for years, thanks to an hour at the gym almost every day since John Fuller’s murder, pressing and p
unching away memories of his killers. But the planter is heavy, and in the few seconds he has to risk using one of his hands to steal the spare key out from under it, the thing almost crashes back to the flagstones—and his fingers.

  But he snatches the spare key up in one hand just in time. Then he’s inside the house, not stopping to hit light switches, racing past the giant mural that covers one wall of the front hallway—Spring House in its glory, beneath a Maxfield Parrish sky of piled-high, purple-fringed clouds so detailed and luminescent that when they were seven, Caitlin was able to convince him you could see them moving if you looked closely enough.

  Even as he races up the stairs, it strikes him how there is almost no evidence of Caitlin’s husband anywhere to be seen. And it’s not like she’s had time to get rid of it. No, this is how the house has always been ever since Caitlin inherited it. It never felt to him like Troy was one of its rightful owners, more like a spirit that took up quiet residence in one corner of its master bedroom. And that presence hasn’t lingered, even so shortly after his disappearance. But something else does, and it urges him onward, toward Caitlin.

  He finds her on the floor of the solarium, facedown where he saw her fall, one arm pinned beneath her, the other twisted elbow-down. It’s not until he has his hands on her, is rolling her onto her back, that Blake realizes she is shaking. Quivering, as if from a small but sustained electrical charge.

  A seizure is his first guess, but none of the other telltale signs are there. The jerking isn’t violent enough for it to be grand mal, and the timeline is all wrong; after this many minutes, she would be in the clonic phase, her arms and legs jerking sporadically, her facial muscles twitching to a different rhythm. He has seen plenty of seizures over the years, and the physical fits were more irregular than the steady full-body quiver that is turning Caitlin Chaisson into Jell-O.

  He scans her for any further physical injuries, and aside from some light, rosy scars on her wrists—they look like day-old scratches left by plants—he can’t find any. So he picks her up in both arms and carries her toward the bedroom, convinced the answer will be found in her medicine cabinet.

  Her vitals are fine, her lips puffing as if she’s trying to whisper something. The choked whispers sound creepy, but they also mean she isn’t in danger of swallowing her tongue, so Blake chooses to see them as a comfort.

  Caitlin has dabbled in various antidepressants over the years, but she’s never been one for tranquilizers or painkillers, or any of the other highly addictive prescriptions people gobble like candy these days. The ones that might cause this kind of reaction.

  He risks leaving her side for a second and scans the bathroom. But it looks untouched. The medicine cabinet doesn’t have a fingerprint on it. He opens it anyway, and as the mirrored door swings open, it reveals Caitlin sitting upright on the bed, staring right at him with a glaze-eyed expression that says she does not find his sudden presence in her bedroom to be a surprise.

  “A trade,” she whispers.

  13

  “So . . . who did it?”

  The three men have been standing inside the ruins of Fort Polk for a few minutes before Kyle Austin decides to break the silence between them. But the joke—if it could be called that—goes over like one of those old Lucky Dog stands in a hurricane, and then the three of them are armored in silence again.

  Wind ripples across the still, swampy waters surrounding the decimated fort where they’ve chosen to meet for the first time in five years, and the crumbling brick walls give way to a night sky laced with low, fast-moving clouds. They’re all staring down at the electric lantern on the dirt floor between them. Scott Fauchier brought the thing, and he’s tried moving it around a few times but it’s no use—every possible angle makes them look like Halloween ghouls.

  “Not funny,” Scott finally says. “Think about it. We’ve got no motive.”

  “Says who?” Mike Simmons asks, and Kyle marvels at how the man’s solid teenage brawn has given way to layers of fat that rival Paul Prudhomme’s. Suddenly he’s imagining Simmons, former football team captain, barking orders at people while he zips around the carpeted offices of his little daddy-financed brokerage firm on one of those fat-people scooters, and he has to bury a laugh in the side of one fist.

  Scott Fauchier, on the other hand, is just as tanned and pretty as he ever was, and he still has a tendency to bat his long golden eyelashes at the rest of them like a cheerleader in search of a date to homecoming. The three men haven’t spoken much of their own volition, not since Troy Mangier tightened the noose around them when they were teenagers. But Fauchier’s pretty mug has been impossible to miss. He’s the poster boy for his own line of health clubs, which means he startles the hell out of Kyle at least once a week by popping up on the sidewall of a bus stop on Veterans Boulevard, shirtless and beaming and holding a folded jump rope over one shoulder as if it were hitched to a wagon full of old tires he was dragging without breaking a sweat.

  “We stopped,” Scott says. “The whole thing . . . he called it off as soon as he became Mrs. Chaisson. I mean, unless he made you guys keep paying. But the last time I—”

  “You know, she’s actually a pretty nice lady,” Kyle interjects.

  “Shut up, dude,” Simmons growls. “Seriously.”

  “No, really. Katie was one of her maids when she was queen of Rex, and said she didn’t let any of it go to her head. Said she was real sweet to every—”

  “Will you shut up, Kyle?” Scott Fauchier says in a pleading tone that makes him sound like a teenager again.

  But Kyle has already clamped his mouth shut. Not because of Scott’s whiny request, but because just mentioning his wife’s name in this secret spot feels like a dark violation. Like leaving her photograph up on the nightstand while boning a hooker in their bed. Which is not something he’s ever done specifically, but he’s done plenty else in his life. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here in the hot, windy dark, one of three former high school heroes turned bitter, drunken slaves to their guilt.

  When Scott Fauchier nervously licks his full lips, Kyle is seized by a jarring, nightmarish image inspired by a faggy prank e-mail one of his nurses sent him once, only now big fat Mike Simmons is the whip-toting, leather-clad freak in the bondage hood and full-lipped Scott Fauchier is the hairless, jockstrap-clad piece of oiled-up flesh, hog-tied at his combat boots. Amazing how badly the e-mail had gotten to him that day—he’d practically fired poor Lenny Jorgensen for sending it, which scared Lenny half to death. They sent joke e-mails around his veterinary practice all the time, mostly Photoshop jobs of Michelle Obama done up like some big-titted African villager. But never any kind of gay shit.

  Never anything that made Kyle see John Fuller tied to the foot of that electrical tower again.

  “Bitch is out of her mind,” Fauchier continues. “That kinda money, it drives a person crazy. Just ask Simmons.”

  “Or lick my balls,” Simmons snaps.

  “No, seriously. I heard Henderson finally cut the cord and she’s been like a shut-in ever since . . .”

  Scott Fauchier realizes his mistake too late. He broke a cardinal rule; he said Blake Henderson’s name aloud.

  Now all three of them are remembering the way the kid sobbed and begged, not for his life but for John Fuller’s. They’re remembering how after they put the two men atop the concrete foot of one of the electrical towers and tied them back-to-back on either side of one of the tower’s spindly metal legs, Blake Henderson started shaking his wrists violently. They’re remembering how at first they thought he was trying to get free, and then they realized he was trying to shake life back into Fuller, who’d gone stone-cold after Simmons delivered the first, too-strong (un-fucking-necessary, if you asked Kyle Austin) blow from a lead pipe that was just supposed to be for show.

  “My point is, it’s been done, fellas,” Scott says, his voice rendered a ragged near whisper by the force o
f memory. “It’s been done for years. He didn’t need our money anymore. Last payment was . . . when?”

  “Five years, for me,” Kyle says, even though he’d rather keep quiet now and watch the other guys slug it out, which has always been his way.

  “Me too,” Simmons grumbles.

  “And me three,” Scott whines. “So seriously . . . can we go now?”

  “Yeah. That’s it. We should just go,” says Simmons, the one who had called them together, the man who, if you asked Kyle Austin, was ultimately responsible for everything going straight to hell that night. “The man who’s got video of us leaving the scene of John Fuller’s murder is either missing or dead, and we’ve got no idea who else has seen the film or where any of the copies are. But you’re right, Fauchier. We should just take a fuckin’ wait-and-see approach. Just let the chips fall—”

  “All right, man. Chill. I didn’t—”

  “—where they fucking may. Or maybe we could just all act like the fucking feather from Forrest Gump, you know? Just drifting here and there and seeing which way the wind takes us.”

  “He’s got a good point, though,” Kyle says.

  “Really? ’Cause I haven’t fucking heard it.”

  “Five years, Simmons.”

  “And he could have started it right up again at any time. That greasy fuck had pussy up and down the Gulf Coast. It was just a matter of time before he got his dick snagged in one and Chaisson kicked him to the curb. This wasn’t fixed, gentlemen. This wasn’t resolved. We were never off the hook even after he stopped making us pay, and don’t either of you forget it. Acting like we were . . . well, it’s a little fucking reckless.”

  “Fine,” Kyle relents. “Then what do we do?”

  “Wait and see if Mangier was actually murdered?” Fauchier tries, feeling like it’s his job to calm Simmons, given that it was his rush to get out of there that made him blow in the first place. “How’s that sound?”

  “Like shit,” Simmons mutters. “That’s how it sounds.”