Read The Tangled Bridge Online
Authors: Rhodi Hawk
The Tangled Bridge
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For Hank
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Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank Sheriff Greg Champagne and his officers at the St. Charles Parish Sheriff's Office for taking time to answer questions and share information about investigative procedures.
Also, my heartfelt gratitude goes out to Joanna McAdam for assistance in getting to the final draft, and to my fellow Candlelighters: Robert Jackson Bennett, David Liss, Joe McKinney, and, of course, Hank Schwaeble.
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Contents
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one
NEW ORLEANS, NOW
ONCE, WHEN SHE WAS
ten, Madeleine brought home pockets full of potatoes she'd found behind the school cafeteria. Mother was already long gone by that time, and Daddy had been away for weeks, so potatoes were a nice break from the usual scrounging. Madeleine and her brother Marc were getting sick of redfish from Bayou Black.
Zenon had come that day, too, escaping his own empty kitchen. He was also their brother, but none of them knew that yet.
That was a good long while ago. Long before they'd learned how to separate their ghosts from their bodies and walk the briar world with its winding, shadowed river. Before Zenon had become a murderer.
Madeleine remembered how she'd stood on the step stool and laid out one potato for Marc, one for Zenon, and the last for herself. All three potatoes were sprouting tails. The boys had watched while Madeleine took the first one and lopped off the end where a long, snaking root had been growing.
“Three blind mice!” Marc had said. “She cut off the tail with a carving knife!”
They'd laughed, all three kids, laughed themselves dizzy over a bunch of sprouted potatoes.
There were no parents around that fall, not anywhere.
Now, two decades later, Madeleine wondered about Marc's baby, out there somewhere, semi-orphaned. The child was most certainly safe, she told herself. Marc was dead, Daddy was dead, and Zenon was as good as dead. The baby's mother had gone and hidden with it somewhere in Nova Scotia. That was good. She should hide. Madeleine didn't want to know where they were.
“Three blind mice!” Marc had said way back when.
She thought of it every time she saw a potato.
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two
NEW ORLEANS, NOW
MADELEINE HAD LAIN DOWN
in her own bed and slept hard, very hard, but when she awoke she was not in her bed. She was in the passenger seat of her truck.
Ethan was asleep behind the steering wheel. They were parked somewhere darkâit didn't look like it was anywhere near Madeleine's place or Ethan's. She rubbed the corners of her eyes, blinking, waiting for sleep to fade so she would recognize where she was. But no, this didn't make sense. She was supposed to be at home in bed.
Is this a dream?
She put her hand on the gearshift, solid and real under her fingers. No dream. Her hair was slick with sweat. Last thing she remembered she was lying in bed, Ethan breathing evenly next to her, and now she was â¦
No idea. She looked through the windshield. Just shy of daylight out there. The truck was parked on a gravel shoulder off some road, beyond which a chain-link fence wrapped around a boat dealer's lot. On the other side, a sharp grassy rise ran along the road like the berm to a sandstone quarry.
She was still wearing her bedclothes: a tank top and drawstring cotton shorts. But there were sandals on her feet. Keys still in the ignition.
In the driver's seat, Ethan groaned and then blinked awake.
“Is the doctor in?” he said.
“Which doctor?”
“Witch doctor! Just my luck.” His eyes were puffy but he was smiling at her.
“What ⦠are we doing here?”
He rubbed his face. “I don't know. We were at your place and sometime in the middle of the night I wake up and you was gone. Found you gettin into the truck.”
She listened, bewildered, trying to dig out a memory from last night:
Tick tick tick tick.
Ethan reached for her and she held his hand to her face, grateful for the comfort of it. Even though she'd grown used to the lapses in timeâa few hours here or thereâthis was the first time she'd truly wandered off.
He said, “Couldn't let you go driving around in your sleep so I took away your keys. But then you just got into the passenger side instead. You told me where to drive you. Don't you remember?”
She hesitated, shaking her head. “I don't ⦠Maybe. What happened after that?”
“Then we drove here.”
“Where's here?”
“The levee, I think. You wanted to go outside, but I wouldn't let you, so you sat there arguing with someone I couldn't see.”
“Who?”
He shrugged. “Couldn't tell, honey. Just assumed it was a river devil. Severin, I guess.”
Madeleine reached over and turned the key so she could roll down the window. The mosquitoes were waiting. They'd been lapping at the dew on the glass. In the fresh predawn breeze, she smelled silt and also something acrid: smoke. Campfire smoke gone cold.
She said, “Hobo fires.”
“Probably, yeah. This part of the levee. What all do you remember?”
“Just ⦠I remember I was looking for something. A bird.”
She frowned, because that wasn't entirely true. She wasn't just looking.
She said, “But that was ⦠you know, briar. River devils. I didn't realize my actual flesh-and-blood body was in on it.”
“Well, maybe it's just a plain old case of sleepwalking.”
She looked away. Sleepwalking! Wouldn't it be nice if it was as simple as that?
Her gaze swept the grassy rise. At the top, an asphalt bike trail formed a spine along the levee's ridge. It looked like a beast curled around the Mississippi River. Streetlights illuminated only the trail and left everything beyond it in darkness.
She couldn't see over the rise, down to the underbelly. Down there, she knew, was the reason she'd come here. The tick-tock bird. Something had gone terribly wrong down on that river, somewhere among those hobo camps.
Ethan said, “Well, baby blue, I guess we oughtta head back now.”
He raised his hand to the ignition, but she stopped him. His eyes flickered. He was feigning puzzlement, but he knew good and well they weren't done here.
She said, “I'm sorry, honey. You know we gotta check it out.”
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NO REASON TO BE
cold, but she was. There had been a sweatshirt behind the seat, which she now hugged close around her even though there was no chill to the air. Damp, yes, without being hot nor cold. It'd be hot as soon as the sun came up. Real hot.
As they ascended toward the hike-and-bike trail, Ethan reached for her hand, and in doing so brought more warmth than the sweatshirt had. Their sandals left dew printsâdotted parallels from Madeleine and a dot-dash that matched Ethan's limp. A high school football injury had once put him in a wheelchair with little hope of ever walking again. But as he'd worked through college, his muscles slowly responded to relentless physical therapy until he got to the point where he could walk on his own. Now a limp and the occasional ache were all that remained.
He said, “I don't like it. It's dangerous.”
“I can use pigeonry if I have to.”
He gave her a sidelong glance.
Behind them, a neighborhood lay hushed in the day's first glow: shotgun cottages and potholed streets bathed in amethyst. The Mississippi was just a stretch of blackness ahead.
They reached the asphalt spine and she scanned the river's edge. The camps were likely somewhere in the black woods along the banks below and to the left. Overhead, an electrical tower supported a network of wires, and beyond that the pumping station routed pipes from the river. They continued moving down the slope toward what her nose judged to be a bog.
Three blind mice â¦
The rhyme was stuck in her head now, but that was the point, wasn't it? Music calms the savage breast. Usually worked to distract Severin. Too bad it had to be a blood rhyme. Always a blood rhyme.