The Tangled Bridge (54 page)

And then at once she had him. He was there in her arms. He pulled her into him so tight she let go her breath and just held, not breathing, not seeing, not even thinking. Just holding. His face was in her hair. They slipped beneath the surface and for one still moment, formed a single interlocking shape. Entangled in mind and heart. Suspended in water and silence and darkness.

 

sixty-nine

LOUISIANA, NOW

HE'D TAKEN HER TO
Terrefleurs. They lay together in a double sleeping bag inside one of the old workers' cabins. They'd made love and wrapped themselves around one another in sweet aching relief after having been separated for so long and under such ghastly conditions. But sleep eluded them. Madeleine listened to the sound of Ethan's soft, easy breathing as they lay with limbs intertwined, his finger tracing a figure eight over her arm, back and forth, back and forth.

In the next cabin, they could still hear Bo and Ray as they talked and probably signed to each other, their voices conspiratorial.

Ethan had been telling Madeleine how they finally found her. After Bo had claimed he knew the direction in which Madeleine was hidden, Ethan had used a method of triangulation to pinpoint her whereabouts. Bo located Madeleine by clicking from a point at Terrefleurs in Hahnville, and Ethan marked it with a straight line across the map. Then, Bo did the same thing from Donaldsonville, and Ethan marked that line across the same map. The point where the two lines intersected was where they found her.

“I'm just glad the boy was right,” Ethan said.

“What would you have done if he was mistaken?”

Ethan shrugged. “Kept lookin. Bo's gut sense was all I had to go on, Honey. I was at my wit's end. Helped that we knew Chloe was near here.”

Ethan had told Madeleine about how Oran led investigators to find Chloe, holed up in “some godforsaken house,” unconscious and near death. She'd been rushed to the hospital where she was being kept alive through an artificial breathing apparatus and kidney support. Apparently she also had a very clear living will in place—that the medical staff go to any means necessary to keep her alive.

“But when you made it to Gaston's
cyprière
I wasn't even there. I'd … left.”

She still hadn't told him about all that happened. She'd recounted her experience in broad strokes—how it had begun with Chloe and the scratch poisons, and then the floating shanty, and how she'd found Gaston, but she had yet to go into detail.

Ethan said, “Yeah, well, ole Bo was worried when his clickin didn't find you. But the triangulation method had given us a fixed point, and the GPS gave us a way to get to that point, and when we found that weird little shanty I figured you'd at least been there. By dawn, you were already back.”

She listened to the sounds of the night, the sounds of Terrefleurs, so much like her own Bayou Black and Gaston's
cyprière.
The sleeping bag was open so as to cool them off a bit. Their bodies smelled like sweat and citronella, the latter of which Ethan had stocked in heroic supplies.

Madeleine said, “It's surreal, being here at Terrefleurs. Like we're on a camping trip.”

Ethan gave her thigh a squeeze. “Yeah, well, I'm in good with the owner of this joint.”

She smiled, snuggling deeper into him.

He said, “This is actually the perfect spot. Zenon can't send pigeons out this way as easily as he can in New Orleans. And if he does, it's a lot easier to protect the property than anywhere in the city.”

True enough. As soon as Ethan had brought Madeleine and the boys back to Terrefleurs in the borrowed Four Winns, he'd spent the rest of the afternoon “reinforcing the camp,” and had insisted Madeleine and the boys stay within ten feet of him the entire time he worked.

Bo's and Ray's voices kept drifting in and out on the breeze. Madeleine could still see a spark through the boarded wall where their lantern glowed. They kept it on so Ray could see Bo signing.

Madeleine said, “I'm worried about Ray, with his mother gone. What's going to happen to him?”

“I don't know, baby blue. Right now I'm just trying to make sure we all survive the next twenty-four hours.”

Madeleine thought this over. “We need to see Chloe.”

“She's in the hospital at St. Charles Parish.”

“I know. I just need to see her.”

“Why? Honey, it's not safe. There's nothing to see. She's just lying there, unresponsive.”

Madeleine didn't immediately comment on that, and they fell to silence for a moment.

Then, Ethan said, “You want to see if she's in there somewhere.”

She squeezed him, thinking, flipping through possibilities. Scattered leaves in her mind.

He said, “I understand why you want to go, but the thing with public places, so long as Zenon's at large, or his mind's at large, or his godawful pigeons are at large…”

She said, “I know. You got a look at her, right?”

“Yeah. Brain activity is reduced. She looks all sunk into herself like a crawfish chimney that got baked down from the sun.”

He paused, and then: “Sounds an awful lot like Zenon's situation.”

“Before he disappeared.”

The notion hung in the air, transparent and drifting. Two people bedridden and physically unresponsive. Both of them, manipulators of the briar—one from within and the other from without. Each drawing loyalty among the river devils.

Madeleine said, “They're going after Cooper. Without me or Gaston, Cooper's the only one who can tip the balance.”

They said nothing further, and instead listened to the night.

 

seventy

LOUISIANA, NOW

JASMINE WAS BARKING
.

Madeleine opened her eyes. Sunlight flooded in through seams in the wood at the doorjamb and along the roofline. They'd slept later than she'd wanted. Something disconcerting in the thought that dawn might have slipped by them unnoticed.

Ethan gave two squinty blinks and then lurched upright, grabbing his transmitter. He regarded the screen, then relaxed. “Just the wildlife. No trespassers.”

Jasmine's barking had grown furious.

“Leave me alone, Jazz!” they heard Bo say beyond the cabin walls.

Ethan went to the door, stepping out onto the thin porch into the morning glare, not a stitch on him.

“What is it?” Madeleine said.

But Ethan shouted, “Bo! Don't move!”

“What?” she heard the boy say.

Jasmine continued to rage.

Madeleine was already scrambling out of the sleeping bag and pulling on some shorts and a tee from the canvas tote full of clothes Ethan had packed for her. “What's going on out there?”

But she saw it. An alligator stood at the foot of the porch steps at the cabin Bo and Ray shared. Madeleine gave a nervous smile. The creatures were really only dangerous when provoked.

Bo clicked, turning his head from side to side. “Shut up, Jazz, I can't hear'm when you're hollering like that.”

“Just stay right there, son.” Ethan said, and turned to put on a pair of jeans.

Bo said above Jasmine's barking, “I got to pee.”

“Wait for Ethan, honey,” Madeleine said.

“What's out there, a bunch of pigs?”

She laughed into her hand. “A green leather pig. With big teeth.”

“Alligator!”

He clicked like mad. The general lack of concern seemed to calm Jasmine, and she now sounded more like she was talking to it and less like she was threatening it. The alligator lay grinning and motionless. Now dressed, Ethan hopped over the railing and crossed the twelve-foot divide to the boys' cabin.

But that's when it sunk in:
What's out there, a bunch of pigs?
Bo had said.

Madeleine looked across the yard and saw a second alligator, resting like a fallen oak branch next to a rain barrel.

“Look, there's another one,” she said, but her mind had already zeroed in on a third beast, over by the other cabin, and then another and another. It seemed alligators were everywhere.

Ethan had taken Jasmine under one arm and was brandishing a huge golf umbrella (“baby blue, you can't imagine the hell of trying to keep a blind kid and wheelchair-bound deaf kid dry during a cloudburst”) at the alligator that had started all the fuss. The thing didn't budge. Looked dead, almost.

“Ethan,” Madeleine said, gesturing out toward the yard.

He finally looked up and followed her gaze. She counted thirteen of them. And even as she stared at the lumps of “green leather pigs” strewn about as if they'd fallen from the sky, she finally spotted the real pigs. Wild boar. Five of them. Black and hairy with almond-shaped eyes and tusks that looked like wood. Bo must have spread his clicks across the clearing and spotted them right away, their shapes more easily discernible than the alligators.

Madeleine watched them moving among the trees that were tangled with kudzu vine and poison ivy. Hogs are easy enough to sneak up on when the wind is in your favor because they have such poor eyesight. But between all the barking and shouting they should have scattered. Madeleine pulled her gaze from them, back to Ethan.

“Do me a favor, baby blue,” Ethan said, though his gaze never left the clearing.

He was taking in each creature one by one, and then he lifted his gaze to the treetops. Madeleine looked, too.

Crows. Thousands perched in the branches as though they might have bloomed there.

Closer in, atop the cabin rooftops and roosting along the fractured staircase of the main house were grackles and starlings. No chatter; all stood silent. The only sound was Bo's incessant clicking and Jasmine's growl-whine where she stood tucked under Ethan's elbow.

Madeleine swallowed. “What kind of favor would that be, honey?”

“Would you kindly grab my boots?”

She turned to look at him and stared for half a tick, then swept her gaze over the strange gathering again and went back into the cabin. Ethan's boots lay at the foot of the sleeping bags, his gray tee-shirt draped over one of them. She grabbed the boots and tossed aside the shirt, then paused. The top of the right boot had been cut down several inches lower than the left. The handle of a pistol rose up over it, and she could smell freshly cut leather from the new holster sewn inside.

Madeleine went back out onto the porch and held them up for Ethan to see. “A few days in the holler and you've gone native.”

But as she started down the steps, Ethan said, “Wait!”

“Wait what?”

“Wait for me.”

“Honey.”

“Baby blue, I know you can take care a yourself but just indulge me. Alright?”

She sighed. At the base of the cottage steps and off to the right a bit she saw yet another alligator. Small and vicious-looking. It's the little ones that are the most aggressive. She hadn't noticed it earlier but then again they were built to be camouflaged. Or maybe it had just now crept up.

Ethan had left the boys' cabin and was reaching for her through the stiles of the porch. She handed him the boots.

He said, “Don't use the steps, alright? Just jump on over the side.”

He put the boots on the boys' porch while Madeleine climbed up onto the rail, feeling extremely foolish.

“What, you figure a bunch of crows and gators're about to lay siege upon us?”

She gave a nervous laugh but Ethan was frowning. “Wouldn't be the strangest thing that happened since this mess started.”

“You gonna shoot them
all
?”

“I hope I don't have to shoot
any
.”

Bo said, “I still gotta pee. Real bad.”

“Just go off the side,” Ethan said.

And when Bo stepped forward, Ethan said, “The
other
side. Please.”

Bo turned his back to them and wasted no time. Ethan reached up to Madeleine and she put her hands to his shoulders for support and jumped off the porch ledge and down onto the ground.

The moment her feet hit the soft earth, everything started to move.

Madeleine gave a startled cry. The alligators, the birds, the hogs, and all the other things that must have been lying in wait, too, but were hidden, each of them advanced. A bobcat emerged onto the roof of a neighboring cottage. Owls. All moving. All of them. No sound other than the rustling of leather and claws and hooves and wings.

Ethan scooped Madeleine up off her feet and had her over at the boys' cabin in a solid second, hoisting her onto the porch and climbing up after her.

The creatures went still again.

Madeleine looked at Ethan. They were both out of breath, as though they'd just completed a quarter-mile sprint.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“I didn't. I was just being careful.”

A single tuft of down swirled in a lazy circle and then landed on the railing. The two alligators that had been nearest were now both resting in the twelve-foot expanse between the cabins. The little one watched with a wide yellow eye, the pupil a thin sliver. The big one all but fell asleep.

Oblivious to the entire incident, probably because he hadn't been clicking while he was peeing, Bo went back into the cabin and reported the one single alligator to Ray, signing and talking simultaneously.

“Ray needs to pee, too!” Bo called.

“Be right there,” Ethan said, and then quietly to Madeleine, “Any idea what's going on here?”

“I have a suspicion.”

She stared at the smaller gator, focusing on that slit bisecting its golden eye.

Go back to the swamp,
she told it from within her mind, from within
its
mind.

The creature did not budge. Her suggestion caught no hold.

She turned away from it and focused on a bird instead—an owl that watched from beneath the eaves of the main house. It stared at her as though furious. But the result was the same.