The Book of the Unwinding Read online

  He was the reason Evangeline was standing in front of her mirror, attacking her hair with her new rotating round brush dryer. Hugo had made it clear that he wasn’t letting up, so today she’d go in to Bonnes Nouvelles, if only to kick his ass.

  At first, Hugo had just come around himself to nag her.

  Then he’d risked sending a couple of the dancers by. Evangeline had stopped them at the door.

  “Girl, you need to let it out,” Samantha had counseled her. “Have a good cry.”

  “Girl,” Brie had said, mimicking Samantha’s inflection, “you need to get right back in the saddle and find yourself a new man. Your old one, well, honey, he was too old for you anyway. He sure wasn’t worth all of . . .” She craned her neck and looked around Evangeline’s shoulder at the already deteriorating condition of the house. “. . . all of this.”

  “Right,” Evangeline responded through gritted teeth, “just when I thought we’d pass the Bechdel test.”

  Her visitors stared at each other blankly. Brie shrugged. Samantha took her hand. “Oh, honey. I’m sorry, but I’m sure your doctor can give you something to clear that up.”

  Evangeline had promised to come into the club the next day, lying to get them to leave her front steps without hurting their feelings. That was going on two months ago.

  A parade of casual acquaintances had joined the assault next.

  A trickle, then a stream, of regulars from Bonnes Nouvelles. “Not the same without you around, E. C. You get better, and you get on back to us.”

  Andrea from her book club, bearing a copy of the month’s selection, now last month’s.

  Even Miss LaLaurie Mansheon, the formidable drag queen bouncer who’d once chastised her for not teaching Hugo better manners—hello, irony—had shown up in full regalia at her door. The fancy new dryer Evangeline now held had come as part of the care package LaLaurie had pulled together at Hugo’s—Evangeline felt sure—persuasive behest.

  “A little pick-me-up,” LaLaurie had said, setting the basket down at her feet and backing away like she was making an offering to an angry god, or trying to earn the trust of a wounded animal.

  That second one rang a bit too true.

  Evangeline finished with the dryer. Her hair was still nothing but a knotted mass of split ends. “Can your conditioner hold up to therianthropy?” She spoke the words aloud in her best commercial model voice. Therianthropy. The ability to change into animal form. A new word for her vocabulary. A new word she’d rather not have learned.

  She sat the dryer down and riffled through the gift basket, the pink—yes, pink—cellophane it’d come wrapped in now on her bathroom floor, joining a week’s worth of towels and washcloths. A week’s worth that had been lying there for nearly two months.

  Cruelty-free makeup. At least Hugo paid attention. Still, it was a good thing LaLaurie, with her knowledge of cosmetics, had pulled the gift together. Hugo may have picked up on her horror of animal testing, but he wasn’t the kind of gay to know how to choose a quality brand. Her luck to be saddled with the only gay in three states who couldn’t even help pick out an outfit. Hugo always delivered the same bored “as good as the last three” type comments you’d expect from a straight guy.

  When unannounced visits from acquaintances hadn’t helped Hugo meet his desired end, he’d started sending around absolute strangers to annoy her. To make it less painful to come out than to stay in.

  Canvassers. Pollsters.

  Magazine sellers bearing clipboards that held both order forms and reference letters from some unknown agency guaranteeing the salespeople were neither identity thieves nor murderers.

  Two realtors. We heard you were considering selling. Market’s hot.

  A well-groomed couple wearing modest, boxy, pastel apparel and offering copies of The Watchtower.

  Girl Scouts. She’d ordered three boxes of each flavor like Hugo had promised them she would. Son of a bitch.

  Innocuous, sweet-faced teenage boys wearing matching sweat-dampened short-sleeved white shirts and long black pants.

  An admittedly hot UPS guy who delivered empty boxes three days in a row.

  And the assault had continued this morning with Fleur’s visit.

  Drift. Associate. Enumerate. Drift.

  Evangeline’s mind kept on chattering. Jumping from one item on the list to another. Making as much noise as it could.

  It wasn’t loud enough.

  There in her own reflection, she saw a dark speck in her right eye, the creature in her looking out, watching her.

  Evangeline slammed her balled fists into the mirror over and over again, cracking the glass, not caring if she cut herself, hoping she would, wanting to feel anything other than the cold, gnawing certainty that the world was coming to an end. That good and evil had duked it out, and she’d been on the losing side. Darkness was now creeping around, swallowing each and every glimmer of light.

  She’d lost control of everything. Even of what happened to her own body.

  She slid down to the cold, hard tile, wrapping her arms around her legs and rocking back and forth. Just as she started to call out for Sugar, she remembered she’d sent her poor old baby girl away. She couldn’t have kept her. The first time Evangeline had transformed in her presence, the animal mind quickly gained the upper hand, and she found herself wondering how the cat might taste.

  She went up on her knees and flipped open the toilet seat, sending the gift basket sailing into the tub. She clutched the porcelain bowl and leaned over it, retching and heartbroken at the memory. Mama’s sorry. Mama’s sorry. The words repeated in her head until her stomach settled, until her breathing slowed.

  Get up, get up.

  She took a deep breath and forced herself up on wobbly legs. She pressed the flush and let the seat slam closed.

  Evangeline bent over the tub, fishing through the basket’s spilled contents for eyeliner and mascara. She found them and turned back to the cracked mirror, only then thinking to check her hands for cuts. Not even a tiny one, as though some force in the universe was taking care of her. Or, a more likely scenario, flexing its muscles to prove its total control over her. She went up on her toes, leaning in to view her reflection in one of the larger islands of cracked glass, and started applying the makeup by rote. Her body carried her through the well-practiced actions.

  She took one more look in the mirror, then turned her eyes down to inspect her outfit, the only clothes she had that could even pass for clean. She grimaced at the cutoff shorts she’d found wadded up at the back of her closet’s top shelf and the Baker-Miller pink tank top emblazoned with the words “Maid of Honor.” She’d gotten the shirt at a former employee’s second—no, third—wedding, when she’d been asked to step in at the last minute for the real maid of honor, whose car had broken down outside Montgomery, Alabama. The shorts, she used to dance in, way back in the day. About the only thing going right was that her thirty-something ass still managed to fit into her twenty-something pants. She used that thought as fuel to carry her through her silent house and out the door.

  Evangeline stepped over the threshold of the house and pulled the door closed behind her. Two steps down, she froze. The light was dazzling. She realized she hadn’t been outside—not in daylight, not as herself—for months. She held her hand up to her eyes to block the light, stumbling down the last couple of steps. Sweat beaded all over her body and her heart started trying to beat its way out of her chest. She heard a pounding in her ears, irregular, frenetic. Alien and familiar in the same instance. It was her own pulse. And it was also the pulse of the darkness that had swallowed Marceline whole. She spun around, readying herself to run back up her steps. To fling open her door and dive into the cool safety of her house.

  A horn blared behind her, and she realized she was standing in the dead center of St. Ann Street. She turned toward the sound. A heavy-duty pickup revved its engine behind her. There was something familiar about the truck. The name Perrault in white on the green hood a
lmost triggered a connection, but her head was throbbing, her vision blurring on the edges.

  The guy on the passenger side leaned out the window. “Wake up, you damn bitch,” he said and took off his green ball cap to wave it at her.

  “Hey, baby doll,” the driver shouted out. “When I said I would hit that, this isn’t what I meant.”

  Both men started laughing, but when Evangeline didn’t clear out of the way, the passenger called out. “Maybe you need a little encouragement?” He looked over at the driver, grinning. Evangeline picked up on his feelings more than his words. They were dark and ugly.

  Then the driver pounded on his horn. Again. And again. Each sounding a bit longer, a tad angrier.

  The noise hurt Evangeline’s ears.

  Enough.

  Her head tilted to the side, and every window in the truck shattered. There was a moment of silence, then the glass fell like a gentle rain into the truck’s cab, covering but not harming either man. Evangeline smiled. Both men had chalky faces and eyes as big as silver dollars. “Gentlemen,” she said, and laughed. If she hadn’t heard the sound coming from her own lips, she would never have recognized it. A high-pitched cackle that made the group of onlookers scatter.

  That felt good, didn’t it?

  She carried on down the center of St. Ann Street till she reached Bourbon. For the first time in a long time she felt normal. “Yes,” she spoke aloud. “That felt very good.”

  NINE

  Nathalie jolted wide awake. A horn was blaring, and she grabbed the wheel and stomped the brake. Only then did she remember that she was sitting parked on the block of St. Ann Street between Burgundy and Dauphine. Right on the heels of that recollection came another memory, that of helping Frank Demagnan put a pistol to his temple and pull the trigger. She’d helped the man kill himself.

  No, that couldn’t be right. He must have been dead already. His head had been taken clean off and stuck on backward. The thing that had dragged itself into his study might have been moving, aware even, but it sure wasn’t alive. Not in any regular sense.

  Just like her mama had always warned her would happen, she’d opened herself up to magic, and dark magic had found her. There was no denying what she’d witnessed was the worst kind, the kind her daddy’s family used to say could get a witch “put down,” things like resurrection spells or stealing the vital force of children to extend your own life. She couldn’t imagine what Frank had gotten up to that would make someone want to do what had been done to him. She couldn’t imagine any crime that he could’ve committed to justify it. Frank’s killer was a monster, no doubt, but Nathalie took it as cold comfort that it clearly wasn’t her monster. Had the killer been Babau Jean, she didn’t harbor a single doubt that she would’ve been flopping on the floor right beside Frank.

  Still, Nathalie hadn’t gone home last night. She’d been too freaked out to be alone, half certain the police would show up at her door, and dead-on certain that if they did, she’d end up in the criminal ward at East Louisiana State Hospital, wrapped up in a straitjacket and wearing one of those masks that kept inmates from biting staff.

  Yes, detective, I was there. No. I don’t usually go into his private quarters, but a strange cat led me . . . No, I know there was no cat. It disappeared right before zombie Frank crab-walked into the room.

  Nathalie hated lying. She tried not to, and when she caught herself in the middle of a lie, she always fessed up. Well, almost always. But, dammit, there were times . . . and this was sure one of them. She’d have to face the law sooner or later, and it might just take a gargantuan whopper to land her clear of this one.

  The horn blared again, pulling her out of the interrogation scenario she’d imagined at least six times now, about five seconds before the bad cop made his appearance. She turned the key in the ignition and rolled down the window. The radio news channel came on—she’d been listening to it all night while she drove around, wishing she knew where she could get her hands on one of those police scanner radios. Pick up on whether anyone—anyone else, that is—had discovered Frank’s body. Maybe there was an app she could get? She glanced at her phone lying dead on top of the folded Demagnan Mortuary suit jacket that rested on the seat beside her. She’d left her charger in the Demagnan hearse. She’d have to stop by a store to buy a new one, as soon as she felt sure her photo hadn’t been shared on every channel and on the front page of the Picayune.

  She flicked the radio off and stuck her head out the window to get a better view of what was going on. About half a block down, she spotted a white commercial pickup with an attached trailer sitting right at the intersection, in the middle of the street. The driver must’ve been having some kind of meltdown, because he banged on the horn again, playing it like he was Gabriel warming up his chops for Judgment Day.

  Then the noise stopped.

  She could sense a dark energy rising, feel that something wrong was about to happen. She caught herself holding her breath and wishing the badness away, reaching, she realized, for the photograph she’d taken from Demagnan’s like it was a good luck piece. Was it her talent for reading people’s natures or just wishful thinking that made her take this as another sign of Alice’s innocence?

  A shower of falling glass.

  Nathalie startled, then rubbed her tired eyes, because from this distance it looked like every single window in the truck had caved in all at once. Then came a sound that imitated laughter, but held no joy. The cackle—that was the word—sent shivers down her spine badly enough that if the one-way street hadn’t been blocked by the truck, she would’ve fired up the engine and gotten the heck out of there.

  For now, she was stuck, so she waited, watching as a group of pedestrians took off in every direction away from the truck. They were following, it seemed, her own instinct for flight.

  Everything fell still for a good sixty or so seconds, then the doors on the truck’s cab flung open. First the passenger, then the driver piled out, dancing around, brushing themselves off, examining their arms and legs.

  Her first thought was to go to the guys and see if they needed any help, but she could already hear the scream of sirens approaching. Anywhere else in the city, it might’ve taken at least fifteen minutes, maybe even half an hour, for the police presence to show up, but the French Quarter was how this town ate. The serving and protecting got done with a much greater sense of urgency around here. When the police got here, they’d most likely be looking around for potential witnesses. But she wasn’t a witness. Not really. She couldn’t offer up even the slightest insight. She rolled up the window and slipped down in her seat, ducking low, hoping to go unnoticed.

  In a bizarre incident today, the still unexplained, simultaneous shattering of a commercial truck’s windows led to the discovery of the city’s most gruesome murder scene since the infamous Axeman’s spree.

  Wait, a realization broke into her imagined news bulletin. That was it.

  The song playing on Frank’s turntable was “The Axman’s Jazz.” Its composer had been inspired enough by the mass murderer’s activity to write the sick ditty, but not enough to learn the correct spelling of the murderer’s alias.

  “Don’t Scare Me Papa.” That was the other name for the tune.

  She had a flash of her father’s great-uncle, the one who told fortunes, saying he was going to play a tune just for little Nat. His eyes had gone glassy and his lips had twisted up into a maniacal smile as he sawed the tune on his fiddle. She’d been terrified by the old man and his music. She remembered sobbing into her father’s arms as he carried her from the parlor out to the porch.

  Nathalie shuddered and sat up straight. At that very moment, a patrol car crept past her. The officer on the passenger side was watching out his window. His sharp eyes met hers, but the white Crown Victoria continued past.

  Down the street, the truck’s passenger was making himself busy, sweeping glass out of the truck cab into a large gray garbage can. She strained her eyes to make out the name stenc
iled on its side.

  Perrault.

  Well, damn.

  All of a sudden being right here, right now, felt a lot less like random chance.

  The can looked pretty full by the way the man strained as he dragged it behind the truck and hefted it up onto the trailer. One of the patrolmen was talking to the truck’s driver, but the other officer, the one who’d spotted her, stepped around him and started coming her way, his walk the confident mosey of authority.

  Well, double damn.

  Nathalie plastered a blank-eyed and innocent expression on her face. Why no, officer. Didn’t see a thing. Only pulled in a moment before you. Some kind of disturbance?

  The policeman had come close enough that she could hear the sudden squawk of his radio. The officer stopped, his gaze fixed on Nathalie, even as he bent his head to speak into the mic that rode his shoulder like a flat, black, plastic parrot. “Yeah.” She half heard him, half read his lips. “We’re on that code fifty-five. St. Ann and Burgundy.” Squawk. His eyes widened. “Okay, we’re on our way.”

  He turned back. Curious, Nathalie opened her SUV’s door so she could better make out what was going on. “Multiple thirty Uptown,” she heard him call out to his partner. “You guys,” he addressed the truck’s driver and passenger as he walked back toward them, “need to take this thing up to Rampart Street and call yourselves a tow. Don’t you be trying to drive it any farther than that.”

  “You heard him,” his partner said to the driver, who was still circling the truck, red-faced and shouting that he’d get the bitch who did this if they didn’t get her first. It was his buddy who followed the officer’s orders. He climbed in behind the wheel and started the truck’s engine. The original driver kept on shouting they were both going to get fired, but still he opened the passenger door and climbed in. The truck headed right on Dauphine. If its occupants intended to follow the officer’s orders, another right would point them back to Rampart Street.