Now, reliving the instant, Sloane would give anything to take back that little burst of spite. But of course she can’t. Her mother and Odessa have both gone where she can’t rescue them, across the River, where not even the smallest of her little cruelties and betrayals can be redeemed.
And it just doesn’t—it can’t ever, ever, ever—get any better than this.
SLOANE fell to her knees, grabbing the doll. It was as if the little girl had somehow slammed into a bruise Sloane didn’t know she had, one carried in her core, deep inside the circle of her ribs. She gasped at the shock of feeling again.
I can’t be here. This is too much. I can’t stand it. I can’t be here.
“Let me go!” the doll hissed, struggling and kicking. She jabbed at Sloane and just missed skewering her with something—a long hairpin. Sloane could remember losing it a year ago.
“That little brat drew blood,” Kyle said, hobbling out of the closet and rubbing his knee.
The doll bucked and twisted like a mad cat in Sloane’s hands. “I want to see Aunt Odessa!”
“You’re an hour late and a bullet short. Stop fussing.” The girl answered with a yell and a kick. Kyle slapped the child hard across the back of the head. She grunted and went still. “That’s better,” Kyle said.
The doll with Sloane’s heart inside was white and shaking, but instead of crying she turned and eyed Kyle with white hate. “My grandfather is going to get you for that.”
“Tell him to take a number.” Kyle grimaced, rubbing at his knee again. “Where the hell did you come from?”
The doll acted and spoke like a child of eight or nine, but she was no bigger than a four-year-old, with very fine bones, wiry muscles, and the heft of a big cat. “My grandfather left me to stay with Aunt Odessa this afternoon. He has a very busy day today.”
“What granddaddy would that be?”
Sloane squeezed the little girl’s arms and willed her to lie, but she didn’t. “Momus,” the doll said contemptuously.
AS Jane fusses with the birthday picnic, Odessa is looking out to sea, watching the chuckleheaded pelicans flap low across the wave tops and then land in their comical way, sticking their long beaks suddenly into the surf and falling over them. She grins. “Fifty million years of evolution for that?”
Sloane is studying a piece of birthday cake. The Grand Duchess of the Krewe of Momus watches nervously as she takes a bite. It’s a pecan pound cake, crumbly and dry, not nearly as nice as something Sarah or Odessa would make. Sloane reckons her mother has tried to substitute rice flour from an old recipe without knowing to use extra eggs or syrup to hold the cake together. “Do you like it, honey?” Jane says.
Odessa looks for all the world to be entirely fascinated by the pelicans—but as Sloane opens her mouth to speak, her godmother’s fingernails gouge sharply into her back, completely hidden from Jane’s view. Sloane suppresses a shriek. “Great!” she squeaks in a spray of crumbs.
Sloane can tell her mother wants to believe her but can’t quite manage it. “Really?”
More gouging. “Really, really great.” Sloane’s imagination stalls. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and forces herself to swallow the mouthful of desiccated pecan cake. “Um. Can I have something to drink, please?”
As Jane reaches for the Thermos, Odessa tickles Sloane in the ribs. The girl shrieks and thrashes, mussing the tablecloth until there’s sand everywhere, laughing and laughing. Her mother smiles awkwardly and looks on, not quite sure how to join in. Then, disaster—Odessa gasps. “Oh, Jane! Honey, I knocked over your beautiful cake!” She abandons Sloane and fusses over the fallen cake, trying in vain to blow the sand off it. She looks ridiculous, with her bum waggling high in the air, blowing like she’s trying to stoke a fire, and pretty soon the frown that had started to form on Jane’s face breaks into a smile. It’s a wonderful performance by Odessa, and Sloane, who knows exactly what is going on, admires it enormously.
Finally Odessa looks up, crestfallen, her woebegone eyes made sadder with mascara, her lips vivid as Indian paintbrush. Jane laughs out loud. “Oh, you,” Odessa says, and she leans across Sloane and tickles Jane this time, hands squirming under the Grand Duchess’s grey jacket, making her fall back on the sand until she’s wheezing and begging for mercy and her shirt pulls out of the waistband of her pants, showing little glimpses of skin. Finally the witch stops her onslaught. Jane’s eyes are teary with laughter; she doesn’t see the way Odessa is looking at her. It’s a strange, vulnerable look: Odessa’s red mouth is smiling, but her eyes are full of loss and longing. Sloane sees the look, but only sixteen years later, as she picks up the doll and turns away from Odessa’s bedroom, does she begin to understand it.
I can’t be here.
The doll wrapped around Sloane like a limpet, all knees and elbows, as if she could hide from Kyle by burrowing into Sloane’s body. “What’s your name?” Sloane murmured.
“Scarlet. I want ’Dessa!”
Jim Ford and Sheriff Denton looked up as Sloane came back into the kitchen. Jim blinked. “Sloane, who is that child?”
“Reveller,” Kyle said. “The Recluse made her. She claims Momus is her grandfather.”
Sheriff Denton’s eyes narrowed. “We’ve had enough magic,” he said.
Sloane watched, terrified, as his hand settled on the butt of his .38. “She’s a child!”
The older man licked his lips. “She’s a monster,” he said.
Scarlet went rigid in Sloane’s arms. Her eyes grew wide and she pointed wordlessly at Odessa’s body, lying next to the trapdoor in the kitchen floor. “I know,” Sloane whispered.
I can’t be here.
I can, said Sly.
“There, there,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly light and careless. Definitely Sly’s voice. “Hush-a-by, baby. The nasty man over there shot your aunt Odessa,” she said, pointing instructively at Sheriff Denton.
Scarlet’s mouth trembled. Her china-doll eyes went wide and filled with tears. Her breath shook. She had the most astonishingly expressive face. Thoughts and feelings chased across it pell-mell, clear as fish flicking in a bowl. Sloane felt one corner of her mouth turn up in a sardonic smile. The kid wouldn’t make much of a card player with those tells. “Come along,” she said, putting Scarlet down and taking her hand. “Time to say bye-bye to Aunt ’Dessa.” Scarlet shook her head and buried her face in Sloane’s grey cotton skirt. Sloane tsked. “Now, Scarlet,” she said reprovingly, “we always say goodbye to someone when they leave. It’s manners.” She peeled the child off her leg and together they crouched beside the dead witch.
“Sloane, what are you—?”
“Be quiet, Jim.”
Yes, even without wearing the mask she definitely had a touch of Sly back. The high blank hum helped steady her. (Christ, how much of that feeling was pure rage.) She bowed her head over her godmother’s corpse. “Our Heavenly Father,” she said, not really caring who heard her prayer, Momus or the Jesus Odessa had learned about in Sunday school. Anyone who would avenge her was good enough. “Take care of your daughter as she comes to join you. Forgive the sins she committed, but not those committed against her. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.”
Sloane opened her eyes to see the blood-spattered Sheriff Denton doll still clutched in Odessa’s dead hand. Her grin broadened. Now that’s what I call a sign. “And as for you,” she said, turning to Jeremiah Denton, “somebody needs to learn you to play nice.”
In a single smooth movement she grabbed the Sheriff Denton doll by one warm leg, spun, and pitched it, thinly shrieking, through the trapdoor. It tumbled down into the water, hit with a flat smack, and disappeared. A desperate cry ripped out of Sheriff Denton’s throat. He dropped to his knees beside the trapdoor, staring down in horror.
“Good Christ,” Jim whispered. “Girl, what have you done?”
“Serves him right,” Scarlet said.
They all watched as the doll bobbed up.
Its tiny fingers clenched and opened. Its bloody head twisted and turned to stay above water. The faint swell had begun to strengthen. Sloane recognized the low mutter of distant thunder. The heat lightning must be coming closer. Sheriff Denton’s face was grey as he watched a long green wave gather up the doll and roll it under, smooth and gentle as a mother’s caress. A moment later it surfaced again, farther out to sea, little legs and arms thrashing. “Wind’s coming up off the land,” Kyle said. Another roller swallowed the figurine. It took much longer to come up this time. The undertow had pulled it even farther from the shore.
“Sloane,” Sheriff Denton whispered, watching the doll drift. “Sloane, why?”
Sloane grabbed Odessa’s hand between hers and gripped it fiercely. She found herself grinning. “I hope you die.” The words clotted in her throat and she spat them out. “I hope you die, you genteel murdering son of a bitch.”
A shutter banged in the rising wind. The stifling heat began to break apart. The long drought was buckling at last, as if Odessa’s blood had been the first drops of an approaching squall. Thunder growled, louder and closer. The doll went under again.
“Storm coming,” Kyle said.
Sheriff Denton began to retch. He dropped to his hands and knees, heaving and coughing. A terrible contraction shook his frame, then another, and finally a rush of green seawater spurted from his mouth. He stared at it, puddled on Odessa’s kitchen floor. Then his eyes rolled back and he fainted dead away.
Chapter Thirteen
HURRICANE
DEPUTY Kyle put his ear on Sheriff Denton’s chest. “Still breathing well enough. Reckon it’s mostly the shock. Man, you sure fixed him,” he said, glancing over at Sloane.
“He deserved it.”
Kyle shrugged. “Tell it to the judge.”
Sloane found herself staring at the seawater the sheriff had spit up. He was going to Krewes for sure now. But then, weren’t they all? Jane Gardner was dead. Odessa was dead. What would stop Momus and his magic from drowning the city? Fear began to build in Sloane. It was one thing to chafe at her mother’s dogmatic opposition to anything remotely magical or divine—but something else to think of Galveston returning to the nightmare of the Flood, when madness had burst over the city, sweeping minds and lives away like so much flotsam on the tide.
Storm coming.
Jim Ford tore his eyes off the trapdoor and knocked back the rest of his bourbon. “Christ. Let’s get Odessa decent and then get the hell out of here.”
They covered Galveston’s great angel with strips and bolts of fabric taken from her sewing trunk, Sloane lifting out each length, checking for spiders, and carefully wrapping Odessa’s body. The first layers of cloth turned dark and wet with blood. Sloane carried on, tucking the fabric under Odessa’s shoulders, wrapping her up as if making a body cast of cloth mâché. Jim Ford tried to talk Scarlet into leaving the room, but she refused, sticking close to Sloane, watching everything.
“We’ll send someone to take care of the body later,” Jim Ford said at last. “In God’s name, let’s get the sheriff out of this accursed place.”
“You’re lying,” Scarlet said flatly. “You won’t send anybody.”
“Shh, honey,” Sloane said, but she thought the same, and refused to be hurried. When she had finished, Jim and Kyle carried the sheriff out to the carriage and laid him across one seat, with Jim and Sloane facing him, and Scarlet in Sloane’s lap. The sheriff wasn’t fully conscious, but he had begun to moan and cough.
While they had been inside, a wall of black clouds had built in the sky, cutting off the sun. The afternoon turned grey and ominous. The wind was coming hard off the land, ruffling the coats of the uneasy horses, making their traces swing and slap. Little scudding whitecaps curled and hissed on the darkening waters of the Gulf.
Kyle Lanier hopped up to the carriage box and geed the horses with a smart smack of the reins. They jerked into motion, rumbling down Seawall Boulevard. Sheriff Denton’s head shook with the rattle and sway of the carriage. Up on the driver’s box, Kyle began to whistle.
“I’m afraid Odessa was up to something,” Jim murmured, glancing at Scarlet and shaking his head. “The kid’s your spitting image, Sloane, only smaller.”
“And prettier, Jim. Don’t forget that.”
Sloane watched the sea through the carriage window. The waterline was up over the skirt of riprap at the bottom of the Seawall, the waves pounding at the wall itself. Incredible that the water could be coming in this fast against a land wind this hard. Not a good sign. Sheet lightning played over the approaching cloud face. The murmur of thunder was getting louder.
Sheriff Denton opened his eyes and coughed. Jim Ford reached to help him as he struggled to sit up, but the sheriff pushed his hand away. Another fit of coughing seized him. Keeping his bearded lips tightly closed he took out his pocket handkerchief, embroidered with crescent moons at each corner, and spat into it.
Kyle turned the carriage onto Broadway. People were spilling out of the grand houses along the boulevard: servants in uniform, tradespeople with their deliveries, rich children in neat shorts and pressed shirts, old-timers who could still remember Alicia, the hurricane of 1980. The land wind gusted and dropped, gusted and dropped, catching at hair and skirts and then letting them fall. Some people laughed, others whispered. The long drought was finally coming to an end.
The wind died for good. A raindrop fell on the canvas roof of the carriage with a sharp tap. Then another. Kyle gave the horses another smack and they picked up speed, rolling on toward Ashton Villa. Dark circles the size of quarters began to appear on the dusty sidewalk. The streets grew loud with a sudden clamor of birds, jays and grackles and mockingbirds calling out to one another, rising and circling, billows of them swirling through the live-oak limbs. Trapped smells rose up from the ground, released by the first touch of rain: tar, dust, warm brick, horse dung. Then the line of black clouds overspread the city, and the rain poured down, drumming on the canvas carriage top, battering the brittle palm fronds and the withered oak leaves—a sweeping, rolling rush of rain that shook the air like a great wave that would never stop breaking.
When they reached Ashton Villa. Sloane picked up Scarlet and dashed from the carriage, hunching her back to protect the child from the rain. She arrived on the porch drenched and gasping, her skin puckered with goose bumps. Waiting to meet them at the door was Sarah, the Gardner’s sharp-faced cook and senior housemaid for as long as Sloane could remember. A row of candles peeked out of the pocket of her apron. “You tramp,” she said, grabbing Sloane and hugging her fiercely. She had to yell to be heard over the din of rain that thundered through the live-oak canopy and rushed gurgling into the curbside drains. “We thought we’d lost you, you little snake. We thought them boys’d killed you.”
“I’m so sorry, Sarah. I didn’t mean to worry anyone.”
Jim Ford and Sheriff Denton joined them on the porch, shaking the rain out of their hats. “Everybody ought to worry, if God gived ’em the sense of a doodlebug,” Sarah shouted. “There’s a hurricane coming, or leastwise a gale. The glass is dropping faster than a whore’s britches, twenty-nine inches and falling. I’ve turned the gas off already, and I’ve been setting out candles.” Sarah stepped back and studied the little girl in Sloane’s arms. “The Recluse teach you a trick for making babies, Sloane?”
“She’s not human,” Sheriff Denton said. “She may look like a child, but she is a reveller.”
Sarah studied the doll, lips pursed. “Beats the hell out of the way I did it. No diapers neither.”
“Don’t worry about the girl,” Sloane shouted. “I’ll be keeping her with me.” The deafening rain rolled and roared, as if the ghosts of the six thousand Islanders killed in 1900 were stirring uneasily in their graves. Sloane raised her voice. “Sarah, get your family and bring them here. We’re on the highest spot on the Island. If the storm gets bad they’ll be safer with us.”
Sarah nodded, undoing her apron. “Thank you
, Miss Gardner. I’ve got all the windows shuttered already and the chickens cooped up. I’ll be back as quick as I can.”
Sheriff Denton grabbed his deputy by the arm and leaned in to shout in his ear. “Kyle, when you’re done with the horses take Ms. Gardner and the changeling to her room—and see they don’t leave it!”
A gust of wind came up, howling off the sea at last, twisting creaks and groans out of the live oaks that lined the boulevard. “Are you arresting me?” Sloane yelled.
“Keeping you out of trouble!”
The rain was a solid silver curtain falling from the iron canopy over the porch. Kyle Lanier broke through it and loped toward the street to stable the horses. By the time he reached the curb, Sloane could see only a black blur, obscured by the driving rain. She turned back to the sheriff, remembering the sight of his little puppet floundering in the swell under the Balinese Room. She felt Sly’s grin on her face as she raised her voice to be heard over the squall. “If I were you, Jeremiah, I’d make for higher ground.”
AN hour later wind roared around the house, rain battered the roof, and thunder boiled constantly overhead. Sloane was sitting at her sewing machine. She had found a piece of forest-green broadcloth and cut a child’s tunic pattern out of it. She lined up the seams by the fitful light of a small oil lamp she had moved to her sewing bench. Her sewing machine stuttered and stopped, stuttered and stopped to the familiar pressure of her foot.
She was sewing partly to make a dry change of clothes for Scarlet and partly to calm herself. The storm building outside was the worst she could remember, and ever since Scarlet had run out of Odessa’s closet and into her arms, Sloane had lost the blessed numbness that had protected her for the first few hours of her return to Galveston. This morning she would have felt the timbers of Ashton Villa shaking without giving a damn, but now she was haunted by visions of Scarlet crushed under a falling wall, Scarlet torn from her by the tide and drowned like the children of St. Mary’s Orphanage who had perished in 1900. They said there were more than forty scalps dangling from the railroad bridge the morning after the big blow, bodies tangled there by their hair and then torn free by the brutal strength of the waves.