A Twisted Ladder Read Online Free

the jamb, she could see that the tiny skiff was not tethered at the boat slip. She trotted across the St. Augustine grass to the bank. The bayou stretched in a broad mirror, reflecting double-ended trees already turning black. No boat nearby. Not on the water, not at the slip. The nearest craft would be at the neighbors’ place, the Thibodaux who ran the café.
    She strode and then jogged the half-mile to their property, and pounded on their door. An evensong of frogs and crickets was just beginning to pulse.
    “Thibby! Nida!” Maddy called.
    She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead. The yard was still but for the intermittent blaze of a firefly. Nida’s old white Caddy was gone, which meant they weren’t home. But Madeleine knew where Thibby kept the keys to his skiff.
    She retrieved them, hands stupid and fumbling, and it occurred to her that she should have called Sheriff Cavanaugh for help. Too late now. She broke into an all-out run, feet quickening across crabgrass and then thumping over the dock. She climbed into the skiff, and as she untied the knot a snake unwound itself from the coil of rope and darted across to the other side, disappearing soundlessly into the bayou mirror.
    It’s their time now
.
    She and Marc had always associated the snakes with twilight. She pulled the starter cord and moved the skiff into the bayou, remembering how she and Marc used to play with their friend Zenon who’d lived nearby. The children ruled the daylight, fishing or swimming in the steaming afternoons while the serpents coiled themselves into lazy piles on rocks, storing up reserved heat so they could hunt in the evening. When full darkness fell, the alligators would rule Bayou Black. But that in-between time, that colorless screen that wasn’t day and was not yet night, that belonged to the snakes.
    The skiff rumbled through the smaller artery and turned into the broad shipping channel. Thibby’s vessel was fast, but it still nodded through the swamplands with agonizing lethargy. It slurped and coughed, and finally rounded the bend and down a narrow waterway, and then an even narrower one.
    Gray receded, allowing black to steal forth, and Madeleine snapped on the guide light. She knew where to find her brother. Perhaps when he saw her, Marc would lay that thing down and shake off whatever fog had consumed him, a fog that had in some way woven tendrils into her own lungs, enough to convince her that her brother was out here, in their secret cove of Bayou Black. He was lying in wait for her, waiting to die.
    The skiff entered their old secret burrow within the cypress forest. She switched off the light. Better in the dark. Her brother was there. Her dear, sweet brother. She knew he was waiting for her.
    She made a final turn. And she wanted to be wrong. God, how she wanted to be wrong, and wished for the comfort of that joke, that stupid joke she’d played on herself as she’d driven to Houma. Pretending she could make him laugh, throw back his head and have a big old laugh. That she herself might fall for the ridiculous joke that he was fine.
    Crack!
    She felt him now in an orange burst. Felt his fear and anguish and fury, all reaching out to her in a moment of monstrous ecstasy. The darkness stole in around her, and eyes of the swamp creatures flashed in slivers of moon.
    She touched her hair, expecting to find blood. But no; she was unharmed. She switched on the light.
    He was there. His boot and leg were still tangled in the skiff, but the rest of him hung over the side, suspended upside down in the water. Lying in wait, but no longer waiting to die.

three

     
     
    HAHNVILLE, 1912
     
    R ÉMI WHITTLED ON A length of hickory and breathed the wet wind from the river. Jacob sat next to him. The gallery wrapped around the entire perimeter of the plantation house, a shelter of mortise and tenon trusses extending from the roof. The design served necessity over vanity, admitting the breeze from the Mississippi