A Twisted Ladder (46 page)

She pulled him toward her.

“Hang on, Madeleine,” he whispered.

He pulled her panties off, moving them slowly down her body. And then he had the packet open and was pulling off his own underwear, putting the condom on. His face was sweet anticipant. His chest was white with curled black hair. She wriggled out from under him and pushed on his shoulder until he rolled onto his back, and she draped herself over him, pulling him to her. She felt the solid mass press at her opening. Heat ricocheted through her. She pushed forward, trying to take him inside, and then relented a little and pushed again. His hands moved from her rib cage down to her hips. She took his length with two hands and angled her spine, and pushed once more. He entered then, and a murmur escaped from her throat. A searing burn between her legs. His hands smoothed the wall of her abdomen, thumbs to her ribs, and then caressed her breasts.

She moved over him, slowly rocking. Quiet, warm, and sweet. Through the window, the branches of the magnolia tree dipped with the breeze and sunlight danced through the shadows. She leaned forward, stretching her body, stretching out her legs. She straightened her back with a curve to her tailbone so that her buttocks rose up and at the front, her soft, sensitive ridge now pressed against him. She paused at the shock of feeling. He slid his hand down her back and pushed his hips so that he was angled along that ridge. She clamped and pushed back. The heady sensations returned. She and Ethan started moving again, moving in rhythms.

The connection felt as though they were caught in the vibration of the earth itself, a core source that caused waves on the ocean and wind that left ripples in sand. A connection that repeated from earth to the elements to humans in one motif after the other. Waves coursed through their bodies and echoed in their movements.

And then the sensation crested and she threw back her head and cried out. Vibrant streaks channeled through her. She went still, though the sensation continued its course, and she could do little more than witness her own pleasure with a sense of awe. Ethan waited. Her lungs seemed to have forgotten to fill.

She melted against him and drew in a careful, staccato breath.

He cupped his hand behind her neck, rolling her over, and then he lifted her up and carried her to the bedroom. “That was a good start.”

STEAM FILLED THE BATHROOM
. Madeleine couldn’t see her own reflection in the mirror. She had already bathed and dressed and was towel-drying her hair while Ethan finished his shower. She wandered out into the living area.

The main living space looked so much larger now. She looked up at the newly revealed stamped tin. A few ragged screws up there. Some repair and touch up to do, but she marveled at the immediate transformation. The flat had gone from eight-and-a-half-foot ceilings to a spacious ten-foot height. The desolate fluorescent tray lights were gone too. She went to the kitchenette and opened the pet gate so Jasmine could roam freely, and put some food in her dog dish.

Ethan appeared with wet hair, wearing just his jeans. “This place is incredible. It’s starting to look more like Sam’s flower shop down below.”

She nodded. “Seeing it like this, it makes me wonder why anyone would ever cover it up. Look.”

She pulled back a corner of the industrial carpet under the tarp, revealing the broad plank wood floor beneath. Like the stamped tin, the original flooring was rough and scarred but solid. Genuine. The suspended ceiling and flat loop carpet now seemed like they’d been part of an absurd costume, a straitjacket for the original warehouse space.

Ethan said, “Wasn’t it your family who carpeted over it? I mean, you’ve owned it forever, right?”

Madeleine shrugged. “There was a tenant who used it as a machine shop for decades. They must have done all this. I actually didn’t even know this warehouse was in the family until around the time I went to college, when Daddy deeded it over to me and Marc.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. That was right around the time the machine shop closed down. I wound up renting out the lower space to Samantha. Found out about the house on Esplanade at about the same time, too.”

“You mean to tell me you had no idea about all this?”

“None.”

He said, “So you just figured that little house on Bayou Black was it.”

“Yeah, that was it.”

“Your father,” Ethan said carefully. “Was he always like he is now? I mean, one minute he seems fine and then . . .”

Madeleine gave a rueful smile. “I remember him fading out when we were really young. But he would leave, I mean physically go off for a few weeks, so we didn’t see it as much. But my mother left when Marc and I were nine and ten, and that’s when we realized how serious it was with Daddy.”

“Because then he was home all the time.”

Madeleine shook her head. “No, he still went off and left.”

“When y’all were nine and ten?”

“Yeah.”

He looked puzzled. “Who looked after you?”

“We looked after each other.”

“No adults at all?”

She shook her head.

“But what about, you know, food and shopping and all that?”

She shrugged. “We just made do. Whenever we ran out of food, we went fishing and caught more food. If the electricity was turned off, we burned candles and used the old hand pump for fresh water from the well. We’d cook on a little hibachi. Sounds bad, but at the time it felt like camping.”

Ethan looked perplexed. “People had to have known there were two kids out there living alone.”

“It only went on for a few weeks at a time at first. Longer when we were teenagers. If some adult asked about Daddy, we’d just say he was sick. We didn’t want social services to get involved. There were neighbors and school teachers who’d send us home with loaves of bread or sacks of beans.”

Ethan looked at her with warm, soft eyes. “No wonder you’re so tough.”

She felt embarrassed, and stepped toward the bedroom. “You want a clean t-shirt? The people from my church brought me a whole bunch of them after the fire.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

She found one that had a fleur de lis on the front and SAINTS written across the back.

He pulled it over his head and said, “What about the other thing. The way your father figured out Joe Whitney’s scheme. He always been that way?”

Madeleine shook her head with a tired shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what to make of that.”

“I’d sure like to see an image of your old man’s brain.”

That got her laughing.

But then Ethan said, “Wouldn’t mind seeing a picture of Zenon’s brain, either.”

She frowned, but the way he’d brought up Zenon had caused her to bypass any dread and anger and go straight to examination. “What do you think you’d find up in there?”

“I don’t know, maybe an enlarged pineal gland. Hyper- or hypo-activity in the amygdala. Or maybe his brain just looks like everyone else’s.”

“I wonder if an fMRI would show signs of a criminal mind.”

“Sociopathic?”

“Yes, or he might even be psychopathic. I haven’t spent enough time around him since growing up to make that determination. He’s manipulative. And seems to disregard any sense of right and wrong. So he could be either. The question is whether he’s rash and disorganized like a sociopath, or calculating like a psychopath.”

“In that case I’d also be interested in seeing what his prefrontal lobes look like.”

Madeleine smiled at him, smiled at how odd the statement sounded.

He said, “Come on, we’ll walk Jazz and then I’ll take you to a late lunch before I head into the lab.”

“I can’t. I’m supposed to head out to Bayou Black and meet with Nida about selling the old house.”

“Ah, I forgot. Wish I could go with you.”

“I know you’ve got patients to see.”

She picked up Jasmine’s red leather leash and pulled it through her fingers. Jasmine danced at the sight of it.

Madeleine said, “You know what’s interesting?”

“What?”

“When you struck him in that alley, you weren’t angry. You were angry before that, but not when it came to blows. Then you were cool as a cucumber.”

She clipped the leash onto Jasmine’s collar. “The second you reclaimed yourself you looked completely calm, even when you struck him down.”

“That’s because I wasn’t angry. Not at that moment anyway. It was pure defense.”

He frowned. “I’m glad you’d told me about clearing your mind. That made all the difference. A lot like Shokotai.”

“You’re supposed to clear your mind?”

“Yeah, that’s how you stay always at the ready. Your reflexes are slow when you’re daydreaming.”

She considered this. “Odd. I never realized the mental game involved in martial arts.”

“That’s ninety percent of it. Part of the discipline is to lay down your fear of death, which in most cases is not even an issue, but you’re supposed to act like it is. Like every physical confrontation is a life and death situation, and you choose not to fear death.”

“I imagine that would keep you focused.”

“That’s the idea. Of course it’s one thing to talk about it in theory, but it’s a whole other thing to put it in practice, especially when it wasn’t my own safety I was worried about.”

He ran his hand up along her arm. “I don’t ever want to worry about being used as a tool to hurt you again.”

She looked into his eyes. “You’ve learned how to counteract Zenon’s trick. So have I. It appears we’re safe from whatever it is he’s using.”

“That guy ought to be locked up.”

Madeleine thought back to Sheriff Cavanaugh’s warning, and felt a new respect for his instincts.

BAYOU BLACK, 2009

T
HE CABIN WAS SMALL
. Smaller than Anita’s own dorm room. No glass on the windows, just cutouts that had been shuttered closed. Newsprint covered the walls. Very dark. But she knew he was just outside.

When Zenon had first grabbed her, he’d made her get in his car and drive to an empty alley. There, he’d bound her wrists. He’d put her in the trunk of his car. At first she’d tried to kick her way out. But then she’d realized she had either broken or sprained her ankle, her fear so numbing that she never even felt the pain. Felt only a sudden realization that her foot no longer worked. She had no idea how long she’d been inside that trunk, but it had to have been several hours.

And in those hours, she’d had time to think, and she’d made some guesses. She believed that Zenon had brought her to some backwater corner of Louisiana. And she believed that he meant to kill her. No; worse than that.

She had seen his watchfulness, his delight in any form of action she took, like when she struggled or screamed, or the reasoning, and then pleading when he moved her from the trunk of the Duster to the hull of a boat. If he meant to kill her outright, he would have done so in Houston when he’d knocked the pepper spray from her hands and shocked her with her own Taser.

She was about to die, this she knew, but not before he’d played his games.

As she lay on the floorboards of this place, this horrible outhouse of a cabin, she knew she had to get out. He was waiting for her out there in the way a snake waits outside a mouse’s burrow. But she didn’t care. She had to move. Was damned if she was going to lie around until he decided to come in and start.