The Casquette Girls (15 page)

“Ren!” I jumped down and ran to greet my favorite customer. His giant arms squeezed me into a bear hug, lifting me into the air.

“Ren… crushing ribs… can’t breathe.”

He gently dropped me to the ground. “Sorry about that. It’s just been so long.”

“No worries.” I smiled, having forgotten the magnitude of the man’s hugs.

René Simoneaux was what people call “a character.” He was born and raised somewhere south of New Orleans in the bayou but had been a permanent fixture of the French Quarter for as long as I could remember. At six feet, seven inches, Ren was a pale-skinned giant with black curls that rippled down his back and a Cajun accent as thick as molasses. With his collection of white peasant shirts, red velvet jackets (in winter), black leather pants (all year round) and boots with shiny brass buckles (also all year round), he reminded me of one of those models from the covers of cheesy romance novels.
The women on his tours fawn over him, never guessing that  he went home and curled up next to Theis – a pasty, Scandinavian DJ who had fangs that had been surgically implanted by a dentist or, as I had once heard him say, by a fangsmith. The tall, blond-spiked guy from the convent yesterday.

“I have something for you, Ren!” I scooted behind the counter and rummaged through my bag.

“For
moi
?”

I pulled out a large white T-shirt with black gothic script that read, “
Equipe Edwar
d
!
”

“Adele, how many times do I have to tell you?” he said in a very serious tone. “Vampires do
not
sparkle.”

“Okay, fine.” I pretended to pout. “I’ll give it to someone else.”

“No, you will not!” He yanked the T-shirt out of my reach. “Sparkles or not, I am still Team Edward.” We both laughed, and he hugged me again.

“
Ça v
a
?
How was Paris? I missed you.”

“I missed you, too. I hated being away for so long.”

“At least you were back in the mothership.”

“I know, that’s what everyone keeps saying. And everyone is right
,
j’adore Paris
!”

I poured him a coffee, slid him the powdered milk, and told him the twenty-minute version of my French adventures. “And you? Where did you guys end up?”

“Theis and I drove to Austin with Fluffy, thinking we’d only be there for a couple of days.” Fluffy was their white Persian cat. “But once the media frenzy turned into a circus act, we kept driving through New Mexico and into the Grand Canyon. We camped there for a couple of weeks. When things still looked grim, we drove north and stayed with friends in San Francisco for a month. Just got back last night.”

“Back last night and already working?”

Every morning, starting at Café Orléans, Ren led crowds of tourists through the trials and tribulations of the streets of “Naw’lins.” There was also a special evening version of the tour, which he touted by promising to spill the secrets hidden in the dark crannies of the Quarter. The odds of even a single tourist being in town were slim to none, but he had still showed up at the rendezvous-point, just in case. Admirable.

An hour went by without a single person coming through the door. After cleaning everything I could reach, I took my place on the stool behind the counter. It was sad to see Ren, who was normally polished to perfection, with droopy bags under his eyes and rumpled clothes.

“Ren, tell me a story,
s’il te plaît
.” It was a request I usually reserved for slow summer afternoons, when people stayed inside to hide from the heat.

“Hmm…” He carefully twirled the end of his waxed mustache. “Do you know the story of the Carter brothers?”

I shook my head and leaned on the counter. I could tell that even though Sébastien was meticulously putting the espresso machine back together, he was listening too.

Never able to pass up the opportunity to take center stage, Ren walked to the middle of the café and brought his fingers to a point. His flair for the dramatic always led me to question how much truth there was to his stories, but their accuracy didn’t really matter because his entertainment value was ace.

“The year was 1930. Huey Long was two years into his infamous reign as the governor of Louisiana. The country was still recovering from World War I, and the stock market had crashed less than a year prior. With the breakneck decline in foreign trade, warehouses on the Port of New Orleans had emptied, and activity on the docks had hushed. Times were hard all throughout the city, and the French Quarter was in dire straits. The buildings were in deplorable condition, and many of the historic establishments had been temporarily closed or abandoned. The prohibition had created a swell of illegal underground activity, and debauchery ran rampant, even more than usual.” He paused to give me a giant wink.

I rested my head on my hands to get comfortable. He was just getting warmed up.

“John and Wayne Carter were two brothers who lived just around the corner from here on St. Ann and Royal Street. Other than the charm that was expected of Southern gentlemen, they appeared to be just your average men with labor jobs down by the river.

“One cool autumn afternoon, while the Carter brothers were down at the docks, a nine-year-old girl escaped from their apartment and ran all the way to the local precinct. Her face was gaunt, her eyes were sunken in, and her hair was thin where patches had fallen out. At a first glance, she appeared sickly, but uninjured. That was until she held out her arms, palms up. The authorities thought that her wounds w
ere a botched suicide attempt, but upon further examination, they discovered that the cuts had been made in a very precise way—with the skill of a surgeon—as if to drain her blood slowly over time. The little girl was in such a state of shock that she was unable to tell her tale, but she kept repeating the words ‘help them’ over and over again. When the policemen raided the brothers’ third-story apartment, they found—”

“Ahem,” a female voice interrupted. “Is anyone here actually working?” The voice belonged to Désirée Borges.

When had she walked i
n
?
I’d never seen her in the café before, but, as far as I knew, we were the only coffee shop in the neighborhood open for business (if you could call it that).

“I’d like a nonfat, vanilla granita
. Extra whip.”

I stared at her, puzzled
by how she thought we could accommodate her request.

“Please?” she added, trying to get me to hustle.

“Um… We can’t make granitas right now. We’re barely operational.”

“Fine, I’ll just have a sugar-free vanilla iced coffee, lots of room for soy milk.”

“We don’t have iced coffee or—”

“It’s still summer! Why are you open if you don’t have iced coffee?”

I considered mentioning my new Sacred Heart status in hopes that knowing someone as lowly as me would be attending her school might cause her head to explode, but Sébastien intervened.

“We just reopened today. Like most places in the city, our iced coffee takes twenty-four hours to cold drip. We should have some tomorrow.” He was far more diplomatic than I would have been.

“Oh, then I’ll just take whatever you’ve got, as long as it’s got caffeine in it.” She obnoxiously batted her eyelashes. I had to keep myself from making gagging noises. Of course, Sébastien was completely oblivious to her flirtation.

I poured her coffee in a paper cup, hoping she wouldn’t stay, splashed in some sugar-free vanilla syrup, and slid it across the counter with a smile as fake as hers.
How the hell am I going to survive Sacred Heart?

Her heels clicking the pavement outside cued Ren to reclaim the stage. This time, Sébastien stopped fiddling with the machine and leaned on the counter next to me.

“
Procéde, s'il te plaît
,” I said.

Ren pretended to ponder. “Where was I?”

“The policemen were just getting to the apartment of the Carter brothers,” Sébastien reminded him.

“
Oui, oui, merci beaucou
p
.
The policemen raided the third-story apartment and, to their horror, found seven other people held captive, all with their wrists sliced open in the same fashion as the little girl’s. Most of the victims praised God for the miracle of being rescued, but those who had been there for more than a few days begged for death. They screamed that they would never be able to escape the Carter brothers or all the horror they had witnessed.

“None of the victims reported having been taken to the grandiose apartment against their will. It was when they tried to leave that the brothers demanded the party never end! They tied each one up and held them prisoner. The victims claimed that every night, when John and Wayne arrived home from work, the brothers would slice open their flesh and drink their blood directly from the pierced veins.

“The cops found only two dead bodies, but the survivors claimed to have witnessed at least six others come through the front door and never leave. They said that once a victim’s blood had been completely drained, the Carter brothers would dispose of the body by shoving them through a trash chute into a bath of acid below. No traces of these bodies were ever found.

“The policemen waited for John and Wayne Carter to return from work, and ambushed them right outside their apartment. Even though the brothers should have been exhausted after their day of manual labor, it still took over a dozen men to hold them down. As you can imagine, there was a media frenzy after the arrests. The Carter brothers photographed well and were charming enough to gain a surprising swell of sympathizers – but despite their charisma and good looks, the sadistic killers were sentenced to be hanged. Post-execution, their bodies were laid to rest in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.

“Now, here is where it gets interesting.”

Sébastien and I exchanged looks.

“I’m sure you know that if you live, or more specifically die, in New Orleans, you’re probably gonna end up buried in an oven tomb, since the high water table makes earth inhumation difficult. You’ll spend your eternal slumber in something that not only looks like an oven but literally roasts you, like a slow-cooker. In times when the body count outnumbered the tombs available, resting bodies got exactly one year to roast in peace – not a day more, not a day less. Then the crypt-keepers would just push the crumbling remains to the back and slip in a fresh corpse.

“When the Carter brothers’ remains were scheduled to be pushed to the back, the crypt-keeper found the tomb empty of bone fragments. There was not a trace of John or Wayne Carter ever having been laid to rest.”

Ren took a deep breath, allowing his audience a moment to ponder the strangeness of his story.

“In all the decades since, no one has been able to explain how two corpses could simply vanish without a trace. The mystery is all that remains.”

He paused again and then took a dramatic bow.

I clapped loudly, and S
ébastien joined me for a moment before returning to the espresso machine with a smile on his face.

Ren took another bow. Despite the meager audience and the events of the last couple of months, nothing had affected his ability to tell a story.

“John and Wayne?” came an unfamiliar voice from the corner. The sketcher. “As in John Wayne? Do people in this town believe this crap?” His headphones were still on, but he must have turned his music off and listened in on the story. I scowled, annoyed by his blatant skepticism, but the questions didn’t faze Ren in the slightest. On the contrary, the naysaying seemed to enliven him. There was nothing Ren loved more than a debate about the supernatural.

“Oh, people in this town believe far crazier things than the tale of the Carter brothers, young man. But you are probably correct that the brothers were likely living under false names. Even so, that’s who they claimed to be, so that’s how the story goes.”

“And do people in this town believe in vampires?” the guy asked, pushing his hair behind his ears.

“The truth is relative,” Ren answered, being purposefully vague.

The scientist in the room interjected, “A logical truth is a statement that is true i
n
al
l
possible worlds. As opposed to a fact, which is only true in this world, as it has historically unfolded.” Sébastien made my brain hurt.

“Don’t bring logic into a discussion about the truth, my boy!” Ren yelled.

Sébastien raised one eyebrow, but knew that arguing would be an exercise in futility.

Ren looked back at the sketcher. “The truth depends on what you believe in.”

“I believe if I ever came across a vampire, I would stake it.” He gathered up his things.

“Them are fighting words, son!”

“You have no idea,” he mumbled, walking out the door.

The three of us looked at each other with blank expressions and then burst out laughing.

“Testy young fellow!”

Suppressing giggles, I looked at Ren. “Sorry about that.”