The Dolls (3 page)

“Happy birthday, sweet girl,” Aunt Bea whispers into my hair. She walks away without another word, leaving Boniface and me to eat our cake in silence.

That night, I lie awake in bed for hours. The wind howls angrily outside my window, and I swear I can hear sirens in the distance. Finally, with Glory Jones’s odd words of caution ringing in my ears, I drift off to sleep.

I rarely dream, but the images that assault me tonight are as clear as the vision I had of my mother’s funeral. First, I see the hallway outside my bedroom door, then the stairway leading to the front hall. As I begin making my way down the steps. I’m hit with the sudden, powerful scent of rusted iron in the air, and that’s when I see it: blood beginning to pour out from beneath the closed parlor doors, pooling thick and nearly black on the marble floor.

I gasp and begin to run back up the stairs, but the crimson ocean is rising fast, and soon I can feel it, hot and sticky, licking at my ankles and then my legs. “No!” I cry out. The faster I retreat up the stairs, the faster the tide advances until there’s nowhere else for me to go. The whole house is filling with blood. . . .

I wake with a jolt, screaming. Aunt Bea rushes into my room and turns on the light. “What happened?”

“A nightmare,” I gasp as I try to catch my breath. My legs still feel wet and sticky. “There was so much blood. . . .”

“It was only a dream.” She strokes my back, and my heartbeat begins to return to normal.

After she’s gone, I stare at the ceiling for a long time. It’s not until the first rays of dawn begin to filter through my windows that I finally drift off into a dreamless sleep.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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S
torms pound the bayou all week, making it impossible to venture out on one of the old bikes from the shed in thebackyard. Like many people who grew up in New York City, I never learned to drive, and Aunt Bea is too busy setting up her bakery to teach me now. She’s making several trips a day into town to prep her kitchen space, in hopes of opening sometime next week. I keep offering to help, but she insists this is something she has to do on her own.

Now I have nothing to do but explore the house while the rain comes down in a steady, driving rhythm. I try to imagine my mom wandering through these same halls when she was my age, but I can only visualize her as she was when she died: twenty-eight years old, already worn down by life, the premature lines around her eyes suggesting the weight she must have felt on her shoulders before she killed herself.

I wander from room to room, trying to piece together my family’s past as lightning illuminates the cloud-spackled sky. In the living room, I see black-and-white photos of a woman in a flapper outfit—my great-great-grandmother, perhaps— and of two teenagers listening to an old-time radio in what looks like the early 1960s.

In one of the photos on the wall alongside the staircase, Boniface is holding my mom and Aunt Bea as little girls, one on either shoulder, as he grins at the camera. He doesn’t look much younger than he does now, although the photo must have been taken thirty-five years ago.

I continue up the stairs to a big piece of glossy, polished wood hanging from the wall. The words carved into it are so ornate that I have to squint to make them out.

                
For each ray of light, there’s a stroke of dark.

                
For each possibility, one has gone.

                
For each action, a reaction.

                
Ever in balance, the world spins on.

Weird
, I think. It sounds almost like a warning. Or maybe I’m just taking it that way because I can’t shake the creepy images from my dream.

I spend the next several hours searching every picture in the house for an image of my dad, the piece of my family history I understand the least. I’ve only ever seen one photo of him: a faded picture where he’s standing in my mother’s rose garden, holding one of her purple Rose of Life blooms and grinning at the camera. Aunt Bea hates his guts, though she’s made a point of telling me that his leaving right before I was born had nothing to do with me. “He just wasn’t the man we all thought he was,” she always says.

By Wednesday evening, the only place in the house I haven’t explored is the room off the front hall with the blood-red doors, the one from my nightmare.

“I’m still looking for the key,” Boniface keeps telling me.

There’s a sharp knock on the front door at two thirty Thursday afternoon, just as I’m in the middle of texting with Meredith about a bag she’s debating buying at Michael Kors.

I bet it’s the UPS man with my Pointe Laveau uniform
, I text as I get up to answer the door.

I can’t believe you have to wear a uniform
, she texts back.
CRAPTASTIC!!!!!!

I want to be insulted, but I completely agree. Plaid and a white oxford shirt are not exactly the fashion statement of the year.

But when I swing the door open, it’s not the UPS man at all. It’s a guy my age with brown hair, muddy hazel eyes, and a deep tan.

“Eveny?” he asks, staring at me like he’s seen a ghost.

“Yes . . .” I’m wondering why he seems to know me. He’s in a black suit with a pale blue shirt and a dark gray tie; he looks like he’s on the way to a prom.

“It’s Drew Grady.” His baritone has an appealing Southern twang to it. “Don’t you remember me?” He grins, and suddenly, I do.

“We used to play together,” I say. His mom was friends with my mom, and they’d sometimes get together to chat while we chased each other around the playground on Main Street. “I used to dump sand in your pants.”

“Every time our moms’ backs were turned,” he says with a laugh.

“What are you doing here?”

“My mom heard you and your aunt had moved back. I didn’t believe it, but I was walking by and saw all the curtains open.”

“Dressed kind of formally for a walk, aren’t you?” I ask. From the way he’s shifting around, and the fact that the suit doesn’t quite fit in the shoulders, I’d bet that he’s more of a Levi’s kind of guy. He looks itchy.

His face registers surprise, as if he’s just remembered what he’s wearing. “Oh, right. Well, I’m on my way to a funeral.”

“Geez, I’m sorry. Whose funeral is it?”

He looks down. “A girl at Pointe Laveau Academy. Same year as us.”

“Really? That’s so sad.”

Drew shrugs and clears his throat. “Well, um, it was good to see you, Eveny. I’ll come back at a better time.”

“Wait!” I call as he starts to walk away. “Can I come with you?”

“Um . . . ,” he begins.

“It’s just that I’ve been stuck here all week.” I realize how odd my request sounds, but I’m desperate to go
anywhere
. “I’m completely bored.”

“You want to go to a stranger’s funeral with me?” Drew asks.

Sure, it’s probably not the most appropriate thing to do, but I’m going to go crazy if I don’t get out of the house. “Please?” I venture.

“Yeah, okay, it’ll be nice to have some company,” Drew says after a moment.

I ask him to hang on for a second then race upstairs to throw on a gray dress and a black sweater, which are the most somber pieces I spot in a scan of my closet. I shoot Meredith a text to tell her I’m going out and will talk to her later, but she doesn’t reply.

When I get back downstairs, Drew points to my ballet flats. “You’re going to want something other than those. It’s really muddy after all the rain this week.”

I settle for the battered motorcycle boots that saw me through last winter’s snowstorms in New York, and although I feel stupid wearing them with a flouncy dress, Drew gives me a thumbs-up. “You look real pretty,” he says, his cheeks turning a cute color of pink.

I leave a note for Aunt Bea, then hurry out the door. “So what happened to the girl who died?” I ask as we trudge through my backyard.

“I can’t believe you didn’t hear,” he says. “She committed suicide. The way she did it was awful, actually.” He points to a spot in the cemetery wall where a few bricks are missing, and he offers me a hand to help boost me up and over. I land with a wet thud, and mud flies up around me, staining my dress.

“Why, what did she do?” I ask as he splashes over the wall too.

“Apparently she drank a bottle of vodka, then stabbed herself in the chest. Right through the heart.”

“Through the
heart
?”

Drew looks down at the soggy ground as we begin walking again. “The medical examiner told the paper she was probably dead within seconds. But what a horrible way to go.”

I shudder. “The police are sure that she did it to herself, that it wasn’t murder or something?”

Drew looks at me sharply. “Of course not. Things like that don’t happen in Carrefour.” His tone is final. “Anyway, I heard the police found a suicide note. There’s a rumor that it was some kind of a satanic ritual or something.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Drew shrugs. “Let’s just say that this is a place where things sometimes happen without an explanation. Strange things.”

“Oh, great,” I mutter.
What has Aunt Bea gotten me into by moving us here?

The ceremony has just begun as we approach, and we’re careful to tread quietly. People still turn and stare, though, and I’m not sure whether it’s because I’m the new girl in town or because sloshing into the middle of a funeral is plain rude.

“Sorry I made you late,” I whisper to Drew as the minister begins to read from the Bible in a monotone voice.

“Don’t apologize.” He reaches for my hand and squeezes. “I’m glad you came.”

He lets go, and I can feel my heart thudding. I don’t exactly have a ton of experience in the boy department. Back in Brooklyn, Meredith was usually the one at the center of attention while I played wingwoman, which was fine by me.

My mind wanders as I scan the crowd, wondering which people here will be my classmates at Pointe Laveau.

And that’s when I see them.

Across the group of mourners, two impossibly beautiful girls are staring right at me. One is a beautiful honey blonde with perfectly tanned skin, ridiculously long legs, and huge blue eyes. The other, who’s even more stunning, has glistening cocoa skin, a perfect model’s body, and mounds of wildly gorgeous ebony curls that surround her like a halo. Both are dressed in clothes that are obviously designer and expensive; the blonde is in a black lace minidress plus open-toed stilettos and loads of pearls, while the dark-haired girl is wearing a formfitting leather sheath, fishnet stockings, and leather spike-heeled boots that come up over her knees. Both have nearly identical black stones with jagged edges hanging from long chains around their necks. They’re surrounded by three guys and two other girls, all of whom are also gorgeous, but not as much so as the two in the middle.

The dark-haired girl’s eyes burn into mine, and I look quickly away, embarrassed to have been caught gawking. There’s something vaguely familiar about them that I can’t quite put my finger on. “Who are
they
?” I whisper to Drew.

“Everyone calls them the Dolls,” he says, and I sense disgust in his tone. “The whole group of them. They all go to Pointe Laveau too.”

“Oh.” My heart sinks. I hoped to make a fresh start here; I’d even hoped that coming from New York City might make me seem a little edgy. But with girls like that at Pointe Laveau, my hope is fading fast. In the cool department, I obviously don’t hold a candle to them.

“I call that one Medusa,” Drew adds in a whisper. He nods slightly toward the girl with the cocoa skin and the killer curls, the one who’s still staring at me.

“Because of her hair?” I vaguely remember the story of Medusa from Greek mythology; she was a monster with serpents growing out of her head.

“Well, that’s one reason.”

I’m trying to puzzle out what he means as the minister asks everyone to bow their heads and pray. As he begins to read from the Bible, I sneak a look back at the Dolls and am unsettled to see the Medusa girl still staring at me. She holds my gaze for a moment then reaches into her purse and whispers to it. Something moves inside, and I clap my hand over my mouth when I realize it’s a fat black snake, which is weaving back and forth, its eyes fixed on her face. I take a big step back, nearly tripping over Drew’s foot.

“Drew!” I whisper urgently, pointing shakily in the direction of her purse.

“Like I said,” he replies with a laugh. “Not just her hair.”

I shoot him a look; I don’t see anything funny about this. “Who in their right mind would bring a snake to a funeral?”

“Who says she’s in her right mind?”

My heart is still pounding when I notice something else; although Medusa and her blond friend have finally looked away, and most of her group appears to be paying attention to the ceremony, one of the guys is staring directly at me, an indecipherable expression on his face.

Suddenly, I recognize him: it’s the gorgeous jogger I caught a glimpse of the day we moved to Carrefour, and he’s even hotter than I’d originally thought. He has smooth caramel skin, close-cropped dark hair, and pale blue eyes, and judging from what I saw that day out the car window, he has a hot body hidden under his crisp, charcoal suit. I can feel the heat rising to my cheeks, but I’m finding it impossible to look away.

The minister puts the Bible down then and begins to speak. “It is with great sadness today that we lay to rest one of this town’s daughters, only seventeen years old. She was a member of our church, and I knew her as a kind, good-hearted young woman. I pray that the Lord is welcoming Glory Anne Jones into his kingdom.”

My heart skips a beat, and I momentarily forget all about the hot jogger. “Wait, it’s
Glory Jones
who died?”

Drew looks surprised. “You knew her?”

“N-not really,” I stammer. “We just met once. She was picking herbs in my yard on Saturday night and I interrupted her. She seemed . . . nice. Normal. Not like she was planning to kill herself.”