The Witch of Bourbon Street Read online

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  To my mother, Theresa Anne Germanese Cooper. Mama, you never liked your name, but to me … it’s the most beautiful name in the world.

  Acknowledgments

  Dear Readers, this book could not have been written (trust me) without the constant and soothing waves of love you all gave the first two “witch” books. There were times I felt I simply couldn’t give this story what it deserved, but there you were, all of you, sending me messages about the previous books and how much they meant to you. It gave me the courage to press on, and produce a novel (this very novel!) that I believe may have the most “me” laced throughout its pages. I hope you enjoy its odd ways.

  “Thank you” is simply not enough when it comes to the readers/writers who read almost every draft of this book. Erica Olivier (as always, your brutal ways burn away my nonsense). Nicki Duncan, a reader and now a true friend. Three up-and-coming authors to watch: Leigh Hewitt, Gina Miel Heron, and Kasey Corbit. Damn, ladies … I mean, wow. I could not have gotten through that crazy Halloween deadline without you. There I was, trick-or-treating, while you guys were parceling out chapters. To my friends who are always willing to read: Casey Heyer Schwing, and Julia Nadeau, who over that fall pause descended on my house and left behind a plot fix that I thought could never be fixed. “Stupid Witch…” I mean, how simple!

  To my brilliant elegant agent, Anne Bohner. You’ve become so dear to me, a true friend and champion. And my editor, Vicki Lame, HEY GLITTER, it’s baby number THREE, you bored yet? I’m not! Bringing a book from a thought to the shelves these days takes a village, and I’m so lucky I got a good one. To the entire team at St. Martin’s Press, I am always in your debt. Dear Marie Estrada, you are the best kind of taskmaster, holding me to high standards that, when I meet them, surprise and fill me with confidence. It’s been the finest gift.

  To my student India Miller who gave me Sippie. I love you.

  To Alice Hoffman, who was kind enough to return my midsummer frantic messages of “OH MY GOD I’M NEVER GOING TO GET THIS RIGHT!” with calming beautiful words of logic and perseverance. I was crying in the barn in early August at about 5 A.M. (add that to the list of sentences I never thought I’d say…) when she sent a message that read “Don’t forget that you are one of the few people who even gets to have this type of worry.” And bam. I was back on track. Her steady hand on my back. Sometimes there are no words.

  To the people of Nola and the bayou and barrier islands throughout the Gulf Coast: The rest of us could learn a thing or two about community, respect, and perseverance from you. I know I did. My father, James Cooper, told me endless stories of shrimping those waters and living among the “realest people in the world.” Amen to that.

  To my brother, Talmadge James, for being the Jack to my Sippie.

  Deep affection and gratitude to Robert L. Mele, my godfather extraordinaire. You pick it all up when things fall apart. You always rescue me, and I’m forever grateful even if I don’t say it enough. The worst part of this amazing dream is the fact that when I’m writing, I don’t do enough with those daughters of mine. You quietly notice and pick up that slack without ever demanding anything but love in return. And you have that. Trust me. So much love.

  And speaking of them, hey … little witches … Rosy, Tess, Grace Louise, I’m so in love with you. Thanks for putting up with my crazy ways. And don’t ever forget, YOU are the loves of my life. Writing makes me happy, and I couldn’t do it if I didn’t KNOW you were all on the same … ahem … page.

  And last but never last: Dear Bill (spouse of my life), you didn’t marry a writer. And here we are. Just know that no matter where I go (in my mind or on the road) you are always there. You are my home.

  Entrances and Exits

  Crow

  When Serafina came across the sea

  A casket girl of only 10 and 3

  She conjured for herself a life of dreams

  And captured all the hearts in New Orleans.

  Serafina purchased land from Spain

  A bayou to the south that bears her name

  With money earned from clever conjure magic

  She’d planned it as she crossed the wide Atlantic

  She built a town for lost souls needing solace

  A new society both just and lawless.

  Her plot worked well, as generations prospered

  The trouble came when lies and secrets festered

  And Sorrows started painting pasts untrue

  Until young Jack went missing in the bayou.

  Redemption hides in vines that blossom sweet

  On the gates of 13 Bourbon Street.

  1

  Sister Vesta Grace’s Confession

  Serafina’s Bayou, Tivoli Parish, Louisiana

  August 14, 1901

  To: The Law Office of A. A. Monroe

  13 Bourbon Street

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  It must be late in the evening now, the sky is mercilessly dark. It has been a season of storms, has it not? The people here who wish me dead believe that not only did I kill the Sorrow family, but that I brought these wicked storms to our shores as well. I almost think it to be true, which proves how altered I am by these circumstances. I feel as if something vast has shifted inside my soul. I lost my way, didn’t I, dear Albert? Drank too greedily from the well of this enchanted world, and now I will be punished for my sins. I warrant I would be terribly upset if I still believed in sin. However, I no longer care about evil or seeking redemption. I’m as bent on vengeance as those who have spent the last month surrounding Sorrow Hall. They want to see me hanging from a cypress tree as much as I wish to see each of them burn in hell for what they allowed to occur to this fine family that both you and I adored.

  Do I sound harsh, Albert? I fitfully tried to pray tonight. The sky raced from gray to black so quickly, it is as if I am a creature lost in time. When I first arrived, that voodoo witch, Rosella, told me this was a sacred place, this Sorrow land. One of the few places on earth where geography and mysticism collide. I did not trust in it then, but now, after all that has happened, I know it to be true.

  I sit here, alone in the cottage Madame Helene provided me, in the shadow of Sorrow Hall, writing this letter by the flickering light of the last candle I could find. I know you told me that if I chose to ride out this storm, you wished for me to close myself up inside the stronger confines of that grand house, whose walls could hold off the wind and the tides. Only, those same walls still echo with the laughter of the children, haunting me. Perhaps they have come back to escort me to the other side. I would gladly go with them, I miss them so.

  Please know I did not take your warning about the “mob” lightly. I know they will come for me and mete out their justice. You were right when you said they believed me to be a demon, a rougarou, or at the very least a murderer of children. And I have done nothing to calm
their hysteria, thus I am convicted in the court of popular opinion. So, when you asked me to come with you, I wanted to run to the safety you offered. But who would I be if I ran toward the very thing that was ripped out from under this beautiful family, be it my fault or not, the very day I arrived? No, I deserve to be alone with these dangers.

  I realize that my previous silence has frustrated you. You have spent weeks patiently interviewing me, taking your copious notes. Asking me repeatedly to summarize my tenure with our beloved Sorrow family in the hope that I would give you some proof that I was not guilty. The zeal with which you have tried to clear my name is admirable. I did not mean to cause you pain. I never meant to cause pain to anyone. After all, I was brought here to ease suffering.

  When you walked away from me (was that only yesterday?), pausing before closing the iron gates behind you (I adore that you called them Edmond’s Folly, you were quite right about that), urging me one last time to accept the refuge you so graciously offered in New Orleans, I saw you pause before you disappeared into the damp mist of the leafy canopies that line the path to the docks. I saw you look back, Albert. Don’t ever look back. You must always only look forward.

  Be it the storm, or the mob, I’m not long for this world … and though I struggle with the fear of what is to come, it is no worse than the weight of what is already lost. As one of the people aside from myself whom the Sorrow family allowed to be part of their magnificent world, I feel it only right that you should be the one to hear my confession, such as it is. Do you see now why I could not give you what you wanted? I could not state that I had nothing to do with their deaths, because I did.

  Though a mere two years have passed, it seems a lifetime since I arrived to begin a new life in this savage paradise. I remember the day it all began in perfect detail. And, Albert, as it began with you, it seems fitting it should end with you as well. When Edmond and Helene decided to find a sister-nurse, it was left up to you, their solicitor, to make the proper inquiries. Oh sir! You must have felt discouraged from the start. What they were looking for was entirely too detailed. They needed a nurse to live with them, to care for darling Edmond Jr. (poor Egg, for whom there was no cure) and the rest of the children, SuzyNell, Edwina, Mae, the twins … Lavinia and Grace, and little wild Belinda B’Lovely. The act of writing down their names is disconcerting to me, Albert. Like casting a spell, or saying a prayer (which I have come to believe might be very similar things).

  I was to be a governess, healer, and religious adviser. Tasks that would prove to be nearly impossible in this strange, wet wilderness. But I fought back any fears I had, and came.

  Perhaps it is that same lingering fear, deep inside, urging me to tell you here the very information you needed to clear my name. It is such a puzzle, Albert, that instead I will tell you what I did not do in the hopes that you will see the bones of truth spanning the blankness in between. I did not go from room to room killing them. That should be clear from the indictment itself. I am, as you know, accused of the following: instigating fits of insanity resulting in the suicides of Edmond and Helene. I am also accused of purposefully poisoning Edmond Jr. and the twins. It is believed I drowned beautiful Mae in the bayou, and lest we forget, delivered a fatal blow to Edwina’s head with a metal croquet ball. SuzyNell, of course, had escaped the madness before it began, running away to France with her beau.

  That leaves but one Sorrow child, Belinda B’Lovely, who is still missing. And though her body has not been found, I am presumed responsible for her death as well. Do not think me wicked if I tell you that I hope her soul is resting with her family, for that would be a finer fate than dying all alone in Meager Swamp, that desolate, tidal plane fed by the magical Sorrow Bay. We couldn’t keep her away from it, remember? She’d come home dragging mud from her skirts. But I digress. Here is what you have been asking for.

  I say this with the honesty that comes from the threat of imminent death: Albert, I did not do the things I am accused of.

  So, why didn’t I profess my innocence when the blame was cast my way?

  Complicity. I was complicit in the demise of the Sorrow family, and one does not have to start a fire, or even watch it burn, to be guilty of arson; you need only be the one who fanned the flames.

  I understand this may not appease your curiosity as much as you may have hoped.

  Only the Virgin Mary, my confessor, will know the entire truth. Once this storm has passed, if you should decide to return from the safety of 13 Bourbon Street to find me, I will no longer be on this earth. I am sealing this letter well, casing it in wax, and placing it on a high shelf. I pray that you will find it and its contents will convince you to let this community continue to believe I am at fault. That is the only way it will heal. Let it be known that I died taking full responsibility, and though I go to God now with a clear mind, I have a stained conscience. That should be enough to keep the feux follets from stealing my soul. Or if that not be true, and you see lights over the bayou, run.

  With deep affection,

  Sister Vesta Grace

  2

  Frances the Great

  Tivoli Parish: Present

  I grew up the way the water moves, in twists and turns with temperamental, amorphous boundaries. And I danced, lightly, over precarious situations and a thousand half-submerged ideas as they tried to surface above the waters of my bayou, reaching out their pale limbs and beautiful, lost faces from under the dark waters. If I looked carefully, I could see the reflections of Sorrows past, my ancestors, peering up at me from the world beneath. I liked to imagine the Sorrow sisters with their hands intertwined, long hair flowing, and white dresses billowing around them like sunken clouds. They’d be smiling slyly, teasingly, about a shared secret.

  “You keep smiling like that,” I’d threaten, standing barefoot on the maze of rotting wood that wound itself around the length of the Sorrow property. “I’m Frances the Great, and when I’m grown I’ll know all your sorry truths!”

  I thought I knew everything back then, but I was dead wrong about those ghosts. They weren’t hiding any secrets, they were trying to tell me things about myself I didn’t want to know.

  My name is Frances Green Sorrow. I’m thirty-two years old. I have one blue eye, one green. My grandmother Dida Sorrow says it’s the reason I grew up all confused and stubborn. But Dida’s like that. She’s got a reason for everything. She walks this earth believing she’s the product of a dark fairy tale come to life. That she fell into a deep sleep for one hundred years and then somehow woke up, still just a child, wandering the bayou. We try not to upset that applecart of hers. After all, I used to think just like her until I grew up too fast and began doubting every single thing I ever thought true.

  I was brought up to believe that I was a witch. Just like freckles, or hair color, or dimpled chins, my family has a collection of tiny … quirks. Talents or “strange ways” or whatever it is people call those things. For us Sorrow women, it was called magic. So we all became Witches with a capital “W.” After generations of exaggerations and folklore, it’s hard to separate what’s real from what’s fake anymore. The same thing happens with religion, or politics, or any other sort of thing a person is brought up with. It all begins beautiful and pure, and then year by year, everyone forgets what it meant in the first place, twisting it up into something it wasn’t ever supposed to be.

  We burn bonfires on the water to celebrate solstice. Summer and winter. But, is it winter solstice? Or is it Christmas? Is it St. John’s Day? Or is it summer solstice? No one even cares to remember that the word bonfire comes from burning bones. We never burned bones, we burn willow, but still …

  There are a few “absolutes” in my life, though. I am without a doubt Daniel Amore’s ex-wife and Jack’s absentee mama. And for all the terrible things I found out carrying secrets can do—like rot a whole family to its core—I carry my own deep inside.

  When I was little, though, it was all true. The legends were my lineage; the curses w
ere as real to me as the cane fields. I believed there wasn’t anything we Sorrows couldn’t do.

  I’ve never been good at that thing called a “middle ground.”

  Two weeks before the summer solstice of my thirty-third year, I woke up to the sound of music floating through the air. Dida and my mother, Claudette, had wound up that cranky antique gramophone and had those old blues albums playing. The notes whimsically traveled the short (but still achingly long) distance from Sorrow Hall to my little shack. And somehow, instead of feeling the terrible burden of facing another day, I woke up happily wanting, needing, to go see my mama and spend time with Dida, maybe even help them prepare for the upcoming festivities.

  When I was fully awake, I almost got dizzy with the lightness inside. They conjured up a spell to make me happy, those witches.… Except, even thinking that way was all upside down. It was the way I used to think before I made a mess out of my life.

  I’m good at that, making messes.

  Later that morning, Millie Bliss came by on her boat. I’d shut out the world, but I could never really shut out Millie. We were brought up together, side by side, not blood kin. But closer, somehow.

  “Hey, Frankie,” she said, smiling.

  “Hey, you beautiful creature!” I called, beaming at her. Millie pulled her boat up to my dock, a frown creasing her delicate features. My upbeat attitude was apparently a shock to her system. (Not that I can blame her.)

  “You feelin’ okay, Frankie?” she asked skeptically.

  “I’m feeling downright strange, Millie. I almost feel … alive.”

  “What happened? You eat something funny?” She frowned again.

  “Shut up. I’m just … hell, I don’t know. I woke up less … hateful.”

  For sixteen years I’d been working as hard as I could at being cold and shut off from everyone. I guess even Millie had grown used to my sour, sarcastic ways.