Page 29 of The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy

Edgar

A few days after revealing that he was part of the Rondeau family, Edgar found himself walking hand in hand with Jamie toward Le Corbeau. Once they’d found out about the connection, they’d immediately begun speculating about what answers Aunt Alaitheia could provide to Edgar’s many uncertainties.

“I can’t believe you haven’t asked her before,” Jamie said for the third time, squeezing Edgar’s hand excitedly.

Poe snorted from beside him. “You’ll believe it after you meet her.”

But nothing could quell Jamie’s delight at meeting another member of the Rondeau family. “She must have such amazing stories!” Jamie kept saying.

Edgar didn’t think revealing that those stories had terrified him as a child would do anything to dampen their excitement.

“She’s kind of…” Edgar trailed off as he thought about how best to describe his aunt.

“Infuriating,” Poe suggested.

“She can be a bit…vague,” Edgar admitted. He hadn’t seen her in years, but he doubted that had changed.

Poe muttered something under his breath that Edgar couldn’t hear and pushed the front door open, the cool dark beckoning them in from the heat of the day.

Once, Edgar had been a frequent visitor.

Before his father left, he, Poe, and Allie had done their homework in the polished wood booth at the back while their mother and aunt talked away long afternoons.

Cameron and Antoine knew to find them there and would often join them, sneaking glances at Aunt Alaitheia until one of them (usually Cameron) worked up the courage to ask her for a potion.

His aunt would look deeply into Cameron’s eyes as if searching for the truth of her, then mix drinks for the table that always seemed to be exactly what they were craving at that moment.

But after…after his father left and Antoine was dead, the visits to the bar stopped. Aunt Alaitheia would appear at their front door on the nights when their mother was at her worst. The sisters would climb out on the balcony, close the window behind them, and talk long into the night.

After their mother had lost too much of herself to have anything left for her children or anyone else, Aunt Alaitheia had been the one to lead her, hand in hand like frightened children, out of the house for the last time.

Le Corbeau looked just like Edgar’s memories of it.

In fact, it didn’t look all that different than it had a century before, in the oldest pictures Edgar had seen.

It had weathered Katrina as it had every storm that had come before it, though whether the rumors of otherworldly intervention were to be believed, even Edgar wasn’t sure.

“Wow,” Jamie murmured as they walked through the heavy wooden doors. Edgar had to admit the place had ambiance.

The elegant curve of the long wooden bar was polished to a mirror shine.

Behind it was a huge ornate mirror, de-silvered in spots.

Glass shelves held a rainbow of bottles, some familiar and others unlabeled, concocted in-house from family recipes passed down with the bar and only available to those who knew to request them.

The wood plank floor was worn smooth in places from a century and a half of dancing, stomping, and sweeping, and the walls were painted a glossy midnight blue that made the place feel cool and dark, even when the sun blazed outside.

Aunt Alaitheia was tall and broad-shouldered.

Where his mother had colored her hair to cover up the bit of gray in her temples, Alaitheia’s rioted down her back and over her shoulders in a kudzu of gray curls.

Her brown eyes were as keen as Edgar remembered, but the neon pink glasses on a chain around her neck were new.

She raised them to her eyes and peered at them.

“Nephews,” she said, crossing to them. “What a surprise. Congratulations on a new generation of Rondeaus.”

“How’d you know that?” Poe asked suspiciously, arms crossed over his chest.

“Our family gift has many uses,” she said. Then she winked at Edgar and added, “And your sister texted me.”

Edgar had forgotten Allie’s soft spot for their aunt.

Aunt Alaitheia leaned in to examine Jamie, and Edgar froze, praying she wouldn’t do anything weird or rude. But she simply regarded them for a while and smiled. “You must be Jamie.”

“Must I?” Jamie quipped. “Just kidding, sorry. It’s really nice to meet you. Guess I’m a little starstruck,” they added sheepishly.

“Starstruck? By little old me?” But her wink was conspiratorial and appreciative, and Jamie grinned back at her like they’d understood everything she’d implied.

“How is your sister getting along?” Alaitheia asked, gesturing them to follow her to the booth in the back corner where they’d spent so many afternoons.

“Pretty well,” Edgar said, not knowing how to talk to this aunt he’d never really gotten to know.

His mother’s sister. She had to know things, right?

They sat in the booth, and Aunt Alaitheia waved a languid hand to the man behind the bar.

“I remember when your mother had Allie,” Aunt Alaitheia said in a faraway voice.

“She was such a sweet baby. She just wanted to be carried around all day and be with the people she loved. You know, when your mother was pregnant with her, she constantly craved pancakes. We must’ve been to every twenty-four-hour diner in the city. ”

The bartender set down a tray before Aunt Alaitheia. It contained four Pontarlier glasses, a glass fountain with two spouts, four slotted spoons, a bowl of sugar cubes, a bottle of absinthe, and a pitcher of water.

“Do you remember when she was pregnant with Edgar?” Jamie asked, leaning in to accept the glass of absinthe she prepared for them.

“Oh yes. She craved grilled cheese and Bloody Mary mix. You”—she turned to Edgar—“were a serious baby. Allie was a toddler at the time, and she would drag you around like a stuffed animal.”

“What about me?” Poe asked softly.

Aunt Alaitheia paused, regarding him. Her eyes darkened for an instant, but the shadow was gone as soon as Edgar noticed it.

“Little Po’boy,” she said. Poe made a long-suffering face. She seemed to consider her words carefully. “You wanted to be wherever your brother and sister were. You wanted to be just like them.”

That didn’t seem unusual for a youngest child, but Poe scowled like she’d insulted him.

Aunt Alaitheia finished passing out the absinthe.

Jamie was sipping theirs slowly and with relish.

Poe tossed his back like a shot, then scraped the green sugar sludge from the bottom of the glass with his finger and sucked it clean.

Aunt Alaitheia downed hers in two sips. Edgar stared at the cup before him.

He had long avoided anything that might make him less aware of his surroundings.

The night of the last day of his freshman year of high school, Edgar had gone with some friends to a party.

It had been in the gymnasium of an old elementary school in Tremé, shuttered after the damage from Katrina had proven too costly to repair or rebuild.

Ivy had crawled into every crack in the intervening years, pulling the walls apart.

The windows were boarded up and the doors padlocked, but that was nothing to local youth in search of a place of their own.

A first floor window had been pried open, where overgrown vegetation blocked the view of it from the road. Crows cawed at them from telephone wires above, but the only other people around were a knot of guys dealing on the corner, and they didn’t care.

That night, Edgar had been celebrating. It had been a difficult year.

His father had taken off eight months before, and they didn’t know where he was.

It wasn’t precisely a surprise. He and Edgar’s mom had fought all the time—about her drinking, about his yelling, about whether she and her children actually saw ghosts or she’d raised them with a dangerous fiction he couldn’t abide.

His relationship with his kids was just as volatile.

Whenever any of them mentioned something queer— his word—he went off, telling them never to talk about their mother’s nonsense to anyone else.

Telling them they hadn’t seen anything. That they just wanted their mother to approve of them.

As for Edgar’s mother, she’d taken his father’s absence as a boon at first—cooking foods he’d disliked and playing records he’d despised.

She cuddled them near her on the couch and told them they were better off without him because he was trying to convince them that she was crazy, that they were all crazy.

When three months had passed with no word or sign, she’d seemed to realize that he wasn’t coming back.

That was when she got sad. She told them their father was a good man, a caring man, and he’d left them because he’d been jealous of what they shared.

That he’d felt left out of his own family.

Edgar hadn’t missed him much. Hadn’t missed wondering which version of his father he’d get—the distant, scornful shadow who only wanted to be left alone, the jocular dad who wanted an audience for his stories, or the furious bully who berated them for being like their mother.

Allie hadn’t wanted him to return either.

Poe had mourned his loss deeply though, and looked for him everywhere, convinced that if he could just tell their father that he was welcome, then maybe he’d come home.

Edgar and Allie didn’t tell their mother about Poe’s search, and they told him not to say anything either.

Because that had been when the sadness had given way to something more confusing.