Three days later, Sunny came around.
The first thing she did was cry and try to apologize.
I sat on the edge of her hospital bed and put pieces of a peeled apple on a paper plate.
"Your mama's dialysis is back on the books," I said. "Out of my account. Don't worry about it."
Her tears came harder.
"Del. I didn't mean to. They sent me a video of Mama in the chair, and then a different one with the chair empty, and they said —"
"Who reached out to you."
"A woman."
My hand stopped over the apple.
Sunny lifted her face. "She had a mask over her mouth. Her voice was real soft. She said she knew about the false bottom in the drawer. She said she knew you trusted me."
Marigny was already pulling his phone out and bringing up a photograph.
"That her?"
It was my mother at thirty, standing on the steps of the old funeral home.
Sunny shook her head.
He swiped. The next photograph was Lila Toussaint at nineteen.
She shook her head again.
A bad feeling started behind my breastbone.
"What were her eyes like, Sunny."
Sunny thought a second.
"Like yours."
The paring knife slid off the apple onto the plate.
A knock came at the hospital room door.
A nurse came in with a white bakery box. "Ms. Aucoin, this came for you at the front desk."
There was no return address.
I lifted the lid.
Inside the box was a fresh plaster life-cast of a face.
The plaster was bone-dry. The features were finely detailed. Every angle of the jaw, every line of the cupid's bow, the slight asymmetry along the bridge of the nose — was mine.
Under the cast was a notecard.
The handwriting was a careful, almost schoolgirl cursive. It was not Delacroix's.
It said:
Big sister — Teacher says you finally passed.
I read the two words twice.
Big sister.
My mother had never told me, in twenty-eight years, that I had a sister.
Marigny picked up the card. His face went down by degrees.
"Delphine. Your mother's interview from this morning. There's something in it."
I looked at him.
"You were a twin."
I went down the corridor to my mother's room.
She was sitting up. Her hands were folded around the plaster life-cast photo Marigny had brought her. She looked clearer than I had seen her in seven years.
"Her name is Camille."
I didn't say anything.
The name came up the way an old bone comes up out of a flooded field. It had blood on it I had never seen before.
My mother's voice broke. "When you two were born, she was the small one. Sickly. After your daddy got in trouble with that man in Gulfport, Dr. Delacroix came to us. He said he could pay off the debt. The condition was —"
She couldn't make it the rest of the way through the sentence.
"The condition was Camille."
Her sobs answered for her.
"You signed her over."
The answer was loud enough without being said.
For seven years I had thought I was the only one of us left to pay.
It turned out there had been a second child, sold into a deeper place the day she was born.
Marigny said, "How old would Camille be."
"Twenty-eight. Same as Del." My mother's eyes came up to me. "She looked like you, when she was small. Dr. Delacroix wouldn't let me see her after she turned six. He said she wasn't going to live long."
I laughed once, dry.
"Looks like she lived."
My mother caught my hand. "Delphine. Don't hate her. She's a victim too."
I took my hand back.
"Lila Toussaint was a victim. Sunny is a victim. The people in twenty-seven case files were victims. Everyone in Delacroix's basement is a victim."
I stood up.
"That doesn't change that somebody has to answer for the choices, even the choices that were made for them."
Marigny stood up with me.
"Where."
"My prep room."
"Delacroix is going to be waiting."
"I know."
He stepped in front of me at the door.
I looked him in the eyes.
"Marigny. Do you still believe what the dead say to you."
He took a long time.
"I believe evidence."
I nodded.
"Then let's go look at some."
There was crime-scene tape across the front door of Aucoin & Sons.
Marigny ran us in on his shield.
The prep room had been turned over twice and put back once. My cosmetic cabinet, my wax tins, my suture lines, my eye caps, all of it tagged and bagged. The drawer with the false bottom was gone, taken into evidence.
I walked past all of that and went to the back of the cold-storage room, where there was an old chest freezer along the wall that had not run in nine years.
Marigny watched me drag a section of plywood out from the bottom panel.
"There's another cavity."
"Delacroix didn't know about this one."
Inside was a fat, stained spiral notebook.
It was the apprentice's journal I had kept since the year I was eighteen. Every body that came through my hands. Every wound. Every suture. And, the year Marigny started bringing me cold-case work, a second column running down the right-hand side of each page — the words he had heard from the body, copied verbatim, and underneath them my own dated cross-checks against the trace evidence and the autopsy report.
I had not been blindly trusting him.
I had never blindly trusted the dead.
I turned to the entry for case seventeen.
The decedent had been a Tulane junior, body recovered from the Atchafalaya. Detective Marigny, on contact, had heard the words sister, don't push me.
NOPD had arrested her stepsister. The stepsister had confessed under interview. She had been sentenced to life without parole.
Tucked into my page was a small photograph from the autopsy. Under the decedent's fingernails — what I had logged at the time as river-bank silt — was a fine white powder.
I knew now what it was.
It was plaster dust. The kind of fine cast-grade plaster that came off the back of a fresh life mask.
Marigny read the page once and went the color of cold ash.
"Seventeen may have been wrong."
"It isn't the only one."
I pulled six more pages from the back of the journal.
"All of these have Delacroix on the periphery."
He shut his hand on the pages.
"I'll reopen them."
"You can't reopen them."
I pointed at the line at the top of the case-seventeen sheet.
"Case seventeen. The lead investigator of record is Wendell Theriot."
Marigny lifted his eyes.
A slow handclap started behind us in the doorway.
Wes Theriot was standing inside the threshold of the cold-storage room with his service weapon out.
He looked tired the way somebody looks who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and is almost relieved that you finally noticed.
"I figured you'd come back here," he said.
Marigny stepped between Theriot and me.
Theriot's muzzle did not move to follow Marigny. It stayed pointed straight at me.
"Aucoin. Give me the notebook."
I held the notebook against my ribs.
"What did Delacroix give you, Wes."
Theriot's eye twitched.
"He gave me the truth."
Marigny said, level, "He gave you a story."
"You don't know," Theriot snapped. He sounded as though he hadn't slept in a week. "My sister Margaux. They pushed her off a bridge. Everybody said she jumped. Everybody. Until Dr. Delacroix called me into his office and told me she'd seen her killer before she went over."
I remembered case seventeen now. Margaux Theriot. Twenty-one. Atchafalaya Basin Bridge.
Marigny said, "So you let her stepsister go down for it."
Theriot's eyes were bright and red around the rims.
"That girl deserved to go down. She bullied Margaux. She stole her scholarship money. She stole her boyfriend. She might not have laid hands on her but she stood behind every reason Margaux had to be on that bridge."
I looked at him steady.
"And Lila Toussaint, Wes. And Sunny. And me. Are we also acceptable collateral on your sister's account."
His muzzle wavered an inch.
In that beat, the PA speakers along the wall of the prep room came on.
The voice that came out was a woman's voice. Soft. Lightly amused.
"Big sister. He's not a bad man. He just wanted the dead to talk so badly."
The blood in my arms stopped moving.
Camille.
The voice went on.
"Teacher says everybody who's alive is lying. Only when you push them right up to the edge of dying do they start telling the truth."
Marigny, quiet, said, "Where are you."
She laughed once.
"You like listening to dead people, Detective. When I'm dead you'll find out."
The PA cut.
A temperature alarm went off in the cold-storage room.
The little screen above the rack of body-storage drawers had a single drawer flashing red. The unit's coil had been flipped — the drawer was warming, fast.
I went to it and pulled the latch.
The drawer slid out.
There was a girl inside.
She was breathing through her nose. Her mouth had been sealed with surgical tape. A film of liquid restorative wax, still warm and translucent, was being poured slowly across her face from the inside of the drawer.
The girl still had a pulse.
Marigny called the ambulance with his phone hand and kept his service weapon on Theriot with the other.
I went into the gloves and the cooling spray. If the wax set on the dermis it would burn the skin off in a flat sheet when you pulled it.
I worked along the cheekbones first, lifting the warm layer back in strips.
Theriot was still standing in the doorway with his weapon up. His arm had begun to shake at the elbow.
The girl's eyelashes moved. Her lips tried to part under the tape.
I leaned in close.
"It wasn't —" she got out. "It wasn't Margaux's sister."
Theriot lifted his head.
"What did you say?"
The girl was working hard to breathe. "On the bridge. The girl who pushed Margaux. She was — a girl with — Teacher kept her at the Institute. She looked like — like Ms. Aucoin."
Theriot's weapon hit the concrete floor.
The seven years of certainty he had hung his life on came down in a single second. He sat down in the doorway like somebody had cut the tendon behind his knees.
Marigny went and cuffed him without his having to look up.
He sat there and said, almost to nobody, "Margaux. I'm sorry, sweetheart."
I did not have time for him.
The wax film on the girl's face would scar her if I didn't get it off before it cured.
I kept working. "What's your name."
"Lena."
"Lena. Where's Camille Aucoin."
Her tears were running into the wax line on her temples.
"She said she was going to see Mama."
I stopped.
Marigny had heard her. He was already on his radio.
The Tulane Medical desk nurse picked up. Her voice came back through the speaker thin and shaking.
"Detective. Ms. Aucoin's mother. She left the floor. The lobby camera caught her walking out with a woman."
"What woman."
"She looked just like the daughter. Like — exactly like Ms. Aucoin."
I stood up from the drawer.
The street outside was sliding into a damp, salt-thick dusk.
My phone went off in my back pocket.
The number was blocked.
The message was a photograph.
My mother was strapped to a stainless prep table I recognized — the long one from the academic building, the one that should have been chained shut behind crime tape.
Standing behind her, in a white lab coat, holding my own number twenty-two scalpel, was a woman who had my face.
Below the photograph:
Big sister — come finish ours.