Read Chapter 5: An Unlikely Ally

The address Tante Odette sent her to was a shotgun house on Dumaine Street, painted a fierce shade of purple that seemed to drink the afternoon light. Elodie stood on the cracked sidewalk for a full minute before approaching the door, her leather satchel pressed against her hip like a shield.

She hadn't told Julien where she was going. After their strange, charged morning in the mansion—winding the music box together and watching the hidden piano answer from somewhere deep in the walls—she needed answers he couldn't give her. The neighborhood gossips had been more forthcoming than Julien ever was. *Tante Odette knows things,* a woman at the corner market had told her, lowering her voice to a whisper. *She knew the Fontenots before the war. Before any of this.*

Elodie knocked three times.

The door opened so quickly she wondered if Odette had been standing behind it, waiting. The woman before her was old in a way that defied measurement—her skin the color of aged mahogany, her eyes bright and sharp beneath a turban of indigo silk. She wore a simple white cotton dress and a necklace of tiny bones and beads that clicked softly when she moved.

"You're the lawyer," Odette said. Not a question.

"Elodie Marchand." She extended her hand. "I was told you might—"

"I know what you were told." Odette's gaze traveled over Elodie's face, lingering on her eyes. "And I know what you've heard. The house. The music. The boy who thinks he's the last of a cursed line."

Elodie's heart quickened. "Julien."

"Come inside," Odette said, stepping back. "We don't speak of such things on the street with the sun looking down on us."

The interior of the shotgun house was dim and rich with smells Elodie couldn't name—dried herbs, candle wax, something earthy and sweet. Every surface held an object: jars of powders, bundles of feathers, small carved figures she recognized from the vague anthropology classes she'd taken in college. Vodou lwa, she realized. Papa Legba, Erzulie, Baron Samedi.

Odette gestured to a worn velvet chair. Elodie sat. The woman did not sit herself, instead moving to a small table where a kettle sat heating over a blue flame.

"You're wondering if I'm a charlatan," Odette said without turning around.

"I'm a lawyer. I wonder that about everyone."

A dry laugh. "At least you're honest." She poured steaming water into two cups, added something from a small unlabeled jar. "The Fontenot house tried everything. Priests, exorcists, engineers, demolition crews. Even a man from the Smithsonian who wanted to record the music for their archives." She handed Elodie a cup. The tea smelled of mint and something darker. "None of them heard what I heard."

"And what did you hear?"

Odette sat across from her finally, folding her long hands in her lap. "The music isn't a haunting. Everybody gets that wrong. The papers, the priests, even the family themselves. They think it's the dead crying out. That Clarisse Fontenot's ghost won't rest, or that her husband Émile is trapped in the walls where he killed himself." She shook her head slowly. "Nothing so simple as a ghost."

Elodie wrapped her hands around the warm cup. "Then what is it?"

"A curse." Odette's voice dropped, and the candles seemed to dim in response. "A working laid so deep into the bones of that house that it became part of the structure itself. The music is a summons, but it's also a warning. It's been calling for over a hundred and fifty years, and it won't stop until the debt is acknowledged."

"Debt." Elodie leaned forward. "What debt?"

Odette looked at her for a long moment, and in that silence Elodie felt the weight of generations pressing down on her shoulders. "The tree remembers," Odette said softly. "You ask the tree, and it will tell you what the people won't. What they can't. What they've buried so deep they've forgotten they were the ones who buried it."

"The tree." Elodie's mind raced. "What tree? In the mansion's garden?"

Odette didn't answer. Instead, she reached into a pocket of her dress and withdrew a small cloth pouch, tied with red string. She held it out to Elodie, whose hands were still wrapped around the teacup.

"Take it," Odette said. "For protection."

"You've never met me before today," Elodie said, not reaching for the pouch. "Why would you help me?"

Because she sensed something in Elodie, something beyond the carefully composed surface she'd spent years perfecting. The question hung in the air between them. Odette's eyes seemed to see through Elodie's professional armor to something raw beneath.

"Because you're the first one who stayed," Odette said simply. "The first one who heard the music and didn't run. And because you look at Julien Bellerose the way his mother looked at his father, and that's a dangerous thing on both sides of the veil."

Elodie felt heat rise to her cheeks. "I don't—"

"I didn't say you'd admitted it to yourself." Odette pressed the pouch into Elodie's hand. The cloth was warm, as if it had been sitting in the sun. "You'll need this when you go back to the house. The music is already learning your name, and it doesn't like the idea of being understood."

Elodie closed her fingers around the gris-gris. It pulsed faintly, or maybe that was her own heartbeat. "What's in it?"

"Bones, herbs, your intentions." Odette shrugged. "The power isn't in the objects. It's in what you believe they can do. You believe enough, and they'll work."

"You sound like a lawyer," Elodie said despite herself. "Arguing precedent."

Odette laughed, a real sound, rich and crackling. "I've argued with every kind of person in this city, child. Lawyers are the least strange of them." She stood, and Elodie understood the audience was over. "Go to the tree. Ask it what it remembers. And when you come back—and you will come back—I'll tell you the rest."

"The rest of what?"

"Of the story that starts before the house was even built," Odette said. She walked Elodie to the door and opened it onto the blinding afternoon. "Be careful, lawyer. You're not just fighting a house anymore. You're fighting a promise made in blood."

Elodie stepped onto the porch and turned back. "One more thing. The boy—Julien. His brother Étienne came to you, didn't he?"

Odette's face stilled. "He did."

"What did you tell him?"

"The same thing I told you. To ask the tree." Her voice grew quiet, almost mournful. "He went into that house with what I gave him, and he never came out. But you already knew that, didn't you?"

Elodie hadn't known—not for certain. But she'd seen the way Julien's face shuttered when his brother's name came up, the raw edge in his voice when he'd mentioned Étienne's claim to deciphering the melody. She'd wondered if the brother was truly gone, or just so lost in the mansion's secrets that he'd become part of them.

"Thank you," Elodie said.

Odette's eyes held hers for a long moment. "Find the tree before the music plays tonight," she said. "It only shows what it remembers while the sun is up."

She closed the door.

Elodie stood on the porch, the gris-gris warm in her palm. The tree. In the mansion's overgrown garden, she remembered, there had been an enormous oak—ancient, gnarled, its roots disturbing the stonework of the old carriage house. She'd noticed it when Julien was showing her the grounds, the way he'd steered her around it without ever acknowledging why.

She called Julien's phone. It rang four times before he answered, his voice guarded. "What do you want?"

"The oak tree in your garden," Elodie said. "What's special about the oak tree?"

A long silence. She heard him breathe in, then out. "How do you know about the tree?"

"Tante Odette. She said to ask it what it remembers."

"Odette." Something shifted in his voice, a note she hadn't heard before. Fear, yes, but underneath it a thread of longing. "My brother went to see her the week before he disappeared. He came home with dirt under his nails and a look in his eyes I hadn't seen since we were children." A pause. "He said the tree had been waiting for him."

"For what?"

"For someone to ask the right questions."

Elodie gripped the phone tighter. The sun was beginning its slow arc toward the horizon, and she could feel time running through her fingers like water. "Julien—will you let me into the garden tonight? Before the music starts?"

He didn't answer for so long she thought he'd hung up. Then: "Elodie. My brother dug beneath that tree. I always knew it, even though he never told me what he found. The next morning, he was gone." His voice cracked on the last word. "If you find what he found, I don't know if you'll come back."

Elodie looked down at the gris-gris in her hand, then up at the sky, where early clouds were beginning to gather. "I'm coming anyway," she said. "With or without your permission."

She ended the call before he could argue.