FAÇADE
THE CHARACTERS:
AMBY
AGE 12, burly headstrong newsboy in the French Quarter, highly intelligent and loyal to his friends despite history as mischief maker in town
EUGENE
AGE 12, soft-spoken newsboy of small stature, an orphan who considers the French Quarter home and likes helping others
THEODOSIA
AGE 11, very clever newspaper vendor, close with her friends AMBY and EUGENE, has an older sister FLORENCE who wants to leave New Orleans forever
THE FRENCH QUARTER
In 1871, New Orleans' French Quarter blends elegance and decay like perfume spritzed on a long-sitting corpse. Extravagantly dressed tourists trot past decrepit colonial buildings, their pillars and other Old World styles crumbling to hazy memory. Child laborers come in many forms—newsboys and factory workers—and hustle in the heat, their toil unseen against the Quarter’s lively streets. Creole aromas fill the air beneath greasy wrought-iron balconies and the tones of lively, booze-fueled music. The district thrives on being the cultural crossroads of the South, caught between faded grandeur and the harsh realities of its working-class populace.
NEW ORLEANS, 1871
“HOW BAD YOU THINK IT IS TO DIE?” asked Ambrose, called Amby by his friends. The bushy-haired boy of twelve was carefully balancing himself on the sidewalk curb along Toulouse Street, his thick arms outstretched to avoid falling in the running stream of murky runoff water.
The small white boy walking on the sidewalk beside Amby, named Eugene, grabbed the top of his worn green flatcap and pulled it down tight, trying to shield himself from the afternoon sun and his best friend’s awful question. “Pretty bad, I’d say. Dying’s painful. You see the look on their faces? Like that old man on the street last week?”
“People always say it’s like sleep. But that old man… his tongue was hanging out and his eyes were wide open. It didn’t look like sleep to me.” Amby said.
“They said it could have been a heart attack or too much whiskey. No one even noticed him until we called the police to help.” Eugene sniffled after he spoke, putting his head down and avoiding the cracks in the cobblestone pavement by side-stepping.
A dark-haired eleven-year old girl walked behind the two boys, Theodosia, the closest friend they had. She drifted to the roadside of the tiny river stream, her dress (more of a bleached flour sack with frills on the sleeves) blowing in the welcomed summer breeze. The wind cooled the sweat off her chest and filled the street with wisps of fresh bread, fresh coffee grounds and even fresher manure. It was a lovely Saturday night and Theodosia would be meeting her sister at the park before they went home for the evening. The flies were buzzing around the closing fruit carts and the road stunk like usual, full of leftover horse matters. The gnats were thirsty for a drink at the corner of her eye. The perfect night after a long day’s work.
A year earlier she was removed from the cigar factory where her sister worked, knocking over and ruining a bale of tobacco leaves after the warehouse heat put stars in her eyes. Mr. Jamison refused to give Theodosia a job at first, satisfied with the boys because their feet never stopped moving. But at the insistence of her sister Florence, Mr. Jamison allowed her to work at his side, saying that “a pretty face can sell anything.” The vendor was an older man with graying hair and deep-set forehead wrinkles, having run his newspaper stand on Orchid Street since before the war. Shouldering knapsacks full of papers and yelling out “PAPER FOR FIVE BITS! PAPER FOR FIVE BITS HERE!”, she and her friends sold pages to paying readers as they walked the rectangled blocks of the city—the French Quarter in the grand state of New Orleans.
New Orleans. What a pretty name…
She didn’t know her own last name, though. That made her heart ache sometimes. Her parents went missing in their war, somewhere between “here and Fairfax Virgenyuh” as Eugene’s uncle told them. The war ended when she was five and her sister was eight. The government moved the two of them far from home, away from any neighbors who might have known their family and too young to know their last names. They grew up at Murphy House Orphanage at the edge of the French Quarter, raised by two kind Spanish women who used to be nuns. The nuns were stern ladies who were married to Jesus, kept churches clean from evil demons and often sung breathless hymns for hours on end. Theodosia hadn’t been back to the Murphy House since her sister Florence was able to rent a room at the inn across from Mr. Jamison’s stand. Florence always told her to be grateful that they traveled to the Murphy House together. Most of the time, families were broken up when the parents died. She was very grateful.
Theodosia’s main job was to stand next to the chestnut-red wooden stand where Mr. Jamison tried to persuade every corset-wearing woman and pocket-watched gentleman to buy a paper or half-paper for less than six bits. While he talked or “chatted up” the regular visitors who always came to the stand at the same time every morning, Theodosia would hold out a tin can and a small stack of papers tucked under her arm. Some people liked to talk and many others just wanted to read the news with no more than a head nod as conversation. An hour before noon her can was filled to the top, the stack would often be dangerously low and her second job of the day began, running to the printing press on Canal Street to grab the afternoon batch for Mr. Jamison and the boys.
The printing press was truly a magic machine, a gigantic cast-iron loom machine with a horse-sized wheel that ate large slips of newspaper before smooshing them in ink that smelled of crushed walnuts and warm leather. Every day but Sunday (her day off), she would grab the fresh papers and place them in two large knapsacks hoisted on her shoulders. Before the hour was up, she waddled past wagons and flocks of tourists and always arrived at the stand before mid-hour. She liked her job but her feet always hurt, no matter how many papers she sold. Today had been a long, sweaty day and she was glad it was over.
“Did the pressman give you a penny? He always flips me one.” Amby said to Theodosia.
The girl snorted and proudly fished the nickel from her dress pocket and showed it off to her friends, a big ‘5’ stamped in. Eugene came to a stop and Amby hopped off the curb to look at her prize. The boys glared at the shining silver coin in delight before Theodosia tossed it back in her pocket.
“You’re lucky, Theo. A whole nickel. What you gonna spend it on?” Eugene asked as the three resumed their walk.
“Me and Florence have been saving up for a book we saw at the little shop.”
“What book? Another one of those Alice in Wondervilles?”
“Wonderland. And no, the book’s called Little Women. Florence’s friend said it was the best book for girls. A bunch of sisters run away from boys and their own problems. The writer wrote a second one but I don’t think I would like it. It’s called Little Men.”
“What’s wrong with little men? Eugene! Somebody wrote a book about us!” Amby laughed.
Theodosia nudged the boy in his side and as the three of them laughed and skipped down the street, the evening sky grew dimmer. Music was starting to fill the air as clubs and venues prepared for another night of song and dance. Wide-smiled people from out of town, called ‘tourists’ had begun their nightly stroll to the bars where they would beg fancy artists to paint a portrait of them or listen to their tall tales about the countries over the Atlanta Ocean. Some of the tourists were rich soldiers who fought on snowy mountaintops, known by all in the homeland and adorned with colorful medals. She often wondered if her father was a war hero before he died.
The big war was something she only remembered in flashes, ant lines of gray and blue soldiers brandishing bayonets that gleamed in afternoon or torch light. She always heard people talking about the fighting, full of blood and fire, but all she ever saw were skinny, sad people holding guns and marching through the streets. The city still had lots of men with no legs and one arm or no arms and a leg sitting on corners, begging strangers to drop a few bits in their noisy metal cups. She was just like them in a way. Not knowing your parents felt like you were missing an arm or leg. Sometimes she would stare at the hurt soldiers and watch how other people tried their best to step around them. What did a soldier do when the war was over? After a person pretended they weren’t there and left the corner, she watched the men take a deep breath, smack their backs against the wall, and wait for the next. Some of them looked like they wanted to cry, others looked like they wanted to sleep but kept having a bad dream. Theodosia had bad dreams sometimes.
“Any weird dreams? I keep having an awful one about an alligator snatching me during a bath.” Theodosia said, the nearby train’s whistle and rumbles shaking her of her wandering thoughts.
“Hm.” Eugene pondered on the dream question. “Sometimes, I’m stuck on a snowy mountaintop, too scared to look over the edge. Part of me think there might be a rope but I’m scared.”
“Are you scared of heights? You never have any trouble on the trains when we sneak to the top on Tuesdays.” Amby said.
“In my dreams, I am. What about you?” Eugene replied. “Too tough to have a nightmare?”
Just then, a man up the street screamed out, followed by a hard slap on stone. It echoed toward the children and they all looked ahead, seeing a dozen people running from the clustered sidewalk in a fuzzy black mass. The roar of murmurs grew louder all around them. The pretty ladies in flower-colored dresses peeked from their conversations, their hats blocking out the sky. A mustached butcher hard at work with a lamb chop stopped to look around and wipe blood on his stained apron. The ground shook. Theodosia shuddered hard when a cannon shot rang out, her chin scrunching into her collarbone.
“Oh God!” a woman yelled before a sickly gray yellow dust storm shot out from the street.
That was the Old Bank. Someone shot it with a cannon? From where? Why? Bank robbery?
Before she knew it, they were sprinting to the hazy scene, dodging deck poles and stiff persons as more crumbling noises echoed out. Her heart was pounding. That old creepy building that always looked like it was going to fall down, crumble in on itself like a rotten sandcastle… did it finally happen?
Rays of red sunset poked her eyes like hot needles as she followed the boys, Eugene taking her hand through the mushy crowd of onlookers. Sweaty hands slapped her face and she got whiff of every type of French Quarter perfume and liquor along the way. The rolling breeze of hot breath whispers urged her to be ruder than usual and shove through the torsos of tourists already pretending to faint or make assumptions.
“Well, by God. At this rate, the whole city will fall apart!”
“Look at the molding! Well, no wonder!”
Theodosia didn’t know what mold had to do with the Old Bank but there was an awful smell.
When they arrived at the front of the smoky site, twenty or so people had congregated at the fenced wall around the steps of the Old Bank. Amby was already halfway up the wall like a squirrel while Eugene took a frog-like leap to and grabbed the top. The wooden planks were pockmarked and drenched night black from the soot that shed on every building and the wall was plastered with advertisements for shops and hotels that existed before the war. Theodosia had never even heard of them. She knew that some of New Orleans had burnt to the ground, soldiers lit their own homes on fire so that the bad guys couldn’t take the state for themselves. There were posters for hotels that looked like castles and bridge towers that reached the clouds, wonders she had been too young to see. It was almost like seeing ghosts in person.
“Grab my hand!” Eugene yelled to her, hoisting her to the top as she dug her small foot in a wedge between the planks.
The dust was clearing and she was taken aback.
She never liked looking at the bank, a scary old building that had been around since the beginning of the city, a thousand years ago or something close to that. That was what Amby told her. The bank’s top almost looked like a church or courthouse and it had six stone pillars as tall as three grown men if they stood on top each other’s heads. Behind the pillars holding up the enormous marble triangle roof with weird angel ladies carved into the stone had dozens of wood crates, boxes and scraps of old rotting wood were stacked to the top. If the Old Bank had any front doors, they had been blocked for good. It was like one of the rich people tombs at the cemetery, a big stone box big enough to house a whole family.
But all of that was gone now. What remained was a honeycombed husk, the bank’s front torn in half and exposing it like a tomato slice. Out from the clearing cloud, she saw several people caked in gray dust, most of them stumbling about. But two gray ghosts were sitting in the rubble like it was a nice picnic spot. The smoke rolled over the fence and she ducked, digging her nails into the planks and coughing.
“What… what happened?” Amby asked loudly, swatting through the air.
One of the older boys filled them in, his prickly-hair chin bouncing against the fence top. “Some college kids on leave were messing with fireworks in the middle of the street last night. One of them hit the roof and it blew the stone to bits. But things keep falling out of the gap. Gold coins and stuff. Treasure. That’s what those fellas were looking at before the whole façade came down.”
“The what?” Theodosia asked.
“The fancy Ro-mann temple thing out front! It was all fake. Those pillars weren’t holding nothing up! Just cheap moldy bricks slapped with white paint! All they had to do was poke at them!”
“What you say about treasure?” Amby asked.
“Yeah! The Old Bank’s got some buried treasure in the attic! Benji’s grandpa said he went in there before they turned it into a bank. It was an old soldier base. It’s got tombs and everything inside.” the older boy said, starting to lose his grip on the fence.
“How can the treasure be buried if it’s in the attic?” Theodosia asked.
“Buried, hidden… same thing!” the other boy said with a laugh. “I believe my grandpa. He fought with George Washington.”
“Who?” Eugene asked.
“The first president!”
“Of New Orleans?”
Benji the treasure hunter rolled his eyes and hoisted himself to the ridge of the fence, following the lead of the older boys. They hopped over one by one while Theodosia stayed behind, her clammy hands sticking to the wood. Her friends looked back at her with a smile, but fear clung to their wet eyes, smeared by the dust.
“Be careful!” she yelled to them.
Eugene smiled back at her. “I’ll get a big gold piece just for you!”
She felt her cheeks get hotter than the sun.
The boys climbed the broken puffy stone and bits of wood, all piled into an ugly heap of brown and grey. There were a dozen young men climbing over one another and sliding down the debris, Amby was left in the dust as Benji the treasure hunter led the climbing effort into the upper portion. The broken remnants of the Old Bank had left plenty of open places for any brave soul to ascend. Benji went first, followed by his older friend while the rest stayed on the ground.
Benji ignored the protest of older folks, kicking his shoes into the fake stone and climbing quick as a lamplighter. Theosdosia followed his path up the broken pillar, a straight shot to the broken attic level. She saw something that reminded her of the falltime. Some red and yellow cloth sticking out of the broken wall. Must have been an old flag or something.
“Get down before you crack yer’ head open! These steps aren’t made of pillows, you brick!” one of Benji’s friends yelled from below, hands on hips.
Eugene and some other boys were pacing about the ground, constantly staring up at Benji with their arm outstretched. Theodosia pushed a funny thought away. What were they planning to do? Catch him like a damsel? How fantastic to see.
Loose bricks and rotten wood careened into the bank’s front steps. The young man nearly lost his grip on the crumbling siding, his tongue sticking out like a lizard at the zoo exhibits. His friends below cheered him on, slapping the sides of the support. Eugene and Amby joined in the revelry. Some of the observers squealed or let out a hoot whenever his foot slipped like they were watching a thrilling puppet show. A drunk man clapped loudly from the back as brave Benji flipped a leg onto the false roof and rolled onto the flat part.
The other boys waited on the steps, Eugene tapping his foot and wiping sweat from his head.
“What are they waiting for?” Theodosia asked.
“To see if he falls or brings the whole thing down. They’re the smart ones.” a shopkeeper answered.
Theodosia turned to him in shock and let out a nervous chuckle. There was nothing she could say. She could only watch.
Benji slapped the sides of the crusted stone, shaking loose things from the upper exposed room. Something round and golden plopped onto his head before hitting the ground. “The hell is that?” he yelled from above.
Eugene picked it up, pushing another boy away. It was a coin. Theodosia smiled as the boy she might have loved squinted back at her and waved with a grin. But crackles from Benji’s climbing position brought her eyes upward. Strangely, a full skeleton, clothed in a yellow cloth sash and shining bracelets popped out, skull first, right onto the boy’s head. His body shuddered. He fell. Theodosia screamed.
As he fell, more of the fake stone ripped off the wooden foundation. The wall ripped out like a lashing tongue. The boy’s supports crumbled and the ones below ran for their lives. Benji’s scream was drowned out by the second boom. A forty or fifty foot drop. A stench stormed out of the dark dust, worse than before, smacking Theodosia in the nostrils with a sour yet stale lingering that stuck to the roof of her mouth. Old death—it was a thought that came from somewhere outside her mind. A strange phrase she had never considered or would have ever conceived of, if not for the bank’s collapse. The heat of afternoon brought the dry, hidden wisps into wet being at the back of her throat. It was like trying to swallow bone gruel and gravel.
There was the strangest silence after Benji’s fall. And then, the hazy street lit up in energy.
It was a hailstorm of worried voices, as if all of New Orleans screamed in her ears on the clogged street. Theodosia leapt from the wall and grabbed onto a parked mail wagon, bracing herself as the people fed their curiosity, pushing in waves through the dust cloud. She was almost hugging the back wheel as the crowd pushed in, squeezing her insides to the point she forgot about everything else.
The loud boom. The evil cloud of black and brown dust that swarmed toward her as her friends and the others vanished in the blast. But there was nothing to replace the endless chatter of taller people paying no attention to her screams as her foot pinned in between the spokes, trying to crawl underneath to escape the crush.
She twisted her ankle to escape, just as the wagon rocked from the weight of the panicked. She returned to the wall, hoping to see Eugene and Amby waiting on the other side. She propped herself on the wooden wall, her throbbing leg wobbly. But she had to see that Eugene and Amby were not crushed by the rubble.
Through the dust, a jawpiece and some leg bones clanged against the armor plates, like the bell tower at noon. Theodosia shook from the sound along with several people in the crowd. Somebody was crying. She finally saw Amby, hunched over with his mouth wide open. The dust had spread far, everything cast in a muggy sunset. But where was Eugene?
A yellow-sashed skeleton toppled out of the opened side, the bones rolling out onto the shattered pile of the Old Bank’s roof. Half of the bones vanished in a poof! of yellow dust while she watched a heavy red cloak, marked with black mold and rodent spots, float its way to the ground. What kind of fight happened at the Old Bank?
It seemed to be that a pile of skeletons was placed against the far wall before they tumbled out of the opening and became hundreds of crusted-yellow relics. There were ten or twenty people’s worth of bones. She had seen plenty of bodies. Every couple weeks, her and her friends would have to step over the body of an abandoned streetman or child around their age—most of time these poor souls were found soiled, blue around the lips and cold to the touch, especially during the bad winters. As the bones and coins poured and poured, Theodosia imagined that a waterfall made of dutiful soldier remains would fit right in next to the Devil’s throne. And she realized she must have been at the gates of Hell.
A few mostly complete skeletons fell in the storm of skulls, ribpieces, arms, and spines, red cloaks meshed to the green armor. Some of the armored ones had long sticks with golden blades wedged inside their ribs or down through the top of the chest. Many of the yellow sashes were ripped apart, moldy black in places. Spears? she thought to herself. Who attacked them? Soldiers during the war? Indians? Each other?
“This is madness!” someone said from the crowd. The crowd erupted into a firestorm of shouts and questions. Theodosia didn’t know how they expected someone to reply.
“How many people were packed in there?”
“What the hell are they wearing?”
“Is that gold? Looks just like it!”
“The whole front fell off, John! It was a sham, I tell you!”
A metal chest plate, caked with green frosting, skittered across the stone edge before tumbling to the rubble below. After the impact, with much of the bright-green coating blasted into powder, Theodosia, and several other gasping people in the crowd, spotted the golden gleam of buried coins beneath.
“That damned governor! My father always said he was a devil in disguise!” a pompous older woman with a French accent said.
Her cream-colored dress was now black as ash and one of the buttons had ran off in the scuffle. She felt worse than dirty. She realized she had seen something no one was supposed to see. So many lives ended by the collapse. The screams. What about Eugene?
A new thought entered her mind as Amby and another boy finally pulled Eugene from the rubble, caked in dust and his face all puffy. His arms looked wrong. His head wobbled and whipped around, flinging the black tar that was soaked into his shirt. It took a minute for her to realize he was covered in blood, but not his own.
“It looked like the Ro-manns!” a shrill voice echoed through the murmurs.
“The Ro-manns? That don’t even make sense. Unless they were having a costume getogether.” another voice responded.
Blurry pictures starting forming in Theodosia’s head. She could almost see a painting or statue of several leaders standing proud, draped in blankets and holding their arm high while pillared buildings of white stone that looked like the Old Bank’s front rested on green hilltops. America had taken their ways of leadership and even how they made their buildings. Every important building in the city had those pillars standing out front. The Ro-manns had been important at some point. But why were they in America?
And the Ro-manns had their city set on fire two hundred years ago or something like that. Her brain felt like it was being cooked on a spitroast. The skeletons, the bodies, looked wrong. Not wrong like Eugene’s limp body. But it was like the bones and weapons didn’t belong in New Orleans or America. From some other distant country. Or faraway time.
Before being ushered away, a nice officer put a hand on her shoulder and told her that Eugene died before he could blink. Just a quick gasp and gone to the wind. Benji was dead as well. Most likely as soon as he hit the ground. Three other boys were crushed by the collapse. A few other were pretty injured, mashed legs and such. Almost like the soldiers from the war begging for money on the street. The best thing for Eugene was that there was no pain.
It almost made her feel better, but looking at Eugene’s loose, ragged body made her stomach flip. Amby grabbed her hand and yelled at her to follow him as the crowd got bigger behind them, the roar of police orders and hospital wagons filling the air.
She was very late to meet her sister at the park.
THEODOSIA AND AMBY HAD BEEN STARING AT the scraped-empty lot where the Old Bank sat two weeks earlier. Things were a bit unreal. How it pushed its way through the growing city of the French Quarter made it seem like it would never be moved or torn down, like a boulder on the shore, ignorant despite the waves. A few dozen men with shovels and wagons took the entire thing down in three days, flattening out tons of dirt overtop like nothing had ever been there. So much for the Old Bank. Now it was just the Old Patch In the Ground Between Two Shops. It was their last night in the French Quarter and she did not want to go.
For some reason, Mr. Jamison had been given “stipe-ends” from the state government to send Amby, herself and her sister Florence to school. She wasn’t happy about going. The French Quarter was her home. But Mr. Jamison told her that “the opportunity was something you couldn’t pass on” so she and her sister packed all they could into three leather bags given by Mr. Jamison’s mother.
The next few years of her life (at least in her own bad dreams since) seemed dull. Hundreds of miles from her home. No friendly faces to see everyday. Out of the heat and into the chill of New York. It would be years of arithmetic, nose-tickling quill pens, telling stories in front of strangers, and sitting in a slippery chair for half the day. Somehow, all this was supposed to be better than what life had been before. Maybe she was just afraid of something new. New things were scary, indeed.
“You and Florence have your clothes packed? I can’t believe we’re going on a train for the first time! Well, the first time with a ticket!” Amby went on, his happiness rising with every word. It made her feel better. His own hopes and dreams weren’t crushed even though Eugene’s future was.
She nodded. She had cried twice since the collapse. Over Eugene. And the other boys. But mostly her friend.
After a moment of silence, Amby spoke up again. “You know something. In a weird way, we have Eugene to thank. They gave more money to Mr. Jamison because Eugene didn’t have family. I’m glad we have someone looking out for us.”
“Me too.” Theodosia said, grabbing Amby’s hand and gently holding it.
Suddenly, Theodosia felt as if she was being watched. And sure enough, after breaking from Amby’s hand and turning around, she saw the strangest lady standing in the crowd across the street. The lady’s hair was a magnificent gold like the swirled iron bars of the rich peoples’ balconies. Theodosia hoped to have her body when she was older. And her fancy dark coat. The long brown coat was the kind she had only seen worn by the street-dwelling soldiers. A ‘warcoat’ as Eugene called them. Theodosia thought about looking away but couldn’t. She was much taller than her, Amby, or even her older sister. And she didn’t look like a tourist. She had a single piece of fancy jewelry, a circular dish on a golden chain around her neck. Even from across the narrow street, the twinkling sparkle of diamonds were bursting out the top curve and Theodosia’s eyes were drawn.
The necklaced lady pulled out a black notebook strapped with a fine blue ribbon and began scribbling intensely, all while staring at Theodosia. After a moment, the woman was walking toward them and Theodosia froze, Amby unaware as he looked toward the busy street as a carriage wheel snapped, spilling a cartful of apples. While he rushed to help the driver as red and green apples bobbed and bounced across the cobblestone, the lady had arrived next to Theodosia, only the briefest flush of wind at her ear.
“Hello, Theodosia.” the lady said with a light voice, little more than a whisper.
Theodosia’s heart stopped. She wanted to leave all of a sudden. Flee the French Quarter. This lady knew her name and she had never seen her, she was sure of it. She was a white lady first of all and didn’t have the tan of someone raised in New Orleans. No, she looked like a Northerner. A Yankee.
“How do you know me?” she blurted out, the sounds of helpful people assisting the broken apple cart drowning out as her heartbeat overtook all.
The lady did not answer, walking around the girl in a slow but intimidating circle. Theodosia felt like an ice sculpture in the making—the pretty lady the one with an icepick or saw in hand, chipping her slowly from the block. But her eyes were leaning toward the lady’s beautiful yet odd necklace. But the lady pulled away, stretching her long warcoat across her bosom and clasping with a button click.
“It’s a medallion.” the lady said, as if she could hear Theodosia’s thoughts.
“What happened the other day? I heard something about some skeletons popping out of the walls! Did you hear about that?” the lady asked.
Theodosia stood as tall as she could, breaking through her grasp. This lady was different. She wrote in an odd way, her head cocked to one side as she struck the leather-covered paper pad with a black fountain pen. The ink shined in the sunlight as Theodosia watched the swirling, connected cursive appear on the blue lines stacked down the page. The ink seeped into the thick page and without warning, Theodosia was reminded of the stranger’s blood soaking into Eugene’s shirt. She grit her teeth as the lady wrote many words with her left hand, filling half the page. She looked at Theodosia periodically with piercing eyes, they were almost identical to green grapes.
“The debris. All the nasty stuff that fell out? Did you see any gold? What about weapons? Like something warriors in a history book would use. Spears, axes, chains?”
She didn’t know how to respond. It seemed like the lady already knew the answers. But she tried to help. “Gold coins started falling out of the roof. The people around said that college kids had broken the Old Bank with some fireworks. The place was no more sturdy than some of the fancy-looking balconies downtown. It crumbled to bits as soon as one of the boys got to the top. Then the bones started falling. After Benji fell, more fell out. Some were broken up but other had been stabbed. With golden spears. And the skeletons were wearing sashes. Yellow and red. Who were they?” She would always remember the pierced skeletons. Did the people in armor die with spears in their bellies? Their backs? What an awful death.
“Did they look old?”
Theodosia paused. Well of course, she thought, they were skeletons. “Very old.”
The lady stopped writing, waving the pad around as the ink dried into a pale blue. She saw her name on the bottom of the pad as the lady closed it and placed it back in her coat. After a moment, the lady pulled out a fluffy collarpiece that covered her medallion, dyed a deep green. She smiled down at Theodosia and opened her mouth slowly, as if to tell a secret.
“What if… you didn’t see anything? I know that sounds odd but I have a good reason. Let’s say we were to play a game. To win, all you have to do is never tell anyone what you saw on that awful day. That means you would never speak about the building falling apart and what you saw inside. And what that mean is—no bones, no red robes or yellow sashes, no shiny armor. No gold coins falling out of the walls. If you do that, and keep it a secret, maybe I can give you a necklace like mine.”
The girl stopped looking at the destruction, stopped thinking about the dead Ro-manns, and wondered why the lady was so interested in what she had seen.
“You want me to lie to people?”
“No! Of course not, miss! But is it nice to go around telling nice folks about these things? All that awfulness has been cleaned up. As if nothing ever happened.”
Theodosia’s face got red. “But something did happen.” Her mind flashed to Eugene’s smile, promising to retrieve a gold piece for her as he ran off to the Old Bank’s steps. His final moments before stupid Benji had to fall and knock the roof down.
The lady got dark in her eyes. Her fake smile had vanished. “It is imperative that no one knows about the collapse or what was inside the Old Bank. We’ve had plenty of trouble trying to get people’s heads thinking straight. The Old Bank was a dangerous place that should have been flattened years ago. You cannot talk to others about this place. Do you understand me, Theodosia?”
“I don’t care how important your job is! My friend died when the bank fell apart! He was smooshed right under those big ugly pillars with the rest of them! Seven people died! I saw the paper headline last week before Mr. Jamison said he was shutting down the business. I can read!”
The lady’s face softened for a second, then the grin returned. “You are… exceptional. Do you know what that means?”
Theodosia was shaking, still unable to move. “Like special?” Tears were forming.
The lady nodded, her necklace jingling. Theodosia’s eyes dove for it. She couldn’t resist it anymore. The tears stopped like a valve twisting shut. She did want one.
“Do you know what a founder is?” the lady asked. Theodosia shook her head.
“Founders can create great things from nothing. Schools. Hospitals. Cities. Hope. But they can’t do it by themselves. They would rather use the wealth of others instead of sharing their own. But most founders have debts to pay, no matter how righteous they present. Remember this.”
Founders… Theodosia’s mind flashed to the red-and yellow caped skeletons surrounded with gold in all its glory and forms. Even the spears were said to be made of gold.
The lady bent down, her bright hair brushing across Theodosia’s face as she bent down to meet her eyes. She smelled like a bundle of fresh fruit and burnt leather gloves. She couldn’t help but smile. The lady was odd but comforting in a way. Like her mother may have been. She pulled the golden chain from the back of her neck and removed the medallion.
The medallion’s etchings became clear as the lady held it out. It was of a crowned woman holding a wrinkly walnut or something at her belly, with rays of sunlight bursting behind her. The lady almost looked identical to the etching. “Well, hold on to this for me. Can you do that, Theodosia?”
“You know my name?”
“Ahh! Who doesn’t?”
“What about my sister?”
“Florence? Of course! We’ve kept eyes on her as well. But we see no reason to get her involved yet. Or Ambrose.”
“Involved in… what?” Theodosia asked.
“Keep this medallion close when you come to New York. You will be contacted soon, miss. Keep your friends close.”
She clasped her warm hands over Theodosia’s. But she felt unsteady. And very confused. “In New York?”
The lady nodded and quickly checked the pocketwatch strapped to the velvet inside of her coat before hiding it again. She flashed a quick look of disgust that morphed to hesitation. “Can you keep our secret?”
Theodosia nodded. “Yes.”
“Then good luck to you.” the lady said, letting go and walking into the street.
One last thing… Theodosia thought to herself, almost letting the moment slip by. But she felt braver. She had to try. “Can you tell me my last name?”
The lady’s eyes went blank, like she was looking through Theodosia. The grin returned. It meant the lady was hiding something. A shiver ran down her back. The roar of the French Quarter crowd nightlife was beginning. Another night of parties, laughing friends, and happiness across the state of New Orleans. And all of those people seemed to be unaware of what happened to the Old Bank. Or they simply didn’t care. It was clear that the medallion lady didn’t care either. She wanted to pretend it never happened. But at least it seemed like she had a good reason.
“It sounds like you have your own story to look after. At least for right now. I’ll be surprised if we never meet again.”
“What?”
The lady put a long finger to her lips and pursed them out.
The crowd swarmed her as the apple cart onlookers began to separate, the ambulance wagon trotting up the street. Amby was returning to her. People brushed by. She tried to spot her as the blurs of the French Quarter’s curious citizens returned to their afternoon duties.
Without even a blink of the eye, the lady was gone.
“Who were you talking to?” Amby asked, hopping onto the sidewalk, holding two apples and throwing one to his best friend.
She let the pale red apple explode on the ground beside her. Around her neck, Theodosia’s medallion had went cold.
THE END