Madeleine's Ghost by Robert Girardi

but I don’t see it.”
    â€œIt’s the eyes mostly. She’s got the same eyes. What color are your eyes?” I reached for her hand suddenly and leaned close across the bar.
    Antoinette was startled, but she did not pull away. “Sometimes blue,” she said almost in a whisper, “sometimes gray. Depends on the mood.”
    â€œNo,” I said. “They’re the color of rainwater.”
    There was a pause, my nose a half inch from the smoldering end of her cigarette. Molesworth groaned audibly to my left. Antoinette’s hand felt cool and small in mine. She disengaged gently and stepped back.
    â€œYour friend here is drunk, Lyle,” she said to Molesworth. “Drunk but cute. Bring him back when he isn’t so drunk.” Then she turned to the clamor at the far end of the bar.
    â€œYou are one dumb sombitch,” he said when she was gone. “I wash my hands of the consequences,” and he made a hand-washing gesture.
    I laughed, something like joy in my heart, and tipped up my Dixie and drank, and I tried not to mind when Molesworth gave me a sharp elbow in the ribs and I turned to see Dothan standing just outside the doorway to the kitchen, a dark figure beneath the paws of the bear in the hard yellow light.

3
    I N MATTERS of the heart, luck is everything. I have never been a lucky man, which is to say circumstances conspired in my favor once, then never looked my way again.
    Two weeks after Molesworth took me to Spanish Town, I happened across Antoinette in the museum in Gibson Hall at Tulane. A dull gray sky stretched tight as a drum over Audubon Park, palm trees along St. Charles drooping listlessly against it. It rained; then it didn’t rain; then it rained again. There is nothing to do in such oppressive weather, impossible to concentrate, so I wandered over to look at the yellow skulls and Indian relics in their dusty glass cases. The museum is a strange, unkemptlittle place, not much visited and full of mismatched oddities: dingy bones of mysterious provenance, the perfect glass beads of the Mound Builders, two Egyptian monkey mummies from the Middle Kingdom, codices written on human skin, and gold ornaments stolen by the conquistadors—perhaps by stout Cortez himself—from the bloody cities of the Aztecs.
    Antoinette stood before a case of Aztec artifacts in an unseasonable sleeveless flowered dress, shivering, her hair in wet curls down her back. There were bruises on her bare arms, and when I got closer, I saw she was soaked through to the skin.
    â€œAntoinette?” I said.
    She turned toward me with a zoned-out stare. Her pupils looked dilated. I had been back to Spanish Town twice since the first visit, each time making a point to talk to her, but I could see she did not know my face.
    â€œAt your bar,” I said. “I’ve been in a few times—”
    â€œDothan’s bar.” She frowned, an edge in her voice. She was too sedated to show any real anger, but I felt a wicked thrill when I considered that something might have happened between them.
    â€œAre you all right?” I stepped closer. “Is there something wrong?”
    She ignored the question and pointed at the case. “Check this stuff out,” she said. “It’s really wild.”
    Behind the thick glass, a large obsidian blade, strands of gold wire still wrapped around the haft, lay on a strip of red velvet. I read the tag and shuddered.
    â€œThe Aztec priests used it to cut out the hearts of their sacrificial victims,” she said in a dull monotone. “They believed that the sun was a feeble old man who needed human blood to survive and rise the next day. So they’d force the people to line up at the base of those stone temples, thousands of them. Then, one by one they’d be dragged up to have their hearts cut out with that bit of polished rock. Then the priests would roll their bodies down the other side, where acolytes