Floodgates

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye supposed there were men in the world who would have worn jeans with multicolored beads stitched across the butt, but she didn’t think many of them weighed a hundred and ten pounds. She decided not to spend much time meditating on the fact that this woman’s jeans had survived water and heat and mildew and rot so much better than their wearer.

  Jodi cleared her throat to get Faye’s attention. “We’ve had us a nice little chat about this crime scene. A few hours of it, to tell the truth. To hear you talk, Ms. Longchamp, I’d think you’d spent a lot of time with cops.”

  Jodi didn’t make eye contact. Somebody should tell her to watch her body language. When a cop is interrogating a witness, it’s a poor idea to let that witness know that she’s saying one thing and thinking another. Faye decided to let someone else give her that advice.

  “Call me Faye. As for me spending time with cops, well, there are a couple of good reasons for that. I’ve had enough bad luck to lose some friends to homicide. And one of my other friends—”

  “You’re telling me that some of them survived?”

  It felt weird to laugh in the presence of a victim of drowning or worse, but Faye went ahead and did it anyway.

  “Yeah. I have lots and lots of surviving friends. And one of them is a county sheriff. He talks to me about his work sometimes. Once, he even hired me as a consultant. Law enforcement sure pays better than archaeology.”

  “No kidding? I didn’t think they made paychecks smaller than mine. What kind of consulting did you do?”

  “He was questioning some suspects who were caught digging up artifacts in a National Wildlife Refuge.”

  “So that’s a federal crime.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Right. I’m pretty sure he thought the Feds didn’t know jack about archaeology, and that they were going to mess this thing up bad. The people they were questioning were also suspects in the murder of a pretty high-profile local resident, but the pothunting charge was all he had on them. He hired me as a consultant to look at the artifacts they were carrying when they were picked up. Also, he wanted me there when the Feds interrogated the guy who was paying them to dig up public property and cart it away.”

  Jodi scratched her arm, and Faye was reminded that standing in this fetid place made her want a hot shower. No, two hot showers. And a lot of soap.

  “Were they the killers your friend was looking for?”

  “No. But the pothunting charge stuck.”

  “Then I’d say you did damn fine work.”

  Jodi glanced at the technicians gently extricating the bones from the garbage and filth cradling them. Faye saw the detective take in a little breath and square her shoulders, and she liked Jodi even more. She worried about people who got accustomed to dead and decaying human bodies.

  “If you’re so determined to make this a murder case,” Jodi said, turning an appraising look on Faye, “tell me why you think this woman’s lying here dead.”

  “I guess I’d start with the run-of-the-mill reasons people get killed. Maybe a robbery went bad?”

  “Possible. Everybody spent the week of the storm running around with their pockets full. When you leave home and you don’t know when you’re coming back, it’s only natural to gather up as much cash as you can.”

  That made sense. Faye always felt like she was on solid ground when a conversation was making sense. “Since the dead person was a woman…” She paused, thinking she might let that phrase speak for itself, but decided not to be a coward. “The newscasts made it look like the city fell into complete anarchy after the levees failed. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a woman alone when that happened. Do you think this was a rape that ended in murder?”

  “Could have been. Her clothes are in decent shape. They’re not torn. All the buttons are where they’re supposed to be. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t raped, though.”

  Faye was thinking of valuable things that weren’t money. “During that week, I imagine you could have been killed for a working cell phone.”

  “Yeah. Or a boat, more likely.” Memories clouded Jodi’s face. “A boat equaled escape. A boat equaled life. If someone you loved was trapped on a roof somewhere, you would have given anything for a boat. If you were the right kind of person—make that the wrong kind of person—you might have killed for a boat.”

  “How will you track down this woman’s identity? I have no idea how that’s done.”

  “I’ve talked to the missing person’s division—” Jodi began.

  “St. Anthony’s people?” Faye remembered after it was too late that it really wasn’t cool to make light of someone else’s religion, but Jodi was laughing.

  “Yeah, but I had to talk to the saint’s assistant, because the head honcho saint of missing persons isn’t taking my calls until I catch up on my acts of contrition.”

  “You’ve been that bad?”

  “Yeah.” The sparkle in Jodi’s eye didn’t look all that contrite. “Anyway, they say there’s nobody left unaccounted for in this neighborhood. So this isn’t where our dead lady lived. We’re still working on getting hold of the owner of this house.”

  “Nina might know something. Or Matt. He seems to know the area.”

  Nina and Charles were long-gone.

  Faye looked around for the young park ranger and realized that she hadn’t seen him since right after the bones were found. Checking her watch, she saw that it was past quitting time and wondered whether Matt had driven away and left her without transportation. It was obvious that he’d been upset, but Matt was a southern boy. He wouldn’t have done that to a lady, not even when that lady was wearing dusty clothes and filthy boots.

  She walked out to the curb and looked down the street. Sure enough, the car was right where they’d left it, and she’d bet money that Matt had left the keys in it for her.

  “Poor kid. I bet he just didn’t want to be here. I mean, this could’ve been somebody he knew.”

  “I prefer my witnesses to stick around.” Jodi filled out the form on her clipboard and using her pen with a little more force than necessary. Substituting a paper-ripping penpoint stab for the period at the end of a sentence, she said, “When people remove themselves from sight before law enforcement arrives, I always wonder why.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Joe was waiting for Faye at the battlefield, standing on the levee and watching the Mississippi flow past his feet. Faye paused in the parking lot, leaning against her open car door, just to look at him.

  His head was turned away from the city, as it always was from any city, and this put his face in shadow. But looking away from New Orleans wasn’t going to give Joe the wild land he craved. Not here. This was a land of oil refineries and shipyards, of smokestacks and distillation towers and filled-in wetlands.

  Andrew Jackson had stood near here with his field telescope, tracking the motion of the British army far down the river. If he could stand here now, he would recognize nothing—not the riverfront, not the drained wetlands, not anything, really…well, maybe the reconstructed replica of the earthworks that saved his army. Probably not even that.

  Joe’s hair, glossy and almost as black as Faye’s short straight locks, blew in the evening wind, and she knew he didn’t like it to do that. Joe was a man of extraordinarily acute senses, a born hunter, and hair blowing in his face bugged the devil out of him. He usually kept it tightly bound in a ponytail that reached almost to his waist. Faye knew that he’d taken it down for her, because she liked it when he wore his hair loose.

  She’d only paused a moment before she slammed the car door shut and started running. Joe’s ears were keen enough to hear the slamming door from a distance, even over the rushing river waters. He could probably hear her feet strike the soft, grassy ground.

  He turned and waited for Faye to throw herself into his arms. He said nothing beyond, “I missed you so much.” That was really all she wanted him to say. He didn’t even seem surprised when she burst into tears instead of kissing him
hello after all this time apart.

  Joe never seemed surprised. He had a talent for taking life as it came. He missed nothing, because he was always paying attention. This, too, was a hunter’s gift.

  He let Faye cry, and he listened to her tell about the stinking piles of refuse where bugs and rats had lived undisturbed for years. He listened to her describe the ruined houses where plywood took the place of windows and nobody would ever be home again. And he listened to her—he really heard her—when she spoke of the naked white bone protruding from all the ugliness.

  Faye loved Joe for all the ordinary reasons women loved men. He had an extraordinarily handsome face and wise green eyes. His long limbs and broad shoulders and lean muscles were the very image of what she thought a man should look like. But she loved him more because he listened to her.

  ***

  Joe was following in his car as Faye drove home. She hoped he didn’t mind the quirky, shabby apartment she’d been able to afford on the project’s paltry per-diem housing budget. She’d never have found even this dump, if she hadn’t hired Dauphine as a project technician.

  Every once in a while, one of Faye’s shovel bums wasn’t the typical hungry grad student, and Dauphine wasn’t a typical anything. She seemed to eke out a living by milking a half-dozen unreliable income streams, including Faye’s favorite intermittent job of all time—part-time voodoo mambo.

  As best as Faye could tell, a mambo was a voodoo priestess of the highest level. Mambos were considered healers, tellers of dreams, and brewers of spells, potions, and hexes. They mingled with spirits. They preserved rituals and songs, passing them along by initiating the next generation. Dauphine’s gris-gris bags, sewed from fabrics as raucously colored as the bright gauze clothing she wore, were sold in every gift shop in town.

  Dauphine was a woman of status in her community, but even mambos had to pay the bills. She had wielded a trowel at local archaeological excavations for years. Fortunately for Faye, Dauphine was also a landlady with a cheap garage apartment behind her house, and it was for rent.

  The apartment was in the Tremé neighborhood, which was fairly convenient to work. Truthfully, though, it was more convenient to the French Quarter and its charms, both historical and hedonistic. Faye didn’t have a hedonistic bone in her body, but she sometimes wished she did.

  As things stood, she got her hedonism second-hand, by enjoying the people-watching opportunities in the French Quarter and its environs. What must it be like to throw caution so completely to the wind?

  The last time Faye’d had a free afternoon, she’d spent it wandering down Bourbon Street, nursing an overpriced beer. A part of her had envied the carefree college students stumbling from bar to bar, though not the young lady leaning over to vomit on the old brick-paved street. And no wonder. Faye knew that she’d be losing her dinner, too, if she’d drunk something that particular shade of blue.

  She’d resisted the urge to lay a motherly hand on the girl’s shoulder and say, “Have a beer, sweetheart. It’ll settle your stomach.”

  And she’d also resisted the urge to spend an afternoon’s wages on a platter of oysters at a Bourbon Street tourist trap, when she knew full-well that the waiter at Felix’s, just a few steps away, would settle a platter of raw, ice-cold bivalves in front of her for a lot less cash. And there would be a thirteenth oyster nestled among the dozen that she’d paid for, because the old establishments believed in the customer-pleasing local tradition of lagniappe—a little something extra.

  Faye had eaten well and cheaply on her jaunts to the Quarter, once she’d learned that a cup of gumbo and a po-boy could be had for less than the price of the unfortunate girl’s blue drink, if she was willing to buy it at a grocery store’s walk-up counter and eat it somewhere else. A picnic at a park bench in front of America’s oldest cathedral—and with the lagniappe of being within earshot of gypsy fortune tellers and jazz bands—suited Faye just fine.

  Walking home through streets that shifted rapidly from a tourist’s paradise to quaint old residential neighborhoods, Faye had looked for the crime-torn war zone that post-Katrina news coverage had led her to expect. She’d seen…not much.

  There were a couple of overdressed ladies loitering on street corners who glanced up to see who was walking past, then looked away in disinterest. She also noticed some expensively dressed young men who looked like they’d just love to sell her some drugs. The poor guys had no idea that they were making eye contact with a woman far too miserly to waste her money on an expensive thrill. Not when there was beer in the world.

  And living in Tremé had a special cultural spark: stores that carried everything a voodoo priestess could possibly need. Faye liked to browse through them and let her imagination run free.

  She was sure Joe was going to love this place. Pretty sure. His Native American spirituality, deeply rooted in solitude and introspection, had pretty much nothing in common with the flamboyant magic of voodoo.

  Gravel crackled under her tires as she drove past Dauphine’s gently aging brick house and parked out back. Joe hopped out of his car quickly enough to open her car door for her, and he held her hand as they crossed the driveway.

  Her apartment perched precariously over its garage, with window frames painted the exact shade of blue that repelled evil spirits, according to Dauphine. The ancient live oaks outside her window gave it the feel of a tree house. They were stupendous enough to rate a brief glance from Joe who, for all Faye knew, could talk to the spirits of trees. She was glad to see that his eyes flicked quickly back her way, and they stayed there.

  Joe didn’t talk much but, right this minute, there was only one thing she really wanted him to say.

  “I missed you, Faye. I missed you every minute.”

  That was what she’d needed to hear.

  ***

  Joe could never have described it in words, but when he was apart from Faye, something wasn’t right. It was the same feeling he got when the birds hushed and the lizards stopped rustling in the grass. A disturbance floated in the air. It might be a hurricane. It might be the intrusion of someone who shouldn’t be there. Or it might be simple loneliness. He knew she had her own work and her own life and he understood when she had to go away. But that didn’t mean he slept well when she was gone.

  He was glad to have gotten here when he did, because he could see that she needed him. Well, he hoped she always needed him, but no one should be alone after the things Faye had seen today. When he saw tough, practical, get-the-job-done Faye dissolve into wordless tears, there was no doubt that things were bad.

  She’d wept when she greeted him, and she’d kept weeping while the story burst out of her. He’d have been worried if she hadn’t. The sight of violent death leaves a mark that’s hard to wash away. This pain would pass for Faye, but it would take time, and time was on Joe’s mind a lot, these days. He’d been thinking about time all day, in fact. Before she told him about the lonely corpse, dead in a pile of trash, it had been on his lips to ask her the question, the one and only question that ruffled his habitual contentment.

  “When, Faye? You said you’d marry me. When?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  There was an element of convenience to an apartment so small. If Joe leaned over and reached out one of his long arms, he could fetch a couple of slices of pizza out of Faye’s little refrigerator without getting off the bed. And if he reached up, he could slide them into the microwave that sat atop that refrigerator.

  The ancient television was within reach of Faye’s side of the bed, which was nice, since the remote was long-gone, if it had ever had one at all. Needless to say, the apartment wasn’t wired to accept cable transmissions, even if Dauphine had been the type of landlady to provide that level of decadence. No matter. Faye was looking for the local news.

  It didn’t take long to surf four channels. Faye quickly recognized the newscaster who’d been the lucky recipient of Nina’s telegenic outburst.

  Since the live broadcast earli
er, someone had taken the interviews and edited them well. The story began with a short moment devoted to Jodi, as she calmly communicated something official and vague about the skeleton that had been uncovered in the Lower Ninth Ward.

  Louie Godtschalk, the author, rated a few more seconds as he talked about his upcoming book chronicling the underpinnings of New Orleans history. The reporter had then inserted footage of herself giving the details of his book, smoothly compensating for the fact that Nina had interrupted the man in mid-sentence.

  “Louie Godtschalk has a daunting task ahead of him. He’s planning to make engineers interesting.” She paused for an ironic grin. “As a lifelong resident of Orleans Parish, it has never occurred to me that I have pocket-protector-wearing science guys to thank for the ground beneath my feet. But the construction of a city in a strategic but inhospitable spot like this one was a job for brilliant innovators, and Mr. Godtschalk wants to tell us their stories.”

  Then the scene cut to Godtschalk as he continued explaining his work. After that, the editor had made no more cuts, choosing instead to run Nina’s entire tirade. Faye was chagrined to see herself in the background, filthy field clothes and all. There she stood, looking out of the TV at all of New Orleans, wearing a blank deer-in-the-headlights face.

  Joe smiled and squeezed her hand, as if he thought she looked just beautiful. Love was truly blind.

  The reporter wrapped up her story with a sound bite proving that she might well have gone to journalism school. “The impassioned speech you just heard is not Nina Thibodeaux’s first attempt to air her views on post-Katrina politics. She is the founder of an advocacy group for residents with grievances against their insurance companies or FEMA, and she blogs regularly on issues related to the levee failures and the politics of our city’s recovery. Whether her efforts will change governmental policy remains to be seen. I, for one, admire her guts.”