Floodgates

by Mary Anna Evans

  And that was why she didn’t get that lump in her throat so much any more, the one that said this was too good to last. It had been a while since her breath caught in her chest at the sight of a pretty young thing checking out Joe’s lean hips and clean profile. For nearly a year, she’d watched Joe stride through a world of women who wanted him, waiting for him to decide he didn’t want to be tied to the old broad by his side. It hadn’t happened yet.

  Maybe it wasn’t going to happen. She saw no sign that Joe looked at these women, then looked at her and made a decision. He didn’t seem to see them at all.

  She had relived the moments before he asked her to marry him, and it was obvious that Joe didn’t care how old she was. When he proposed, he’d listed all the reasons he’d been hesitant to tell her how he felt, and age didn’t even figure into his reasoning. He’d thought she was too smart for him and, God help her, he’d been under the misapprehension that she was too pretty to want him. The woman in her would treasure that last statement till the end of her days.

  He’d told her that he’d thought through the reasons she might not want to be with him, and he had come up with this: “I know that I love you. I’ve loved you ever since you caught me camping on your island, but you were too tender-hearted to make me go away. And I know that I would be good to you. I think maybe that’s enough. If I can give you those two things, then maybe I’m good enough for you, after all. I want to be.”

  When he put it that way, how could she possibly have said no?

  Then why hadn’t she been able to make herself set a wedding date?

  ***

  Joe was stirring. While he slept, Faye had been straightening the apartment. A space so small felt crowded easily, even when cluttered by nothing more than a discarded pair of moccasins, a scattered pile of books, and an empty pizza box.

  She picked up the fallen tower of books and started stacking them up again. Faye didn’t expect to ever live any place that wasn’t cluttered by books. She’d spent a lot of her life making room for herself among stacks of books she was reading or had read or intended to read someday. She was nearly finished cleaning before she noticed that some of those books weren’t hers.

  Joe raised an eyelid and peered at her. “I borrowed some of those from the rangers at the battlefield park. Some came from the library. Had to buy a couple of the others.”

  Faye was used to being the bookish one. And she wasn’t accustomed yet to the fact that Joe sometimes had a little spare pocket money to spend on things like books. He had a job working for an archaeology professor who paid him rather well for an undergrad, because there just wasn’t anybody else around who knew so much about how stone tools had been made throughout history. If somebody handed Joe a pile of rocks, he could outfit a fearsome army in short order. His unusual skills had become highly salable.

  She recognized the top book. It was the one Joe had been waving under her nose while she was trying to talk to Jodi—an old memoir called The Floodgates of Hell. It was an interesting name, considering recent New Orleans history. He’d also acquired a history of the Army Corps of Engineers, a textbook on hydraulic engineering, and a couple of popular history books about the history of the Mississippi River. Faye decided she wanted to read one of them herself—a book explaining how the levees breached after Katrina hit that was called, simply and eloquently, Failure.

  She should have realized which aspect of the past would grab Joe’s attention. He was always fascinated with the intersection of history, technology, and the natural world. How did Paleolithic people make spears? How did the moundbuilders make piles of dirt the size of Egyptian pyramids that had lasted for centuries? Millennia, even? Of course, he’d want to know how people had managed for three hundred years to maintain a city that was constructed below sea level.

  “Put down the books and come back to bed, Faye.”

  So Joe hadn’t turned into a complete bookworm. Well, he didn’t have to ask her twice.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Faye began earning her consultant’s fee before she even took a lunch break from her nine-to-five job. She’d watched Nina grow slowly more animated through the morning. When her skin grew pink and she started glancing frequently toward the parking lot, Faye used her coffee break to call Jodi. A heads-up seemed to be in order.

  “I’m pretty sure Charles Landry will be stopping by the battlefield about lunchtime, if you want to talk to him. He’s the person who told Nina where Shelly spent the days after Katrina.”

  “I remember,” Jodi said. “I’ll be there. And I’ll bring the man a po-boy, so he won’t have any reason not to sit down and spend his lunch hour with me. Joe’s not on your payroll, is he? I have some questions, but if he’s available after lunch, I can ask him, instead of you, so I can avoid taking you away from your real job. Or do you have…plans…for Joe?”

  “I wish. But I’ll be working and you know it. Joe’s just killing time until my workweek ends this evening.”

  “Good. I need a tutorial in aerial photography and satellite imaging. And I need to know how Shelly used those things to find flood victims. All I know right now is that the technique is called geoaddressing. I saw Joe reading aerial photos yesterday like a pro. I bet he can get me up to speed. Tell him to take a short lunch and meet me in your office afterward.”

  ***

  Faye was pretty sure that she and Jodi had just wasted an hour. And it had been Faye’s lunch hour, so she couldn’t look forward to any time to relax and get rid of the slimy aura that pervaded any room where Charles Landry was. She’d choked down her lunch, but it hadn’t been pleasant.

  Charles was one of those people who seemed so patently untrustworthy that she wondered why people even bothered to listen when he talked. It made her twitch to think that his job put him in charge of large engineering projects that involved huge sums of other people’s money. Even worse, they were civil engineering projects—bridges, levees, roads—and when that kind of project failed, people died. Faye wanted to be able to trust the people who built them.

  He smiled constantly. He laughed frequently. He was just so darned pleasant. Faye had no doubt that he had the trust of his five hundred closest friends. Faye just didn’t believe that any of his excessive pleasantness was sincere. And if he called her or Jodi “darlin’”or “sweetheart” one more time, she was going to slap that burnished tan off his smiling face.

  Sheriff Mike, along with most of her other male friends back in Florida, called her endearments like that all the time, but they’d earned them with their friendship. And they meant them. This guy just didn’t know when to turn off the sweet-talk.

  Nina clearly didn’t have the same reaction to Charles and his studied charm. Maybe most people didn’t. But Faye didn’t like him, and she could tell that Jodi felt the same way. His voice was soft, so Faye couldn’t say it sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. But listening to him talk felt somehow like licking a chalkboard.

  “After Katrina,” he said in unctuous tones, “there was a good little handful of my co-workers from Pontchartrain Engineering working with Shelly and me at Zephyr Field. It never occurred to me that the police would want to know that Shelly was there during those terrible days. I was…well, pretty busy during that time and for a long time afterward. We all were. I know you remember.” He turned expressive eyes on Jodi.

  “And even if it had occurred to me that it was important for you police to know where she was last seen, I guess I assumed that you did know. We were on the phone with you guys—and with all the other first responders—constantly. Looking back, I know that there was no way for any of you to know who you were talking to, or that any of us would turn up dead, but I just never gave the question any conscious thought.” He sighed deeply. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Jodi’s voice sounded like it was stretched a little thin. “If our investigators had done a better job, they’d have found you and asked you those questions. Of course they were…pretty busy, as wel
l.”

  “I don’t know if I can help you much at this late date, but this is what I remember.”

  Faye noticed an awkward pause at the end of this sentence, as if his lips wanted to form the word ‘sweetheart,’ but he’d figured out that saying it might prompt Jodi to reach out a hand and smack the smarmy grin off his face. The most successful manipulators could read people just that well. Garden-variety con artists just kept saying ‘sweetheart’ until they got slapped silly.

  The smarmy grin lingered, and Charles continued. “I don’t know when Shelly arrived at Zephyr Field, but we were all there within twenty-four hours after the levees started breaking. I don’t know when she left, or how she left. The streets were dry, more or less, out where we were, but she would have needed a boat to get too far. Certainly, she would have needed one to get to the house, where she was found. If I’d been trying to get anywhere that week, I’d have tried to hop me a ride with one of the rescue boats. Maybe Shelly went and helped with the on-site rescue work until she got herself on a boat headed to wherever she wanted to be.”

  “So you don’t think she left on foot?”

  As soon as she said it, Faye realized that the question was repetitive. And it was naïve. Nobody who watched the news was unaware of what the streets of New Orleans were like that week.

  “I sure wouldn’t have done that. The police had already told us that there were criminals running loose, looting and stuff. I hear some of the police did a little looting themselves.”

  Charles was still speaking in that chocolaty-smooth voice, but there was calculation in his decision to twit Jodi about the bad apples in her profession. After faltering on the word ‘sweetheart,’ he’d changed his tactics, coming to the decision that he wanted to make Jodi mad, after all. Faye wasn’t so sure it was a smart strategy, but he had clearly done it on purpose. Maybe that controlled exterior was merely a camouflage for a risk-taker. It didn’t take much imagination for Faye to see the man as the modern incarnation of a riverboat gambler.

  He plucked a piece of ham out of his po-boy and ate it with his fingers, eyes fastened on Jodi. “There was no law on the streets of New Orleans. Not that week, and not for a long time after. If Shelly went out on those streets by herself, she might have gotten herself murdered over her wristwatch.”

  “She was wearing her wristwatch. And her wallet was still in her pocket. With money in it.”

  Jodi was doing a good job of keeping her temper. Faye could see that it was hard.

  “So maybe she wasn’t murdered by a thief. Or maybe she was wearing a cheap wristwatch. But it could’ve been a rapist. No way to know that now, is there?”

  This time, he picked a tomato slice out of the wreckage of his sandwich and popped it into his mouth. Thinking about the reason that evidence of rape would no longer exist—a completely decayed body—made Faye want to run outdoors and think of something else. Anything else.

  Jodi’s nerves seemed to be holding up well enough. “Did anyone else who was working with you and Shelly that week disappear?”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me. Do you have any idea what Zephyr Field was like? It was probably the sanest place within a twenty-mile radius, and it was still nuts. We had volunteers coming in from all over the country. There was no way to coordinate all the things that needed to be done, but people found a way to get a lot of ’em done anyway. There were a lot of heroes hanging around that week but no, Detective, nobody was keeping track of their comings and goings.”

  Faye knew that Jodi couldn’t argue with that logic, though she would probably like to try. She kept plowing ahead. “Is there anything you can tell me about Shelly’s behavior during the days after the storm that might help me find out how she died?”

  “Not that I can recall. It was a very busy week. Like I said.”

  “I know. You’ve told us that several times. And I do remember.” Jodi pushed back from the desk and stood up. “Please make me a list of anybody who might have seen Shelly after the storm, dead or alive. Make a note of the ones who worked at your engineering firm, including their job titles and contact information. Oh, and list anybody else who you think might be helpful to the investigation. After that, you’re free to go.”

  Charles was still smiling as he left, like a gambler who’d just bet on an inside straight and won. But what had he won?

  Maybe he was just one of those people who didn’t like the police and made as little effort as possible to be helpful. If Faye were to practice psychology without a license, she would have added that he seemed like one of those men who enjoyed putting women who had reached a position of some power back in their places. Even if both those things were true, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t keeping an important secret to himself.

  Jodi had an oddly triumphant look on her face, for someone who had just been jousting with an arrogant jerk.

  Faye waited for Jodi to speak, but she didn’t. Finally, she said, “What? Why are you smiling? What can you possibly have learned from that interview? I’d say it was a waste of sixty nice minutes.”

  “No, I didn’t learn anything from the interview, but I just had a killer idea.”

  “And it was…”

  Jodi picked up Charles’ list and perused it a minute. “I think I need to talk to that man’s secretary.”

  “I didn’t hear Charles say that his secretary was one of the co-workers who was with them at Zephyr Field.”

  “No, he didn’t. But he didn’t say she wasn’t, either, and she might have been. And yes, I know a secretary can be a man, and I know they’re called administrative professionals. But not that man’s secretary. He lives to lord it over women and he likes power. Any administrative professional working for Charles Landry is going be a woman, and she’s going to get treated like a secretary in a bad black-and-white movie.”

  Faye couldn’t argue with that.

  “Anyway,” Jodi continued, “Nina and Charles have both told us that Shelly was at Zephyr Field with a big group of people from Pontchartrain Engineering, and here they are.”

  She waved the paper in front of Faye’s nose.

  “I think I need to question a whole slew of these people. They may be able to shed some light on Shelly’s last days, true. They can help me compile a list of everyone who had contact with her, which will be an excellent addition to my very short suspect list. Mainly, though, I need to question every person on this list—starting with his secretary—because it’ll annoy the hell out of Charles Landry.”

  Faye liked the way Jodi thought.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Faye’s work team was moving so slowly that they seemed to be traveling through molasses. When she considered the wet heaviness of the air, she realized that they might well be slogging through something as syrupy as molasses. And it was still “springtime,” if a weather this oppressive could ever really be considered springlike.

  She had not considered that there might be a climate damper than the weather at her home on Joyeuse Island. Logic suggested that water in all four directions would keep the air pretty saturated. Here, though, water on all sides meant that it was underfoot, too.

  Nobody was talking, because there was nothing to say. Nobody’s trowel had uncovered anything of importance all day. They hadn’t even found anything mildly interesting. Monotony had become the enemy.

  Nobody was happier than Faye when Dauphine crowed, “Hey! This is a pretty thing.”

  She had turned up a fragment of pottery, a tiny little find considering the size of the endless piles of backdirt that were piled around her.

  “It’s majolica, I think,” Nina said, cradling it on her palm and letting light play over its colorful and iridescent glaze.

  It was indeed majolica, decorated marineware, unless Faye missed her guess. Lustrous colors on the pure white ground of a tin glaze led her to agree with Nina. “You’re right. It is pretty.”

  Joe came to look over her shoulder. “So, is this good news? Were you hoping to find Spanish potter
y in this spot?”

  “Yup,” Faye said. “The great house for the Beluche plantation was near here. It’s likely that it was destroyed in 1792 or 1793, which was still during the Spanish period. Not that there weren’t any Spanish goods in the area during times that the French were in charge. But for something so small…” It was hardly bigger than her fingernail. “For something this small, that’s a very tidy connection. I’d love to find the kitchen. It was probably somewhere near here. Maybe this sherd came from a platter or crock used by the cook.”

  Everyone went back to work, but a moment with an old but pretty chip of pottery had lifted some of the boredom. Even the air seemed to be made of a thinner grade of molasses.

  When a group of people is looking for something, whether it be artifacts or a place to stop the car so a child can visit a rest room, the laws of probability do not seem to apply. Hours or days or miles can pass with no sign of something that the lookers know just has to be somewhere close. But the moment comes when probability and statistics have been completely violated for so long that the pendulum swings the other way. Suddenly, there are pottery chips and bathrooms everywhere.

  Faye’s team was overdue for one of those streaks of good luck. Within half an hour, Faye had found two more sherds of majolica, one of them fairly sizeable. Within an hour, something way more significant saw the light of day. Dauphine, who seemed to be having a lucky day and should probably buy a lottery ticket, raked away a thin layer of dirt with her trowel and, in so doing, uncovered the brick foundation of something old.

  “Anybody want to bet me that’s not the Beluche house’s kitchen?” Faye asked as she whipped out her camera. “We could have a pool. A dollar a guess.”

  “I’ll take that bet.” Dauphine looked at the battered old bricks like a proud mother. “I think it’s the Rodriguez kitchen.”

  Joe ambled over in time to jump in the pool with, “My money’s on a smokehouse.”

  Nina scooped up some soil with her snub-nosed trowel and spoke without making eye contact. “I think it was an ice house.”