He pointed at a less distinct layer, further down the unit wall. “Down here, we found some evidence of Native American activity. I’m not sure whether anybody was living this far out on the natural levee in those days. The elevation is zero here—exactly sea level. That’s higher than most of New Orleans, but it wouldn’t have been all that desirable back when there was still space close to the river, around the cathedral. I’m thinking that the scattered artifacts we found at this level date back to the years when local tribes carried their canoes across a portage that was probably right near here. If you could tote your stuff from the Mississippi to the Bayou St. John, then you could get to Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico without dealing with the twists and shoals of the Mississippi south of here.”
This tracked with everything Faye had read, so she just nodded her head. Joe had disappeared, lured away by a site worker offering to show him the stone tools found in that stratum.
Joe appreciated stone tools. He made them. He used them. He treasured them for their beauty. He knew so much about them that he’d likely be able to add to the information the site team had already gleaned just by giving them a good lookover. If anybody needed to know how a stone tool was used or how it was made or why the maker chose that particular rock to knap, then Joe was the one to ask.
“We’re even finding a few things below that level, from a still earlier period. It makes sense. New Orleans is sitting on a site that has always been strategic. Even way back then, before the Europeans arrived and mucked things up, those guys traded all over eastern North America.”
Faye nodded, and said, “They needed efficient shipping lanes, too. They just used smaller boats.”
“Precisely.” Dr. Britton grinned the way people do when they’re talking to someone who’s interested in their work.
“What’s this? And this?” Faye asked, pointing to areas of dark soil just below the level of the house that had burned.
“We’re finding a number of features related to drainage at all levels during the historical period. Cesspools were everywhere in those days, because sewage had to go somewhere. Over there—” he said, straightening up in the excavation and pointing toward the street, “we’ve found something that looks like one of the ditches that surrounded each block in the city’s original design. And over there, if I’m not mistaken, is what’s left of a canal from the years just after that. It’s not on any historic maps that I know of, which is pretty cool, since we have a lot of them. Whether it was for drainage or navigation, I can’t say yet.”
The image of an old map was swimming in Faye’s mind’s eye. She stood up and looked around her, as if she expected to somehow translate the houses and trees around her now into the bird’s eye view of a map drawn in 1815.
“You say you found a canal that’s not on the maps. Wasn’t there a major canal around here somewhere? If I close my eyes, I can just see it on the old drawings. It ran diagonally to the southeast. I think it started at the Bayou St. John.”
“Amazing. Do you have a photographic memory or something?” Britton asked.
Faye shook her head. “I just remember things that I think are interesting.”
Joe appeared, leaning down into the excavation to say, “She thinks everything’s interesting.”
Britton laughed. “Photographic memory or not, you’re exactly right. There was a canal nearby, but it was west of here. Well, I think it’s west. I’ve lived here all my life and haven’t figured out the curve in the river yet. Anyway, over there.”
He waved a hand in a direction that Faye thought might be west. The Crescent City and its crescent-shaped streets had been confusing her since she hit town.
“It was called the Carondelet Canal,” he said. “Aren’t place names just…pretty…around here?”
Britton was still looking in the direction that was probably west, thinking about an old shipping channel with a pretty name. They waited a second for him to continue.
The archaeologist shook himself and said, “Why don’t you people just tell me to get to the point? The Carondelet started over there close to Basin Street and Congo Square and, you’re right, it went as far as Bayou St. John. People with goods to sell could float from Lake Pontchartrain down the bayou to the canal, then it was a straight shot to the city’s back door.”
Faye squatted down to study the dark soil from the 1800s, so Dr. Britton shifted his attention back to that century. “Like I said, we see drainage features everywhere, but that stratum from the early 1800s has more of those features than you’d expect. At least it does here, on this piece of property.”
“You talking about drainage and water and stuff?” Joe had an intent expression one would expect in a conversation about something more obviously appealing than sewage and rainwater. “I’ve been doing some reading about a spot right near here. There’s a story that’s been floating around for a long, long time about a man by the name of Deschanel who was trying to learn how to stop the flooding. Died trying, as a matter of fact.”
Dr. Britton’s eyebrows had risen halfway up his forehead. “Deschanel? Where’d you hear that story?”
“I got an old book out of the library. It’s full of stories about the early years of the city. Especially about water. The guy that wrote it was all about water. Lately, I am, too.”
Dr. Britton’s words were calm, but Faye could tell he was one step away from demanding that Joe get him that book right now. All he said was, “Wait until you see the title search for this piece of property.” His voice rose, in spite of himself. “One of its earliest owners was a man named Deschanel.”
His workers had gathered round as they noticed that their boss was losing his composure. When they learned that two old documents carrying a single name—Deschanel—tied this property and its unusual collection of ditches, cesspools, and canals to a real human being who built things like ditches, cesspools, and canals, all anybody could say was “Cool.” And that included Faye and Joe.
***
Faye sat on the front stoop of the Victorian shotgun house that occupied the land where Monsieur Deschanel’s house had once stood. She rested her hands flat on the old bricks beneath her, because she liked their chalky feel. Joe sprawled on the grass at her feet, leaning back on his elbows and stretching out his long legs.
She wiped a bead of sweat off her jaw. “It’s been an interesting morning, but I swear that I can’t see how Shelly’s work could’ve had anything to do with her death.”
Louie Godtschalk, the writer who had upset Nina so, was puttering around the site, gazing curiously into the excavations and just generally getting in the way of archaeologists who were trying to work. Faye could not believe that Joe had called a virtual stranger and urged him to come tour the site with them. Joe hardly spoke to people he knew.
It seemed that Joe had cornered Godtschalk after his ill-fated television interview because he’d sensed that the man shared an interest that was growing into a mild obsession for Joe—how the heck did the water here work, anyway? When Joe learned that he and Faye were talking to archaeologists who could actually show him the remains of canals and cesspools and such, he got on his phone and told Godtschalk to get himself over there.
Joe had always seen nature as a logical thing, a web of interlocking habitats that made the world go ’round. Once he noticed that rainwater in these parts flowed away from the largest river on the continent, he wasn’t going to rest until he understood the oddities of this strand in the earth’s web.
Water seemed like such a simple subject, but in New Orleans, it just wasn’t. It was, at rock bottom, the only subject. Stave off the omnipresent danger of flood, and the city lives. Fail to stave it off, and the city dies.
Joe’s fascination with the subject had driven him out of nature and into the library. It took a lot of doing to convince Joe to go indoors.
Louie Godtschalk, who looked like he was born in a library, had been so seduced by the watery history of his hometown that he’d been driven ou
tdoors. Faye had spent the past hour talking to Dr. Britton, while watching Louie and Joe out of the corner of her eye. They had never once stopped talking.
They’d done more than talk, really. They’d walked the site, chatting about slight changes in elevation. They’d stood in each excavation and tried to read history from the earthen walls, then they’d squatted under a tree and pored through the stacks of books they’d each brought with them.
“Looks like you’ve made a new buddy,” she said to Joe, nodding in the direction of the pasty-faced academic, whose face wore a smear of mud and a beatific smile. Faye hoped the man had remembered to put on some sunscreen.
“I can’t believe we’ve read this same book.” Joe looked down at his library copy of James McGonahan’s The Floodgates of Hell. “And I mean the same book. Louie says they’re not printing it any more, and there’s only this one copy that he knows about. He turned it in last week, just in time for me to check it out.”
Godtschalk poked his head out of the excavation and beckoned excitedly to Joe, who loped over for a look. Faye couldn’t help smiling at the contrast between tall, lean, dark Joe and the pudgy little white-haired author.
Dr. Britton was seated in a lawn chair, with a sheaf of oversized papers spread across his lap. Faye watched as he leaned close to one, squinting, then beckoned to Faye with the same intellectual excitement as Godtschalk had just shared with Joe.
“You’re interested in the work Shelly did for us? Well, this is it.” He slapped at the paper in his lap. “She could discern the most telling details from an old map or an aerial photograph. Any idiot can see the route of the old Carondelet Canal cutting diagonally across these neighborhoods north of the Quarter, even though it’s been out of service for seventy years.”
“The whole canal’s out of service?” Faye distinctly remembered reading otherwise.
“Well, pieces of it are still used for drainage, which is fairly remarkable, considering they started building it in 1794. But for the most part, it’s gone. Filled in and covered over. But that’s beside the point. I wanted you to understand that Shelly saw things in these photos that nobody else could. Look. You and I can see the scar left by a big ol’ canal stretching across miles and miles.”
He tapped on the paper, where anyone with eyes could see the Carondelet Canal’s mark on the cityscape.
“Well, Shelly could see evidence of little tiny things—a ditch or a wall or a pathway that’s been gone for a century. She was that good.”
Godtschalk walked over to see what they were doing. When Dr. Britton pulled another photo out of the stack and spread it atop the others, the writer grabbed his glasses excitedly, lifting them a quarter-inch off the bridge of his nose so that he could focus through the proper section of his trifocals.
Joe looked at him with an expression that said, “What the heck are you doing with your glasses?” and Faye wanted to say, “Yeah, people get old. Even you will, someday.” She had recently invested in a pair of reading glasses, but they were hidden in her shirt pocket, waiting to be used at times when she just couldn’t manage without them…and when nobody was looking.
If she squinted, she could see the photo perfectly well. Okay, not perfectly, but well enough.
“Would you look at the resolution of that thing?” Godtschalk enthused. “You can see cars. You can almost see them well enough to identify a particular car. You can even see people, but they’re just blobs walking down the street.” He shifted his glasses a quarter-inch to the right and Faye wondered whether he needed a new prescription. “Hey! You can even see the fortune-telling gypsies sitting at their tables in front of the cathedral!”
That did it. Faye wanted to see the gypsies.
She broke down and pulled the glasses out of her pocket, despite the fact that she hated for Joe to see her wear them. It was a bit startling to be so visibly reminded that satellites and airplanes and helicopters—the world’s eyes in the sky—never slept. And they didn’t need trifocals, either. Most people never gave a thought to the hardware zipping around the Earth until their GPS went on the fritz. Faye knew somebody who could be seen on Google Streetview, calmly riding her bicycle down the street with her dog at her side.
“Shelly’s talents were as psychic as any of those fakers on Jackson Square,” Dr. Britton said. He raised his own glasses off his nose, and rubbed a handkerchief over his eyes. “Losing her was such a waste.” He took a moment to gather his composure. “She was no gypsy, though. Shelly’s skills weren’t magic. After she’d shown me an anomaly on one of her photos, I could see it, too. She just had an incredible eye for detail. And not just with aerial photography, either. Let me show you something.”
They followed him to his car, where he pulled a heavy file box from the back seat. Shuffling through junk that seemed to have been thrown in there randomly, he pulled out an old copy of Archaeology magazine.
“Most high-profile article I ever published,” he said, smoothing the cover possessively. “We found a very early habitation site not far from here, but maybe I shouldn’t say ‘we.’ Shelly turned that job from an absolute bust into some of the most interesting work I’ve done.”
He opened the magazine and went straight to the page he wanted. “See this photo? See the silhouette where a wooden post decayed in place?”
Faye did. Of course she did. The darkened soil enclosed within straight vertical lines was hard to miss.
“Well, this is what it looked like when Shelly first saw it.”
He pointed to another photo that showed an excavation cutting down through apparently undisturbed soil. A small black arrow in the middle of the photo pointed to a smudge only slightly darker than the surrounding dirt. “Shelly crawled down in the hole and studied the stratigraphy until that dark spot caught her eye. She told me she thought it was something interesting. I said, ‘Yeah, right,’ but we enlarged the unit…and found what was left of a hut that dated to the early 1700s. I never doubted her after that.”
The handkerchief took another swipe under his glasses.
Faye studied the photo with its tiny telltale smudge. Yes, the woman had indeed been good.
“Since we resumed work at this site, I’ve wished for someone with Shelly’s skills. You’ve seen some of the remnants of water storage and drainage features that we found. We’ve done the best we could at reading the soils’ permeability and texture and color, then imagining where people would have wanted their water moved. We’ve done okay, I think. Still, I have to wonder what she could have done with the very same information. The only comfort is knowing that she used her skills to the very end, saving lives. My friend Bobby worked with her at Zephyr Field. It takes a lot to earn Bobby’s respect, but Shelly did.”
It occurred to Faye that Shelly sounded a lot like Joe in her feel for the way the natural world worked. Joe was, at that moment, head-down in the open unit, scooping up chunks of soil and smelling it. She took off her glasses. If he was going to taste that dirt, she didn’t want to see.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Faye wished her cell phone hadn’t rung. Well, it didn’t ring, actually. It played the memorable strains of The Sorceror’s Apprentice, because they were just bombastic enough to catch her attention when she was deep in an excavation, hard at work. She couldn’t believe that Jodi had gotten her cell phone company to honor her maintenance contract and get it replaced so quickly. Badges were handy things to have.
If her phone had just stayed silent or if Jodi hadn’t managed to get it replaced or if Faye had managed to somehow ignore those bombastic strains, then she could have gone a little longer without knowing the truth about Nina’s accident-that-wasn’t-an-accident. As it was, she wished she had just switched the phone off, instead of listening to what Jodi had to say. But Faye was a realist. Given a choice, she would always opt for the truth, no matter how grim. Jodi’s voice had sounded tight—choked, even—when Faye answered the phone, so she’d had early warning that this was one of those times when the truth was gr
im.
“My divers found some things in the river, under the dock where Nina fell in.”
Faye’s analytical mind reflexively began trying to figure out what the divers found. She decided that it had to be something heavy enough to sink, and shaped in such a way that it dropped to the bottom before the mighty river moved it far downstream…then she stopped herself. Some of the possibilities were icky enough that she didn’t want to think about them. Besides, Jodi was going to tell her anyway.
“The most important thing we found was an archaeologist’s trowel.”
Jodi sounded like she wished she didn’t have to tell Faye that.
Faye didn’t like the direction her thoughts were taking her.
“At least, I think it was an archaeologist’s trowel, but it doesn’t look like the ones I saw in your office.”
Faye’s answer was slow in coming. “There are other kinds of trowels out there in the marketplace. It’s just that archaeologists are just a boring bunch, so most of us use the same kind. Was it…did it have a blunt end, like a spatula?”
“Yes. And the shape of the cut on her head and the bruise around it matches that odd shape. At least my forensics people say so. You’ve seen one like it lately?”
“It was Nina’s.” The anger surged so quickly that Faye was hard-put to say where it had come from. Apparently, it had been there all the time. “Who did it? Who did this thing?”
“We’re a little short on clues, other than the trowel. You and Joe tracked the dock up with your old dirty boots, so I can’t say whether anybody else was out there who might have pushed Nina.”
Faye said, “I’m so sorry—,” but Jodi wouldn’t let her finish the apology.
“Crap, Faye. If Joe hadn’t tracked mud out there, Nina would be dead right now. And if you hadn’t left another trail of grime, Joe might be dead, too. Let it rest.”
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