Floodgates

by Mary Anna Evans

  Where was Nina?

  Jodi somehow doubted that Nina was enjoying a slumber party with an old friend. Something had prompted somebody to try to crush Nina’s skull, before shoving her into a river that had swallowed more human lives than Jodi cared to count. If someone had wanted Nina dead that bad, just a few days before, Jodi figured that they still wanted her dead. She’d been missing for twelve hours, so the odds were good that her kidnapper had already found a way to make that happen.

  But why did somebody want Nina dead? She was sweet, hardworking, unassuming. How could anyone want to hurt a woman like that?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “We’ve been fired, Joe.”

  Faye realized that sitting at the kitchen table, sipping morosely on a cup of cold coffee, meant that she had rendered herself completely unattractive to any man alive. This should probably have bothered her, but Joe seemed to love her even when she had mud on her face and sweat in her hair. She was learning to trust that love. “How could Jodi have cut us loose like this?”

  “She didn’t cut us loose, Faye. She told us to go back to doing what she hired us to do—thinking about Shelly’s job as an archaeologist and finding out whether it had something to do with her getting killed.”

  Faye hated it when Joe talked sense. She walked to the window. Dauphine’s altar to Ezili Dantò was a red blotch on nature. The offerings left for the Lady were untouched, except for the empty rum glass. Faye wondered if the candles strewn around the damp yard could be made to burn again when Dauphine needed another favor from her Lady.

  The bold strokes of Lady Dantò’s portrait cut through the gray mist that had descended the evening before and lingered all night and into the day. The afternoon was winding down, but the gray hadn’t relented yet. Faye guessed the day would be over before she ever really saw the sun.

  The pack of cigarettes still lay on the cloth-covered stump, beside the empty glass that had held rum before Dauphine helped her lady drink it. Everything was as it had been.

  No, it wasn’t. The Lady Dantò’s knife was gone.

  There were no lights in Dauphine’s windows, and why should there be? It was her day off and she had spent a long night dancing. Why were Faye’s thoughts straying to the coffin nails under her own stairs?

  The stump of a red candle. A stone wrapped in blue cloth. An open pair of scissors. A handful of coffin nails.

  Faye had taken her share of anthropology classes and she understood the concept of sympathetic magic. She knew why these objects had been placed under her entry stairs. It was because she’d be forced to walk over them, and the magic associated with a person’s path was considered powerful.

  She knew that open scissors were supposed to protect against witchcraft. The red candle was intended to provoke desire. She suspected the blue cloth was meant to be calming. The stone must be the baby that this spell was conjuring up. The coffin nails…

  She knew that coffin nails, to the practitioners of voodoo and hoodoo, were intended to bind, so maybe the idea was to make sure Joe stuck around, presuming all the other magical items worked and she actually got pregnant. But the coffin nails meant something more to Faye, more than the concept of being physically bound.

  She did feel bound. She felt bound to this place out of sheer ignorance, because she didn’t know where to go or what to do. If she stepped outside, she could be shot dead in her own front yard. Somebody had already tried.

  When her cell phone rang and Bobby Longchamp’s voice came out of it, asking her to come look at something important he’d just found, she was primed and ready to go. It really wouldn’t have mattered who was on the other end of the line, nor what he wanted from her. Right that minute, anyone who offered Faye a reasonable excuse to get out of the house—an excuse to get out of her own head—was going to win out over Faye’s fears of invisible gunmen or monsters who prayed on lonely women. As it turned out, Bobby was the one to offer her that chance.

  ***

  “Come see!” Bobby had crowed. “I found the precise photos that Shelly had in her pocket. I know who took them and when, so I can tell you that she was definitely alive for at least three days after the storm. I’ve laid my hands on copies in the original size. Shelly had cut her copies down and thrown away the rest. Why don’t you come see my copies, so you can see the parts she didn’t care about? There’s value in negative information, you know. I’m still at the Historic Collection. Come see what I’ve got here.”

  “Aren’t they about to close? Did they give you a key to the place?”

  “When I was a callow fraternity boy, my grandfather donated two hundred years worth of family papers and artwork to this place, along with a small fortune to curate it all. It’s been a long, long time since then, but they still give me whatever I ask for, and they do it with a smile. I can’t even afford an annual membership to the place, but I’ll happily ride on Grandpère’s coattails.”

  Faye was in the mood to get out of the house anyway, but the deal was sealed by Bobby’s promise to show her the parts of the photos Shelly threw away. She had to appreciate the thought processes of anyone who could understand the finer qualities of data gathering implied by the term “negative information.” Maybe she and Bobby were kin.

  Throwing on a jacket as a safeguard against the damp evening air, she stuck her phone in her pocket, and hustled Joe out the door. It made her flat-out angry to find herself glancing furtively around the yard, looking to see if someone with a gun was hiding there.

  As she crossed the yard, she had the inexplicable urge to run her fingers over the leering face of Lady Ezili Dantò, still nailed to her tree trunk, but something—she couldn’t say what it was—stayed her hand. Faye would have thought that years devoted to the study of a rational science like archaeology would have driven every last vestige of superstition from her psyche. Apparently not.

  Though the sun hadn’t set, the moon already hung low in the darkening east. They were both veiled in the same cool mist that had dropped over the city the night before. As Faye and Joe walked through Dauphine’s aging neighborhood and reached the even older streets of the Vieux Carré, the fog was penetrated by the rhythmic plucking of a guitar being tuned. Those random tones were punctuated by the bangs and crashes of a drummer’s warm-up. There would be music at Congo Square tonight.

  Since Faye had no desire to go back to her apartment and sit, she thought maybe she and Joe would stroll over there after they finished working with Bobby. Enthusiastic street music would drive her worries over Nina away for awhile. Maybe the jolting rhythms would tie up the conscious part of her brain long enough to let her subconscious come out to play. Because she somehow thought that, deep down, she already knew the answers to the tough questions—What happened to Shelly? Where on earth is Nina?—pestering her waking mind.

  Suddenly, with a cymbal crash and a free-form trumpet wail, the music started. The hum of human voices told her that a crowd had gathered, ready for a party. If the trumpet player hadn’t taken a breath, preparing to play his heart out for the next three hours, at least, Faye would never have heard her phone ring.

  She didn’t recognize the number on her phone’s small screen, other than to notice that the area code was local. Gripping the phone hard against her ear, she struggled to hear the voice on the other end of the line, but it was too weak to stand against the blast of noise coming from Congo Square.

  Faye backed away from the music, looking for a courtyard or an alcove or any place where she could shelter her ears from the music permeating the old town. She needed to find a quiet place to listen to this quiet voice…

  …because it was Nina’s.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Nina. Where are you? Can you tell me where you are?”

  Faye caught Joe’s eye and tapped her phone. He whipped out his own phone and dialed. He was calling Jodi. She knew it as surely as she knew he loved her.

  The thin, reedy voice had a strident edge, as if the words were being forced
past her vocal cords. “Faye…the saints. Sometimes saints do wrong. Sometimes.”

  And then there was silence.

  “Nina! Nina, are you still there?”

  “Yes…where is here?” The frail voice drifted away, as lost as its owner was.

  “That’s what I want to know. Can you tell me where you are? And can you tell me who took you? Where are they now? Are you safe?”

  Too many questions. She was asking too many questions for Nina’s battered brain to follow. But those questions meant life or death.

  “Safe…yes…suh-safe. Are you safe?”

  Was Nina safe? Was she asking if Faye was safe? Or was she echoing the words because she wasn’t capable of forming sentences of her own?

  Faye found a tiny niche in a long line of storefronts, big enough for one body. Stout bricks on three sides insulated her ears from the raucous partiers a few blocks away.

  “Nina. If you tell me where you are, I can come get you.”

  “Streetcar? Mmmm…yeah. Streetcar.”

  “You want me to come by streetcar? Are you near the streetcar line?”

  Faye fumbled in her pocket for the tattered tourist map that kept her from getting lost. The streetcar line ran down St. Charles Avenue. How far away was that?

  “Come, Faye.”

  I’m trying, Nina. I’m trying.

  Joe had one hand clapped over his free ear. He’d drawn away from Faye, several paces away, so that he wouldn’t bother her as he bellowed instructions for Jodi into his phone.

  “The police are coming to help us, Nina.”

  Could they find Nina if they knew she was talking to Faye’s cell phone? Maybe they could if she were talking on a land line. Faye just didn’t know what investigators could do with the limited information available. Whatever it was, Jodi would make sure it got done.

  “Nina,” she said, trying to make her voice soft and reassuring, despite her mounting frustration. “Jodi and her officers are coming to help you. We just need to be able to tell them where you are. It might help if we knew who took you. Do you know who it was? Can you tell me?”

  Faye was asking too many questions again, but they were all important. She couldn’t choose just one. “Do you know why this person has done these things to you?”

  “Do anything to have my mama back, Faye…anything. My daddy…whatever it took.” The weak voice finally broke. “Anything.”

  It tore Faye’s heart to hear Nina weeping. She’d give pretty much anything to have her parents back, too.

  “Where are you, sweetheart? Mama’s not here, but I’ll come get you. I’ll come, if you’ll just tell me where you are. Just give me something I can use to find you.”

  But all Faye got was quiet sobs. And the bricks weren’t doing their job, because the music was intruding, still. Faye jammed her hand so hard against her free ear that she heard a roar like the ocean, but the music didn’t stop. How could she make it stop?

  She had closed her eyes, trying to think, when she finally heard the music clearly…because she could hear it with both ears.

  “Nina! Do you hear music? Can you get to the window and open it?”

  Faye heard the faint grinding of a heavy window being raised. It sounded like an old window, with many years of thick paint that made the sash hard to operate. This observation didn’t help her at all. How many old windows, with their woodwork roughened by years of paint, existed in this city?

  “Cold…wet, too.”

  “Yes!” Faye was laughing, but she didn’t know why. “Yes, Nina, it’s wet and cold outside. Do you hear music?”

  “Music…yeah! Dixieland. Basin Street.”

  Faye didn’t think the song of the moment sounded much like “Basin Street Blues,” but that wasn’t the point. Nina was within earshot of Congo Square. She might well be in earshot of Faye and Joe, but how were they going to find her?

  “What do you see out the window?”

  “Trees.”

  Great. That was a lot of help. There were a lot of those in this town, but none of them were visible from the city street where Faye stood. So maybe Nina was in one of the residential neighborhoods on the other side of Rampart Street.

  Or maybe not. There were trees in the French Quarter, too. Some of them were in the courtyard of Charles Landry’s house. Could he have faked the kidnapping and hidden Nina, bringing her back to his house while he decided what to do with her?

  Why would he do that? Why would he want Nina dead? Was she dangerous to him in some way? Did she know something that he wanted kept secret? No matter. The question of the moment wasn’t whether Charles had Nina, nor why. The immediate issue was her safety.

  The trees in Charles’ courtyard were impressive. They’d probably been growing in their tremendous clay pots for way longer than Faye had been alive. But they were still glorified potted plants.

  “Nina…tell me about the trees. Are they big?”

  “Pretty trees. Big? Hmmm…maybe…”

  Well, Charles’ trees were pretty, but so were most trees. And, though there were other trees in the French Quarter, there weren’t an awful lot of them. She could go forward, deeper into the Quarter, or she could turn back, toward the tree-lined residential streets in Tremé.

  Faye decided to take the better odds. There were a lot of trees in Tremé, so that’s where she’d go. She caught Joe’s eye and pointed back up the street. They were turning around.

  Faye ran with an awkward gait, hefting her feet just a little higher than normal to clear big chunks of pavement that were heaved upward by soil that never stopped settling. She flung her left arm out for balance, but her right hand relentlessly clutched the phone to her ear.

  She passed a cross-street and saw throngs of people converging on Louis Armstrong Park, which surrounded the spot where Congo Square had always served as a gathering spot for music and revelry. The music slid from one soloist to another without stopping, as if it had never stopped, not in three hundred years. It shifted again, and the trumpet made its opening call, answered by softer woodwinds.

  Faye heard Nina sigh, and say, “Oh, listen.”

  A leather-lunged vocalist was belting out an old song with such power that Faye could actually understand the words from this distance.

  Won’t you come along with me?

  To the Mississippi?

  They were playing Basin Street Blues.

  The historic maps, the new photos, the old photos, the tattered tourist map in pocket…Faye could see them all in her mind’s eye. She could see the old diagonal slash of the Carondelet Canal with its turning bassin, the basin that inspired the name of one of music’s most famous streets.

  The original location of Congo Square had bordered on the bassin, which meant that modern Basin Street passed damn near the park where Basin Street Blues was being played with such gusto, right that minute. Maybe Nina had mentioned the song, even before Faye could tell it was being played, because she was trying to tell Faye where she was. Maybe she was somewhere near Basin Street.

  Basin Street wasn’t much of a street, in terms of length. Just a few blocks, really. Still, getting there and canvassing the street itself—not to mention nearby side streets—was too much to do on foot.

  “Let’s start from scratch, Joe. Let’s go back to the apartment and get my car.”

  ***

  The cacophony at Congo Square kept Faye’s thoughts scrambled. She ran down blocks that grew scarier as the sun set. What had she been thinking, walking after dark in this part of town?

  The streets were deserted, and Faye praised God for that. And she was eternally grateful that someone tall and brawny was running at her side. Not that Joe would be much help if they were attacked by someone carrying a gun.

  Every minute or so, Faye mustered enough breath to wheeze a few words into her telephone.

  “Keep talking, Nina.”

  That’s really all she could think of to say. Nothing else was important, right this minute.

  The face
less vocalist had no idea how hard her song was driving Faye—driving her to run because her friend’s life depended on it. If somebody had been willing to beat her and drown her and steal her out of her sickbed, then that somebody would surely be willing to kill her.

  “Keep talking. Please, Nina. Keep talking.”

  So Nina kept whispering nonsense about saints and streetcars, and the vocalist kept singing, sending out a timeless melody to Faye and Joe and Nina and everyone else nearby who had ears.

  We’ll take the boat to the land of dreams,

  Steaming down the river down to New Orleans.

  Basin Street…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The band’s here to meet us,

  Old friends to greet us.

  Where all the light and the dark folk meet,

  This is Basin Street…

  The streets of Tremé were lined with old mossy oaks, maybe the very trees outside Nina’s cage. How would Faye know which ones Nina could see?

  The massive trees soaked up the music, slowly bringing quiet until Faye could hear herself breathe again. She could hear the thudding of her heart beneath her ribs. The silent calm made her want to run slower, take a deep breath, give herself a moment to think. But there was no time for those things, and Faye knew it.

  Nina’s doctor had said that brain injury patients could often understand everything that was said to them, but their ability to choose words in response was garbled. Why was Nina talking about streetcars?

  The St. Charles Avenue streetcar line was blocks away from Basin Street, at its closest point. It started at the intersection of Carondelet and Canal Street, which was an interesting coincidence considering that Shelly was working along the former route of the Carondelet Canal before she died, but the old canal was many blocks from that intersection. This line of thought was filed away for future consideration, because it was getting her nowhere. Worse, it was adding more streets, stretching for far more city blocks, to the area Faye needed to search—St. Charles Avenue, Canal Street, Carondelet Street…