Burn

by Nevada Barr

  Jimmy Stewart, patting his pockets. Looking for what? Channeling the tall actor in stance and posture, she frisked herself. As it often did onstage, action informed motivation: She was looking for tools, if any, that were hers to work with.

  In the breast pocket of the coat—once on the inside, now on the out—was David’s cell phone. It took up less space than the foreshortened pack of unfiltered cigarettes she’d bought. Dare she use it? On television and in the movies the police could find a person from a cell phone call; they could blow up a pinhead-sized picture to perfect clarity, break passwords in seconds, and hack into anything in minutes. What worked in the real world? The Seattle police couldn’t know she wore her husband’s coat, carried his wallet, and had his cell phone. Could they?

  She’d dialed 911 from his cell, and with modern magic they’d come up with his name and address. Or had she given it to the operator? She couldn’t remember. The EMTs and cops at the fire, they’d seen the coat. Not the phone, though, not the wallet, and Clare was tall, nearly as tall as David. There was no way they could know it wasn’t her coat. One Burberry trench coat is much like another. The cell phone question wasn’t pressing. Who would she call? Her sister, Gretchen, was in Japan teaching English for the next seven months. Friends she trusted, she wouldn’t endanger by asking them to harbor a fugitive. Those she didn’t might believe she was a child-murderer. A lifetime of not killing and eating the neighborhood children would do her no good. Everyone knew it was always the quiet ones.

  There’d been so much madness in the night, for a gaping instant she wondered if she had killed her children and her husband and fired the house. People went crazy all the time. The devil or the family dog told them to do unspeakable things and they did them. Had she murdered Vee and Dana?

  A cry grated from her lips, and she fell against the rough brick. Mackie put his paws on her thigh and howled like a dust mop deluding itself that it’s a wolf. He didn’t do it often. It was too dear to waste on everyday performances. The effort was not in vain; Clare rose to the surface of the poisonous thoughts drifting over her soul.

  “Stop it!” she ordered herself. Believing she spoke to him, Mack was shocked back onto four paws.

  Clare knew she could not have hurt the girls. David, maybe. The girls, never. “That way madness lies,” she murmured and shook herself, a palsy that ran from her heels to her head. One thing at a time. One day at a time. Like an alcoholic. One minute at a time. She’d get through one minute at a time doing only what that minute demanded.

  This minute demanded she assess her resources.

  David’s wallet was more a purse than the sleek leather envelope one might expect from a well-dressed man. Clare had never looked inside. Her husband wasn’t the sort to leave it lying about. As far as she could remember, tonight was the first time he’d ever forgotten it. When she’d gone out for Vee’s cough medicine, she had not taken it simply because it happened to be in the pocket of the raincoat, she’d taken it because he and Jalila had run off in such a peculiar and insulting manner. Spending his money wasn’t much of a revenge, but spending it from his sacrosanct secret wallet was.

  There was cash, four or five hundred dollars at least, the bills fanned out from a brass clip in the middle. The expected credit cards were in place, as well as three she hadn’t known they—he—had. A key she recognized as a spare to the back door of the Laggert Street house was beneath a flap. On the other side of the wallet, tucked behind his ATM card, was another key, one she hadn’t seen before, and the security cards he used to let himself into the warehouses and factories where the clothing was assembled.

  She lifted the strange key from the wallet and slipped it into her pocket. She dearly hoped it was to his apartment by the docks. There was a good chance Jalila would be there, and she was the one person who might know why the children weren’t in the house and David wasn’t and then they were, dead, but Vee’s Sleepy Dog and Mackie the real dog were safe and sound outside.

  Clare rubbed her face hard. One minute at a time: the apartment, then Jalila.

  Two more hours’ walking brought her to the waterfront just before daybreak. Streetlights were still on, but, with the coming of day, the sky was changing from sodium-arc-orange to pewter. Standing outside the rundown building she’d watched her husband emerge from several times over the years, Clare realized that even if the key in the wallet was for the door, she didn’t know how to locate that door. She had no idea which apartment was his.

  Holding horror at bay, supporting an insupportable hope, going without sleep, and walking for miles on concrete had exhausted her till her insides felt as if they, too, had burned and all that remained was cold wet ash. Mackie was so tired she’d carried him for the past half hour. Vision swam. Dead children pulled at her from an abyss where she could do nothing right, where her judgment was twisted and her ears stopped up with the words of crazy people.

  Cinderella.

  Because of her height and build she’d been cast as Prince Charming. Like the slipper on the ladies of the kingdom, she’d try the key in every door. Maybe one would open. Maybe it wouldn’t. That was trouble for another minute, and she’d promised herself to deal only with this one.

  Not for the first time, Clare was glad to be a woman nearing a Certain Age. Middle-aged females were considered the safest, most innocuous of Americans, often invisible, sometimes tedious, but never alarming. Had she been a young black man, she’d have thought twice about going up stairs and down halls trying all the doors.

  The process was mercifully short. The building had but three apartments on each of the four floors. David’s key turned easily in the lock of the fifth she tried. The door swung inward at a touch, hinges silent and smooth. The lock itself was shiny, state-of-the-art. David might choose a slum, but he wasn’t precisely slumming.

  The inside of the hideaway had also been given a facelift. The windows were the same gritty hue as those she had noted from the outside—dirt kept intact as camouflage—but the walls were painted David’s favorite winter white, as was the woodwork. The furniture was modern and spotlessly clean, the floor covered in white carpet. No pictures broke the planes of the walls; no pillows cluttered the divan and chair; there were no bookcases or clocks, just a wide-screen television set with the remote left on top and a coffee table with two opened bottles of water on it. One had fallen over, pooling water on the glass and darkening a couple of inches of carpet where it had spilled. Lipstick, a dark, nearly purple shade, ringed the bottleneck. Jalila’s. It looked good with her olive and raven coloring. On anyone else it would have been ghoulish.

  The only other scrap of color was a canary yellow leather sport coat. It wasn’t David’s; David had more taste and conceit than to be seen in the sartorial equivalent of a pink Cadillac.

  “Jalila?” Clare called softly. Could the au pair have been having an affair with somebody other than David? Maybe the guy with the peculiar accent who’d been on the cell phone? Was that why the house had been burned? Was Jalila’s other lover murdered by David in a fit of, if not jealousy, then outraged owner’s rage, then dressed in David’s pajamas and burned? After a night of hideous surprises, Clare was unmoved by the fact that she didn’t think an act of such cold malice beyond the man she’d slept next to for so many years. “Jalila?” she called again, louder this time.

  The faint creaks of an old building thinking about waking up for the day were her only answer.

  Mackie, tired—or intimidated by the expanse of white canvas—chose to flop on the floor rather than jump on the couch as he would have done at home. If he’d still had a home.

  Too anxious to sit and too worn and stupid to move, Clare stood in the middle of the room, unsure what she should do next. Fleetingly, she wondered if the police had already thought of this place. The scene, a staple in a million cop shows, flickered behind her brow bone: black-and-whites surrounding the building; grim-faced policemen, guns drawn, crouching behind open car doors. What was that about? The car do
or thing? Wouldn’t bullets punch right through a car door?

  Surely if the police had known of David’s pied-à-terre, they’d have arrived long before her and Mack. For once she had cause to be grateful for her husband’s secretive nature. As his wife, she’d never seen any record of this place. He never spoke of it in front of family or friends. Without being told to, she’d never mentioned it either. She’d thought this was because of the women, but maybe it was just the way David was. Secrets were power.

  “We have some time,” she said to the dog. Mackie didn’t intrude with “Time to do what? Time to go where?” Dogs were good about that sort of thing.

  A liquor cabinet, also white, also topped and fronted with sparkling glass, came into her awareness. David didn’t drink. He was a Muslim and took his religion seriously. Clare drank, but never in front of him and never much. As she opened the cabinet door she considered breaking the second of those rules. A bottle of red wine was closest. She grabbed it and unscrewed the cap. Screw caps were the new snobbery. David wouldn’t have had a bad—or at least a cheap—vintage. It wouldn’t have looked good to whoever the hell it was he wanted to look good for in this white box.

  Not women, Clare thought. David liked to seduce women, to wow them with his good looks and charm, but he’d never thought well enough of the gender to bother impressing any member of it further than that.

  Clare tossed the cap onto the pristine carpet, trying not to wince at her effrontery, and gripped the bottle by the neck. Because she had to believe at least one of her children was still alive—and to swig from the bottle was not something a good mother would do—she picked up a glass and poured as she wandered toward the bedroom. She would drink only enough to take the edge off, sleep a few hours, then think of what came next.

  Her mind shifted into neutral as she watched the liquid curling down the side of the crystal.

  The wine never reached the bottom. Bottle and glass fell from nerveless fingers, spreading wine in a sudden stain on the carpet.

  The first watery gleam of day and the spill of electric light from the living room caught the edges of the almost perfect black of Jalila’s hair. Unbound, it fanned out through the blood as if trying to escape the jagged wound in the back of her skull. Bits of white and gray, bone and brain, clung to the edges of the ruin, prosaic reminders that mortals were mere constructions of disposable matter.

  As red of wine ran into red of blood, Clare sank to her knees. She uttered not a sound. A soft pad-pad announced Mackie’s arrival. For a moment he sat beside his mistress, seemingly as stunned as she, but for all his civilized demeanor, he was a dog at heart. He trotted to the corpse and began to lick at the wound as he might with any newly dead thing.

  Clare added the contents of her stomach to the wreck of the carpet.

  TWELVE

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Anna escaped Patty’s emporium of the arcane. Until the last few moments, the potions, candles, and spells (three for ten dollars) had struck her as charming and silly but basically harmless. The warning Patty had tossed like a hand grenade before pulling her vanishing act changed that.

  The stoniness of her voice and the deadness in her eyes spoke of indifference to life, to Jordan’s life. Or Anna’s, should she align herself with him. That iciness had not manifested when speaking of her archenemy at the rival shop, the woman in white. Relating her transgressions had enlivened the little witch in the way delicious gossip can.

  The Walmart receipt, on which Anna had sketched the symbols from the ill-fated pigeon’s winding cloth, was still clutched in her hand. Beside her the many-armed creature sat in its derelict birdbath. Up close the poor old monster looked foolish and tired. It had been carved of some kind of plastic that had grown pitted from too many days in the sun. At one time it had been painted, apparently by the simultaneous application of orange and purple Day-Glo spray paint. Except for the shaded areas in the many armpits, the colors had faded.

  Standing beside this sorry representative of the netherworld, Anna felt her quest was pretty silly as well. Jordan had gotten crosswise of Patty and probably a few other residents of the Quarter. Anna had stuck her nose into the middle of a local squabble.

  Shrugging it off, she shoved the crumpled receipt into the pocket of her shorts and turned left toward the NPS. Half a block and she was under the sign for the rival shop: Authentic Voodoo. Her intention was to stride purposefully by it, righteously minding her own business. Instead, she allowed the cool air emanating from the open door to lure her inside.

  What the hell? Another few minutes of surreality wouldn’t kill her.

  The woman in white’s store was as different from Vieux Dieux as a garden from a cave. Windows let light into a spare, well-organized space resembling a library-cum-herbarium. The shelves were well stocked but not jammed; herbs, bits of bone, and other necessities were as neatly labeled and displayed as the spices at Whole Foods. The back left corner of the shop, farthest from the windows, was set off by a four-foot-square carpet, green with pink roses. A little girl, dressed in white, with fine, stick-straight blond hair falling to her waist, sat barefoot, marching a plastic horse with a one-armed Handsome Prince through the gates of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, the Disney logo displayed proudly as the castle’s coat of arms.

  “Welcome to Authentic Voodoo. What troubles you today?”

  Anna turned toward the cool ripple of sound. The child’s mother—the resemblance was not only obvious but uncanny, heightened by the similar clothes and hair—stood behind a counter opposite the play area. The countertop was clear but for the cash register and credit card machine. Behind its glass front, as bloodlessly displayed as artifacts in a museum, were wax dolls, pins, tiny scarecrows, realistic-looking miniature black mambas, and other presumably useful staples of her trade.

  The proprietress, wearing a sleeveless white linen shift with no jewelry, belt, pockets, or frills, her blond hair parted in the middle and falling straight as a die to either side of a face as round as a coin, was the physical embodiment of Innocence. Had she not been clutching what appeared to be a hank of human hair in one fist and a headless black stuffed animal in the other, the vision would have been flawless.

  “I just have a couple of questions,” Anna said. Then, realizing she sounded clipped and authoritarian, she threw out some softening conversation. “I’m interested in symbols, kind of a hobby, I guess. I’m not very good at it yet.” She smiled disarmingly and wondered why she was bothering to lie to the woman. Maybe because of the way Patty had shut down when she realized why Anna was evincing such an interest in magic. “Are there symbols in voodoo?” she asked disingenuously.

  “Lots of them,” the woman replied. “Many are veves.” She pronounced it “vay-vays.” “They pertain to a particular god or to a set of attributes like fertility, rain, generosity or chance, unfaithfulness, danger. That sort of thing.”

  “Do you have a book of . . . veves?” Anna turned vaguely in the direction of the fourteen-foot-high bookshelves. Geneva was scheduled to sing in a few minutes. If Anna was to leaf through that many books, she’d best wait till the singer’s set was over.

  “I don’t,” the woman said. “I used to order them, but they weren’t moving. I could special order one for you if you like.” As she’d been speaking, she’d slid the headless black dog beneath the level of the counter and secreted it somewhere out of sight. The move struck Anna as furtive, but it was probably simply an indication of the woman’s compulsive tidiness.

  “Do you practice voodoo?” Anna blurted out.

  “I am a voodooienne,” she replied in the tone one might use to say, “I’m an Episcopalian.”

  Precisely what that entailed, Anna wasn’t sure. Judging by the few stories she’d heard of Madam Laveau, New Orleans’s most famous voodooienne in the old days, a bit of dancing with large snakes and wild sexual orgies was de rigueur. It was hard to picture the blonde in the linen shift doing anything much more alarming than hanging stuffed dice from the mirror
of her minivan. In the modern era it was probably all done with virtual snakes and sexting.

  Except for those who loved the classics; for them there were pigeons skewered with striped sticks.

  Tired of playing cat and mouse when apparently there was no mouse, Anna reached into the pocket of her shorts and pulled out the wadded-up receipt.

  “Are these veves?” She smoothed out the wrinkles and pressed the paper flat on the glass countertop. A small pile of business cards she hadn’t noticed before caught her eye: AUTHENTIC VOODOO, RACINE GUTREAUX. “Racine?”

  “Yes.”

  The blonde leaned over the scrap, her hair cascading off her shoulder to fall in a curtain hiding both her face and the sketches. She remained like that, face obscured and unmoving for an unusual length of time, so long Anna began to suspect her of using the veil of hair to hide behind while she mastered emotions or got all her lies in a row. Shortly before Anna decided the woman was just fishy as hell, Racine lifted her moon face, a face devoid of lines or freckles, moles or bags beneath the eyes. Checking IDs for much of her life, Anna was fairly good at guessing ages, but Racine defied her experience. She could have been anywhere between seventeen and thirty-seven.

  “What’s this supposed to be a drawing of?” Racine asked politely enough; still, Anna was stung. She’d thought it rather good, given it had been done from a rain-wet and garbage-soaked memory.

  “I saw it somewhere,” Anna said. “Or something like that. I drew it afterward and didn’t recall the details. I thought it might be a symbol used in the voodoo religion.” She used the word “religion” with care, not knowing where religion left off and magic—or insanity—began. The outward show of respect bore fruit.

  “Let me get my book from upstairs,” Racine said. She didn’t move right away but stayed a moment, staring at the child playing in the corner as if debating whether it was safe to leave her alone with Anna. Anna started to offer to keep an eye on the little girl but decided against it. For some reason, maybe the strained look that had formed on the otherwise unmarked face of the voodooienne, she knew it would be more alarming than reassuring.