Burn

by Nevada Barr

  Racine glanced out the window fronting Dumaine Street, her face moving so suddenly the curtain of hair was set to swinging, and Anna caught a faint scent of something unpleasant, a damp stale odor like that of a little-used basement. Or an unopened grave, Anna thought with a smile that she didn’t let reach her lips. She was rather getting into the spirit of this whole ghoulies and ghosties thing.

  “Laura?”

  The girl looked up from her game. Her face was not as round as her mother’s, and her gray eyes held traces of fear that Racine either didn’t share or hid magnificently.

  “Yes, Mama?”

  “Will you be okay down here by yourself for a minute?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Don’t go outside.”

  “I won’t, Mama.”

  Still Racine made no move toward the back of the shop, where Anna presumed the stairs up to their apartment were located. Decision flickered a touch of age into her smooth face, and, leaving the counter, she walked past Anna and closed and locked the door of the shop. “I’ll only be a minute,” she said to her daughter as she crossed to a door in the rear of the shop. There she stopped again, hand on the knob, eyes on the window.

  Anna found herself looking to the street as well, as if demons from hell might be visiting the Quarter this morning. Racine was beginning to give her the creeps in a way the little, long-nailed black witch with the many-legged doorkeeper had not. She was put in mind of when she and Molly used to scare each other when they were kids by pretending to hear or see something in the dark.

  Suddenly, Racine pulled open the rear door and, leaving it gaping wide, ran up the narrow stairs behind it. Within seconds, she ran back down, the leather soles of her flat white shoes loud on the old wood. When she burst forth, book in hand, her eyes went first to the windows fronting the shop. Racine’s face was one of the more impenetrable Anna had seen, but she was fairly certain there was a flash of relief at seeing the demon hordes had not formed on the sidewalk in the seconds she was away. The coast being clear, she unlocked the door but didn’t open it. Having returned to her post behind the counter, she put the book she’d fetched down on the glass, opened it, and turned it so Anna could see it right side up.

  “These are the most common veves,” she said. “This one is for Damballa. He’s one of the most important loa—a sort of god. He’s to do with snakes and the color white. He likes offerings mostly of eggs and flour but sometimes other things. If you think of maybe St. Patrick, you get an idea of Damballa.” Pointing to the drawing on the opposite page, she went on. “This is Papa Legba’s veve. Papa is the liaison between the loa and us, people. Kind of like St. Peter guarding the pearly gates. If you want to talk with any particular loa, you need to go through Papa Legba. He likes dogs.” She turned several pages and stopped at another. “This one is for Maman Brigitte. She is a death loa and is married to another loa, Baron Samedi. Maman likes her hot peppers and swears a lot. There are more. They are the diagrams a practitioner would draw to attract these gods—or their attributes—down to earth to help with a wish or to fend off danger.”

  Each veve was given an entire glossy page in the coffee-table book. They were intricate, lacy, complicated designs that reminded Anna both of snowflakes in the high country and the wrought-iron work that proliferated on the balconies, fences, and doorways in the French Quarter. As Racine paged through the book explaining the loa the veves called into action, Anna could feel the pull of the intricate drawings. The ancient symbols brought together sharp points and gentle curves in sinuous patterns, shapes that indicated fish as well as stars, heaven and earth, fire and water. Looked at one way, they would evoke terrific strength, then, as a cloud formation can turn from a castle to a menorah and back again as brain and eye form and re-form it, suddenly remind her of the fragility of fading spidery handwriting on a crumbling document.

  Anna wasn’t sufficiently ensorcelled by these nuevo–dark continent runes to grant them independent powers, but she had to grant them the respect due to well-made tools. It was easy to see how a person with a strong godly—or ungodly—personality could invest them with the forces of the gods they summoned. If not enough to fool all of the people all of the time, then at least enough to make a decent living, as W. C. Fields said.

  The intricacy that lent the veves their ability to fascinate also made it difficult for Anna to ascertain which one had graced her namesake’s burial rag. Put side by side with the drawings in Racine’s book, her sketch was simple and clumsy to the point of being virtually useless.

  Closing her eyes to shut out the confusion of reality, Anna breathed in and out slowly, blowing detritus from her mind. When it was relatively free of dust and fur balls, she allowed herself to remember that first moment she had moved the dead bird and seen the figures on the cloth.

  At the time, she’d been more focused on the carcass than the fabric it was wrapped in, and her mental picture was blurred as a snapshot taken by impatient hands is blurred.

  “Damn.” She opened her eyes to see Racine looking at her with an expression of alarm—if the infinitesimal lift of one eyebrow could be called an expression. No wonder she didn’t have any lines on her face. “I wish I’d hung on to the thing,” she said.

  “Hung on to what?” Racine asked as she turned to the next image in the book of veves. Maybe her voice had iced over a tad. Maybe she was thinking of the cloth because she’d wrapped the pigeon in it or knew who did. Maybe she was just tired of Anna’s staying and gobbling up free information and not buying.

  “Nothing,” Anna replied, waving away the need to retell the whole garbage can saga. “Wait, stop.” The page facing her, Racine’s neat fingers with their unpolished nails poised to turn the leaf, had a drawing as close to what she remembered as she’d seen. “Who is that? Whose veve, I mean. What powers does the loa supposedly have?”

  Racine’s hand slammed down on the page with such force Anna squeaked and jumped like a rat just saved from the cheese.

  “Get out!” Racine hissed.

  At the same time, Laura cried, “Mama!”

  Both were looking at the entrance to the shop. Through windows in the door, Anna could see what had caused the eruption. Standing on the other side of the glass was Jordan, his lean frame curled into the shape of a crone, his hands limp at his sides. He was looking at Laura in her play area.

  On his face was a look of such naked hunger it made Anna’s flesh shrink back against her bones.

  THIRTEEN

  A clap of homemade thunder loud enough to penetrate the glass tore Jordan’s gaze from Laura and dragged it to the counter where Anna and Racine stood. Even at a distance of thirty feet and through a window Anna could feel the heat from his eyes. Eyes like burning coals, like embers, like pools of desire—the clichés dropped into her mind and, made real, ceased being clichés.

  Air was leaking out of the world. Hissing. The thoughts rattled through Anna’s head and were gone in an instant. The paranormal had not stepped into the magic shop, at least not yet. Racine was hissing like a snake. Her empty moon face altered, the eyes narrowing, the lips drawn tight and thin down over the teeth the way children’s do when they’re playing as toothless old crones. Racine looked like a snake. Like she was becoming a snake. Or a snake inside her was allowing itself to be seen.

  Jordan must have glimpsed the snake as well. The eyes that so troubled Anna were immediately hooded. He turned, stumbling, regained his balance, and walked slowly toward the levee and the river, his gait as uncertain as that of a man three times his age. It was as if the snake loa Racine had called down had sunk its fangs into him and poisoned him to the marrow of his bones.

  “What was that about?” Anna asked.

  Racine’s humanity was back; no trace of the serpentine face remained. Anna didn’t believe it was truly gone, and she was no longer crazy enough to believe she hadn’t really seen it. The sense she was left with was that of newly stilled waters where a monster, risen briefly from the depths, had re
submerged.

  “We close the shop for lunch,” Racine said calmly. The book of veves was clutched to her chest. That had been the clap of thunder that had changed their wee scrap of world. The proprietress had slammed it shut with enough violence for the sound to penetrate walls.

  Anna stood her ground. “Has that guy threatened you, pestered Laura?” she asked.

  “We reopen at one,” Racine said.

  “If he has, you should call the police.”

  A hint of snakiness played around Racine’s mouth. Book still held to her chest, she came around the counter, walked to the front door, flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and, one hand on the knob, looked pointedly at Anna.

  Admitting defeat—at least for the moment—Anna thanked her for the information on veves and left the shop. Her butt had scarcely cleared the lintel when she heard the chunk of the dead bolt sliding into place.

  Jordan, a block ahead, was crossing North Peters against the light. A white SUV stopped politely; a green sedan honked. He seemed unaware of either but continued his shuffling progress till he reached the far curb and went on toward the art gallery, past the fountain, and through the floodgates to the trolley tracks and the river walk. Anna glanced back into the voodoo shop. It was deserted, the door to the upstairs firmly closed and, no doubt, locked.

  Anna’s mention of the police had bounced off Racine’s hard shell. Was it because, in New Orleans, the police were not trusted to protect and serve? Or was it because she had reasons of her own not to want police looking too closely into her life? Like, say, skewering live pigeons and delivering them door to door?

  Anna knew she should leave it alone just as certainly as she knew she wouldn’t. For the best part of twenty years she’d been in the business of rescuing things and people from other things and other people. The habit was too strong to break at this late date. Added to force of habit, Helena, a baby she’d helped to keep alive in Big Bend, Texas, had forever removed the insulating idea of “children” and replaced it with a dear little face. Since Helena, every baby, every child, was personal. If Laura was in danger from Jordan, Anna would put a stop to it. One way or another. It was the only way she would be able to sleep at night.

  Besides, she thought with a wry smile, Jordan was so wasted and frail she could probably take him two falls out of three. It was rare in the life of a female law enforcement officer to face a criminal that was physically weaker or smaller than she. She doubted most men would be as comfortable facing a world of foes that outweighed them by fifty to a hundred pounds. Women cops, rangers, and border patrol officers did it every day, all day.

  She thought about calling the police, her brothers in blue. Except rangers didn’t have brothers in blue, not the way real cops did. She’d probably get more attention as the wife of an Episcopal priest than as a ranger from the Far West, and one on administrative leave to boot. Besides, what could she tell them? That she’d found a dead bird in the trash and, thus, decided her neighbor was a pervert?

  “Anna, you don’t have to do anything. You’re on vacation, remember? You left home and husband because you were working too hard doing nothing.”

  “This isn’t nothing,” Anna said.

  “I know it isn’t, love.”

  Paul’s voice, a sweet tenor at the worst of times, said the word “love” with a tenderness that annoyed Anna because there was no defense against that kind of wonderful.

  Too many years of risking whatever was hers—health, youth, charm, good looks, money, time, and sanity—in the pursuit of an idiosyncratic sense of justice wouldn’t let her feel more than a passing gratitude for the man who wanted to keep her safe. “Geneva told me he’s got a job, a night job. He leaves for work around ten o’clock most nights.”

  “You don’t know where this guy works. You yourself described him as chased by demons. Maybe he’s chasing the demons instead. You could follow him right into the middle of something that would be tricky to get out of. To say the least.”

  The last bit was almost a whisper, and Anna smiled in spite of herself. Paul had been at her side when the shots were fired in Big Bend. He’d handed her the knife to try to save a dead woman’s unborn child; he’d wrestled a man eight inches taller, forty pounds heavier, and fifteen years younger to the ground and bashed him on the head with a stone because he looked as if he were going to hurt her.

  “Geneva said he doesn’t smell half bad when he’s going to work,” Anna said.

  “And this not reeking guarantees he works in an OSHA-approved place?”

  Anna said nothing.

  “Could you get one of the rangers there to go with you? Preferably one that can see?”

  “They’re musicians,” Anna said. She thought she heard a minute sigh from Port Gibson, Mississippi.

  “Could you at least wait till I can come down to serve as your backup?”

  Again she said nothing. This time the sigh was quite audible.

  “Promise me you’ll be careful,” Paul said.

  “I will.”

  “Really, really careful.”

  “I promise.”

  Paul laughed, a sound of both love and exasperation. “Your definition of ‘careful’ is vaguely analogous to most people’s definition of ‘damn the torpedoes.’ ”

  “I’m careful,” Anna said. “It’s just that occasionally my luck runs out.”

  “From the way you describe him, he sounds like a man who has it all: scabies, crabs, AIDS, gonorrhea, hangnails. If, God forbid, you have to take him down, promise me you’ll wash your hands afterward.”

  Anna laughed. “And use sanitizer.”

  “Call me the minute you get back. No, call me the minute you get to wherever it is that your not-too-stinking, occasionally violent, demon-ridden little friend goes to work in the middle of the night.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Anna said. Cell phones were not a favored tool of hers. She didn’t like conducting private conversations in public places, didn’t like phone calls emanating from her pants pocket pushing their way into places where conversations—or those instigating them—didn’t belong, like bathroom stalls, grocery aisles, fistfights, and just about anyplace else she could think of.

  “Am I going to have to settle for that?”

  “Pretty much,” Anna said honestly.

  “I love you.”

  “And I you.”

  Anna closed the phone, then opened it again and turned it off, watching the gray and white “Good-bye” fade from view on a star-trekkian whoosh of electronic noise. There were a lot of people who’d rather see her alive than dead—most, she liked to think—but, other than her sister, it had been a long time since there was anyone who was so hell-bent on keeping her alive and in one piece that it could be a pain in the pasta fagioli.

  She would be careful, really, really careful. Her survival instinct had pretty much recovered from previous adventures; that was part of it. Mostly, though, she knew for a fact, knew with every gram of gray matter left in her cranium, that her death would devastate her husband.

  Love was a grand burden.

  Clad in black Levi’s and a red tank top, lights off, she sat inside the open doors to her abbreviated balcony and waited. From the bedroom of the guesthouse she couldn’t see Jordan’s door, but she would hear when he opened it, would hear his feet on the brick, the squeak of the gate on his side of the apartments. The small deep courtyard funneled sounds up from below with such efficiency she heard even the faint scratching of insects in the leaf litter around the turtles’ pond.

  Most cities Anna was familiar with began to settle after the evening rush hour. Even on Friday and Saturday nights, there was a slowing and a sense of drowsiness that came over neighborhoods as breadwinners arrived home, suppers were cooked, children kissed and put to bed. Perhaps that was true in other parts of New Orleans. Not so in the French Quarter.

  As the hour grew later there was a sense of waking up, the sound of laughter from the street, scraps of conversations drifting up fr
om stoops and balconies, the crush of automobile tires as cars negotiated the narrow, one-way streets. On Ursulines, a few blocks from Bourbon, Royal, Chartres, and North Peters, where the bulk of the night tourists found entertainment, the coming to life wasn’t hectic or edgy, just the waking of a nocturnal world as at home in the darkness as bats and cats and owls.

  Since Geneva had given her Jordan’s customary time of departure, Anna hadn’t been listening for more than a quarter of an hour before she heard Jordan’s door open, then shut, then the snuck-chunk sound of the lock.

  When she heard his footfalls moving toward the iron door that let onto the street, Anna rose.

  She didn’t change into dark clothes, or mute the paleness of her flesh, or any of the things she might have done had she been going to track a possible malefactor through the woods at night. She didn’t pull a ball cap low over her eyes or wear dark glasses to avoid being recognized as one might in other cities. This was New Orleans. On her way downstairs she pulled on a mask bright with red feathers and black sequins that she’d picked up in a souvenir shop on the corner of North Peters and Dumaine after Geneva finished her set, then wrapped a red and gold boa obtained at the same emporium of the tacky and predictable around her neck. All she need do was add a brightly colored hurricane in a shapely plastic two-foot-high glass and she would be just another tourist, all but invisible to the locals.

  FOURTEEN

  A silent descent made impossible by the old cottage’s xylophone stairs, Anna trusted to distance and ambient noise to cover her, pattered down the three flights, and let herself out the front door. Once on the brick, she moved as silently as a cloud.

  She didn’t trail Jordan down his side of the house. The iron gates to the street were locked with a dead bolt and needed a key to open from either side. Geneva had given her a key to her gate; Anna had neglected to check whether it worked on the second gate. A task for another day, she thought as she stood quietly behind the iron, head cocked, ears straining for the sound of Jordan’s retreating footsteps. Keen as her hearing was, she couldn’t separate his footfalls from the general murmur of the Quarter.