by Nevada Barr
Half past five, she turned at Chartres and headed down the west side of Dumaine. Stores were beginning to close for the evening. Soon she’d need to move into the nocturnally oriented businesses’ territory.
At Authentic Voodoo she made her last stop. She paused in front of the door trying to remember the owner’s name. Racine. As she reached for the door handle she heard a man shouting. Unashamedly, she leaned closer to eavesdrop. The words were unintelligible, Cajun French, she guessed. Racine—at least she assumed it was Racine—replied in English. Unlike the man’s, her voice was not raised, but Anna could still hear well enough.
“You hate magic, you embrace work the devil would turn down, and yet you say you love me and Laura. There is so much dark in you, I wouldn’t let you near her. Get out.” The last was hissed. Anna was reminded snakes were an integral part of a lot of voodoo rituals; she was also reminded of the snake she’d sensed beneath Racine’s skin on their first meeting.
The man spoke again, still in Cajun French, but Anna knew cursing when she heard it. Then he cried out as if Racine had stabbed him with a knife. Anna jerked open the door and walked in, making as much noise as possible, banging the door and stomping. It was not her intention to get cut in a domestic dispute. She merely wanted to shatter the mood and distract the participants till things settled down. Failing that she would run away, fleet as any deer.
Again dressed in unrelieved white, a tiered cotton skirt with eyelet trim and a tank top, the tall pale voodooienne stood behind the counter. Her hair was loose and straight and fell from a center part. Her daughter, Laura, was nowhere to be seen. In a bizarre tableau, the slender blonde was holding a burly middle-aged man, with wild black hair and muscles like the roots of an old oak, at bay with what appeared to be a handful of dried sagebrush.
“I call on Papa Legba. Come to me. Send me a warrior; send Ogoun.” Her voice was louder now and had changed pitch. The man threw his hands before his face.
“You goddam witch!” he cried in accented English and backed toward the door in such a blind rush Anna had to jump out of the way or get trampled. He was so anxious to escape the curse of the loa that Anna didn’t think he’d even noticed she was there.
Slowly Racine lowered the weeds with which she had terrified the man. The elevated stare she’d adopted as she chanted melted down to a normal gaze, and her eyes locked on Anna.
“You,” she said. “We are about to close, but if your problem is small, and I can help, I will.”
Anna wasn’t going to get a better invitation than this. She crossed the room and laid the sketch on the glass-topped counter. “Do you recognize this man, or does this sketch resemble anyone you know or have seen?”
Racine turned the page around and, holding her hair back with one graceful hand, bent over the paper. It occurred to Anna that the woman was nearsighted and too vain to wear glasses.
Suddenly, Racine jerked her head up as if the drawing were a scorpion about to strike and emitted a stifled gasp. Without looking at Anna, she spun around till her face was shielded from view and snatched up a pile of papers near the cash register, tapped them into line on the counter, laid them back down, and squared the corners as if it mattered.
“You know him,” Anna said flatly, not wanting to give Racine time to work up a good story.
“I don’t,” Racine said, continuing to fiddle with the small pile of flyers.
“It matters,” Anna said. “It matters a lot.”
Racine took a deep breath. Letting her head fall back, she exhaled slowly. “I don’t know him,” she repeated.
“Nothing will come back on you. I don’t need to know how you know him, and I don’t need to tell anyone you told me.”
Racine said nothing for a moment. Then, “I was about to close. Is there anything else I can help you with?” Her eyes were hard and her mouth determined.
Playing for time, Anna looked around the shop. Racine started toward the door to usher her out. Anna sighed. Meeting Racine’s eyes she said, “I know this guy’s name is Dougie. I know he’s dangerous. I know he’s connected to the business of harming children. Me, by myself, I might not stoop to threats. With little girls factored in, I might stoop to anything. So: I know your name, Racine Gutreaux, and your daughter’s name, Laura. I know you’re involved with—or married to—a man who speaks Cajun French. I’m guessing he’s Laura’s father and there is a dispute about custody. In this information age, just how long do you think it will take me to put these pieces together and find out how you know Dougie?”
Racine opened the door to assist in Anna’s immediate departure.
Anna rubbed her face with one hand. A headache was starting behind her left eye. “It might take me a day, two days. That might be long enough for the little girls I’m looking for to die or to be shipped somewhere their mother will never see them again. Can you live with that?”
Racine looked at the floor. “Please go,” she said.
Having been chasing wisps and scents and old clues from the mind of a child, Anna had no intention of letting something that resembled a solid lead slip away. Eliciting information from an unwilling witness was tricky business. Sometimes threats worked; other times they backfired. The same went for good cop and bad cop and every other form of manipulation. The only thing that was fairly dependable was payment, but what kind? Money wouldn’t work on Racine, Anna was fairly certain of that. She stood silently for long enough that Racine finally closed the door softly and leaned her back against it.
“You know Jordan,” Anna said suddenly. “I was in here one day when he stopped to look through your window at Laura. You thought he was a pedophile, and, being a voodooienne, you did something to him, didn’t you?”
“Curses are not illegal,” Racine said.
It was close enough to an admission of guilt for Anna. “Murdering harmless pigeons is.”
“No it isn’t. If they are not anyone’s personal property and if they are not protected by state or federal statute or city regulations, they can be killed at will. You don’t even need a license, and there is no hunting season as regards pigeons.”
Anna hated it when people were well informed.
“What would you say if I told you Jordan is not, and never has been, a pedophile?” Anna asked.
“I wouldn’t believe you. He’s a pedophile. I should know.”
“Ah. You should? And why is that?” Anna leaned back against the counter.
Racine said nothing. Her hands twitched on the doorknob as if she couldn’t decide whether to run or to try to bodily throw Anna into the street.
“Mommy?” came a tiny voice from behind Anna’s shoulder. Laura had come down from the upstairs apartment and stood looking out at them from the gloom at the foot of the stairs.
“What is it, honey?” Racine asked, trying to watch Anna and her daughter at the same time.
“I heard Daddy’s voice,” Laura said.
“Daddy’s gone, baby,” Racine said.
Anna watched the interplay between mother and daughter, both ethereal with their long blond hair and pale skin, eyes big and luminous blue in their smooth faces. Did Racine know about child molesters because her husband was molesting Laura? The idea of anyone despoiling such a frail and beautiful child made Anna’s stomach clench. The idea of anyone despoiling any innocent made her stomach clench.
“He didn’t say good-bye!” the little girl wailed.
Clearly she loved Daddy. That proved nothing. Abused children were dependent on their abusers. The attention and secrecy and “special” relationship, mixed with the natural love of child for parent, strangled the true meaning of love. Love was power and, in the hands of the corrupt, could be used in the most heinous of ways.
Anna’s mind leapt from Laura to Vee and Dana, the lost girls of Clare Sullivan. Girls who’d not yet been removed from danger. “Dougie,” she said to Laura. “Is that your daddy’s name?”
Laura didn’t say anything, but she scrunched up her nose and wrinkl
ed her perfect little mouth into a moue of distaste. “Dougie’s a stinker,” she said. Anna got a sense that Dougie was not big enough in the child’s mind to have monster status but was sufficiently odious to dislike.
Racine left the door and was crossing quickly toward the stairs, intent on snatching her daughter out of Anna’s reach, when Laura said, “My daddy’s name is Blackie.”
THIRTY-ONE
Anna was invited upstairs, not, she knew, because Racine had come to like or trust her but because it was more private than the windowed shop. They sat at a tiny table in a kitchen the size of a closet, each with a cup of tea that smelled faintly like gardenias and had little more color than plain water. Laura was in the front room. They could see her through the open door serving tea to her dolls. Beyond the child was the door to the stairs down to the shop. Though it was an internal door, and the voodoo shop was locked, Anna noted there were three locks on it: a key lock, a dead bolt, and a chain.
“Is your husband a child molester?” Anna asked when it was clear that, once the tea and amenities were seen to, Racine wasn’t going to speak further without prodding.
“Shh!” Racine hissed, her eyes on Laura.
Anna had spoken softly so her words wouldn’t carry to the child, but the admonition didn’t offend her. To even speak of these things seemed to taint the air in a room.
“No,” Racine answered in a low voice. She lifted her tea as if to drink, then set it down again without taking any. “At least I don’t think so.”
In that sentence lay the end of the marriage. How could a woman live with a man she didn’t “think” was abusing children? That she could even have the thought was trust’s death knell and the beginning of fear.
“Dougie?” Anna asked. She suppressed an urge to glance at the doll’s tea party. To look at Laura with Dougie in mind would be somehow damaging. Whether to her or the angels, Anna wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know. I only know him from meeting him three or four times. He gave me the creeps—the way he looked at Laura—and I asked Blackie never to bring him to the house again. Blackie doesn’t like him either. Maybe even hates him, but they had to work together.”
“At what?” Anna asked when Racine didn’t go on of her own volition.
Racine lowered her face till her hair fell in a curtain, hiding her features. “Blackie worked for an import-export company. He drove a truck, picking up things off-loaded at different ports and delivering them to a buyer here in New Orleans. Dougie sometimes went with him when there was more work than one man could do by himself.”
Again she raised the teacup, and this time it actually arrived at her lips; still, she didn’t drink. Setting the untouched beverage down, she said, “I thought my husband was hauling art—the mass-produced stuff from China—that you see in shops in the Quarter. Even uptown there are a lot of antique shops that sell reproductions. Sometimes they tell the customers that they are. Sometimes they don’t.”
Getting the feeling that Racine wasn’t telling the whole story, Anna leveled an open, expectant gaze on her and waited.
Finally the woman said, “I guess I guessed that some of it wasn’t quite, well, kosher. Dougie was so creepy, and they called their boss the Magician instead of by his name—there were a lot of things like that. But I thought it was just maybe that some of the things Blackie was hauling were maybe stolen or contraband or the import duties hadn’t been paid. And I love—loved—my husband, and Laura thinks her daddy walks on water, so . . .”
She let the thought trail out. It didn’t need finishing. She’d done what most people do, hoped and ignored and made excuses and tried to keep her and her child in the life where they were comfortable, in their home, with their family. In a way, Clare had done the same thing.
“Then you found out something,” Anna said to help bridge the gap between denial and realization.
“Yes,” Racine said. “Blackie came home from one of his trips to pick up imports and he was really upset. He grabbed a bottle of bourbon that we’ve had around the house so long I don’t know when we even bought it—neither of us drink all that much, and mostly wine—and he poured himself a half a glassful and took it like he was taking castor oil. He got in late—sometime after midnight—and he was tired. Laura was asleep, but I’d heard his van and gotten up. When I came into the kitchen he wouldn’t even look at me. He filled the glass again and knocked it back. I think it was the bourbon that let him talk. If he’d been rested and sober and in his right mind I don’t think he ever would have told me. But he wasn’t, and he started to cry after the alcohol hit him.
“He said Dougie had killed a woman and her husband. From the way he said it, I think he didn’t do it, but maybe he didn’t stop it either. He said they’d had to make it look like an accident—or like the deaths weren’t related to anything that could lead back to their boss—so they took the man’s body to his house, put it in his pajamas, and burned the place down so it would look like he’d died in the fire.”
That was in keeping with what Clare had told Anna. David had been murdered. It was his corpse the firemen had carried out of the house on Laggert Street in Seattle. “What did they do with the woman’s body?” Anna asked.
“He didn’t tell me, only that we were safe. By ‘we’ he meant me and Laura and him. Of course we never would be safe. Dougie is a rat right down to his little rat heart. If he saw a nickel in it, he’d rat out his own mother.”
Finally teacup made a successful trip to tongue and Racine took a long drink. Anna hadn’t touched her tea either. Though she’d seen Racine make it, she knew the woman was steeped in voodoo with its powders and potions and skewered pigeons, and she had no intention of swallowing anything she gave her.
They sat without talking for a moment. Laura had finished serving her dolls their tea and was now reading to them from a book about balloons and balls. Anna let her mind drift over what Racine had said; it appeared to her Racine would not have broken up her marriage over something as mundane as aiding and abetting in two murders, covering up felonies, and the illegal transport of bodies.
“Did Blackie tell you about killing two children?” Anna asked softly, her eyes unable to tear away from Laura.
“Blackie would never do that,” Racine said and sounded sure.
“But?”
“But the items he hauled for the Magician weren’t fake antiques or mass-produced bronzes.”
“They were people,” Anna said.
“Yes.”
“Children.”
“Not usually.”
“But sometimes.”
Racine nodded. After a moment she couldn’t sit with that damnation on her husband’s head any longer, and she said, “Blackie told me he thought they were orphans. Most of them were from the Middle East, but there were some from Central America, Mexico, and Asia. He said he thought they were going to be adopted—you know, those illegal adoptions for people who can’t get a baby through legal channels or don’t want to wait? There’s big money in that.”
Another silence came and went. Anna thought, Given to nice people in the country that have a farm where Fluffy can run free. She said, “But you didn’t believe him.”
“I wanted to. But I didn’t think he believed himself. The bourbon had made it so he couldn’t lie as well as he can sober, and I knew he really didn’t think the kids were adopted. I still thought it was bad but not so bad, like they were going to be servants in people’s houses or maybe do factory work.”
She looked up at Anna and shook the hair out of her face. “I know you think that makes me a monster, too—to be okay with that—but there are worse things that can happen to orphans.” Such was the look of defiance and sorrow on her face, Anna guessed she’d been one of those orphans and would have traded whatever her lot was for a little overwork and underpay. Even a lot of work and no pay.
“Yet you took Laura and moved out? When was that?” From the Amazing Patty, Anna knew Authentic Voodoo had been open for six months
or more. Hardly on a timeline with events of scarcely a couple weeks back.
“Two weeks ago,” Racine said. “I’d had the shop for a while. Blackie didn’t like it. Magic scares him. Even white magic. He grew up in the swamps, and he says that magic is magic and you can think it’s white or black, but it is what it is in the end, and it doesn’t care what you wanted it to be when you took it up. Blackie doesn’t think it’s like water or electricity—forces you can understand and control and use to create light or destroy cities. To him magic is alive, and, like a wild animal, it might let you think you’ve tamed it, but you haven’t, and it will turn on you. But he was gone so much he let me have the shop.”
“Let?” Anna said. Racine didn’t seem quite the type to ask a man’s permission for much of anything.
“There might have been a suggestion of Gutreaux dolls and hat pins,” Racine said with the first smile she’d shown since Anna had come into the shop. “The upstairs wasn’t rented, so I took it, and Laura and I moved in.”
Since Racine wasn’t bothered by the possibility of her husband dealing in contraband and, though she didn’t like it, wasn’t suffering the tortures of the damned because he might be selling children into, if not slavery, then certainly indentured servitude, Anna waited for the last revelation, the moment when Racine knew or suspected he was selling little girls to whoremongers.
“And the straw that broke the proverbial’s back?” Anna nudged when, instead of continuing her story, Racine got up and began fiddling with the teakettle.
Racine looked over her shoulder, her eyes meeting Anna’s with such loathing that Anna got ready to run. “Dougie.” Racine spat out the name, her lips twisted around the vile taste it left in her mouth. “Dougie’s not smart, but he thinks he is. He texted Blackie about getting some broken ‘jewels.’ I heard Blackie’s phone go off, and I read the text. The so-called code the fool had dreamed up didn’t do much to hide the fact he was asking if he could use the little girls—or boys—that were sick, dead, or damaged in some way. He was asking my husband for permission to do it. Then I knew what happened to the children Blackie delivered to the Magician.