by J. R. Rain
Okay, I admit it; my temper got the better of me, nearly all week. I had become more frustrated and impatient being stuck back here. I missed my kids, I missed Kingsley, I missed my real life. I’d already sent two messages to Marie Laveau’s hairdressing shop on Toulouse Street, and both times, they were ignored. My attempts to get the rebel vampires and the werewolves to bury the hatchet hadn’t gotten anywhere, and because of the corpses found in the caves nearby, Congo Square had been temporarily closed. So the Saturday Night ‘African Dances,’ which had been a major tourist attraction, couldn’t go on. They had also been a way for the New Orleans slave population to let off steam. All of the servants, delivery men, and street workers were sullen and furious—ours less than most, maybe, but you could still tell the difference in how they treated everyone.
Besides, Bricky said a ‘black Republican’ sat in the White House now, and he would soon free all the slaves, so they saw no point in working hard and following orders anymore. Their masters had only themselves to blame for this rumor, because white southerners had insisted on calling the new president, Abraham Lincoln, a black Republican. So, much as I sympathized with their cause, it had brought the city to a standstill and made it really hard to get anything done.
Like finding Marie Laveau and convincing her to send me forward in time.
Meanwhile, as I predicted, Lalie had risen from her bed and pretty much snapped out of her mourning for the dead actor dude. Though that didn’t mean she was being a whole heck of a lot nicer to her new husband, of course. She mostly complained about how he had no big house for her to move into being a doctor, which at the time didn’t pay all that well. He lived in ‘bachelor quarters,’ which meant a pair of rented furnished rooms above a hat shop on Dauphine Street. They lacked a kitchen, a bathroom, and most importantly, a nursery for the baby, which Lalie had come to view Dr. James as responsible for. She decided they would have to just go on living with Colonel Bart for the foreseeable future.
“Besides, I need you at my side, dearest Sam,” she said in her best wheedling tone. “You’ve had children of your own—for you, womanhood has no mysteries. I’ve never had the good fortune to know a mother’s love, so you will have to take care of me and my baby.”
Great. So now on top of everything else I had to be a grandma.
Dr. James didn’t seem too thrilled with the arrangement, either.
“Pelagie hasn’t thought matters through,” he said to me on our way to the parish prison. “She doesn’t seem to realize she’s my wife now. What if I should decide to move back to Edinburgh? My professional prospects are decidedly better there at my father’s practice, and if there really is a war coming, that would certainly be the safest place for her and the child.”
Aside from a few fiery newspaper editorials and the colonel’s constant bitching, this was the first time I heard anybody in New Orleans openly talk about a war with the northern states. I’d been told it wasn’t a proper subject for ladies to worry about. According to Colonel Bart, mostly the French Creoles had become excited about seceding. Everybody else knew war was bad for business, especially for a city like New Orleans which had been built on commerce, most of it shipped north.
But as he said, it ran on the backs of black slaves.
“So when do you think the shooting will start?” I asked the doctor as we walked through the prison gates. I’d wracked my brains trying to remember when Fort Sumter had been fired on, but all I could come up with was the year 1861, which I’d landed in.
“You’re asking my opinion, madam? You would do better to ask Lalie’s cat. As you know, I’m an outlander here and so know very little of American politics. The colonel thinks the madness will begin soon.”
“Yeah, I know.”
We looked at each other and exchanged sympathetic smirks. Dr. James had pretty much moved in with us since his quickie wedding and received an overdose of his new father-in-law’s opinions on every subject under the sun.
“Do you need to see him now?”
“Yes, I’ve prepared a medical report on the unfortunate Madame Pretis-Baille. She was, as you acutely observed, almost completely exsanguinated. Is that… normal practice among your kind?”
“No. No, it’s not. Think of it like this—would you whip your horse to death every time you rode somewhere on it? Or would you keep riding it as long as you could?”
“Perhaps he did,” said Dr. James, looking thoughtful; then turning pink when he realized the sexual implications of what he’d just said. “I mean, perhaps the lady had been intimate for some time with him in, in this fashion, and he had tired of her. Or feared she would become indiscreet.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but what about the other three bodies before that?”
“His servants?”
I noticed we assumed the killer a ‘he.’ I nodded. “Establishing who the victims knew in common is the first step in police procedure. You’d make a pretty good cop, doc. Unfortunately, that ship’s pretty much sailed on the first three vics, since they were never ID’d or PM’d.”
I was still translating this for him as we walked into the colonel’s office.
The colonel had a guest; an ancient, wizened African American lady with a carved cane. Like Eulalie, she was of mixed blood, so light-skinned in her case that she could probably have passed for white in a northern city like New York. She wore black and white like a lay nun, and you could see she’d been a real looker in her younger days. I’d seen her around before; she came by every Saturday with baskets of fresh baguettes and crullers for the prisoners. I’d just assumed she had a son or grandson behind bars.
She complained to the colonel about the closure of Congo Park due to the murders. “I give you my word none of my people are the murderers, monsieur!” she said angrily.
“And you know I believe you, Madame Glapion.”
“The last time the place was closed, I spoke to Councilman Cambré, and he opened it again at once. My word was good enough for him!”
The colonel sighed. “I well remember, madame, but that was thirty years ago. Monsieur Cambré is no longer with us. However, barring unforeseen circumstances, I will speak to the mayor about it tomorrow. I promise.”
This barely seemed to satisfy the old lady; she huffed out, whacking the floor with her cane, and the colonel rolled his eyes at me.
“That woman is a tartar,” he said. “She’s been coming here once a week to feed the prisoners for as long as I can remember. She still considers herself the queen of black New Orleans—they all fear her because she’s a witch.” He sat back again in his chair and waggled his white eyebrows. “And maybe with good cause. I remember once when I was a young man witnessing the execution of a pair of convicts, murderers and rapists she’d taken a fancy to, and seeing her conjure up a tempest of hail and lightning and heavy rain out of a clear blue sky to halt the proceedings.”
“What’s her name?” I asked him. I had a sudden suspicion I knew.
“Marie Glapion,” he said. “Before that, she was called Marie Paris, and before that Laveau. She’s buried several husbands, you see, and—”
“That was Marie Laveau? That old lady?”
I took off out of the room down the hall. Once I reached the street, I picked up my skirts and flat-out ran after her, getting funny looks from pedestrians and scaring a milkman’s horse. The whole damn time, the one person in New Orleans I desperately needed to meet had been right there under my nose! How crazy was that?
Chapter Twenty-four
I caught up with her a couple blocks away, halfway to the Tremé Market.
“Madame Laveau,” I said. “I need to talk to you. Really badly.”
She stopped and looked at me calmly and contemptuously. “You can talk all you like. Don’t mean I will listen. You are one of them.”
One of who? Did she mean I was white? Or a friend of the Macartys? Or a vampire?
“Me, I don’t understand how you can bear the sun. The others cannot.”
; Okay, vampire. “I have a… a special magic that protects me.”
She stared down at my fingers and the rings on them, then nodded. “Yes, I see that now.” Up close, she looked even older, as if a living statue carved from teak.
“I need your help—you’re the only one who can send me back.”
For the first time, she looked baffled. “Send you back? Back to where? To the hell you devils come from?”
We were attracting more than our share of glances from passersby, and I grew increasingly worried about my next words being overheard. “Can’t we go somewhere more private? To talk? How about the cemetery?”
We were only blocks from where the old lady was buried—it seemed like just a few nights ago I’d been visiting her tomb with a tour group. Just goes to show you never know who you know who will turn out to be super-famous.
She shook her head furiously. “I go nowhere with you. You have something to say to me, say it.”
I lowered my voice and looked her right in the eyes, which were oddly youthful and a dark gold color like aged honey. I summoned all my strength of will to hold her gaze. I could easily dominate people psychically, even put thoughts and commands in their heads If it would work on this woman, I needed every volt I could get.
“I’m from the distant future,” I said. “I was sent back in time by another Marie Laveau, a great-great-great-grand-daughter of yours, during a magical voodoo ceremony.”
If I’d said something like that to anybody else on the planet, unless they were a mental patient, they would have just laughed at me, and I was a little afraid the old lady might.
She didn’t. Or let’s just say, she laughed at me for a whole totally different reason. First she smiled, then burst into loud laughter. With her mouth open, I had a great view of the same type of expensive Vulcanite and porcelain dentures as the colonel. Poor people their age had flapping toothless gums and collapsed cheeks; whatever else she was or had been, the old lady didn’t lack for money.
“So now you are fixed,” she said, her eyes flashing. “Fixed good, and by one of my own blood. So it must still run very strong even in your time.”
Well, at least she believed me about being from the future. That was a start. “It certainly does. Look, I really need your help, Madame Laveau. I’ll do anything in return, pay any price. I can make you live forever, make you young again.”
Her expression instantly changed back into one of hatred and contempt. “Make me one of you, you mean. Never. You have no soul. My soul already belongs to Jesus and to Papa Legba and Mama Erzulie.”
I think that would have been that if our attention hadn’t been caught by a black man with a long white beard cantering down Marais Street on a huge horse with silver-trimmed leather harness. Doctor John; unlike the night I’d met him, he’d dressed like a circus master in a bright red coat and garish yellow silk hat.
“That man,” she said after he’d passed by splashing mud, and uttered a string of French curses under her breath. “Everywhere I go, that salopard de merde, he is there, and he becomes more arrogant every day, as if it is he who has the power and not I. You see how rich and grand he has become—and him a slave, an African. Yet because of the curse on him, he cannot be defeated without…” Her voice trailed away in thought.
“There must be some way to defeat him. Something I can give you…” It was a desperate last-ditch attempt to make a pitch to her, but I could tell it must have struck home, because her eyes wavered from side to side.
“Perhaps… but I don’t do services in my home anymore,” she said. “My daughter Marie Philome has taken over the business. Still, she cannot make that magic to take you to another time, not yet. For that, you need Baron Samedi and me. And my price is this: you must bring me the teeth of one of your own kind. All of them. That is the only way to make the gris-gris that will destroy that detestable con who calls himself Docteur John.”
“Okay, deal,” I said. I’d work out the exact details later. “But how will I find you?”
She gave me her address on Toulouse Street, then turned and walked away without another word. I had the weirdest feeling she snickered at me all the way down the street to the market. What could I do about it? She held my only chance to get home again, so Marie Laveau had me in her power.
Sergeant Dupont interrupted my little reverie, running up waving and shouting at me, “Madame Moon, Madame Moon, there is another! Another murdered cadaver au Parc Congo! You must come at once, the colonel say.”
***
This time, the cave was a few blocks from Congo Square, in the backyard of a house on a residential street in Tremé.
It had been bricked in and connected to a two-story shed with a huge tin barrel on top that acted as a rainwater tower for the square yellow house in front. Overnight, the weather changed; a cool front had moved in and it felt like I’d gone up north. Everybody said Toussaint was the changeover from summer to winter, and for the first time ever, I could see why people might want to live here.
For half the year, anyway.
I found the colonel inside the open door of the shed. Tears streamed down his face, so I thought at first the victim might be Lalie. That made no sense; we had just left her behind at home. Colonel Bart had a couple of uniformed policemen with him, but they were around the front of the house restraining a crowd of gawkers and onlookers. The moment he saw us, he wiped his face with a handkerchief and told Dupont in French to (I think) take a witness statement from the owners of the house, an elderly couple who stood on their back porch. The old man had found the body.
“It is Mademoiselle Caledonia, Pelagie’s friend,” said the colonel.
Caledonia Corneal had been with Lalie the night at the opera when the two young Creole men had started slapping each other, which had led to their duel. I could see what had upset the colonel so. Aside from him having known the victim since childhood, Callie and Lalie looked enough alike to be sisters.
Had looked. The pale, naked, dead thing on the floor of the muddy cavern in the back of the brick building barely looked human anymore. What remained of her could have been Lalie at first glance. Doctor James sure thought so when he walked in, leading a pair of stretcher-bearers; he flinched, then sent the two orderlies back out again.
“It’s Caledonia Corneal,” I said quickly
He nodded. “Was she drained of blood, like the others?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And… it looks like she was raped first.” So that let any female vampires—like Delphine Macarty Lalaurie, Arthemise Bouligny, Eulalie, or for that matter, me—off the hook. “Probably someplace else, then dumped here.”
Doctor James crouched down beside me and conducted his preliminary exam. His face flamed bright at the sight of the dead girl’s lady parts. After a moment, he cleared his throat and announced, “Your suppositions appear to be correct, but I’ll have to confirm them on the dissection table.”
The colonel shook his head grimly and blew his nose. “The poor little dear. You know, I was there at the Corneal house on Canal Street drinking port with her father George the night she was born. Never was there a prospective father more fearful or drunker by the end, I do recall. I’ll have to break this news to them myself. Now there’s a duty I do not look forward to, par Dieu…”
“There’s something else,” I said getting to my feet after I closed the girl’s staring, open eyes. “Didn’t Caledonia teach music and singing to the girls at the Ursuline Academy? Just like Madame Pretis-Baille, the last vic… I mean, victim.”
The two men drew in their breath sharply. The same thought had occurred to all three of us at once: and just like Lalie.
“We’ll need to put a guard on her until this reign of horror is resolved,” said the colonel. “At all times of the day and night. It might even be best if you took her out of town for a week or two, my boy. A proper honeymoon, perhaps? To Pass Christian or Mobile? Naturally, I would pay all expenses. What do you think, Sam?”
As long as I didn’t hav
e to go along and babysit, I was okay with that. “It’s a plan. What about that big wedding reception you’re holding for James and Lalie at the St. Charles Hotel Friday night? Is that still on?”
The two men glanced at each other. “I don’t see how we can cancel that at such short notice,” Colonel Bart said after a pause. He sounded scared but helpless. “The invitations have all been sent out and replied to and the food and wine ordered. We must all make doubly sure that nothing untoward happens to her in the meantime.”
Chapter Twenty-five
The meeting between the rebel vampires and the werewolves took place the next night in the swampland where Bayou St. John met Lake Ponchartrain.
To get there, Eulalie, her brother Bernard, and I took the Smoky Mary steam train up to where it ended at the Old Spanish Fort. The military blockhouse had been abandoned by the army, then sold and converted into an amusement park with restaurants, a casino, a dance hall, and even an alligator pond for tourists. I’d seen all the alligators up close as I wanted to in one eternal lifetime, so I didn’t hang around to sightsee.
A carriage waited for us in the circular driveway in front, and we drove north up a potholed, muddy road that soon became nothing more than a pair of deep ruts through the mangroves and dwarf cypresses. Eulalie’s eyes glittered in the dark, and drums beat somewhere off in the distance. I wondered if someone had started a voodoo rite, or if we listened only to the drums the black slaves used to communicate between different plantations at night?
“This is the place I used to come to meet with the other loups garous at the full moon,” she said. “Before I grew too old and sick. Doctor John, he lives across the waters on the Bayou Road in a big shack with his wives. You can see the lights twinkling from its windows.”
Windows with no panes or screens. We’d gone deep into mosquito country. Sucks for them. Though many of the locals seemed to be free of them, I noticed. Maybe a person reached a limit where their skin repelled them naturally… the locals didn’t bathe much. Or maybe, like the city of New Orleans itself, their toxins worked their way under the skin into your bloodstream like a fever, until you gradually got hooked on the place and never wanted to leave. Or maybe couldn’t, like a zombie.