City of the Dead

by Eileen Dreyer

  A hurricane was coming. Even if it was still wandering around the Caribbean, it was coining right for her. She knew it right where she knew when disaster approached in her ER and in her life.

  But the hurricane only made it all worse.

  Because she had much bigger things to be afraid of.

  James did not share the vigil with Chastity. Instead, he went looking for Frankie Mae Savage.

  James Guidry was a patient man. He’d learned how to be the hard way. But his patience vanished like pocket change the minute somebody deliberately lied to him. Especially somebody he’d thought he could trust.

  James trusted very few people anymore. But Frankie Mae Savage had been one of them. Frankie was an honest cabbie. She didn’t steal fares, she helped old ladies, and from all accounts, she raised a good family in a marginal neighborhood. James had respected her.

  Until she’d looked up at him with that age-old smile of hers and told him she didn’t recognize Faith Stanton.

  Until she’d lied.

  Now, he was furious.

  And it had nothing to do with the fact that somehow he found himself feeling responsible for an out-of-town nurse who couldn’t find her sister. It certainly couldn’t be because he still shook when he thought of the moment he’d stepped down onto Bourbon Street to see that crazy asshole aiming his shiny black shoe right for Chastity Byrnes’s head.

  Rages like that were a thing of the past. James had vowed a long time ago that he would never again suffer the kind of impotent fury that pushed a man into action before he thought.

  He made damn sure of it, every day of his life.

  So he was just finishing a job, like he was getting paid to. He was going to find out what Frankie Mae Savage knew about Chastity’s sister. And why she hadn’t thought to share it with him.

  There was only one problem with that plan. Frankie Mae, it seemed, did not want to talk to him. James spent three days looking for her. He haunted taxi stands, he harassed the dispatcher at the office, he knocked on every door along Piety down in Bywater, where the dispatcher said Frankie Mae lived.

  Frankie had disappeared.

  James kept his voice level when he asked for her. He ignored the stares and shudders that always accompanied a first look at his scars. He even flirted with some of the little old ladies who cleaned the Saint Claude Tabernacle of Light Church on a Friday morning. But he got nowhere.

  Frankie didn’t leave a message. She hadn’t consulted neighbors or bosses. She’d just vanished into the ether, as if she knew that James would come looking for her.

  By the third day of his search, James figured that even if Frankie did come back home, she’d make damn sure she didn’t talk to him. He had not left many instant friends in his wake. Frankie’s mother had slammed the door in his face. Her next-door neighbor, a tall, stately black man with a dead-animal toupee on his head, had simply shaken his head at James’s behavior. Only the volunteer cleaners of the Saint Claude Tabernacle of Light Church had remained kind. But James had a feeling that those smiling, sweet ladies would serve tea to the devil himself if they thought it would help.

  It wouldn’t help him. He’d been lied to. And Chastity Byrnes deserved some answers.

  Not that that mattered to him.

  Dixie Livingstone didn’t live in the Bywater neighborhood. She didn’t belong to the Saint Claude Tabernacle of Light Church. She could have told James where Frankie Mae was, though. That was because Frankie Mae was sitting in Dixie’s passenger seat as the two of them returned to the city from out on Chef Menteur Highway.

  Dixie knew that what they were doing was dangerous. She knew that she couldn’t talk about it to nobody, not even her own husband, Warren Lee. Especially not Warren Lee. He just wouldn’t understand how his wife, who spent her days driving a cab just like her friend Frankie, was helping people break the law. He really wouldn’t understand that she was using his hunting camp to do it.

  Sounded a lot more romantic than it was, really, that hunting camp. Made a person think of deer heads and servants and dogs and shit. Truth was, Warren Lee’s camp was a rickety wood box on stilts out on a marshy strip between Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, where the Intercoastal Waterway made fishing easy, and the swamp grew pigs and deer and nutria. Warren Lee just loved to disappear of a weekend with his men friends and shoot things out in the marshes and catch fish from his little john boat.

  The only time Dixie had ever been to the camp was to decorate. That meant that she ran string through Handi Wipes and hung them as curtains. Then she stocked the jury-rigged bathroom with cleaning supplies she figured Warren Lee would never use.

  She’d been right. She and Frankie had just come from the camp with its two bare rooms out in the saw grass, and it looked like the pigs lived there instead of the hunters.

  But it didn’t matter. Since Warren Lee was double-shifting for the overtime, it was the perfect place to hide something. And Dixie had helped Frankie do just that. Now they at least had a couple of days to figure something else out before they had to worry about that hurricane heading their way.

  Cause if that hurricane did hit, Warren Lee’s hunting camp would smash itself into kindling, and there’d be no more pigs roaming the grass.

  But that was okay. There were still a couple of days before they had to worry about that, and by then Frankie’d think of something.

  She’d have to. There were already two people dead, and that bitch of a nurse was getting too close. The nurse they’d thought Eddie Dupre was going to take care of.

  Couldn’t ever depend on a man. They’d just have to see to it themselves.

  Well, Frankie Mae would. Dixie just didn’t have the stomach for that kind of thing.

  Sixteen

  “Where are you goin’?” Kareena demanded.

  Chastity stopped a second as she struggled to get her arm into the sleeve of her one good silk blouse. It was the fourth day of her recovery, and her stitches itched. She had a knot the size of a regulation baseball on the back of her head, she was stiff as a quarterback on Monday morning, and the bones Lloyd Burgard had nicked with his knife screeched every time she moved.

  She’d spent three days trying not to think about her sister, and it hadn’t worked. Trying to pretend she didn’t know that her father was not just alive, but close by. She’d called her therapist and upped her antianxiety meds, and still the coming storm clawed at her chest. She’d spent hours staring at that swirl of yellow on the TV, and couldn’t help thinking how appropriate the symbol was for a balanced, harmonious life spinning out of control.

  She just couldn’t breathe anymore, and she knew that things were only going to get worse. After all, compared to the chaos Chuck Byrnes could sow, a hurricane was just a weather snit.

  “I’m going to a funeral.”

  Kareena lifted an eyebrow. “Yours?”

  Again, Chastity reached around and flinched. But this time she managed to slide her arm successfully into the sleeve and covered the bandage on her left wrist.

  “Susan Wade Reeves.”

  There was a moment of heavy silence as Chastity closed her blouse and Kareena closed her mouth.

  “Yeah? Why you wanna do that?”

  “I have to find out what happens to that little girl. Susan said her mother didn’t want her.”

  Kareena actually looked stunned. “Well, you can’t have her.”

  “I know that. I just…I feel like there’s something more there I need to find out.”

  “You need to make yourself feel better, that woman dead. That’s what.”

  “It’s something I can do, Kareena. It sure as hell seems as if there’s little else I can control right now.”

  “James lookin’ for that cabbie for you.”

  “I know. And he can’t find her. Maybe there’s something to see at the funeral.”

  “And maybe you should ask you daddy. You sure you don’t want to know where to find him?”

  Chastity deliberately focused on her buttons
. “No.”

  “You need to talk to him, girl. Even Tante Edie says so.”

  “Then let Tante Edie talk to him. I’m not going near him without a gun. Maybe a knife. No, an ax, just like Lizzie Borden. Who I need to talk to is Eddie Dupre. The people at New Life Center. The police. I do not need to talk to my father.”

  “He’s in the sex offender database, girl. We can find him.”

  “You find out where he is, I’ll just have to kill him.”

  Big words from a woman who sank straight to sex every time the man was mentioned. Just the idea of seeing her father face-to-face set Chastity to shaking so badly she almost couldn’t get the last button closed.

  “You’re stronger than that, girl,” Kareena insisted, her voice quiet. “Kareena knows.”

  From where she stood, Chastity could see all the bright colors of Kareena’s house. Pinks and greens and blues and purples, a big jumble of crayons in a dilapidated box. A haven of joy and exuberance. It was the difference between Kareena’s house and Chastity’s. Chastity painted with bright colors in defiance of her life. Kareena did it to celebrate hers.

  Chastity felt so unbearably tired all of a sudden. Old in ways she thought Kareena could never imagine. Her father was here. The monster had crawled out from under the bed, and she was going to have to face him, just like Tante Edie had said.

  God, she wanted to climb back into that bed and pull the covers over her eyes. She wanted to hide for ten more years. For twenty, until he was dead and she was safe.

  But she wouldn’t be safe, and she knew it.

  Not until she finally faced him.

  It was what had really kept her curled up in that house. Not pain. Not confusion.

  Fear.

  And not the fear she’d lived with for the last ten years. That had been residual. The itchy, uncomfortable, healing scar kind of fear that had gradually begun to wear away with therapy and drugs until water was the only thing that still terrified her.

  This was the kind of fear she hadn’t felt since the day her father had been escorted from the courtroom in handcuffs.

  Belly-crawling, breath-stealing, I-can’t-open-my-eyes fear. The kind of fear that robs your strength and sets you to shaking because you know that your worst nightmare is about to start all over again. That no matter how hard you fight, those footsteps you hear padding down the hallway late at night are coming for you.

  But Chastity had learned a long time ago how to survive this kind of fear. You just did what tiny little thing you were able to. You controlled what you could. And you spent your days pretending that those footsteps never destroyed your nights.

  “I have to go to a funeral,” she said.

  Another moment of silence. Then Kareena nodded. “We’ll all go.”

  They did, with James actually sporting an oxford shirt and khakis, and Kareena in a flowered dress. They drove in James’s cab, first to Sacred Heart Parish on St. Charles, and then up to the end of Canal Street where Metairie Cemetery took up the only real ridge in the city. They watched as Susan Wade Reeves was laid to rest with all the ceremony and dignity of an old aristocratic family.

  The service was familiar, the tone bemused, the emotions held in strictest check. The sermon was about unfair death and random violence, which made Chastity shift in her seat. Unfair death, Chastity could agree with. She just didn’t think that the violence delivered on Susan Reeves had been random.

  The cemetery was beautiful, the grass green and the trees lush. It was a solemn, sweet place, even if just beyond the trees Chastity could see the roof of a nearby restaurant, and it had a twenty-foot plaster crawfish climbing out of it.

  The family stepped out of limousines, and friends clustered in groups separated by the roles Susan had assumed in her life. Chastity, Kareena, and James stayed by the cab and watched. Chastity watched the funeral. Kareena watched the crawfish and said how hungry she was.

  It was only after the three of them followed everyone to that monstrous house on Prytania that Chastity finally caught sight of Susan’s little girl. She sat wide-eyed and silent on an overstuffed couch in a back room, held in the arms of the black woman. The little girl looked confused. The black woman was weeping.

  No one else was.

  “Shit, girl,” Kareena breathed in astonishment at the sight. “No wonder that little girl make you so nervous. Genetics is just scary, yeah?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “What you do now?” Kareena asked, tearing her attention away from Susan’s daughter so she could finally catch a look at the decor in one of the Prytania houses.

  “I don’t know,” Chastity admitted. She just couldn’t take her eyes off Susan’s daughter.

  “What are you doing here?” a strident voice suddenly demanded to Chastity’s left.

  It wasn’t a loud voice. Chastity knew that because no one else turned around except her and Kareena. But Chastity knew who owned it from the first syllable.

  She was tall and patrician, a brunette with a pageboy that owed its color to expensive treatments. A queen clad in the very attire Chastity had seen on Susan Reeves. She had Susan Reeves’s glacial blue eyes in an older face, and the obligatory pearls around her neck.

  Susan’s mother.

  “You can’t have her,” she said, stalking forward. “You have no right!”

  Chastity blinked, bemused. She obviously shouldn’t have taken that last Vicodin.

  “Pardon?”

  Susan’s mother stepped closer, a brittle, angry light in her eyes. “She’s my granddaughter,” she hissed, not even bothering to note who might overhear. “I don’t care who you are or what your part in this was. You gave away your rights when you signed that contract. Margaret Jane is Susan’s little girl.”

  It took a second, but finally at least one rock lifted off Chastity’s chest. “The way Susan talked, I wasn’t sure you’d want her. Margaret Jane.”

  “Not want her? Who could not want her? But I told you that when you were here before.”

  Chastity absorbed the surprise like a punch to the head. Oh, a very bad time to take Vicodin.

  “My sister,” she said, trying to remain as calm as possible. “You mean my sister, Faith. You saw her here?”

  It was Mrs. Reeves’s turn to reassess. She peered hard, squinting just like an old woman who refused to wear her glasses. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I saw those eyes….”

  Chastity nodded. “Yes. I know. But I’m not Faith. My name is Chastity Byrnes. I’m Faith’s sister.” Always good to reinforce basic information. “I’m here because my sister is missing, and my friends are helping me look for her.” She grabbed elbows and drew Kareena and James close, needing the support. “This is Kareena Boudreaux, who is forensic nurse liaison at Charity Hospital. And James Guidry, her cousin, who is also helping us.”

  Mrs. Reeves assessed them all with precision and restraint. “But what does that have to do with any of us?”

  Chastity sucked in a calming breath and tried to focus. “You said you saw my sister. Can you tell me when?”

  “Oh, heavens. Two weeks ago? Ten days? I didn’t speak to her, you understand. I just saw her. At Susan’s.”

  Chastity held her breath. “Did she look all right?”

  Mrs. Reeves looked bemused by the question. “Well, I’m sure I don’t know. She was just arriving. Another young lady was dropping her off.” She smiled, suddenly. “As a matter of fact, the only reason I really noticed was because the young lady reminded me of Elvis Presley. She was all in white.”

  “Susan never spoke to you of why my sister was here?”

  Mrs. Reeves blinked. “Susan has her own friends. I never pry.”

  Which stopped the conversation cold.

  “Now if you’ll excuse me…”

  “Mrs. Reeves.” Chastity reached out. Laid a hand on that tailored linen sleeve. “Please. It’s really important. If you can remember anything Susan might have said about my sister. Anything that might help us find her. I spoke to Susa
n, but she never got the chance to help me. She…”

  Mrs. Reeves was still looking uninvolved, as if Faith’s problem had nothing to do with Susan. Chastity knew she had to break through the denial.

  “Susan was supposed to meet me at Saint Roch’s the morning she was…the morning she died.”

  Mrs. Reeves blinked. Then, imperceptibly stiffening, she blinked again. “Susan was robbed.”

  Chastity held herself together. “No, ma’am. I don’t think so.”

  An eyebrow lifted. “You think she’s dead because she was going to talk to you?”

  “I’m afraid she’s dead because she had something to do with my sister’s disappearance. I’m also very afraid that my sister is in the same kind of danger.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know that. I know they were both connected to the Arlen Clinic. I know that Susan was going to tell me something and is dead. I also believe that another woman who knew my sister from the clinic is dead. Unless I find my sister, I can’t tell you how any of these things connect. Or who killed your daughter.”

  Chastity hated to see how pasty and small Susan Reeves’s mother suddenly looked. Mrs. Reeves didn’t so much as falter, though. “Susan would never do anything illegal. She would not hurt anyone.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t.” Chastity handed out another card. “If you remember anything, couldn’t you call? It’s all I ask.”

  Mrs. Reeves accepted it without a word and turned to go.

  “Mrs. Reeves,” Chastity said, stopping her. “Susan loved her little girl so much. I’m glad you have her.”

  Tears suddenly glistened in the older woman’s eyes. She straightened until it looked like she would snap and gave a nod, nothing more.

  “I’d like you to take my card, too,” Kareena said quietly, handing it over. “If I can help in any way, please contact me.”