Floodgates (20 page)
The three of them sat there silent, eyes focused on the photo, until Joe reached out and turned it over, face-down. It felt like the right thing for him to do, just as it would have been right to gently close the eyes of a person newly dead.
Faye wished there was some way to guarantee that she’d never have to smell a hospital, ever again. She didn’t think of herself as having a particularly keen sense of smell, but some odors seem to cling to her skin. They lingered, and her body responded viscerally, time and again.
Death. Antiseptics. Sickness and stale sweat. Disinfectant. Institutional food. Fear. Hospital air carried layers of bad smells. How lucky for Nina that she was escaping those foreboding odors.
Faye and Joe had just stopped for a quick evening visit. Dauphine had done the same thing, so she stood with them now wearing a puzzled expression that reflected their own thoughts:
Going home? That’s great…but…
Where will she go?
Can she care for herself?
Can she make herself understood in a world that doesn’t wait for people to grope through their memory banks for the right words?
Is she ready for this
?
Faye didn’t think she was ready. Not at all.
Nina’s face should have been radiant as the orderly pushed her wheelchair toward the elevator and freedom. If she were really ready to go home, she would have been casting girlish glances at the man walking beside that wheelchair. Under ordinary circumstances, Charles’ mere presence would have made her pale cheeks glow.
Instead, she canted her head nervously in Faye’s direction and reached a tentative hand toward the bandage wrapping her head. After a few seconds’ stammering, she came out with, “Head…water…save. Thank.”
Faye put a hand on her arm and said, “You’re very welcome. Joe and I are just happy we were there. You would have done the same for us.”
Nina nodded without speaking, but she seemed determined to try to communicate. Nothing but a groan came out of her mouth for a hard second, but the groan finally coalesced into recognizable words. “ Mmmmuh…mom. Da-aaa-aad. Save.”
Faye looked at Joe, then Dauphine. What was there to say? Nina’s parents had been dead for many years. Had she forgotten that? Who knew what random damage was done by a powerful blow to the head?
It would be a long time before Faye let go of the image of Nina, who had challenged authority on the evening news with such strength and vitality, being wheeled toward the elevator. She had lost so much weight in the few days since the attack that she looked shrunken, with her arms wrapped tightly around her breasts.
When the bell sounded to signal the elevator’s arrival, Nina turned around in the chair, looked at Faye and reached a hand just a few inches in Faye’s direction. Her mouth worked for a second, but all that came out of it was, “Save.” And again, louder, “Save!”
Then the orderly pushed her into the elevator, Charles stepped in, and the door closed behind them.
***
“You’ve got to get some sleep, Faye.”
Joe said this as if he thought she was unaware that the human body needed sleep. Or as if he thought she was lying in bed awake because it was a fun way to spend the hours between midnight and three a.m.
Maybe Joe had total control of his autonomic nervous system. Maybe he could wake at will and sleep when he wished. Maybe he could consciously slow his pulse so that no pesky heartbeats would jostle his arm as he pulled back his bowstring and took aim.
Faye could do none of these things. She couldn’t do anything but stare at the ceiling and pretend like she didn’t know that dozens of candles lit the open yard between her apartment and Dauphine’s house.
Dauphine had begun setting those candles hither and yon, muttering to herself and singing, as soon as she, Faye, and Joe had returned from the hospital. She had spoken to them as they walked past her on their way from the car to Faye’s apartment, but her speech was hardly distinguishable from the mumbling she’d been doing before they approached.
A heavy fog was settling like a miasma over the scene, but the candles burned despite the dampness. Their flames set small globes of gray mist alight.
Dauphine had glanced over her shoulder as Faye passed, and kept up her unintelligible speech. The quiet words had prompted Faye to move closer, but Joe had just drifted on upstairs, perfectly willing to let her have a few minutes of girl talk with her mambo friend without his supervision.
If he’d known about Dauphine’s brand of girl talk, he might’ve stayed, just to get a chance to compare Haitian ceremonial magic with his own Creek ways.
“My blood is flowing,” Dauphine had crooned as she wiped the top of a broad stump clean and spread a red cloth over the worn wood.
Faye had thought the woman was oblivious to the wet mist dropping from the sky, but maybe she wasn’t, because she turned her face skyward. The song changed to, “When you see Dantò pass, you think it is a thunderstorm. My blood is flowing, Dantò.”
In mid-song, Dauphine’s voice had quieted to a hum, then gone silent as she watched Faye approach.
Faye had thought at that moment that it had been a mistake to approach Dauphine. She had no idea what one said to a mambo in preparation for…for whatever it was that voodoo practitioners did. She’d settled for saying the first thing that entered her head. Perhaps that was what voodoo mambos wanted to hear, anyway.
“How are you, Dauphine? Are you feeling as worried about Nina as I am?”
“I give my worries to my lady Ezili Dantò,” Dauphine had said, plunking a metal plate loaded with fried pork onto the red cloth.
The odor of the crisp meat, redolent with spices, grabbed Faye’s attention and kept it. She’d forgotten to be hungry.
“My lady does not smile when women are harmed,” Dauphine declared, slapping an open palm on the altar’s red cloth. “She acts to defend victims, always. My lady knows that women and children are so often victims. Lady Dantò and I will dance tonight for our poor Nina. And for our Shelly, too. Always for Shelly.”
Dauphine had then set an open pack of Camels on the stump, letting it rest there for a moment before removing one from the pack and lighting it. The cigarette had dangled from her fingers as she poured Lady Dantò four fingers of rum, then lifted the glass to help her lady drink it. She plunked the bottle and the empty glass onto the red cloth, right next to the pack of cigarettes.
The offerings had been stored in a shapeless bag slung over Dauphine’s shoulder. Reaching her hand back into its depths, she’d retrieved a large piece of canvas, rolled up and secured with a dirty string. She’d driven a nail through the canvas, nailing it to a tree beside the lady’s makeshift altar, then unrolled it and held it flat against the trunk while she fumbled for another nail. Faye had hurried over to help her get it straight.
Once the canvas was fully visible, Faye found that she couldn’t look away from the fierce female face emblazoned on it. The face had been splashed across the canvas in Dauphine’s trademark shades of brilliant blue and red and black paint. There were scars on the woman’s cheeks and she cradled seven infants in her massive arms. Ezili Dantò’s image was not a comforting one. If the Madonna had gone to Haiti, watched her children suffer, and worked herself into a towering rage, she might look like this.
“I do not think our Nina’s pain is past, no. She cannot tell us her troubles, and that puts me in mind of the Lady.” Dauphine drew an endless drag of cigarette smoke. “Lady Dantò carries her pain inside, too, ever since she led the slaves in Haiti to revolt. The masters cut out her tongue for that, you know. She cannot talk any more than Nina can, but she is strong. I cannot talk for our Nina, either, but I can dance for her.”
Dauphine had stubbed the cigarette out on the red cloth, leaving a smut-black hole. “Lady Dantò and I will do our best to dance that pain away, if God wills it. Away with you. We do not need your help.”
From the bottom of her sack, Dauphine had drawn a jewel-hilted dagger. She’d freed it from its scabbard and laid it carefully with the other offerings on her makeshift altar to Lady Ezili Dantò. After that, nothing Faye said could induce Dauphine to speak. The woman had swayed and moaned and clicked her tongue in a “keh-keh-keh-keh” sound, but she couldn’t be induced to say anything more intelligible than Nina’s few words. Maybe she really
had
lost her ability to speak as she surrendered to the avenging power of the mute but fearsome Lady Ezili Dantò.
Faye had retreated to her apartment, frustrated by Dauphine’s inability to respond to a simple good-night. She’d been looking forward to a quiet evening with Joe, but Dauphine’s flickering candles had invaded her windows and the woman’s wordless songs could not be quieted. Sometime after three, Faye’s eyes had finally slid shut but, so far as she knew, the Lady Ezili Dantò had danced with her faithful mambo all night long.
Excerpt from
The Floodgates of Hell, The Reminiscences of Colonel James McGonohan
1876
After Monsieur Deschanel was killed by the failure of his floodgates, his widow and Monsieur Beaulieu lived together for a number of years. I suppose they were happy, though the gossip that grew into legend recounts that they were never blessed with children. They enjoyed her dead husband’s wealth, but even that great pile of money began to fail in the face of their extravagance. There are always ways for people to spend more money than they have.
For a time, they staved off creditors by selling shares of the proceeds flowing from the brilliant inventions that Monsieur Beaulieu concocted in his dead employer’s workshop. He gained a reputation for genius among a citizenry that had forgotten how they derided Monsieur Deschanel for the very same kind of labor. That reputation was eventually tarnished when his business schemes crashed, one after another, taking the money of his friends and neighbors with them.
It eventually became obvious that Monsieur Beaulieu needed to keep a closer eye on the plantation, since it was his only venture still generating the money that they needed for their happiness. This meant that his wife was once again married to a man whose business kept him away from the social whirl that she loved. I wonder whether this turn of events shows that God was playing His own jokes on her.
She accompanied this husband on his trips to the hinterlands, perhaps because she didn’t trust him. Or perhaps he demanded that she come, because he didn’t trust her. In either case, I wonder again whether God enjoyed toying with a murderer and his woman.
Soon enough, mounting debts forced them to sell the townhouse and live on the plantation, so they were cut off from society year-round. It is at this point, when circumstances force them to be alone with each other, that a man and woman learn whether they were meant to be married.
I do not know how long they lived there, nor whether they were happy. But the night came when a crevasse opened in the levee that Monsieur Deschanel had so assiduously attended while he lived, right in front of the house where the guilty couple lay sleeping. The Mississippi roared through, rapidly opening the narrow gap into a cleft that rendered the levee useless. The rushing waters shoved the house right off its foundations.
Their slaves were able to escape, rowing in small boats to safety, but Monsieur Beaulieu and Monsieur Deschanel’s widow were trapped in the house. Their bodies were found in the attic, trapped beneath the impressive but impenetrable slate roof that they’d had installed before they ran short on funds.
If they had only left the original cypress-shingled roof in place, they could have hacked through it in time, but slate roofs were oh-so-fashionable in that day, because they were oh-so-expensive. I see this deadly roof as one of the proofs that my theory is correct: they were guilty of murder, both of them. The roof was another of God’s jests, if you will.
How did I reach this conclusion? By faith? No. An engineer may have the faith of an Old Testament prophet, but he always draws his conclusions from pure logic. Allow me to explain.
Consider this. A great engineer—a man capable of creating the inventions that flowed out of Monsieur Beaulieu’s workshop—would not have built a house that could not be escaped if a flood should come. Not on the very bank of the most powerful river on the continent.
I believe that he stole those inventions, one after another, from drawings left behind by his dead benefactor. That is why he was never able to make those inventions profitable. He didn’t completely understand them. Perhaps he simply wasn’t smart enough.
And consider the fact that all the slaves escaped the flood, even those who slept in the house to tend their owners’ nighttime needs. They were almost certainly awakened by the field slaves, whose low-lying cabins would have flooded early. Out of more than a hundred slaves, not a single one had enough feeling for the master and his wife to wake them up and warn them of the danger.
You might say that this is because they hated their owners, because that is what slaves do. But few human beings hate so thoroughly that they will leave defenseless people to die. No, I believe they knew what this man and his wife were—murderers, the both of them— and I believe that they knew that this earth would be a better place without them.
And I believe God knew it when He reached down His finger and carved a hole in that levee.
Saturday
Louie Godtschalk seemed to have glommed onto Joe as a limitless source of material for his book. He did at least have enough social grace to lay offerings on the altar of his benefactor, and they were the kind of offerings that were best-designed to get Joe’s attention: they involved flour, grease, and a towering pile of powdered sugar.
Joe was incapable of resisting
beignets
—also known as “French market doughnuts” to people with so little poetry in their souls that they weren’t willing to even try to pronounce the French word. It wasn’t that hard:
ben-yay.
Louie stood in the doorway and held out the bag of
beignets
with one hand. He clutched a cardboard carrier loaded with cups of coffee with the other. “There should be plenty. I brought enough to feed four, but Dauphine didn’t answer when I knocked.”
Joe stretched out his big hand and plucked three beignets out of the bag. No food went to waste when Joe was around. “Dauphine’s sleeping off a long night of voodoo stuff, I bet,” he said. “And all the rum that goes with it.”
“Probably. There’s burned-out candles everywhere out there.”
Faye grabbed some plates and napkins and they pulled chairs up to her tiny table. “So what’s the topic of today’s research? And how can Joe help you? I’m dead certain that
I’m
not the reason you’re here.”
“Not unless you know something about drainage canals. Or screw pumps.”
“I know quite a lot about pumps. Old Wheezy’s been moving water for months, thanks to me.”
“I’m talking about pumps big enough to empty the bowl this city’s sitting in.”
Faye shook her head. “Can’t help you there.”
“The librarian got me an article that talks about the canals. Says there’s something like ninety miles of ’em.” When Joe started talking about numbers as big as ninety, and distances as long as ninety miles, he talked with his hands. Even Joe’s arms were hardly long enough to communicate his excitement over these glorified drainage ditches. “Ninety miles!”
Godtschalk wasn’t easily impressed. “Ninety miles? I’m not surprised. There are canals just…everywhere. I grew up in a house that backed up to one. It was the same one that ran beside my elementary school. There’s so many canals that you stop noticing them. They—”
“You didn’t let me finish.”
Faye was surprised to hear those words come out of Joe’s mouth. He never interrupted anybody, and he was so soft-spoken and good-humored that he ordinarily just let people drown him out. Somehow, canals and pumps lit his fire enough to make him want to be heard.
“Sorry. Go ahead, Joe.”
“There’s maybe ninety miles of canals that you can
see
. Underground? There’s ninety
more
miles. And some of those canals? They’re big enough to drive a school bus through.”
“Get out! That’s good enough to put in the book.” Louie grabbed his notepad. “You got a reference for that article?”
“Over here somewhere.”
Faye wasn’t sure how she felt about Joe turning into a geek—he might even qualify for bookworm status soon—but she was proud of him. When her cell rang, she was so distracted by watching him fumble through his stack of reading material that she barely looked at her phone as she thumbed it on.
“Faye?” Jodi’s voice had more than its usual edge. “Did I wake you up?”
Faye turned her head so she couldn’t see how cute Joe was when he was excited about canals. “No. I’m up. What’s happening?”
“It’s Nina.” Jodi’s voice had that foreboding tone, the one that goes along with sentiments like,
I’m so sorry for your loss,
or
I know the doctors did all they could.
“What’s wrong with Nina? Is she back in the hospital? I wish she’d been talking better yesterday, but she looked okay—”
“It’s not her health. She’s fine. Well, Charles said she was fine when she went to bed last night.” Jodi let out a long breath. “She’s missing, Faye.”
***
Charles hadn’t shaved, and sweat slicked his pasty skin. He had never been conventionally good-looking, but his easy swagger had called attention away from an oversized nose and puffy cheeks. Take away his confidence, and he was just another homely man pushing forty. This particular homely man lived in a house Faye would have killed for—one of the French Quarter’s “hidden houses” tucked behind the storefronts visible from the cobbled streets—but that didn’t change the fact that he was homely.
“No, I didn’t hear a thing. I guess I was just glad to have Nina here, where I could take care of her, because I went to sleep in front of the TV and I stayed there all night. It was nearly nine before I woke up this morning. I haven’t slept till nine since I was a teenager. I hardly sleep at all, most nights.”
“Insomnia?” Jodi asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you take anything for it last night?”
“I never do. I don’t like the way it makes me feel.”
“That’s not an answer.” Jodi sounded like she had officially come to the last millimeter of her patience. “Yes or no, did you take any medication last night that would have made you sleep?”
“No. I didn’t. Besides, I wouldn’t have done that last night, especially. What if Nina had needed me?”
Jodi wasn’t feeling merciful. “Apparently, she did need you.”
She swept an arm around the room where Nina had been sleeping. Tangled bedclothes hung off a queen-sized bed, dragging on an unfinished cypress floor burnished by centuries of feet. Behind the bed, a pair of casement windows opened outward onto a courtyard hung with flowering vines. Tremendous clay pots held trees that looked like they’d grown in this garden since the French ruled the city. New curtains sewn from old lace framed the window opening. It was a beautiful spot for a kidnapping.
Jodi pointed at a gate on the far side of the courtyard. “Where does that go?”
Charles found a way to look even more miserable. “An alley.”
“Was that window locked?”
“Yeah. At least I think so. This is my guest room, so I’m not in here much.”
“Your girlfriend sleeps in the guest room?”
Jodi fastened an “I-don’t-believe-you” glare on Charles.
“I just thought Nina would be more comfortable resting in here, instead of sleeping with me like she usually does. She has to be in some pain. It hasn’t been that long since she got hurt.”
“Did Nina do or say anything last night that would suggest she might have left here on her own?”
“No.” He shook his head, then repeated himself. “No. She certainly didn’t do anything. She might have said a few things, but they didn’t make any sense.”
“Do you remember what they were?”
The tone was crisp and decidedly cool. Jodi was making no secret of the fact that she felt no sympathy for this man whose sick girlfriend had gone missing under his very nose.
Charles pursed his lips in anger. Beneath the razor stubble and clammy skin, Faye caught a glimpse of the arrogant man who had so captivated Nina.
“Why are you taking this attitude with me? I picked Nina up from the hospital and brought her home so I could care for her. That’s what you do when you love somebody. How could I know someone would snatch her right out of my own home?”
“Maybe she was snatched. Maybe she left on her own. All I’m doing right now is asking questions. Do you remember anything Nina said before she went to bed last night?”
Charles said, “No,” but Faye didn’t believe him.
If Joe were to lose his ability to tell her what he wanted her to know, she would hang on every last thing he said. She would turn every word over in her mind like a stone imprinted with an unfamiliar fossil, feeling for something, anything that would re-open the flow of communication. So Charles was lying when he said he didn’t remember what Nina had said.
Either that, or he was lying when he said he loved her.
***
The crime scene technicians were hard at work, lifting fingerprints and looking for tiny things like hairs and fibers. The rumpled bedclothes in the unmade bed were no evidence of a struggle, and there were no other signs that Nina’s abduction had been violent. They had found nothing but footprints on the courtyard’s bricked floor suggesting that someone in sneakers had come in from the alley, walked to the window, then walked back to the alley with a second person, presumably Nina.
“
Assuming one set of those prints was Nina’s, then she was walking under her own power,” Jodi told Faye and Joe. “We’ve got no proof she was taken against her will. We don’t even have any proof that it wasn’t Charles who drove off with Nina. He could have walked her across that courtyard just as easily as anyone else. The only tricky part—for Charles or anyone—would have been convincing Nina that there was some good reason to crawl out the window.”
“Nina would have done anything Charles asked her to do.” Remembering Nina’s face when Charles reappeared in her life, Faye was certain of this. “She was recovering from a serious conk on the head, so we can’t presume out-of-hand that her actions would make sense to us. But if she was acting logically at all, we should presume that Nina knew the person who took her.”
“She trusted the person,” Joe said. “She felt like she’d be safe with whoever it was.”
“Then where is she?” Jodi demanded. “If she’s so damn safe, why doesn’t anybody know where she is?”
***
A movie stub. And another one, identical in every way. They lay on the interrogation table in front of Jodi, mocking her.
She had sent Faye and Joe home, because she’d hired them to help her navigate the world of archaeology—the science, the people, the arcane bits of history—not the world of criminals willing to kidnap a badly injured woman from her bed. This was police work, and she’d let them follow their curiosity too far already.
She should have taken Faye and Joe off the case after someone tried to shoot them, but she’d dragged her feet. They’d both been incredibly useful to Shelly’s murder investigation. Besides, she just liked having them around.
Jodi knew it would break her heart if her new friend Faye were stolen from her bed. Also, she knew that Joe would kill her if she let that happen. So she needed to deal with Nina’s disappearance on her own, with old-fashioned police work and without the unorthodox assistance of an archaeologist or two.
Matt and Leila had sat calmly across the table from her, with the ticket stubs lying in the center of that table, denying that they’d done anything the night before that could remotely interest the police. Since it was Friday night, they’d gone to the movies. They always went to the movies on Friday night.
Jodi reflected that neither Matt nor Leila was old enough to even give middle age a good long look. They were way too young to be so set in their ways.
The young couple had said that they’d seen no one they knew, but they’d produced these two ticket stubs as if the two scraps of pasteboard were incontrovertible proof that they’d been where they said they’d been. As if it were impossible to go to the movie, buy a couple of tickets, tear them in half, then walk away.
Their alibi was absolutely useless. Jodi would be checking into surveillance tapes, looking for proof of the young couple’s whereabouts, but it was a pointless exercise. Even if they’d attended the midnight showing of the latest cinematic celebration of guns and car chases—and these two ticket stubs said they had—there was still no accounting for their activities between two a.m. and sunrise. That was the likeliest time period for Nina’s disappearance, and precious few people could ever offer an alibi for that time of night.
Why was she putting so much effort into tracking down two people who didn’t bear much resemblance to any of the murderers and kidnappers Jodi had ever sent to jail? Nor any of the ones she wished she could have sent to jail. They were young, attractive, educated, polite. She had no doubt that they paid their bills and that they were good to their respective mothers. In fact, their excuse for going to such a late flick—if two people their age even needed an excuse for staying out late—was that they’d gone to an anniversary dinner for Leila’s grandparents earlier in the evening.
It was a fair measure of Jodi’s desperation that these two people were even viable suspects. Leila was on her radar screen because she looked nervous and because her mother’s (very common) maiden name had been written on a scrap of paper found in the pocket of a corpse. Also, because she worked for the missing woman’s slimy boyfriend.
Matt? She’d hauled that poor man in for questioning because he was dating a woman whose mother’s maiden name was found on a scrap of paper in the pocket of a corpse. And so had his own name. She was also questioning him because the missing woman had once said that the dead woman called her cousin Matt “weird.” This did not strike her as brilliant, groundbreaking police work.
Where was Nina?
Jodi somehow doubted that Nina was enjoying a slumber party with an old friend. Something had prompted somebody to try to crush Nina’s skull, before shoving her into a river that had swallowed more human lives than Jodi cared to count. If someone had wanted Nina dead that bad, just a few days before, Jodi figured that they
still
wanted her dead. She’d been missing for twelve hours, so the odds were good that her kidnapper had already found a way to make that happen.
But
why
did somebody want Nina dead? She was sweet, hardworking, unassuming. How could anyone want to hurt a woman like that?