by G A Chase
“That should matter to me, right—who killed me and why? I’m finding it hard to keep a handle on the facts regarding my life.”
Myles still found the realm of consciousness released from life confusing though he’d been dabbling with it all his life. “I suspect dying is like being born. An infant doesn’t give a lot of thought to the dramas of being in the womb. Do you have any connection to your body?”
She pulled the sides of her blouse together to hide the gashes. “You mean, when and where did I leave life’s stage? I don’t have a sense of time, but I’ve been wandering long enough to know that feeling of urgency is gone. The panic I felt at the end wasn’t my final living emotion. There was a sense of being taken care of, like in a hospital. What’s going to happen to me?”
Her explanation relieved his worry about the police. If she’d died in a hospital, they wouldn’t be going bar to bar, looking for clues. However, the voodoo loas had misplaced a soul, and that was never good for the living or the dead, and especially not for Myles.
“I’ve only visited the deep waters for short periods of time. When I’m there, I find it hard to leave. You’ll be a part of every other human soul, and they’ll be a part of you. Eventually, you’ll be like a cup of water floating in the ocean without the cup.”
She hugged her stomach tighter. “What if I haven’t been very good to people?”
In all of his mental journeys, he’d never experienced anything resembling judgement, only acceptance. “You have every bit as much right to join with others as anyone else. In life, we call the state of existence being loved, but once you pass through Guinee, it’s the only reality that remains.”
She looked up at his eyes. “But there is a place where I’ll be judged?”
“You have to pass through the seven gates on your own. The loas who stand guard will ask you questions about what you’ve learned in life. Don’t think of it so much as an interrogation as them trying to distill answers we all seek.”
“How do you know so much about what happens after death?”
The memories of being possessed by the baron Malveaux—who thought himself to be Baron Samedi, loa of the seventh gate of Guinee—continued to haunt Myles’s dreams. “I was trapped in the afterlife for a time. My friends needed to move heaven and earth to free me.”
She cowered away from the bar. “You spent time in hell?”
“Sorry, poor choice of phrases. It wasn’t the place that was the problem. The loas of the dead were actually very nice to me. Guinee is more like purgatory. It’s a chance to say goodbye to your life before letting go of everything that you were. The deep waters—which is where you go after Guinee—is neither heaven nor hell. Remove everything you know about your life, and exist as pure consciousness, and you’ll find you’re connected to every other being. It’s the ultimate freedom.”
She looked past him to the wall of bottles. “I’m going to miss drinking. Even though it might be a waste, could you pour me a shot of rum? I’d just like that one last memory of the booze flowing out of the bottle.”
Charlie had already done the nightly inventory sheet before leaving, but one shot wouldn’t be missed. As Myles poured the amber liquid into the miniature glass, he lifted the bottle to give the alcohol room to breathe. The heady smell was a nice change from the cleaning solvents.
“Drink it for me. Obviously, I can’t pay you for it, but consider it my offering for your assistance.”
He downed the shot, and its warmth spread to all parts of his body like the feeling of being appreciated. “The first gate isn’t far. I can walk you there if you’d like. Wandering the streets of the Quarter alone at night is never a good idea, even for the dead.”
“You’re very kind. Maybe if my boyfriend had been more like you, I wouldn’t be in this mess.”
The bar was sufficiently clean for a Wednesday night. Myles made one last check to make sure no other beings were passed out in the bathrooms. Before leaving the bar, he sneaked a small bottle of rum into his back pocket.
They walked in silence for the first couple of blocks. Escorting a woman, even a dead one, in such a damaged state made him keep an eye on her—not that he could have done anything. Passing from the brightly lit area of Bourbon Street to the shadows of the Quarter put him on his guard.
She didn’t seem to notice his discomfort. “Are there others like you who can see the dead?”
Looking as though he was talking to himself had the benefit of discouraging any potential thug, especially if the explanation was that he was talking to a dead woman and escorting her to a cemetery.
“If there are,” he said, “they haven’t confided their ability to me.”
Her big blue eyes must have been quite captivating in life. With blood dripping into them, however, he found it hard to focus on her for long.
“And have you told anyone about your special abilities?” she asked. “People don’t often give trust without first being trusted.”
“There are a handful of people who know about my special brand of insanity.”
She tried to kick him, but her foot just passed through his leg. “I’ll bet your self-deprecation doesn’t get you many girls. We like guys with confidence even if—especially if—their stories sound unbelievable at first.”
“I’ve got a girlfriend who knows the truth. That’s enough for me.”
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 was creepy enough during the day, but the city-block-sized walled-in compound wasn’t what was giving him the shakes. The neighboring housing project, which had replaced the elegant whorehouses of the Storyville era one hundred years before, made him wonder if his chivalry had been such a good idea. He longed for the bygone era. Being accosted by prostitutes selling their services had to beat being held up at knifepoint any night.
Myles approached the wrought-iron gates. As a prisoner of Baron Malveaux, he’d spent time on the other side, but the land of the dead wasn’t meant for the living. He pulled out the bottle of rum and poured an offering to the loa of the dead.
Baron La Croix strolled out from between the tombs. “It’s good to see you again, my friend.”
Myles just wanted to drop the woman off and get back to his apartment. “I seem to have found one of your lost souls.”
* * *
Kendell sat on the floor of her bedroom with Cecile—her whitewood acoustic guitar—in her lap. The problem wasn’t the instrument but the pick she was twirling between her fingers like a half-dollar coin.
“I can do this without destroying another set of strings,” she said.
Cheesecake, her somewhat overweight Lhasa apso, looked unconvinced as she lay on the bed, watching from her elevated position. Kendell typically received a constant low-pitched growl from her pup when using the dark powers for her music, but the guitar pick wasn’t cursed. As a gift from Papa Ghede and the other loas of the dead, the token of appreciation wasn’t meant to do any harm, not that the difference mattered to the pup. Anything magical made the old dog growl in disapproval.
“I promised to listen to you, and I am,” Kendell said. “You were right about my work with Madam de Galpion causing Myles’s problems, but you can’t watch over me every minute. Isn’t it better if I learn the limits of what I can do here with you than up on stage?”
The dog put her head on her paws as if to say, We’ll see.
The late-afternoon light from the floor-to-ceiling window, which could open to a balcony over Decatur Street, reflected off the solid-gold pick. Learning music was never a challenge for Kendell, and trying to imitate a guitar legend’s technique only proved useful to her in an academic sense. She was tired of paying homage to the greats. As Olympia Stain, lead guitarist for Polly Urethane and the Strippers, she would always be playing blues standards in the band’s punk-rock style, but as Kendell Summer, she needed to break out of the mold she’d created.
The gold guitar pick was like a puzzle box with the answer inside. All she had to do was figure out how to unlock its powers.
She looked back into Cheesecake’s trusting eyes. “Every butterfly has to break out of her cocoon someday.”
She leaned over the guitar and did her best to keep her mind from butting in. When it came to playing with raw emotion, she felt a kinship with only one musician, and playing his music might work as a transition from the known to the unknown.
“Computer, play ‘Kind Hearted Woman Blues’ by Robert Johnson.”
Her fingers took up the challenge of playing both lead and rhythm guitar at the same time, but she left the singing to the digitized copy of the scratchy, worn, eighty-year-old recording emanating from her laptop.
Tears filled her eyes as the heart-wrenching emotions captured by the recording rolled over her. The magic wasn’t in the chords or the words or even the technique. Like Myles’s ability to detect strong emotions that had been left behind in objects, the voice of the bluesman carried a pain that could be felt but not understood. She’d done her best to copy his playing, but even if she managed an exact rendition, it would only be like a computerized copy of the Mona Lisa. The hand of the master was missing.
Cheesecake continued to stare at her, but at least the pup wasn’t growling, as she had when Kendell had worked with the baron Malveaux’s cursed items.
“This isn’t going to be so easy, girl. I can see the mountain of learning ahead of me. This golden pick isn’t a magic wand to get what I want but a means of seeing how far I have to go.”
Kendell wondered if that was the difference between a gift from the devil versus one from a god. The devil would give a person what they wanted while a god would simply point the way.
“What was it Myles said? Success is earned, not given? I hate it when he’s right. Don’t tell him I admitted it.”
Cheesecake would always keep her secrets.
As if mentioning his name had been enough to summon her boyfriend, Kendell heard the key in the lock. Quickly, she stashed the golden pick in her guitar case and got to her feet. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but meddling with voodoo still made her feel guilty. Time to remedy that.
He looked tired and not simply in the way he often did after working too many long shifts without a day off. Their kiss was sweet but brief.
“I didn’t know you were coming over,” she said.
“I had a weird experience after work last night. At first, I wasn’t going to tell you, but the more I thought about it, the worse I felt.”
“I know what you mean.” She was tempted to hide her attraction to voodoo from him. Her dabbling with the dark arts in the past had contributed to his possession by the baron, but like discovering music, it was a natural skill she couldn’t ignore.
He sat next to Cheesecake on the bed and started scratching her ear—not the first time the pup had proven an emotional mediator. “My trips into human consciousness have opened a door. It’s not like the one the baron passed through. No one’s escaping from the other side, but apparently, the recently departed see me as some kind of guide to Guinee.”
Kendell used the excuse of putting her guitar back into its case to grab the magical pick and hide it in her hand. Sitting on the other side of Cheesecake, she kept the golden triangle in her lap. “So we can expect ghosts to just walk in on us day or night? What do the loas expect? That you’ll just take up the individual mysteries of how these people died?”
“I only briefly saw Baron La Croix. So far, I don’t know what they want from me. It was just the one woman, but I thought you ought to know. There’s something else. When I first met Baron Malveaux, he insinuated that I was a loa of the dead. I didn’t believe him, but with this latest development, I’m thinking I need some answers.”
She hadn’t been on a lot of spiritual trips with Myles, but she knew the dangers. “I nearly lost you to the other side, and not just because of the baron. If I hadn’t been there to pull you out of Guinee, would you have returned on your own?”
He stared into her eyes, revealing the conflict inside him. “I don’t think I would have. It’s not that I don’t love this life, but hanging out with the loas was pretty enlightening, and continuing on to the deep waters has been a temptation I’ve had to resist all my life.”
She stopped petting Cheesecake and took his hand. “You’re not ready to go back. That bastard took more than just your strength.” She took the guitar pick off her lap. “And I understand your temptation. This was a gift. I’m not sure how to use it, but it’s not just some keepsake I can leave on my dresser.”
He lifted her hand and kissed it. “I guess the afterlife isn’t done with either of us.”
* * *
Myles had never quite gotten used to sleeping in Kendell’s bed. Between the seemingly endless number of pillows, the billowy comforter—which she insisted went with the décor, no matter the temperature—and Cheesecake, who always managed to take up half the bed, he felt like a dirty sock that had gotten lost in the sheets.
With the lights from the late-night music clubs on Decatur Street below her balcony, the room was never really dark. He eased out of the covers, trying not to wake the dog. She’d grown used to his presence in her mistress’s bed, but that didn’t stop her from following Myles around the apartment. After all Kendell had been through, he appreciated Cheesecake’s constant vigil—just not when he desired a little solitude.
He pulled open the double-hung window that provided access to the outdoor veranda. Flowerpots overflowing with night jasmine hung from the cast-iron latticework and filled the air with a fragrance reminiscent of the Old South. He eased down into the chaise lounge to enjoy the music floating up from the jazz club a block away. The outdoor oasis was his favorite part of her apartment, particularly at night.
He jerked up in his chair at hearing her step onto the balcony. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
She pulled her blanket up around her shoulders. “I always know when you get out of bed. Most of the time, I pretend to stay asleep so you can have your personal time, but I thought tonight you could use some company.” The blanket covered the matching chair as she sat next to him.
“You must be the only person who gets cold on a summer night in New Orleans.”
She hugged the blanket close. “Only after a gig with the girls. I’m so energized while I play I think my metabolism goes into overdrive. Then when I stop, my body gets very calm.”
“I noticed. The same thing happens to you after we have sex.”
She rolled onto her side to face him. “We need to talk about that.”
He’d avoided the topic long enough. “I should have known you’d detect the change. Making love to you is still magical. I don’t ever want you to think I’m not into it.”
Her smile never failed to make him feel connected to her. “I know. But you have been more distant. And I know you come out here every night after we make love. What do you do out here?”
He lay back and looked at the stars over the river. “Just a quick check of my psyche.”
“You’re still afraid I might be infecting your spirit with the baron’s soul? What’s left of him is secure in Delphine’s voodoo totem. I’d sacrifice my life before I saw you possessed by an evil spirit again.”
Having Madam de Galpion in charge of the baron’s soul hardly eased Myles’s fears. He trusted her only slightly more than the man who’d been the impetus of the curse.
“I don’t blame you,” he said, “and I don’t think you’re filling me with some dark energy again. It’s not that. Our souls meld together during sex. Two people becoming one always sounded like wedding-vow bullshit to me. Not any longer. It’s not the sex, though. We’d already joined our spirits during our shared psychometric experiences. Sometimes, I just need to remind myself that I’m still a fully-functioning individual.”
She reached across and held his hand. “I understand. We each still need our space. Sex with you isn’t like anything I’ve ever experienced before. I know that’s because we took that journey with our souls. I always thought being
in a romantic relationship was as close as two people could be, but our partnership in investigating the curse, figuring out your abilities, and knowing that we trust each other with more than our lives makes my connection to you unbreakable. Ours is a paranormal connection.”
“In this strange world, you’re the only person I truly trust.”
46
Lincoln Laroque surveyed the piles of personnel folders covering his glass-and-metal desk as if the clear top were thin ice. Many of the workers at Sullivan, Cooper, and Ward Capital would already be polishing up their resumes if they knew what was good for them. Any halfway decent investment analyst would have seen the writing on the wall.
He didn’t feel bad for any of the people he was about to fire. Hostile takeovers involved casualties, but unlike war, the victor got to choose who suffered. He pulled the first folder off the chief executives’ pile and opened it on his lap. He toyed menacingly with a red Sharpie. His people had left pages of notes in the dossier, regarding the accomplishments, strengths, and weaknesses of the vanquished titan of business. From the cover sheet, a picture of a smug middle-aged businessman smiled at him as if Lincoln were the one being judged.
Lincoln slashed a red X across the entire folder and tossed it on the floor. Winning should be more fun.
He would have chalked up his feelings to a midlife crisis had they not plagued him all his adult life. Sitting alone in his penthouse office with its views of the Central Business District out one window and of the French Quarter out the other, he tried to figure out the source of his latest discontent.
Across Canal Street from his modern high-rise stood the marble Greek Revival police station like a chess king’s guardian knight. Uncle Gerald ran the department like his own fiefdom, not only within the family but also within the city. No elected politician had the balls to cross him. New Orleans had never been known to have the best handle on crime, and Chief of Police Gerald Laroque used that to his advantage. He manipulated the criminal element like an expert gamesman, pitting them against his foes. Those who screamed the loudest for improved police protection were often those who had run afoul of the secretive chief.
