Floodgates

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Why was Shelly carrying before-and-after photos of Lakeview?” Joe wanted to know. “You found her in the Lower Nine.”

  “But you said her home address was in Lakeview. Didn’t you?” Faye pointed out.

  Jodi nodded. “These photos may be an indication that she intended to go to Lakeview. They might show us that a mugger or rapist or killer brought her to the Lower Nine against her will. Or they might just mean that she was carrying a depressing souvenir showing what had happened to her neighborhood.”

  “Of course, she came to the Lower Nine against her will,” Faye said, surprised by her certainty when she really had no facts to go on.

  Jodi looked surprised, too. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Did she have family in Lakeview?”

  A shadow fell on Jodi’s face. “Yes. Her parents. They both drowned.”

  “Then by the time Shelly laid her hands on this photo, it had been days since the storm and she hadn’t seen her parents. She was found deep in the middle of a huge area of destruction. A woman doesn’t set out to enter a disaster zone alone for just any old reason. I think Shelly was out there violating the curfew because she was looking for her mom and dad. I think she was going home.” Faye still felt certain of her utterly unprovable premise. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  Faye studied the photo, wishing for her magnifier. She’d spent a lot of time poring over aerial photography, because it was incredibly useful in archaeology. Old structures, even entire ancient cities, that were invisible at ground level could be detected with the naked eye on an aerial photograph. Satellite photography gave the same information at a scale that had revealed entire trade networks around some of those vanished cities, in the form of long-gone roads.

  God doesn’t draw in straight lines, but people do. Human scars on the land take a very long time to heal.

  Did this photo show something else? Would something hidden in this scene help Jodi find out what happened to Shelly? She hoped so. The scars Shelly’s death had left on the hearts of her friends and family would also be slow to heal.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The afternoon hadn’t been pretty. Jodi had wanted to talk to Faye’s workers. At the very least, she’d wanted to find out how well either of them might have known Shelly. If, while they were chatting, one of them mentioned something that might shed some light on her death, so much the better. As it turned out, Jodi got lucky on both counts, but Faye had been left to pick up the emotional pieces.

  Dauphine had been a woman on a mission when she returned from her interview with Jodi, packing up her threadbare knapsack and talking all the while. “That poor child. She worked beside me for weeks, right here at this battlefield. Such a sweet spirit she had, and she’s been wandering all this time. Not even a candle burned for her dear soul. Well, I’ll burn one every night for a year. If God wills it, I’ll burn ’em.”

  Dauphine was out of sight before Faye even realized that the woman hadn’t asked permission to leave work early. Or maybe Dauphine wasn’t leaving work, from her point of view. Maybe she was just shifting gears from field technician to voodoo mambo a few hours earlier than usual.

  Nina’s interview with Jodi left the archaeologist ashen-faced. In fact, Jodi had walked her back to the excavation and handed her over to Faye personally, because she’d felt Nina was too upset to be alone.

  Faye’s experience in dealing with employee crises was limited. She had no doubt that she was born to be a scientist, not a manager, but this was clearly no time to be cold and business-like. She’d spent the past months becoming friends with Nina, which probably broke every rule in the boss’ handbook, but when your friend has suffered a painful loss, you take her someplace private and listen to her.

  “Come on, Nina. Let’s go for a walk.”

  The park’s loop road was such a good place to take a walk that the locals seemed to use the place for a private track. Its broad sweeping curve was dotted with joggers every day, in the cool of the mornings and evenings. Faye figured their tax money kept the park service going, so it was nice for them to get that little bonus. Walking its mile-and-a-half length should give Nina enough time to pull herself together.

  Nina had looked at her feet as she walked, hiding eyes that were pink and watery with grief. “Shelly was a sophomore when I was a senior. We were roommates that year in one of those ‘dorms-for-geeks.’ You know…the ones where they have quiet hours so that people who want to study can hear themselves think? But Shelly wasn’t a geek. She was plenty smart, sure, but she was fun, too, the way Detective Bienvenu is fun.”

  Nina tried to smile, but couldn’t pull it off. “We’d be studying together and Shelly would lift her head up from her book and tell me one of her silly stories. Those stories made my study time a lot more pleasant. I always wished I could think of something funny to say back, but I never could. I don’t know why I thought I needed to do that. Maybe to balance things out so that I wasn’t always on the receiving end of her friendship. But I’m just not fun that way.”

  Nina waved a hand at Faye, so she wouldn’t feel compelled to argue over whether or not Nina was fun.

  “Shelly introduced me to her friends,” she continued, “and they liked me because she liked me. I dated one of them for a couple of years, in fact. Charles. You met him yesterday.”

  Faye nodded and tried to think of something to say other than, “Nice guy.” She couldn’t. It was hard to know what to say to someone who was hurting so much.

  “I’ve spent plenty of time in school learning about archaeology, but that year with Shelly was an education in getting along with people. I watched her, and I learned how to make conversation just for the pleasure of talking to someone. I learned that you don’t have to be all that gorgeous or elegant for people to like you. Shelly wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t ugly. She was just a plain-faced girl who was beautiful when she smiled.”

  “Did you two keep in touch after you graduated?”

  “Yeah. Well, at first, Shelly was the one who did all the keeping in touch. It was that social skills thing again. I missed her, but I was busy with work and my new apartment and other stuff that I thought was important, and I always let way too much time go by before I called her. Shelly could’ve been mad about it, and that would have been the end of our friendship. But she kept calling until I got it into my thick head that friendship is important stuff, too. It took some doing but, after that, we managed to grab lunch or a drink every month or so. Just to catch up.”

  Faye felt that way about her friendship with Magda. They were both chasing their own tails all the time, trying to squeeze their bottomless-pit jobs and their adorable but time-consuming men into days that only came in twenty-four-hour sizes. Adding friendship to that mix sometimes seemed like an impossible feat, but Faye knew that friends were necessary for happiness. Sanity, even.

  She and Magda saw each other at work regularly, but as for having lunch or a drink…that happened about as often as Nina’s visits with Shelly. Once a month, if they were lucky.

  “Since…since the storm,” Nina went on, “I’ve missed her so much. When they don’t find a body, you always hope…or you wonder. I don’t know what you call that sense of waiting. But the sense of death…the sense of something ending…I just learned today that you don’t really get that until you know, without a doubt, that a person’s really gone.”

  “You didn’t hear from her after Katrina hit? After the storm?” Faye asked, then she stopped herself. This would have been an inane question if she hadn’t just learned from Nina that Shelly survived the storm for a matter of days. Nina didn’t seem to find it inane at all.

  “No. The cell towers were down. The phone lines were out. The water and the curfew made it impossible to get around the city. It was weeks before I knew for sure where all the people I cared about had gone, and they were flung all over the damn country. So it was a long time before I gave up hope that Shelly would show up one day and tell me that she’d—oh, I don’t know—b
een staying with an aunt in Baton Rouge. Or working in Shreveport. Anything but this. She’s been lying dead all this time, and not so very far from here.”

  Faye found the image supremely unsettling, and she didn’t even know the dead woman. She changed the subject. “Was Shelly still in graduate school?”

  “No. She ran out of money and didn’t want to take out any more loans. It’s not easy to make a living in archaeology without a Ph.D.—”

  “I’m not even sure you can make a living with a Ph.D.”

  Nina flashed her first real smile since she’d heard the news about Shelly. “I’m not listening to you. I’m entertaining fantasies of eventually driving a car that’s not old enough to start first grade.”

  “Mine’s old enough to drive. No. It’s worse than that. My car’s old enough to drink.”

  Faye looked out over the battlefield, which was a bad idea. This was not an easy place to quash eerie thoughts of vivacious Shelly lying dead until she was nothing but bones. The road under her feet circled a killing ground where 2,000 British soldiers had once lain dead or wounded. Somewhere near here was the mass grave where they’d been dumped. How long would it have taken to dig 2,000 graves? How much land would have been consumed? And what in hell had been so important that it was worth the loss of so many lives?

  “What kind of work did Shelly do after she left school?”

  “She got a job at an engineering firm—the one where Charles works, actually. He’s already made manager there, over the entire engineering department. That was just three years ago, and they’re already talking about promoting him again.”

  Faye thought she detected more than a trace of pride on Nina’s face. Charles didn’t look much older than Nina—mid- to late-thirties, maybe—so he was rather young for such a high-level job, but Faye had gotten the impression he was capable of serious ambition.

  “Anyway, after Shelly started working with Charles, she introduced us. The firm doesn’t keep many archaeologists on staff, but they have a few to help with environmental impact statements and other projects that require an assessment of the cultural environment. She was even thinking about going back to school in civil engineering.”

  “Lord knows it would have paid better.”

  “No kidding. It would have only taken a couple of years, and the company would have paid for it. Shelly said that the two disciplines overlapped a lot. Civil engineers and archaeologists both need to know chemistry and physics and soil science. Shelly had learned a lot about aerial photography as an archaeologist, and she was a wizard at using GIS to put mapping information in order. All that work was a perfect fit with her engineering job. I’ll never get to talk to her about it now, but I know it meant a lot to her to use those skills to save lives after Katrina.”

  Faye had been still staring at the quiet battlefield, but Nina’s words made her whip her head around toward her distraught assistant. “After Katrina? You knew for sure that she was alive after the storm before Jodi told you? And you know where she was and what she was doing?”

  “For a few days, yes. She was doing relief work at Zephyr Field. That’s what I heard. I just told Detective Bienvenu about it. She said there wasn’t anything in the missing persons file about any witnesses seeing Shelly alive during the first days after the storm. That may be. But I know some folks who saw her. They say she worked like a dog during those first days, helping save hundreds of people.”

  “How? Was she in a boat? Or one of the helicopters?”

  “Nope. She was telling the boats and helicopters where to find people, so they could scoop ’em up before they drowned. She knew how to take the GPS information from an emergency cell phone call to figure out where the person was calling from. Then she could use a satellite image to show rescuers just where to go, so they could pluck the caller off a roof or out of the water. Those satellite photos were incredibly important. Street signs aren’t much good when they’re underwater. Or gone. Shelly worked day and night to get that information out to the rescuers.”

  Faye remembered how deep the water got in Chalmette. So much water had rushed through there, and it had done it so fast. She doubted a single street sign had been left standing.

  Talking about Shelly seemed to be helping Nina’s feelings. “She saved a lot of people. That’s what makes the whole thing so damned sad. Her parents…their names were Dan and Aimee and they were such good-hearted people…” Nina swallowed hard. “Her parents drowned in their own attic, because nobody knew for sure where they were. Don’t you know what Shelly asked every rescuer she saw? Everyone she talked to?”

  Of course, Faye knew what Shelly had wanted so desperately to know.

  Did you see my parents out there? Dan and Aimee Broussard? Did any of you see my parents?

  “After the first days, even the hearsay petered out. Charles saw Shelly early on, but he lost track of her. The whole city was hell on earth, and I don’t imagine it was any different for the rescuers. Later, when Shelly was listed as missing, I talked to everybody I knew who might have seen her there. Everybody.”

  Nina lifted her head and shoved her glasses back up her nose. Faye had seen Nina do archaeological research. She was a flippin’ bulldog. If Nina were looking for a missing friend, Faye sure wouldn’t want to get in her way. If Faye were ever missing, herself, she hoped Nina would be on her trail.

  “I talked to some people who did rescue work with her—mostly engineers she knew from the office. Charles was one of them. They’d gathered someplace in Metairie that didn’t flood, until they heard that rescuers were working at Zephyr Field, needing help they knew how to give. Once they heard that, they hustled their butts out there and got down to business right fast. You don’t mess with an engineer who’s on a mission. One of them had a company satellite phone. You know it was worth more than a pound of gold to rescuers working that week.”

  “What happened to Shelly after that?”

  “I couldn’t ever find anybody who knew. To hear people talk, she was there for days, then she just…wasn’t. If I’d had to guess, I would have said that she went looking for her parents, but they lived in Lakeview. So why in heck has her body been lying in the Lower Ninth Ward all the time?”

  Faye couldn’t begin to answer her.

  “Did Jodi show you the things found in Shelly’s pocket? Photographs and a newspaper clipping and some lists of names?”

  Nina nodded her head. “Detective Bienvenu wants me to tell her if I remember anything that’ll tell her what it all meant, but I’ve got nothing.”

  Faye could tell that Nina was nearly talked out. As they rounded the final curve of the park’s loop road, the temporary visitor’s center came into view. Matt was walking out the door toward the levee, preparing to give yet another guided tour to yet another boatload of tourists.

  Faye decided that Nina might be willing to answer one more nosy question. She nodded in Matt’s direction. “Did you know that Matt and Shelly were cousins?”

  “I did.”

  Nina’s short answer and terse tone caught Faye’s attention.

  “Don’t you like Matt?” The young man was so soft-spoken and inoffensive that Faye couldn’t imagine why Nina’s voice was so tight when she spoke of him.

  “I don’t know Matt well. He spent a good bit of time with Shelly, especially near the end, because he was dating someone she worked with. So was I, actually, but Charles didn’t like to hang out with co-workers in his spare time, so I didn’t know their crowd. Shelly, on the other hand, would hang out with anybody. When Matt started coming around her office, she made sure that he was part of her group of friends. She said it was nice to spend time with family, especially a cousin you knew when you were both kids.”

  Nina’s tone was too careful. Why didn’t she want to say whether Shelly liked Matt or not? Was she just being polite?

  Good manners trumped just about anything in this part of the world. Faye knew people who would like an ax-murderer if he was polite. She decided she wanted to
see what it would take to get Nina to say something about Matt as a person.

  “So Shelly liked him.”

  “Shelly liked everybody.”

  Interesting. Nina had dodged the question a second time. Faye decided to let a little silence happen. Sometimes, a person would say whatever popped into her mind to make the silence go away. Nina’s stiff body language and guarded voice told Faye that the woman had something to say. Soon enough, she said it.

  “Shelly liked everybody,” Nina repeated. “Matt was family, so I guess she loved him. But she did say he was weird.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Faye had managed to salvage the rest of the workday by propping Nina up and telling her not to think, just to screen soil. Faye had always found repetitive, slow work quieted her mind. She considered it a form of meditation. This was a good thing, because a lot of archaeological work could be described in just that way. Repetitive and slow.

  Much of Faye’s life had been spent cleaning dirty little pieces of junk. No, make that dirty little pieces of fragile junk. Even in the field, where it was sometimes necessary to move dirt by the cubic yard, encountering an important find changed everything. When her excavating work called for precision, she was sometimes reduced to moving dirt with a sable-haired paintbrush, to avoid destroying something irreplaceable. Archaeologists who were capable of turning off a nattering brain and letting the work take its own pace were happy archaeologists.

  Nina already looked less sad and stricken, as she ran soil through a screen designed to catch tiny artifacts that might otherwise be overlooked. Nina had shown a lot of talent for doing detailed work with her hands. Screening soil often made impatient Faye want to scream, but Nina seemed to be content enough, settling in for some quiet time with a pile of soil.