She reached out and touched him on the forearm.
Her touch seemed to revive him. Faye wished it were so easy for the paramedics. Another sidewise glance told her that the paramedics hadn’t given up on Nina yet.
“Did she jump? Did you see her go over?” She was asking too many questions, but the adrenaline that was still shaking her arms and legs wouldn’t let her stop. “Is that why you went out to the river? Did you see her cross the levee and get worried?”
“No. I was poking around at the end of the canal, trying to see where it went into the river back when Andrew Jackson was around, and I heard something on the other side of the levee.”
The questions kept coming. They were completely out of Faye’s control.
“Did she call out for help? Do you think she tripped and went in?”
“I don’t know. I just heard a splash that didn’t sound right.”
…a splash that didn’t sound right. If Nina survived, it would be because Joe paid attention. If he could see it, hear it, feel it, touch it, or taste it, he paid attention to it.
A drop of water trickled from his hair onto his forehead. He left it there. “She fell off the dock, I know that. But I don’t know whether she jumped or slipped.”
“Or whether she got pushed.”
Faye didn’t like the way those words tasted in her mouth.
“I don’t like to think that way,” Joe said.
“I don’t either. But think…how much time passed between when you heard the splash and when you got over the levee?”
“Not a lot. But it wouldn’t take long for someone to run up the dock and hide in the trees on the far side of the levee down there.”
“Nope. We’re just talking about a few seconds, tops.” Faye tried to picture someone running, imagining how long it would take. The dock wasn’t that long.
“Besides,” Joe said, brushing wet hair out of his face, “I didn’t look downriver toward the dock right away. I checked out the area close to the canal first, then I looked down toward the dock and saw Nina in the water. It didn’t take long—a few seconds, like you say—but there could have been somebody down there that I missed. Still, I don’t like to think that way. I’d rather believe it was an accident.”
“Me, too, but I can’t help wondering what happened. I’ve never seen Nina out on that dock. Did she just go out there for a look at the river, then fall in? That doesn’t usually happen to able-bodied adults who aren’t drunk. Did someone walk out there with her, then give her a push? Was she suicidal? I’d say she was depressed until this week, but since Charles came back she’s been…well, I guess giddy’s the word.” Faye sneaked another look at the paramedics as they tried to revive Nina. “Yeah, giddy. I’d like to presume this was an accident, but facts are facts and I can’t ignore them.”
Jodi, who had walked up behind them while they spoke, said, “I know. That’s why I hired you.”
***
Intensive care waiting rooms are usually full of people who wish they were at their loved one’s bedside. Unfortunately, the patients being visited are, by definition, too sick to enjoy having visitors. There are limited visiting hours, it is true, but they’re more for the benefit of the patient’s frantic loved ones than for the patient.
Friends and family without the magic title of mother, father, children, or spouse gather in the waiting room and try to be helpful. They tell stories of people who have been similarly ill, but are now happy and whole. They hold hands. They ask, “Can I get you anything to eat?”
Nina’s parents were dead, so a female cousin was playing the role of closest kin. Faye remembered Nina saying that she had slept on her cousin’s couch since Katrina demolished her home. Charles sat beside the cousin, with his head bowed, and Faye liked him better because he seemed to really care about her friend Nina.
Matt had followed the ambulance from the battleground to the hospital. He was sitting with Joe, face taut, with his elbows resting on a small table in the corner of the waiting room. Empty candy wrappers and chip bags were piled in front of them, because young men eat when they’re under stress.
Matt seemed to be keeping a constant distance between him and Charles, which Faye found interesting, since she was sure that Matt knew him pretty well. She remembered that he’d dated someone who worked with Shelly. There was no woman in sight, so he was either no longer dating her, or she didn’t feel close enough to Nina to have rushed to the hospital.
Actually, “no woman in sight” wasn’t quite accurate. There was a woman in sight, and she worked with Charles, but Faye devoutly hoped young Matt wasn’t dating her. She was thirtyish, just a few years older than Matt, but she seemed so unsuited for the outdoorsy park ranger. The young woman had the impeccably coiffed hair and not-subtle makeup of a Southern belle of the old school. She was not so old-school, however, as to have avoided working for a living.
Charles had introduced her as Leila, his executive assistant, and Faye recognized the light in her eyes that marked her as her boss’ most zealous fan. Leila had a planning calendar open across her lap, a pen in one hand, and a cell phone in the other. Faye couldn’t hear what she was saying, but her body language said that she wanted people to understand that it would take forty phone calls to reschedule all the important meetings that Nina’s unfortunate accident had interrupted.
Jodi sat alone, in a chair that gave her a vantage point for viewing the entire room. Faye remembered that she’d wanted to question Charles’ secretary, and here Leila sat. Nina’s tragedy had probably shoved Jodi’s desire to annoy Charles off the top of the detective’s priority list, but Leila’s day in the hot seat would surely come.
Faye watched Jodi scan each face, one after another, and she wondered whether the detective had serious concerns that Nina’s fall off the dock had not been accidental.
Faye walked over to Jodi, “Any word?’”
“The latest news on Nina has been…okay. She’s alive, so that’s good. She’s conscious and responsive. That’s good, too. But her speech or her cognition or maybe both seem to be affected. No one’s been able to conduct an intelligible conversation with her yet.”
Faye watched Matt as he stood and walked over to Leila, murmuring, “I’m going to get some coffee. You want some?” His touch on her elbow was intimate. So was the angle of her head when she looked up from her work and nodded. So this was the girlfriend. Well, nobody ever said love was predictable.
“So we don’t know yet about Nina’s medical condition. How’s she doing from your perspective?” Faye asked Jodi. “Is she recovering from a suicide attempt…or did somebody push her? Why would somebody want to hurt Nina, anyway? It would be like attacking a…field mouse.”
Jodi shook her head. “You underestimate your friend. You saw Nina on TV yesterday. You think she didn’t make a few people mad? Politicians on the levee board, maybe? Engineers working for the Corps who’ve heard just one criticism too many? It’s not like she just started being a community activist yesterday when the television crews pointed their cameras at her. You should read her blog. Nina’s like an avenging field mouse with fangs.”
“Any hard evidence that this wasn’t an accident?”
“Just like a scientist, aren’t you? If you don’t have hard evidence, then something isn’t true. Well, we detectives kinda operate that way, too.” Jodi gave a half-shrug. “Nina’s body shows no signs of a struggle. No strangulation marks around the neck. So this isn’t Shelly all over again. There are no bruises that anyone could say for certain were made with a fist or a weapon. But there’s a humdinger of a wound on her head.”
“Could she have slipped and fell?”
“Yep. But she could also have taken a big wallop upside the head, right before somebody shoved her into the Mississippi. No way to tell. Yet.”
Faye liked the determined glint in the detective’s eye.
***
Joe wondered if his hair was ever going to dry. It had soaked up a prodigious amount of river
water. He also wondered if his brain would ever clear.
Faye had said something about a Christmas wedding. That was real nice but, right that moment he wasn’t altogether sure he remembered what month it was, or even what year it was. He wasn’t clear on where he was, either. Nearly drowning tended to mess with a man’s mind.
May. It was May. He remembered that now, because he’d just finished an endless semester at school—a semester made still more interminable by the problem of Faye’s absence.
Christmas was a hell of a long time away, but Joe didn’t seem to have much voice in their wedding date. Faye had announced her decision, then walked away. This was a common state of affairs. Under ordinary circumstances, Faye was going to do what Faye was going to do.
But these weren’t ordinary circumstances. Joe had cheated death in a big way just a year before, and he’d just had another near-miss. He could just as easily have lost Faye in the rushing river. Such things tended to focus the mind.
Joe wanted Faye, he wanted a family, and he wanted her to stop stalling, because he knew she wanted a family with him, too. She was just scared.
Fear was not something that Faye would ever admit, but facts were facts. Her age, too, was a fact. She would be forty soon. Waiting until December to get married and start trying for a baby was only going to make it harder to get that baby. If Faye didn’t want him to know that, then she shouldn’t have made him take biology.
Joe knew that if he let her be a coward for very much longer, there wouldn’t be much chance for children, and Joe wanted kids. They both did.
Telling Faye what to do was generally a bad plan. She didn’t react well at all to being bossed around, so he wouldn’t be doing that. Sooner or later, though, he’d need to find a way to inform her—gently—that she was being irrational. The question of when to get married wasn’t hers alone to answer, and she knew it.
Joe intended to get Faye to budge on this issue, but he had the uneasy feeling that softening her stance was going to take dynamite. He’d rather use a gentler approach. It would sure help if he could figure out why she was so damn scared.
Excerpt from The Floodgates of Hell, The Reminiscences of Colonel James McGonohan 1876
I am reminded of a story I heard more than fifty years past. It was purported to be true. It has the ring of truth. Still, I cannot swear that everything happened in just this way, nor that any of it happened at all.
Everyone who has told this tale to me has given its hero the same name: Deschanel. Monsieur Deschanel was a wealthy man with extensive upriver land holdings planted in indigo. He spent his youth consolidating this empire, marrying late to a belle named Geneviève, twenty years his junior. Wealthy men who marry children can be indulgent, and for a time he neglected the plantation so that the two of them could live in his opulent New Orleans townhouse and attend balls and operas and glittering dinner parties.
When the social season passed, he was anxious to make the annual move upriver to his other home on the plantation, so that he could personally supervise the agricultural business that supported these frivolities. It was the custom of the day. Planters kept one house in town for entertaining and to impress their friends, and they kept a second house on the plantation for those times when work could no longer be avoided. The wives—the dutiful ones, at least—left the city each year to live with their hard-working men in the hinterlands.
The huge plantation houses lining the Mississippi’s River Road were extravagantly decorated, and there were well-trained house slaves to ensure that the family was well-cared-for during their exile, but each was built on a plantation that must perforce be vast. How else could such a lavish and gracious life be supported? Sheer distance curtailed social activities during the agricultural season and convivial New Orleans aristocrats were often lonely in their River Road plantation houses.
As I told you, Geneviève was young, too young to know where her duty lay. She told her doting husband, “No.” (Or, I presume it would be more accurate to say she said, “Non.”) She refused to leave the city, weeping and raving and declaring that she could never live in the filthy and uncivilized wilderness.
Knowing what I know of him now, I imagine that Monsieur Deschanel looked out the window of his sumptuous home and saw streets heaped with kitchen offal and worse, and wondered if she understood the meaning of the word “filthy.” But, as I have said, wealthy men who marry children can be indulgent, so he traveled up the Mississippi alone many times during that growing season, so that she could live in the city while he earned the riches that she so enjoyed.
The legends say that the young Madame Deschanel was breathtaking, with coils of black hair that set off the milk-white pallor of her skin. This dramatic coloring must have made her suffering all the more striking when yellow fever spread its sallow veil over that exquisite face. It is said that Monsieur Deschanel returned from yet another business trip just moments before she passed into the next world. The fever took their infant son that same day, and she was buried with him cradled in her arms.
There were those who said that the man lost his mind the day he buried his wife and child. Others have said that he was a genius, born too soon to see his visions take shape. All the legends agree that, from that day, he turned his attention to the mud, the swamp miasmas, the bugs, and the filth harboring the pestilence that destroyed his family. It is said that he slept little in the days remaining to him. His every waking hour was spent tinkering with strange and fantastic machinery with but one purpose: to lift New Orleans out of the muck.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Thursday
It was Faye’s day off and here she was, looking at an archaeological site. This wasn’t because she had workaholic tendencies, though sometimes she did. Okay, a lot of times she did. But that wasn’t the reason she was peering down into yet another excavation.
If she was going to be of any help at all to Jodi in finding out what happened to Shelly, it only made sense to check out the site where the woman was working just prior to her death. Joe was on Jodi’s payroll, too, so he was peering down into the same excavation. So much for their vacation plans, but the weekend wasn’t over yet. Faye was sure that there was some fun yet to be had.
As fortune would have it, work at the site had been stopped by Hurricane Katrina and had only now resumed. Under ordinary circumstances, these pits would have been long-since backfilled and the soil re-sodded. Faye and Joe would be standing in a grassy lot. Instead, Shelly’s work was continuing as if she had just stepped away for a minute.
An SUV with “Pontchartrain Engineering” emblazoned on its side was parked on the street, just as it would have been when Shelly was alive. The same workers were on-site, except for Shelly. The colorful shotgun houses, with their Victorian woodwork and their inviting porches, hadn’t changed since Shelly worked here. They had hardly changed in a hundred years. Paint had peeled and flaked away, and windowglass was flowing slowly into ripples, but the houses were what they were. They reminded Faye of the houses on Dauphine’s street, just blocks away.
Faye had the dizzying sense that time had not passed. The storm had never come. A thousand people had not died in the floods. The city where jazz was born was unchanged, and it never would change.
A short conversation with the archaeologist in charge, Dr. Al Britton, brought her back to reality.
“The flooding wasn’t too bad here in Tremé—which makes sense. It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods outside the Quarter, and our ancestors weren’t stupid. They built on high ground until there wasn’t any more high ground. So our work here wasn’t directly affected by the storm but, like everything else around here, the project suffered some setbacks indirectly traceable to the storm. For instance, we lost Shelly.”
A shadow fell over his face.
“Shelly was my right hand. Her work was technically flawless, and she had a generosity that sometimes eludes my professional peers. Even outside of academia, people are jealous of their reputations. Some of them
aren’t big on giving credit where it’s due, not when keeping that credit for themselves might advance their career. Shelly wasn’t like that.”
He motioned with his head, and Faye and Joe walked with him over to another unit that was being excavated as they watched.
“The flood didn’t do our work any good, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Lots of times, we have to use pumps in these parts to keep units dry, even under the best of circumstances, so standing water in the excavations wasn’t the end of the world. We had some problems with saturated soil just slumping down into the units, but nothing that completely destroyed the validity of our work here.”
“Yet you’ve lost years in getting this work done.”
“Our personnel were scattered hither and yon, and the client corporation had plenty of better places to spend its money. Pontchartrain Engineering has had to scramble to get all of its projects back on a solid footing, and this is far from their most lucrative job. It took awhile for our project to rise to the top of anyone’s priority list, no question. But I expect it’ll be on a lot of people’s minds pretty soon. You would not believe the stuff we’re finding here. Layer on layer of cultural material.”
Faye hopped down into the unit with him and listened as he interpreted each stratigraphic zone. The significant finds had been stacked up like layers in a wedding cake.
He read the evidence to her in no particular order. Pointing to a black smear in the clay at about shoulder level, he said, “There was a housefire here in the mid-1800s. The city was rebuilt in brick, for the most part, after the 1788 fire destroyed most of the Vieux Carré, but brick houses can burn, too. At least their contents can, not to mention the wooden beams holding up a roof shingled in cedar. And people were still cooking in open hearths. So fires continued to be a problem, especially since the closest thing they had to a fire hydrant was a bucket brigade stretching all the way to the river.”
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