Nina had been attacked with her own trowel, a tool so intimate that it rarely left her hand during working hours. Faye groped for words—just for a second, but it wasn’t like her to be at a loss for words, ever. She came up with one.
“Things.” The word was important, so she said it again. “Things. You said you found ‘things’ in the water. What else did you find besides Nina’s trowel?”
“Um…weird stuff.”
“I’m coming to think that everything about this town is weird.”
“Well, it is. But usually it’s weird in a good way.”
“Are you going to tell me what you found, or not?”
Jodi expelled a stream of air from her lips that was audible even over the staticky cell phone connection. “Yeah. I’ll tell you. But remember that I told you it was weird.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Five coffin nails. And a handful of pennies. And they went in the water recently, because it wouldn’t take too awful long for the Mississippi River to wash some silt over the top of ’em.”
Faye couldn’t think of any logical response to this, other than, “How do you know they were coffin nails?”
“Do you know how many voodoo shops there are in New Orleans? And how many hoodoo practitioners we’ve got?”
“No. Do you?”
“No. But it’s a whole lot. I’ve run across coffin nails before. And a whole lot of other hexes and spells. I went out to your work site to ask Dauphine what she knew about those nails. She wouldn’t say much, other than that coffin nails were used to bind things. She allowed as how maybe somebody wanted to bind Nina to this life. The way she said it, I’m thinking that Dauphine threw them in the water and that she was doing what any voodoo mambo would do for a friend. I never got her to actually say so, though.”
“Maybe somebody wanted to bind Nina to the bottom of the Mississippi.”
Faye didn’t like being so relentlessly negative, but it was just how she felt at the moment.
“Heck if I know. Now pennies…” Jodi’s voice turned speculative. “As far as I know, they’re usually good luck pieces. Lots of people carry a penny in their pocket all the time to keep from being bewitched.”
“Really? These days? In the twenty-first century?”
“Yes, really. And don’t get all high and mighty on me. Your family’s been in the South for a long time?”
“You know it has.” It rankled Faye to think Jodi was implying that being southern was inextricably linked to being ignorant. And it made no sense, since Jodi’s people had probably been in south Louisiana since Napoleon was a boy.
“So what does it mean when you drop a fork?”
“Company’s coming.”
“When you step over a child lying on the floor?”
Faye wished that she didn’t know the answer, because knowing it meant that Jodi was right. “She’ll stop growing.”
“You don’t sweep dirt out of your house after dark, do you? Because you’ll sweep your luck out the door. And you do know that sweeping under a woman’s feet means she’ll be an old maid.”
“I don’t sweep. I like dirt.”
A smug laugh told her that Jodi knew she’d won this round. “You archaeologists are all about culture. Well, superstition’s a part of that. Isn’t it? There’s a bit of Africa in every corner of this part of the country. You can call it voodoo, if you’re into the formal religion stuff. Voudon, if you want to be plu-perfect about your spelling. Or you can call it hoodoo, if you prefer your root magic passed down from mother to child. But don’t tell me you think people don’t still believe in the power of coffin nails.”
Faye grunted, wishing she could think of an argument that would deny the truth. People are superstitious and they always will be. They just shift their irrational beliefs into a modern form…hence the proliferation of fortune-tellers who plied their trade by telephone, television, and internet.
Jodi laughed again. “Faye. You’re a fraud. I bet you don’t even shake crumbs out of your tablecloths outside after dark. Somebody might die.”
“I don’t own a tablecloth.” And it was a good thing, because there was no way she’d be shaking any crumbs outside after dark, not while Nina’s life hung in the balance. “How’s Nina doing?”
“Not much different. Doing better all the time, physically, but she still doesn’t make much sense when she talks. You know, it could have been worse. If Nina had been attacked by a strong assailant with a pointy trowel like yours, it might have punctured her skull.”
Faye paused again. The notion of being attacked with her own trowel, the tool that rarely left her hand on the average workday, felt like an utter violation. Thinking of it gave her the same sick shudder that came of imagining a stranger putting a gun in her hand and forcing her to point it at her own head and pull the trigger.
Faye couldn’t talk, so she just mumbled, “Later,” and thumbed the phone off.
***
Jodi’s call had taken just minutes. Dr. Britton had stepped back into the open excavation, pointing to soil thats only claim to fame was the fact that it was the wrong color. No one had even seen her leave, except Joe.
Joe didn’t miss much, and he didn’t miss the look that Jodi’s news had left on Faye’s face. He locked his sea green eyes on hers and rested a comforting hand on her shoulder. Faye remembered that having Joe made her a lucky girl, if a female person on the verge of forty could ever be considered a girl.
“This band of goopy clay here,” Dr. Britton was saying, sticking the point of his trowel into a ribbon-wide layer of black soil, “is something we have to watch. It’s a conduit for water, because rainwater seeps down through the more porous layers and gets stopped by the clay. Then it moves along the surface of this layer and oozes into the excavation, flooding it slowly. If it weren’t for this goop, we could probably work without a pump.”
Pumps. Faye hated pumps.
“It’s a weak point, too. We have to watch what we’re doing, because the soils can slip along that plane, caving into the unit and leaving us nothing but scrambled eggs.”
Faye knew that she would hate that metaphor forever.
“Shelly’s the one who identified that layer as the source of our seepage problems.”
Why wasn’t Faye surprised to hear that?
“If Shelly were still working with us,” Dr. Britton continued, “we’d understand all those ditches and sumps and cesspools. She’d have read the soil better than any of us can, checked old maps, then somehow put herself in the place of people in those days until she guessed where they wanted their water moved. And why. And how they would have done it. We’ll manage without her, but it won’t be the same.”
Dr. Britton crawled out of the excavation and took Faye by the elbow. He reached out the other hand and grabbed Joe’s elbow, carefully steering both his captives toward the single picnic table sitting outside the trailer that served as his field office. Godtschalk followed them, and Dr. Britton didn’t shoo him away.
“I’ve nattered on about how good Shelly’s work was, and I sure don’t mind my workers hearing that. But there are some other things I wanted to make sure the detective knew, things that maybe should stay just between us. You did say you were working with Detective Bienvenu?”
Faye and Joe both nodded and settled themselves at the picnic table. Godtschalk hesitated, but Dr. Britton flapped a hand at the picnic bench. “Go ahead and have a seat, Louie. I’ve got some thoughts I’d like to share with the law, but I’ve got some sense that I’d also like to share them with a writer…someone who’s chronicling what happened to our city. Somehow, I think Shelly’s story is important in a way that might belong in your book. Please join us.”
Dr. Britton picked up his sandwich and leaned over it, speaking quietly. “Shelly was worried about one of the levees.” He paused for emphasis. “Before Katrina.”
“What was she? Psychic?” Godtschalk asked. “You make her sound supernatural.”
“No, not
supernatural. Not psychic. Just a very smart girl who never missed the smallest detail. Also, she was tenacious as hell.”
“Why was she worried about the levee?” asked Joe.
“Not long before the storm, she was testing a new pump at the company’s Lakeview branch office, within site of a canal levee. Try as she might, she couldn’t get that test pit dry. Water was coming into the test pit as quickly as that pump could get it out. Lots of people would have blamed the pump. Sometimes the new ones are so flimsy that our ugly old ones leave them in the dust.”
Faye felt a new appreciation for Old Wheezy.
Dr. Britton set down his half-eaten sandwich. “I know other people who would’ve said, ‘Hey, the whole city’s under sea level’ and given up. Shelly got down in that waist-deep water, so she could find out where it was coming from.”
Faye didn’t like the sound of too much groundwater so near a levee. A grim possibility—actually two grim possibilities—were coalescing in her mind. “Was it a slippery clay layer like the one you have here?” she asked.
“You got it. Now nobody sitting here is a civil engineer, but this isn’t rocket science. All that groundwater was probably coming from the canal, beneath the levee. That’s called ‘underseepage,’ and it isn’t a good thing. A levee’s just a pile of dirt. If an extra-permeable layer lets canal water undermine it, then the whole levee could go.”
“The slippery layer—” Joe began, but Dr. Britton kept talking.
“Underseepage can destroy a levee, even when the water level in the canal is normal, but think about what can happen when that level rises. The levee is put under stress by the increased water pressure, and that stress is directed straight out.”
Joe nodded. “If there’s a slippery layer underneath, then the levee’s going to slide sideways. Probably break apart while it’s doing that. The whole thing would be shoved back from the canal.”
“That’s a recipe for failure,” Godtschalk said. His voice was tight.
“What did Shelly do?”
Faye hadn’t known the woman, yet she was confident that Shelly had gone to someone who she thought could help.
“She called the levee board. She called the drainage commission. She called the Corps of Engineers. She told them that the situation was one step short of a sand boil.”
Faye saw by his expression that Joe had the same question that she did, so she asked it. “And a sand boil would be…?”
The third person listening to the story, Godtschalk, didn’t have the same question on his face, but then he was local. “Water seeps under levees all the time,” he said. “It’s terrifying when you think about it, but engineers design for that underseepage. I’ve seen an open field with dozens of wet spots, even little tiny upwellings like fountains. When the water’s clear, all’s well. But when those upwellings start bringing up sand—in other words, when they turn into a sand boil—watch out. That sand is coming out of the soil supporting the levee, or even the levee itself.”
Now, Faye could get a glimpse of the extent of Shelly’s concern. “Did anybody listen to her? Or did they brush her off?”
Dr. Britton gave a short bark of a laugh. “They didn’t get a chance to brush her off. In my heart, I believe that they would have told her that the design was sound and that she shouldn’t worry her little head about it, but I’ve got to give them the benefit of the doubt. They didn’t have time to return Shelly’s calls. Katrina was already roaring our way and anybody who was able got the hell out. Within days, we got a chance to see how well those levee designs held up.”
Godtschalk grunted. “Days? If I know politics around here, it would have taken years to get action. Maybe if Shelly had made her discovery when she was a little girl making mud pies, something could have been done in time…”
“In time?” Dr. Britton started to laugh, and it looked like the laughter hurt him. “In time? Hurricane Betsy blew through in 1965, when I was in first grade. It was bad. People who weren’t here then have forgotten Betsy, but it was bad. My grandmother’s house flooded up to the eaves. The government told us, ‘Never again,’ and they drew up a flood control plan that was supposed to stand behind that statement…only they put that plan on a fifty-year schedule. It wasn’t finished when Katrina made her appearance. Do you want to know how long fifty years is? Just look at me.”
Faye studied his grizzled beard and the deep lines carving into his forehead. Fifty years was a long time.
“When a government makes a promise to a few hundred thousand people,” she said, “I don’t think it should take nearly that long to deliver.”
“No kidding. But a lot of levees did get built, and there’s an irony there. People—lots of people—died after Katrina, because they told themselves, ‘My house didn’t flood during Betsy, and they’ve built the levees up since then. It’ll never be that bad again.’ They could look out their windows and see nice, tall levees, and they trusted them. It’s easy to trust that a humongous pile of dirt won’t go anywhere.”
“Did that levee fail?” Joe asked. “The one Shelly was worried about?”
Dr. Britton shook his head. “No. It held. It was the Orleans Canal. It didn’t fail because there was a two-hundred foot gap in it.”
Faye remembered Nina grieving on live television over that mystifying hole.
With trembling hands, Dr. Britton wrapped his unfinished sandwich in a napkin. “I don’t know why the levee system on that canal was never finished, but that’s the way it was. They say it happened because of political infighting, but it hardly matters now. Water just poured out of the gap and into the city. It didn’t get deep enough in the canal to put the kind of pressure on the levees that Shelly was worried about. So we don’t know whether she was right.”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “Dear God. I hope we never have another chance to find out.”
***
After a half-hour spent studying Dr. Britton’s detailed maps and aerial photos, the simple and colorful city map stuffed in Faye’s pocket began to look a little silly. She’d found it on a rack of brochures catering to tourists and, silly or not, it had kept her from getting lost for months now.
She unfolded it and spread it across the picnic table. “I could sit here and talk shop with you all day, but Joe and I should probably try to do something else today to earn our police consulting fees. You told me on the phone that your friend Bobby was one of the last people to see Shelly alive?”
“Yep, Bobby was working with her, side by side, making maps to guide rescue teams through the flood. Bobby’s a funny guy. He’s no older than you, but he’s a history scholar of the old school. Bobby likes to read about the past. He doesn’t like it to get him dirty.”
Dr. Britton looked ruefully at the ground-in dirt on his knees. Faye didn’t look at hers, because she knew they were just as grubby.
“Bobby’s made a career of studying historical maps of New Orleans, which gave him enough knowledge of the modern city to save lives during the flood. Helping the rescue teams after Katrina was the only practical thing the man has done in his life. The time he spent at Zephyr Field…I’d call that his finest hour. There are a lot of people walking around alive today because of Shelly and Bobby.”
“It seems like everybody but the police in Missing Persons knew what Shelly did after the hurricane,” Faye observed. “I bet they’re feeling stupid about now.”
Dr. Britton shook his head. “I didn’t know, not until this week, when they found her dead and everybody started talking about it. If the police had talked to the right people back then, they’d have found out right quick. Nobody was keeping it a secret on purpose, and everybody in these parts likes to talk.”
“Where does Bobby work now?”
“He works for the Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism. He’s all about culture, but he really hates the recreation and tourism part of the department’s work. I should probably tell you that Bobby’s a bit of a snob. He can’t help it. His family was hig
h and mighty in this town for decades before Napoleon got around to selling it to us. Sometimes a family like that hands down money, and sometimes they don’t. In Bobby’s case, they didn’t. But that sense of utter superiority…it must be on a dominant gene.”
Faye folded up her crummy tourist’s map, resolving not to let Bobby the map connoisseur see it. “You said he’s working near here?”
“Walking distance, actually. In the Quarter. At the Historic New Orleans Collection. Their map collection is amazing, and if a man can fall in love with a sheet of paper or ten, Bobby’s managed it. He just got back from some time in Texas—went there to get some work and to live in a house that hadn’t ever been wet. But his family goes back more than 250 years in this town. A little water ain’t gonna keep Bobby away forever.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Faye liked the way Joe looked, walking through Congo Square, where people had gathered to trade and sing and dance and socialize for a couple hundred years. Faye’s boots made a clatter on the cobblestones, but Joe never made a sound when he walked.
Sometimes, Joe wore traditional Creek garb, from head to toe, right down to the moccasins that he sewed for himself. Other times, like today, he traded jeans for his buckskin pants, but there was almost always a feather plunged casually into the nape of his ponytail. And the moccasins were non-negotiable. Whether Joe wore buckskin or a tuxedo to their wedding, she knew what would be on his feet.
Faye had spent a year trying to decide what kind of wedding she wanted, but her ambivalence extended even to that subject. It would be at home, at Joyeuse. That part was non-negotiable for her. But would they invite a crowd of their friends? Did she want to sew herself the dress of her dreams? Or should they load Magda, her husband Mike, and a handy preacher on a boat, haul them out to Joyeuse, and just do it?
She didn’t want to think about it, so she looked around Congo Square, instead. The shade of Louis Armstrong Park’s old oaks, which had lured her on this detour, was inviting, but the square itself felt alive with the ghosts of all the people who’d passed before. The slaves of New Orleans had precious few freedoms, but Sunday gatherings in Congo Square had been one of them.
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