Floodgates

by Mary Anna Evans

  The rhythms and melodies played here on African instruments—bamboulas, banzas, and gourds—would one day morph into jazz and blues and rock-and-roll, and even in that long-ago time, such music could draw a crowd. Tourists in powdered wigs and whale-boned corsets had gathered like rock groupies to watch dancing like they’d never seen before and would never see anywhere else.

  According to Dr. Britton, they were just downriver from the site of the former turning bassin for the Carondelet Canal, a basin of water where loaded boats made a U-turn and headed back to Lake Pontchartrain. It was no surprise that one of the most famous streets in this wet city, Basin Street, was named for an oversized mud puddle.

  Faye had spent so much time reading up on the history of her temporary home that she found it easy to imagine that time had stood still. The fact that so many houses and cobblestoned streets in the old parts of town were right where the colonial French and Spanish had put them made it even easier.

  If she squinted, Joe could pass for a tribal chieftain, striding proudly through town when the old city was new, ready to negotiate as an equal with the fledgling territorial government. She could have been…well, in all likelihood, she would have been a slave, but she might have been lucky enough to live in the social no-man’s-land of a free person of color. She figured it was her fantasy, so she could be a free woman, if she pleased.

  She imagined herself strutting proudly through the Congo Square marketplace, dressed in varicolored calico, her hair wrapped in a fashionable tignon, with a certain spectacular-looking Creek chieftain by her side. As an archaeologist, Faye’s daydreams tended to be remarkably colorful.

  Crossing Rampart Street and entering the French Quarter did nothing to detract from the time-blurred sensation of this very pleasant walk. Faye shifted her focus to her feet, as she tried not to trip over two centuries of bumps and cracks in the sidewalks of the old city. Shopkeepers still started the day by washing down these sidewalks, just as they always had. Maybe the custom went back to the days when ditches ran around each block, catching whatever the rainwater sloshed into them.

  Everything in sight, except for the people on the street and some of the expensive goods in the shop windows, had the worn patina of great age. Time passed slowly here, if at all.

  As they walked down a street lined with antique stores that had once been banks, Faye heard little beyond the occasional clinging bell announcing that a customer had come in the door. The Historic New Orleans Collection was, fittingly, housed in one of the few buildings that survived the widespread fires that ravaged the old city in 1788 and 1794, so it was about as old and historic as a building could get in those parts.

  Faye mentally shed her tignon and morphed back into a 21st-century woman as she walked through its old door. Joe never changed, no matter what century she imagined him in.

  Dr. Britton had called ahead to let his friend Bobby know they were coming, but Dr. Britton neglected to give Faye and Joe Bobby’s full name. Surely, he would introduce himself, because Faye couldn’t see herself calling him “Dr. Bobby” indefinitely.

  Dr. Bobby was slow to look up from his work when Faye and Joe walked into the room. He eventually focused a pair of soft brown eyes on them, but he was a millisecond late in doing it, as if to communicate that he was in control of their interaction. It was a very aristocratic thing to do.

  He was of average height and slender. Faye thought his skin would have been pale, even if he hadn’t spent all his adult life in map libraries. His facial bones were chiseled and his long-fingered hands, though uncalloused, still managed to be manly.

  Bobby’s hair was thick, wavy, and dark, and he moved with the languor of the very rich. Still, his dark-rimmed glasses didn’t look expensive, and neither did his well-shined shoes. It was entirely possible that Dr. Bobby had no assets whatsoever, and no more income than the average historian. Which wasn’t much.

  In New Orleans, an old family was an old family. The fact that your old family lost everything in the Panic of 1837 was completely immaterial.

  Faye took a deep breath. She’d been dreading this moment. It was time to talk to the person with the most intimate knowledge of Shelly’s activities in her final days.

  The oppressive pall of death over those days gave her the shivers, and not just Shelly’s death. While the rescue team had been working feverishly at Zephyr Field, lives were being snuffed out, one by one, by the dank, rising water. Stopping to sleep, eat, even visit a stinking and overloaded portable toilet could have slowed rescuers just long enough to leave the world dimmer by just one light. Then another. Then another.

  Maintaining his faintly superior air, Bobby shook their hands and said, “I’m pleased to meet you. My name is Robert Longchamp, but I’m known far and wide as Bobby.”

  He gave his name as “Lawnshaw,” or some such French pronunciation, so it took Faye a few seconds to realize what he had said.

  Releasing his hand, Faye looked closely at his face as she said, “Well, I pronounce it like a rural Floridian—‘LAWNG-champ’—but I do believe we have the same last name. I’m Faye Longchamp, and this is Joe Wolf Mantooth.”

  The soft eyes lingered for a single extra millisecond on Faye’s medium brown skin and glossy black hair, but he was too well-bred to show chagrin or even surprise at the suggestion that he might be related to someone so racially ambiguous. “What was your father’s given name? And his mother’s maiden name?”

  “Earle. And my paternal grandmother was a Carr.”

  “Her mother?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He gave a small nod, eyes fastened on her face as if he were trying to comprehend a family that didn’t catalog their connections back to 1600s France, and beyond.

  “I’ll look at the family tree. And I have a cousin who’s fairly obsessed with genealogy. She may know whether we’re connected.”

  Wow. The first thing Bobby said to her, directly after stating his name, had been two questions: “Who’s your daddy?” And “Who’s his mama?”

  If this man called his cousin “fairly obsessed with genealogy,” then the cousin must be immersed in the subject to the point of insanity. Not that Faye had any room to talk. She might be ignorant of her father’s family, but she knew as much about her maternal ancestors’ roots in slavery as Bobby did about his high-falutin’ family. Faye had read her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s journal dozens of times.

  The old, yellowing map on the table behind him caught her eye, and Bobby noticed. He finally smiled. “That one’s nice, but take a look at this one.”

  He motioned for Faye and Joe to come look at a framed map on the wall that was even older and yellower. “I love this thing. It’s an early drawing of the original layout of the city, and there’s a bazillion copies floating around, but I just like to stand right here next to the original and breathe its air.”

  Yep. Bobby was a historian.

  Faye scrutinized the map. The old, original city plan had been an orderly thing, with its neat gridwork of streets surrounding the cathedral and town square, the Place d’Armes. Fronted by the irregular sweeping curve of the Mississippi, and backed by swamps and bayous reaching all the way to Lake Pontchartrain, this tiny spot had been a misplaced piece of Europe, dropped down on a spot where life couldn’t be so tightly controlled.

  Joe reached out a finger and traced a long diagonal line in the air over the map, from Lake Pontchartrain to Rampart Street. By the time this drawing was made, the Carondelet Canal already sliced its way from the bayou to the back side of the city, neatly marking the general vicinity of the excavation she had just left.

  Given a few seconds to count the blocks between where she stood and St. Louis Cathedral, she could have precisely plotted her current location on this two-hundred-plus-year-old map. It was amazing. The New World began its metamorphosis in 1492 and it had continued to this day. Few places on this side of the Atlantic had been so little changed as New Orleans over so great a period of time. But that
wasn’t why she was here.

  “Al Britton called to tell you we were coming?” she asked.

  Bobby nodded slightly.

  “He tells me that you and Shelly Broussard spent a few harrowing days right about…there.”

  Faye pointed at a spot of swamp where Zephyr Field would be built in 1997.

  The slender archaeologist pulled his glasses off and looked down at her, squinting. The motion shook the loose dark curls that dangled almost to his shoulders. He was attractive in a bookwormish sort of way. Before she met Joe, Faye would have said he was her type. One of her types. Truth be told, she was a fan of men in all their forms.

  “Now why’d you have to take me out of 1798 and dump me into 2005? I was having fun in 1798. There wasn’t a lot of fun to be had in 2005. Not the last part of it, anyway.”

  “I’m trying to help the police by talking to people who might have seen Shelly in her last days. Joe and I are archaeologists like she was, and we’ve been asked to chat around and find out what people remember.”

  “You’re an archaeologist? No wonder you gave that map more than a passing glance. Sweet little thing, isn’t it?” Then the rest of her statement hit home. “Shelly? Last days? Are you telling me they found her? Or did someone just finally give up and declare her dead.”

  “They found her. We found her, in a way. I was there. That’s how I got involved.”

  Bobby had sunk into an elaborately upholstered chair. Joe dragged over a couple of matching chairs. He and Faye sat and waited for Bobby to go on.

  “I’d hoped…” He swallowed. “Everybody had hoped…”

  There was nothing to say.

  He put his glasses back on, as if to hide behind them, and cleared his throat. “You asked how Shelly spent her last days. Well, I should know. I was right beside her. We were just cogs in a big, lopsided wheel, but we got some things done. Has anybody explained to you the convoluted way we rescuers found a lot of the victims? It’s amazing, really, the ways that technology worked, and the ways that it didn’t.”

  Faye shook her head and said, “I know so little that you might as well just tell me.”

  “Well, first of all, the rescuers were working in a zoo, but that’s because Katrina walloped us where she wasn’t supposed to. There were rescue teams staged in places like Shreveport, waiting for the clouds to clear so they could rush in…to Biloxi. All night long, the weather instruments were telling people that it was going to be bad in Mississippi. And it was. It was awful. But nobody expected the New Orleans levees to break, so we started out behind the eight-ball here, and we stayed there. Still, a lot of good things happened. It all started with the victims and their cell phones.”

  Faye, who had seen what happened to a human body when it was shoved off a cell phone tower, knew more about how they worked than she would have liked. “Their cell phones stayed functional after the storm?”

  “To an extent. Voice calls were hard to place but, lots of times, text messages would go through. Some guy would be standing on his roof, thinking he was about to drown, and he’d send a good-bye text to his mama in Texas. Then, Mama would get on the phone to the Texas emergency people and tell them in no uncertain terms that they needed to, by God, send somebody to go get her baby.”

  “So the Texas people called the Louisiana people and told them where to find the missing person?” Joe asked.

  “Hold your horses. Didn’t I just say the cell phones weren’t working too well here?”

  Faye nodded to concede his point.

  “So volunteers—say, at the University of Texas—took each text message and they found out the latitude and longitude where it was sent. Then they found a satellite or aerial photo taken after the flood and marked the coordinates of the victim’s last known location. Well, really, the coordinates were for the victim’s cell phone.”

  “And the volunteers would use that info to send out a rescue team?” It all sounded reasonable to Faye—except for one small detail. “But…how did they get the data into New Orleans? There were no regular phones at all, and no cells to speak of. Not enough to bet lives on, that’s for sure. I’m guessing internet service was a pipe dream.”

  “No kidding. How did they send us the info? Good question. Some of it came in by satellite phone. And they actually flew in some of it in the form of data bricks.”

  Faye hated to display her ignorance, but she had no choice. “And data bricks would be…”

  “Really, really, really big jump drives.”

  “Gotcha. I can see how that information would be enough to send out a rescue boat.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Faye was tired of being the idiotic half of this conversation, but she went along. “What am I missing here?”

  “The water was all different depths. But our friends at the university in Texas could compare known water levels with detailed laser measurements of the city’s topography—its texture, if you will. Using that information, they could tell the rescuers how deep the water was around the victim. Maybe they needed an airboat to get there. Or maybe a flatboat would do. Or maybe a simple high-axle vehicle.”

  Faye was struck by the tiny gap between pure research and feet-on-the-ground practicality. Jodi had told her about the days she spent after Katrina, trying to do police work with no way to call for help. Her descriptions of being hip-deep in sewage while chasing murdering low-lifes would stay with Faye a long time. “God, how it would have helped the police if they could’ve had an eye-in-the-sky like that.”

  “And we shared our eye-in-the-sky with anybody we could find who needed our help. Police. Paramedics. Coast Guard. National Guard. Volunteers who hauled their fishing boats to town so they could help. Anybody. But first we had to find ’em. Communication was just…gone. It was as if Alexander Graham Bell had never been born.”

  Bobby’s hand went unconsciously to the cell phone he wore on his belt, as if he half-expected modern communication to vanish again. Maybe he’d never again completely trust that somebody would be there when he picked up the phone.

  “Anyway,” he said, patting the phone absently. “When those data bricks got to us, Shelly and I could look at the information and send out an effective rescue team. Somebody brought us computers and some fantastic printers that we used to make maps of the routes for the rescue boats to take.” He sat a little straighter in his chair. “And it worked. The rescuers found people, yanking them off rooftops and out of floodwaters, and they survived. It may be the only time I have ever felt like my own arcane little skill set was worth something to anybody outside academia. I somehow doubt that it ever will be again.”

  “I understand Shelly could handle a map pretty well, herself.”

  “Oh, yes. She was amazing. And she had the stamina of a Mack truck. We both sat stooped over those maps for days with hardly a nap. Hell, hardly a cup of coffee. All I had to do was to look at the latest satellite photo that showed the extent of the floodwaters and I was wide awake. Thinking about it now probably means I won’t sleep tonight. Maybe not for a week.”

  He looked like he needed to sleep for a week.

  “I understand that Shelly had a personal reason for working so hard. She didn’t know whether her parents had gotten safely out of town.”

  Tears welled up in Bobby’s eyes. “Every time we handed a map to another boat captain, she asked whether they’d been to Lakeview, and whether they’d seen her parents. She burned up the battery on her cell phone, trying to get a text message to them. She was a tough woman, but sometimes she was crying while she worked. And she wasn’t the only one.”

  He gave up pretending that he wasn’t crying and went fishing in his pockets for a handkerchief. “I was actually ashamed to tell people that my parents were okay. My whole family left for Shreveport before the first raindrop fell. It seemed…indecent…for me to even mention that to people who were terrified. Or grieving. You don’t know what it was like here that week. And I don’t know how to tell you.”

 
; “When did Shelly leave?”

  “I wish I knew. After we’d been working about seventy-two hours straight, somebody snatched both my hands off the computer keyboard and dragged me to a cot. It was still warm from the person who just got out of it. I fell on my face and didn’t move for hours…I don’t know how many hours. When I got back to work, somebody else was in Shelly’s chair.”

  “No one knew where she was?” Faye couldn’t imagine that anybody was alert enough by that time to know where they themselves were.

  “I heard that she’d completely lost it. She was heard yelling and screaming. Shrieking, even. Calling somebody names. Bad names. If you’d known Shelly, you’d know how far gone she must have been to behave that way.”

  “Who was she yelling at?”

  “Nobody knows. It was hours in the past before I even heard about it. Frankly, I can’t imagine there was a single calm person within a hundred miles of here that week. I figured she was sleeping it off on a cot somewhere, but she never came back. Still, I just thought somebody gave her another job to do. There wasn’t really anyplace else to go. I had no idea that she was gone forever. It’s horrible to just…lose…a human being.”

  Faye wished this conversation had never happened. She wished Bobby had never been forced to peek out of his ivory tower, because she didn’t think he was built to weather tragedy. Somehow, he’d managed.

  She offered an empty sentence designed to gloss over the enormity of what he’d seen. “I know things must have been busy and confusing for everybody that week.”

  He studied his soft and immaculate hands for a moment, then turned a surprisingly steady gaze on Faye’s face.

  “You have no idea. And I don’t know how to tell you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Faye had spent the rest of her afternoon in the office Jodi lent her, following up on the things she’d learned from Dr. Britton and Bobby Longchamp. She’d made three important phone calls so far, and each of them had been a bust. Dr. Britton had told her that Shelly’d hoped to draw attention to the potential sand boil situation she’d uncovered in Lakeview. Maybe she’d been treading on some professional toes with some of her questions. Faye had thought it was time to find out.