Floodgates

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye would have given a lot to know what Shelly had said to those people, and what they’d told her in reply. She’d made calls to every flood-control agency she could think of—the Corps of Engineers, the local levee board, the drainage district—trying to get that information. No luck.

  If only Dr. Britton had known who Shelly had called at any of the agencies, Faye might have made some progress, but he didn’t have a clue. Shelly’s notes had drowned in the flood, which could have been predicted, but Faye was disappointed anyway. She was reduced to taking shots in the dark, calling random government employees, hoping to find someone who knew something. Anything.

  The response had been predictably puny. An unheralded call from a stranger like Faye wasn’t going to shake any lethargic bureaucrat into action. She might eventually hear from one of the people who had talked to Shelly about the underseepage problem, but it wouldn’t be soon.

  While she reached this disappointing conclusion, Faye had strewn notes and files and maps and photos hither and yon, following up on things she’d learned from Dr. Britton and Bobby Longchamp. Sometime during the afternoon, she’d officially bagged the idea of a relaxing weekend vacation with Joe. He would understand.

  Joe was, in his way, as obsessed with finding Shelly’s killer as she was. He carried his obsessions quietly, and nobody knew about them but her, but he could pursue the truth as implacably as Faye. He and Godtschalk were at the library, investigating the newspaper clipping Shelly had been carrying in her pocket. Its date could help them pinpoint her time of death.

  Faye had elected to spend most of her remaining time and energy on Shelly’s aerial photos. Everybody kept talking about how good the dead woman had been at reading the things. And there had been aerial photos found on her body. There had to have been an excellent reason for that. Shelly had wrapped those photos in plastic like precious heirlooms, then she had waded into a flood. Why was she carrying them?

  Bobby had rooted through his collection, looking for the original of the pre-Katrina map of Lakeview that had been in her pocket. Until he found those actual prints, he’d lent her copies of other photos of the same area for comparison, a later version and a fifty-year-old print, without being asked. Faye could see that Bobby was thrilled that his little corner of the scholastic world could harbor things that were so useful in real life.

  The original photos were much larger than the fragment Shelly had been carrying. More than two feet square, the three of them draped over the sides of her borrowed desk. They covered the central part of the city from the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain. The rectilinear street layout of the French Quarter, nearly three hundred years old, stood out among the curving streets of the Crescent City. Dauphine’s neighborhood hid under its trees nearby. Congo Square, by contrast, was easy to spot. It had been there almost as long as the city had, lying just outside the Quarter, giving revelers a place to sing and dance out under the sky. Now there were planes and satellites in the same sky, looking down on those revelers and taking pictures.

  In the newest photos, post-Katrina devastation was still evident, even down to the blue tarps on roofs. This made the photos interesting and depressing, but probably useless, since Shelly likely didn’t live long enough to see them.

  Faye turned to slightly older photos, taken just before Katrina. She could make out throngs of tourists on Bourbon Street. Horse-drawn carriages could be seen clip-clopping down Decatur Street, carrying still more tourists. She could see delivery trucks blocking streets that were designed for horses and buggies. Normal scenes of everyday life were visible in amazing detail, but what did that tell her?

  Motives for murder could so easily be masked by everyday routines. Something as simple as a car parked in the wrong place could reveal that somebody’s husband was somewhere he shouldn’t be. There could no doubt be something in one of these photos that had gotten Shelly killed. Faye just didn’t know enough to see it.

  As she was putting away the photo taken just before Katrina, an odd cluster of activity caught her eye. Large construction equipment was parked alongside a levee, presumably for maintenance or for improvements. She knew such construction was still going on even now, because Joe had seen it. Maybe she’d get him to take her over there for a look. She could think of no useful reason to do that, but she didn’t know how levees were built and Faye liked to understand how things worked.

  Faye gawked at the clarity of the image, thinking, Sweet Lord, these photos are amazing. In ten years, we’ll be able to see people pick their noses.

  A long straight line stood out to Faye’s eye, as clearly as if someone had marked the photo with a yellow highlighter. It was different somehow from all the short straight lines and natural curves of the scene. Even when she looked away, it drew her eye as soon as she returned her focus to the photo. Surely this was how Shelly’s gift had worked. She’d simply been incredibly sensitive to details that were visually different from their surroundings, more so than most people.

  Now Faye was having the same experience. Once she noticed that straight line, she couldn’t have ignored it if she’d tried. It was a sheet piling being driven into a levee to form a metal extension that raised the effective height of its earthen berm, just like those that Joe, the self-trained water resources engineer, had seen pounded into the ground not long before.

  If she’d thought about it beforehand, she’d never have imagined that the piling would be visible from so far away, but it made sense. To bite far enough into the soil to hold back raging floodwaters, the thing would have to be lots longer than a car, and cars were easily visible on photos of this scale. People had been driving past the levee at the instant this photo was shot, and the piling was longer than their cars were. But not enough longer. The fact that it was too short was obvious to Faye in the same way that Shelly’s observations had been obvious to her.

  How long should that sheet piling have been?

  Shelly hadn’t been doing a major geological study when she hit the mucky layer of soil that had scared her so badly. She’d just been trying out a new pump. Faye sincerely doubted that she’d dug a hole halfway to China to do that. She’d have bored down to the water table, and then gone just a little deeper. In that area, Faye’d guess six feet, give or take.

  Dr. Britton had said that Shelly was working very near a levee. How tall would that levee have been? Faye conjured one up in her mind’s eye and guessed eight feet. And how much sheet piling would stick out of the top? Four feet, maybe? So it would take twelve feet or so of piling just to reach ground level. Then it would take another four feet to reach the top of the mucky soil that had worried Shelly so. That was sixteen feet of piling, and who knew how thick the worrisome layer of soil was? To keep water from seeping through it, the protective sheet piling needed to go all the way through it, with extra length to spare to anchor it into something stable.

  Faye was no engineer, but she wasn’t altogether sure she was looking at pilings that were long enough to protect against the seepage that had driven Shelly to get on the phone and look for help. And even if they were long enough, was it possible that Shelly had seen something else? Something that nobody else saw? Something that doomed a levee and the people it was protecting? Had someone cut corners while installing this levee? And maybe others?

  Not long after this photo was taken, Shelly got worried about a levee and started asking questions. And not long after that, the world watched one levee after another fail catastrophically.

  Shelly worked for a firm that did civil engineering. Levee construction was high-stakes work for a business like that. Any design engineer working on a levee project—not to mention every last one of their contractors—would be shaken to hear the questions Shelly was asking. If one of those people had already known that the levee might be inadequate, then Shelly’s questions would have been troubling indeed.

  Would those questions have been a motive for murder?

  Before August 2005, it might not have been. After more than a th
ousand bodies were fished from the floodwaters? Yes. Shelly could have died for those questions.

  Faye was out of her league here. She’d better call Jodi. The detective probably needed to add another consultant to her payroll—a pricey one. Faye had a feeling that civil engineers cost a lot more than archaeologists.

  ***

  The phone rang. Faye answered it, expecting to hear Joe’s voice explaining how he and his new buddy, Louie Godtschalk, needed to work real late at the library. If she’d looked at the screen before flipping open her cell, she would have known that the caller worked for Pontchartrain Engineering.

  “You need to lay off the calls to the Corps of Engineers.” It was the opening salvo of a woman whose tone brooked no impertinence.

  “Who is this, and why do you care that I’m talking to the Corps? They’re a government agency and I’m a taxpayer.”

  Faye felt like she paid a lot of taxes, just like everybody else. The more she thought about it, the more this woman had pissed her off with a single twelve-word sentence. “They have a public information officer who has nothing to do all day but make sure we taxpayers know what’s happening to our money.”

  “This is Leila Caron, Charles Landry’s assistant. The Corps pays my paycheck and everybody else’s here at Pontchartrain Engineering. They’re our biggest client, and I’m on the phone every day that rolls, talking to that public information officer and to the contracting officer and to their purchasing department. People are talking.”

  “Already? I just called them. Those people are getting paid with my tax dollars. If they’ve got time to talk about me, then they need some more work to do.”

  “Yeah? Well, they’ve caught a lot of flak they didn’t deserve these last few years. Sometimes things just happen, things that nobody can foresee, not even the best engineer alive. Those people are hurting, too. They asked me who you were and why you were stirring up Shelly’s old paranoid business at this late date.” Leila’s voice dropped three semi-tones. “I told them I’d find out.”

  Faye was hard to intimidate. “You’re not paranoid when they’re really out to get you. Shelly saw the levee failures coming a week before they happened, and she called over there to talk to an engineer who would know something about the design. I wanted to know what she said to that engineer, but I can’t find out who it was.”

  “For all you know, she’s dead. Drowned.” Leila’s voice had been steadily rising, but she caught herself. “It’s over, and the Corps has been patching up those levees ever since.”

  “So the Corps of Engineers is your biggest client. Have they been paying Pontchartrain Engineering to repair those levees? Did your company build them in the first place?”

  “Shut up.” It was the spiteful voice of a high school cheerleader who wasn’t accustomed to having the school dweeb get in her face. “Just shut up.”

  “Didn’t you lose anything in the flooding? Didn’t you lose anybody? Don’t you want to know why it all happened?”

  Leila Caron hung up the phone.

  ***

  Somehow, Faye wasn’t surprised when the phone rang again. She had clearly hit a sensitive spot with her calls to the Corps and the other flood control agencies. When Shelly had made the same calls, she would have hit the same tender spot. Only it would have been worse. Faye was just looking for information. Shelly had been calling with hard questions about questionable design and other uncomfortable issues.

  There was a soft, firm woman’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “I’m Chloe Scott, with the Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District.”

  Faye remembered that, somewhere in Leila’s diatribe, she had spewed out some reference to the fact that Shelly’s contact at the Corps had been a woman. She’d said, For all you know, she’s dead. She figured that this meant Leila’s statement was about a specific person.

  If Leila had said, “For all you know, he’s dead,” while speaking about an engineer, then she might have been speaking about a hypothetical person. But Leila had said, “For all you know, she’s dead.” Even now, in the twenty-first century, Faye couldn’t think of a single workplace where a design engineer would be automatically presumed to be a woman.

  “Ms. Longchamp—” the woman continued. “I heard you called and asked about my friend Shelly.”

  “Can you tell me about her? I can come to your office, if—”

  “I’m at a coffee shop called the Rue de la Course on Magazine Street. Can you find it?”

  Faye checked her wristwatch. It was already past five.

  “I’m on my way.”

  ***

  Chloe Scott’s accent said that she hailed from somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon line. Faye was thinking maybe Ohio. She had apparently been in the Big Easy long enough to like her coffee strong, black, and laced with chicory.

  Chloe would never be able to find coffee to suit her now, if she were to decide to move back home. She was trapped here forever, below sea level, because now she knew that no one anywhere else in the world knew how to brew coffee properly. She would never again be content with Ohio-baked bread or with food cooked without sufficient seasoning, either. If Chloe had not yet learned how to make a roux, moving back north would mean that dinnertime wouldn’t be a happy time for her, not ever again.

  If Faye weren’t engaged to marry a handsome man who was a brilliant cook, she’d be in the same boat as Chloe.

  Chloe was getting a refill when Faye arrived. She sat across the table and knocked back half an unsweetened cup while Faye loaded hers with sugar and cream.

  “So why did you call the District asking about Shelly? There’s been whispering among the office gossips all afternoon. I heard that her body was finally found.” Chloe took another swallow and added, “God rest her soul.”

  “I was told that Shelly was worried about the levees. I just wanted to know more.”

  “What are you? A reporter?” Chloe’s icy blue eyes looked away from Faye’s for just a second, but they flicked back and held steady.

  “I’m an archaeologist.”

  “Those levees aren’t that old. Some of the ones along the river are old enough to interest someone like you, but not those.”

  “The past is the past. I’m interested in all of it. But I just wanted to learn more about Shelly’s fears as a…private citizen. An interested private citizen.”

  Okay, that was sort of a lie, but she figured that saying she was a contractor for the police department was a quick way to make Chloe shut up. So maybe she was a plain-clothes archaeologist/detective now?

  Chloe didn’t seem to care who was on the other side of this difficult conversation. She just wanted to talk.

  “I spoke to Shelly myself, right before the storm. I told her that she might be right. There could be a danger that the levee was suffering from underseepage, or that it would slide sideways under the load of significant floodwaters. But the geotechnical work didn’t predict it, and you’ve got to base a design on something.”

  “So you think the design was sound? The levees were tall enough and thick enough? They were well-maintained—”

  “I can’t speak to maintenance. That’s not what the Corps does.”

  Faye nodded, then casually asked the question that interested her most, adding it to her list of more general questions as if it were no more important. “Do you think the design used sheet pilings to a sufficient depth?”

  “Based on the geotechnical models I’ve seen, yes, I do. Models are based on assumptions and limited knowledge, so they can fail, but that’s not necessarily the fault of the design engineer.”

  And now for the most sensitive question. “Did the contractors build the levees exactly as they were designed?”

  This was when Faye learned what to say if she should ever want to make an engineer mad. Chloe was a pale-skinned blonde. When her cheeks flushed, she couldn’t have hidden her fury if she’d wanted to.

  “They better, by God, have built those levees to spec.
I’ve been on-site for many construction projects over the years. Whenever I was involved, the taxpayers got the structures we designed for them. I don’t have any colleagues I’d suspect of allowing anything else.”

  “Then what happened?”

  Chloe took a controlled sip of her coffee. Her flushed cheeks began to pale. The military engineer was marshalling her thoughts. In a second, she would marshal her words.

  “An engineer is held to prescribed design parameters. A bridge, for example, cannot be made a hundred percent safe. It’s not possible. And it can’t be made ninety-nine point nine nine nine…” She made a gesture to indicate that those nines would go on forever. “…percent safe, because it would be cost-prohibitive. Society has to make a decision on the balancing point between how much it can spend and how infallible a design must be. This is the difference between an applied science like engineering and a theoretical one like…oh, I don’t know…cosmology.”

  “I understand. Everybody has to balance a checkbook. We all have to put our resources where they will do the most good.”

  “Yeah.” Chloe stared into the bottom of her empty cup.

  “So I’m just a rank-and-file engineer. Someone else gives me a safety factor, and I apply it to my work. For the New Orleans levee system, we design for the hundred-year storm. In other words, the storm that we would expect to cause the system to fail will come along every hundred years.”

  “But…New Orleans has been here for nearly three hundred years, and I presume it’ll be here hundreds more.”

  Chloe set the cup down and pushed it away from her, but she kept staring at it, as if it held some kind of design secret that would make everything clear.