Floodgates

by Mary Anna Evans

  It seemed worthwhile to concentrate on Nina’s obsession with saints, more so than on St. Charles Avenue or its streetcar line.

  An echo in that sentence bothered Faye’s ear. Saints. St. Charles.

  She tried to think like someone whose brain couldn’t process language. Was Nina reaching for one word and coming out with the one her brain had filed in the neural cells next-door? Was she saying “saint” when she meant “Charles?”

  Charles’ patronizing air toward Nina and his arrogant behavior with Jodi had never spoken well for him. Neither did his uneasy manner when he was showing Jodi the scene of Nina’s kidnapping.

  Faye had suspected Charles of hurting Nina the whole time, simply because she didn’t like him. Was Nina trying to tell her that she was right?

  Faye’s pace flagged, and Joe reached out a hand to steady her and to help her along if necessary. She reached for energy reserves that she might not have, as they turned the corner onto Dauphine’s street. Faye knew her car was just a block and a half away. The Pontiac Bonneville had been wrecked and patched together again, but it would get her where she needed to go. Her legs sure didn’t have much left in them.

  She was trying to think of something else odd that Nina had said about her parents. If she could only make the poor woman’s ravings make sense. What was it she had said?

  I’d do anything to have my mama back, Faye…anything. My daddy…whatever it took.

  Faye knew it was the truth. Of course, Nina would be thinking of her parents at a time like this. But she had said it at an odd point in their conversation. What had Faye said just before that? What had she said to prompt that particular response out of Nina?

  Do you know why this person has done these things to you?

  Did they do it because Nina wanted her parents back? Maybe not. But maybe they did it because they wanted their own parents back. Shelly had lost her parents to Katrina. Faye believed in her heart that Shelly had gone to look for her parents when she was killed. And she wasn’t the only person who had lost loved ones. What had Bobby said about Shelly’s last days?

  She was a tough kid, but sometimes she was crying while she worked. And she wasn’t the only one. I was actually ashamed to tell people that my parents were okay.

  Whose names were on the lists in Shelly’s pocket? Charles Landry. Matt Guidry. Leila Martin Caron, and Shelly Broussard. All of them had been working at Zephyr Field.

  Bobby Longchamp had been there, but his name was not on the list. His family had never even been in danger. What about the rest of them?

  Charles Landry had mentioned his parents in the present tense when Jodi was questioning him about Shelly’s list of names. Leila Caron’s parents ruled the Garden Club and the Mystic Krewe of Something-or-Other. Matt’s parents were rescued at the last minute off their roof in Chalmette.

  The families of everyone else they knew who had surnames on the lists had survived the storm, except Shelly’s. Faye had stared at those names for so long that she could see them swimming in front of her eyes. On one of the lists, the one written in Leila’s handwriting, the first three names were Landry, Martin, and Guidry…and the last one was Broussard.

  I’d do anything to have my mama back, Faye…anything. My daddy…whatever it took.

  When the rescue teams went out in their boats, they had to go somewhere first. How much power would have rested with the person who decided where they went and when?

  Zephyr Field was staffed with volunteers. Leadership would have gone to the person who acted like a leader. Maybe Charles? Certainly not Leila or Matt.

  Suppose the hurriedly scrawled list had been the first one made, and it had gone through Leila Caron’s hands on its way to Charles. How hard would it have been for him to ask her to copy the list over, but put the names in the order he wanted them? How much would people have paid to have their loved ones rescued quickly, while a rescue was still possible? How much was it worth for your parents’ name—or your sister’s or your grandmothers’—to be high on that list?

  Shelly did not seem like the kind of person who would stand for that kind of corruption, and she’d had no compunction about taking her fears about the levees to everyone who would listen. If she’d learned about this scheme, she would have protested…and loudly. She was heard arguing with someone just before she died. Faye sincerely doubted that a person who had perpetuated a scam like this one wanted the city to know about it…this city filled with people who had suffered their own losses to the floodwaters.

  If the scammer knew Shelly, then he or she would have avoided letting her know about the scheme at all costs. This would mean that Shelly’s parents would go to the bottom of the list, below the loved ones of all the paying customers.

  This scheme was nothing more than the sale of life and death for individual human beings. Who could have done such a heinous thing?

  Was it Leila? Was Leila the one who took bribes to have certain names given a higher priority?

  Maybe. But a huge promotion had been handed to Charles Landry right after Katrina. Perhaps the company president had bought his sister’s safety—or his grandmother’s or his mother-in-law’s—with that promotion. Leila was still an administrative assistant.

  Married women usually use their husbands’ names. With that in mind, Faye realized that only some of the names on a list like this would be familiar. If Shelly’s friends or coworkers had paid to have a maternal grandmother rescued, their own last names would not appear on the list. Just their relatives’.

  If Faye read Leila’s handwritten list correctly, Charles and Matt made sure their parents were safe. Leila had safeguarded someone on the maternal side of her family, the Martins. If any of the other people on the list had been maternal connections to the people paying Charles off, their last names would be different, and thus very difficult to track.

  And how were Charles and his co-conspirators paid? Faye guessed that the company president might have paid Charles with a salary and a job title. Everybody else had been forced to make do with mere cash…which would have been in ample supply at Zephyr Field. Everybody there had fled their homes, certainly with their pockets full of all the cash they could assemble for an evacuation that could last indefinitely.

  Charles Landry was the one living in a posh townhouse in the Vieux Carré. And his last name was first on Shelly’s list.

  ***

  The goal had been simply to reach Faye’s car and drive away, hoping that Nina’s location would be obvious once they got to Basin Street. Faye had never intended to climb the stairs to her apartment, so she was never sure why her eyes strayed to the staircase. Maybe she was thinking of the coffin nails.

  If she hadn’t stopped dead in her tracks—if she hadn’t reached out a warning hand that stopped Joe—he might have shot them on sight. Instead, they were standing well within range, but just a little too far away for an easy shot. Darkness was falling, blurring their outlines and making it harder for the man beneath the staircase to raise the gun barrel and fire off a shot that he was certain would find its mark. And then another.

  By stopping and turning their faces toward that gun barrel, murder became a different thing. It became the snuffing out of two lives, rather than the simple elimination of a threat. It was harder to shoot people whose eyes were locked on yours, much harder than squeezing off a few bullets in their direction while they were sitting in their lawn chairs sipping iced tea. Even harder than attacking a defenseless woman from behind her back.

  Two defenseless women, actually.

  The man holding the gun was surrounded by people he needed to kill. Faye. Joe. And Dauphine, sitting beside him on the ground, as stoic as the Lady Dantò.

  If he killed them all, what would happen to Nina? Did he have her locked away somewhere? Faye could hear the hum of constant chatter from the cell phone in her hand. Nina was alive, somewhere. Why hadn’t he killed her already?

  Faye wondered how she could have been so wrong. Charles was corrupt and sleazy,
and he may well have sold spots on that damnable list to the highest bidder. But he didn’t kill Shelly and he didn’t hurt Nina.

  Wide-eyed Matt sat in front of her, panting with terror, holding a semi-automatic handgun in his shaking hands.

  How could she have forgotten that there was a saint named Matthew?

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “It’s growing dark, child.”

  Dauphine waited for Matt to focus on her murky green eyes. “You need light to see your path. That’s the only way for you to see what you need to do. There is a candle in the dirt underneath your foot. And I have matches in my apron pocket. You need your hands to control your gun. Please hand me the candle. I will light it.”

  In a single non-threatening motion, she pulled the matches from her pocket and reached out her hand, just slightly. Matt snatched up the red candle stub that was supposed to bring Faye a baby and handed it to Dauphine. Faye sensed a tremor in Joe, a sign that he had thought about jumping Matt during the instant there was only one hand on the gun. He had thought about it, and rejected the idea.

  Matt was too far away. In the time it took Joe to reach him, Matt could put a bullet in his heart. Or Dauphine’s. Or Faye’s. Or his own. This was a man who had murdered out of terror and shame. Anyone with a glimmer of humanity would be unhinged by that act. And Matt was no inhuman beast who had killed for entertainment or convenience.

  Faye couldn’t imagine ever making the choice to kill, so she couldn’t empathize with his agony. But she understood it, just a little. The things he’d done had left him unbalanced and, in a way, more dangerous than a demon who killed coolly and easily. There was no way to predict what he might do.

  To underscore that unpredictability, Matt seemed to find himself inexplicably fascinated by his gun. He turned it slightly left and leaned forward to get a good view down the muzzle. Satisfied, he leaned back and practiced aiming it. In turns, the target was Joe’s belly, Faye’s heart, Dauphine’s head.

  Then he checked the muzzle again—for what? dust?—before making the rounds again. Joe’s heart. Faye’s head. Dauphine’s throat. When he had finished with that game and sat again with the gun balanced in two relaxed hands, Dauphine lit the candle.

  The match flared more than Faye expected, then settled to a steady glow as Dauphine held it to the candlewick. Her hand was silhouetted by the small flame and, even from a distance of several paces, Faye thought she saw the mambo’s hand shake as a faint cloud of powder dropped from her hand into the flame.

  A nameless smell reached out for Faye. If forced to give it a name, she would have said, “Warm. It smells warm.”

  Dauphine held her hands to the flame, humming a gentle song. More sound wafted from an unexpected corner. Joe was humming the same tune, so quietly that no one could possibly hear but Faye, and she wasn’t even sure she was hearing it. It seemed that he had been listening on that long night when he had communed with Shelly’s spirit, and Dauphine had said good-bye to her in the style of her own religious tradition. What else had Joe learned from this voodoo priestess?

  “Young Matthew, my people teach that our ancestors love us.” Matt twitched at the word “ancestors.” “They want the best for us. They heal us. We can call them to us with good thoughts and a candle like this one to light their way.”

  Dauphine kept her hands open, showing that there was no weapon in them. She was showing Matt that he had nothing to fear from her. Something about Matt’s reaction to the word “ancestors” told Faye that he thought they might be well worth fearing.

  “There are clouds all round you, young one. I see them…here.” She gestured in a tight circle around her own chest, belly, pelvis. Her hands moved slowly, easily, so that he wouldn’t be startled by the motion. “You’re bewitched, but you don’t have to stay that way. Let Dauphine help you get clean.”

  He looked at her like an orphaned child. “Nobody can help me. I killed Aimee and Dan.”

  “Not with your own hands?” Dauphine moved her hands close to the candle. They moved through gentle steady arcs, and the flame made her skin glow from within.

  “No! Not them. I didn’t kill Aimee and Dan myself. I just gave Charles everything he wanted, and that’s why they’re dead. I’d emptied my bank account when I saw the storm coming, thinking I’d need money to live until things got back to normal. My pockets, my briefcase, the glove box in my car—they were all full of cash by the time I got to Zephyr Field.”

  He drew a deep, ragged breath. “I went to Zephyr Field because I wanted to help. Can you believe that? Help. I thought maybe I could help.”

  He shifted his hands, and Faye could see a shimmer where they’d left sweat on the gun’s frame.

  “I gave my money to Charles, all of it, so he’d send someone to get my mother and father. I didn’t think about what that meant. I didn’t think about other people dying just because Mom and Dad didn’t. Aimee and Dan drowned while my parents were being rescued, and other people did, too. I’m sure of it. Shelly realized what I’d done before I really understood it myself. She never knew for sure that her parents died because mine lived. I killed her before either of us could know that without a doubt, but the look on her face when she found out what I’d done…”

  The gun wavered dangerously as Matt groped for his last shred of self-control. “How can I ever look my mother in the eyes? People are dead because she’s alive, because of what I did. As it turned out, one of those dead people was Aimee. I killed Shelly so that Mom would never know that.”

  Faye recognized the gentle motions of Dauphine’s hands. She’d seen them before, but the last time she witnessed these movements, Dauphine had held a knife in her hand. They were the motions that called Ezili Dantò from her slumber. Faye hoped she came. At this moment, she couldn’t think of any better supernatural being to call up than a fierce Lady who danced and drank rum and carried a knife.

  Faye decided to risk speaking, because there was something she desperately wanted to know.

  “Why did you take Nina? Where is she?”

  She really wanted to ask Why did you hurt Nina? Why did you want her dead?, but the questions might have set Matt off again. Dauphine’s candle—and that good-smelling dust she’d dropped into its flame—seemed to have calmed him.

  “Take her? I didn’t take her.” He stroked the barrel of his gun. “Somebody’s got her, and she’s telling them everything. Charles has been a wreck, ever since you showed Nina those lists. She knew all those people, the ones who paid to get their families saved. She knew what their last names were when they were single. She knew their mother’s maiden names. She knew who their children married. Charles said she’d almost figured it out, but he didn’t know what to do about it. I did. His problem is that he loves her. But Nina’s not going to keep those secrets. She’ll tell them on TV. She’ll write them in her blog. She’ll tell the world. I like Nina, but I’d rather see her in the river than let her tell anybody what I did.”

  Faye tried to decide whether she believed him. If he didn’t take Nina, then who did? Charles? Had Faye guessed wrong? Maybe Nina was at Charles’ house and Faye could have saved her, if she’d rushed straight there. But maybe that would have meant that Dauphine was shot right here in her own yard.

  “But if you don’t have Nina—” Faye began, but she stopped at a twitch of Dauphine’s head.

  Dauphine was right. There would be nothing to gain by pointing out to Matt that he had no reason to kill Joe or Dauphine or Faye. If Nina was out there somewhere safe, there was nothing to stop her from telling someone everything she knew, so there was no reason to add three murders to his list of crimes.

  Matt was beyond that kind of reasoning now. He just wanted to silence anyone who knew his secrets. Unfortunately, the three of them were on that list.

  Dauphine had closed her eyes. Faye wasn’t sure that she was capable of closing her own eyes in the face of certain death. She needed her wits about her. She needed to trust that there was some way to get out of this. />
  Dauphine trusted something else. She trusted someone else.

  With eyes still closed, she began crooning a song Faye had heard her sing before. But she only sang two words—Come, lady!—and merely hummed the rest. The effect was peaceful, serene.

  The tightness around Matt’s eyes eased. Faye found it harder by the minute to resist the urge to relax and trust that everything would be okay. But she needed to resist, because she was in no way sure that things would work out okay. The warm smell seemed to be emanating from Dauphine now and the candle seemed to be glowing brighter.

  Dauphine murmured—Come, lady!—again, and Faye snapped back to attention, because she had remembered the words that Dauphine was being careful not to sing:

  Seven stabs of the knife, of the dagger

  Seven stabs of the knife, of the dagger

  Lend me the basin, I must vomit my blood

  Lend me the basin, I must vomit my blood

  My blood pours down

  Come, Lady…

  Joe knew the song. Dauphine had been singing it on the night that he sat vigil for Shelly. He’d sat so quietly while she sang it over and over that it was probably as engrained on his brain as it was on Faye’s. But he just kept humming along with Dauphine, pausing only to let her call out Come, Lady! alone.

  And then calm, rational, scientific Faye saw a spectral lady with her own eyes. She felt alert and wide awake, certainly not like someone who was dazed or drugged, yet there was no question in her mind what she saw.

  There was a woman beneath the oak tree in front of her. She was fifty feet away, but there was no mistaking the sinuous curve of a woman’s silhouette—of a Lady’s silhouette. The setting sun’s last few beams of red light highlighted a cheek, a jaw, and a collarbone revealed by a wide-cut neckline.