Peyroux Landing didn't have a lot of streets, and Max found the address easily enough. He pulled to the curb in front of 124 Lizotte Road. As he killed the engine and popped the door, he gripped the keys in his hand. Having the car changed everything. He was still afraid, but he no longer felt trapped. When he needed to, he could get the hell out of town.
The Noone house was a two-story brick job with concrete steps that stood slightly off-kilter, or perhaps the steps were straight and the house was off-kilter. The brick had faded through decades of Louisiana weather, and the postage-stamp yard consisted mainly of weeds and hard-scrabble ground, but once upon a time someone had taken care of it. Rounded granite stones ran along both sides of the walkway up to the door, some of them jutting at odd angles like vandalized gravestones. Nobody cared about this place anymore, but that hadn't always been the case.
Max took a deep breath, thinking about the last time he'd walked up to the front door of a strange house. But he didn't slow down. Momentum could be disrupted too easily to allow hesitation. He went up the steps in two strides and rang the bell.
Rocking on his feet, feeling as if he'd had too much caffeine, Max rapped on the door for good measure.
“Coming!” a voice called from inside. Then, more quietly, “Jesus, give a guy a chance.”
The door swung open. No chain lock, no dead bolt. The kid who answered couldn't have been more than eighteen, a good-looking boy with shoulder-length hair that framed his face without making him look feminine. His shoulders and biceps marked him as a weight lifter or football player, or both.
The kid gave Max a what-the-fuck look. “Yeah?”
Max peered past him into the house. Ratty carpeting covered the stairs going up to the second floor. The hall that led toward the rear had decent wooden molding, reinforcing his belief that someone had cared about this place once upon a time. Maybe it had been a previous owner.
“I'm looking for Joe Noone,” he said.
The kid flinched, producing a snort of derision. “Yeah?”
Max fought the urge to ask if he knew any other words. In the car on the way over here he'd considered and discarded a dozen lies, and decided in the end to let the truth—or as much as he dared—pave the way.
“My name's Max Corbett. I used to teach at Tulane. Joe was a student of mine. I came back to New Orleans for the funeral of a mutual friend, and I was hoping to talk to him about her.”
And it's possible someone might be trying to kill him, he thought. But that wasn't the sort of thing you blurted out on a stranger's doorstep.
A kind of understanding touched the kid's eyes, but it only made him look younger, and Max wondered if the kid might not be fifteen or sixteen and just big for his age. The football coach must love him.
“You been away a while?”
Max nodded. “Yeah.” Give the kid a dose of his own monosyllabic medicine. “I missed the storm.”
“That ain't all you missed,” the kid sniffed, oddly superior. “Joe's dead.”
He delivered the news like an insult.
Max deflated, searching the kid's face for some sign of deception. The Tordu had already gotten to Noone. How could that be?
“I'm sorry. That's terrible. Can I ask what happened?”
The kid's face softened, and for the first time, Max could see the grief behind his anger. “Were you really his teacher?”
“Yes. I really was.”
The kid pushed his hands into his pockets and leaned against the door frame, seeming to shrink into himself. “I'm Drew. Joe's brother.”
Max noticed the wording. Not “Joe was my brother” or something like that. All his life, Drew had been “Joe's brother,” the younger Noone boy. And in the same instant, Max noticed something else as well. The way he'd talked about Joe dying, it hadn't just happened.
“Sorry to trouble you, Drew. How long ago did he die?”
The kid glanced back into the house, but nobody stood behind him. Max felt pretty sure nobody else was home, or they would have come to the door by now.
“ ‘Die’ isn't the word. Not for what they did to him.”
Dread trickled down the back of Max's neck. “Who?”
Drew shrugged in that way only teenagers can manage, hands still in his pockets. “Not a clue. The cops say they don't have a fucking clue, either. Joe didn't come back from classes one day, this was early May, and that was it. At first the cops didn't even want to look for him. Nineteen-year-old college guy? They figured he was shacked up with some girl or just off on a road trip or something. My mother pushed 'em pretty hard. Some fishermen found him in bushes on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain.”
Max's skin prickled. The end of May. He wondered what day, exactly? Maybe the day he'd walked in on Gabrielle with Joe? Which would mean that other than Gabrielle, he was the last person to see Joe Noone alive.
Not something he planned to tell Joe's little brother.
“He drowned?” Max asked.
Drew sneered. “I know what you're thinking. Suicide? Not Joe. Anyway, he didn't drown, and the way they cut him open, it's not the kind of thing that's self-inflicted.”
He sounded disgusted, but then he hitched slightly with emotion and his eyes grew moist.
“What do you mean?” Max asked.
Drew narrowed his eyes, pulling his hands out of his pockets. “Man, what's with you? Why does it matter? You came to tell him some kid he knew at school died in the storm, right? By the time Katrina rolled in, Joe had been dead for months. You want details, that makes you some kind of sick fuck. Why don't you get—”
“Did the police catch his killer?” Max pushed.
That stopped Drew. The kid looked at him a minute, then grabbed the door. “In New Orleans? Seriously? They'd have to care first. For four months, they could barely be bothered to take my mother's calls, and once the storm hit …well, they stopped taking everybody's calls, didn't they? They got more important shit to worry about in the Big Sleazy these days.”
The two of them stared at each other for a moment, and then Max opened his hands, like he was talking to a church congregation. It was part of his almost unconscious professor's repertoire, and he regretted it immediately.
“I'm very sorry about Joe, and about bothering you.”
“It's a sorry world, man.” And Drew shut the door.
After a moment, Max retreated from the house, swept along on the current of this new information. Somewhere around the time he'd been involved with Gabrielle, Joe
Noone had been murdered. Cut open, his brother had said. And Max felt a terrible certainty that if Drew had been willing to talk about it, he would have learned that parts of Joe had been removed.
Gabrielle held the key to Noone's involvement. Her connection to Coco and the Tordu, whatever they were, had been a secret people were willing to kill for. But Gabrielle could tell Max nothing.
He climbed into the RAV4 and felt the map crinkle in his back pocket. He thought about Ray, and a conjure-man named Matrisse. Gabrielle couldn't tell Max anything, but if he could find Ray, or this Matrisse, both of them must know more about all of this than he did.
That meant going back to the place where he'd met Ray and asking around, and that would draw attention he couldn't afford.
Max started up the RAV4, and headed away from the river and back toward the highway. The nuns he had seen taking their own lives had chanted: Por Mireault, le Tordu. The same name Max had seen written on the map in the Third Moment. Ray hadn't given him any kind of warning, but there was no doubt it was all connected. Gabrielle, the Map of Moments, and the Tordu. So before he ran the risk of sticking his head back in the hornet's nest, he wanted to see the next Moment. Perhaps it held more clues.
Before that, though, he needed to take a breath and focus on the other Moments; what he'd seen and heard, and what they might have contained that he'd simply missed.
It was time for the history professor to learn.
Sitting in a research cubicle at the main
branch of the New Orleans Public Library, Max should have felt at home. And simply being there amongst the books and the quiet did lend him a certain solace that the eerily vacant halls at Tulane had not. Yet he still felt out of place.
He knew he could have talked to librarians about the specific moments that interested him, perhaps even accessed special collections due to his prior connection to Tulane. But apart from the brief chat he'd had at the front desk—presenting his ID and congratulating the staff member behind the desk on their post-Katrina efforts, as though he had any idea what he was talking about—he shied away from contact. Those who weren't a threat to him might themselves be put under threat simply by talking to him.
Max wanted to be a ghost, moving unseen through the stacks.
A notice on one wall had laid out the current plight of the city library system. Eight of the city's thirteen libraries had been completely ruined by Katrina. Some of the others remained closed. But the city promised that the system would be rebuilt and upgraded to a 21st-century library system worthy of a world-class city.
After what Max had seen of New Orleans’ current status, this seemed awfully optimistic. But all that really concerned him at the moment was that the main branch had power, and Internet access.
The stacks could wait. He still wasn't sure where he'd be sleeping tonight, and time felt valuable to him. For speed, Google came first.
He sat in a wooden chair, fingers on the keyboard. The back of his neck felt warm and he glanced around, always on edge now. He wanted to laugh it off as paranoia, but that would be foolish.
The First Moment he'd already figured out: an Indian ritual conducted to end a terrible storm, strange magic witnessed by the French scout who'd first identified the area as a good place to build a city. Exactly what the ritual had been, he had no idea. The attempt to drown the child had disturbed him at the time, but in retrospect seemed largely symbolic, a gesture to whatever primal deities the Biloxi Indians had prayed to.
The Second Moment, the spiritual power of the priest's voice, raised in song, seemed self-explanatory. These were both occasions of positive magic that had had dramatic effects on the fate of New Orleans.
But the Third Moment presented its own mysteries. The behavior of those novices had been ritualistic, and the map had referred to their deaths as a sacrifice. Yet their suicide had not had any magical effect that Max had seen. Whatever they had been attempting, it had been hideously dark magic, nothing like the first two Moments. And yet Max felt that the Third Moment must have been significant, and he needed to know why.
There were a hundred ways he could have started a web search. But even before he began typing, he knew what his first query would be. He tapped out the five letters, clicked on the search button, and Google went fishing in the pool of public knowledge for anything referring to the word “Tordu.”
The search turned up more than 107,000 results. A lot of the pages were in French, and there were music pages, a porn site featuring girls with extreme piercings, and a European horror magazine. A town in Estonia had the name.
Por Mireault, le Tordu. He could still hear those young women at the Ursuline convent chanting.
He typed “Mireault,” just the way it had been written on the map, adding it to the search. Fewer than a thousand results appeared. Still too many. Max added “New Orleans” to his search. There were three results, and none of them was what he sought.
“Right,” he whispered to himself. “Did you think it would be that easy?”
The Tordu, whoever or whatever they were, kept people in fear by remaining little more than whispers and shadows …and yet sometimes, the opposite was true. They seemed able to remain shadows by sowing seeds of fear. At first he had believed that they were little more than a street gang, New Orleans style. But once he'd seen that Third Moment, Max had understood that they were far more than that. And far older.
That event had resonated through the magical history of the city enough to end up on the Map of Moments. There had to be some trace of it.
He stared at the search window, turning it over in his mind. How to phrase the inquiry, that was the key. What words to include. Max added the word “Ursuline,” and then hesitated a moment before deleting “Tordu” from the search. The Tordu were a secret. But the convent was real.
There were six results. Max stared at the fourth one. Haunted History of the French Quarter. It could have been like a hundred other sites operated by ghost story collectors, “haunted tour” operators, and true believers. Perhaps it was. But his focus was on the words in bold under the title of the page. His search words. “Ursuline. Mireault.”
He clicked open the story and started to read, barely breathing as he scanned a written account of the suicide of five teenaged girls who had pledged themselves as novices at the Ursuline Convent. It had been discovered that Marie-Claire Bissonette, one of the girls, had been pregnant, though the Ursuline sisters tried their best to hush up this discovery.
…the convent's Mother Superior made public accusations against a Creole aristocrat, Monsieur Henri Mireault, claiming that Mireault had corrupted not only Marie-Claire Bissonette, but the other two novices as well, and that he had fathered a child upon Bissonette and deflowered other Ursuline novices. The Ursuline sisters insisted that Mireault—of mixed French and Caribbean descent-had exerted the force of his will and sexual power over the young girls, in effect mesmerizing them, and that he had driven them to suicide. The Mother Superior went so far as to claim Mireault had commanded them to hang themselves.
With no evidence save the sisters’ claims, and scornful of the suggestion that Mireault could have had such persuasive charms—particularly given his physical appearance [Henri Alain Mireault suffered from a childhood ailment that left his body bent and twisted, as pictured]— the authorities recorded the deaths as suicides and performed no further investigation.
All of this is a matter of public record. What is not a part of that record are the stories that sprang up and persisted from that horrible day in 1823 until at least 1951. Many visitors to 1114 Chartres Street, the oldest extant building in the entire Mississippi Valley, have seen apparitions in the corridors of the top floor. Passersby in the early hours on winter mornings have sometimes seen similar apparitions, dressed in nuns’ habits, hanging from the roof.
A detailed listing of such sightings follows, but one final observation seems appropriate. The Ursuline sisters remained at the Chartres Street property barely a year after the suicides took place. In 1824, the convent—and school—was relocated across town and the original property became storage and offices for Catholic archives dating back to the early 18th century. Reportedly, at the time of the move, the Mother Superior referred to the Old Convent as “tainted ground.”
No wonder the ghosts walk there still!
Specific accounts of alleged encounters with the novices’ ghosts followed, but Max ignored them. His throat felt dry. He scanned what he'd read once more, first the words, and then again and again he came back to the photographs of the convent, the Mother Superior, and a flock of black-habited nuns on the grounds. Black-and-white, grainy images.
All of his scrutiny was merely to avoid focusing on the one photograph that troubled him most. It revealed a well-dressed man whose features and hue favored his Caribbean ancestors more than any French heritage. His dark hair implied a man of youth, but his face had a hardness and his eyes an awful gravity that spoke of age. He was stooped, his back crooked, and his arms and tiny, bent hands were held twisted against his body.
Monsieur Henri Mireault.
Mireault, le Tordu.
Nearly two hundred years had passed. It should have been easy for Max to brush away the connection. A 21st-century gangbanger named Coco couldn't have anything to do with a wealthy Creole aristocrat from the beginning of the 19th century. But the sick feeling in Max's stomach said otherwise. He was way too deep into this thing to allow himself to imagine, even for an instant, that the two could not be
connected. Maybe the people Coco worked for, the ones he called “the Tordu,” were the remnants of whatever organization Mireault had established in those dark days. Or perhaps they were just inspired by him, the way so many freaks in Europe seemed to worship the memory of Aleister Crowley.
Either way, he was looking at the man who had brought a terrible, dark magic to New Orleans and tainted the Old Ursuline Convent. Perhaps that was the significance of the Third Moment, a tilt in the balance between lightness and darkness in the city.
He needed to learn more about Mireault.
Max pushed back from the computer and glanced around for a librarian. He hadn't wanted to have contact or draw attention, but he needed to know where to begin searching for books covering the goings-on in the city during the 1820s.
As he stood, he felt heat flush the back of his neck. He turned around.
The man staring at him from across the room did not look away.
Max froze. The guy wore an elegant leather jacket. His hair hung in beaded cornrows to his shoulders and he had the biggest hands Max had ever seen. He stared with unblinking, stone-cold eyes, but did not make any move to approach.
Tordu, Max thought. Has to be.
He glanced at the computer screen, thought of pausing to wipe his search history, but fear seized him. He took a step away from the cubicle …and the cornrowed man took a step as well.
Max started walking, slowly, toward the front of the library. The man matched his progress with longer strides.
Max broke into a run.
The man came for him, the beads clinking in his hair.
An attractive fortyish black woman pushing a metal book cart emerged from behind a shelving stack. Max dodged around her and sprinted for the front desk, but his pursuer slammed into the woman and the cart, spilling books and knocking her down. She cried out, but Max didn't turn to see how badly she might be injured.
At the front desk, someone shouted at him as he ran between the security sensors and crashed through the doors. He leapt down the front steps, the sun glinting off of the railings. Cars passed by in both directions on Loyola Avenue. On this block, north- and south-bound sides of the street were separated by a thin grassy island.
The Map of Moments Page 14
