by Nevada Barr
At the checkout counter a sleepy middle-aged woman, made as garish and bleak as the shelves by late-night fluorescent lights, rang up her purchases.
“May I have some matches?” Clare asked and was stunned at how normal she sounded. At least to her own ears.
The woman behind the counter wasn’t as sluggish as the hour and the lighting suggested. Her pale blue eyes darkened as she glanced at the inflammables on the counter.
“And a pack of cigarettes,” Clare added. Vigilance relaxed.
“What kind?”
Clare hadn’t smoked in twenty years. She pointed.
“Camel nonfilters?”
Clare nodded.
“You must have a death wish.”
Clare returned to the alley behind the houses. It was important to be as close to where her daughters had been as possible, close enough her ashes could blow into theirs.
As she rounded the neighbor’s garage, a sharp bark welcomed her. Mackie. She’d forgotten him. He was still tethered to the glider with the belt of her dead husband’s raincoat. At the sight of his fuzzy face with its lopsided grin, the tongue ill-fitted to his mouth and peeking out one side, an upwelling of joy hit her so hard it nearly doubled her over. Happiness was betrayal. Proof she’d never deserved Vee and Dana, that some karmic how, some karmic where, she’d killed them. Falling to her knees, she tried to retch. Even this homage was denied her.
Inside out, the coat’s pockets were next to her bare skin. On her hands and knees, the tops of the bottles touched her thighs above the lip of fabric. The faint pressure of cold plastic against her naked flesh brought back the life of the body: a cool breeze, the scent of lilacs. A memory came from the jangled mess of her mind: a little girl being bundled into her dad’s bathrobe—a disreputable plaid flannel from Sears Roebuck. There in the dirt, Mackie whining in her ear, she remembered how safe she felt folded in the worn softness, in the smell of Lava and Aqua Velva.
David’s robes were of silk; too fine to spill cocoa on, throw up in, or wet the bed in. Vee and Dana had never been bundled up in Daddy’s robe. They never would be. A second recollection battened onto the first, the reason she had been in such need of comfort, and the warmth of the remembered flannel turned to flame. A sense memory of a burning log rolling from the fireplace onto her bare foot exploded in her skull: smell of cooking flesh, searing overwhelming pain. The vomit Clare had been denied came then, thin and sour.
She was afraid to die the way her children had died, and she hated herself for a coward.
SEVEN
Anna automatically stepped in front of Geneva to absorb any blows coming as punishment for her earlier good deed. If Sammy hadn’t had such excellent reflexes, Geneva would have plowed into her.
“Can I help you?” Anna asked the punk, ranger-speak for “What in the hell are you doing here?”
The scruffy black dog danced over and greeted Sammy like an old friend.
“That you, Jordan?” Geneva called.
The singer had squatted on the brick, and the punk’s dog wriggled gleefully under her hands.
“No. That’s my dog,” the man said and stood.
“I thought he smelled better,” Geneva joked. “Anna, this is Jordan. Jordan rents the apartment on the other side of mine. Jordan, this is Anna Pigeon, a fed-ee-ral law en-force-ment agent.” She drew out the words the way she always did, and Anna suspected it indicated equal parts rebellion and respect.
It meant something altogether different to Punk Jordan. He lost the ability or the desire to look Anna in the eye, focusing instead on the ground to the far right so his face could only be seen in partial profile. Shoulders, already stooped from the lash of his personal demons, rounded down further as if they were a cape he could use to hide himself.
As Anna watched the metamorphosis, she decided he looked guilty as hell. Maybe it was only that he’d made a feeble attempt to assault her earlier, but she doubted that was the whole of it. An educated guess was that Jordan was on the run from more than just demons.
Mumbling something that started with “I gotta” and trailed off unintelligibly, he slouched toward the side of the house where his apartment was, his dog at his heels. He’d said nothing about having met Anna before. For reasons she wasn’t clear on, Anna decided not to say anything either.
“What do you know about Jordan?” she asked Geneva. Her voice was sharper than she’d intended, and Geneva, rooting through her bag for her house keys, stopped and shot a sardonic look over her shoulder. Why Ray-Bans and lack of vision did not inhibit her ability to do this, Anna wasn’t sure.
It wasn’t any of Anna’s business who Geneva had as tenants, but, should her friend end up murdered, chopped into bits, and simmered on a stove top, as had happened to a woman mere blocks from where they stood, Anna wanted to at least be able to say, “I told you so.” She pressed on.
“Did you get references? Do a security check on the guy?”
Geneva turned her attention back to the key search. “The rent is always paid on time and in cash. The little dog is sweet, and she’s quiet. As a landlord it doesn’t get much better. On occasion she smells a bit ripe, but the apartment didn’t stink the couple of times I had to go in. That’s all I need to know.”
Geneva had gotten her back up. Anna would get no more out of her.
“She. The dog is quiet?”
“Only barks when this one old cat comes over the wall to kill my birds.”
“She. The dog smells ripe?” Anna asked, remembering the silky brushed coat smelling of lilac.
“No. He’s okay, but she can get a little whiffy.”
Anna was still confused. “The dog is male?”
“I guess.” Geneva had lost interest in the conversation and Anna couldn’t blame her. Anna’s questions—those that weren’t prying or downright rude—sounded like the musings of a dullard fixed on canine behavior patterns. It wasn’t species that had her baffled; it was gender.
A whirl of wind carrying bougainvillea blossoms and a few drops of rain rattled down through the trees into the courtyard. At the far edge of hearing, thunder murmured threats. Geneva threw back her head, face to the sky, arms open wide. “God, but I love thunderstorms,” she exclaimed. “They make me feel like I could be lifted on the wind and fly.”
Anna laughed. “Probably because where you grew up that was true.”
“Tornadoes, I don’t like,” Geneva said.
“So you live in hurricane country?”
“Hurricanes don’t sneak up on you and pounce. They don’t single you out the way tornadoes do. Hurricanes aren’t personal. I’ll tell you one thing for sure,” she said as she unlocked the French doors that led from the garden to the part of the house in which she lived. “Sammy and I are not evacuating again. The powers that be all got massive amounts of egg on their faces for screwing up with Katrina. Now every time a butterfly farts off the coast of Africa they issue mandatory evacuation notices.”
The doors blew open, and Sammy trotted in, his leash snaking behind him. Once Geneva was home he was officially off duty. The change was as obvious as if he ripped off his tie and threw his suit jacket over the back of the couch.
“Do you want to come in for a drink?” Geneva asked.
“Sure. This sounds weird—”
“Everything you say sounds weird.”
“—but do you think Jordan is a woman?”
“Jordan is a woman.”
“Nope,” Anna said. “He’s a man, pathetic excuse for a mustache and all. Didn’t you ask?”
“Right. ‘By the by, now that you’re going to be renting from me, might I inquire as to whether you have a penis or two? Could I see it? Oh, right, I’m blind. I’ll need to feel it.’ The name Jordan goes both ways; the voice does, too, I guess. Now I’m going to be all convoluted. For your information, I see quite clearly in my brain. I see this woman. Now it’s like you snatched her up and presto change-o she’s a guy. Thanks a heap.”
Sammy got kibble, Anna a
nd Geneva a California sauvignon blanc. They sat side by side on the sofa, their feet on a wide ottoman, and watched the rain, illuminated periodically by flashes of lightning, sluice down into the courtyard. Or, rather, Anna watched. Geneva listened to the pound of the rain and thunder and saw whatever memories of storms her four-year-old brain had treasured up for a rainy day.
An inky black cat, easily sixteen pounds, stretched across Geneva’s ample lap, front paws extended so he could knead the edge of Anna’s thigh whenever he felt her attention wandering from the admiration of his magnificence. M’Boya was never allowed out of doors. As a consequence, he never killed birds, and thus could he and the musician maintain a loving relationship.
Anna enjoyed a sip of wine and watched the liquid night through the convex lens of her glass. She and alcohol had a long and rich history. In her thirties she had declared herself an alcoholic and eschewed the stuff. After nearly losing her life—and losing a good friend—in the bowels of Lechuguilla Caverns in New Mexico, she’d taken it up again, but it had never gotten the hold on her it had in the early days when she grieved for Zach. Now that she had apparently lucked into true love twice in a single lifetime, wine had become simply an old friend she visited from time to time.
“I should go,” Anna said finally. The rain had stopped falling from the sky, but there was still the passive drip from trees, eaves, and vines. “I want to call Paul; see if I can catch him between things. He’s being all things to all people at the moment. Port Gibson lost a deputy and a deacon. It falls to Paul to do triple duty till there are new hires.”
Neither moved nor spoke for a moment, hypnotized by the darkness and the dripping of the rain.
M’Boya reached out a black paw, invisible but for the sheen on his fur from a patio light on the far side of the walled garden, and sank the tips of his claws into Anna’s flesh. Spell broken, she pushed up from the sofa. “See you in the morning,” she said to her three hosts.
“Anna?” Geneva’s voice stopped her as she was stepping through the French doors.
“Yeah?”
“Jordan is really a guy? This is not some cruel hoax perpetrated on the visually handicapped but massively talented?”
“Jordan is a guy,” Anna affirmed.
Geneva groaned theatrically. “My reality has crumbled. My self-confidence at an all time low. I must ask you a personal question.”
Anna didn’t much like being on the receiving end of personal questions, but she was, after all, a guest.
“Shoot,” she said.
“Please be blunt with me. I’m a big girl. I can take it. Tell me, do you have a penis?”
“I do,” Anna replied gravely, “but it is not with me at present. More’s the pity.”
Closing the doors quietly behind her, Anna paused a minute to breathe in New Orleans in spring after rain. In the mountains and deserts of the West there would be the ozone and pine, sage and dust—scents that cleared the head and the vision, made the heart race and the horizon impossibly far away and alluring.
Here spring’s perfume was lazy and narcotic, hinting of hidden things, languid hours, and secrets whispered on breath smelling of bourbon and mint. In Rocky Mountain National Park, the clean dry air scoured the skin, polished bone, and honed Anna’s senses to a keen edge. Here it caressed, nurturing flesh with moisture, curling wind-sere hair. It coddled and swathed till believing in dreams and magic seemed inevitable.
The Big Easy, Anna thought, letting the darkness carry her past the still fountain and into the guest cottage. Easy living, easy dying, easy come, easy go: It was as much a place of tides as the ocean that waited beyond the levees to reclaim it.
The guesthouse’s bedroom was on the third floor. The bath was on the second along with an armoire. A living-room-cum-kitchen took up the ground floor. Three rooms stacked one on top of the other with a zigzag ledge of a stairway that would have intimidated a mountain goat stitching them together. The building dated from the 1800s. Everything else was a hodgepodge of eras, half-finished projects, and passing fads. The bathtub was a relic of the 1970s, big and pink and square, and the kitchen and living room were an uneasy alliance of dark wood veneer paneling and fifties Formica.
The bedroom was the saving grace. None of the bright ideas of owners over the years had made it to the third floor, and, though it was as seedy as the last gasp of a failing octogenarian and the NPS salary of Geneva, her one living heir, would suggest, Anna found it charming: worn hardwood floors, peeling white-painted cornices, yellowing wallpaper, sconce lighting, and two-inch-thick hardwood-and-antique-glass French doors opening onto a balcony twenty-four inches deep and seven feet wide.
The room was as close to a tree house as grown-ups usually got. The place had running water but no electricity. That, too, Anna liked. She’d lit her way up the narrow stairs connecting the vertical home with a kerosene lantern with a chimney and a heavy glass base and set it on the room’s only table, a battered TV tray scarred and daubed with so many colors of paint Anna guessed it had served a number of years in somebody’s studio before it got recalled for house duty.
A double bed, looking tiny after decades of queens and kings, leaned against the back wall. It had a painted iron head and footboard, the metal twisted into vines and beaten into leaves. The only other furniture in the room was a lawn chair, the kind Anna remembered from picnics as a kid, an aluminum tubing frame with woven plastic strips riveted on for the seat and back.
Having opened the French doors wide, she blew out the lamp and dragged the patio chair to the edge of the balcony. When she’d first arrived she’d hazarded a step out from the doors, but the resulting creaks and groans had undermined any faith she might have had in its structural integrity.
Settling in, the breeze stirring life into the rain-wet leaves of her bower till they twinkled with captured fragments of city lights, she dug her cell phone out of her backpack to call Paul. Her husband’s home and work numbers were both on her contact list, but she didn’t use it. Numbers important to her she kept sharp in memory because somewhere, sometime, technology always failed and one was left to rely on one’s wits.
Before she had punched in the last number, movement in the courtyard below caught her attention. Folding the phone shut, she stood and stepped silently to one side of the French doors. The tail end of the thunderstorms that had racketed around the city for the past few hours tossed tendrils of vines and stirred the leaves of the oak that sheltered several houses under its wide umbrella.
Abandoning a phone call to her lover to watch in silence and darkness was natural to Anna. Fleetingly she wondered if that in itself was unnatural. Did other people habitually still themselves to listen and wait to see what or who walked unknown and uninvited into their camp? Anna’s watchfulness wasn’t born of fear, or at least it wasn’t most of the time. It was because she loved watching creatures—deer, grizzlies, mountain lions, foxes, jackrabbits—in their natural habitat. At ease in their perceived privacy, they would startle and run if she intruded, so she’d learned to be still.
Relaxed, breathing gently, she waited to see if the marauding neighbor cat had come in to hunt. It could even be a raccoon. Absurd as it seemed, raccoons did occasionally find their way into the gardens in the Quarter.
A slim shadow slipped out from the walkway on the far side of the house. Jordan, probably out for a smoke. Anna was about to leave him to it when he looked furtively up at her darkened windows; not a casual glance or a voyeuristic stare but a hunch-shouldered, head-ducking peek that would have landed him the role of Uriah Heep if she were holding auditions for David Copperfield.
He didn’t see her; that was obvious by the way his eyes, dark smudges in a pale oval face, darted quickly from her balcony. Determining he was unobserved, he hurried across the courtyard with quick catlike steps. Cradled in his left arm was a parcel wrapped in white paper or cloth. As quietly as the feral cat he put her in mind of, he turned down Geneva’s side of the house. Another iron door at the end of t
he alley on his side opened to the sidewalk. Anna had seen it from the street; separate entrances provided a nice bit of privacy for both landlady and tenant. Given he didn’t need to cross by both Anna’s and Geneva’s glass houses to come or go, why creep down Geneva’s alley in the dead of night?
Anna drifted back from the windows and padded quickly down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor. She wasted no time trying to be sneaky; each step had its own complaint. Traversed they sounded like a chorus of very old women levering themselves out of overstuffed chairs.
Reaching the front of the cottage, she stopped. The panes of glass in the door were wavy with age and fogged with grime but clear enough to let her see a grown man less than twenty feet away. The only reason Anna could think of for a nocturnal foray into the landlady’s territory was mischief. Halfway down the skinny ribbon of path, another set of French doors let into Geneva’s kitchen. She never used them. Her aunt had nailed them shut for reasons she’d taken with her to the crypt. Jordan might not know that. He might see it as a good place to break in.
Stupid, Anna thought. Sammy would bark. The guy had just been informed a federal law enforcement officer had moved in next door. Jordan didn’t strike Anna as stupid; massively unbalanced, yes, but smart.
The characteristic whump of a hinged plastic lid falling closed on a garbage bin let Anna know it was she who drew the short straw in the cerebral sweepstakes. Jordan reappeared walking normally, no parcel under his arm. Anna had successfully surveilled a young man taking out the trash. She considered going back upstairs, calling Paul, taking a bath, but she didn’t move.
Jordan hadn’t carried the parcel like it was garbage. One didn’t cradle garbage in the crook of an arm as if it were a baby. Jordan didn’t move like a man on a domestic errand either. Normal people don’t creep like the fog on little cat’s feet checking windows to be sure they’re unobserved when they dump the wastebasket.
