Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  "Rats," Anna muttered and, letting herself out onto Ursulines, tried to remember the disposition of the little avian corpse and, most particularly, the symbols or diagrams that had been sketched in blood on its shroud.

  Across Dumaine, a block from New Orleans's Historic Voodoo Museum, was the magic shop Vieux Dieux. The museum might have provided more scholarly observations but, when dealing with the bizarre, Anna's instinct told her to go with the practitioners of the bizarre. She didn't want an intellectual; she wanted a witch.

  Vieux Dieux's door was open and, beside it, a strange sculpture of a many-armed creature sitting in what had, at one time, been a birdbath. To the right of the door was a large picture window, sans glass, shutters folded to either side and used as display boards, one for T-shirts printed in a pastiche of skulls and other sinister cliches, the other supporting a black signboard as long and thin as the shutter it leaned against. Hand lettered in white was a menu of the shop's specials: Magiks, Spells, Curses, Psychic Self-Defense, Tarot, Love Potions, and, at the bottom but written with no less respect, Souvenirs.

  Anna left the bright sunlit street and entered the dim confines. The shop felt witchy enough--a little kitschy as well, but even practitioners of the occult needed to make a living. It was deserted: no customers, no salespeople, not even a black cat lounging amid the esoterica. Nobody.

  At least nobody visible, Anna thought with a smile.

  The tiny shop was stuffed with the necessities of a well-maintained occult life. The center had been given over to an island covered with tiers of gargoyles, demons, crosses, headstones, tiny tombs and zombies to go with them, sarcophagi and coffins, Barbie-sized skeletons, and rocks--with some arcane powers, Anna presumed. On a wire rack thrusting up from this macabre landscape was the solution to the world's problems just a shake away, vials filled with different colored powders and identified by neat hand-lettered instructions tied around the necks with bits of string. One could sprinkle bad luck or good luck, sprinkle away a bad boss, a sloppy neighbor, an abusive lover, or simply sprinkle general all-purpose Evil Repellent around the house. What the powders were comprised of was not disclosed. They varied in color and texture. To Anna they looked to be filled with Comet, colored sand, dried ground herbs, talcum powder mixed with blue glass beads, and a dozen other creative combinations.

  Another rack held "witch bottles," square-ish glass bottles about the size of Anna's palm with bits of stone and fabric and other magical ingredients inside. These Anna rather liked. They went one notch higher on the continuum of force. The powders fended off evil. The witch bottles actually caught the wickedness sent by the enemy and boomeranged it right back at him.

  In the herbal display was a nod to the classics; eye of newt was represented, as was toe of frog.

  The walls were as densely covered as the island. On a floor-to-ceiling shelf near the back of the shop were candles. Some were tall votives in holders that could be "dressed" for any specific event. What that meant, Anna could only imagine. Beneath these were strobe candles to be burned to grant wishes, bring relief, or cast spells--depending on the color of the wax. Anna's mind flashed on banks of votive candles burning before statues of the saints in cathedrals, each small flame representing a desire burning in someone's breast.

  Vieux Dieux was crammed with the promise of fulfilling unfulfilled hopes, granting unrealized wishes, curing feelings of helplessness, yearnings for revenge, and unspoken anger. The knot that had sat in her belly like an undigested acorn since she'd seen Jordan's macabre donation to the refuse heap began to loosen.

  Maybe the world needed more magic shops. Far better lonely, frightened souls come to this store, redolent with incense that could soothe, lure, avert, abate, and generally make the world a better place, than spend their hard-earned cash on the modern voodoo of psychology. Religion and old magic knew the power of faith and good theater.

  Opposite the candles were books: vampires, witchcraft, tarot, vampires, herb cultivation, vampires, spells, histories, vampires. Anna learned voodoo had come with slaves from Africa to the West Indies, and as tribes were mixed in slavery, their religions were shared and reinvented, mingling gods and stories from the Dark Continent. This amalgam of belief systems was imported to New Orleans along with the enslaved believers. There was no single set of rules for the practice any more than there was for Christianity, where one church speaks in tongues, another prescribes penance to clear the soul of sin, and yet another baptizes dead ancestors.

  Thumbing through the books on voodoo, she didn't find anything that looked like the symbols on the rag the bird had been wrapped in. She was about to move on to books on witchcraft when a silky voice insinuated itself into her solitude.

  "Can I help you?"

  Anna turned toward the source.

  As befit the circumstances, a pale disembodied face manifested out of the gloom behind a dark drape sequestering the inner sanctum from the eyes of the uninitiated. Form coalesced around the specter, and a woman, not five feet tall and as fine-boned as a child, was standing behind a counter draped like an altar and lit by two votives. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the prosaic intrusion of a cash register and credit card machine.

  The proprietress's hair was unremittingly black, parted in the center and grown to the middle of her back. Blunt-cut bangs hung straight and thick just above eyebrows plucked into thin arches that made her eyes seem larger than perhaps they were. A high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-dusting dress the same unrelieved black as her hair left only the white face and long-fingered white hands, devoid of rings or nail polish, exposed.

  "I'm Patty," the apparition said.

  Leticia, Serena, Cosmos, Guinevere: Anna would have taken in her stride. "Patty" took her off guard. "Surely not," she said, then, to cover her rudeness, added, "Yes, maybe you can help me. I found a dead pigeon that looked like it had been used in some sort of voodoo ritual."

  Patty's lips thinned into a hard line, and the face Anna had taken to be in its thirties looked more like late forties. Anna stepped closer and folded her hands on the erstwhile altar. Unsure what she'd said to offend Madam Patty, she soldiered on.

  "It had a stake--like a barbecue skewer--through its heart."

  Patty turned so abruptly her long ink-stained hair swung out, ruffling across Anna's knuckles in a feathered kiss smelling of patchouli oil. Her back to Anna, the miniature voodooienne busied herself tidying a basket filled with mood rings, or what Anna took to be mood rings. For all she knew they could be zombies' teeth powdered into glittery resin, sure to bring down plague and pestilence or at least a bad case of acne.

  "Voodoo is a peaceful religion," Patty said dismissively, her tone at odds with the stone face she'd recently whisked from Anna's view. "Kids will sometimes find a dead bird or rat or cat or something and fiddle with it to freak out their friends. It's nothing to do with magic, just pranks in bad taste."

  The Amazing Patty was clearly a believer. She was reacting to the dead bird the way a rabbi might react to the news that hoodlums had carved a Star of David into the Baptists' cross down the block.

  "I hope it wasn't child's play," Anna said. "The bird was alive when the stake pierced its heart. Runes were written in blood on the shroud." Anna had no idea whether or not the marks were runes. She didn't even know if the skewer had pierced the bird's heart or torn an artery or collapsed a lung or if the poor thing had died from shock at the pain and fear caused by rough handling. Patty's gravity and portentousness were contagious. Faith--or disinformation (a.k.a. lies)--was also contagious, and Anna had to remind herself that the only magic in the shop was the kind manufactured in the human mind.

  The woman's pale hands quit playing across her inventory like spiders tapping out chopsticks. She turned to face Anna across the counter. For a long moment she studied Anna's face. Finding no malice, mockery, or slyness there, she relaxed.

  "People want to believe the worst of voodoo the way they do of any religion not their own," Patty said with a trace of
defiance. "They do the same with the Wiccan religion," she added, fluttering her fingers. They weren't as long as Anna'd first taken them to be. The nails extended a good inch past the tips of her fingers and appeared to be homegrown rather than acrylic. Maybe Patty really was a witch. Anna's nails split or broke before they were long enough to bother filing.

  "Do you know anyone around here who might not be as peaceful as the rank and file?" Anna asked carefully. "Someone mean enough to kill a pigeon to make a point?"

  "Modern voduns don't customarily sacrifice animals, and the few that are sacrificed are raised for it, pampered. It's a gift, you see, and it has to be sacrificed by the right person, someone who's trained for it. If just anybody does it they won't see." To make her point she drew her hands over her eyes, then covered her ears.

  The spirit world, it would seem, was deaf and blind to inappropriate sacrifice.

  "It used to be common enough. Even into the thirties and forties. Your dead pigeon might have been killed by somebody trying to make it look like a voodoo curse to scare you."

  "There are no throwbacks to the bad old days still hanging around?" Anna asked. "Every religion has a darker side. For every god, there's got to be a devil or a demon to make him necessary."

  "There is something called voodoo witchcraft," Patty admitted. "Just like there are people who practice black magic. This could even have been a mix--hex and voodoo--to give a spell added power. Voodoo witchcraft is that darker side. The practitioners of it don't care who they hurt," she added with a bitterness that suggested she had been on the receiving end of a dead pigeon or two in her time.

  "Come." Patty wove her way through the crowded shop to the window that opened onto the sidewalk. Anna followed. Beside the bookshelves was a narrow doorway partially obscured by a curtain that she hadn't noticed. Inside the protected alcove was a tiny round table covered with symbols. A candle sat in the center. A handwritten sign above the table read: KNOW THE FUTURE $45.00.

  Seers' clientele seemed ever unperturbed by the fact that the fortune-tellers hadn't made a killing at the racetracks or on the stock market. They simply believed and, in believing, didn't question. Faith and blind faith were not different things. What a comfort faith would be, Anna thought wistfully. Then, ushered into a chair between a scaly, fanged gargoyle and a bag of herbs guaranteed to deflect killing curses, she remembered faith and paranoia were two sides of the same coin.

  Flanked by two straight-backed chairs, the table at which Patty seated her was in front of the window opening onto Dumaine. A nice marketing choice on Patty's part; a bit of theater to draw in customers.

  When they were settled, Patty laid her hands, palms down, on the table, her fingers spread as if she expected the spirit world to knock or make the table dance. "Tell me," she said.

  Anna described the dead pigeon in detail, including the symbols on the cloth as best she remembered them.

  After she'd finished, Patty thought for a moment then said, "It's a psychic attack. Wait." She sprang to her feet, then flitted through the curtain into the alcove where the future waited to be unveiled for forty-five dollars.

  "Shall I follow you?" Anna asked, starting to rise.

  "No. I'm coming out." She reemerged in a whirl of black fabric, a battered trade paperback in her hands.

  "The Witches' Formulaic," she said as she plopped it down on the table between them. "Spells and curses handed down the way cooks hand down recipes that work. It's out of print, but I can probably get you one."

  Patty gracefully slid into her chair and flipped through the pages. "Here," she said, pointing to a page titled "Black Blood and Feathers." "This is a slash-and-run curse. There's a belief that it causes magical harm to the victim, but it's a public curse, meant for the neighbors to see."

  "Intimidation?" Anna asked.

  "Among other things." Patty leaned over the book and traced the words with one long fingernail as she read with undisguised relish: " 'Get a trussed black chicken,' trussed, what a wonderful sound. What is a trussed chicken, do you suppose?"

  "Tied up," Anna said. "Usually by the feet."

  "Trussed. I love learning new things." Patty went back to the book. " 'A trussed black chicken and a black candle. Hang the chicken up and burn the candle down to a nub beside the chicken, but not touching the chicken. Carry the nub and the chicken to the door of the house to be cursed. Hang the trussed fowl over the door. Drop the candle-end some distance away, but not too far away. Slash the chicken's throat and run. Do not get any of the chicken's blood on your body or your clothes.' "

  Color had come to Patty's cheeks, and she was gesturing and making faces as she mapped out the magical means to an end. For a witch who professed to be white, the owner of Vieux Dieux seemed at home and happy with birds and blood.

  "Do you know anyone in the Quarter who might do a slash-and-run curse?" Anna asked.

  Patty's lips pressed together as if she were blotting her lipstick, and her eyes slued to the left, looking out of the window. She was about to get down and dirty with the gossip in the occult world, Anna thought. Witches weren't the only ones who could read signs.

  "I had something like it happen to me." Her voice was barely above a whisper, and Anna had to lean in to catch all the words. "The shop on the next block, partway down on the other side of the street, Authentic Voodoo--" Patty's long nails etched quotation marks around the word "authentic," and she rolled her eyes to underline her scorn. "This woman moves in like six months ago and opens the shop. She does this all-white thing: long blond hair, white dress--too stupid for words. If you ask me, she looks more like Alice in Wonderland than a voodooienne--and she's got a mini-me! Her little girl gets the same exact dresses all in white. Her hair is the same long Disney thing with the white headband. They must go through a lot of authentic bleach--"

  Patty stopped talking, and her eyes narrowed as she stared at Anna. "You know who left the pigeon," she said shrewdly.

  "No," Anna started.

  "You always know. You know." Patty was all business now, annoyed that Anna was trying to play her. "Let me see the symbols."

  A long explanation wasn't going to rectify things, so Anna did as she was told and sketched the symbols on the back of a Walmart receipt with a government pen she'd stolen at one time or another.

  Patty looked at them for a few seconds, then shook her head. "I don't know what they mean. Maybe nothing," she said coolly.

  Anna couldn't tell whether Patty didn't know or just wouldn't say. "The pigeon wasn't given to me," Anna said. "So I really don't know who might have done it. I honestly don't."

  Patty softened marginally. "Who was it for?"

  "A neighbor. A guy named Jordan. He lives up Ursulines."

  Patty's eyebrows drew down till they formed a knot of flesh between them. "That creepy guy with the dog and the wispy chin hair? Stinks and hangs with the gutter punks?"

  It always came as a surprise to Anna that cities weren't vast sprawls of humans unknown one to the other, but clusters of incestuous social groups no different than those in small towns or isolated parks. "That's him," she said.

  Patty stood abruptly. "He probably did it himself for attention, or one of his greaseball friends did it as a joke." The interview most decidedly at an end, Patty left Anna seated at the table and headed back to the recesses of the shop.

  "Thanks," Anna called after her.

  Safe behind Vieux Dieux's altar to capitalism, one hand resting on the credit card machine, the other on the cash register, Patty gave Anna a long level look. Anna wondered if she was trying to cast a spell on her.

  In a low voice Patty said distinctly, "Life is not random. What appears evil might be necessity." In a more normal tone, she added, "Don't mess with this guy. He's not--" She seemed at a loss as to what Jordan wasn't.

  Anna waited politely, but Patty turned her back, waggled white fingers in farewell, and vanished through the curtain behind the counter where she'd been when Anna first entered the shop.

&nbs
p; NINE

  Clare collapsed against the side of the glider. The wooden corner jabbed between her shoulders. She didn't mind the pain. Because dogs sense the emotions of their humans--or because he was cold--Mackie crawled into her lap. After a time of stillness, the intruding intruder light went out, leaving them in darkness made incomplete by orange streetlights burning the underside of the sky.

  Lurid. The streetlights made things look lurid. Ever aware of language, the actor in Clare noted this but ascribed no meaning to it. Digging beneath the damp dog, she fumbled the Camels from the pocket of David's inside-out raincoat. Pack opened, she put one between her lips and lit it. She noticed without interest that, though she had stopped smoking years ago, her hands had never forgotten how to hold and strike, how to protect the nascent flame.

  The first drag was like she'd never quit. She drew smoke and tar and carcinogens deep into her lungs. It was the least she could do. Closing her eyes, she let the smoke trickle from nose and mouth. The end of the world smelled of smoke, not the smoke of Turkish tobacco but the wet reeking smoke of lives ruined, goods destroyed by fire, futures incinerated. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes.

  She didn't cry for Dana and Vee, for their pain, their fear. She didn't even cry for the pain she would bear over a lifetime of their loss. These things were too great for tears. Screaming and pounding one's face on the stones of the seashore, rending one's garments, raking the flesh from one's bones with broken fingernails as other cultures, other times, had recognized the need for, might have given some relief, but Clare wasn't them. Americans had no way of expressing the big emotions. Americans weren't even supposed to have them.

  She cried because she cried. Then she slept because she was tired.

  Childish whispers entered her dreams.

  "She's on fire, like the house."

  "No. Look. There's a cigarette in her hand."

  "Smoking's bad for you."

  "Doesn't matter. She's dead."

  "Stop it. She's not. She's sleeping."