Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  Clare was maintaining her grip on sanity. "If you call the police, I will be arrested and sent back to Seattle to await trial. It's possible I will be convicted. I don't care about the conviction one way or another. What I care about is my girls. Dana and Vee. I didn't kill them. I didn't kill anybody. They were taken, and they are here in New Orleans. Somewhere. They have to be." This last was in the merest of whispers.

  A banging on the door made the women and the dog jump. Anna had forgotten about rousing Geneva. She opened the door. Geneva stood foursquare on the narrow walk, her nightdress as white and flowing as that of a Victorian damsel in distress. In her right hand she held a staff not unlike the one Moses was often depicted with.

  "Hey, Geneva," Anna said. "Jordan's a woman."

  "I told you that. You bang me up in the middle of the damn night to tell me I was right?"

  "Come in," Anna said. "Jordan's telling a bedtime story." Geneva didn't question, or even seem to notice, the bizarreness of the invitation. Anna rolled the computer chair to her, and she sat, looking like Judgment personified.

  Jordan, still on the floor, still holding the dog, was changing. Her outline had softened, her mouth had grown fuller, her hands more graceful, or so Anna thought, watching her. Freed from the curse and burden of a lie, she was morphing back into a woman. Anna wished the Incredible Patty was here. This was voodoo at its best. Glamour, the mist fairies can put in one's eyes to make them see what the fairies want them to see.

  "I read you were an actor," Anna said. Her first husband, Zach, had been an actor, and Anna had always had a soft spot for those who trod the boards.

  "Yes," Clare said simply. Anna was willing to bet she'd been a very good actress but wasn't in the mood to give compliments so she kept it to herself.

  "This is Mackie," Clare introduced the dog. Then she embarked on a tale so twisty and full of turns it had to be true. She finished by telling Anna and Geneva that she'd hopped a train with some travelers out of Seattle and, when she'd gotten to New Orleans, kept on being a punk because nobody saw them, not really, and she could hide in plain sight and watch Bourbon Street, try to find the "nursery." She landed a job at Live Girls Live and was trying to get information about who ran child prostitution in the city. She'd attacked Anna because of the yellow coat the man Mack followed was wearing. It was the same coat that she'd seen in her husband's apartment, the one the Cajun and his cohort had taken away with them. When he'd gotten away, Clare thought she'd lost the one chance she'd had to track down her children.

  When she finished, the four of them sat quietly, letting the telling and the hearing settle into their minds. After a minute Anna asked, "What's in the garbage bag in the closet?"

  It took Jordan a minute to follow the jump in the conversation. "Clothes," she said, sounding confused.

  "It smells like a sack of dead rats," Anna said.

  "My punk clothes," Jordan told her. "If I don't keep them in plastic, they stink up the apartment."

  Anna nodded. One mystery solved. She'd still look in the bag for good measure before the night was done, but she was no longer afraid of what she'd find. No one spoke for a bit, and Anna turned things over in her mind. Clare was a wanted fugitive. Now that Geneva knew, she was sheltering a fugitive--a felony offense. Because Anna knew, if she did not report it to the police, she would be aiding and abetting a fugitive, also a felony offense punishable by jail time. Serious jail time. Even should she and Geneva be found not guilty for some reason, both would lose their jobs. The Park Service was not appreciative of rangers who broke, or even bent, the law. If she shared any of this with Sheriff Paul Davidson and continued not to report it, or convinced him not to report it, he, too, would be guilty of a felony offense.

  Though Anna had a good feeling about Clare, whatever that meant, there was a great deal of impressive evidence--or so she read in the papers--that the woman had committed the crimes of which she was accused.

  If Anna turned her in, Clare would be locked up immediately, her search for her children over. There was no evidence but the word of a woman accused of quadruple murder that her children were alive. The charred corpses from the house fire could be DNA tested, but Anna doubted there was enough proof on Clare's side to get that done. Either way, by the time the results were in and a search for the children was begun, too much time would have elapsed to have much hope of finding them alive--or finding them at all. It was possible, if what Clare said was true and not the ravings of a crazy woman, the children had been sold out of the country.

  Anna was also aware of the fact that if she turned Clare in, she and Geneva would have to physically restrain her until the police arrived. Already she was eyeing the door, and Anna could see the need to run building inside her. Even if she could escape detection a second time, if she remained in New Orleans, it would not be for long.

  Geneva pushed to her feet, using the staff as if she were as old as the prophet. "I'm going to bed," she announced. "Before I do, I'm going to take another Ambien. When I wake up I'm not going to remember a thing. I won't remember you banging on my wall, Anna, and I won't remember this little tete-a-tete. I tell you, when I take that stuff I draw a complete blank."

  With that she found the doorknob and let herself out into the waning night.

  "What are you going to do?" Clare asked Anna.

  Anna got an anxious feeling in her belly. Prison would be hell on earth for her. The thought of losing her freedom gave her the cold sweats. The threat of incarceration might not deter a lot of criminals, but it worked for Anna. She wasn't going to risk it now for the woman on the floor.

  She was going to risk it for two little girls who might still be alive. Three, she amended, remembering Aisha.

  "You're Jordan," she said. "A creepy punk guy. If you're anybody but Jordan, I've never even suspected it. I'm a good neighbor. I'm going to help you find the murderess's children."

  TWENTY-ONE

  Anna and Clare sat in cute uncomfortable chairs on either side of a tiny cafe table in the courtyard, each with a mug of coffee. It was nearly noon, but neither woman had been awake long. Anna still wore her lounging pajamas, pink with yellow duckies--her nod to the decencies. She slept nude. Clare was dressed, her little beard in place. The tattoo across her brow--the crown of thorns, which Anna had figured out was made with Magic Marker and powder--had been retouched. Anna appreciated that Clare kept up the masquerade even in private. Plausible deniability was the only thing that was going to keep her out of prison if this thing went south.

  After Geneva had left to commit amnesia, Anna and Clare had spoken little. There was too much to absorb, too many risks taken or contemplated, to want to be with strangers. When Anna wandered out the following forenoon with her coffee, it had surprised her to find the other woman waiting. She'd more than half expected she would have rabbited and taken her dog with her. Part of her had hoped she had. That would have spelled the end to Anna's moral obligation.

  Sunlight filtered strongly through the live oak, casting sharp-edged leaf shadows on the brick. Mack lay between Anna and Clare, sharing his benevolence. "What color are you when you're not undercover?" Anna asked him as she rubbed the toes of her left foot behind his silky ear.

  "Black and white, like a zebra," his owner answered for him. "When I was dyeing my hair, I got the idea that he might be put in the police be-on-the-lookout-for things. The cops that came when the house exploded knew he was alive and with me. He's got a worse problem with roots than I do."

  Where fur met dog, there was a quarter inch of white in some places. It gave him an exotic, slightly out-of-focus look Anna found fascinating. She continued brushing his fur this way and that, watching the play of black and white.

  Clare cleared her throat. Anna didn't look up or stop playing with Mack. The burden of this conversation was Clare's to carry.

  "Last night I told you what I'd found out in Seattle," Clare began, her voice in its male incarnation. Anna preferred it that way. Not only because it reminded
her to maintain the charade on her end, never call Jordan "she," "her," or "Clare," but because when Clare was Clare, the crazed mom, running on nicotine and hope, she was too fragile to deal with.

  As Jordan, Clare seemed to genuinely be another person. Her acting skills were uncanny. It reminded Anna of when she was a kid watching Charlie McCarthy on television, seeing the wood being brought to life by the puppeteer. Jordan was hard-edged and full of anger; he smoked nonfiltered cigarettes and seemed fueled by rage. Jordan was still functioning on a level that Clare could not.

  "I haven't just been jerking off since I got to New Orleans. I've been trying to find out where the major houses are--not the street corners or upstairs rooms where these assholes stand in line waiting to get a ten-dollar blow job, but the higher-end houses where they'd be more likely to cater to a specialized, richer kind of asshole."

  Jordan's vocabulary was stunningly different than what she'd heard of Clare's the previous night. Anna doubted Clare swore. She was probably the sort of mom who would quietly but firmly take people to task for using foul language in front of her children. The script she was writing for Jordan was different. It wasn't Clare who had intended to cut Anna's throat, it was Jordan. That Jordan would kill if he had to--and found the strength to--Anna didn't doubt. What she didn't know was how schizophrenic Clare Sullivan had become, as if acting had begun to slide over into multiple personality disorder. She made a mental note to call and ask Molly if she'd ever witnessed such a thing.

  "Candy--you must have met her in the women's john--before she came to Dick's Den--"

  Dick's Den must be the actual name of Live Girls Live, Anna guessed. "Classy," she said.

  "Yeah, real witty. The owner's playing on the contrast with his dump and Rick's across the street. Anyway, before Candy got on at Dick's she was on the streets. Before that, from when she was real little, she remembers she was in what she calls a 'fancy house.' Candy's retarded. You noticed?"

  "Hard to miss," Anna said. She drank her coffee and watched the sun play across her knuckles and the rim of the cup. This time of year it was rich and gentle, a mixture of honey and aloe and eternity spilling onto the skin. In a month or less it would be closer to molten metal. The sweetness and cruelty of the Deep South allowed the inherent insanity of the human condition to flower in ways it didn't elsewhere. Artists, musicians, writers, alcoholics--creativity and excess and genius and decay found a home beneath the heavy branches of trees older than most American cities.

  Probably in the clear cutting air of the Rocky Mountains Anna would not be having coffee with a cross-dresser accused of four murders. In New Orleans it was ceasing to seem particularly remarkable.

  "The kid's also been beat to shit more than once. She's clean now except for pot, but she's had her go-arounds with coke and horse. Only being broke and stupid has saved her from that good night. She's also gotten cunning--and the mind of an eight-year-old, given the right circumstances, can be as cunning as that of a much smarter person. Almost a feral survival mode. Somewhere along the line, someone told Candy to keep the secret of the fancy house in such a way she's not only keeping it but has probably buried it.

  "Since she likes me, I think she might tell me in time. I think she'd tell me now, but on some level she senses that's all I want; that's what this man is going to use her for, then abandon her like every other man in her life used and abandoned her. So she's holding it back, keeping me with her. It's not my style, bashing retards--"

  Again the schizophrenic-vs.-professional-thespian question flitted through Anna's mind and left a comet trail of alarm. Clare Sullivan probably never used the word "retarded," much less "retard." Seattle, liberal theater crowd, she was far more likely to refer to the intellectually challenged or mentally handicapped. Jordan used the word without a flicker of self-consciousness.

  "But the one thing I don't have is time. I can feel it running out. It's like bleeding to death; I know the life is leaking out and if I don't stop the flow, the girls will die."

  "Or worse," Anna said without thinking.

  "For Clare--for any mother--there is no 'worse.' If they're alive, there's hope. If they're dead, it's curtains. For everything."

  "How do you plan to 'bash it out of the retard'?" Anna asked coldly. "Would you really do that?"

  "I'll do what I have to," Jordan snapped. He threw himself back in his chair. His hand fisted and began beating a silent tattoo on his thigh. Sun flickered in the moving shadows and lit up his crown of thorns. For a second it looked so real Anna had to quell the urge to reach out and touch it.

  The fierceness left Jordan's face. "I didn't mean bash it out in the sense of hitting or hurting her," he said with the ghost of Clare Sullivan haunting his eyes. "I meant something not physical but, given what the poor thing has been through, no less brutal--threatening to abandon her unless she lets me hypnotize her."

  "Can you hypnotize people?" Anna asked, impressed in spite of herself. She'd always wanted to be hypnotized for some reason and was the first to volunteer when opportunity knocked, but she'd never even come close to going under. Molly said she was too guarded to let anyone in, that or she was too contrary.

  "Anybody can hypnotize susceptible people," an unsettling hybrid of Jordan and Clare said. "We studied it for a while when acting classes were all about weird. I could put Candy under. She's been giving over control of her life since she was born."

  "Or having it forcibly wrested from her," Anna said.

  "That, too."

  "Why would that be brutal?" Anna asked, genuinely curious.

  "Because she would be doing it so we wouldn't leave her. That's the tacit contract she makes when she gives herself away. But as soon as we get what we want we will leave her, just like every other son of a bitch."

  "Ah. There's that. What do you hope to get from her, if she'll go under for you?" Anna asked. She almost said "you guys"; the sense of two people sharing one skin was so powerful!

  "Just from the way she talks about the fancy house--and she doesn't do it much, I think she was scared silent, born stupid, and has forgotten most of it--but some of the things she's said made it sound like she was really little when she was put there. There is no memory of life before the fancy house. It's possible she was born there, but I don't think so. I think she was dumped there when she was around eighteen months to two years old. The bits she's remembered start when she got in trouble for peeing in her 'date dress.' I'm guessing she was maybe three when that happened."

  "Damn," Anna muttered, thinking of the photographs that stained the walls of Jordan's apartment, the youth of the children, some babes in arms. It hadn't been too long ago a preacher of some sort in northern Louisiana was arrested for the rape of a thirteen-month-old infant. The child died. Mostly these were things Anna didn't think about by choice. Now there was no choice.

  "I think when Candy got too old for the fancy house--probably eleven or twelve, when she started looking like a woman--they put her out on the streets. Lucky she's a retard," Jordan said. "The fuckers probably kill the kids that can tell on them, that or sell them overseas somewhere."

  "Do you think she's just blocked all memory of the fancy house because she was so miserable there?"

  "Miserable compared to what? She'd never known anything else. She had pretty clothes and food and there were other kids to play with when she wasn't 'on dates.' Candy remembers being on the street like being cast out of Eden. From what I've been able to pry out of her the fancy house customers weren't allowed to hit. In Candy's world that's a huge job perk.

  "Look at this." Jordan fished a well-worn photograph out of the pocket of his disgusting punk shirt and passed it to Anna.

  She laid it on the tabletop where the sun wasn't playing games and looked at it. "The guy's got a doll?" Anna asked

  "It's Candy."

  Anna looked closer. Jordan was right. The doll's face was familiar. Other than the breasts and the height, Candy hadn't changed much in the past months or years.

&
nbsp; "She give you this?"

  "No. I lifted it from her little bag. The girls all leave their purses behind the bar so they don't get stolen."

  "Good idea in theory," Anna said dryly.

  "Look at her clothes." Jordan pushed the picture closer to her. "The costume looks well made. I'm guessing Paris, turn of the century--the nineteenth, not the twentieth. It was the fashion to dress children like tiny adults. Even to tiny little powdered wigs and heavy makeup. This isn't easy and it isn't cheap. If they've got guys paying for this kind of fantasy, it's got money connected. If there's money, we should be able to find it. They can't move an operation like that around to a new place every night like a Joe's speakeasy.

  "I've tried to talk to the women at Dick's--Tanya, Delilah, and Star--but they treat me like I've got every disease known to mankind."

  "They think you're a pedophile," Anna said.

  All trace of Jordan disappeared, and the stunned face looking at Anna was that of a shocked, middle-aged actress from Seattle. "You're kidding! My God! Why would they think that?"

  "You cozy up to a child and pump her for information about where children are sold for sex, what are they supposed to think? That you're simply a murderess seeking her daughters?"

  "Gosh," Clare said and slumped in her chair. "The woman who runs that voodoo shop, the blonde, does she think so, too?"

  "That's my guess. Do you remember that dead pigeon, the one you put in the trash?"

  Clare looked blank for a moment, then nodded.

  "I dug it out. I thought you'd voodooed a pigeon to curse me. After talking to the Amazing Patty at Vieux Dieux, I figured her rival was putting the curse on you."

  "Poor thing," Clare said. "She must have been afraid for her little girl."

  Anna sipped her coffee and watched as Jordan seeped back into Clare's face and body.

  When the transformation was complete, Anna said, "This is too big for us. We've got to bring in the police."

  Jordan snorted. "See the guy in the picture?" Anna looked at the man on whose lap the Candy doll sat. "That picture was taken a few years ago--at least that's my guess. If Candy's in her early teens now and was about nine or ten then, three years would be about right. Well, that guy grew up, too. His name is Walter Le Beau. For the past five years he's been New Orleans's chief of police."