“The whole canal’s out of service?” Faye distinctly remembered reading otherwise.
“Well, pieces of it are still used for drainage, which is fairly remarkable, considering they started building it in 1794. But for the most part, it’s gone. Filled in and covered over. But that’s beside the point. I wanted you to understand that Shelly saw things in these photos that nobody else could. Look. You and I can see the scar left by a big ol’ canal stretching across miles and miles.”
He tapped on the paper, where anyone with eyes could see the Carondelet Canal’s mark on the cityscape.
“Well, Shelly could see evidence of little tiny things—a ditch or a wall or a pathway that’s been gone for a century. She was that good.”
Godtschalk walked over to see what they were doing. When Dr. Britton pulled another photo out of the stack and spread it atop the others, the writer grabbed his glasses excitedly, lifting them a quarter-inch off the bridge of his nose so that he could focus through the proper section of his trifocals.
Joe looked at him with an expression that said, “What the heck are you doing with your glasses?” and Faye wanted to say, “Yeah, people get old. Even you will, someday.” She had recently invested in a pair of reading glasses, but they were hidden in her shirt pocket, waiting to be used at times when she just couldn’t manage without them…and when nobody was looking.
If she squinted, she could see the photo perfectly well. Okay, not perfectly, but well enough.
“Would you look at the resolution of that thing?” Godtschalk enthused. “You can see cars. You can almost see them well enough to identify a particular car. You can even see people, but they’re just blobs walking down the street.” He shifted his glasses a quarter-inch to the right and Faye wondered whether he needed a new prescription. “Hey! You can even see the fortune-telling gypsies sitting at their tables in front of the cathedral!”
That did it. Faye wanted to see the gypsies.
She broke down and pulled the glasses out of her pocket, despite the fact that she hated for Joe to see her wear them. It was a bit startling to be so visibly reminded that satellites and airplanes and helicopters—the world’s eyes in the sky—never slept. And they didn’t need trifocals, either. Most people never gave a thought to the hardware zipping around the Earth until their GPS went on the fritz. Faye knew somebody who could be seen on Google Streetview, calmly riding her bicycle down the street with her dog at her side.
“Shelly’s talents were as psychic as any of those fakers on Jackson Square,” Dr. Britton said. He raised his own glasses off his nose, and rubbed a handkerchief over his eyes. “Losing her was such a waste.” He took a moment to gather his composure. “She was no gypsy, though. Shelly’s skills weren’t magic. After she’d shown me an anomaly on one of her photos, I could see it, too. She just had an incredible eye for detail. And not just with aerial photography, either. Let me show you something.”
They followed him to his car, where he pulled a heavy file box from the back seat. Shuffling through junk that seemed to have been thrown in there randomly, he pulled out an old copy of
Archaeology
magazine.
“Most high-profile article I ever published,” he said, smoothing the cover possessively. “We found a very early habitation site not far from here, but maybe I shouldn’t say ‘we.’ Shelly turned that job from an absolute bust into some of the most interesting work I’ve done.”
He opened the magazine and went straight to the page he wanted. “See this photo? See the silhouette where a wooden post decayed in place?”
Faye did. Of course she did. The darkened soil enclosed within straight vertical lines was hard to miss.
“Well, this is what it looked like when Shelly first saw it.”
He pointed to another photo that showed an excavation cutting down through apparently undisturbed soil. A small black arrow in the middle of the photo pointed to a smudge only slightly darker than the surrounding dirt. “Shelly crawled down in the hole and studied the stratigraphy until that dark spot caught her eye. She told me she thought it was something interesting. I said, ‘Yeah, right,’ but we enlarged the unit…and found what was left of a hut that dated to the early 1700s. I never doubted her after that.”
The handkerchief took another swipe under his glasses.
Faye studied the photo with its tiny telltale smudge. Yes, the woman had indeed been good.
“Since we resumed work at this site, I’ve wished for someone with Shelly’s skills. You’ve seen some of the remnants of water storage and drainage features that we found. We’ve done the best we could at reading the soils’ permeability and texture and color, then imagining where people would have wanted their water moved. We’ve done okay, I think. Still, I have to wonder what she could have done with the very same information. The only comfort is knowing that she used her skills to the very end, saving lives. My friend Bobby worked with her at Zephyr Field. It takes a lot to earn Bobby’s respect, but Shelly did.”
It occurred to Faye that Shelly sounded a lot like Joe in her feel for the way the natural world worked. Joe was, at that moment, head-down in the open unit, scooping up chunks of soil and smelling it. She took off her glasses. If he was going to taste that dirt, she didn’t want to see.
Faye wished her cell phone hadn’t rung. Well, it didn’t ring, actually. It played the memorable strains of
The Sorceror’s Apprentice
, because they were just bombastic enough to catch her attention when she was deep in an excavation, hard at work. She couldn’t believe that Jodi had gotten her cell phone company to honor her maintenance contract and get it replaced so quickly. Badges were handy things to have.
If her phone had just stayed silent or if Jodi hadn’t managed to get it replaced or if Faye had managed to somehow ignore those bombastic strains, then she could have gone a little longer without knowing the truth about Nina’s accident-that-wasn’t-an-accident. As it was, she wished she had just switched the phone off, instead of listening to what Jodi had to say. But Faye was a realist. Given a choice, she would always opt for the truth, no matter how grim. Jodi’s voice had sounded tight—choked, even—when Faye answered the phone, so she’d had early warning that this was one of those times when the truth was grim.
“My divers found some things in the river, under the dock where Nina fell in.”
Faye’s analytical mind reflexively began trying to figure out what the divers found. She decided that it had to be something heavy enough to sink, and shaped in such a way that it dropped to the bottom before the mighty river moved it far downstream…then she stopped herself. Some of the possibilities were icky enough that she didn’t want to think about them. Besides, Jodi was going to tell her anyway.
“The most important thing we found was an archaeologist’s trowel.”
Jodi sounded like she wished she didn’t have to tell Faye that.
Faye didn’t like the direction her thoughts were taking her.
“At least, I think it was an archaeologist’s trowel, but it doesn’t look like the ones I saw in your office.”
Faye’s answer was slow in coming. “There are other kinds of trowels out there in the marketplace. It’s just that archaeologists are just a boring bunch, so most of us use the same kind. Was it…did it have a blunt end, like a spatula?”
“Yes. And the shape of the cut on her head and the bruise around it matches that odd shape. At least my forensics people say so. You’ve seen one like it lately?”
“It was Nina’s.” The anger surged so quickly that Faye was hard-put to say where it had come from. Apparently, it had been there all the time. “Who did it? Who did this thing?”
“We’re a little short on clues, other than the trowel. You and Joe tracked the dock up with your old dirty boots, so I can’t say whether anybody else was out there who might have pushed Nina.”
Faye said, “I’m so sorry—,” but Jodi wouldn’t let her finish the apology.
“Crap, Faye. If Joe hadn’t tracked mud out there, Nina would be dead right now. And if you hadn’t left another trail of grime, Joe might be dead, too. Let it rest.”
Nina had been attacked with her own trowel, a tool so intimate that it rarely left her hand during working hours. Faye groped for words—just for a second, but it wasn’t like her to be at a loss for words, ever. She came up with one.
“Things.” The word was important, so she said it again. “Things. You said you found ‘things’ in the water. What else did you find besides Nina’s trowel?”
“Um…weird stuff.”
“I’m coming to think that everything about this town is weird.”
“Well, it is. But usually it’s weird in a good way.”
“Are you going to tell me what you found, or not?”
Jodi expelled a stream of air from her lips that was audible even over the staticky cell phone connection. “Yeah. I’ll tell you. But remember that I told you it was weird.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Five coffin nails. And a handful of pennies. And they went in the water recently, because it wouldn’t take too awful long for the Mississippi River to wash some silt over the top of ’em.”
Faye couldn’t think of any logical response to this, other than, “How do you know they were coffin nails?”
“Do you know how many voodoo shops there are in New Orleans? And how many hoodoo practitioners we’ve got?”
“No. Do you?”
“No. But it’s a whole lot. I’ve run across coffin nails before. And a whole lot of other hexes and spells. I went out to your work site to ask Dauphine what she knew about those nails. She wouldn’t say much, other than that coffin nails were used to bind things. She allowed as how maybe somebody wanted to bind Nina to this life. The way she said it, I’m thinking that Dauphine threw them in the water and that she was doing what any voodoo mambo would do for a friend. I never got her to actually say so, though.”
“Maybe somebody wanted to bind Nina to the bottom of the Mississippi.”
Faye didn’t like being so relentlessly negative, but it was just how she felt at the moment.
“Heck if I know. Now pennies…” Jodi’s voice turned speculative. “As far as I know, they’re usually good luck pieces. Lots of people carry a penny in their pocket all the time to keep from being bewitched.”
“Really? These days? In the twenty-first century?”
“Yes, really. And don’t get all high and mighty on me. Your family’s been in the South for a long time?”
“You know it has.” It rankled Faye to think Jodi was implying that being southern was inextricably linked to being ignorant. And it made no sense, since Jodi’s people had probably been in south Louisiana since Napoleon was a boy.
“So what does it mean when you drop a fork?”
“Company’s coming.”
“When you step over a child lying on the floor?”
Faye wished that she didn’t know the answer, because knowing it meant that Jodi was right. “She’ll stop growing.”
“You don’t sweep dirt out of your house after dark, do you? Because you’ll sweep your luck out the door. And you do know that sweeping under a woman’s feet means she’ll be an old maid.”
“I don’t sweep. I like dirt.”
A smug laugh told her that Jodi knew she’d won this round. “You archaeologists are all about culture. Well, superstition’s a part of that. Isn’t it? There’s a bit of Africa in every corner of this part of the country. You can call it voodoo, if you’re into the formal religion stuff.
Voudon
, if you want to be plu-perfect about your spelling. Or you can call it hoodoo, if you prefer your root magic passed down from mother to child. But don’t tell me you think people don’t still believe in the power of coffin nails.”
Faye grunted, wishing she could think of an argument that would deny the truth. People are superstitious and they always will be. They just shift their irrational beliefs into a modern form…hence the proliferation of fortune-tellers who plied their trade by telephone, television, and internet.
Jodi laughed again. “Faye. You’re a fraud. I bet you don’t even shake crumbs out of your tablecloths outside after dark. Somebody might die.”
“I don’t own a tablecloth.” And it was a good thing, because there was no way she’d be shaking any crumbs outside after dark, not while Nina’s life hung in the balance. “How’s Nina doing?”
“Not much different. Doing better all the time, physically, but she still doesn’t make much sense when she talks. You know, it could have been worse. If Nina had been attacked by a strong assailant with a pointy trowel like yours, it might have punctured her skull.”
Faye paused again. The notion of being attacked with her own trowel, the tool that rarely left her hand on the average workday, felt like an utter violation. Thinking of it gave her the same sick shudder that came of imagining a stranger putting a gun in her hand and forcing her to point it at her own head and pull the trigger.
Faye couldn’t talk, so she just mumbled, “Later,” and thumbed the phone off.
***
Jodi’s call had taken just minutes. Dr. Britton had stepped back into the open excavation, pointing to soil thats only claim to fame was the fact that it was the wrong color. No one had even seen her leave, except Joe.
Joe didn’t miss much, and he didn’t miss the look that Jodi’s news had left on Faye’s face. He locked his sea green eyes on hers and rested a comforting hand on her shoulder. Faye remembered that having Joe made her a lucky girl, if a female person on the verge of forty could ever be considered a girl.
“This band of goopy clay here,” Dr. Britton was saying, sticking the point of his trowel into a ribbon-wide layer of black soil, “is something we have to watch. It’s a conduit for water, because rainwater seeps down through the more porous layers and gets stopped by the clay. Then it moves along the surface of this layer and oozes into the excavation, flooding it slowly. If it weren’t for this goop, we could probably work without a pump.”
Pumps. Faye hated pumps.
“It’s a weak point, too. We have to watch what we’re doing, because the soils can slip along that plane, caving into the unit and leaving us nothing but scrambled eggs.”
Faye knew that she would hate that metaphor forever.
“Shelly’s the one who identified that layer as the source of our seepage problems.”
Why wasn’t Faye surprised to hear that?
“If Shelly were still working with us,” Dr. Britton continued, “we’d understand all those ditches and sumps and cesspools. She’d have read the soil better than any of us can, checked old maps, then somehow put herself in the place of people in those days until she guessed where they wanted their water moved. And why. And how they would have done it. We’ll manage without her, but it won’t be the same.”
Dr. Britton crawled out of the excavation and took Faye by the elbow. He reached out the other hand and grabbed Joe’s elbow, carefully steering both his captives toward the single picnic table sitting outside the trailer that served as his field office. Godtschalk followed them, and Dr. Britton didn’t shoo him away.
“I’ve nattered on about how good Shelly’s work was, and I sure don’t mind my workers hearing that. But there are some other things I wanted to make sure the detective knew, things that maybe should stay just between us. You did say you were working with Detective Bienvenu?”
Faye and Joe both nodded and settled themselves at the picnic table. Godtschalk hesitated, but Dr. Britton flapped a hand at the picnic bench. “Go ahead and have a seat, Louie. I’ve got some thoughts I’d like to share with the law, but I’ve got some sense that I’d also like to share them with a writer…someone who’s chronicling what happened to our city. Somehow, I think Shelly’s story is important in a way that might belong in your book. Please join us.”
Dr. Britton picked up his sandwich and leaned over it, speaking quietly. “Shelly was worried about one of the levees.” He paused for emphasis. “Before Katrina.”
“What was she? Psychic?” Godtschalk asked. “You make her sound supernatural.”
“No, not supernatural. Not psychic. Just a very smart girl who never missed the smallest detail. Also, she was tenacious as hell.”
“Why was she worried about the levee?” asked Joe.
“Not long before the storm, she was testing a new pump at the company’s Lakeview branch office, within site of a canal levee. Try as she might, she couldn’t get that test pit dry. Water was coming into the test pit as quickly as that pump could get it out. Lots of people would have blamed the pump. Sometimes the new ones are so flimsy that our ugly old ones leave them in the dust.”
Faye felt a new appreciation for Old Wheezy.
Dr. Britton set down his half-eaten sandwich. “I know other people who would’ve said, ‘Hey, the whole city’s under sea level’ and given up. Shelly got down in that waist-deep water, so she could find out where it was coming from.”
Faye didn’t like the sound of too much groundwater so near a levee. A grim possibility—actually two grim possibilities—were coalescing in her mind. “Was it a slippery clay layer like the one you have here?” she asked.
“You got it. Now nobody sitting here is a civil engineer, but this isn’t rocket science. All that groundwater was probably coming from the canal, beneath the levee. That’s called ‘underseepage,’ and it isn’t a good thing. A levee’s just a pile of dirt. If an extra-permeable layer lets canal water undermine it, then the whole levee could go.”
“The slippery layer—” Joe began, but Dr. Britton kept talking.
“Underseepage can destroy a levee, even when the water level in the canal is normal, but think about what can happen when that level rises. The levee is put under stress by the increased water pressure, and that stress is directed straight out.”
Joe nodded. “If there’s a slippery layer underneath, then the levee’s going to slide sideways. Probably break apart while it’s doing that. The whole thing would be shoved back from the canal.”
“That’s a recipe for failure,” Godtschalk said. His voice was tight.
“What did Shelly do?”
Faye hadn’t known the woman, yet she was confident that Shelly had gone to someone who she thought could help.
“She called the levee board. She called the drainage commission. She called the Corps of Engineers. She told them that the situation was one step short of a sand boil.”
Faye saw by his expression that Joe had the same question that she did, so she asked it. “And a sand boil would be…?”
The third person listening to the story, Godtschalk, didn’t have the same question on his face, but then he was local. “Water seeps under levees all the time,” he said. “It’s terrifying when you think about it, but engineers design for that underseepage. I’ve seen an open field with dozens of wet spots, even little tiny upwellings like fountains. When the water’s clear, all’s well. But when those upwellings start bringing up sand—in other words, when they turn into a sand boil—watch out. That sand is coming out of the soil supporting the levee, or even the levee itself.”
Now, Faye could get a glimpse of the extent of Shelly’s concern. “Did anybody listen to her? Or did they brush her off?”
Dr. Britton gave a short bark of a laugh. “They didn’t get a chance to brush her off. In my heart, I believe that they would have told her that the design was sound and that she shouldn’t worry her little head about it, but I’ve got to give them the benefit of the doubt. They didn’t have time to return Shelly’s calls. Katrina was already roaring our way and anybody who was able got the hell out. Within days, we got a chance to see how well those levee designs held up.”