Chloe was getting a refill when Faye arrived. She sat across the table and knocked back half an unsweetened cup while Faye loaded hers with sugar and cream.
“So why did you call the District asking about Shelly? There’s been whispering among the office gossips all afternoon. I heard that her body was finally found.” Chloe took another swallow and added, “God rest her soul.”
“I was told that Shelly was worried about the levees. I just wanted to know more.”
“What are you? A reporter?” Chloe’s icy blue eyes looked away from Faye’s for just a second, but they flicked back and held steady.
“I’m an archaeologist.”
“Those levees aren’t that old. Some of the ones along the river are old enough to interest someone like you, but not those.”
“The past is the past. I’m interested in all of it. But I just wanted to learn more about Shelly’s fears as a…private citizen. An interested private citizen.”
Okay, that was sort of a lie, but she figured that saying she was a contractor for the police department was a quick way to make Chloe shut up. So maybe she was a plain-clothes archaeologist/detective now?
Chloe didn’t seem to care who was on the other side of this difficult conversation. She just wanted to talk.
“I spoke to Shelly myself, right before the storm. I told her that she might be right. There could be a danger that the levee was suffering from underseepage, or that it would slide sideways under the load of significant floodwaters. But the geotechnical work didn’t predict it, and you’ve got to base a design on something.”
“So you think the design was sound? The levees were tall enough and thick enough? They were well-maintained—”
“I can’t speak to maintenance. That’s not what the Corps does.”
Faye nodded, then casually asked the question that interested her most, adding it to her list of more general questions as if it were no more important. “Do you think the design used sheet pilings to a sufficient depth?”
“Based on the geotechnical models I’ve seen, yes, I do. Models are based on assumptions and limited knowledge, so they can fail, but that’s not necessarily the fault of the design engineer.”
And now for the most sensitive question. “Did the contractors build the levees exactly as they were designed?”
This was when Faye learned what to say if she should ever want to make an engineer mad. Chloe was a pale-skinned blonde. When her cheeks flushed, she couldn’t have hidden her fury if she’d wanted to.
“They better, by God, have built those levees to spec. I’ve been on-site for many construction projects over the years. Whenever I was involved, the taxpayers got the structures we designed for them. I don’t have any colleagues I’d suspect of allowing anything else.”
“Then what happened?”
Chloe took a controlled sip of her coffee. Her flushed cheeks began to pale. The military engineer was marshalling her thoughts. In a second, she would marshal her words.
“An engineer is held to prescribed design parameters. A bridge, for example, cannot be made a hundred percent safe. It’s not possible. And it can’t be made ninety-nine point nine nine nine…” She made a gesture to indicate that those nines would go on forever. “…percent safe, because it would be cost-prohibitive. Society has to make a decision on the balancing point between how much it can spend and how infallible a design must be. This is the difference between an applied science like engineering and a theoretical one like…oh, I don’t know…cosmology.”
“I understand. Everybody has to balance a checkbook. We all have to put our resources where they will do the most good.”
“Yeah.” Chloe stared into the bottom of her empty cup.
“So I’m just a rank-and-file engineer. Someone else gives me a safety factor, and I apply it to my work. For the New Orleans levee system, we design for the hundred-year storm. In other words, the storm that we would expect to cause the system to fail will come along every hundred years.”
“But…New Orleans has been here for nearly three hundred years, and I presume it’ll be here hundreds more.”
Chloe set the cup down and pushed it away from her, but she kept staring at it, as if it held some kind of design secret that would make everything clear.
“You think like an archaeologist, and of course you’re right. We can expect a design based on a hundred-year flood to fail over the life of a city. Maybe not as badly as it did here, but still. The odds favor it. It doesn’t have to be this way. The Dutch live underwater, too, you know.”
“I never thought about it, but they do. I guess I was thinking of New Orleans as unique.”
“Well, yes. Good heavens, yes. There’s no place in the world like it, in terms of history and culture. But from an engineering standpoint, the Netherlands sits on land that was once under the sea, and I imagine the sea would like to have it back. Care to guess what their design criterion is?”
“More than a hundred?”
“Um, yeah. They design to a thousand-year flood and, in heavily populated areas, they do better than that. They design to the ten-thousand-year flood. This is where they’ve chosen to balance cost and benefit. To an archaeologist, that means that many cities will never see a flood while they stand. Do you know what it means to an engineer?”
Faye was getting an inkling, but she said, “No.”
“When I design any project to a hundred-year model, it means that the odds are very good that I will see it fail within my lifetime.” She took her eyes off her coffee cup and fastened them on Faye. “I’m thinking of getting into another line of work.”
A rusty wrought-iron lawn chair, a sweating glass of iced tea, and good company. Faye was pretty damned content.
Her garage apartment was set well back from the street. This meant that the cracked concrete pad in front that served as a makeshift front porch was far enough away from traffic to assure private conversation, yet near enough for a smiling nod and wave at neighbors as they passed by. They streamed in and out of gently aging shotgun houses, socializing and just generally enjoying one of the last cool evenings before summer’s onslaught. Faye could see why whole families stayed in neighborhoods like this one, generation after generation.
The houses were painted every conceivable pastel color, and their sagging porches were loaded with pots full of flowers in every conceivable non-pastel shade: scarlet geraniums, creamsicle-orange impatiens, purple petunias, and lemon-yellow marigolds. Picket fences leaned like sleepy drunks against head-high rosebushes planted by somebody’s grandmother. The flowers alone were proof that money couldn’t buy beauty. A dry brown lily bulb, passed over a fence from friend to friend, could light up a garden for the rest of its giver’s life.
Twilight was coming on. The squealing kids on tricycles had already been scooped up by their young mothers, and Faye could hear those mothers now as they stood on the front steps and called for their older children to come in the house. It was suppertime and cars were passing even more infrequently than they had been in the hour since Faye sat down to chat with Jodi.
The detective rattled the ice in her glass and Faye reached for the pitcher sitting on the tray table beside her. Jodi looked around for a second, as if she’d just noticed where she was, and said, “Didn’t I tell you to take my money and get you a nice place to stay with that pretty man?”
“It’s not your money any more.”
“Too true. Which is sad, because I’d know how to make much better use of it than you seem to, darlin’.”
“Besides, what’s wrong with this place?” Faye gestured at the live oaks, the Spanish moss, the festive parade of slightly decayed houses lining the street.
“It’s not so bad, though I’ll be honest and tell you that I don’t know many folks who’d stay here if they had the money to be anyplace else.”
“Depends on where you want to put your money. Don’t worry. I have some expensive plans for Joe. I’m just not ready to spring them on him yet.”
“That’s more like it. Care to tell me about them, or are you talking about some seriously kinky stuff?”
Faye rolled her eyes and didn’t answer the question, because she knew Jodi’s imagination could outdo any scenario she might dream up. “I just spent the day talking to people about maps and history and, well…my kind of stuff. One in particular was definitely worth the time I spent on him—Bobby Longchamp.”
Faye was careful to give Bobby’s last name his preferred French pronunciation. If Jodi noticed that his name was the same as Faye’s, only with a Francophone spin, she didn’t say so.
“So,” Faye continued, wiping iced-tea-glass sweat on her pants, “what’s the latest word on Nina?”
“Well, I’d love to talk to her about what caused her to go in the river, but I can’t.”
“Has she gotten worse?”
“Nope. She didn’t make any sense when she talked yesterday. She didn’t make any sense when she talked this morning. And she doesn’t make any sense when she talks now.”
Faye thought of Nina’s articulate plea, asking for help for people who had been suffering for years. It had been broadcast to all of New Orleans and probably, through the modern miracle of all-news cable networks, to all the world. She didn’t like to think that her friend might never be able to speak her mind again. “Will her speech improve?”
“She took a bad blow to the head and breathed in a lot of muddy water, so it’s possible that some of the part of her brain that makes her talk is just…gone. The MRIs and CAT scans and what-have-you don’t show any obvious damage, so everything may come back by itself. If it doesn’t, well, they say speech therapy can do a lot. Maybe it’s a good sign that she can speak as well as she can. Like I said, she talks a lot.”
“What does she say?”
“I spent a few minutes with her this afternoon. Her mind just wanders and, when you’re an archaeologist like Nina, it has a lot of ground to wander over. She talks about saints and kings…”
“Don’t tell me. Catholic school.”
“Bingo. And streetcars and Americans moving to town. Did you know that she thinks Americans should be segregated into their own part of the town, away from the French and Spanish folks?”
“That was the majority view among Creoles a hundred-and-fifty years or so ago. The neighborhood we’re sitting in was well-established, even then.”
“Yeah, it’s plenty historic, if you like slums.”
A dark look from Faye prompted Jodi to backtrack. “Okay, I take back the slums comment. Let’s call it ‘a neighborhood ripe for gentrification.’”
Faye gave a surly grunt.
“Anyway,” Jodi went on, “Nina would probably love it here. She’s all about old-fashioned stuff these days. And so’s that boyfriend of hers, Charles. He’s acting like an Edwardian suitor who just wants to breathe the same air as his beloved.”
“Spending five minutes with that man makes me want to go home and take a bath.”
“Me, too. But I’ll give him credit. He hasn’t stirred from Nina’s side. Nobody in my life besides my mama would be that attentive, if I were in the same shape.”
An image of herself watching over Joe just twelve months before, while he hovered between life and death rose in Faye’s mind. Being a no-nonsense kind of person, she squashed it down and promised herself she’d deal with that pain later. “Well, just because I don’t like Charles doesn’t mean he’s not a good man. I am hardly an infallible judge of character.”
“Nevertheless, I want to hear what you think of young Matt the park ranger.”
“Huh?” Faye blinked. “Matt? He hardly speaks to Nina.”
“Nowadays, he hardly speaks to anybody. He’s a very quiet young man, I notice. Anyway, he hasn’t left Nina’s side, either. Well, I exaggerate.”
“Really. I’d never expect such a thing from you.”
Jodi wrinkled her nose in Faye’s direction. “The hospital’s enforcing visiting hours on Nina, and they’re being pretty strict about them. Her parents are both dead, so Charles has muscled himself in there by calling himself her ‘fiancé.’ Still, he spends a lot of time in between those visits in that waiting room down the hall, sitting a few feet away from Matt and pretending he’s not there.”
Faye wasn’t sure what to say about that so she sat still and enjoyed the sweet and astringent taste of her tea. She could see Dauphine through her open bedroom window, rearranging the shells and candles on her bedroom altar. Joe and Louie Godtschalk were upstairs in her apartment, but the windows were open, too, so she could hear their animated conversation as an unintelligible buzz. Faye didn’t care what they were saying, not so very much. She just enjoyed the sound of masculine voices.
Joe leaned out the window and called, “Hey, Faye!”, then he waved the book in his hand at her, and kept talking.
His face and voice were animated, but Faye couldn’t understand a word. She shrugged at him, and he hollered, “I’ll come down there.”
If Faye had taken a snapshot of the world surrounding her at that moment, she could hardly have imagined a more contented scene. She and Jodi were lounging in their chairs, drunk on sweet tea and pleasant conversation. The love of her life was bounding down the stairs clinging to the outside of Dauphine’s cottage, anxious to share something exciting with her. Dauphine’s lit candles were fending off the coming dark.
She always thought she remembered slow-moving tires on the street in front of her at that moment, but she was never sure. Everything was slow-moving that evening. She remembered that much. When gunfire erupted, life slowed almost to a stop.
A bullet slammed into the metal chairback beside her chest. That was the first thing that happened when the world spun out of control. She would always remember the first bullet.
There was another bullet, and another, but they were just background noise, accompaniment to the frantic movements of people turned prey.
Out of instinct, Faye grabbed Jodi as she lunged for the ground. Out of training, Jodi grabbed for Faye as she dropped flat to the dirt shouting, “Get down! Get down! Don’t move!”
As Jodi groped for the weapon and radio concealed beneath her fashionable street clothes, Faye turned her head toward the street. There was no car, and she couldn’t be sure there ever had been.
Then Jodi was barking, “Get down!”, again. And “Get on the ground now, you idiot!”, as something dark and lean dropped on top of them both.
It was Joe. He had run full-tilt, wide-open and without cover, to protect Faye and Jodi with his own body. Of course he had. That’s who Joe was.
“Now that you’re here, get her someplace safe. Idiot.” Jodi sounded like she wanted to take the gun in her hand and pistol-whip Joe until he promised to quit doing heroic but stupid stuff. She slithered off on her belly, gun in one hand and radio in the other.
Faye crawled alongside Joe, remembering something she’d heard an old soldier say as he recounted tales of his service in World War II.
When there’s bullets whizzin’ over your head, you find a way to get real friendly with the ground. I remember a time when I was so scared I started cussin’ the buttons down the front of my uniform. They kept me further up off the ground than I wanted to be because they was so damn thick.
Joe persisted in lifting his head a millimeter now and then, so that he could glance left and right and call out, “Louie!”
Faye figured that Louie was huddled safely upstairs in her apartment, but there was no way to know. He very well could have taken a stray bullet. The same was true for Dauphine.
Faye was crawling—oozing?—across the ground as fast as she knew how, but Joe had an arm around her so he could haul her faster still. When they reached the far side of Dauphine’s garage, she started to sit up, but got no further than a twitch in that direction. Joe’s arm was welded to her back.
“We should be safe now,” she whispered. “We’ve put a whole garage between us and the street.”
“Are you sure that the shots came from the street? Dead sure?”
No. She wasn’t.
“Are you dead sure that the shooter isn’t on foot? That there isn’t somebody hiding behind the house next door, waiting to get a clear shot?”
No. She wasn’t.
“Then lie still.”
He reached out a fist and knocked on the garage’s wood siding, still calling, “Louie! Louie! Knock if you can hear me.”
There was a faint rapping. Faye didn’t so much hear it, as feel it through the skull she was resting against the garage’s exterior wall.
“Knock again if you’re okay.”
The wood siding vibrated again. So Louie Godtschalk had survived the shooting. Faye knew of no way to get the same information from Dauphine.
There was nothing to do but wait and listen to Jodi describe the situation to several armed officers who had arrived within minutes of her call. They fanned out through the neighborhood, searching for someone who was probably out of sight within seconds of shooting the third bullet.
“Joe?” He had thrown himself so completely over her body that her voice was almost totally muffled.
She could hardly hear herself speak, but he must have heard her, because he said, “Don’t even think about going out there to help Jodi. Or to look for Louie and Dauphine. Or to do something else stupid. Because you’re not big enough to shove me off you.”
Oh. So he was allowed to do stupid things because—why? Because he was bigger than her? And she wasn’t allowed to do stupid things because—why? Because he was bigger than her. It was logic like this that made her despair for the male half of the human population.
She answered the “you’re not big enough” part of his statement by saying, “Yeah, I know,” but with oversized Joe on top of her, it sounded to her more like, “Ehmmph. Ah-oh.”
Joe gave a mollified grunt. This gave her the fortitude to keep talking. “Thanksgiving. I don’t want to wait till Christmas.”
He raised his shoulder up a millimeter, which made it easier to talk.
“Let’s get married in November, before it turns cold.”
“You know I’m ready whenever you say so.”
The shoulder dropped back down, and Faye gave up trying to talk. She lay on the ground, with Joe’s massive bulk weighting her down. Though she’d have never believed it, she dozed now and then during the long wait until Jodi said, “You can come out now. The situation’s under control.”
When the immediate danger was past and the other officers had dispersed, there was nothing to do but hug Jodi and Joe and Louie and Dauphine, who had jumped into her broom closet when the first gunshot sounded. After Louie had disappeared into the night and Dauphine had begun occupying herself by lighting candles placed strategically around her garage and yard, Faye had tugged Jodi toward the steps that ran up the side of Dauphine’s garage and into Faye’s apartment.
“I need to show you something. I saw this stuff when Joe and I were crawling around in the dirt. It’s nothing out-and-out dangerous, and I didn’t want to bother you with it until you’d dealt with the immediate crisis, but come look.”
Tucked out of sight, under the bottom step leading to Faye’s home, lay an odd assortment of objects. Jodi’s department-issue flashlight did an excellent job of illuminating them. The stump of a red candle. A stone cradled in a scrap of blue cloth. A pair of scissors, open as if to cut a harmless piece of paper.
Jodi grinned.“You don’t know what this stuff means? Your grandmama didn’t do a good job of passing folklore down to you and your mama, did she?”
“Apparently not.”
Jodi glanced over her shoulder at Dauphine, who was concentrating on a sweetly scented cloth bag balanced atop her palm. “Somebody thinks you need a baby. And apparently she thinks you don’t know how to go about getting one.”
Joe snickered. A withering look from Faye sent him into the shadow of the staircase so that he could enjoy the rest of his good, long laugh.