The Map of Moments (15 page)

And she'd have been right to do so.

But he wasn't going anywhere, not yet. People were haunted far more often, it seemed to him, by what they hadn't done instead of things they had. Regrets. Omissions. If onlys. He would not allow those ghosts to find him.

The elevator doors slid open at the lobby and he strode to the front desk.

“Can I help you, sir?” asked the black woman behind the counter. Her name tag identified her as Audrey.

“Does the hotel have a business office?”

Audrey frowned. “Sure. But it closes at four o'clock. I'm sorry.”

Max ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath. “Listen, I didn't bring a laptop because I didn't think I'd need it. But I need to get online desperately. Is there any way I could get in there? It's really important.”

Audrey gave him a sympathetic look. “Fires to put out, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Hang on,” she said, ducking through a doorway behind the counter.

She spoke quickly to someone there, and a moment later a man emerged, dark circles under his eyes suggesting that Katrina had left him with plenty of ghosts of his own.

“I've got it,” the man said.

“Thanks, Jaime,” Audrey said, and then she smiled at Max again. “Right this way, sir.”

She led him out of the lobby into an alcove with several doors with glass inset windows. One bore a brass plate beside it with the words BUSINESS OFFICE, and Audrey fished a set of keys from her pocket and unlocked it for him. She turned on the light and gestured toward the computer. Silver fireworks exploded on the screen saver.

“Let me know if there's anything you need.”

Max looked at her. “Is there, I don't know, a time limit or anything? How do I pay?”

“Don't worry about it,” she said, her smile faltering a moment. “Just tell people, when you go home, that New Orleans is open for business.”

Audrey left him there.

As Max sat down at the computer, he realized that some of his nervous energy had dissipated. The woman's kindness had done that, and he was grateful. He needed focus, and that feeling of spiders crawling under his skin, and the urge to take off at a run, wouldn't do him any good.

He opened up the web browser and went to a white-pages search, typing in “Doucette” and “New Orleans.” Even as he did, he remembered Corinne saying something about the family evacuating, and wondered if any of them had come back. There were forty-two listings for “Doucette” in the city, including one for Corinne at the old Lakeview address. Many of the other addresses were probably ruined now as well. But he had to find the ones that still existed.

Max looked around and spotted a printer. He could just print up the list of Doucette phone numbers and start dialing, one by one.

As he glanced at the screen again, however, something else caught his eye. One of the menu options read
Reverse Directory Search.
He clicked on the link, opening a page that asked for a telephone number.

“Yes,” he whispered, fishing into his pocket for the paper on which he'd written Corinne's two phone numbers.

Her cell wouldn't do him any good, but that home number was a landline. He typed the ten digits into the box and clicked search. The browser seemed to slow down, and for a second he worried it would crash.

Then the name and address came up, along with a small window containing a map. With a click of the mouse, he had a map showing directions to the home of Huey Kelton, who
lived on Magazine Street in the Garden District. Max had no idea who this Kelton guy was, but that was the phone Corinne had called him from to tell him that Gabrielle was dead.

Max jumped up and went out into the lobby. Audrey looked up from behind the desk. “Did you get what you needed?”

“I did, thank you. Any chance you could call me a cab?” “Can't promise one will come, but I'll do my best.” Max had a feeling her best was pretty formidable. He thanked her and went back into the business office, printed up the page with the map and Huey Kelton's address, closed the browser, and shut off the lights, then left, pulling the door closed behind him.

The cab rolled slowly through the early-evening streets of the Garden District. No traffic appeared to clog the route, but the driver never accelerated above thirty miles an hour, content to go at his own pace. In the time he'd lived in New Orleans, Max had found that pretty much summed up the populace here. Frantic or laid back, everyone did their own thing.

It had taken nearly half an hour for the cab to arrive, during which time all of Max's nervous energy had returned. The waiting made him itchy and he'd stood on the street in front of the hotel, trying his best not to look like some kind of junkie, twitching and biting his nails. When the cab did arrive, the driver reeked of booze and kept an unlit cigar chomped between his teeth. He guided the car
with one hand, the other one out the window, surfing his fingers through the wind like a kid.

When Max had told him the address, he'd only grunted his assent and started driving. They'd gone through the Warehouse District, but the clubs that had made the place trendy in the last decade were either still closed up after the storm or hadn't yet opened for the night.

As they passed through the Garden District, Max found himself distracted by a bizarre spectacle. Some of the side streets were dotted with refrigerators, left out at the end of driveways as if their owners expected the garbagemen to pick them up. They hit a section of Magazine where the same phenomenon was in evidence. Some of the fridges were still covered with magnets, and all of them were taped closed with duct or electrical tape.

“What's that all about?” he asked.

The driver grunted, this time a question.

“The refrigerators. I didn't think this neighborhood flooded.”

“Didn't. But the power was out too long. Nothing but rot and E. coli and shit in those things. Who knows what's growing in there? I wouldn't open one. They got dump trucks and loaders goin’ around, picking 'em up.”

“Looks weird.”

The cabbie grunted, as if the relative weirdness of the forest of fridges hadn't occurred to him. “Drove through Gentilly and the Seventh Ward a few days ago. There's places up there where the fridges are the only things still standing. Rather lose the fridge and keep the house.”

Max shut up. What could he have said to that?

In the front seat of the cab, the driver took a swig from a flask. He didn't give a damn about being surreptitious.

Max had lost track of addresses a while ago, and he let the driver do his job. When the cab slowed, he looked around. There weren't a lot of gardens in this part of the Garden District. Trees and bushes, sure, though the hurricane had stripped most of them of any green. They were pitiful, skeletal things, and seemed lost in front of the rows of houses and apartments. The buildings were stacked up close together.

“Hard to make out numbers, but I think that's the one you want,” the driver said, around his unlit cigar. He pointed to a small, gray, neatly kept house whose bay window had been boarded up. Smaller windows were still intact, though, and a light burned inside.

Max looked at the house. Now that he was here, uncertainty took hold.

“Any way I can get you to stick around for a few minutes, in case I've got the wrong house?”

“If that's not it, it's bound to be one of these. This here's the block, for sure.”

“I just meant, if the person I came to see isn't home—

“I'm going home now. Got dinner waiting. I'm not going back to the Quarter tonight.”

Max looked into the rearview mirror. The driver wasn't even looking at him. The man's tone was flat and dull, and he knew the cabbie was lying Nobody waited at home for this guy, especially not with dinner on the table. Maybe he'd
go home to a bottle and his television, and something micro-waved out of a can. He just didn't want to be bothered. But Max couldn't get angry. If their situations were reversed, he'd want to go home, too.

“Can I get a card with the number of the cab company?”

The guy nodded. “Sure, sure.” He grabbed one and passed it back.

Max paid him, tipping him a few extra bucks for his trouble, and stepped out of the cab. The car rolled away, taking with it the stink of whiskey. Max stood in front of what he hoped was Huey Kelton's house and watched the windows for a minute, looking for any sign of life.

Screw it, you're here. Just go.
He didn't have any options. His cell phone was wrecked, and if nobody was at home he'd have to walk back along Magazine until he came to a bar that'd let him make a call.

Tucking the cab company's card into his pocket, he walked up to the house. For just a second, he thought he saw something move in the darkness to the side of the house, but when he narrowed his eyes for a better look, there was nothing there. Just the night, growing darker.

He went to the door and knocked. It felt quiet and empty in there. Max didn't believe in any sort of preternatural awareness, but he thought sometimes people sensed things, foremost among them the absence of other people. The house felt as if nobody was home, so that even when he knocked again, harder this time, he wished the cabdriver had agreed to wait.

For the first time he noticed the doorbell. It was half a
foot from the door frame, round, with a metal button at its center, painted the same color as the house. The thing looked old and unused, and he felt sure it must be out of order.

But when he pressed the button, the bell rang, a traditional
ding-dong
that sounded muffled, as though it came up from the inside of a well. His feeling that no one was home intensified.

“Shit,” Max said.

He counted to ten and knocked again, his last effort before setting off down Magazine Street in search of a bar with a phone. And maybe a drink or two as he waited for a cab to come and fetch him, however long that might take.

He reached out and pressed the doorbell again.

From inside there came the chime, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass. Max blinked, straightening up. What the hell was that? He'd been so sure the house was empty.

“Mr. Kelton?” he called, hammering on the door. “Corinne?”

Coming down off the stoop, he moved around some bushes to the nearest unboarded window and tried to see through the curtains. The front rooms were dark, but a light burned at the back of the house. Its illumination flickered as something passed in front of it.

“Corinne?” he called through the glass.

Inside, someone screamed.

“Fuck!” Max jumped back over the bushes and started pounding on the door. “Kelton? Open the door!”

A light flicked on in front of the neighbor's house and an old man poked his head out the door. “Get away from there, boy, or I'm'a call the cops.”

Max paused, mind racing. He stared at the old man, remembering the shattering of glass and that scream. One scream only.

Then he threw himself at the door, slamming his shoulder against it once, twice, a third time. It gave a little, but not enough. He hauled back and aimed a kick at the wood right beside the knob. On the fourth kick, the lock tore through the frame, wood splintering, and the door banged open.

The neighbor was shouting. Other lights were coming on.

Max rushed into the house, calling for Corinne. He heard sounds deep in the house, the rustling of clothes, something wet, and then a dark laugh. He rushed along the narrow corridor toward the back, careening into the kitchen.

He saw the blood, a spray across the linoleum, but couldn't stop. His feet slipped out from under him, and he managed to twist as he fell so that he landed on his hands and knees. His fingers and palms smeared trails in the blood.

Corinne lay stretched out on the floor, her throat cut. The edges of the gash pouted as blood burbled from arteries and veins. Her shirt had been slashed and her gut sawed open from breastbone to below her navel, fistfuls of intestine yanked out and unfurled onto the floor. The stink was terrible.

Her eyes were still open, tears drying on her face.

She twitched.

Max scrabbled away from the corpse, glancing around to see if her killer was still here. The window at the back of the kitchen had been smashed, the curtain rod pulled down. Outside, it was dark. Whoever had done this had vanished into the night.

Pulling up his shirt to cover his nose and mouth against the stink of her exposed bowels, he managed to stand and spotted a telephone on the wall next to the cabinets. Shaking, he picked up the phone—the same phone Corinne had probably used to tell him Gabrielle was dead—only to have it slip from his bloody hands.

He retrieved it, and steadied himself long enough to dial 911.

“Murder,” he said. “There's …there's been a murder here.”

But death and murder, new as they were to Max, had been all too common in New Orleans of late, and like cab-drivers, the ranks of the police had thinned in the wake of the storm.

They told him to wait.

H
e tried waiting in a room at the front of the house,
I I
but the thought of Corinne's body lying alone in the