The Heavens Rise

16

MANDEVILLE

OCTOBER 2013

Danny Stevens made it to the front porch just in time to see the taillights of his wife’s Mercedes disappear around the wall of stately oak trees at the end of their driveway. He tried her cell, but there was no answer. Satellite radio, Kelly Clarkson, his wife’s impatience: Danny blamed all three in equal measure.

“Metamucil,” he said after the beep. “Orange-flavored. None of that pink lemonade crap . . . And sorry. You know, about . . .” What was he apologizing for? His irregularity or his forgetfulness? He wasn’t sure, so he hung up.

Just a few minutes earlier, Sally had cornered him in the kitchen, armed with pad, pencil and her plainest pair of eyeglasses, the ones she only wore to Albertsons on the weekends. Danny had insisted up and down that they weren’t out of anything, only to realize his omission once he was alone with his bloat. But that’s not what was really bothering him. Lately, he’d been consumed by a burning need to issue some kind of apology to his wife whenever she entered the room. And he often did, usually a mumbled, halfhearted thing, as reflexive and irritating as a dry cough. Sometimes she would hear it and stop in the doorway to ask if something was the matter, and he’d do his best not to give her a guilty look. Because in the end, what did he have to feel guilty about?

Unlike most of the men he worked with at Cypress Bank & Trust, he’d never cheated. (Not on his wife, anyway.) And he was a damn good provider—that was for sure. The house was proof of that: two stories of French Regency perfection with immaculate limestone walls and second-floor windows adorned by slender, intricate iron railings. Just another year of bleeding the Ferriot trust and the damn thing would be paid off too. Because that’s what good providers did; they made deals that had to be kept in the shadows.

It was a crisp autumn afternoon. The house wasn’t right on the Tchefuncte River, but it was pretty close. Just a few yards of smooth, rolling lawns separated them from the glassy green waters and the boat dock they shared with their neighbor Lloyd Duchamp. Technically the oaks between the house and the water belonged entirely to Lloyd, but he’d allowed Sally to dress them up with string lights last Christmas, probably as penance for that awful hog of a motorcycle he’d bought after his wife left him.

Danny loved Beau Chêne. And no matter how bad things got at the bank, he’d fight like hell to stay within its grassy, wooded borders. The place had given his son a damn near perfect childhood, a childhood where Douglas and his friends could water ski in their own backyard and spend afternoons on the rope swing without fearing stray bullets. Nothing like his childhood, trapped in the Irish Channel with a mother who refused to let go of the old house on Constance Street even after the blacks moved in on all sides.

But things at the bank were bad, had been bad for a long time in fact. Like most of the other managers and officers at Cypress, Danny wore the fact that he was employed by the last locally owned bank in New Orleans as a badge of honor. But lately the whispers about a sale to one of the nationals had grown into a dull clamor, and even senior staff were starting to jump ship to JPMorgan Chase. Layoffs were imminent, he was sure of it. And if his situation were any different, Danny probably would have left by now.

But his situation wasn’t different. There was one trust he just couldn’t afford to leave.

His son had arrived for a visit the night before, but he’d only been home an hour or two before zipping across the causeway to meet up with some friends. They’d probably done a circuit of all the old Uptown bars they used to frequent in high school with their fake IDs, and now Douglas was probably sleeping it off at a buddy’s house. Midway through his junior year at Chapel Hill, his son’s connection to his hometown was still as strong as ever. Good, Danny thought as he made his way to the kitchen. Too many of us leave. Too many of the good ones anyway. As for the fact that Douglas had left his bags at the foot of the stairs? Everyone has room for improvement.

Home alone, for a half hour at least. Too fast for a quick wank to some of the new porn he’d downloaded the night before: naughty nurse stuff, a little spanking thrown in, predictable but efficient. (And the truth was, at fifty-five, a quick wank wasn’t as easy to pull off as it had been a few years before.) The news was out too. More depressing footage off that awful pipeline explosion over in Ascension Parish; trailers turned to molten heaps, mothers weeping for the incinerated children. The whole place looked like Pompeii, and though Sally couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away from the coverage, he’d had enough after twenty minutes.

So John Coltrane and a quick scotch would have to do, but as soon as Danny closed his hand around the bottle of Balvenie, he was swallowed by a wave of silent darkness.

• • •

His first thought when he came to was, I’m having a stroke. He was in the front parlor. It was still light out, the Audubon bird prints were still safely in their frames.

The last thing he could remember was holding the bottle of scotch. Had he downed the whole thing? Was this the end of some alcoholic blackout?

But there was no headache, no sour stomach even. No pain of any kind. And for some reason, that scared him more than anything else—the fact that this feeling of complete disorientation, this sense of having lost time completely, wasn’t accompanied by any physical sensations at all.

It was like he’d literally been plucked out of time and moved to a different . . . second? Minute? Hour?

Some kind of weight was tugging against his right arm. When he looked down, he saw he was holding one of the massive candleholders his wife kept on the mantel. The thing was solid glass, the base a fat pillar, the platform still matted with the waffle-print residue of those high-end beeswax candles Sally loved.

A brain tumor? Wasn’t this how it started with Jake Bensen? No, that wasn’t it. The guy had tripped. One day he was walking across his bedroom and it was like his right foot wasn’t quite attached to his ankle. MRI. Inoperable. Four months. Just four months from diagnosis to—

A car engine distracted him from this quickening panic. Then he heard another sound: someone breathing, someone standing a few feet away.

Before Danny could turn or scream—and he started to do both at the same exact second—the darkness returned. And this time it felt like great pincers rising up from under his feet, closing high above his head, sealing him inside an obsidian tomb.

• • •

His office. He was standing in the middle of his office and the flat-screen computer monitor was turned around so he could see it. He blinked and tried to focus.

The candleholder was in his right hand still. He dropped it and it hit the hardwood floor with a deep, fatal-sounding thud. His entire body was sore, the same kind of bone-deep ache he used to feel after the gym.

The glowing computer screen looked grainy. He took a step toward the screen, fearing for a second or two that his legs wouldn’t respond to his commands. But they did. He was back inside his body, and whatever was on his screen wasn’t part of the plain blue wallpaper he’d opted for in a quick, distracted moment.

It was blood splatter.

His desk chair had been turned to face the window so he couldn’t see who was sitting in it, just the coil after coil of bloody nylon rope that had been used to tie them down.

Against his will, Danny Stevens reached for the back of his desk chair so he could turn it around and see who it was, because whoever it was, they weren’t moving. He’d heard a car engine outside in those last few seconds before the darkness returned, so whoever was in his chair, they had to be—

“Don’t do that yet,” someone said.

Danny bellowed and landed ass-first on the floor.

Marshall Ferriot stepped forward from the band of shadow beside the double doors to the hallway. The last time Danny had laid eyes on the guy had been six months earlier, on the same computer screen that was now smeared with blood. The kid called the house one afternoon, right after they’d sent Allen Shire after him and his sister, and a dumbfounded Danny had refused to stay on the phone for more than a few seconds without some kind of proof the caller was who he claimed to be. Skype: that had been the kid’s suggestion, the same thing he and Sally often used to talk to Douglas when he was up at school. And so, stunned and slack-jawed and wishing he could hide the emotions passing over his face, Danny had listened intently that day as Marshall Ferriot made his pitch.

He hadn’t just listened. He had given in, completely.

And it had all gone perfectly since then. But now, Marshall was in his office and there was blood everywhere, so maybe it hadn’t gone so well after all. The kid seemed to have no trouble moving around but he looked gaunt and ghostly. How long had it been since he’d come to? Six months. What had he said at that time? I need time to get my bearings. And a fresh start. After what I’ve been through, I think I deserve a fresh start, don’t you, Mr. Stevens?

And so, as far as anyone at Cypress Bank & Trust knew, Marshall Ferriot was still a vegetable, still being cared for in seclusion by his dutiful sister. Danny had taken care of everything: submitting fake medical reports to the trust committee, setting up a new account to receive the disbursements, which he and Marshall could both access—Marshall under a new identity Danny had provided for him, Henry Lee. He’d been handling Allen Shire himself, so there weren’t a lot of questions to answer on that front.

The split was a little more than fifty-fifty, weighted more generously in Danny’s favor. That had been the kid’s proposal, not Danny’s. And he’d never taken out a penny more than he was supposed to. So why? Why was this happening? Why was there blood everywhere? Why was the kid here in his house?

When Danny tried to ask this question, he tasted blood on his lips. He rubbed at his mouth and the back of his hand came away dark red. Suddenly all he could do was wheeze and groan for a minute or two while Marshall studied him patiently.

“I did . . . I did everything you asked . . . Everything we ag-agreed to . . .”

“I know.” But he didn’t sound grateful.

Marshall crouched down next to him and Danny looked into his eyes for the first time in his life. He’d only seen them in photographs. At first, their large size made them oddly welcoming, but then he saw they were utterly expressionless; staring into them felt like being invited to dive headfirst into an empty swimming pool.

“Please,” Danny wheezed. “Please . . . tell me . . .” He gestured toward the chair.

“Oh, I get it. You want to know who it is?” Marshall asked evenly. “Your wife, or your son?”

A sob exploded from Danny’s chest.

“I know, I know. It’s a real mind fuck, isn’t it? No pun intended. But the whole thing—it kinda makes sense, don’t you think? My gift, I mean. After the way my sister dragged me around like a rag doll just so she could keep getting her checks. It’s gotta be some kind of poetic justice. . . . Hey, you know what’s also interesting, Mr. Stevens? How you never asked about her.”

“Wh-who?”

“My sister. I guess you assumed she just walked away? No trust, no checks. Nothing in it for her. Was that it?”

Danny nodded. It was total bullshit, but Danny nodded.

“Uh huh . . . okay. And the private detective that you sent to find us? Allen Shire?”

“Well, I never heard from him again. I figured he’d—”

“No one ever heard from him again.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Yes, you do, Mr. Stevens. You know exactly what I’m saying.”

“I figured you paid . . . paid him off, I guess . . . Both of them . . . I th-thought—”

“Did you really? Or did you think I killed them?”

“Now I do.”

Marshall cackled and clapped his hands together.

“Very good, Mr. Stevens,” he said once he caught his breath. “Excellent. In all seriousness, though, Allen Shire was a big help. Huge. Thanks for sending him. Eight years without moving your legs, well, it takes you a long time to learn to walk again. And I needed someone with me every step of the way. So thank you. Thank you for not sending the cavalry after him and causing a big mess for everyone. ’Cause there were other things I needed to learn too, you see? And he was very, very helpful.”

Marshall tapped the side of his head with one finger and smiled broadly, and that’s when Danny realized there was something in the kid’s head, something that defied everything Danny had believed to be true about the world, something that had covered his office in blood while it thrust Danny into some corner of darkness inside himself.

“But you can’t . . . I mean, that doesn’t . . .”

“Doesn’t what?”

“Just ’cause . . . My family . . . Just ’cause of what you did to them, that doesn’t make it right for you to hurt my family.”

“Silly rabbit! I didn’t hurt your family, Mr. Stevens. You did.”

Marshall stepped behind the desk. A few keystrokes later, a surveillance image from the hidden camera Danny had installed in the office filled the screen. He’d put the camera in after he and Marshall came to terms, and for one purpose only: to make sure no one was accessing his computer without his knowledge. But Marshall had clearly put it to another use.

There was his desk, clean, well lit, unbloodied. There was his empty chair. There was his computer monitor. The only thing that looked off was the window shade; it had been pulled and Danny couldn’t remember drawing it himself.

Then, in a flash of movement that blurred and pixelated the low-resolution image, he and Sally erupted into frame, a tangle of limbs. His wife’s arms pinwheeling, the glass candleholder arcing through the air, striking her in the jaw so hard Danny thought her head might rip from her neck. And then, slowly, the realization, rising up within Danny on a hot tide of bile, that he was the one bludgeoning his wife. That he was the one hurling his wife’s rag doll body into the desk chair, barely waiting for her to slide limply to the floor before he brought the candleholder down on her again and again and again. And he knew the only reason he couldn’t see the blood lashing onto the desk was because it was a cheap camera. But it was there when he looked down, black and oily in the dull sunlight coming through the shade.

Marshall spun the chair around. Sally was beaten beyond recognition, the border between blood and bruising impossible to distinguish anywhere on her skin, the stained flaps of the gray hooded sweater she’d been wearing squeezed by coil after coil of nylon rope.

Danny screamed. Marshall’s gloved hand closed around his mouth and gathered a clump of Danny’s hair in his other first, forcing the man to watch the monitor.

“Look what you did, Daniel J. Stevens.”

In his mind’s eye, which he had retreated to with a suddenness and entirety that froze his sob, Danny saw his son, Douglas, blowing past the entrance booths to the causeway in his Jeep, windows down, singing along with the radio.

“I told you it was a gift,” Marshall said.

He wanted to sink his teeth into the bastard’s gloved fingers, but he knew that would just bring the darkness back. Because that was how this thing worked; the darkness came and then you woke up in a hell of your own making, of Marshall’s making.

“I’m sorry. I know you probably think it doesn’t mean anything. But I am, Danny. I’m truly sorry. You see, some things, they’re just bigger than you. Bigger than me. Bigger than everyone. And this is one of them. I didn’t ask for this. It came on . . . well, almost like an infection. At least I think that’s what happened . . . anyhoo . . . the point here, Danny, is that I have a lot I need to get done in a very short time. And it’s gonna be easier for me if everyone thinks I’m dead. Now, before you think I’m a complete bastard let me be very clear about something. A bad thing is going to happen to your son tonight. But you get to decide just how bad it’s gonna be, Danny. Are you with me?”

The knowledge that he couldn’t run, that if he cried out for help or made a mad grab for something heavy, the darkness would return in an instant, filled Danny Stevens with a kind of drunken, floaty feeling, a sense of complete powerlessness and surrender. But images of Douglas walking through the front door, calling out to him, were like jagged chunks of glass underneath his splayed palms, spiking him back into his body, preventing him from floating away to join his wife in whatever heavenly place she’d just escaped to.

“Danny? Are you listening to me?”

Danny nodded.

“Good. Because I’m going to ask you a question, and I need you to answer honestly, okay? ’Cause if you do, the worst thing that’s gonna happen to your son is that he’s gonna come home to find his parents dead. Which is very sad, I know. But my parents are dead too. So, boo-hoo. Join the club.”

A silence fell, and Danny could hear the sounds of his own heavy breathing as if from far away.

“Ask me what’s going to happen if you don’t tell me the truth, Danny.”

“Wh-what’s going to–”

“If you lie to me, the police will find Douglas chewing your neighbor’s face off.”

“I won’t. I won’t lie. I promise I won’t oh God please—”

“Okay. Okay. Christ, easy. Enough already. Chill. Just chill out and listen, okay?”

Danny nodded.

“Does anyone else know about our little arrangement?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. Just like I promised. I mean, Sally didn’t even—” Just saying his wife’s name aloud squeezed the breath from him. Marshall shot the woman’s bloodied corpse a quick glance, like he thought he might have gone too far but would consider that possibility later, after a beer.

“All right, fine. You didn’t tell anyone. But do they know? Does anyone suspect anything? Anyone. Take your time. Think about it. Because believe me, I don’t want to come back for your son, but I will if I have to, Mr. Stevens. I will.”

Several minutes later, after he had finished a litany of silent prayers asking for forgiveness from a God who now seemed more remote than ever, Danny Stevens spoke the person’s full name. And after studying his face for a bit, Marshall thanked him, nodded politely, and brought the darkness back for the last time.

17

NEW ORLEANS

Ben had been looking for Marissa all morning, but he only checked the dive bar a few blocks from her house because he was getting desperate. He’d actually forgotten about the place altogether; there was no sign out front and if you drove past it too quickly, you could easily mistake it for just another one of the Faubourg Marigny’s brightly painted shotgun houses.

They were a few blocks from the French Quarter’s jolly chaos, but it was just past ten in the morning, so Marissa was one of only three customers inside, and the only one sitting at the bar. Her hands were resting palms down on either side of a sweating, half-empty rock glass—rum and Coke, Ben figured, her usual, but not so early in the day—as if she were trying to levitate it with her mind.

“Can you change the channel, please?” Ben asked the bartender as he took a seat.

“Do not change the channel,” Marissa said.

“Enough already, Marissa. You’re not—”

“Do not change the channel,” Marissa repeated, with enough force in her voice to make the bartender set the remote back on top of the register.

And so they sat there for a while, watching the same loop of terrible images most of the city had been hypnotized by for twelve hours now: blackened trailers guttering flames in their shattered windows, a morbidly obese white woman, her uncombed hair like bales of straw, screaming bloody murder as sheriff’s deputies shoved her back from the scene of a scorched home in which her young daughter had burned to death. Only now the woman’s screams were silent, her excruciating display reduced to a visual backdrop for speculating news anchors. The gas leak had probably started in the middle of the night, they were explaining for the thousandth time, and that’s why no one had called the emergency number posted on warning signs that ran the pipeline’s length through Ascension Parish; because they hadn’t been awake to smell the cloud of methane spreading over their homes, before something, probably infinitesimal, had ignited it: a pilot light, the small spark inside a light switch. Someone’s furtive late-night smoke in the backyard.

“Remind me again what I said to you in my office that day,” Marissa whispered.

“I’m not going to help you punish yourself for something you didn’t do.”

“Remind me, Ben.”

“Or else what?”

“Marissa Hopewell Powell is not in a position to reprimand anyone on her staff today. So, if you can find it in your heart, just remind me what I—”

“You said it wasn’t the right time for us to take risks. You said . . . we needed time to let the Lanes get comfortable, to let you get comfortable—”

“Comfortable,” Marissa snarled, and when she lifted her glass to her lips, it trembled in her hand. “If I wanted to make people comfortable, I should have gone to work in a fucking mattress store,” she growled. Then she drank.

“Marissa—”

“You came to me with a line on Judge Crowley weeks before he ruled the owner of that damn pipeline didn’t have to reduce their operating pressure—”

“And no piece of mine would have forced him to rule another way, and you know it. It’s gradual, what we do. It’s cumulative, if it works at all. You get a silver-bullet hit piece maybe once in a lifetime. Anything else is movie crap. And come on, you know how this state is. It’s just like Edwin Edwards use to say. Unless we catch ’em in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, then we’ve got nothing. It takes time—”

“We don’t have time!”

Ben hadn’t seen her come apart like this in years, not since their fifth hour of night rescues after Katrina, their fifth hour of listening to the anguished, pleading wails of Marissa’s trapped and dying neighbors calling out to them from attics and rooftops. One minute she’d been ordering them in the direction of one house, the one flashing SOS at them with a flashlight, then she’d crawled to one corner of their aluminum boat, curled into a ball and started shaking all over until Ben curved an arm around her back and held her until she went still. Of course, she’d repaid the favor a few days later, when they’d finally arrived at the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center on foot, expecting the National Guard, food and water and finding only masses of the abandoned and the dying. That’s when Ben fell to his knees and wept, and the proud, educated black woman who had once snapped at him that she would never be his mammy, collected him off the ground, took him in her arms and kissed him gently on the neck while whispering assurances that everything would be all right. On many nights in the years since, they’d called each other randomly and without explanation, sometimes in the hours just before dawn, because something about the other person’s voice served to remind them that the bloated corpse they had awakened to find in their bedroom, the one piled in the corner like several sacks of sand, was in fact just an untethered memory that had taken on the illusory weight of a nightmare.

Had those late-night calls—they were always mock-casual, as if the other was just calling to chitchat, even though it was almost 3:00 a.m.—pushed those years too far into the past? Had they lost hold of some fundamental piece of themselves that had been revealed during those seventy-two hours in August of 2005? It was as if the city itself had asked them a clear and direct question when the levees failed—Will you fight for me?—and they answered with courage and a boat. But ever since, the answer to that same question had been: Get back to me. I’m busy trying to get comfortable.

He studied her wide-eyed, furious stare, and the way she was now lifting one trembling hand as if to hold him back, even though he hadn’t moved an inch since her outburst. Maybe it was post-traumatic stress syndrome, or maybe it was the old, uncompromised Marissa. One thing was for sure, he was so desperate for the return of that long-lost woman, he didn’t mind if she broke the door down on her way in.

“This city lost its margin of error twenty years ago,” Marissa said. “Somebody’s supposed to tell the truth even when no one wants ’em to. Goddamn Times-Picayune isn’t even a daily paper anymore. And while I was waiting for some spoiled white lady to give me permission to do my real job, sixteen people burned to death in their sleep.”

The door to the bar was swept open as if by a gale-force wind, and when Ben matched the strength of the person on the other side with the height of the baseball cap–crowned shadow suddenly blocking out the sun, an involuntary groan escaped from him.

“This is not the time, A-Team,” Ben managed, sliding off his bar stool.

But by then, Anthem Landry had slammed the latest issue of Kingfisher down on the bar so hard the row of beer mugs behind the register clinked together, and for a few stunned seconds Ben and Marissa just stared at the cover: “RIVER ROYALTY: How a Culture of Nepotism Is Putting Our City, and Our Lives, at Risk.”

The graphic, which Ben had literally turned away from when it first went up on the art board at the office, was a giant, bloodred oil tanker enlarged to the point that it looked like its wheelhouse was about to tear out the bottom half of the Crescent City Connection bridge. Ben thought it was a cruel irony that he would have been less afraid of this confrontation if Anthem had still been drinking. But at six months of sobriety, he wasn’t just a live wire; he was a curtain of them wrapped around leaner, more efficient muscles. Sure, his skin looked great, and there was an unmistakable twinkle in his eyes, but ever since he’d tossed his flask into Lake Pontchartrain, he had a tendency to bare his teeth during everyday conversations and shout at waiters if they brought him a Diet Pepsi instead of a Diet Coke.

Ben saw no good end to the collision before him, no good end at all.

“You followed me here?” Ben asked.

“You wouldn’t tell me where she was yesterday, and I have something to say to this nice lady.”

“No, you don’t. Not today.”

“Oh, let him talk,” Marissa muttered.

“San Francisco Bay?” Anthem growled. “You had your reporter compare our pay scale to bar pilots on San Francisco Bay? May I just point out to you that San Francisco Bay is almost as big as San Francisco. They don’t have anywhere near the currents or the proximity to population we deal with out there every day.”

“She didn’t write the piece, Anthem.”

“Did you?”

“Did you see my name on it?” Ben asked.

“You could have at least given me a warning, goddammit!”

“I apologize. Next time when I have to practically bribe a colleague to keep your DUI out of my paper, I’ll give you plenty of notice so you can give some thought to where you’re gonna buy me dinner.”

“You really did that?” Anthem asked. Then, to Marissa, he said, “Did he really do that?”

“We both did,” she said quietly.

“So is that some kind of consolation prize?”

“You know what, buddy?” Ben started, stepping between his best friend and his boss. “We’re kinda having a day here, and it’s not about you right now. I know this may come as a shock, but it’s not always about Anthem La–”

“You’re right. It’s not about me. It’s about the men I work with up and down this river. And they all want to know the same thing.”

“Which is?” Marissa asked him.

“What do you want? You want us all fired? Restructured? Because if that’s the case, then it’s my duty to explain what the alternative is. It’s a bunch of outsourced South Americans who will be willing to launch a tanker full of crude in a fog so thick you can’t see your hand in front of your face, all so they can make a delivery deadline on the other side of the world for British Fuckin’ Petroleum.

“How safe do you think our river will be then? How will you all sleep at night knowing you got ships moving up and down out there, full of God knows what, being piloted by guys who’ve got no connection to anything on the other side of the floodwall? Guys who live and die by what the oil industry tells ’em to do. And pardon me, but if you don’t think being bossed around by the oil and gas companies is a problem, allow me to direct your attention to Ascension Parish today.”

Rather than wince right in Anthem’s face over this deep cut, Ben stepped out from between his best friend and his boss, and turned his back on them both. The reaction must not have been lost on Anthem, because when he spoke again, his voice had lost its hard, furious edge.

“Every moment I’m out there, I’m thinking about my family. I’m thinking about the two of you. I’m thinking about how far away everyone I care about is from the bridge I’m piloting my ship under, in case something goes wrong. Now, I know I rode out Katrina in a condo on Pensacola Beach. But if I had known what was coming, I would have been here with you both. But you have to believe me. There’s not a day when I round the bend in the river and see all those buildings still standing there that I don’t thank my lucky stars . . . There’s my girl. I say it every damn time, whether I want to or not. Ask any captain who’s done a turn with me. There’s my girl . . . But this . . . crap made it sound like men like me would run a ship straight through the Riverwalk if we didn’t get paid on time. And that is wrong. It’s just flat-out wrong.”

When he saw her watching the images of fiery destruction on the TV above the bar, Ben figured Marissa had tuned out Anthem’s lecture altogether.

“You think you can put all that in writing?” Marissa finally asked.

“Excuse me,” Anthem whispered. Ben was just as startled as Anthem appeared to be.

“I said, do you think you can put that in writing? That way, I can have one of our copy editors go over it and we can put it up on our website this evening.”

“What . . . like a letter to the editor?”

“No. A rebuttal. Better placement. Your photo. The works. It’ll even get its own comment thread if your pals want to chime in.”

Slack-jawed, Anthem shook his head, eyes moving from Marissa to Ben. Once he had his old friend in his sights again, he barked, “You write it!”

“I’m flattered, really,” Ben said. “But I have grout to clean.”

“Come on. I can’t write!”

“Well, you know how to spell and you know how to shoot off your mouth. Apparently, that’s all you need to know these days.”

“It’s all you knew how to do when I took you on,” Marissa said to Ben.

“I don’t want to work at your paper,” Anthem said.

“Well, that’s good, son,” Marissa said, rising from her bar stool. She pulled a business card and pen out of her pocket and wrote something on the back of the card. “ ’Cause I didn’t offer you a job. This is a one-shot deal, and I’ll need it by three o’clock. Email it to Sue LaSalle, she’s our Web person.”

“All right . . . But you can’t blame me for being suspicious. You’ve never liked me very much.”

“Well, A-Team, let’s just say I’m a bigger fan of Anthem two-point-oh then I was of the old version. Still, nothing can change the fact that I do hate white people. Even the pretty ones.” She chucked Anthem on the cheek, then she headed for the door. “Good-bye, y’all. I have booze at home.”

Ben returned to his bar stool. Anthem took Marissa’s spot and gestured for the bartender. When he saw Ben’s startled look, he said, “I’m gettin’ a Diet Coke.” Then he repeated his order to the bartender with petulant emphasis.

Ben ordered a Corona.

“You mad at me?” Anthem asked.

“No. But I do wish that you would, you know, maybe shut the hell up every now and then.”

“Well, that’s the pot calling the kettle a pot. You know, you’re never going to find a boyfriend, you keep spending all your weekends with her.”

“Funny. She says the same thing about you.”

“I don’t want a damn boyfriend!”

“That’s not what I meant, genius.”

“Whatever. You don’t spend all your weekends with me.”

“I used to. I used to have to chase you all over town. Your mother would be calling me all night, half out of her mind.”

“Well, then you spent the weekend with my momma and not me, all right? Anyway, that’s not how it is anymore.”

“Guess not.” The bartender brought Ben’s beer. He took a slug. “Does it bother you that I’m—”

Anthem hissed and waved one hand at him dismissively, but in the same instant, he turned away from the sight of the froth collecting inside the bottle’s neck as if it were a picture of Nikki Delongpre.

“This isn’t some kind of setup?” he finally asked. “What do you—I don’t even know what you’d call it. An article? A piece?”

“Piece is good,” Ben said.

“You don’t think she’s going to try to make me look like crap?”

“No. I don’t. I think it’s a good thing.”

“For who?”

“For both of you.”

Anthem studied him for a while, decided that he was telling the truth and drained his entire Diet Coke in three uninterrupted swallows. Then he slammed the glass back down to the bar as if it were a shot of tequila. “Good!” he declared. “Then help me write the thing.”

“I can’t. Not today.”

“Benny, come on. I don’t have the time. I—”

“You’ve got nothing but time this weekend. You’re on call, which means you’re going to be staying home, gardening, downloading porn, and trying not to drink, until you have to go out on a ship.”

“You really think I can do this?” Anthem asked him.

Ben was disarmed by the hope in Anthem Landry’s reluctant smile, by the brightness in his eyes and the blend of childlike nervousness and exuberance Marissa’s offer had stirred in him so suddenly. For years now, sarcasm had been his most effective shield against Anthem’s physical beauty and frequent moments of raw, boyish charm. But this wasn’t the time. And so what if one unguarded smile from a handsome friend had him relieving himself later that night to a preposterous and vaguely incestuous fantasy? He was allowed one or two every now and then, as long as he kept it a fantasy. As long as it was only every now and then.

“I think you’re going to knock it out of the park, A-Team.”

Anthem picked up his empty glass, clinked it against the neck of Ben’s beer bottle, and tousled Ben’s hair with one massive hand so forcefully Ben was forced to bend over and shield himself. Then he barreled out of the bar and into the blinding sunlight outside, proving with each step that it was possible for a giant to move with a spring in his step.

18

From where he stood, just outside the window above her kitchen sink, Marshall Ferriot watched the woman inside drag a meat cleaver across her left wrist, and then her right, and wondered, just as he had with her boss, Danny Stevens, earlier that morning, if it would have consoled her to know how beautiful she looked in the final moments of her life.

As she cut herself, Janice Walker appeared in Marshall’s gaze as a shimmering, colorless apparition, trailing little starbursts of quantum material that shifted through the air around her like ghostly impressions of herself, impressions that effervesced so brightly in Marshall’s vision, they distracted him from the resulting arterial spray when Janice effortlessly dragged the knife’s blade across her throat. It was the same experience he had every time he willed himself to open to his subjects and felt the velvety rush of their souls moving into his.

As with all of them, he’d experienced a brief flash of her soul when he’d first hooked her. He’d seen a woman he knew to be her mother walking a young Janice by the hand through the Audubon Zoo, and the monkeys in their cages turned to stare at them with humanlike approval and warmth, the product of young Janice’s fanciful imagination. And then the vision passed, and it felt as if he were drinking her in as he forced her to shuffle toward the cutlery block so he could get to work.

It hadn’t been Marshall’s intention to re-create that long-ago fantasy of what he wanted to do to Nikki Delongpre after she’d betrayed him. But that’s exactly what he’d done, in all its bloody splendor, albeit from a slight distance and with a much older and less attractive subject. The little tableau was so appropriate to the day’s agenda, Marshall laughed gently as the woman slid down the blood-splattered wall with lifeless, unblinking eyes.

Effortless, easy. No need for chitchat, no need to go inside and risk contaminating the scene as he’d done with Danny Stevens. And it was a painless death he’d granted her, despite all the blood. As far as Janice’s consciousness was concerned, she’d been rinsing dishes one second, headed off to the afterlife the next. No need to inform her that her ticket had been punched because her boss of seven years suspected she might have had some suspicions about how much he’d stolen from the Ferriot trust.

Now she was crumpled against the blood-splattered wall just inside the back door, her Pepto-pink bathrobe spilling open over her bloodstained pajamas, her eyes glazed and lifeless, but her slack jaw still drawing slight breaths. With impossible, steady determination, she rolled over onto all fours, lifted a hand to her gushing throat and began painting letters across the nearest wall with a splattered finger: S O R R Y M A R S H A

Marshall felt the sharp tug deep in his chest that told him the woman’s death had arrived. He released her, and he was relieved when she didn’t spasm with sudden agony or grasp desperately for her gushing throat.

He didn’t want her to suffer. After all, what was she guilty of besides answering phones for a crook for several years? He’d had no choice but to position her alongside all the other pieces he’d left behind in a precise trail of blood and lies, pieces that included her missing boss and the evidence Marshall had left on his computer suggesting his wife had discovered evidence of his crime and that this discovery had resulted in her violent murder; pieces that included Allen Shire, dead by self-inflicted gunshot wound in the house on Chamberland Island, along with a suicide note nearby explaining how he’d conspired with Elizabeth and Danny Stevens to kill Marshall and milk the trust, and that when he and Elizabeth had quarreled over his share, he’d killed her in a fit of rage, only to be consumed by guilt.

Which body would be discovered first?

The curiosity made Marshall almost giddy. He’d done such a good job. The discovery of one body would immediately lead to the others, and then the world would be made aware of a murder plot that hadn’t actually been executed, by three individuals who had barely known one another. Yet the evidence would be undeniable, indisputable.

But there was one person out there who wouldn’t be convinced, of this Marshall was sure.

How long before she’d hear the story? Did she have some kind of news alert set for his name or the names of his family members? (He’d set up one for the names of everyone he’d killed over the past few weeks.) There was no telling. But Marshall was confident that by the end of the day at the latest, as the news media and cops shook their heads in bafflement over the extraordinary, impossible details of the diabolical plot that had cost Marshall his life, one woman would hear the story and be gripped by fear and certainty. She would know that yes, the story of Marshall Ferriot’s murder was too impossible to be true, and that the real explanation was far from ordinary, and in that moment it would be as if Marshall’s ghost had floated up out of his comatose body and whispered in Nikki’s delicate little ear: I’m coming for you, bitch. I know what you did to me and I’m coming for you. But first, I’m going to destroy everything you ever loved.

He was walking briskly down the alleyway toward the street, reaching for the notecard in his front pocket on which he’d written Anthem Landry’s address, when he noticed his ring was gone. Marshall retraced his steps, but the brush alongside the house was cut back, the dirt exposed and visible, and there was no tiny glint of gold anywhere he looked. The ring he’d lost wasn’t some nondescript piece of generic jewelry either.

He’d purchased the little beauty on Chamberland Island, the same day he’d left Allen Shire’s body to rot. He’d walked the length of the island before he’d reached the bed-and-breakfast at the other end. There, shadowed by oaks and just a stone’s throw from the plantation house that played host to honeymooning couples, Marshall had come across a tiny shack that turned out to be a gift shop. It was owned by the daughter of the woman who ran the bed-and-breakfast, and the dusty glass cases were full of custom-made jewelry fashioned from found objects native to the island. And those objects had included the carcasses of water moccasins. The ring he’d purchased and worn faithfully ever since had been a gold-dipped rib from a cottonmouth. And now it was gone. In fact, he had no recollection of seeing it on his hand after leaving Beau Chêne that morning.

And that was bad. That was very, very bad. Because it wasn’t just any ring. It was literally one of a kind. And if he’d left it behind at Beau Chêne . . . well, then, the invisible hand that assembled his perfect little imaginary murder plot wouldn’t be so invisible after all.

Hovering just inside the alleyway, Marshall rested his hand against his pants pocket and the address inside. He stilled his panic by reminding himself of his power and of its great depth. As he decided what to do next, he assured himself that he was entitled to act with as much patience and wisdom as the God that had given him his incredible gift.

19

Ben Broyard?”

He’d only been home a few minutes when his phone rang. He’d expected Anthem, with some desperate question about the basics of English-language composition. But the woman who’d just said his name didn’t sound familiar, and her phone number hadn’t looked familiar either when it flashed on his iPhone’s screen. Except for the area code, 228, Bay St. Louis, a quaint coastal Mississippi town about an hour’s drive from New Orleans, close to where Katrina’s eye had made devastating landfall.

“Speaking.”

“My name’s Alison Cross. I . . . forgive me for calling on a Saturday.”

“It’s no problem at all, Ms. Cross. How can I help you today?”

What he heard was the nervousness of a woman with a good story to tell, a story that was tearing her apart, so he padded to his desk, grabbed a pen and put his earpiece in, all without missing more than a few syllables of the woman’s stammers.

“It’s my husband, you see— Oh, Christ. I sound like a woman in some movie. I just can’t believe I— He’s missing. He’s been missing for almost a month now, and I just— Okay. Maybe I should start over.”

“No. Please. Keep going.”

“I still get the paper, you see. Your paper, I mean. Jeffrey and I—” Jeffrey Cross, Ben scratched onto his pad. Vaguely familiar, but only vaguely. “—we lived in New Orleans up till just a few years ago and so I still subscribe to Kingfisher because it makes me feel connected still, I guess. Anyway . . .”

“Your husband? Jeffrey?”

“Yes. When I saw your name . . . that article you wrote about the cold storage facility that got shut down in New Orleans East . . . Well, I just thought that maybe . . . Do you remember my husband?”

“Honestly, I don’t, Mrs. Cross.”

“Well, of course not, it was so long ago, and I feel terrible bringing it all up now. I certainly don’t want to make my trouble yours. Not after all these years. But I just thought, what with the connection and all—”

“What connection would that be, Mrs. Cross?”

“I’ve told you he’s missing, right? My husband.”

“Yes. You have.”

“You must hear stories like this all the time. Husband goes missing, wife insists he wouldn’t leave her. I mean, you probably think I’m as crazy as the police. But maybe there’s one . . .”

Truck brakes hissed out front, and a large shadow fell across his front drapes. He padded to the window as Alison Cross continued, keeping his footsteps as quiet as he could.

“ . . . You see, I wasn’t the love of his life. I mean, we were happy but I know Millie was the real . . . I mean, she was the one he—”

“Millie?”

When he pulled back the edge of the drape, he saw a giant pickup truck with a small motorboat attached to its tow hitch, and sitting behind the wheel was Marissa Hopewell Powell. She saw him peering out at her, and punched the horn lightly. Ben just stood there wondering why his boss, who had been on her way to a good drunk just a few hours earlier, when she’d left him in that dive bar with Anthem, was now sitting in front of his apartment in someone’s else truck, towing someone else’s boat.

“Millie Delongpre,” said the woman on the other end of the line.

Ben was too stunned to respond at first. He let the drape fall back into place. Marissa punched the horn in protest.

“I’m sorry. Did you say—”

“Millie Delongpre. Yes. You see, she and my husband, they were together before she met Noah and, well, Jeffrey always carried a torch for her. He even talked to her in his sleep . . . Jesus . . .” For a few seconds, he wasn’t sure if she was laughing or crying. “I’m throwing all of this at you at once.”

“Your husband is missing.” Outside, Marissa honked the horn. “And he used to be involved with Millie Delongpre.”

“Yes, and I remembered how close you were with her daughter and I thought maybe there was a chance you would help me.”

The horn honked again. Ben threw open his front door and lifted an index finger to request silence. In response, Marissa shouted, “Hot tip, Uptown Girl. Get in!”

“Mrs. Cross, are you saying you believe your husband made contact with Millie Delongpre?”

“No!” she gasped. “No, no, no. I just—I don’t know what to believe, to be honest with you. The police are so dead set on convincing me that my husband planned to leave me, I just . . . I’ve been thinking of any explanation. I mean, isn’t this how it works in the movies? They tell you you’re crazy so many times eventually they drive you insane.”

“Sometimes,” Ben answered.

“It’s just . . . what with the connection between you and the Delongpres, well, it was something, you know? Something I could try.” Now the woman actually was crying. And Marissa was honking the horn like they were a half hour late for a Saints game.

“Mrs. Cross, I’m going to call you back, okay? And I mean that. I am. I’m just in the middle of something right now and I want to be able to give you my undivided attention.”

“Sure,” she whispered. “Of course. Do you need my number—”

“I have it on caller ID. Is this the number you’d like me to call?”

“Yes. Sure. That’s great. Thank you. I really— I appreciate it.”

“Of course.”

He hung up on her, then bounded down his front steps. “What is wrong with you?” he cried.

“What, we’re you makin’ a date? I got a hot tip. Let’s go.”

“You also got someone else’s truck and someone else’s boat. I’m confused. I thought you were drinking today.”

“Yeah, well, you and the River King ruined that one.”

“Doesn’t smell like it.”

“Fine. You drive. I’m not good with towin’ anyway.” Marissa hopped out from behind the driver’s seat but she left the engine running and the keys in the ignition.

“What’s happening right now?” Ben asked the surrounding houses as much as he asked his boss.

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

“On the way where?”

“Beau Chêne. You ever been to Beau Chêne? It’s lovely.”

Ben got behind the wheel and pulled the door shut. He wasn’t in the habit of towing boats either, but the thing wasn’t exactly a yacht, so as long as he took corners slowly . . . “It’s my neighbor Clem’s. He told me if there’s a levee failure before we get it back, he’s going to haunt my dreams. He just keeps it in his driveway. Thinks it’s gonna scare hurricanes away.”

“What the hot tip?”

“Looks like some banker killed his wife and then hit the road. It’s a crime scene, Ben, and we’re gonna crash it.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a good idea . . .”

“Not sure what’s a good idea?”

“For you to come along.”

“Oh, really?”

“Marissa, you smell like rum.”

“I’m a child of the Caribbean. Leave me alone.”

“What’s happening?”

Marissa threw up her hand as if preparing some big lecture, but instead her chest heaved and her breaths sputtered out of her and for a few minutes, they just sat there, the tinny voices of WWL News Radio playing faintly in the background. “Let’s just say Hilda Lane picked the wrong morning to warn me off another story.”

“Oh dear.”

“Banker’s name is Daniel J. Stevens. Son came home a few hours ago, found his mother beaten to death. TV hasn’t gotten wind of it, but Hilda’s friends with the family and she said she doesn’t want us digging into it.”

“So you dug into it?”

“Yep. Got an off-the-record source with St. Tammany Sheriff says they found something open on the computer, something about Mr. Stevens stealing from one of the trusts he managed. They think the wife saw it too, and that’s why she’s dead.”

“I still don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go with me.”

“Well, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to go at all, given the man manages a trust that belongs to Marshall Ferriot.” She let Ben absorb the impact of this body blow for a few seconds. Then, with a leering smile, she added, “Who knows? Maybe it was the one he was stealing from . . . That’s right. How ’bout you thank me instead of acting like my daddy?”

“I hear he was a lot taller. Okay. The boat?”

“Gated community, but the Tchefuncte runs right through it and it’s not gated.”

“I see . . .”

“I’m going, Uptown Girl. You can do the driving. But I’m going.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause it might be the last story we work on together for a while.”

“Oh, Jesus. What did you say to Hilda?”

“I told her if she didn’t like the way journalism worked, maybe she should get her husband to buy her a store so she could sell shiny things to other white ladies and leave me to do my goddamn job.”

“You might be able to recover from that one.”

“Yeah . . . not the part about how I held her personally responsible for all those deaths out in Ascension Parish. That one’s gonna stick, I think.”

Ben was speechless, suddenly imagining a future at Kingfisher without his mentor, if such a thing was even possible.

“Come on, Ben. Time’s a wastin’. We don’t want WDSU catchin’ this thing before we do.”

Ben took the truck out of park and placed his foot on the gas.

“What was that phone call about?” Marissa asked, once they’d gone a few blocks and the shock of her revelation seemed further away.

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Well, it’s a day for that, isn’t it?”

“You got that right,” Ben whispered. “Marissa, if they fire you, I’ll—”

“Don’t. Not yet. We’ll talk about it later. Just drive.”

A few minutes later, Ben’s phone let out a small chime that told him he had a new email. The message was from Alison Cross, and the attachment was a photograph of her and her missing husband, standing on a windswept beach in the light of dusk. She was a plump, fading beauty with flame-red hair, and he was a foot taller than her, with thick, ink-black eyebrows and a deeply recessed brow that looked poised to swallow his pinprick eyes.

Ben had seen the man before, in an old photograph the Delongpres used to keep on the living room wall. It had been taken on the night Nikki’s father had proposed to her mother, back when Elysium was just a muddy acreage with two trailers parked a few yards from each other and string lights running through the low-hanging branches, all of it powered by a gas generator. In it, the happy couple and several of their close friends were crowded around a lounge chair as a young Millie Delongpre extended her ring finger toward the camera. Jeffrey Cross has been one of the friends featured in that photo. But that was the extent of his contact with the man—a picture on the wall of a friend’s house, a friend who had been declared legally dead a few years before. And he was too distracted by the strong scent of booze coming off his boss to spend his afternoon wandering down the darkest part of memory lane.

• • •

Ben was glad they weren’t the only boat launching from Madisonville that day. It meant the police hadn’t closed off the Tchefuncte farther upriver. As he did his best to obey the no-wake rule posted on buoys that bobbed in the dark green water on either side of the tiny boat, Marissa fussed with her iPhone, cupping one hand over the screen to shield it from the sun while she tapped it with the other. The boat had a tiny tarp that only covered the captain’s chair.

“Any idea how far into Beau Chêne we have to go?” Ben shouted over the motor.

“I’m workin’ on it.”

“Is that a no?”

“We’re workin’ to beat the clock here. I didn’t exactly have time to pull out my swamp atlas, all right?”

She had a point, and to her credit, she’d tried ceaselessly on the ride there to get her phone to connect to Google Maps, only to have her signal drop every few minutes or so.

After just a little while on the water, walls of cypress rose on either side of the river, and it was easy to believe they were in the middle of a vast unending swamp. But the palatial homes of Beau Chêne would rise on the eastern bank in just another few minutes. They had only about another hour before dark and the setting sun laced the rippling green water with elongated tree shadows and great blades of orange.

“We could go it on our own,” Ben said.

“Ben—”

“We could. Seriously. The whole online advertising thing’s a whole ’nother ball game. We’d figure it out . . . eventually.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Okay, now, I’m guessing we get two bends in the river before we hit the Stevens place. So why don’t you—”

“I’m not staying without you.”

“Ben. Focus.”

“I’m not, Marissa. It’ll just be a matter of time before I mouth off to that bitch too. Especially if she fires you—”

“We got houses up ahead, Ben.”

She was right. A few yards down the suddenly manicured riverbank, a giant boat dock, big enough to house a spiral water slide, jutted out into the water, and beyond it, sunlight filtered through oak branches onto green lawns and redbrick McMansions. Ben saw no sign of the St. Tammany Sheriff’s Department. Or of any of the residents, for that matter. Maybe the prospect of a wife-killing banker on the loose had them inside behind locked doors.

“Okay. There’s one bend,” he said.

“I think we got two more.”

Ben throttled the motor and the tiny boat picked up speed. “How far from shore is the house?” he asked.

“Not sure. He’s not listed.”

“You didn’t ask your source?”

“I was kinda drunk.”

“Anastasis.”

“What?”

“That’ll be the name of our new website. It’s Greek for resurrection. What do you think?”

“I hope you got a long list of those.”

“You don’t like it?”

“You’re not going down with me, Ben. You’re too damn talented, and you don’t owe me that.”

“I do—”

“You don’t, Ben!”

The force of her anger startled both of them silent, and for a minute or two, there was just the whine of the boat’s engine and the river’s water whooshing past the fiberglass hull.

“No matter what happens with me and Hilda, I’m not leaving your life. Not now, not ever. And you won’t have to chase me from bar to bar to keep me in it, either. I owe you that much ’cause you’re my friend, and you’re a good one. And I promise you, the only time you’ll have to say good-bye to me is when one of us is leaving this great earth. Got it?”

He was grateful for his sunglasses because they hid tears so sudden and forceful, a few quick blinks were enough to keep them at bay.

“And Ben?”

“Yes.”

“Looks like it was one bend, not two. Sorry.”

The cops were suddenly everywhere along the bank up ahead, uniformed deputies, walking the perimeter, and as soon as one of them saw the boat approaching, he held up one palm in the universal signal of “Don’t move another damn inch, son.” Ben cursed up a storm under his breath while he yanked back on the throttle until they were almost drifting. The engine sputtered as it the propeller slowed, the deputies clotting together on the bank to meet their approach.

“Goddammit,” Marissa whispered. “I fucked up. Sorry.”

“So I guess we have to keep going or else we’ll—”

Just then the boat’s propeller made a sound like a motorcycle slamming into a brick wall. The jolt was so strong it knocked Marissa forward into the back of the captain’s chair. Ben’s chest hit the wheel as the entire boat rose and fell beneath them; it felt like a whale had passed underneath the thing. But the terrible scream was coming from the propeller blades in back.

“Kill it! Kill it!”

Ben followed Marissa’s instructions and in the silence that fell, he heard one of the deputies cry out, “You folks just stay right where you are!”

“Well, that should be easy,” Marissa called back. “Looks like something just ate our propeller.”

Ben scooted past her toward the back of the boat. He saw it right away, the bright loops of steel wrapped around the blades like the tentacles of an octopus, and as Ben used both hands to free it, Marissa started backing up, probably because she was stricken by the same thought as Ben. The chain wasn’t some rusted, filthy river-bottom relic they had stirred to the surface by mistake. It looked brand new. And if it was new, that meant—

The corpse exploded to the surface a few yards away.

“Ho, mother,” Marissa groaned.

Ben did his best not to look away. The body bobbed in the green water like a cork: greasy blue lips, brown hair plastered to one side in a style that would have been adorable on a little kid bursting from a swimming pool; but on this bloated, grown man it looked obscene. Two loops of chain crossed the man’s naked, bruised shoulders, and a shiny padlock secured the four loops of chain at the center of his chest.

“Daniel Stevens?” The question was intended for his boss, but he’d directed it at the corpse floating a few feet away from him. When Marissa didn’t answer him, he turned and saw that all the life seemed to have drained from her eyes, and from her body itself; her arms hung limply at her sides and he couldn’t tell if she was pouting or if she’d lost all feeling in her lower jaw. Shock. It had to be shock.

“Marissa?”

She lunged at him, and before he could cry out, she’d shoved him headfirst into the water. He was choking, arms flailing, bumping up against the corpse, pawing at its slick chest as he tried to get his bearings, kicking to get his head above water. Then he felt the chain he’d loosened from the propeller tighten suddenly around his waist. She was dragging him toward the boat, and for a second, he thought she was helping him, that she was about to pull him out of the water. Then the chain tightened suddenly and viciously around his neck. His head slammed into something hard. The chain tightened again. His head was wedged between two of the propeller’s scored, mangled blades. And when he tried to scream Marissa’s name, what came out instead was a frenzied chorus of high-pitched keening sounds that sounded more animal than human.

And over them, he could hear the sound of Marissa’s footsteps padding across the floor of the boat, heading in the direction of the captain’s chair, the throttle and the ignition.

• • •

Lloyd Duchamp came to on the floor of his kitchen. He figured it was the high-pitched screams coming from the river that had roused him. But what had they roused him from? Yes, he’d allowed himself a beer after the police had finished questioning him a few hours before. But that was all. Just one beer. Surely not enough to trigger a full-on-blackout, and that’s exactly what this felt like.

And it wasn’t like anyone would blame him for knocking back a single Heineken either. It had been a helluva day, what with Danny Stevens going full psycho on everyone. Lloyd was basically a prisoner in his own home until the cops were finished securing the scene, as they’d put it. And in this case, the scene was the bloody murder house next door.

His house sat right on the bank of the Tchefuncte, and from his kitchen window, he could see a tiny motorboat floating in the river. That’s where the screams were coming from. A couple cops were running along the bank, shouting things across the water to the black woman in the boat. But it looked like she was ignoring them. She certainly wasn’t the one screaming, he could tell that much. And she didn’t look like she cared much who was. Actually, it looked she was getting ready to start up the motor and get the hell out of there, which to be frank, is just what he wanted to do.

Crazy. This whole place has gone full-on crazy.

In a single instant, he smelled the gas and heard the sharp crack outside. He turned in time to see the black woman go down, saw the deputy on the bank who’d fired the shot still frozen, gun raised. A sudden, stunned silence washed over the entire scene; all heads had turned toward the river now and its lone floating boat.

Lloyd Duchamp would have stood at his kitchen window forever watching the scene unfold if it hadn’t been for the gas. The smell was overpowering him now.

He threw open the cabinet doors under the sink. When the wave of gas hit him, his eyes started to water and he had to blink madly before he saw that the gas line snaking out from behind the oven had been completely unscrewed. It hadn’t popped off or slipped out of joint. It was unscrewed, and that meant someone—

Then Lloyd Duchamp’s vision seemed to slide sideways, losing resolution as it went, as if his entire world were being wiped away by a giant, invisible hand.

• • •

The gunshot turned Ben’s panic into clear, focused action.

He drove himself straight down under the water. It turned out to be the magic direction. His neck jerked loose from the chain and when he surfaced, he was several feet away from the mangled propeller Marissa has lassoed his head to. An accident. It had to be. An accident. She panicked . . . But there was no sign of her, and that’s when he realized they’d shot her.

One of the deputies on the bank was beckoning him toward the shore with both hands, and Ben focused on the man’s stoic expression as if it were a goalpost. Impossible. Impossible. The word kept repeating itself in his brain, then, when he tasted rank water, he realized he was rasping it to himself even as he swam. Only now he could feel how deeply the water had gone into his lungs. His neck stung in a dozen different places from where the scored propeller had sliced into flesh as he’d struggled to free himself. But the deputy kept beckoning and Ben kept swimming.

And then, some strange sense of foreboding stirred inside him, and something behind the deputy caught his eye. At first, Ben thought he was hallucinating the clouds of splintered wood and glass hurtling through the air toward the assemblage of cops a few yards in front of him. Then everything seemed to arrive out of sequence: the belt of orange flames that exploded from the center of the redbrick house just down the riverbank, the uniformed deputies toppling like rag dolls, the explosion’s deafening pop that seemed to come like an afterthought to the blaze of lights and flying debris.

He forced himself under the water again just as flaming timbers splashed down on all sides of him, praying that when he surfaced again, this deranged, impossible nightmare would suddenly be over.

20

Can you walk?”

From the expression on the man’s face, it looked like the sheriff’s deputy crouching down over Ben had screamed these words at the top of the lungs. But to Ben they sounded distant and distorted; he was still partially deafened by the explosion, a whomp so deep and powerful it had rattled his teeth and kicked bile into the back of his throat.

Before the blast, it had been an orderly crime scene lined with uniformed deputies walking grid patterns. Now it was a war zone of flaming debris and crumpled bodies. The redbrick house a few yards away was geysering flames from its first-floor windows. And the fire had spread to the roof of the house next door, a stone French Regency affair Ben assumed to be the Stevens place. Gas. It had to be, he thought, because now it looked like the fire’s only fuel was the interior of the redbrick house where it had started.

“Was it the gunshot?” the deputy screamed. “What was it? Did you see?”

Ben was startled by the question, then by the brief rain of flaming leaves that fell from the burning oak branches overhead. The deputy shoved them both out of the way. And that’s when Ben realized the cop next to him hadn’t witnessed the surfacing corpse, Ben’s near beheading and the shooting.

The bodies along the bank lay facedown, motionless. Ben blinked a few times and saw that the bright red stains in their khaki uniforms had dimension and depth. They weren’t stains; pieces of the men had been torn away from them by the explosion. One of those deputies had shot Marissa, and all three of them had witnessed the crazy thing she’d done to him with the chain.

And there was the boat, undamaged, still drifting a few yards from shore, Marissa a dark shadow across the floor next to the captain’s chair.

No witnesses. None that were conscious anyway. Maybe not even alive.

“What the hell happened?” the deputy screamed at him.

“I don’t know!” Ben shouted back, his voice sounding louder inside his own head than the nearby screams and approaching sirens. And the answer was partly true. He didn’t have a damn clue what had started the fire. All he knew was that as soon as Stevens’s body had shot to the surface of the river, his boss, one of his closest friends for eight years, had almost torn his head off. But it was all so quick, so confusing. Maybe she really had been trying to help him . . . Then why did the deputy shoot her? Ben thought, before he could stop himself. If she wasn’t about to kill you, why did the deputy shoot her where she stood?

He didn’t use the word casually, but this was honest-to-God chaos. The bloody scene all around them, the deranged events that had created it in the blink of an eye. There was no other word for it. He’d interviewed enough soldiers and surgeons to know they were trained to take quick, decisive action in the midst of chaos, but he was not a solider or a surgeon; his training told him to gather evidence, assess each piece, assemble a bigger picture once he’d managed to take a breath and get a pen in hand.

Had some kind of trip wire been attached to the corpse? Had Marissa somehow realized the explosion was imminent, panicked and gone to start the boat without realizing she was about to tear his head off in the propeller?

“Why did they shoot her?” the deputy shouted, with a kindergarten teacher’s careful emphasis.

I’m not leaving your life. Not now, not ever. And you won’t have to chase me from bar to bar to keep me in it, either. She’d said these words to him just minutes before everything had gone to hell. How could she have gone from those words to trying to kill him? How was it possible? It wasn’t possible. That had to be it. It wasn’t.

“It was an accident!” Ben shouted. “We’re reporters. And Stevens—he’s in the water. It looks like he was weighted down, but our propeller caught on him, and I fell overboard. And they must have thought—I mean, they must have thought she was going to hurt me because she couldn’t hear them and she was going to start the boat. I don’t know. She needs help. Now!”

The deputy shook off his own skepticism; neither of them had time for an interrogation. “There’s a new perimeter just beyond that Mercedes. Go there and wait for the ambulance. You need . . .” He gestured absently at Ben’s neck, then ran back toward the riverbank he’d been steadily guiding Ben away from as they’d yelled at each other.

Ben was almost as far as the new perimeter the deputy had directed him to when his legs went out from under him, and another set of hands was on him, another deputy, this one a woman. And charging toward them around the bend in the oak-lined street was an ambulance, lights flashing against the falling dark, the first of several.

• • •

Marissa was in surgery.

That was the best information he could get. In separate ambulances they’d both been taken to Lakeview Regional Medical Center, a short drive from Beau Chêne, and when they’d found him wandering the hallways after being treated in the ER for his minor cuts, the plainclothes homicide detectives from the sheriff’s department expressed surprise that Ben had decided to wait around so they could take his statement.

He didn’t correct their mistaken impression. If you were going to lie to the police, it was important to look cooperative. And he’d fine-tuned his lies by then, even though he wasn’t sure who he was buying time for, himself or the friend who had almost torn him to pieces.

There’d been such confusion after the corpse of Daniel Stevens had scared them all half to death, well, those poor deputies on the bank (the homicide detectives refused to disclose any details of their respective conditions despite the number of times Ben referred to them as those poor deputies) must have thought Marissa was trying to hurt him when really she was as confused as everyone else.

The gunshot? Simple. Ben had seen the deputy draw his gun on Marissa, but it must have gone off when the house blew. Maybe the force of the blast had caused him to fire by mistake?

Maybe. Perhaps. I’m not sure. Every statement he gave them was peppered with these qualifying phrases; he knew he’d have to back out of them eventually if any of the deputies recovered. But for now, the detectives had little to say in return; Ben hoped that was a sign that the Stevens murder was still their focus, that they knew more about the explosion then they were letting on. But he knew better than to ask, and when one of them firmly instructed him not to go anywhere, he nodded gravely and assured them he would camp out in the waiting room.

It was only then that he realized he’d been wearing wet clothes for almost two hours. They weren’t soaked anymore, but they weren’t exactly dry either. He tried to turn his iPhone on but it was fried. He’d asked a drowsy-looking woman sitting nearby if he could use her cell phone before he’d planned what he was going to say to Anthem if he answered. Only once he heard the ringing on the other end did he realize he couldn’t ask Anthem to drive all the way across the lake. Not tonight. For one, he was on call, and secondly, he didn’t want to tell anymore lies that night.

This thought speared him in the gut. Maybe it had been the mention of Marshall Ferriot’s trust earlier that night, or maybe it was just fatigue and shock combining into a kind of nervous delirium, but the extent to which he had lied to Anthem over the years overwhelmed him suddenly. Eight years and he’d never said one word to the man about his suspicions of Marshall Ferriot. How many years did it take before a lie of omission that big became an all-out betrayal?

The waiting room was filling up, mostly with frantic women who stormed in as they talked on cell phones, detailing everything they didn’t know yet about their loved ones to the person on the other end. The wives of the injured deputies from Beau Chêne; they had to be. He walked a safe distance away from the woman whose phone he’d borrowed. Then, before he thought twice about it, he pressed his nose to a plate-glass window that reflected the harshly lit interior of the room behind him.

“Hello?” Anthem finally answered.

“I’m okay.”

“Ben! You’re . . . Why? What happened?”

“There was an accident, on the North Shore.”

“Beau Chêne! You were there?”

“Me and Marissa. Were we on the news?”

“No.” Good. More time, Ben thought. “But it’s crazy. That goddamn pipeline and now this. My brothers all called me ’cause they think the whole state’s about to blow up.”

“Listen, if we do show up on the news, call me, okay? Then call my mother in St. Louis and tell her I’m fine. My phone’s fried and she won’t be able to get me.”

“I’ll call her right now if you want me to.”

“No. No. I don’t need her freaking out before she absolutely has to.”

“Is Marissa, okay? . . . Ben?”

“She’s fine. Just . . . She’s fine.”

“You need me to come?”

“You can’t drive all the way to Covington. You’re on call.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ll get off call if I need to.”

Anthem 2.0, indeed, Ben thought, when he heard the man’s eagerness to put someone else’s needs ahead of his own for once. But remembering Marissa’s utterance of this flattering term earlier that day only reminded him of her lifeless expression as she lunged at him like a snake and shoved him overboard, of the scored propeller blades biting into his neck.

Ben’s eyes watered.

“Ben?”

“I’m good. A- Team. But I appreciate it.”

“All right then. Well . . . Hey, when you see Marissa, thank her for me.”

“For what?”

“My piece. It’s up. Sixty comments already. Some of them think I’m a shithead, but the rest of ’em . . . they’re callin’ me a hero, Benny.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

The words he’d meant to say next were You are a hero, but a great, silent wave of darkness seemed to course through his entire body before it robbed him of his vision, and then his hearing a few seconds later. Ben expected to feel the floor rising up to meet him. Instead he felt nothing at all.

• • •

“Ben?”

A few more tries, and then Anthem Landry was answered by a dial tone, and once again he was alone with his glowing computer screen, filled with the big headline they’d given his article, “The River’s Response,” and the smart-looking photo he’d emailed them earlier that day. Ben had probably been called away or the call itself had dropped and he’d ring again in a second. Whatever the case, there was no sense in standing there like an idiot listening to a mocking dial tone.

Of course, that wasn’t really what he was doing, now that he thought about it. It was the computer he couldn’t tear himself away from. Every few minutes or so, more comments were posted. Hell, if the whole state could stop catching fire for an hour or two, his first piece of journalism just might make the evening news. But the suddenly dropped call had made it feel too quiet all of a sudden, and that’s when Anthem realized that something else was missing, a comforting and familiar sound he usually took for granted.

His apartment was on the second floor of an old corner grocery store on Tchoupitoulas, directly across the street from the concrete Mississippi River floodwall and the wharves just behind it. The constant hum of idling container ships drove most of his neighbors insane, but he loved it. It made him feel connected to his lifeblood, especially on nights like this, when he was giddy with anticipation about going out on a ship. That’s why he’d left open the door to the exterior staircase’s second-floor landing. So he could hear the pulse and the throb of the river’s constant call as he went about finding various ways to kill time until the phone rang.

Beignet. His dog. That was it. The little slobberbox had been snoring up a storm on the porch just outside. And now he was gone.

The building had a side yard shared by both the upstairs and downstairs apartment, but it was Anthem who had turned it into a veritable jungle. And he’d done most of the work on those first early nights of trying to stay sober while he was on call, when he had no choice but to avoid friends who hadn’t taken his pledge seriously, and women who liked to knock back a beer after a hookup, and his brothers, who were the absolute worst. Those guys spun through the nearest drive-through daiquiri shop on their way home from just about anywhere.

First he’d planted the banana trees, then he’d started work on the birdhouses and then he’d gone about laying the flagstones for a circuitous path from the tall wooden back gate, through the dense leaves and to the foot of the exterior wooden staircase that climbed the side of the building. His neighbor, an overworked paralegal, had once remarked to him when he’d caught him working on the pathway, “You realize we don’t own any of this, right?” As if Anthem hadn’t known, as if he’d been doing it for any other reason than to keep his hands busy and his head filled with something other than the terrible fear that he wasn’t going to make it through another night sober.

Now he stood on the second-floor landing, staring down at a million places where his pet might be hiding. But Beignet was an English bulldog, which meant he wheezed like a runner in the Crescent City Classic wherever he went; if the little guy was down there somewhere, Anthem would be able to hear him. But he couldn’t hear him. Just the rustle of the banana leaves in the humid breezes off the river.

When he noticed the shadow in the garden below, Anthem’s mouth opened, but nothing came out and then it appeared to him as if the shadow itself had turned into a column of darkness, shot upward and swallowed him whole.

21

The darkness cleared and Ben found himself lying facedown on a twin bed, lips parted against a chemical, institutional taste he couldn’t quite identify. He braced himself for the agonizing throb of some head injury, or the stomach-twisting aftermath of Goldschläger shots. But all he could feel was a clean and quick release from a previously impenetrable darkness, and the same sense of lost time he’d experienced during hernia surgery as a child, after they placed the mask over his face.

He had to have passed out in the waiting room. Some kind of delayed reaction probably; shock or, God forbid, some injury he’d sustained during the blast.

He opened his eyes and saw the retro starburst comforter his face had been pressed to; the distant familiarity of the design made him recoil off the bed so quickly his back knocked into a wall of cabinetry just a few feet away.

The trailer he found himself inside of was all 1970s but everything about it had a new sparkle. The place was homey, but fake, no personal items anywhere he could see. He’d visited a few movie sets since New Orleans had turned into Hollywood South, and he felt like he was on one now. Nobody lived here. This trailer was some kind of re-creation. As soon as this word strobed through his mind, as soon as he found himself staring down at the comforter that had frightened him so badly, he realized where he’d seen it all before.

Elysium. Before Noah Delongpre had tried to turn it into a compound, when it was just two trailers parked together like lovers on an acreage of mud beside a serpentine bayou.

The door was barred from the outside, and he was on the verge of crying out when he saw the leather-bound journal sitting by itself on the immaculate kitchen table. READ ME, read the notecard sitting atop the scored leather cover.

Ben flipped the cover back. The sight of Nikki Delongpre’s handwriting, still familiar to him after all these years from the labels of the mix CDs she used to make for him at least once every few months, forced a sound from him that was something between a gasp and a yelp. And soon Ben was sinking into the tiny booth that served as the trailer’s pathetic dining area.

But even as he read, he told himself not to surrender to hope, told himself that this could be some kind of fake. Most of all, everything he was reading could have been written before that terrible night—the day Anthem had transferred to their school, some disjointed thoughts about Elysium and the well her father had dug, none of which Ben could quite put together in his race to find proof that this journal had been written after her disappearance

Then he saw the word Katrina, and he was forced to blink madly to keep the tears from spilling down his face. But then the swell of emotion hardened as he kept reading, like a charging ocean wave suddenly saddled with an iceberg.

My name is Niquette Delongpre and on the night before her 47th birthday I killed my mother . . .