City of the Dead Read online

  “She seems to have found a husband.”

  “I heard.”

  “Well, he’s lost her,” Kim reminded them all.

  Chastity should have done more than recognize that omen. She should have run from it. Bought a plane ticket for parts unknown and blown this pop stand before anybody knew she was gone.

  Before that brother-in-law chased her down.

  She could feel whispery feet tiptoe right across her grave. She could feel her life lurch imperceptibly out of balance. And no more than hours after she’d acknowledged it had existed at all.

  A brother-in-law.

  She checked her pocket again, just to make sure. She usually didn’t need to check it more than twice a week. This had been, what, four times in an hour? Not a good sign. Not good at all.

  “I’ll still call him back,” she said. “Get his number.”

  “This something you want to talk about?” Moshika asked quietly as she sidled over to where Chastity was crouched by the cart doing a final check on chest tube output.

  Chastity looked up at St. M’s best new surgical turk. Moshika had managed to get a lot of information out of Chastity since they’d been friends, but nothing this pertinent.

  Chastity smiled. “And give you the satisfaction of knowing that my family’s more screwed up than yours? Thanks, no.”

  Moshika chuckled. “Honey, nobody’s family’s more screwed up than mine. We’re listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. There are even pictures.”

  Chastity bet not. Chastity bet Moshika’s family was just run-of-the-mill screwed up. Not operatically fucked like Chastity’s.

  But that wasn’t something Chastity was going to think about right now. Right now, she was going to do the same thing she’d done for the ten years since she’d last seen her sister, Faith. She was going to pretend she was all alone in the world, so she’d be safe, and she was going to get on with her life. Which was why she smiled again and climbed back to her feet.

  “It’s time to take your boy down to CT,” she said and popped the brakes on the cart.

  Moshika flashed a mighty scowl, but in the end, she gave in to the inevitable. Grabbing hold of IV poles and monitor, she took her place on the team and helped maneuver Willie out the door for his run down to CT. Gathering the bulging evidence bags from the counter, Chastity headed in the opposite direction to meet with the police.

  For the rest of the shift, she did her best to avoid Kim, the secretary. If Kim didn’t find her, she couldn’t hand off that damn phone number of the brother-in-law Chastity hadn’t known she had. And if Chastity had no phone number, she couldn’t call to have him tell her that her sister was missing and he wanted Chastity to help him find her.

  Kim found her anyway. Right before end of shift, Kim ran Chastity down in the nurses’ lounge and handed off that phone number like the nuclear codes. And Chastity, fool that she was, took it. She took it in front of witnesses so that later there would be no way to deny culpability.

  She walked out into a purpling dusk and thought she had a few things to say to Moshika. Because maybe if Moshika hadn’t mentioned that damned chaos theory, she wouldn’t have recognized the moment her harmony slipped the tracks.

  Willow Amber Tolliver had shown up at Jackson Square sometime between Mardi Gras and Easter. A thin, anxious young woman with stringy blond hair and a pierced eyebrow, she wore flowing skirts and a tank top that exposed the copper bracelet high up on her arm. Her wrists jingled with cheap beaded bracelets, and her backpack was stuffed with fantasy novels.

  It took only a week or so for her to join the psychics and tarot card readers who controlled the Chartres Street side of the square. At first too shy to mingle, she simply staked out a corner with a battered little card table covered in an old purple scarf. On it, she lay her oversized tarot cards, an assortment of crystals, and a candle she’d bought at the Wal-Mart in Biloxi, which was where she said she was from. With a hand-painted sign that said, “Let Madame Nola see a better life for you,” she set up her own little corner of business.

  Willow didn’t have much of a gift, but she was earnest. She told her customers only the good things she thought she saw in their cards and crystals. She played with any baby who came by and petted the dogs the other street kids brought around. She struck up a relationship with another of the tarot readers, an irascible seventy-year-old ex-Black Panther by the name of Tante Edie, who couldn’t tolerate most people and made it a point to frighten the customers who displeased her.

  But she liked Willow. They kept an eye on each other’s tables, traded food and stories, and shared the late night when the cathedral church bells chimed into darkness, and their candles flickered in the desultory breeze.

  When Willow didn’t show up for six days in a row, it was Tante Edie who notified the police. She cornered one of the uniformed officers who regularly watched the square from the unit he pulled right up to the edge of Chartres and St. Ann.

  “I ain’t seen the girl for a good few days,” Tante Edie said, leaning in his car window. “You see or hear anything?”

  “Nah. You know where she lives?”

  “Algiers Point, I think.”

  It was where most of the homeless street hustlers huddled at night. Tante Edie preferred a real house, which she’d been squatting in over to Bywater way for the last year. The last week or so she’d been thinking of letting Willow share it with her, but she’d never gotten around to asking.

  “Was she in a warehouse, do you know?” the policeman asked, jotting notes on the paper his muffaletta had come wrapped in. “There was a fire in one the other night.”

  Tante frowned. “I don’t know. Anybody killed?”

  “Not that I heard.”

  “Can you ask around?” she asked because this was one of the cops who would help a street performer.

  “Yeah, sure. Do you think Willow’s her real name?”

  Tante Edie could only shrug. Who knew in New Orleans?

  The officer never did hear anything. The next day a new girl took over Willow’s corner with a henna tattooing stand, and Tante Edie went back to sitting alone. Willow Amber Tolliver, it seemed, was meant to fade into the lore of the Quarter, just like most ghosts before her.

  It was inevitable, really.

  Once Chastity got that phone number in her hands, there was no way of holding off the rest. She tried, she really did. For four days she hid in her house, where she painted her bedroom neon yellow. She took Lilly out for walks in the park down the street. She worked extra shifts, and she tested her limits in the clubs on Washington Avenue, where she went to be pummeled by thumping rock ’n’ roll and drink herself into a quiet stupor.

  Finally, though, she gave up and called her brother-in-law.

  “You were the last person I wanted to call,” he said, sounding thin and harried.

  “Not the way to entice me down there, Mr. Stanton.”

  “Doctor Stanton.”

  “Ah. Doctor, then.”

  “I’m just not sure Faith wants anything to do with you.”

  “Well, I’m sure. She doesn’t.”

  “But I can’t find her,” Dr. Stanton insisted. “And I don’t know where else to go.”

  Chastity fought a shiver of prescience. “Why me?”

  “Because you’re a forensic nurse.”

  Another short pause for disquiet. “How’d you know that?”

  “Your mother. One of her friends from home sent her an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about how you helped solve some big murder case. She showed it to me.”

  “I see.”

  “The article said you knew people all over the country. Police and coroners and such. It said you found missing people.”

  “Identify unidentified people. There’s a difference.”

  “Nobody will listen to me,” he said, as if not hearing. “I was hoping you’d know somebody down here who’d listen to you.”

  As a matter of fact, she did. She didn’t tell him, thoug
h.

  “What about my mother? Doesn’t she know where Faith is?”

  After all, it had been her mother who’d disappeared with Faith the first time. Who’d decided that Chastity had no right to know where either of them were. Well, while Chastity had been tied to St. Louis like a sacrificial goat, the two of them had been in New Orleans enjoying gumbo and jazz.

  How nice for them both.

  Suddenly Chastity realized she was hearing a very awkward silence on the other end of the line. “You didn’t know,” Dr. Stanton was saying. “Of course.”

  Well, that sent her stomach sinking. “No, I guess I didn’t. What?”

  “Um, your mother passed a few months ago.”

  It was Chastity’s turn for the uncomfortable silence. Tears. How ridiculous, after all this time. She looked down, to find her hand clenched around her drawstring bag. She fought the need for details, fought the urge to apologize, when it couldn’t have been her fault. At least not this time. So she emptied the contents of the bag and spread them across the table she’d bought from a bankrupt Mexican restaurant.

  “I have no desire to ever see New Orleans,” she said.

  Her brother-in-law never said a word. Chastity could hear his need in the rasp of his breath, though. In the weight of the silence that stretched taut across the miles. She listened, and she fingered her cache, the garnets and citrines, and clear water aquamarines that tumbled across her table like pirate’s treasure.

  Her treasure. Amethysts and tourmalines and one small emerald the color of spring. The treasure she’d accrued from the late night shopping channels she watched when she couldn’t sleep.

  Glittery, colorful, solid.

  Hers.

  She kept staring at it all, touching it, watching it glitter in the kitchen lights, as if it could tell her something.

  It told her something, all right. It told her she was an idiot if she thought she was going to avoid this.

  “All right, Dr. Stanton,” she said, rolling a garnet beneath her fingers. “I’ll come help you look for my sister.”

  Which was how, four days later, she found herself confronted with her third omen. The omen that finally frightened her beyond escape.

  Lake Pontchartrain.

  Chastity didn’t really know what it was when she saw it. She only knew that as the plane circled New Orleans for a landing, she looked out her window and saw water.

  Everywhere, nothing but water.

  And only one, endless bridge.

  Chastity hated water. She hated it worse than she hated late-night phone calls. Worse than she hated the words “It can’t get worse, can it?” Worse than she hated her own history.

  No, not hated.

  Feared.

  Chastity was paralyzed by water. She couldn’t so much as take a bath. She couldn’t sleep some nights because she woke to the sounds of lapping water and laughter, and it made her cry out into her empty bedroom. She couldn’t bear to look at that much water in one place.

  She did, though. She sat in that claustrophobic little seat looking down on an endless expanse of metallic, shifting water, and suddenly she knew for a fact that she’d made a mistake. She should never go to New Orleans, no matter what was at stake.

  It was too late, though. She was already there.

  Two

  She didn’t like him.

  Chastity liked most people. She’d always made it a point to. But as she climbed out of the taxi to find her brother-in-law standing on the porch of a house the size of a midsized hotel, she decided that it was a good thing she hadn’t been able to see him when he’d asked for her help.

  “Chastity?” he asked, walking forward into the hot, sticky sunshine, a hesitant smile on his face. “Is it you?”

  Chastity accepted her overstuffed backpack from the taxi driver and wondered if she could ask her brother-in-law to wait a bit for an answer. She wondered if, maybe, she could just climb back into the cab and turn back for home.

  “It sure is,” she said instead, angry at her brother-in-law for making her sound stupid.

  Angry at him for being a square-jawed, well-groomed, middle-aged white man with thick, graying hair. Angry at him for things he certainly couldn’t control. Like being a doctor. Like being unable to pick her up from the airport because of an emergency.

  Like making her suffer this trip in the first place.

  It hadn’t been bad enough that she’d had to fly over Lake Pontchartrain with its flat, ominous sheen. On final descent, the plane had seemed to skim every bit of water in the state.

  And not just rivers or lakes.

  Swamps.

  Miles and miles of swamps, glinting in stuttering flashes as the sun probed between bushes and trees to find the water lurking below. Water opaque with decay, thick with old secrets and sin. Water terrified her. Swamps damn near sent her into meltdown.

  And then, to add insult to injury, when she landed, her brother-in-law hadn’t been there to meet her. Instead he’d sent a dour Eastern European gentleman holding a lit cigarette and a sign that said CHARITY BURNS, who’d shoved her into a worn, fuggy sedan to be driven right past New Orleans and across a bridge that arced high over the Mississippi River.

  They’d ended up here, in what had to be the only subdivision in New Orleans that looked exactly like the one in which Chastity had been raised in St. Louis. Except for the fact that it had been created whole cloth out of the middle of another damn swamp. And Chastity had paid thirty dollars to get here.

  Which was why Chastity knew she had to try and overlook the fact that she didn’t like her brother-in-law for reasons he couldn’t control, and stay long enough to get her sister found.

  Slinging her backpack and purse over her shoulder, she resettled her laptop and stepped up on the sidewalk. She even smiled for the man who’d talked her into coming down into a hot, steamy New Orleans summer when she’d been so in harmony back in the hot, thick St. Louis one.

  “Here,” he said, reaching her halfway down his lawn, “let me get that. Don’t you have any other luggage?”

  Chastity wasn’t sure why, but she hadn’t expected his accent. Soft, courteous, with just a hint of New Orleans and a bit of the Deep South. If he hadn’t been a surgeon, he could have made a great butler.

  He sure had the house for it. A jumble of rooflines, as if one wasn’t interesting enough, and at least five architectural styles, all crouched over a tiny, pedestrian porch with pillars. It even had a lawn landscaped within an inch of its life by somebody who thought that all plants should come in threes.

  Three. Chastity seriously wanted to rip out at least one of each and see if the whole yard tilted on its axis.

  Instead, she let the good doctor take hold of her two-pound laptop instead of the forty-pound backpack and smiled as if she meant it. “Thank you, Dr. Stanton. That’d be fine.”

  She saw the taxi heading back through the gate to this walled-in compound and thought fleetingly of missed escapes.

  A gated community. In New Orleans. Chastity wondered how in hell Faith had managed to find it. Then she wondered why, but only briefly. She knew why. Just as she knew why Faith had married her successful, gray-haired surgeon.

  The question, of course, would be why she’d left him again.

  “Come on in out of this heat,” Dr. Stanton urged as he turned for the front door. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your coming down all this way. Especially since the first thing I did was miss your flight because of surgery.”

  Chastity caught the self-deprecating smile he flashed as he held the door open, and found herself surprised. Endearing, she thought. He looked endearing. She didn’t know many surgeons who could manage it. She didn’t know many who’d waste their time on it. She almost said something to that effect.

  She never got the chance. She’d just stepped into the arctic chill of Dr. Stanton’s house, when everything went wrong.

  Chastity shuddered to a stop. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. She damn near backed
out of that fancy doorway and ran straight for the swamps.

  That smell. She’d recognize that smell in hell.

  Bleach and lavender. It had the power to bring her right to her knees. How stupid was that?

  Then she saw what was past the entryway and almost brought up her lunch.

  “Chastity?”

  But Chastity couldn’t pull a single coherent thought out of her suddenly paralyzed brain.

  From the smell of bleach and lavender, for God’s sake.

  That and the living room. The living room looked exactly like the one she’d never been allowed into as a child. Pristine white couches and gleaming cherrywood tables, squared to the walls like soldiers at attention, never to be touched or relaxed upon or comforted by.

  “Chastity, my dear, is something wrong?”

  Chastity felt a hand on her arm and almost bolted like a startled horse. She sucked in a breath, trembling. She was a trauma nurse. She was trained for shock and disaster. She could control herself long enough to get safely out the door. She shoved her hand into her jeans pocket and only then realized that her drawstring bag was in her purse.

  Oh, this was starting out well. If she ever made it as far as the bedrooms in this house, she’d probably have seizures.

  “My,” she managed with a wry smile as she stepped carefully away, “I didn’t realize Faith liked our old house so much. This looks…amazingly like it.”

  Dr. Stanton looked around the arid splendor of his home as if seeing it for the first time. “Really? I didn’t know.”

  Chastity was still staring at the crystal lamps and precisely arrayed silk flower arrangements. The uninspired Italian landscapes and curio cabinet that held the very ceramic flowers her mother had protected all through Chastity’s childhood like sacred relics.

  “Mother didn’t tell you?” she asked, feeling every ghost of her twenty-six years whispering in her ear.

  Dr. Stanton shook his head. “No. I guess she didn’t. You don’t seem very comfortable, Chastity.”

  Chastity almost told him exactly how uncomfortable she was. But that wouldn’t be fair. It seemed that Dr. Stanton had never been filled in on the particulars. And Chastity wasn’t at all sure she was up to correcting the oversight.