City of the Dead Page 7

  Decay.

  It spun her around every time she caught a whiff of it, because she kept thinking it didn’t belong amid all the exotic scents and sights and sounds of New Orleans. But it did, of course. She, more than anyone, knew what kind of rot a pristine facade could hide. And no matter what was said about New Orleans, no one could accuse it of putting up a pristine front.

  “Chaz?”

  Chastity startled back to attention. They were already a couple of blocks down, weaving through the sidewalk traffic on their way somewhere. Chastity wished she knew where.

  “I just don’t know, Kareena. But I don’t think the good lieutenant asked nearly enough questions about that fertility clinic.”

  Five

  When they found James at the Napoleon House, he was seated at a scruffed-up table by the French doors drinking coffee with an old black man in a red pageboy wig and a young white guy with a back full of tattoos and a boa constrictor around his neck.

  It was something Chastity had noticed in this city. The per capita rate of tattoos was higher than hair follicles. The other thing she noticed was that she seemed to have been here long enough for the snake to somehow make sense. She gained points all-round when she sat right down with the group and smiled.

  James finished his coffee and laid down some money. “You finished with the police?”

  “They seem finished with us,” Chastity said. “Time to set out on our own.”

  James nodded. “Where to?”

  “Is it time to eat yet?” Kareena asked. “We could have lunch, and then Kareena has to get back to work.”

  “We could eat here,” Chastity said, enamored by the idea of settling into this dimly lit, well-used room that reeked of history and tourism, to talk about freedom and personal choice with the old guy in the pageboy wig.

  Kareena eyed that snake. “No we couldn’t.”

  James grinned. “He won’t eat much.”

  Chastity was rubbing that spot right between her eyes again. “Well, if we’re not going to eat, I need to avoid my brother-in-law long enough to rifle through all his personal belongings. James, while I do that, would you mind getting Faith’s picture copied and take it around the taxi stands and ask if anybody picked up my sister from Gallatoire’s two Fridays ago?”

  James pulled out a cigarette. “It’ll be extra.”

  Chastity looked up, sure he was joking. She was wrong. She saw it in the carefully nondescript expression in his eyes as he lit up. Snake boy scowled at James.

  The guy in the wig nodded. “All right,” he intoned, as if answering to a truth delivered from the pulpit.

  Kareena straightened like an outraged mother. “What’s the matter with you, James? You said you’d help.”

  His smile was as lazy as summer. “I said I’d drive. Questions are extra.”

  “I’m disappointed in you,” Kareena huffed. “You can’t do this little thing for her as a favor?”

  “I don’t do favors, Kareena,” he said, as if reminding her of something she already knew. “I’m afraid I’ve fallen out of love with altruism.”

  He didn’t move, but it seemed as if everybody in the place knew he was pointing to the scars along his face. The terrible, disfiguring scars that carried such pain and stigma.

  Chastity felt a lurch somewhere in her middle, which she didn’t like at all. She didn’t want to feel empathy for this guy. She just wanted him to drive her around, preferably in silence.

  No, damn it. That wasn’t true. But what she wanted did not involve sharing sore spots.

  “What did Richard Gere pay Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman?” she asked, eyeing the row of liquor bottles that glinted in the dusky light at the back of the room where Napoleon’s bust sat watching the street. “Would that be enough for all the extras?”

  James lifted a knowing eyebrow. “All the extras?”

  Chastity faced him down like a terrorist. “I won’t make you tattoo your ass or satisfy my maidenly yearnings, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Now everybody in the bar was listening. Kareena laughed like a car horn and leaned against the open door.

  James’s smile was dust dry. “Too bad. My ass needs a tattoo.”

  “Probably the only thing left in town without one,” Chastity retorted.

  The black guy nodded again. “All right.”

  “For the money Richard Gere gave Julia Roberts,” James proclaimed as if bestowing a boon, “I’ll be happy to include all the extras. What time did your sister leave Gallatoire’s?”

  There was a second of silence as they all reset goals.

  “One, I think,” Chastity said, noticing that the snake’s tongue flickered like a filament, as if tasting the smoke that curled off the end of James’s fresh cigarette. “Why Gallatoire’s? Why every Friday? That seems to mean something.”

  “That mean she part of that snotty-ass uptown crowd,” Kareena said. “Miracle Max from up there, I think. His mama was Comus queen for sure. It mean your sister have to par-ti-ci-pate in the social rounds to be part of that family. Charities, school events. Friday lunch at Gallatoire’s with all those rich old ladies in pearls.”

  Chastity pulled her gaze away from the snake and faced James. “I get the rich old lady part. What the hell’s a comus?”

  It was the snake boy who answered. “Oldest Mardi Gras krewe, had the first big parade back a thousand years ago. Stopped bein’ part of the parade when krewes had to be integrated. Social acme.”

  She nodded. “Ah. In St. Louis we call it Veiled Prophet. We have a parade and everything.”

  He pointed at her as if she were the prize student. “Exactly. Local bigwig honored as king and his daughter as queen. Big to-do, debutante balls, exclusive and restricted. That kind of shit.”

  “Where’s uptown?”

  “Other side of Magazine from me,” Kareena said.

  “Which means Max and my sister could have lived in one of those beautiful old houses on St. Charles instead of that post-pretension subdivision,” Chastity said almost to herself.

  “They coulda lived jus’ about anyplace but there,” Kareena assured her. “No accountin’ for taste, yeah?”

  She got heartfelt nods from the old guy and the young guy. Then the snake caught sight of Kareena and began to undulate in her direction. Kareena slid right out the French door to the street.

  Chastity climbed to her feet and gave the snake a pat before following. “I think what I really need is a translator.”

  “That’s what you have me for,” James said, waving good-bye to his friends. “Now that I’m being compensated, anyway.”

  Three miles away, deep in the uptown area so cherished by the ancestors of the old families of New Orleans, Susan Wade Reeves was just walking out her front door. Susan Wade Reeves was one of those women who ate lunch every Friday at Gallatoire’s, just like her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother before her. In fact, Susan had been introduced to Gallatoire’s on her seventh birthday by her Grandpere and Grandmere Beauregard, in a dinner where she got dressed up in her lacy socks and pearl hair barrettes. All the waiters sang “Happy Birthday” to her, and her grandparents gave her the exciting news that she was going to be flower girl at the next Comus ball, come Mardi Gras season.

  Susan was, in many ways, typical of her class. The second daughter of Matthew Taber Reeves and Sarah Winsom Beauregard Reeves, she was born in a magnificent Greek Revival mansion on Prytania into old, inherited money her father had expanded with his banking interests. She attended the McGehee School and Newcombe College and served as maid at the Comus and Rex balls and queen at one of the lesser balls. Then she married the first gentleman who had called her out for a dance, John Matthews McCall, and moved with him into the gargonnierre that sat out back of the house on Prytania.

  Susan still lived in that tidy little carriage house, but she now lived there alone. Susan had failed to live up to the expectations of her parents and her class. Instead of breeding a new generation of da
ughters for the service of society, she had divorced her alcoholic, abusive husband of five years and finally admitted to everyone what she’d known from the minute she’d taken her first shower at McGehee. Susan was a lesbian.

  That didn’t take away her social influence or her family’s interference.

  Susan still dressed in the appropriate uniform: well-tailored suits and pearls, classic pumps and simply styled hair. She still attended to the rituals, the balls in season and the lunches and charitable causes out of season.

  She was simply considered the eccentric aunt, the good girl of the crowd, as if her lesbianism were no more than a jolly joke on everyone. She had a good career as a bond trader, and a lover on Esplanade who had never been invited to family functions, not because she was a lesbian, but because she was black.

  Even more baffling to her family and friends than her sexual orientation, though, was her religious one. About the time she announced her sexual preference, Susan converted to Catholicism.

  Susan loved the ritual, the mystery, the faint layer of mortification that lay on everything in the Catholic Church like sacred ash. She loved the fact that there was an institution on earth that seemed completely oblivious to the fact that they’d turned the corner into the third millennium. She even loved the incongruity of a church that punished lesbianism worse than one of the big ten when it wasn’t so much as mentioned in the Bible.

  What she loved most of all, though, was the pantheon of saints the Catholic Church specialized in. Saints for actors and saints for firemen and saints for people who lost their way.

  It was easy to love saints in New Orleans. Saints were endemic there. There wasn’t a Catholic church without its collection of saints, and there were a lot of Catholic churches in New Orleans. There was even a saint who was the city’s very own inside joke. Saint Expedite, a lovely male saint who stood inside Our Lady of Guadalupe on North Rampart Street.

  Saint Expedite had shown up one day in the eighteen-hundreds, sent from France as a gift to the city. Unfortunately, there was no sign denoting exactly which saint the country had sent. Only the marking on the package. Expedite. Now the citizens prayed to him if they needed things in a hurry.

  One of Susan’s favorite saints, though, was Saint Roch. There was something so Buddhist about Saint Roch, as if it was his job to maintain balance in the world. Saint Roch, who had once survived the bubonic plague by the grace of God and a faithful dog, granted wishes. Susan knew. He’d granted one for her.

  But that wasn’t all he did. When Saint Roch gave a boon, he took something away. It was a good reminder, Susan always thought, that nobody should think they could get something for nothing.

  Susan had been drawn to his shrine over at the old Saint Roch Cemetery off Claiborne for years, where Saint Roch shared a tiny side alcove in the chapel with a statue of Saint Lucy and maybe Saint Phillipa Duschene, who looked unnervingly like Kate Smith. The three of them waited in the breathless hush of holiness in that peeling and moldy, claustrophobic little room with the forest of braces and crutches and anatomically correct plaster casts the faithful had left to represent wishes Saint Roch had granted.

  Susan had prayed to him for everything from good ACT scores to the reorientation of her sexuality. Some things he’d helped with, and some not. But always he’d given her a sense of satisfaction for the effort.

  So today, she was heading over to the Saint Roch Campo Santo, just as she did on every Sunday she was in town, even though she didn’t really need to anymore, since her prayer had already been answered. Her little plaster cast cluttered up the floor of the side altar at the Campo Santo along with all the others. But she simply liked going there to remind herself of what Saint Roch had given her. And wonder what he was planning to take away.

  Bleach and lavender and stiff white couches. Chastity wondered just how many times she was going to have to walk through this little purgatory. She took a couple of slow, deep breaths, just as she would have in a room with a bad burn patient or a decomposing body. Closing her hand around her little velvet bag, she braced herself for the worst, shut the front door behind her, and waded right into the stagnant recycled air in that monster of a house.

  Chastity had always known she was a coward. It was brought starkly home to her as she stood in that hallway, too afraid to move. If only she could have gotten James to do this for her. But James was off looking for taxi drivers to interview. So it was up to Chastity to play anthropologist with her sister’s life.

  She still stood there a moment, frozen by the smells and the precisely arranged furniture. Struck hard by memories she’d spent ten years repressing. By poisons she’d thought she’d purged.

  It hadn’t been true, really, that part about not being allowed in the living room. She’d sat there, once, on one of her mother’s couches, the plastic covers cold and sticky against the backs of her bare legs. She’d been in her plaid school uniform, hands clenched in her lap, legs dangling clear of the floor, her breath harsh and tight in her sparrow chest as she faced her mother.

  They’d gone to confession at school that day. The sacrament of reconciliation, where the priest had said they should offer their guilt to God. They should share their shame and be freed of it.

  She’d tried.

  “You shouldn’t tell lies, young lady,” he’d warned in the claustrophobic darkness of the confessional.

  Her mother just slapped her.

  It was the last time she’d sat on that couch.

  So here she was ten feet inside the house and already shaking. Here she was one day in New Orleans and already losing control. She sucked in a breath through her mouth so she couldn’t smell anything. Focused so she couldn’t remember. And then she walked to the stairs and the farthest point she could think of from the rooms that really scared her.

  She tried that door to the left of the foyer first, but found it locked. Probably an office of some kind. Although she could, she didn’t have time right now to pick the lock. So she climbed the stairs instead to where the boys had lived.

  There were three bedrooms there in all, each with the obligatory bathroom, each decorated in varying shades of blue. The rooms had been cleaned when the Stanton boys had moved out, because they contained no posters, no trophies, no fug of adolescent hormones. They could have been guest rooms at a Hyatt for all the individuality that remained.

  Chastity searched anyway. Chests and cupboards and the space beneath the beds. All was tidy, clean and folded. The closets held extra blankets and barely worn tennis shoes, the drawers precisely folded famous label attire. The boys had taken the evidence of their personalities to school with them. There was nothing there left to find.

  So Chastity spent a couple of long minutes just sitting on a denim-blue bed to gather courage, and then walked back downstairs into the area she dreaded. Past the awful living room, the dining room decorated in grass paper and cherrywood, the family room populated by overstuffed black leather and glass tabletops. All the way to the double doors that opened onto the master suite.

  Chastity wanted to close her eyes when she opened those doors. Hell, she didn’t want to open them at all. But she had to find out who her sister had been these last ten years. She had to understand why Faith had disappeared, although she thought she knew.

  Especially after seeing that living room.

  And the dining room. Precise, perfect-looking, a real ad for Norman Rockwell. A terrible, terrifying lie.

  But those rooms weren’t enough. The real answers would be where Faith would have kept her private possessions. Her secrets and souvenirs. So Chastity opened the master bedroom door and prepared herself for what she was going to find.

  She found nothing.

  For a long moment, all she could do was stand there like an idiot, the wash of air-conditioning raising goose bumps on her arms, the hard edges of the gems in her bag solid in her fingers.

  Lemon polish.

  That was what she smelled back here. Lemon polish and old lady perfume.
How odd.

  The bedroom she’d so feared was featureless. Bland and beige and completely devoid of personality, as if nobody really lived there. The furnishings were expensive, the fabrics more so, damask swagged over the bay window and layered on the king-sized oak four-poster. But no color. No contrast. No distinction at all.

  When Faith was a teenager, her bedroom had resembled a harem tent. Jewel-toned saris draped over her bed, paper lanterns that turned the ceiling light red. Lush, plump pillows piled as if she could manufacture the only comfort she’d find. Piles of albums and walls cluttered with landscape paintings. Escape and protection. A song of longing Faith never once sang out loud.

  Here, there was silence and emptiness. It made Chastity afraid.

  The bedroom was the size of a football field, with that little salon Max had mentioned taking up an alcove to the left. Beyond that Chastity caught sight of a wall of mirrors, marble shelving, and flowers. Faith’s bathroom. Max’s, on the other side, showed Drakkar Noir and brown towels.

  She knew damn well she didn’t want to go into either of those bathrooms, so she sucked in a big breath and turned to the bedroom.

  The bed was king-sized, the end tables glass and holding a phone, a lamp, an alarm clock, and a couple of pictures of the boys. There were two chests and a vanity, all in thick, sculpted oak, with the vanity topped with a grooming set and a bottle of perfume—old lady’s perfume—all precisely placed.

  Chastity had the odd feeling that if she picked up any item, she’d see a mark beneath, showing that it had never been moved a millimeter. Even the bobby pins that rested in a small copper dish looked as if they’d been lined up.

  Faith had always been orderly, even in her most outwardly extravagant teens. She’d cut food like a pathologist and counted calories like an accountant. But this was way more.

  One look at the closet proved it. Chastity opened the doors to a walk-in the size of her own bathroom to find it full and organized to a hair’s whisper by color and size and textile.