“More like an early finish,” I said. “There’s been a change of plans.”
TWO
I stood on the street, a rented minivan against the ruined curb behind us. Thick, wet American air pressed in on my skin, indefinably different than the damp of Europe. I looked down at the limp MapQuest printout in my hand, then up at the ruin where the house was supposed to be. The walls were covered in dirt and grit, and they slumped ominously to my right. Grass higher than my hips swallowed the concrete rubble that had been a walkway. The windows were gone, the interior walls all stripped down to water-blackened studs.
I walked up two steps of warped boards. Flecks of green paint still clung to them. A huge X had been spray-painted on the door, something that looked like a date above it, letters and numbers to the left and right, and a three beneath it. I could watch Chogyi Jake make his way around the side of the house and toward the back, his shadow visible through the holes in the walls. There wasn’t enough tissue left on the house’s bones to stop the light.
“Are we sure this is the right address?” Aubrey asked.
I put the key the lawyer had express-mailed me into the lock. It felt like I was dragging it through gravel, but the mechanism turned. I pushed the door open to the smell of rotting wood and mold.
“Yeah,” I said. “This is the place.”
Ex said something obscene in a reverent voice. The rest of the neighborhood, spreading out around us for blocks, was the same. Ruined streets as much pothole as pavement, shells of houses with only a handful restored or in the process of being restored. Tall grass. I was standing in front of an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar wound, and that was just my house. Every ruined house or bare foundation for blocks around was the same thing.
Hurricane Katrina had rolled into New Orleans three years before. I’d been in the long breathless pause between high school and college at the time, waiting tables at Cracker Barrel and screwing up the courage to tell my father that I was going to a secular university whether he liked it or not. I’d seen the pictures on the news, same as everyone else. I’d given some money to someone as part of a relief effort, or I thought I had. I couldn’t remember now if I’d really done it or only meant to.
It felt like everything important in my life had happened since then: my whole abortive college career, losing my virginity to an unethical teaching assistant, the explosion of my social circle, losing my first real lover, dropping out, Eric’s death, my inheritance, then fighting spiritual parasites and evil wizards. And in all that time, no one had fixed this house. Or knocked it down.
Three years was a long, long time for a twenty-three-year-old woman. It apparently wasn’t much for a three-hundred-year-old city.
“Should we go in?” Aubrey asked. “Do you think it would be safe?”
“I wouldn’t want to bet on it,” Ex said.
“Why didn’t the lawyers tell us the place was trashed?” Aubrey said.
“Who would have told them?” I asked. “If Eric didn’t come check on it, they might not know.”
Chogyi Jake finished his circuit of the house. Yellow-green grass burrs clung to his linen shirt.
“Okay,” I said. “New plan. Everyone back in the car.”
It took under ten minutes sitting in the backseat with Aubrey beside me on the laptop with the cell connection to find a hilariously pricey hotel, make reservations, and plug the address into the rental’s GPS system. Chogyi Jake drove, and Ex rode shotgun. The jet lag was beginning to lift, my brain starting to unfog by slow degrees. The signs of damage that hadn’t registered during the ride out from the airport now became clear. The yellow-white-gray high-water mark on the buildings, the broken windows made more evident by the few houses where new glass had been installed, the ruined asphalt, the strange and ubiquitous X mark on the houses we passed.
We were moving from water to water. My ruined house was a few blocks south of Lake Pontchartrain, the hotel I’d picked a few north of the Mississippi. But as we headed south on I-10, the signs faded. The water mark fell and went away. The city looked hale and healthy, as if we hadn’t just seen a whole neighborhood that had gone necrotic.
“Were you ever here before?” Aubrey asked.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “They have Mardi Gras here. Women get drunk and expose themselves. I’d have been disowned if I’d brought the idea up.”
“I don’t think the exposing yourself part’s required,” Ex said from the front. “I’ve been through a few times, and no one seemed offended when I didn’t insist on seeing their breasts.”
“Doesn’t matter if it’s true,” I said. “It’s all about appearances. Dad thought this place was Gomorrah to San Francisco’s Sodom. He’d burst a blood vessel if he knew I was here.”
“What does he think of Las Vegas?” Aubrey asked.
“Gibbering hysteria,” I said. “Apoplexy. Doesn’t have much to say in favor of New York either.”
“Forgive the change of subject, but should you consider telling the lawyers that we’ve changed venues and why?” Chogyi Jake said as he pulled the rental over one lane and got off the highway at Orleans heading toward Vieux Carré.
“Fair point,” I said. “I’m on it.”
If anyone had asked me, back when I was a college dropout with no friends and a family that wasn’t speaking to me, whether it would be harder to deal with an arcane world of possession by bodiless parasites or having a lot of money, I would have guessed wrong. Riders and magic were weird and unnatural, but at least they were expected to be. Money was just as strange, but everyone assumed that if I had that much, I must have some idea how it worked. I felt like half of my day was taken up with doing things that real rich people manage by instinct. Like letting my lawyer back in Denver know where to send things.
The man who answered the phone went from chilly to obsequious as soon as I said my name. Two blocks later, I had my lawyer on the phone, saying she’d get an assessor out to the ruined property as soon as possible. She spoke with careful enunciation so sharp I imagined all the words being relieved that they’d gotten out alive. She was the same lawyer who’d first told me my uncle was dead and that I’d inherited everything. We’d never had a personal conversation, but I secretly liked her.
The hotel was smaller than I’d expected and grander too. A fountain burbled in a low foyer. Dixieland jazz jumped and spun through the air like a company of musical acrobats, each instrument doing something apparently different but all perfectly coordinated. Crystal chandeliers hung from high ceilings. But the bones of the place showed that it had been built before the age of steel infrastructure.
The desk clerk—a black man with perfect skin and a Jamaican accent that could melt butter—handed me my key card. He even got my name right, zha-nay. I usually get Jane or Janie. I felt myself blushing a little bit, and wondered how long it had been since I’d been seriously flirted with. The four of us agreed to meet back in the lobby once we were unpacked and settled. I headed to my room.
It wasn’t a large room, but it was beautiful. Silk wallpaper, crisp sheets, and wireless Internet. There can be no better. I tipped the guy who’d hauled my bags for me, then popped open my laptop and checked mail for the first time since we’d gotten on the plane in Greece.
The background check of Karen Black was in my inbox, cc’d to all the guys. I settled in to find out what I’d gotten us all into.
Karen Alicia Black was born a little over fifteen years before I was. Her father was a cop, her mother was a mother. No living family now, though. When I was getting out of Mrs. Detwyler’s second-grade class at Blackburn Elementary, she was graduating from Oberlin with a double major in criminology and mathematics. She moved to Los Angeles and worked as a cop for two years, then joined the FBI. A note in brackets pointed out that this was an unusually short period of time—the FBI preferred three years of professional experience. I had the impression that whoever was writing the report had developed a little crush on her.