A Density of Souls (32 page)

Jordan nodded.

“And say good-bye to your mother.”

Jordan went downstairs and lingered behind the couch, waiting for Elise to sense his presence. On television, The Young and the Restless had given way to the mayor, who addressed a huddle of reporters. “We are using every possible structurally sound building as a storm shelter.

The media has been given a list of these places, which includes the Heaven's Answer

237

Superdome. We’re asking everyone who can to get out of New Orleans now, but those who can’t should proceed immediately to these shelters . . .”

“Mom?”

Elise turned with pained slowness.

“I’m going to stay,” Jordan said.

“This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?” she asked him.

In the living room, Jordan dragged furniture away from the windows. Through the panes he saw how Philip Street was eerily quiet, the oak branches still an ordinary blue. Not one car was parked on the street.

The news stations had been advising all day that this was merely the calm before the storm. Last night Stephen and Jordan had noticed that the television reporters were energized by the imminence of Brandy’s strike, acting as if it were the night before the Super Bowl. By morning, with Interstate 10 clogged all the way to Baton Rouge, the reporters and news anchors had grown more somber, their eyes heavy with the possibility of a storm that might tear down their own homes.

His mother was half-right. Jordan wasn’t going to miss this for the world.

Three days before the official warning, Meredith had bought a generator and had waited in line for three hours at the Schweggman’s grocery store to buy enough bottled water and canned food to last a week. Trish Ducote had busied herself by telling everyone, including Meredith, that Brandy was not going to hit. A year earlier, Hurricane Georges had given New Orleans a similar scare, resulting in a lot of useless panic, she said.

Meredith had paid no attention. She had stored all of her supplies in the guest house, behind the Ducote’s swimming pool that was jok-ingly nicknamed the Manger. At parties Meredith had overheard her mother often say, “When there’s no room in the inn, you stay in the Manger!”

On the second floor of the guest house, Meredith stretched Xs of duct tape over the bedroom windows. She hoped the tape would hold the glass in place should the storm batter the windows. Now sobered by the prospect of the storm, Trish saw the Xs as she crossed the yard.

“You damn well better get in the car with me!” she called up the stairs.

238

A Density of Souls

“No,” Meredith said flatly. She was changing the sheets on the queen-sized bed.

“This is a hurricane, Meredith!” Trish shouted. “It’s not any safer to stay out here than in the house.”

“If it gets bad I’ll go to Aunt Judy’s in La Place,” Meredith answered, throwing a comforter onto the bed and adjusting the corners.

“Judy’s already gone. They went to Mississippi this morning.”

“Just go, Mother,” Meredith said.

Trish started to cry loudly. Meredith rolled her eyes and went down the stairs to her, looping one arm over his mother’s shoulders.

“Mom, you need someone to stay here. I know how much you hate floods, so . . .”

“Oh, please!”

“If you put a lock on the liquor cabinet, will you feel better?”

Trish shrugged off Meredith’s arm. “You’re old enough to know when you’re being an idiot, and I’m too old now to stop you,” she declared, striding toward the door to the yard. Meredith, relieved, didn’t follow her.

“Maybe we should just fill the bathtubs with gin?” Stephen suggested.

Jordan laughed from the front porch where he was securing the window shutters. Monica emerged from the kitchen.

“Want a drink, Mom?” Stephen asked as the shutters rattled closed over the window behind him.

“Yes, please,” Monica said. “Did you fill the bathtub in your bathroom?”

“Yeah. What do you want to drink?”

“Something alcoholic,” Monica said, implying that Stephen should know already. She glanced out the living room window where Jordan was unlatching the shutters from their locks on either side and rapped on the pane with her knuckles.

“Not the front door!” she called.

Jordan seemed startled but nodded before closing the shutters between them.

“He’s not a butler, Mom,” Stephen muttered as he added a tiny splash of gin to Monica’s tumbler of tonic. Jordan’s footsteps echoed over the front porch as he moved down the side of the house. He would nail plywood strips to the kitchen windows.

Heaven's Answer

239

“We should talk,” Stephen said.

“No, we shouldn’t,” Monica said firmly, taking her drink from Stephen. “If you need me, I’ll be on the third floor . . .”

“Mom, what is up with the third floor? Don’t you think Dad’s office can wait?”

“No. I’m going to dump everything in it tonight,” Monica said.

“When the water gets high enough outside.”

“That’s kind of weird,” Stephen remarked.

“Yes, it’s all very weird.” She shot a glance at Jordan through the front windows and mounted the stairs, burdened with the knowledge that Jordan made Stephen happy. This truth made the task of clearing out Jeremy’s office utterly crucial.

Warner Doutrie’s battered 1978 Ford pickup slipped past the highway patrol before the roadblocks were set up at the north end of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. Spanning twenty-one miles of shallow, tem-pestuous lake water, the Causeway had been closed as an evacuation route. They had reached the dead middle where no land was visible on either horizon of the darkening sky. Ahead, the Causeway was a desolate strip of concrete that seemed to lead nowhere. The Boy had asked for one of Warner’s shotguns and Warner had consented. He could spare one for a soldier of truth. He’d also given the boy a white T-shirt ripped around the armpit, exposing a pectoral behind a flap of white cotton.

Brandon was rooting around in the mess of tools behind the seat, making Warner nervous. Brandon extracted a spool of metal fishing line.

“I need this,” Brandon announced as he set the spool on his lap.

Warner eyed the spool and then Brandon.

“Das good stuff. Yoo could hold a twenny poun’ catfish on dat.”

“I need it,” Brandon repeated.

Warner didn’t say anything. He’d given the Boy a shotgun. Why did the Boy need his strongest fishing line? “You gonna be doin any fishen?” Warner asked, with a smirk on his lips.

“I need it,” Brandon said again, his voice lower.

“C’mon, boy, you can take my bes—”

The first blow sent Warner’s head into the steering wheel, beep-ing the horn. He could taste blood on his tongue. The second blow 240

A Density of Souls

connected with Warner’s shoulder blades, jerking his head. He spit a stream of blood on the dashboard.

“I fucking need this!” Brandon wailed.

On the third blow, Warner slumped back. The steering wheel spun free from his hands, and the left side of the truck plowed into the cement guardrail, shattering the left headlight. Brandon saw the rail whizzing past the passenger window.

Blood dribbled down Warner’s chin.

“Goddamn it!” Brandon cursed. The truck slowed as it rode, kissing the guardrail, then dragged to a halt against the cement. Its tail swung outward at a forty-five degrees as its nose crumpled into the guardrail.

“Boy . . . Boy,” Warner moaned.

“Shift! Fuck!” With one sweep of his arm Brandon smashed the wheel of metal fishing line into Warner’s face, snapping the bridge of his nose. Warner’s last two breaths were haggard whistles as he saw Brandon kick open the passenger door. The door struck the guardrail with a thud. He watched Brandon squeeze out of the truck and leap to the cement. As Warner died, Brandon was marching down the desolate Causeway toward the blackening horizon, the spool of fishing line in one fist.

3

A
ndrew Darby watched the news as he drained the Glenlivet, speculating that his house might be washed away that night. The revelation caressed him through the alcohol haze. He turned off the television and poured the scotch into a plastic cup. Convinced he was leaving his house for the final time, he drove to Bayou Terrace.

As he pulled into the hospital’s parking lot, he saw three Orleans Parish prison buses idling at the curb outside the entrance as nurses dressed in rain slickers directed the buses as if they were ket planes taxiing on a tarmac.

He walked through the lobby to the front desk. The nurse there scrutinized him as if he were a confused, wandering patient. “I’d like my wife, please,” he asked quietly, setting his cup of scotch on the desk between them.

“Mr. Darby?” the nurse asked. Andrew nodded. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. If you’d like to arrange a discharge, you can do so after the patients are transported to Magnolia Trace, but you’ll have to talk to—”

Andrew knocked the cup across the desk, spraying her face with scotch. As the nurse screamed, Andrew dashed through the hallway door.

“Angela!”

The doorway to Angela’s room was open. A security guard rushed down on him from behind, grabbing his arms in a vise. Andrew glimpsed an open window, a gap torn in the chain-link fence.

Twenty minutes later, he was loaded onto the last bus bound for Magnolia Trace Hospital, sixty miles north of the city. His hands cuffed behind his back, Andrew muttered “baby” under his breath before he fell back against the seat, grinding the metal cuffs into the small of his back. When he started to sob, several other passengers followed suit.

242

A Density of Souls

• • •

“Bugs!”

Angela had been silent. As soon as the Acura merged onto Jefferson Highway, she grabbed Meredith’s wrist.

“Bugs!” Angela screamed again.

“Angela, there are no bugs!” Meredith said calmly.

Angela Darby had not ingested Haldol and Thorazine in twelve hours and her fog was lifting, inducing fits fired by hallucinations. Jefferson Highway was desolate, its storefronts boarded up. Gas stations emerged from the pre-storm gloom. Meredith slowed the Acura to thirty as she passed a battalion of state trooper cruisers and National Guard trucks ferrying sandbags to the subdivisions scattered along the Mississippi.

“Hand me my purse off the floor,” Meredith instructed her.

“But they’re all over it!” Angela whined.

“I’m not afraid of the bugs, okay. Just hand me my purse,” Meredith said. Angela picked up the strap, her hand trembling, and dropped the bag in Meredith’s lap. She tucked her legs to her chest, thrashing in her seat to crush the bugs crawling under her robe.

With one hand, Meredith fished out her mother’s diet pills. She tapped four from the bottle into her open palm and extended them to Angela.

“Take these!”

“Meredith, I see them!”

“Angela, if you swallow these, the bugs will go away. Trust me. I’m taking you somewhere safe, remember?”

Meredith held out her free hand. Angela took the pills and swallowed them with a grunt. They drove in silence as Jefferson Highway wound uptown. Overhead, black fingers of clouds crawled across the sky, heralding Brandy. “There’s a storm coming, isn’t there?” Angela asked, her jaw resting on her knees.

“Yes,” Meredith answered. When they finally pulled onto St.

Charles Avenue, she pondered what she was going to say to Andrew Darby when she called him. She knew. She was carrying out a lunatic mission: If Andrew Darby wanted his wife back, he would have to rectify everything he had done to her. He would have to set her free. If not, Meredith would expose him and the administration of Bayou Terrace at the risk of facing criminal charges herself.

Heaven's Answer

243

They were entering the Garden District. Meredith felt she had nothing to lose.

Angela slumped onto Trish’s guest bed, hands curled against her chest as she whispered into the pillow. Meredith listened to the phone ring on the other end. When the machine picked up, an old recording of Angela’s voice, strangely even in tone, asked if the callers would be so kind as to leave their names and numbers. Andrew had not changed the message on his answering machine since the death of his two sons.

He left, Meredith realized. He left her.

An hour passed. Angela, finally quieted, whispered, “They’re all gone. Greg’s gone, too . . .”

Meredith nodded.

“That’s good,” Angela said, sounding strangely normal, like her voice on the machine. “That’s good, because I know he would have come to visit me. I know he . . .”

“No,” Meredith said abruptly. “He wouldn’t have come.” She began to explain as the first rain pattered against the second-floor windows of the guest cottage.

In the Cadillac’s rearview mirror, Roger Charbonnet watched black clouds churn across the sky. Elise regarded the graying landscape out of the passenger window. Green Lawn Cemetery stretched along the side of Interstate 10. Ahead of them the Interstate dipped beneath a train trestle so severely they couldn’t make out the taillights of the cars ten feet in front of them.

They’d been stuck in gridlock for nearly five hours.

As the rain tapped the windshield, Elise reached to turn on the radio, but Roger grabbed her. She pulled her hand free. “I told you not to get on the fucking Interstate,” she growled.

She scanned the stations. Nothing but snatches of music and the titter of static. And then suddenly a bellowing male voice filled the Cadillac. “The wind is really picking up . . . It’s black as night out here . . .”

“Where is he reporting from?” Elise asked.

“Pretty soon we’re going to have to get a . . . Jesus, okay . . . The National Guard has just informed us that we need to leave the area. . .

244

A Density of Souls

These are the first storm bands of Hurricane Brandy coming to shore now in Grand Isle . . .”

Roger and Elise both paled. Grand Isle lay at the mouth of the river, less than an hour from New Orleans.

Lying in the crook of Jordan’s arm, Stephen could hear Monica lugging cardboard boxes around upstairs. The wind was stronger now, rattling the plywood boards and storm shutters. On television, a reporter practically screamed into her microphone, the winds angling the hood of her rain slicker over her face. “Anyone who has not evacuated should do so now,” she was saying, sounding as if she wished she were in Memphis. Stephen felt Jordan’s laughter vibrate through his chest.