The Heavens Rise

6

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

APRIL 2005

Anthem Landry considered it a miracle that Nikki took him back, and every hour since that fateful phone call, he felt like an electric-chair-bound convict rescued by the governor’s pardon at the last possible second. He’d turned into one of those chatty, cheerful jackasses who could make conversation about almost any topic with any clerk in any place of business. His older brothers, who only rallied around him when he was down, had taken to calling him Cool Whip, which was really just a version of the term pussy whipped that they could use when their mother was in the room.

For Anthem, the real discovery was that none of the begging, none of the sobbing late-night phone messages and none of the long letters he had tucked under the windshield of her Toyota 4-Runner, letters in which he had pled his innocence to kingdom come, had done the job.

Once again, it was Ben who had come to the rescue. The kids and teachers who’d observed their little trio from a distance over the years always wrote Ben off as their third wheel, the nerdy hanger-on Nikki stayed loyal to because they’d been besties since birth. It was horseshit, and Anthem told them so whenever he got the chance.

Ben Broyard was their glue, their rational mind, the provider of their few deep breaths. And in the past twenty-four hours he’d averted the end of Anthem’s whole world. Sure, he was barely five foot two, and had a high-pitched nasally voice that wasn’t about to get him work on WWL radio, but when the little dude set his mind to something he could marshal as much wallop as a hurricane. And for the past two weeks the most important project in his life had been getting Brittany Lowe to admit that her story about hooking up with Anthem was a complete crock. How he’d done it, Anthem wasn’t exactly sure. All that mattered was that he’d tape-recorded the lying skank’s confession and played it for Nikki.

And the rest, as they say, was makeup sex.

“Why?” Anthem had asked Ben after things were reconciled, after a night spent inhaling the scent of Nikki’s perfume and feeling like he’d been pulled up and over the edge of a cliff by one arm. “Why’d she lie?”

“I’m workin’ on it, A-Team” was Ben’s cryptic reply.

That had been three days ago, and now the two of them were flying across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, bound for Elysium. Of course, someone was missing, and in light of recent events, Nikki’s absence from his pickup truck that night left knots of tension across Anthem’s upper back. It wasn’t just a housewarming party they’d be attending in the morning; it was also Miss Millie’s birthday, so she had every right to demand that her daughter ride out to Elysium with her and Mr. Noah. But still, it made Anthem nervous, like the weekend away was actually an audition rather than a welcome back celebration.

It was neither, Ben pointed out about three times after they got on the causeway, probably because it gave him an excuse to turn down the volume on the Cowboy Mouth CD Anthem had been playing on repeat for about a year now.

“This is a birthday party for her mom,” Ben said, with that maddeningly parental tone that sometimes made Anthem want to pop him one. “Don’t make this all about you. God knows. The Anthem and Nikki Show has had enough cliffhangers this season.”

“It’s just good that we’re going, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“I mean, if she wasn’t sure, we wouldn’t be going at all. And they sure as hell wouldn’t let us come out the night before like this and sleep in the guest room, so—”

“You know, we’ve really covered this, A-Team.”

“I know, I know. I’m just saying.”

“Yeah, well, less saying. More driving. The causeway cops are all bored a-holes.”

“You’re a real gift in my life, you know that?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Totally bullshitting.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

But he wasn’t kidding. And he figured from the way Ben had gone quiet, his hands clasped between his bony knees, his gaze straight ahead so that the dashboard lights glowed in his circular-framed glasses, Ben knew he wasn’t kidding but didn’t want to talk about it. The older they all got, the more sarcastic and uncomfortable with touchy-feely moments Ben got. And, Nikki insisted, the less interested in girls he got. But Anthem figured that was just because most of the girls Ben was hot for were the pretty, popular types who weren’t all that interested in a nerdy bookworm who wanted to write for a newspaper someday. Right, Nikki would answer, the ones he knows are out of his league so he doesn’t have to worry about— And Anthem would change the subject or cut her off because the idea of his best buddy being a bone-smoker felt oddly like some kind of betrayal, and worse, Nikki’s insistence on bringing it up all the time told him she was trying to prepare him for the possibility, and not herself.

But none of that mattered now. What mattered was, his passenger’s frosty silence notwithstanding, that everything suddenly felt like a gift to Anthem Landry. They had just entered that spot in the middle of the causeway where it was impossible to see land and, for the first time, he knew complete contentment. Or at least what he thought contentment should feel like; it was such a grown-up word, so superior sounding and so removed from the hormonal mood swings of adolescence.

What Anthem Landry felt that night was the sense that he and the two people closest to him were living in a sacred space between great moments in their lives. And for years afterward, whenever he was in pain or trapped in the dark minutes of another sleepless night, he would exert all the effort he could to return to that lone, blissful hour. To Fred LeBlanc’s voice singing about how the morning mist arises through a crack in the glass after another sleepless night of wishing someone would take him back to New Orleans. To the hot wind ripping through the half-open windows and the briny smell of the moon-rippled lake water. To that eternal, frozen hour, buffed and polished to perfection, a lens focused perfectly on past promise.

For years afterward, the sound of oyster shells cracking under tires ignited a low flame in the pit of his stomach because that was the sound that brought an end to so many things. That sound, and the sight of Elysium’s long curving driveway, empty and deeply shadowed behind the padlocked cast-iron gate. He tried Nikki on her cell but got her voice mail.

That didn’t mean anything, Ben insisted. Coverage on this part of the North Shore was always spotty.

Twenty minutes. That’s how long they lasted, twenty minutes of listening to the ticking sound of the truck’s cooling engine mingling with the moist undertones of the swamp, before Anthem pointed out the strangeness of the situation.

“This is weird,” Anthem said. “They should be here by now.” And Ben started right in with all the assurances, all the elaborate possibilities as to where they could have stopped along the way and why. Gas stations, grocery stores. Maybe a flat tire or two or three. Never mind that Ben had spoken to Nikki on the phone just as the family was heading out the back door, over an hour before Anthem had left Metairie to pick up Ben at his parent’s house Uptown. Never mind that Mr. Noah was a taskmaster who defined punctuality; if he knew the boys were joining the family tonight, which he most certainly did, he would have had the house open and blazing with light to greet their arrival.

After an hour, and four calls to Nikki’s cell, Ben ran out of explanations.

After an hour and a half and no return call from Nikki, Anthem ran out of patience.

He made a three-point turn in the rutted road and drove back to the highway. There was a gas station next to the turnoff and Ben wanted to see if anyone working there had seen the Delongpre’s Lexus SUV.

Later that night, they’d both learn that if Anthem had kept driving for about another half mile on Highway 22, they just might have noticed the mangled stretch of guardrail through which the Delongpre family had disappeared.

7

NEW ORLEANS

Please God, Marissa thought. Not another endless conversation about what did or didn’t happen to the Delongpres. But as she walked the perimeter of the carpeted ballroom, she realized the other guests that evening were mostly white, well-fed Uptown folk, just like the missing family in question, and that meant Marissa Hopewell would have a better chance that evening of avoiding a conversation about the weather.

Noah, Millie, and Niquette Delongpre had vanished exactly a week ago, leaving behind only pieces of their Lexus SUV along the banks of Bayou Rabineaux. Forget about the five young black men, two of them teenagers, who had been gunned down in cold blood just a few blocks from where Marissa lived with her mother in the Lower Ninth Ward. Apparently, the Delongpres made for better television. Or at least their ironically cheerful family photographs did.

Even so, Marissa had still combed through all the articles on their disappearance. Hell, she’d even started a file on the case to see if it had the makings of a good column. But for now the details were too sketchy, the concerns a little too Garden District for her taste. And she found herself jumping to the same conclusion as the other women who worked at her paper; the father, one of the top surgeons in his field, had made enough money over the years to stash plenty in bank accounts throughout the world if he’d wanted to. He’d probably staged the whole thing, maybe even offed his wife and daughter so he could run off with his exotic, foreign mistress. That, or the whole thing was just some weird tax evasion stunt that would come to light as soon as the police finished combing through Noah Delongpre’s files.

It never ceased to amaze Marissa how often rich white men ran afoul of the IRS.

As she searched for the table number printed on her place card, she saw that while she wasn’t the only full-figured black lady in the room—five in all, including her, and not counting the servers—she was the lone pantsuit in a sea of tuxedos and off-the-shoulder cocktail dresses. For the most part, the guests looked jovial and carefree, despite the strange disappearance of three of their own. Maybe coming out en masse to support a scrappy little French Quarter theater now in its seventy-fifth year of operation made Uptown’s best and brightest feel spiritually connected. Or maybe the special Sazeracs mentioned on the invite were going right to everyone’s head.

The event’s organizers had dressed up the Plimsoll Club for the occasion, although Marissa was having trouble figuring out the exact theme. Flowing blue drapes imprinted with stars and lightning bolts framed the walls of plate-glass windows, and the view stretched all the way from the Mississippi River Bridge to the Central Business District’s humble cluster of buildings. They were thirty-one stories above the spot where Canal Street met the river, inside the circle of steel girders that sat atop the World Trade Center, an X-shaped skyscraper that was a little too heavy on the concrete for Marissa’s taste. (And a little too sixties and out-of-date to hold such a prominent place in the city’s skyline, if you asked her. But nobody had. And it wasn’t like some Fortune 500 company had offered to tear it down and build something nicer in its place.)

All of the waiters and strolling performers were dressed in flowing medieval costumes Marissa couldn’t quite put a label to. Were they supposed to be at a circus or a Renaissance festival? Venetian Carnival, read the invitation in her hand. Not quite, she thought, but that certainly explained the bejeweled, feathered masks that covered their faces. She wasn’t there to pull a Tom Wolfe on the night’s proceedings, but that didn’t stop her from taking mental notes on everything.

Her boss had slid the invitation into her hand earlier that day because the theater was honoring its first (and only) black executive director, and well, that seemed like something that might fit well in Marissa’s weekly column. The man’s smile was just tense enough to acknowledge the strange place Marissa occupied as the only black columnist at Kingfisher. The paper was a household name in New Orleans and a formidable rival to The Times-Picayune. But it was staffed largely by do-gooder white kids, and even after three years, most of them reacted to her as if she was an intelligent life form from another planet. Fact was, most white people in New Orleans weren’t equipped to deal with a black woman who didn’t speak in the halting, drawling patois of the housekeepers who had helped raise them. Take away the accent altogether, add a bachelor’s from the University of Chicago and three years at the Chicago Tribune and oh, lordy! They practically quaked in their books thinking she was going to demand reparations on the spot.

When she saw the Ferriots seated at her table, each step across the plush carpeting seemed to place an even greater strain on her calves. Marissa had expected to spend the night feeling out of place. But the Ferriots were Garden District, King of Carnival–style rich, the kind of family that made weekly appearances on the society page of The Times-Picayune because they just couldn’t stop handing out piles and piles of their own hard-earned money.

When Marissa took the empty seat across from her, Heidi Ferriot glanced up from her wineglass as if she’d heard a short, high-pitched sound from somewhere across the room, just sharp enough to have been a nuisance but not loud enough for her to investigate with more than a frown. (A frown intended to make someone else, preferably someone who worked for her, do something about it.) Her black velvet dress had a sloping white collar that made her look like a calla lily stuffed inside a black stocking. Next to her, Donald Ferriot looked their way with a wan smile; he’d been turned around in his chair, studying one of the costumed jugglers weaving expertly in between the tables. The man’s explosion of downy salt-and-pepper curls and oversize bow tie made him look like a mad scientist attending the Bride of Frankenstein’s wedding. (If the Bride of Frankenstein had decided to get married in Monaco.)

And then there was the son. Marissa had trouble remembering his name at first. Maxwell? Meyer? No. Marshall.

That was it. Strange kid. For some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to look up from the designs he was tracing in the white tablecloth with his dinner fork. (The kid’s slow, repetitive motions reminded Marissa of some Hitchcock film, something with Gregory Peck and ski tracks in the snow.) He was far more handsome than both of his parents, with his high, sculpted cheekbones and his jet-black hair, slicked back like some 1950s matinee idol.

“Careful, folks,” Donald Ferriot said, with a tip of his wineglass at Marissa. “The press is here.”

She was embarrassed by how pleased she was to be recognized, especially by a man of Donald Ferriot’s alleged stature. But she tipped her glass in return. “Just here to cover the awards ceremony. All comments at this table are officially off the record.”

There was a light ripple of laughter from the other guests, but not one of them bothered with an introduction. Heidi Ferriot, on the other hand, gazed at Marissa mirthlessly.

“I know everyone who works on the society page at the Picayune,” she finally said. “And I don’t remember you.”

“You wouldn’t. We’ve never met.”

“Yes, that I gathered.”

“Also, I don’t do society columns and I don’t work for the Picayune.”

“She writes for Kingfisher,” Donald Ferriot said.

“Ah,” Heidi Ferriot said, and the sound was more breath than syllable. “That makes sense,” she whispered.

Because Kingfisher is more liberal than the Picayune. And you’re black. And not the kind of café-au-lait, is-she-or-isn’t-she kind of black my kind of white lady is more comfortable with. And oh, by the way, how the hell did your black ass end up at my table?

Marissa told herself to cut it out, to stop letting the voices of her own insecurities masquerade as insight. Sometimes being the odd one out meant you had to give other people the chance to show you they weren’t always—

“And what do your people do?” Heidi Ferriot asked.

“I’m sorry. My people?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t say you people. I said—”

“I heard what you said,” Marissa answered. “My mother’s retired now.”

“And your husband?”

“Haven’t met him yet.”

“And your mother. What did she do before she . . . retired?” There was too much emphasis on the last word for Marissa’s liking. It suggested that in Heidi Ferriot’s world, black women didn’t retire, they just went on the dole.

“She was a dance teacher.”

“So at some point, presumably, she was a dancer?” Heidi asked.

“When she was younger, yes. She taught children, mostly. Through church groups and the like. She had her own studio for a while but she gave it up when I was a girl.”

“But not on Airline Highway. And not with a pole, I presume.”

The brittle silence around her seemed to confirm it: Yes, the bowed heads and pinched mouths of the other guests seemed to say. That bitch just called your mother a whore.

Marissa was not an investigative journalist, but she was a columnist, and columnists lived off of access just like anyone else in the business. And you didn’t get access by shooting off your mouth at fancy parties and taking things too personally. And yes, this may not have been the most significant event of her career, and the end of the night probably wouldn’t deliver the makings of more than a passable column. But still. But still, but still, but still . . .

“Marissa?”

It took her a few seconds to realize it was the kid who’d spoken. And he’d used her first name as if they’d been lifelong friends.

“I asked you if you knew your snakes.”

Asked. How long had he been speaking to her before she’d heard him? Was she on the verge of having a stroke? Was she really that angry?

“My snakes?”

“Yes. Your snakes.”

“I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t own any snakes.”

Marissa was surprised to see that Donald and Heidi were looking not at her but at their son, and their expressions were suddenly tense. Were they afraid he was about to divulge some terrible family secret to this black journo? Or were they just afraid of their son in general? Too afraid to pull that fork out of his hand and slap some manners across the back of his head?

“I guess I should be more specific,” Marshall said, but he was staring down at the table. Marissa thought, The way he’s working on that tablecloth, I’d bet he’d be just as happy doing that to his own leg. Or mine. A strange thought, but the guy was plenty strange. “If you were confronted with a snake, would you be able to determine whether or not it was venomous?”

“That depends,” Marissa said.

“On what?”

“I grew up here. So I know the snakes in this area. But if you dropped me in Texas, I’m not sure I’d be of much use on that front.”

“I think it’s important . . . in life, I mean, to be able to tell the difference between a snake that can actually kill you and a snake that just scares you. Don’t you agree?”

“Well, maybe . . . but what if you’re not afraid of snakes at all?”

“Are you not afraid of snakes, Marissa?”

In a low voice, Donald Ferriot said, “What’s this about, Marshall?”

The kid was barely eighteen years old and talking to Marissa like she was his kindergarten teacher.

“Now, don’t lie just for the sake of argument,” he chided her. “That wouldn’t be very polite, now, would it?”

“To be honest, Marshall, I’m more afraid of the snakes I might meet every day.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The snakes I might be forced to have dinner with, for instance.”

The silence around the table was as stilted and pained as it had been after Heidi Ferriot fired the first shot. Marissa was about to say something to lighten the mood but Marshall was suddenly staring straight past her head with such wide-eyed intensity that her words left her. One of the costumed waiters, or possibly one of the jugglers or mimes, had caught the kid’s eye. Caught both of his eyes in one tense fist was more like it. The longer Marissa stared at him, the more it became clear that Marshall Ferriot had gone entirely still, so still it felt as if the air pressure around them shifted suddenly. As if Marshall had been rendered so rigid and devoid of life, the air itself was literally avoiding him.

“What’s the matter?” Donald Ferriot asked his son. “Are you getting sick again?”

In response, Marshall got to his feet and started walking toward the nearest plate-glass window. He picked up an empty metal folding chair a bartender had been resting his feet on a few minutes earlier. The chair had heavy cushions on the back and seat, so when he lifted it in both hands, the seat’s weight forced it to fold automatically.

“Oh shit,” Marissa whispered. She was convinced the kid was about to do something truly, truly stupid, probably in some kind of sick retaliation for Marissa’s crack about snakes. When Marshall was still several paces from the plate-glass window, he swung the chair back over one shoulder as if it were as light and slender as a baseball bat.

He’ll just try to make a commotion, Marissa thought. He’ll hurl the chair at the window to get the entire room’s attention and then—

The first crash got everyone’s attention all right. But Marshall didn’t stop there. He slammed the chair into the glass again and again and again, with a ferocity and determination that kept everyone glued to their chairs. The room was a sea of frightened expressions and napkins brought to mouths. Around the fourth strike, the kid had managed to punch several large holes in the plate glass, and the cracks radiating out from each one looked poised to bring the entire window apart.

Then Marshall tossed the chair to one side and took several steps backward. He had backed up almost to the nearest table when a terrible realization of what he was about to do swept the room. There were several small screams. Then Marissa was on her feet.

If she’d thrown herself at Marshall, tried to tackle him to the ground like he was a quarterback, she might have been able to prevent what happened next. But the kid was a good two feet taller than her. And it was a moot point anyway because when she reached for his shoulder, she missed.

Marshall hurled himself face-first into the perforated glass. Like something out of a goddamn cartoon, Marissa thought. The collision made a deep, bone-rattling thud tinged with the violent metallic rattle of the giant window’s frame.

But the window held.

The kid’s right shoulder was wedged inside one of the holes he’d punched with the chair; it looked to Marissa like he was trying to pry himself free. He was dazed and disoriented, his forehead sprouting blood from a dozen different cuts. But when he looked back into the room, his eyes found Marissa and she saw utter lifelessness in them. It was as if the kid’s spirit had literally been drained out of him.

In the years to come, Marissa would try to convince herself that it was the impact with the window that had knocked Marshall Ferriot’s senses from him, but that look—the emptiness of it, its soullessness—would stalk most of Marissa’s quiet moments for the rest of her life.

The group of tuxedoed men who had gathered behind her and Donald Ferriot froze where they stood. The glass Marshall was plastered against was too fragile for anyone to make a sudden move, she realized.

Marshall’s jaw went slack. His Adam’s apple jerked in his blood-splattered throat.

“I . . . I . . . put a . . .”

And as soon as his son’s words seemed to sputter out into ragged breaths of delirium, Donald Ferriot broke free from the group and lunged for his son. And even though the men all around him could sense Donald’s terrible mistake before he made it, none of them got to him in time.

Donald crossed the carpet with too much speed and force. He stumbled in his final steps, pitching forward into his son’s body. And for a few seconds, it seemed like it would just be a slight nudge, that’s all. But as Donald Ferriot threw his arms around his son’s waist and prepared to pull him free of the glass spiderweb he’d hurled himself into, the window gave way right in its weakened center and both men became a single tangle of limbs that vanished in an instant.

Then it sounded to Marissa like all the chairs in the room had gone over at once. Silverware and glasses were knocked from the tables as everyone jumped to their feet at the same moment. The screams came next; a single piercing wave of them that said the shock of what they had all witnessed had worn off almost instantly.

To Marissa it felt like a stampede, and in the midst of it somehow, Heidi Ferriot ended up in her arms, her knees going out from under her, the bellows coming out of her a blend of rage and agony. Marissa wanted to lift her hands to her ears to blot out the terrible sound; instead she held tight to the shuddering wreck of a woman who was making them.

8

The oak branches outside Ben Broyard’s window cast dancing shadows on his bedroom ceiling. Night had fallen hours ago, but he was too exhausted to reach for the bedside lamp. This wasn’t just exhaustion, he knew, but a bone-deep sense of loss that felt completely alien. Not just alien. Adult. That was the thought he kept returning to; that what had happened this week to him, to Anthem, to all of them, was an adult thing, more significant and lasting than graduating high school or having sex for the first time.

Loss. Grief. Words that had tumbled off his tongue too easily over the years but which he’d learned the real meaning of only that week, when his best friend was replaced by a yawning, fathomless darkness surrounding miles of empty swamp road. He’d always been the mature one, the one who said the adult thing in every situation, but now he realized that to be mature, you had to know more than the dictionary definition of words; you had to know what it felt like when those words hit you in the gut.

Ben was only ten when his father died, an aneurysm during dinner that dropped the man to one knee next to the kitchen table, and then face-first into oblivion. And what he remembered most about that time was how Nikki’s parents let her sleep in his bed because her prolonged embrace was the only thing that allowed him to get through the night without waking up in tears. He could remember how everyone had closed in around him en masse; his best friend, aunts, uncles, cousins, even his mother, who’d just been made a widow in her late thirties—they had all worked in concert to protect him, the baby, the only child of a good man gone too soon.

How many times had he heard those two words back then? Too soon, too soon. Well, eighteen was also too soon, right?

Still, everything about this week was different. He wasn’t the baby anymore, for one, and he had no special status amongst all those who had gathered on the banks of Bayou Rabineaux, spreading grid maps of Tangipahoa Parish across the hoods of their sun-baked cars, loading into fantail boats to assist in the fruitless search. No one left behind was special or more significant than any other. That’s what the sudden disappearance of an entire family could do; it sent out a pressure wave that leveled all their loved ones with the same explosive force, rendering them incapable of caring for the man, woman or child standing next to them.

At times, he’d found himself praying to a God he wasn’t sure he believed in and asking the simple question, Is this how you would have me grow up? Not with a great love or some accomplishment, but the sudden unexplained absence of the person I cared most about in the world? Is this how you would have me start in the big wide grown-up world?

Nikki, the only person in his life who’d taken him aside and told him she would always be there, no matter who he turned out to be. No matter who he fell in love with. And what had he done? Just nodded and smiled as if she’d offered him a ride home after school that day, as if he didn’t understand what she truly meant. Yeah, thanks, Nick. Hey, that new cheerleader’s kinda hot, maybe I should ask her out, huh?

Down the hall, his mother had turned up the volume on the TV just enough to let him know she was parked in the living room a few feet from the front door. And because their house was a small shotgun cottage, that meant she had the back door in plain sight as well. So he was basically under house arrest. Again.

If she hadn’t called and made them come home when she did, he and Anthem would probably still be traveling back roads, hanging missing-persons flyers all over the state. But it had been a hell of a first day, that was for sure.

They’d started around dawn and managed to hit every gas station window and restaurant bulletin board from Madisonville to Gonzales. They had a flyer for each of them. Nikki, Mr. Noah and Miss Millie. And for most of the day, it had felt good. They were doing something. Being proactive, as Ben’s mother liked to say.

But after she ordered them home, their adrenaline surges subsided, and as they were driving back on Interstate 10, the setting sun a blood-orange bonfire behind them, each too consumed with thoughts to turn on the radio, that’s when Anthem exploded with the first sobs he’d let lose since Nikki vanished. And they were snotty, choked things, desperate wheezes combined with terrible, gut-clenching whines, and Ben could only rest his hand on Anthem’s shaking knee lest he lose control of his car. And after a while, he managed to speak again. “I was going to go. I was going to go with her, to North Carolina. That’s what I was . . . That’s what I was—” going to tell her that night, Ben knew; Anthem didn’t need to finish.

Now, as Ben watched the dance of shadows on his ceiling, he envisioned the flyers the two of them had left all over the state that day. He saw the black-and-white faces of Nikki, Mr. Noah and Ms. Millie staring out at night-shrouded highways, their frozen smiles abandoned to the reluctant company of bored gas station attendants and grimy shelves of junk food.

Better to see these things, he guessed, than to imagine what might have become of their SUV that night. The scraps of evidence they’d been left with could be easily assembled into a nightmare: the mangled guardrail scraped with banners of black paint that matched their Lexus, two cracked pieces of rear bumper, one half of the SUV’s rear window that had been recovered from the mud a good distance from where they went off the road. All he had to do was run through this list in his head before he saw Nikki trapped inside the sinking car, fists pounding the windows, black water rushing in to fill her screaming mouth.

It was the third or fourth ring, he couldn’t be sure which one exactly, that stopped his tears.

“It was him,” the girl on the other end said as soon as Ben picked up.

Not Nikki. And he wondered if he’d be sidelined by this realization for the rest of his life, whenever the phone rang unexpectedly. But he did recognize the girl’s voice. After the hell he’d put her through, and the confession he’d wrung from her, he figured Brittany Lowe would never speak to him again, but here she was.

“You asked me why I did it,” Brittany said. “The story, about hooking up with Anthem. You asked me why I—”

“Why you lied. Yeah, I remember.”

“He wanted me to.”

“Anthem?”

“No! Jesus. Aren’t you watching the news?”

“I’m kinda tired, you see, my best friend, she disappeared last week and we’re still looking for her so—”

“Marshall Ferriot,” she said, unwilling to be the victim of his sarcasm. “The guy who just jumped out a window at the Plimsoll Club?” Ben was stunned silent. “He’s the one. He’s the one who asked me to lie, all right? I figured I’d just tell you now since, you know, it doesn’t look like he’s going to live and all.”

When Ben didn’t respond, Brittany Lowe let out a long, pained sigh and hung up, leaving Ben staring at the hardwood floor, rings of sweat beading in between his face and the phone that was now trembling in his right hand.

9

You’re a liar!”

The boy couldn’t have been any older than sixteen, but his outburst left Marissa Hopewell standing gape-mouthed a few steps from the entrance to her office building.

She was as startled by the kid’s physical appearance as she was by his shrill accusation. Business-casual pedestrians weaved around him as his thick patch of sandy-blond hair danced in the hot wind, the same wind that kept turning her breasts into a boat’s prow under her flapping peasant dress. He was older than he looked at first glance; it was his height—five foot two, tops—that made him look like a child, and an angry one at that. The rest of him was all milk-white skin, a small, round face dominated by huge blue eyes—bloodshot from hours of crying, it looked like—and a full-lipped mouth so generous it made him look like he was constantly sneering.

He looked vaguely familiar, too. Like a child actor she’d seen play bit parts in movies over the years.

Bev Legendre, Kingfisher’s ad sales director, put a protective hand on Marissa’s shoulder, while the other ladies they’d just had lunch with hovered close by, deciding whether or not to call the security guard.

“I’m sorry. But I don’t know who you are,” Marissa tried in her best maternal voice. But the kid screwed his eyes shut and shook his head as if her soothing tone was enough of an accusation to rival the one he’d just made.

“You had a fight with him. Before he did it. Before he jumped. But you just left that part out, didn’t you?”

“Young man, how ’bout you calm yourself down and—” Bev cut in, with a tone of whiskey-voiced authority. Marissa placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder and gave her a slight nod. Bev withdrew and went to join the other women, a few of whom were now stationed inside the lobby doors, pretending not to stare and doing a bad job of it.

“You’re a friend of Marshall Ferriot’s?”

Instead of answering, the kid said, “I talked to everyone who was at the table that night and they said your column was crap!”

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste.”

“How about lying? Is there any accounting for lying?”

She’d regretted her wisecrack as soon as it was out of her mouth, but when the bundle of hostility a few feet away reacted with that dreaded accusation yet again, she had to work to unclench her fists. She’d averaged three hours of sleep a night since the horrors she’d witnessed in the Plimsoll Club, and reliving it all again for the column her editor had leaned on her to write certainly hadn’t helped much. In fact, it had resulted in her first visit to Sunday services in months, which had thrilled her mother no end, but left Marissa feeling a little desperate and weak.

But one thing was for sure; the teenager before her was in a lot more pain than she was, and she was willing to endure another few insults to find out why.

But had she lied?

It was an op-ed column, for Christ’s sake. Teen suicides had been the focus, not the gory blow-by-blow of Marshall Ferriot’s horrific and fatal jump. Not her. But maybe that was just it. Lies of omission were the worst kind, really, maybe because they were so damn prevalent. Was that what he was accusing her of? Some unpleasant words exchanged with the victim before his leap and suddenly she was, what? A part of the story?

Come on, girl. Don’t act like you haven’t thought it yourself over the past few nights, staring up at the ceiling, remembering the soullessness in his eyes when he hit that window. Wondering if maybe you’d tipped a crazy man over the edge with that cute little line about having dinner with snakes.

“I’m very sorry about what happened to your friend,” she said.

“He wasn’t my friend,” the kid muttered. And something about this admission seemed to make him more present; he registered their audience inside the lobby and his eyes widened with embarrassment. And there was that wet sheen again, but he quickly blinked it away.

“Then what was he?” she asked.

“His mother, she was being rude. Asking you questions about your family. Your people. Some of the other people at the table, they thought it was racist.”

Well, glad I wasn’t the only one, Marissa thought.

The boy continued. “But then Marshall . . .” And Marissa saw for the first time that uttering the guy’s name seemed to make her surprise visitor sick to his stomach. “Marshall . . . he asked you something about snakes . . .”

“Yes. He did . . .”

And it pained her to answer. It made her realize that yes, there was plenty of weirdness before Marshall’s big leap, and she’d left it all out. Maybe if she’d taken a deep breath while she was writing the damn thing. If she hadn’t rushed through it and let her sleeplessness get the best of her. And maybe she’d left out those pesky details because she didn’t want to be writing the damn column in the first place. The whole thing felt gruesome and invasive and she couldn’t find the right words to describe that mind-bending night. Hell, she’d also left out the part about how Marshall’s mother, a woman who had radiated contempt for Marissa just moments before, had somehow ended up sobbing in her arms, sobbing for a son who would be declared brain-dead when he was wheeled into Ochsner Medical Center an hour later, and for a husband who had died breaking their son’s thirty-one-story fall.

“And you said something back,” the kid said, only his voice had gone soft, and maybe that was because Marissa couldn’t look him in the eye anymore.

“He asked me if I could recognize certain snakes in the wild and I said I was more worried about the snakes I might have to have dinner with.” And as soon as the words left her mouth, she saw the soulless look in Marshall’s eyes again, the lattice of cuts on the boy’s face. And . . . Oh my God. Holy mother. He’d said something! He actually said something and I plum forgot it with everything that—

She didn’t want her struggle to remember Marshall Ferriot’s last words—maybe they’d be his last words; he wasn’t technically dead yet—to show on her face, not with her tiny accuser still standing right there, looking calm and focused now that she’d been thrown off her game.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” The boy said. “That he said something . . . before the window gave way . . .”

“I put . . . That was it. He said, I put a . . . And then. That was it. The window gave and he was gone. He and his father . . . just gone.”

His slight nod told her she’d just given him what he’d really come for, that her sudden recollection matched what the other guests at Table 10 had told him. And only then did she stop to consider how remarkable it was that this quaking teenager had managed to get to all of those people in just a few day’s time. Her column had gone up on the website just the day before, and it wouldn’t be in the print edition until Monday. So, either he’d done his investigative work in a day, or he’d been working this since it happened. Working it, or living it, she wasn’t quite sure, given that the kid’s connection to Marshall Ferriot still wasn’t clear. Either way, holy crap! Who was this little guy?

“Is that why you went to church with your mother last Sunday? ’Cause you feel responsible for what happened to Marshall Ferriot?”

“That’s stalking, son.”

“Oh, but if I was you, it’d be journalism, right?”

“It’ll all be semantics when my mother pulls the pepper spray.”

“And you still won’t have answered my question.”

“I went to church because I haven’t been sleeping well since it happened and I believe in something, so I thought it might help.”

“Did it?”

“Yes. But so did wine.”

“My mother drinks wine to go to sleep too.”

“Yeah, well, if I had to deal with your mouth every day, I might need wine to get up in the morning.”

“That’s nice.”

“I see. So nice was your objective here?”

“Well, if your objective is not to answer my question, then—”

“Tell you what. If one of those nice ladies over there steps in front of a truck by mistake later today, you gonna feel responsible because you shot off your mouth at them before they had time to digest their lunch?”

“It’s not the same thing and you know it—”

“Don’t tell me what I know, young man.”

“He bashed out a plate-glass window with a metal folding chair and threw himself against it. He took a running start, for Christ’s sake!”

“I know what he did. I was there. I saw it!”

“Yeah, but you didn’t write it. No, you wrote all about teen suicides and mental health resources in high schools. Oh, and you took a bunch of pot shots at my high school because everybody who goes there is rich—”

“Rich and?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“The answer’s no. I don’t feel responsible. I think Marshall Ferriot was clearly unbalanced and it wasn’t going to take much to tip him.”

“I’ll say,” the kid growled under his breath.

“But you’re asking the wrong question.”

“How so?”

“You should ask me if I regret saying it.”

He was regarding her for the first time without open hostility, and she felt the tension in her chest turn into a vague wash of heat that ran down into the pit of her stomach.

“Do I think he tried to jump out that window because of me? Hell, no. But what I said to him that night might be the last words he ever hears. And they were unkind and they were meant for his mother. So yes, I regret saying it. I do. But if you’re after some kind of truth with me today, son, let me tell you the only thing I know to be true, one hundred percent. Nothing in life is under our control except how we treat people. Nothing.”

It didn’t look like she’d knocked the wind out of him, but those big, bloodshot eyes of his had wandered to some point just behind her, and she realized he had the look of someone reading off a script. And when he spoke again, she was startled to stillness by how devoid of emotion his voice was.

“Junior year we had a transfer student come to Cannon named Suzy Laborde. Her parents didn’t have two pennies to rub together, but Suzy was a killer math student so she got a scholarship and she worked her ass off to stay there. She was from outside Thibodaux, so that was about a two-hour drive each way. Her mom would have to drop her off near school at six in the morning so she could get back to Houma in time for her first job. So Suzy would have to wander the neighborhood for a couple hours, maybe hang out at gas stations ’cause those were the only places open that time of day. Sometimes Mom and I would see her on the way in and we’d give her a ride. But most people just ignored her.

“She didn’t care that barely anyone would give her the time of day. She didn’t care that she couldn’t afford the nice clothes the other girls wore. She didn’t ask to be invited to anyone’s parties and she sure as hell didn’t expect to be Homecoming Queen. And I don’t think she gave two shits when Marshall Ferriot started spreading rumors that he’d seen a roach crawl out of her shirt during assembly.

“Then she made a mistake, see. We were all in American History class and the teacher had put Marshall on the spot. I can’t even remember what the question was but Marshall didn’t know the answer and the teacher was letting him hang himself. And then Suzy jumped in and corrected him. And she was right. And I remember thinking, Oh shit, Suzy. Now he’s really going to come for you.”

A sudden spike of emotion caused the kid to suck in a deep breath. Marissa watched, silently, as he gritted his teeth in an attempt to get his composure back.

“Cannon has this big courtyard in the middle of school. And there’s a giant oak tree right in the center with these benches all around it. Suzy and one of the art teachers built this birdhouse for the doves that used to nest in the tree. It was like her thing. She was out there every morning and every afternoon, feeding the birds. Making sure the house was still in one piece.

“One morning, when everyone was in the courtyard before first period, Suzy went to check on the birdhouse and she saw someone had nailed a piece of wood over the opening. And there was a smell coming from inside it, a bad smell. So bad, nobody was sitting near the tree that day. So she ran and got some maintenance staff and they pulled the board off . . . and I just remember her screaming. Screaming so loud everyone in school could hear. See, there was a security light in the tree right over the birdhouse and whoever had nailed the birdhouse shut had replaced the bulb in it with a heat lamp. The doves had cooked to death overnight.”

“And you think Marshall did it?” Marissa asked.

“I know he did it.”

“How?”

“Because I went to every hardware store in Orleans and Jefferson Parish before I found the clerk who sold him the bulb. And I took what I found to Suzy and I told her we had to go to the upper-school principal. And she begged me not to because if her parents found out that anyone that crazy was threatening her at Cannon, they’d pull her out in a heartbeat. Because they were tired of driving her two hours every day, tired of her needing to be too good to wait tables like her mother. And that’s the only reason Marshall got away with it.”

“Because Suzy asked you not to do anything,” Marissa said.

“All I’m saying, Miss Hopewell, is that maybe you should let yourself off the hook if you were unkind to Marshall Ferriot. Also, they say most coma patients can hear everything that’s said in the room with them. So that comment you made to him in the Plimsoll Club. It’s not like it’ll be the last thing he hears. Not until he decides to die.”

“Is that what you really believe?” she asked. “You think he’s in some kind of limbo?”

“Well, if he’s not in hell, I hope he’s got a real good view.”

The kid’s jaw was quivering again, and the wet sheen in his eyes was back, and that’s when Marissa realized why he’d looked vaguely familiar. His jaw was quivering the first time she ever laid eyes on him, on the WDSU nightly news, when he was one of scores of other well-dressed Uptown teenagers and their parents standing along the banks of Bayou Rabineaux and setting glowing Japanese lanterns adrift in the black waters that had swallowed the Delongpre family with one final, unforgiving gulp.

The Delongpres. Funny how the name itself had been scrubbed from her memory by the horrors she had witnessed at the Plimsoll Club.

“What’s your name?”

But he was halfway down the block, and he was moving so fast down the grim little concrete canyon, the white soles of tennis shoes seemed to be winking at her.

10

I want you back in school tomorrow,” Peyton Broyard told her son when she found him slouching in front of his laptop. She’d only been home from the grocery store a minute or two when she abandoned her bags in the kitchen and came straight to Ben’s room, and that meant the message she had to deliver was important with a capital I, P, T and another T, as she liked to say.

Ben’s mother had stopped searching his face for evidence of teenage secrets a while ago, mostly because she wasn’t any good at it. Too many alarmist news stories about teenagers and drugs had given her the false sense that her only child was a lot more predictable then he actually was. Three times last year she’d accused him of recreational cough medicine abuse when in each case he was just sluggish at breakfast because he’d been up most of the night downloading pirated gay porn.

Now, as she stood planted in his doorway like a miniature Beefeater with a festive scarf, Ben was reminded once again of how his mother would always look twice as masculine as him, even when she was decked out in J.Jill. They were almost the same height, but the gymnastics training she’d gone through as a young girl had left her brawny and bullish. Her Suze Orman haircut and sharp jawline didn’t do much to soften her appearance either.

It had been a few hours since Ben’s run-in with Marissa Hopewell and he’d spent the time since perusing Nikki’s Myspace page, now plastered with heartfelt tributes from students who just couldn’t go on with their lives in the wake of her disappearance even though they’d hardly said more than a few words to her in their lifetimes. But it wasn’t the desire of his classmates to cast themselves as major stars in The Great Delongpre Disappearance that had left him dazed. And it wasn’t his spat with Marissa Hopewell either. It was the dawning realization that he and Anthem probably wouldn’t be doing any more flyering anytime soon, not after what had happened the day before.

“Mom, I have two classes tomorrow and I’m passing both of them.”

“That’s great. And I want you back in some kind of routine, so you’re going to go to both. Even if you plan on getting a C in both.”

“I’ve never made a C in my life.”

The doorbell startled them. Theirs was a small shotgun cottage on a block of mansions, so it was just a few paces to the front door, down a short hallway wallpapered with the annual Jazz Fest posters his mother collected and had framed every spring.

In her youth, Peyton Broyard might have blanched at the sight of a strange black woman standing on her front porch, but Ben thought even that was growth considering his grandmother had once said to him of black people, They’re like dogs, Ben. You can’t show them you’re afraid of them. But Peyton’s widowhood had included several dalliances with black men. Also, after a second or two of awkward silence, it became clear to everyone that Marissa Hopewell wasn’t a stranger to her at all.

“I read your columns!” his mother cried.

“Thank you.”

“You’re wrong most of the time, but I read you anyway.”

“Well, good. That’s what they’re for.”

“So why are you—” Peyton turned and gave her son a look. Then pivoted toward Marissa, one hand going up as if to ward off an offer of Girl Scout cookies. “Oh, no, no, no. No interviews. Nah uh. No way!”

“Uhm, actually, Mrs. Broyard, your son came to interview me earlier today.”

“I see,” Peyton said. “So we didn’t do more flyering, did we?”

“I didn’t say we did,” Ben answered.

“You didn’t say you didn’t either.”

“Hey. Can we do this all night?” Ben suggested. “It’ll be awesome!”

To Marissa, Peyton said, “Are you here to sue us?”

“Well, your son is a very articulate young man. I’ll say that much.”

“My son is a verbal terrorist who doesn’t believe in personal boundaries.” Peyton’s stage whisper must have been for effect because Ben heard every word.

“I see . . .” Marissa answered, searching Ben’s face. The woman was probably trying to figure out if Ben had been wounded by his mother’s description, or if the two of them always sparred like this. Ben rolled his eyes to let her know it was the latter. “You know what they say. One man’s terrorist is another man’s—”

“Journalist?” Ben finished for her.

“Who says that?” Peyton asked. “No one says that.”

Then she saw the two of them smiling at each other and realized it was a joke. “All right, well, come on in. Since you seem to be friends and all. Just think twice before you give this one a platform, okay? He’s loud enough already.”

• • •

A few minutes later, Ben and Marissa were outside in the backyard, seated at a wrought-iron patio table blanketed by the deepening shadows cast by the oak tree overhead. The yard was sandbox size and it always felt to Ben like the oak was going to literally take it over one day. His mother had worked hard to cover the fences with walls of bougainvillea, and a moss-dappled cherub sat on a lone stone bench at the very rear of the garden.

Peyton brought them both glasses of iced tea. Then she departed with a bright smile, relieved that her son was someone else’s worry, if only for the next few minutes or so.

“Were you pulling my leg when you said you went to every hardware store in Orleans Parish to find that bulb?” Marissa finally asked.

“Which bulb?”

“The one that killed those birds at your school.”

“The one Marshall used to kill those birds? No. I wasn’t pulling your leg.”

“Jesus . . . Do you ever actually go to school?”

“I’m a second-semester senior and I was already accepted to Tulane. I don’t really need to go to school.”

“Well, there’s always the whole learning aspect, especially if you want to go into journalism.”

“Who said I wanted to go into journalism?”

“You did, when you went around acting like a reporter.”

“I’m working on a novel.”

“Don’t bother. There’re too many already and not enough people to read them.”

“Seriously? You realize you said that out loud, right?”

Her arch smile told him she didn’t care. She seemed utterly at ease in his presence despite their brief, tempestuous history together; when she took a sip of iced tea and brushed her free-form dreadlocks back from her brow, she did so with hands that were still and controlled, unlike his own. He envied her stillness, her maturity. Her poise.

“You know,” she said, “I recognized you today. From the news. That’s how I found out who you were. You’re one of Niquette Delongpre’s friends. That’s what the flyers are about, right?”

“We’re done with the flyers.”

“Why’s that?”

“Something bad happened yesterday.”

“Oh?”

“My mom said no interviews.”

“And I haven’t said the word once.”

“We were in Ponchatoula and Anthem wanted to put some up in this sorry-ass little bar. I didn’t think we should go inside but he wouldn’t listen. So he just barged right in and started giving his little speech. Like about how our friend might be lost and she was in an accident so maybe she’s disoriented and wandering around out in the swamp somewhere and doesn’t even remember her name—” Saying the words now made him believe them even less, and remembering Anthem’s pained desperation as he’d said them, studded with pathetic attempts at good cheer, made Ben want to cry. “The bartender went off on us ’cause he thought we were scaring off his customers. But Anthem didn’t give a sh—damn. He just kept at it. So finally the guy ripped the flyer out of his hand and he read the date when they disappeared and said, ‘Sorry, pal. Looks like your little slut walked out on you.’ ”

“That is unfortunate,” Marissa said.

“Actually, the unfortunate part was when Anthem broke the guy’s nose and knocked out two of his front teeth.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“How old is this Anthem?”

“My age. But he’s bigger. A lot bigger.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yeah . . .” Then he noticed she was studying him closely and he realized her words might have been some kind of trap. “Her boyfriend.”

“I see,” she said calmly. Apparently she would have had no problem hearing that Anthem was Ben’s boyfriend. The idea was absurd, of course, but the fact that she would have accepted it so easily made Ben feel exhilarated and terrified at the same time.

For a while, they sat listening to the nearby fountain’s gurgle and then the sustained wail of a train blowing its horn as it traveled the Mississippi’s crescent.

“You can’t blame me for thinking that if you’re chewing me out over a column about Marshall Ferriot, you think there’s some connection between what he did to himself and your friend’s disappearance?”

“Remember how this isn’t an interview?”

“I remember. But if you think there’s a connection, I’d be curious to know why you wouldn’t want it made public.”

Ben looked away, ashamed by his inability to answer. All he could think of was the flask Anthem had brought him yesterday; silver, freshly polished, sloshing with bourbon. There’d been almost no time to savor their quick escape from that awful little bar before Anthem began to drink himself into a full-blown vomit fest.

Almost as bad as the sudden loss of his best friend was the dawning realization that his next-closest friend in the world was becoming completely unglued because of it and that in just a week’s time, Anthem Landry had been sent the way of his bar-brawling, jail-visiting older brothers.

“Why are you here?” he asked her.

“You made an impression today.”

“And you don’t get a lot of chances to visit the Garden District?”

She flinched. It was slight, but he noticed it, and even though it wasn’t much, it was more emotion than she’d shown him on the sidewalk that day, even when he was really laying in to her.

“That’s offensive, Ben,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded but there was no awkward, placating smile, no real need for her to let him off the hook right away. She wasn’t his teacher or his mother. And there was no denying it; he’d hurt her feelings. But he’d only been able to do that because she’d let her guard down. And if she’d let her guard down that meant her motives for being there were more pure than he’d imagined.

The idea that she might be genuinely concerned about him left him at a loss for words; worse, it threatened to undam a tide of emotions he’d held at bay for a good four or five hours now. He knew his mother loved him and cared about him, but as always she thought she could save him from his feelings by barking a bunch of sensible orders at him. And Anthem? Had Anthem once turned to him and asked him how he was handling everything? And for Christ’s sake, he’d only been with Nikki for three years; Nikki had been Ben’s closest friend in the world for fifteen.

He didn’t want to go down that road. He really didn’t. But he was so damn tired, and when he wasn’t absorbed in some obsessive quest to find another person who had been sitting at Marshall’s table that night, the inside of his head felt like a jar full of wasps.

“I think he caused the accident,” Ben said.

It was the first time he’d said the words aloud, and their effect on Marissa was instantaneous. Her eyes widened and she leaned forward so far she had to place her fleshy elbows on the edge of the table. “Marshall Ferriot?”

“Yes.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“Nikki and Anthem broke up about a month ago because they had a big fight and this girl at our school claimed Anthem hooked up with her afterwards. The girl was lying. I got to her admit it. Then, when Marshall did his thing, the girl called and told me Marshall was the one who asked her to lie about it.”

“Why’d she agree to lie?”

“The bottle of Vicodin Marshall lifted from his mother’s medicine cabinet helped.”

“Okay . . . Keep going.”

“The night the Delongpres went missing, I went to the house before the cops got there. I knew where the key was. I didn’t tear apart her room or anything. Mostly, I just wanted to see if any of her belongings were there. Like her cell phone or anything. There was a phone there, all right, but it was in her desk drawer and it wouldn’t turn on, which was weird because it looked okay. But after a few minutes, I realized it had been soaked in water.”

“Wait a minute. You think she came home after the accident and—”

Ben shook his head. “That’s what I thought at the first. But the cops checked the records and saw the last call she’d made on it had been the week before. And I know she had another phone on her the night she went missing because I talked to her on it before Anthem and I left to go meet up with them at Elysium.”

“So she replaced her phone, the week before she went missing?”

“Yep. Because it got soaked. Not wet. Soaked. And she didn’t tell me where or how. And we told each other everything. But that wasn’t all . . .”

“I’m listening.”

“There was a card. It was on her desk. Can’t wait to see Elysium. XO, M. I didn’t make much of it at that time. There was going to be a party at Elysium that weekend, the weekend they . . . I mean, that’s why we were all driving out there that night. But the more I thought about it, it just didn’t seem right. And she only had one relative I know of whose names start with M, an uncle. And he died two years ago. Besides, the card had hearts all over it.”

“But you’ve got no real proof the two of them went out there together.”

“I’ve got the card.”

“A card that says M on it.”

“Marshall uses drug dealing and lies to try to break them up. Days after they get back together, her entire family disappears. A week later he throws himself out a thirty-one-story window and no one knows why. Remember his last words? The ones you couldn’t remember until today? I . . . put . . . a . . .”

“I remember,” Marissa said.

“I think he was trying to confess. I think he put something in their car. Maybe it was in the gas tank or the brakes, I don’t know.”

He could tell from the way she was staring openly at him, without any apparent regard for how her mouth was hanging open and her nostrils were flaring, that he almost had her. That she was more convinced by his theory than she would like to be. But all she said was: “Well, Mister Broyard, you are imaginative and articulate.”

“Only when I have to be.”

“Do you have to be?”

“You expect me not to find out the truth?”

“I think the truth is always good. And if that’s what you’re after, you’d be jumping at the chance to give me an interview. But you’re not. Do the police know everything you just told me?”

“They know about the phone and the card.”

“But not what Marshall did to try to break up your friends?”

Ben hoped it was dark enough that she couldn’t make out his flaming cheeks.

“So you’re keeping this all to yourself because you’re afraid if your pal Anthem gets wind of it he’ll yank Marshall Ferriot off life support.”

“Marshall’s in a coma, but he’s not on life support.”

“Still . . .”

“Something like that,” Ben whispered.

“You really think Anthem’s capable of that?”

“I didn’t think he was capable of what he did to that bartender yesterday. But he did it. And I just stood there and watched him.”

“It’s not your job to keep that boy from blowin’ sky high if that’s what he needs to do about all this. Not if it costs you your mind.”

“So you think I should go to the police?”

“I think you made up a theory because it gives you something to solve, and you think solving it will keep your Anthem from going off the deep end.”

“That’s not true.”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s not true. And maybe Marshall had something to do with what happened to your friend. And maybe he didn’t. Either way, you’re gonna have to start living your own life at some point.”

“Is that why you’re here? ’Cause you just wanted to give me a bunch of advice?”

“No. I’m here because you were right about one thing.”

“Which thing?”

“My column was crap. What that boy did . . . it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life. And I just couldn’t go there. So as a result, my column . . . well, it was crap. Also . . .”

“What?”

In the long silence that ensued, Marissa Hopewell seemed to be summoning her courage. For a crazy instant, Ben thought she was going to ask him out on a date. Finally, she said, “You really went to every hardware store in Orleans Parish to find that bulb?”

“Orleans and Jefferson Parish.”

• • •

Peyton Broyard was on the front porch, sucking nervously on a Virginia Slim, when Marissa went to leave. “God damn you,” Peyton whispered.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry. I just . . .” She exhaled a long drag through pursed lips, angling the smoke stream in the opposite direction from where Marissa stood just outside the front door; it was an oddly polite gesture, given her angry greeting. “This whole Delongpre thing. It’s awful, but I thought I might have a shot . . . I just listed the house. My sister, she lives in St. Louis. I’m going to move there as soon as it’s sold.”

“You were eavesdropping?”

“Once he has the diploma, I’ll stop. Until then. My house, my surveillance rules. Okay?”

Marissa nodded and showed the woman her palms.

“You got kids?” Peyton asked.

“No.”

“Pity. If you did, you might think twice about having Ben hang out at your office every day?”

“I think your son has some real investigative skill. He just needs to learn how to focus it.” Peyton’s laughter turned her next drag into a series of light coughs.

“A shot at what?” Marissa asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Just now. You said you thought you were going to have a shot at something. With Ben. What did you mean?”

“He’s just like his father with this damn city. The two of them, they see . . . promise in it that I just don’t see. You know he didn’t apply anywhere besides Tulane? Oh, you should’ve been here for that. The fight, I mean I thought the neighbors were going to call the cops. And now . . . Now he’s going to stay here and end up working for you, trying to take down the latest in an endless series of felons we keep electing to public office.”

“It’s a summer internship, Ms. Broyard. I wouldn’t say we’re deciding his fate here.”

Peyton stamped out the cigarette in a tiny ashtray on the porch rail. The street around them was quiet and oak-shadowed, save for the pinpoint spotlights set within the manicured front lawns of the surrounding mansions. To Marissa, beholding the beauty of the Greek Revival façade was like taking a sip of champagne studded with broken glass; the Doric and Ionic columns and the soaring keyhole doors always appeared edged with the blood of field slaves.

“I keep having dreams,” Peyton Broyard said, as she studied their beautiful surroundings with an expression that said she had come to regard them as threatening. “The same dream, really. About it all just getting washed away . . . But maybe that’s just ’cause of what happened to them. The Delongpres, I mean.”

“I didn’t think we knew what happened to the Delongpres.”

“Well, they had to have gone into the bayou, right? I mean . . .” She cut her eyes to the door to make sure no one was listening, then she whispered, “They had to have drowned, right?”

“A bayou has almost no currents to speak of. If they had drowned, the bodies probably would have turned up by now.”

“So . . . what? What do you think happened?”

“I think no one knows.”

I think they’re on the run for something, something the father did. And I don’t think all of them got to go along for the ride; Noah Delongpre probably decided who would be excess baggage and who wouldn’t be.

“That won’t be good enough for him,” Peyton said.

“The only Press Club Award I’ve ever won was for a column about levee protection in St. Bernard Parish. They don’t even like black folks in St. Bernard Parish.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying if your son’s got any real knack for journalism, he’ll have to learn what we all do. You do your best work when you’re not working your own agenda.” Marissa had never put it quite that succinctly before, and now that the words we’re out of her mouth she wasn’t quite sure she believed them. Peyton Broyard didn’t look like she was all that sold on them either.

“I see . . . okay. Well, good luck, Ms. Hopewell.”

“Good evening, Ms. Broyard.”

“Drive safe now.”

As she slid behind the wheel of her Prius, Marissa gave herself some credit for not firing off her mouth at Peyton Broyard over her recurring flood nightmare. As if anything could wash the Garden District away, perched as it was on the highest, safest ground in the city. If a deluge ever did come, it would be the poor black folks in her neighborhood who’d see their whole lives swept away in an instant.

But the woman was right; her nightmare probably had more to do with her own dark imaginings of what fate might have befallen the Delongpres. Although there had been a wire story just that afternoon. Apparently the Atlantic storm season that year was poised to produce some of the strongest hurricanes on record.