Floodgates (15 page)
Godtschalk grunted. “Days? If I know politics around here, it would have taken years to get action. Maybe if Shelly had made her discovery when she was a little girl making mud pies, something could have been done in time…”
“In time?” Dr. Britton started to laugh, and it looked like the laughter hurt him. “In time? Hurricane Betsy blew through in 1965, when I was in first grade. It was bad. People who weren’t here then have forgotten Betsy, but it was bad. My grandmother’s house flooded up to the eaves. The government told us, ‘Never again,’ and they drew up a flood control plan that was supposed to stand behind that statement…only they put that plan on a fifty-year schedule. It wasn’t finished when Katrina made her appearance. Do you want to know how long fifty years is? Just look at me.”
Faye studied his grizzled beard and the deep lines carving into his forehead. Fifty years was a long time.
“When a government makes a promise to a few hundred thousand people,” she said, “I don’t think it should take nearly that long to deliver.”
“No kidding. But a lot of levees
did
get built, and there’s an irony there. People—lots of people—died after Katrina, because they told themselves, ‘My house didn’t flood during Betsy, and they’ve built the levees up since then. It’ll never be that bad again.’ They could look out their windows and see nice, tall levees, and they trusted them. It’s easy to trust that a humongous pile of dirt won’t go anywhere.”
“Did that levee fail?” Joe asked. “The one Shelly was worried about?”
Dr. Britton shook his head. “No. It held. It was the Orleans Canal. It didn’t fail because there was a two-hundred foot gap in it.”
Faye remembered Nina grieving on live television over that mystifying hole.
With trembling hands, Dr. Britton wrapped his unfinished sandwich in a napkin. “I don’t know why the levee system on that canal was never finished, but that’s the way it was. They say it happened because of political infighting, but it hardly matters now. Water just poured out of the gap and into the city. It didn’t get deep enough in the canal to put the kind of pressure on the levees that Shelly was worried about. So we don’t know whether she was right.”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “Dear God. I hope we never have another chance to find out.”
***
After a half-hour spent studying Dr. Britton’s detailed maps and aerial photos, the simple and colorful city map stuffed in Faye’s pocket began to look a little silly. She’d found it on a rack of brochures catering to tourists and, silly or not, it had kept her from getting lost for months now.
She unfolded it and spread it across the picnic table. “I could sit here and talk shop with you all day, but Joe and I should probably try to do something else today to earn our police consulting fees. You told me on the phone that your friend Bobby was one of the last people to see Shelly alive?”
“Yep, Bobby was working with her, side by side, making maps to guide rescue teams through the flood. Bobby’s a funny guy. He’s no older than you, but he’s a history scholar of the old school. Bobby likes to read about the past. He doesn’t like it to get him dirty.”
Dr. Britton looked ruefully at the ground-in dirt on his knees. Faye didn’t look at hers, because she knew they were just as grubby.
“Bobby’s made a career of studying historical maps of New Orleans, which gave him enough knowledge of the modern city to save lives during the flood. Helping the rescue teams after Katrina was the only practical thing the man has done in his life. The time he spent at Zephyr Field…I’d call that his finest hour. There are a lot of people walking around alive today because of Shelly and Bobby.”
“It seems like everybody but the police in Missing Persons knew what Shelly did after the hurricane,” Faye observed. “I bet they’re feeling stupid about now.”
Dr. Britton shook his head. “I didn’t know, not until this week, when they found her dead and everybody started talking about it. If the police had talked to the right people back then, they’d have found out right quick. Nobody was keeping it a secret on purpose, and everybody in these parts likes to talk.”
“Where does Bobby work now?”
“He works for the Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism. He’s all about culture, but he really hates the recreation and tourism part of the department’s work. I should probably tell you that Bobby’s a bit of a snob. He can’t help it. His family was high and mighty in this town for decades before Napoleon got around to selling it to us. Sometimes a family like that hands down money, and sometimes they don’t. In Bobby’s case, they didn’t. But that sense of utter superiority…it must be on a dominant gene.”
Faye folded up her crummy tourist’s map, resolving not to let Bobby the map connoisseur see it. “You said he’s working near here?”
“Walking distance, actually. In the Quarter. At the Historic New Orleans Collection. Their map collection is amazing, and if a man can fall in love with a sheet of paper or ten, Bobby’s managed it. He just got back from some time in Texas—went there to get some work and to live in a house that hadn’t ever been wet. But his family goes back more than 250 years in this town. A little water ain’t gonna keep Bobby away forever.”
Faye liked the way Joe looked, walking through Congo Square, where people had gathered to trade and sing and dance and socialize for a couple hundred years. Faye’s boots made a clatter on the cobblestones, but Joe never made a sound when he walked.
Sometimes, Joe wore traditional Creek garb, from head to toe, right down to the moccasins that he sewed for himself. Other times, like today, he traded jeans for his buckskin pants, but there was almost always a feather plunged casually into the nape of his ponytail. And the moccasins were non-negotiable. Whether Joe wore buckskin or a tuxedo to their wedding, she knew what would be on his feet.
Faye had spent a year trying to decide what kind of wedding she wanted, but her ambivalence extended even to that subject. It would be at home, at Joyeuse. That part was non-negotiable for her. But would they invite a crowd of their friends? Did she want to sew herself the dress of her dreams? Or should they load Magda, her husband Mike, and a handy preacher on a boat, haul them out to Joyeuse, and just do it?
She didn’t want to think about it, so she looked around Congo Square, instead. The shade of Louis Armstrong Park’s old oaks, which had lured her on this detour, was inviting, but the square itself felt alive with the ghosts of all the people who’d passed before. The slaves of New Orleans had precious few freedoms, but Sunday gatherings in Congo Square had been one of them.
The rhythms and melodies played here on African instruments—
bamboulas, banzas,
and gourds—would one day morph into jazz and blues and rock-and-roll, and even in that long-ago time, such music could draw a crowd. Tourists in powdered wigs and whale-boned corsets had gathered like rock groupies to watch dancing like they’d never seen before and would never see anywhere else.
According to Dr. Britton, they were just downriver from the site of the former turning
bassin
for the Carondelet Canal, a basin of water where loaded boats made a U-turn and headed back to Lake Pontchartrain. It was no surprise that one of the most famous streets in this wet city, Basin Street, was named for an oversized mud puddle.
Faye had spent so much time reading up on the history of her temporary home that she found it easy to imagine that time had stood still. The fact that so many houses and cobblestoned streets in the old parts of town were right where the colonial French and Spanish had put them made it even easier.
If she squinted, Joe could pass for a tribal chieftain, striding proudly through town when the old city was new, ready to negotiate as an equal with the fledgling territorial government. She could have been…well, in all likelihood, she would have been a slave, but she might have been lucky enough to live in the social no-man’s-land of a free person of color. She figured it was her fantasy, so she could be a free woman, if she pleased.
She imagined herself strutting proudly through the Congo Square marketplace, dressed in varicolored calico, her hair wrapped in a fashionable
tignon
, with a certain spectacular-looking Creek chieftain by her side. As an archaeologist, Faye’s daydreams tended to be remarkably colorful.
Crossing Rampart Street and entering the French Quarter did nothing to detract from the time-blurred sensation of this very pleasant walk. Faye shifted her focus to her feet, as she tried not to trip over two centuries of bumps and cracks in the sidewalks of the old city. Shopkeepers still started the day by washing down these sidewalks, just as they always had. Maybe the custom went back to the days when ditches ran around each block, catching whatever the rainwater sloshed into them.
Everything in sight, except for the people on the street and some of the expensive goods in the shop windows, had the worn patina of great age. Time passed slowly here, if at all.
As they walked down a street lined with antique stores that had once been banks, Faye heard little beyond the occasional clinging bell announcing that a customer had come in the door. The Historic New Orleans Collection was, fittingly, housed in one of the few buildings that survived the widespread fires that ravaged the old city in 1788 and 1794, so it was about as old and historic as a building could get in those parts.
Faye mentally shed her
tignon
and morphed back into a 21
st
-century woman as she walked through its old door. Joe never changed, no matter what century she imagined him in.
Dr. Britton had called ahead to let his friend Bobby know they were coming, but Dr. Britton neglected to give Faye and Joe Bobby’s full name. Surely, he would introduce himself, because Faye couldn’t see herself calling him “Dr. Bobby” indefinitely.
Dr. Bobby was slow to look up from his work when Faye and Joe walked into the room. He eventually focused a pair of soft brown eyes on them, but he was a millisecond late in doing it, as if to communicate that he was in control of their interaction. It was a very aristocratic thing to do.
He was of average height and slender. Faye thought his skin would have been pale, even if he hadn’t spent all his adult life in map libraries. His facial bones were chiseled and his long-fingered hands, though uncalloused, still managed to be manly.
Bobby’s hair was thick, wavy, and dark, and he moved with the languor of the very rich. Still, his dark-rimmed glasses didn’t look expensive, and neither did his well-shined shoes. It was entirely possible that Dr. Bobby had no assets whatsoever, and no more income than the average historian. Which wasn’t much.
In New Orleans, an old family was an old family. The fact that your old family lost everything in the Panic of 1837 was completely immaterial.
Faye took a deep breath. She’d been dreading this moment. It was time to talk to the person with the most intimate knowledge of Shelly’s activities in her final days.
The oppressive pall of death over those days gave her the shivers, and not just Shelly’s death. While the rescue team had been working feverishly at Zephyr Field, lives were being snuffed out, one by one, by the dank, rising water. Stopping to sleep, eat, even visit a stinking and overloaded portable toilet could have slowed rescuers just long enough to leave the world dimmer by just one light. Then another. Then another.
Maintaining his faintly superior air, Bobby shook their hands and said, “I’m pleased to meet you. My name is Robert Longchamp, but I’m known far and wide as Bobby.”
He gave his name as “Lawnshaw,” or some such French pronunciation, so it took Faye a few seconds to realize what he had said.
Releasing his hand, Faye looked closely at his face as she said, “Well, I pronounce it like a rural Floridian—‘LAWNG-champ’—but I do believe we have the same last name. I’m Faye Longchamp, and this is Joe Wolf Mantooth.”
The soft eyes lingered for a single extra millisecond on Faye’s medium brown skin and glossy black hair, but he was too well-bred to show chagrin or even surprise at the suggestion that he might be related to someone so racially ambiguous. “What was your father’s given name? And his mother’s maiden name?”
“Earle. And my paternal grandmother was a Carr.”
“Her mother?”
“I have no idea.”
He gave a small nod, eyes fastened on her face as if he were trying to comprehend a family that didn’t catalog their connections back to 1600s France, and beyond.
“I’ll look at the family tree. And I have a cousin who’s fairly obsessed with genealogy. She may know whether we’re connected.”
Wow. The first thing Bobby said to her, directly after stating his name, had been two questions: “Who’s your daddy?” And “Who’s his mama?”
If this man called his cousin “fairly obsessed with genealogy,” then the cousin must be immersed in the subject to the point of insanity. Not that Faye had any room to talk. She might be ignorant of her father’s family, but she knew as much about her maternal ancestors’ roots in slavery as Bobby did about his high-falutin’ family. Faye had read her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s journal dozens of times.
The old, yellowing map on the table behind him caught her eye, and Bobby noticed. He finally smiled. “That one’s nice, but take a look at this one.”
He motioned for Faye and Joe to come look at a framed map on the wall that was even older and yellower. “I love this thing. It’s an early drawing of the original layout of the city, and there’s a bazillion copies floating around, but I just like to stand right here next to the original and breathe its air.”
Yep. Bobby was a historian.
Faye scrutinized the map. The old, original city plan had been an orderly thing, with its neat gridwork of streets surrounding the cathedral and town square, the Place d’Armes. Fronted by the irregular sweeping curve of the Mississippi, and backed by swamps and bayous reaching all the way to Lake Pontchartrain, this tiny spot had been a misplaced piece of Europe, dropped down on a spot where life couldn’t be so tightly controlled.
Joe reached out a finger and traced a long diagonal line in the air over the map, from Lake Pontchartrain to Rampart Street. By the time this drawing was made, the Carondelet Canal already sliced its way from the bayou to the back side of the city, neatly marking the general vicinity of the excavation she had just left.
Given a few seconds to count the blocks between where she stood and St. Louis Cathedral, she could have precisely plotted her current location on this two-hundred-plus-year-old map. It was amazing. The New World began its metamorphosis in 1492 and it had continued to this day. Few places on this side of the Atlantic had been so little changed as New Orleans over so great a period of time. But that wasn’t why she was here.
“Al Britton called to tell you we were coming?” she asked.
Bobby nodded slightly.
“He tells me that you and Shelly Broussard spent a few harrowing days right about…there.”
Faye pointed at a spot of swamp where Zephyr Field would be built in 1997.
The slender archaeologist pulled his glasses off and looked down at her, squinting. The motion shook the loose dark curls that dangled almost to his shoulders. He was attractive in a bookwormish sort of way. Before she met Joe, Faye would have said he was her type. One of her types. Truth be told, she was a fan of men in all their forms.
“Now why’d you have to take me out of 1798 and dump me into 2005? I was having fun in 1798. There wasn’t a lot of fun to be had in 2005. Not the last part of it, anyway.”
“I’m trying to help the police by talking to people who might have seen Shelly in her last days. Joe and I are archaeologists like she was, and we’ve been asked to chat around and find out what people remember.”
“You’re an archaeologist? No wonder you gave that map more than a passing glance. Sweet little thing, isn’t it?” Then the rest of her statement hit home. “Shelly? Last days? Are you telling me they found her? Or did someone just finally give up and declare her dead.”
“They found her. We found her, in a way. I was there. That’s how I got involved.”
Bobby had sunk into an elaborately upholstered chair. Joe dragged over a couple of matching chairs. He and Faye sat and waited for Bobby to go on.
“I’d hoped…” He swallowed. “Everybody had hoped…”
There was nothing to say.
He put his glasses back on, as if to hide behind them, and cleared his throat. “You asked how Shelly spent her last days. Well, I should know. I was right beside her. We were just cogs in a big, lopsided wheel, but we got some things done. Has anybody explained to you the convoluted way we rescuers found a lot of the victims? It’s amazing, really, the ways that technology worked, and the ways that it didn’t.”
Faye shook her head and said, “I know so little that you might as well just tell me.”
“Well, first of all, the rescuers were working in a zoo, but that’s because Katrina walloped us where she wasn’t supposed to. There were rescue teams staged in places like Shreveport, waiting for the clouds to clear so they could rush in…to Biloxi. All night long, the weather instruments were telling people that it was going to be bad in Mississippi. And it was. It was awful. But nobody expected the New Orleans levees to break, so we started out behind the eight-ball here, and we stayed there. Still, a lot of good things happened. It all started with the victims and their cell phones.”
Faye, who had seen what happened to a human body when it was shoved off a cell phone tower, knew more about how they worked than she would have liked. “Their cell phones stayed functional after the storm?”
“To an extent. Voice calls were hard to place but, lots of times, text messages would go through. Some guy would be standing on his roof, thinking he was about to drown, and he’d send a good-bye text to his mama in Texas. Then, Mama would get on the phone to the Texas emergency people and tell them in no uncertain terms that they needed to, by God, send somebody to go get her baby.”
“So the Texas people called the Louisiana people and told them where to find the missing person?” Joe asked.
“Hold your horses. Didn’t I just say the cell phones weren’t working too well here?”
Faye nodded to concede his point.
“So volunteers—say, at the University of Texas—took each text message and they found out the latitude and longitude where it was sent. Then they found a satellite or aerial photo taken after the flood and marked the coordinates of the victim’s last known location. Well, really, the coordinates were for the victim’s cell phone.”
“And the volunteers would use that info to send out a rescue team?” It all sounded reasonable to Faye—except for one small detail. “But…how did they get the data into New Orleans? There were no regular phones at all, and no cells to speak of. Not enough to bet lives on, that’s for sure. I’m guessing internet service was a pipe dream.”
“No kidding. How did they send us the info? Good question. Some of it came in by satellite phone. And they actually flew in some of it in the form of data bricks.”
Faye hated to display her ignorance, but she had no choice. “And data bricks would be…”
“Really, really,
really
big jump drives.”
“Gotcha. I can see how that information would be enough to send out a rescue boat.”
