River Road (15 page)

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence for a while, until I finally said the words I’d been uttering way too often lately. “I guess it’s time to call the Elders.”

“Why don’t you call Zrakovi directly instead of going through Hoffman? His number’s on my cell—I assume you have my phone since I had yours.”

“I do.” I rolled over and pulled my backpack toward me, digging out Alex’s phone and tossing it to him. “You call him. I’ve already made my Elder call today, trying to get Hoffman to dig up info on Melinda Hebert.”

Add the oddly emotionless grieving widow to our gumbo of weirdness.

Willem Zrakovi was the head wizard for North America—each continent had one grand poobah that served on the Council of Elders and above them all was a single First Elder. Below them were the heads of the four congresses, then the sentinels, then the licensed wizards. The enforcers were a group unto themselves, part FBI prete team and part assassins. How Alex managed to be such a nice guy, however much he tried to hide it, I could only credit with his upbringing. But I didn’t want to think about Mama Warin right now.

Alex’s version of the day’s events for Zrakovi was succinct yet thorough. Probably why he was so good at reports. Once he got to the elven stuff, he threw the phone at me.

I set it to speaker. “Doing a little elven magic, are we, Drusilla?” Zrakovi’s voice was a lot calmer than the last time I talked to him, when he’d been yelling at me for, I think, doing a little elven magic. Alex leaned back on the sofa with his eyes closed again, but a smile threatened to break through.

“Uh, yes, sir.” I launched into a patchy, un-succinct, slightly defensive account of the origination allurement. “But in the end it was worth it,” I said. “I found the source of the contamination was the River Styx.”

Long silence. Really long silence. “Are you sure?” Zrakovi’s voice deepened a register.

I described the boat, the demon, the river. “I don’t know how I knew where I was,” I concluded, realizing how lame it sounded. “I just knew, and I’m absolutely sure.”

Zrakovi said a few curse words that had Alex and me both looking at the phone with raised eyebrows. Somehow, an Elder dropping an F-bomb was just … wrong. “Make a transport and send me the remaining water samples here in Boston,” he said. “The head of the Yellow Congress is in town and I’ll have him look at them tonight. He might be able to verify it without you repeating the elven ritual.”

Fine with me. I had enough hellish things in my life without actually visiting the place twice. “One more question,” I said. “If there was some sort of rift between the Mississippi River and the Styx, wouldn’t it show up on the Elders’ tracking devices?”

Zrakovi sounded as weary as I felt. “Now that the borders are down, we have no way to tell. We’re working on a new tracking system but it’s going to take a while.”

I didn’t share this with Zrakovi but, in the words of my grandmother, who lived in a small town in Alabama, it sounded like the Elders were trying to close the barn door after the horse had run off.

CHAPTER
15

By the time Alex showed up with bagels on Monday morning at seven, I’d finished a marathon series of phone calls. I’d missed our run because I was already on the phone with Willem Zrakovi—again—before six.

The head of the Yellow Congress had verified the water’s origin as being the Styx, although Zrakovi admitted they wouldn’t have known what to test for if I hadn’t done the elven ritual first. The good news for me: no more nosebleed-inducing visits to Hades. Bad news: I needed to come up with at least a stop-gap fix, and fast. The Elders would do what they could to help, but they were shorthanded and it was my job and blah blah blah.

Next, I’d gotten a call from Jean Lafitte to verify a time for our dinner date on Sunday night. He was definitely getting way too comfortable with the telephone, and someone needed to explain to him that just because he, in his undead state, no longer needed to sleep, that did not apply to the rest of us.

Jake needed the don’t-call-before-breakfast memo, too. He wanted to verify a time for our dinner-and-a-concert date on Wednesday night. My sudden popularity was epic.

Tish had a few ideas to try on the Styx problem, which I would certainly do if I could get off the phone.

I had only a scowl for Alex when he blasted in the back door, shouting greetings at my neighbor Eugenie over his shoulder—I was meeting her for dinner tonight to catch up on girl talk unless more crises intervened. He wore a caramel-colored short-sleeved shirt and khakis. Big-boy clothes without a trace of black. It looked good on him.

The bagels cheered me up. I pulled one in front of me, slathering on the softened cream cheese.

He poured coffee, got a plate, and pulled out a bagel for himself. “You’re quiet. Convo with Zrakovi went that bad?” He carefully spread a thick layer of cream cheese on each side of the bagel and took a monstrous bite that gave him chipmunk cheeks.

I told him about the Styx confirmation. “I’m going to have to assume there’s a physical rift that we can plug up, and see if one of the mers will risk diving again to check it out,” I said. “I guess that means going back to Pass a Loutre this afternoon.”

“I can’t.” He dabbed a few crumbs from his shirt into a napkin, folded it, and put it on his saucer. “I was up late fabricating documents to show the NOPD why the feds are taking over the missing-persons case they didn’t know about.”

That was too complex a thought after my marathon of phone calls. “What are you talking about?”

“I talked to Zrakovi again last night.” He took a sip of coffee and grimaced. “What is this—chicory and chocolate?”

I nodded. “Put some cream in it if you want to be a wuss, cuts the bitterness. What about Zrakovi?”

“We decided the only way to explain Doug Hebert’s and Jeff Klein’s absence was to not try to explain it—make it a missing-persons case,” he said. “By weaving in some phony evidence from Mississippi, it threw the case across state lines and into federal jurisdiction.”

“So you can legitimately question people and get warrants without worrying about the NOPD. Makes sense.” I pushed the rest of my bagel away. “But you realize it’s going to be all over the
Times-Pic,
even the local TV stations. Two missing college professors is big news. And then some reporter is going to call Melinda Hebert, which will be a disaster.” I didn’t know if the woman was stable enough to refrain from babbling about wizards and preternatural species.

“I’d hoped you could go and talk to her again today, convince her to keep her mouth shut. Maybe get her to go out of town for a few days till we figure this out.”

My cell phone rang before I could answer him. I looked at the caller ID and groaned. “Hotel Monteleone—has to be Jean. What does he want now?” Would the hotel disconnect his room’s phone service if I bespelled the manager? Or maybe I could get into his suite and put a mild electrical-shocking charm on the phone itself.

Pepé Le Pew appeared at my kitchen table again, disguised as Alex. “When shall we meet for our dinner date,
Jolie
?” he mocked.

I flipped him a one-fingered salute with one hand and flipped the phone open with the other. “Jean, didn’t we just talk a half-hour ago? Seven o’clock Sunday night. I haven’t forgotten.”

Jean’s voice was uncharacteristically grim. “Drusilla, I have spoken with Rene. One of his family members has fallen ill, and he is threatening to kill that blackguard Denis Villere. On this occasion, I believe he might be serious.”

Great. “Was his family member swimming at Pass a Loutre?”

“
Non,
that is the difficulty,” he said. “She was near the head of passes, at the convergence of the river mouths, where the river pilots gather. It is a popular spot with the mermaids.”

Yeah, I just bet it was. “Pilottown?”

“Oui.”

I closed my eyes and beat the phone against my head before putting it back to my ear. “Give me Rene’s phone number.”

*   *   *

For the second time in three days, I wound my way through the concrete jungle of the Westbank and left New Orleans for the wilds of Plaquemines Parish. This time, I was alone and headed to Orchard, where I’d try to work out a deal with Rene Delachaise to do the underwater work to unravel the Styx question. He didn’t answer his phone, but I’d activated his tracking charm so I knew he was there.

Rene or one of his kinfolk weren’t off the hook as suspects for the wizard murders, but we were going to have to work together. I made jokes about not being able to swim, but it wasn’t just me. Wizards and water are a bad mix, especially saltwater or brackish water like that in the South Louisiana marshes—it made our magic hard to channel, probably because we were too freaked out to concentrate. If we needed work done in water, we had to hire it out.

Alex and I had decided to treat the water problem and the murders as separate cases until we found something to link them. Alex and Jake had headed off for a day at Tulane, interviewing the associates of the professors. Then they’d tackle the NOPD, smoothing out red tape, getting a warrant for the professors’ homes and offices, and soliciting detective Ken Hachette’s help in finding Doug Hebert’s missing car. The cell phone records had shown nothing but a call from a pay phone outside a convenience store in Marrero, a Westbank suburb.

Meanwhile, I had a Styx problem to fix, and didn’t have a clue how big it was or what would work—only that if the contamination had reached Pilottown, it was getting way too close to endangering humans.

I’d done some quick homework. A triangle of land near the point where the Mississippi river mouth branched apart at the gulf, Pilottown was home base for not only a number of oil outposts but one of the river pilots’ associations.

Before going to Orchard, I decided to pay a surprise visit to the Villere family in Tidewater. I’d also checked to make sure Denis was at home. Now, as I reached the end of Highway 23 and wound my way along the narrow Tidewater Road, with water encroaching on both sides and no other traffic, I questioned my sanity. The few narrow side trails had names like Chevron and Halliburton, and the skeletons of Katrina-slain warehouses and boats peppered the landscape.

I finally came to a small path that branched into a marshy area and turned in according to the directions I’d gotten from an online map. I switched into four-wheel drive as the Pathfinder bounced over ruts and ridges, sending clumps of mud skyward. I eased my way toward a house set deep into the tall reeds.

The scents of new wood, saltwater, and fish surrounded me when I climbed out and looked around. I reached into the front seat and pulled out the elven staff. My backup. As my senses sharpened, what had seemed like silence gradually filled with the calls, clicks, clacks, and occasional splashes of the nearby marsh.

“Vous n’avez aucune raison de venir ici!”

An undignified squeak escaped me before I could squelch it, but I thought I’d just been ordered to leave. I swirled to stare into a pair of bright eyes buried in a face of tanned wrinkles. An old woman, wispy white hair escaping from a faded blue do-rag, hissed up at me. Worn steel-toed boots peeked from the hem of her old cotton dress.

“Uh.” I tried to collect my wits and calm my thumping heart. “Do you speak English? I’m looking for Denis Villere.”

“La sorciere,”
she said, poking me in the ribcage with a surprisingly strong finger, a much better option than the wicked kitchen knife she held in her other hand.

I took a step backward. I sure didn’t want to use Charlie to zap an old lady.

“La sorciere. Va-t’en, ou je vais vous faire bouillir pour le dîner!”

“Denis Villere?” I said again, backpeddling. I had no clue what she was saying, except the serrated blade of her knife was waving awfully close to my nose.

“You ain’t gonna boil da wizard for dinner,
Grandmère
.” A young man approached us from the back side of the house. Yegods. I’d never been so happy to hear English, especially since Grandma had apparently been threatening to serve me at the family dining table.

“Hold on a minute,” the guy told me. He wrapped a muscular arm around his vicious little grandmother and escorted her back to the wide porch that stretched along the front width of the house. Once she was settled back into the rocking chair from whence she must have sprung like an aged, lethal mousetrap, he trotted back to me. He was in his late teens or early twenties, with long black hair, warm brown eyes, and a compact, muscular build.

“Sorry ’bout dat—
Grandmère
don’t like wizards. You the one my pop talkin’ ’bout?”

He was smiling, and no further mention of boiling had been made, so I began to relax.

“Drusilla Jaco,” I said. “DJ.”

“TJ Villere, or T-Jacques or Tit-Jacques to the old-timers,” he said, shaking my hand. “My pop’s awful pissed at you for puttin’ dat tracking tattoo on him. I thought it was kinda cool, me.”

“Where is your dad? I wanted to talk to him about the water contamination.” I looked around at the small house, which looked to be a mix of old and new construction. They must have taken a Katrina-damaged place and patched it up.

“Just missed him, you. Went out lookin’ at the property you givin’ us now. He ain’t happy ’bout dat, neither.”

No kidding. “It’s the best I could do. The Delachaise clan has been on the Birdfoot Delta a long time so it was the best compromise we could come up with. But I wanted to tell you guys to stay away from the area around Pilottown, at least for the next few days. There’s more contamination.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell him,” TJ said, cocking his head at the staff in my right hand. “Dat the stick you threaten my pop with?”

Pop sure didn’t keep anything from his son, who looked healthy enough—he had the build of someone who either worked hard or worked out. If he’d been sick, his recovery had been complete. I threw the staff back in the front seat, lest TJ or his granny thought I was threatening them.

“Just tell your dad about the new water problem, and call me if you have any questions.” I dug a card out of my pocket and handed it to him.