The Map of Moments (19 page)

Max shook his head and managed a smile.

The shelving and cabinets in the office looked the same as when he'd last been here. The files and books were different, but when he knelt beside a filing drawer and checked the labels, he was relieved to see one of them still marked in his own handwriting:
students.

Of course, someone with a quote like that on the wall would lock their filing cabinets.

But luck breathed on Max, and the drawer slid open. He fingered through the files until he found Noone's details, grabbed a pen and pad from the desk, and jotted down his address. He replaced the file and closed the drawer, and as he backed out of the room he suddenly felt like an intruder. The office should be left as it was, he knew. This was not his place anymore, and he had no right being here.

Max stood there for a moment after he'd closed the door, looking at the stranger's name, crumpling in his right hand the piece of paper he'd ripped from the pad. What dangers would he be subjecting Noone to if he approached him now? He remembered the boy; a quiet, intelligent guy keen to learn about history, and determined to become a teacher himself, given time. He'd always worked studiously, been polite and courteous to Max and his fellow students, and his work had been of a consistently high standard. And as Max blinked, he saw Joe's soft hands grasping Gabrielle's buttocks as she raised and lowered herself onto him.

He liked to think there was no sense of petty revenge here, but he needed to know some truths. And if asking Joe certain questions put him in danger from the Tordu …so be it.

Max stared along the corridor, toward Charlie's office. Could the Tordu really stretch this far? They'd known about Corinne because she was Gabrielle's cousin, and Gabrielle had been in deep with whatever the Tordu were. Others knew their name—the two cops that had let him go from a
murder scene, for instance—but perhaps just enough to know to stay away.

Maybe just knowing about them wasn't enough. Hell, half of New Orleans might know enough about them to be scared to even whisper their name, like some group of bogeymen. But Max was snooping. He was hearing their name breathed with fear in the present, and uttered during moments of the darkest magic from the past. Maybe the trouble came from asking questions, digging around, opening old wounds.

That made more sense to him than the idea that simply mentioning them could bring death down like lightning. And it meant that visiting Charlie wouldn't really do any harm. If he was right.

He started walking along the corridor. When Max reached it, Charlie's door was open several inches. There were three knives stuck in the wood of the door, forming a very precise equilateral triangle with its point facing downward, and each blade pierced a dried hunk of meat.

“Fuck,” he whispered, all of the little, logical conversations he'd been having with himself crumbling. Logic had no place here.

The meat looked like organs. Dried parts of the body, belonging inside, not out.

Cattle organs, obviously. Yeah …
had
to be.

He nudged the door open with his foot.

The office had been cleared out. Papers and files lay scattered across the floor, and the shelves still held some books, but much of Charlie's presence had been removed. He had packed up and gone, warned away.

Charlie had been born and brought up in New Orleans. He must have known what this warning meant.

And Max could not plead ignorance, not really. This had to be a Tordu warning, which meant that they were already at least one step ahead of him. Whether he believed in magic or not didn't matter. They knew more about him than they should; about him and Gabrielle, Corinne, and his old job and friends at Tulane…

He ran from the building, Joseph Noone's address clasped tightly in his hand.

M
ax felt as though he'd been slogging through mud and now his limbs were free for the first time. Purpose gave him momentum. A call to the cab company had eventually brought a taxi—the same one that had run him out to Tulane to begin with—and promises to the mostly silent driver had persuaded the man to search with him for a working ATM machine. Though wary of being robbed, Max took a five-hundred-dollar advance on his Visa card just to have the cash in his pocket, and he'd paid the driver fifty dollars to take him out to Louis Armstrong International Airport.

The place felt deserted and hollow. Half of the car rental
desks were closed and of those that were open, it took him three tries before he found one with a vehicle to rent. The Toyota RAV4 smelled like mold inside, but Max didn't give a shit. He needed wheels. He cranked the windows down, turned the radio up, and looked at the map the lady at Dollar Rent A Car had given him, watching the mileage as he drove along I-10 back up toward Baton Rouge.

His destination sat about a third of the way to the state capital, off the highway and along the river. Given its size on the map, Peyroux Landing had probably only had a population of a couple of thousand, even before the storm.

The small town was mostly row houses and bars, and a big empty industrial structure loomed on the river, which must once have been a factory or a fishery keeping the town alive. Max felt confident that Peyroux Landing was the sort of place young people spent their lives trying to leave. It couldn't be anybody's idea of a haven.

Yet there were trucks in driveways, laundry hanging on lines behind the houses, and dogs in yards. To people who'd grown up here and stayed, it wasn't a matter of coming or going, it was just home.

Peyroux Landing didn't have a lot of streets, and Max found the address easily enough. He pulled to the curb in front of 124 Lizotte Road. As he killed the engine and popped the door, he gripped the keys in his hand. Having the car changed everything. He was still afraid, but he no longer felt trapped. When he needed to, he could get the hell out of town.

The Noone house was a two-story brick job with concrete steps that stood slightly off-kilter, or perhaps the steps
were straight and the house was off-kilter. The brick had faded through decades of Louisiana weather, and the postage-stamp yard consisted mainly of weeds and hard-scrabble ground, but once upon a time someone had taken care of it. Rounded granite stones ran along both sides of the walkway up to the door, some of them jutting at odd angles like vandalized gravestones. Nobody cared about this place anymore, but that hadn't always been the case.

Max took a deep breath, thinking about the last time he'd walked up to the front door of a strange house. But he didn't slow down. Momentum could be disrupted too easily to allow hesitation. He went up the steps in two strides and rang the bell.

Rocking on his feet, feeling as if he'd had too much caffeine, Max rapped on the door for good measure.

“Coming!” a voice called from inside. Then, more quietly, “Jesus, give a guy a chance.”

The door swung open. No chain lock, no dead bolt. The kid who answered couldn't have been more than eighteen, a good-looking boy with shoulder-length hair that framed his face without making him look feminine. His shoulders and biceps marked him as a weight lifter or football player, or both.

The kid gave Max a what-the-fuck look. “Yeah?”

Max peered past him into the house. Ratty carpeting covered the stairs going up to the second floor. The hall that led toward the rear had decent wooden molding, reinforcing his belief that someone had cared about this place once upon a time. Maybe it had been a previous owner.

“I'm looking for Joe Noone,” he said.

The kid flinched, producing a snort of derision. “Yeah?”

Max fought the urge to ask if he knew any other words. In the car on the way over here he'd considered and discarded a dozen lies, and decided in the end to let the truth—or as much as he dared—pave the way.

“My name's Max Corbett. I used to teach at Tulane. Joe was a student of mine. I came back to New Orleans for the funeral of a mutual friend, and I was hoping to talk to him about her.”

And it's possible someone might be trying to kill him,
he thought. But that wasn't the sort of thing you blurted out on a stranger's doorstep.

A kind of understanding touched the kid's eyes, but it only made him look younger, and Max wondered if the kid might not be fifteen or sixteen and just big for his age. The football coach must love him.

“You been away a while?”

Max nodded. “Yeah.” Give the kid a dose of his own monosyllabic medicine. “I missed the storm.”

“That ain't all you missed,” the kid sniffed, oddly superior. “Joe's dead.”

He delivered the news like an insult.

Max deflated, searching the kid's face for some sign of deception. The Tordu had already gotten to Noone. How could that be?

“I'm sorry. That's terrible. Can I ask what happened?”

The kid's face softened, and for the first time, Max could see the grief behind his anger. “Were you really his teacher?”

“Yes. I really was.”

The kid pushed his hands into his pockets and leaned against the door frame, seeming to shrink into himself. “I'm Drew. Joe's brother.”

Max noticed the wording. Not “Joe was my brother” or something like that. All his life, Drew had been “Joe's brother,” the younger Noone boy. And in the same instant, Max noticed something else as well. The way he'd talked about Joe dying, it hadn't just happened.

“Sorry to trouble you, Drew. How long ago did he die?”

The kid glanced back into the house, but nobody stood behind him. Max felt pretty sure nobody else was home, or they would have come to the door by now.

“ ‘Die’ isn't the word. Not for what they did to him.”

Dread trickled down the back of Max's neck. “Who?”

Drew shrugged in that way only teenagers can manage, hands still in his pockets. “Not a clue. The cops say they don't have a fucking clue, either. Joe didn't come back from classes one day, this was early May, and that was it. At first the cops didn't even want to look for him. Nineteen-year-old college guy? They figured he was shacked up with some girl or just off on a road trip or something. My mother pushed 'em pretty hard. Some fishermen found him in bushes on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain.”

Max's skin prickled. The end of May. He wondered what day, exactly? Maybe the day he'd walked in on Gabrielle with Joe? Which would mean that other than Gabrielle, he was the last person to see Joe Noone alive.

Not something he planned to tell Joe's little brother.

“He drowned?” Max asked.

Drew sneered. “I know what you're thinking. Suicide? Not Joe. Anyway, he didn't drown, and the way they cut him open, it's not the kind of thing that's self-inflicted.”

He sounded disgusted, but then he hitched slightly with emotion and his eyes grew moist.

“What do you mean?” Max asked.

Drew narrowed his eyes, pulling his hands out of his pockets. “Man, what's with you? Why does it matter? You came to tell him some kid he knew at school died in the storm, right? By the time Katrina rolled in, Joe had been dead for months. You want details, that makes you some kind of sick fuck. Why don't you get—”

“Did the police catch his killer?” Max pushed.

That stopped Drew. The kid looked at him a minute, then grabbed the door. “In New Orleans? Seriously? They'd have to care first. For four months, they could barely be bothered to take my mother's calls, and once the storm hit …well, they stopped taking everybody's calls, didn't they? They got more important shit to worry about in the Big Sleazy these days.”

The two of them stared at each other for a moment, and then Max opened his hands, like he was talking to a church congregation. It was part of his almost unconscious professor's repertoire, and he regretted it immediately.

“I'm very sorry about Joe, and about bothering you.”

“It's a sorry world, man.” And Drew shut the door.

After a moment, Max retreated from the house, swept along on the current of this new information. Somewhere around the time he'd been involved with Gabrielle, Joe

Noone had been murdered.
Cut open,
his brother had said. And Max felt a terrible certainty that if Drew had been willing to talk about it, he would have learned that parts of Joe had been removed.

Gabrielle held the key to Noone's involvement. Her connection to Coco and the Tordu, whatever they were, had been a secret people were willing to kill for. But Gabrielle could tell Max nothing.

He climbed into the RAV4 and felt the map crinkle in his back pocket. He thought about Ray, and a conjure-man named Matrisse. Gabrielle couldn't tell Max anything, but if he could find Ray, or this Matrisse, both of them must know more about all of this than he did.

That meant going back to the place where he'd met Ray and asking around, and that would draw attention he couldn't afford.

Max started up the RAV4, and headed away from the river and back toward the highway. The nuns he had seen taking their own lives had chanted:
Por Mireault, le Tordu.
The same name Max had seen written on the map in the Third Moment. Ray hadn't given him any kind of warning, but there was no doubt it was all connected. Gabrielle, the Map of Moments, and the Tordu. So before he ran the risk of sticking his head back in the hornet's nest, he wanted to see the next Moment. Perhaps it held more clues.

Before
that,
though, he needed to take a breath and focus on the other Moments; what he'd seen and heard, and what they might have contained that he'd simply missed.

It was time for the history professor to learn.