CHAPTER FIVE
The Ecologist
The Vaudry land lay the better part of an hour east of the city, out where New Orleans gave up being a city and turned into water with a road laid over the top of it.
Maren drove out the Chef Menteur Highway in the truck, windows down, the mark leaning her east the whole way.
Past the last gas stations and the shuttered seafood shacks, past the Vietnamese bakeries of the East, until the houses gave out and there was nothing on either side but marsh: gray-green grass running flat to the horizon, standing water bright as tin between the reeds, a dead cypress here and there holding up its piece of the sky.
Bayou Sauvage, a sign said. A wildlife refuge, as if the whole drowned eastern edge of the parish could be fenced and named and made to behave.
Here and there a fishing camp stood up out of the grass on stilts, shutters latched, nobody home.
The heat came in the windows thick enough to chew.
Out past all of it, where the road finally ran out at the Rigolets, the moving water went deep and fast between the lakes.
The land she wanted was one of the still places the moving water had forgotten.
She found it the way she found everything now.
She drove until the mark warmed, and turned off onto a shell road when it warmed harder, and followed the shell road until it gave out at a slumped chain-link gate with a sign so old the lettering had worn to nothing.
Past the gate the marsh opened out into a wide flat backwater, and the backwater was red.
Not blood-red. Worse, somehow, for not being dramatic about it.
A flat rust-brown skim lay over the still water from bank to bank, dull and even and wrong, the color of old iron, the color of a thing left too long in the damp.
Nothing moved on it. No birds worked it, though the marsh at her back was loud with them.
The reeds at its edge had died off in a brown ring.
It sat there in the white afternoon doing nothing at all, and Maren stood at the broken gate and understood in her body, before she understood anything with her mind, that this was the place.
This was where they had put Lark into the water.
The mark over her heart had gone very still.
Not cold, not pulling. Still, the way a held breath is still, the way a room goes still when something terrible has happened in it and the air has not finished knowing.
Maren stood and looked at the red water and made herself picture it, because not picturing it was a lie she had been telling herself for two weeks.
Lark, who was frightened of nothing on this earth but exactly this, brought down to this flat red edge in the dark.
The still water closing over her. The marsh going on being loud all around it, indifferent, the way it was being loud now.
She did not picture it from a distance, either.
She made herself crouch at the broken edge of the bank, close enough to smell it, a low rot under the iron.
She had her own horror of water like this, still water, water with no bottom you could see.
It was the one fear she and Lark had truly shared, the one place the two of them had always been the same kind of afraid.
She had spent her whole life keeping back from edges exactly like this one, and Lark had gone over it, or been taken over it, alone in the dark.
Maren stayed crouched there a long moment and did not let herself look away.
She did not hear the boat until it was nearly on her.
?
A small flat-bottomed thing, an electric motor almost without sound, which was how it had come so close. A woman in it, cutting the motor and letting the boat slide the last of the way to the bank, watching Maren with a flat, unhurried attention that did not blink.
She was older than Maren, late twenties, and built by a life outdoors: tall, broad through the shoulders, browned and roughened by sun and water, in waders and a shirt with the sleeves shoved up.
Dark hair tied back off a face that gave nothing away.
A plastic crate of sample bottles sat at her feet, half of them filled with the red water and labelled in a small square hand.
Her eyes, when they lifted to Maren's, were a gray with green gone through it, the color the Gulf turns before weather, the kind of eyes people read as cold and are wrong about.
Maren did not know yet that they were wrong.
"This is private land," the woman said. Low voice, a little rough, no heat in it. "You shouldn't be back in here."
"So shouldn't you, then," Maren said.
Something shifted at the corner of the woman's mouth that did not get as far as a smile.
"I've got permission." She did not offer to prove it.
She looked at Maren a moment longer, and her gaze went over her the way a medic's goes over a body, quick and sorting, and Maren felt absurdly that she was being read like a chart.
"You're not fishing. You're not lost. Nobody comes out to this particular water by accident. " A beat. "So what is it."
Maren said nothing. Her hand had gone up to her chest without her telling it to, flat over the still mark, the way it did now without asking.
She saw the woman's eyes follow the movement and stop on it, on Maren's hand, on the place beneath it.
Something changed in her face. Not much.
A narrowing, a stilling, the look of a person whose worst guess has just been confirmed for her.
"Who did that to you," the woman said, quiet. It was not really a question either.
?
The question went into Maren and kept going down. Nobody knew. In her whole life nobody had looked at her chest and known there was a single thing there to know. She took her hand off it, too late, and made her face flat. "I don't know what you mean."
"Yeah, you do." The woman shipped the crate and stepped out into the shallows in one easy motion, waders sheeting, and pulled the boat half up onto the mud, and stood.
She had a head on Maren. Close to, her stillness had a different grain to it, less cold than careful, the carefulness of someone who had learned to take up no room until she knew the room was safe.
"I'm not going to hurt you," she said, which was a strange thing to say, and stranger for the plainness of it, as if she had needed to say it to people before.
"But you can't be out here. This is a bad stretch of water to come asking questions on, and you have got questions all over you. "
She stood there easy in water Maren could not have made herself wade into for money, ankle-deep in the still red shallows as if the stuff that had killed Lark were no worse than weather.
Maren hated her a little for it, and noticed in the same breath, against her will, the worked muscle of her forearms where the sleeves were shoved up, the contained economy of her, and hated that she had noticed at all.
The mark gave one small cold tick, there and gone, and Maren put it down to the heat.
Maren looked at the red water instead of at her. "Then tell me what that is."
The woman's jaw worked. For a moment Maren thought she would not answer.
Then it came out level, like something she'd recited to nobody many times.
"Algae. A bloom. The wrong kind, in the wrong water, the wrong color for any species that has a business being out here.
" She looked at it without the distance a scientist was supposed to keep.
"It comes up where they've been. I find it, I map it, I write it down.
Nobody who could do anything with the map has ever once wanted it.
" A beat. "That's all you get from me. Go home. "
"My girlfriend died in this water." Maren laid it down plain and hard, to see what the woman would do with it. "Two weeks ago. They wrote it down as an accident."
The woman went still in a new way.
For half a second something crossed her face that Maren, much later, would understand, and at the time only filed away as wrong, because it was not surprise.
The woman was not surprised. She looked, for that half a second, like a person handed a grief she already owned, and then she shut it away fast, the way you shove a thing back in a drawer at the sound of a key in the door.
She looked at Maren then, really looked, and did none of the things people had been doing to her for two weeks.
She did not soften her voice into the careful register they had all used at the funeral.
She did not tell Maren she was sorry for her loss as if loss were a wallet someone had lifted.
She just looked at her, steady and level, like Maren was a person standing too close to an edge, and said, "You drove all the way out here to stand where it happened.
" Not a question. "I know what that wanting is.
It doesn't give you anything back. This water never gives anything back. "
It got in under the place Maren had spent fourteen days armoring against every soft word aimed at her, and it got in precisely because it was not a soft word.
It was a true one, from someone who plainly knew the inside of it, and that was worse than any amount of kindness would have been.
Maren felt her eyes sting and despised it.
"I'm sorry," the woman said then, lower, and it was true, and it was also a door easing closed. "I mean that. But I can't help you, and you need to go home."
She bent to push the boat back off the mud, and her sleeve slid back from her forearm, and Maren saw the inside of it.
An old tattoo, deliberately ruined. Scarred over with a pale webbing of burn or blade, as if someone had worked hard to take it off and only half got there.
Under the scarring the shape of it still held.
Water-lines. A bird. The same grammar as the thing on Maren's own ribs, set down by a different hand.