CHAPTER SIX
The Slackwater
The binding house off Esplanade had someone else's life in it now.
Maren stood across the street in the white morning and looked up at the outside stair she had climbed three years ago behind Lark.
There was washing strung along the gallery rail where there had been nothing: a child's clothes, a chambray shirt, a row of cloth squares gone stiff in the heat.
The shutters that had been shut against the night stood open.
A window unit dripped its small gray stain down the clapboard, and inside a baby was winding itself up to cry while a woman's voice went to it, low and tired and ordinary.
None of it had anything to do with candles, or a basin of black water, or an old woman with scars laddered up the inside of both arms.
She had known it would be like this. Walking up Moss Street with the bayou flat and close at her shoulder, she had told herself not to hope.
Three years was a long time, and people moved, and a woman who did in secret the thing Vesper had done would not stay where she could be found.
Still Maren had come, because the receipt was the only address she had, and because she had carried the name east out of the marsh like a coal cupped in both hands, and she had wanted to walk it up those stairs and set it down on the woman who had earned it.
There was nobody up there to set it down on.
She made herself cross the street and check the mailboxes in the stairwell, three of them now where there had been one, none of them Calder.
A neighbor two doors down, watering pots in his vest, said the old lady had been gone for years, before his time.
Good riddance by some accounts, he said, though he couldn't have told you why.
People hadn't liked going past that stair after dark.
He didn't know where she'd gone, and people like that didn't leave a forwarding address.
He laughed at his own joke and went back to his pots.
The bayou ran beside the road on the walk back, the same flat black ribbon it had been the night she was bound, holding the morning upside down in its skin without a wrinkle.
Maren kept to the far side of the path from it without deciding to.
Over her heart the mark lay quiet, a low even warmth, neither pulling nor flinching, as it had been since the marsh, as though it too were waiting to see what she would do now that the one door she'd been sure of had a stranger's washing on it.
If she could not find the woman, she would find the thing the woman had served.
The marsh had given her two names and the bar had given her a third, and all three of them ran back into the same dark water.
Les Noyées. The Slackwater. Our Lady of Slackwater, who did not have accidents.
Somewhere in a city that half knew them and would not say so, there was a thread she could pick up, and Maren knew exactly where people set down the things they would not say out loud.
They set them down in a chair, with a needle in their skin, once they had stopped being able to feel where they ended.
She went home and opened the shop.
?
It had been shut the best part of three weeks and it smelled of it, of dust and old stencil and the green-water damp that came up through the floor of every building in the Bywater the moment you stopped fighting it.
Maren went through it the way you go through a house after a funeral, touching things to be sure they were still solid.
The two chairs, Lark's in the front where the morning came in and hers in the back where the light stayed even.
The flash curling on the walls. The little brass bell over the door that Lark had screwed on crooked their first week and that had got into the habit, this last lean year, of not ringing for anyone.
She propped the door and turned the card in the window to OPEN, under the crooked hand-painted board Lark had hung over it, their two names and a swallow, because with Lark it was always a swallow.
Then she sat in her own chair in the back with her hands loose in her lap and waited to see what the city would bring her, and tried not to look at the front chair, and looked at it anyway.
The first two walk-ins were nothing. A bachelorette who wanted a tiny anchor and her friend who wanted nothing and got talked into a star.
They were kind and drunk and from Ohio and they did not know one single thing.
Maren did the work clean and took their money and learned that her hands still worked even with the rest of her gone somewhere flat and white, which was a mercy of its own, and not the one she'd come for.
It was the man after them who gave her the first of it.
He was older, a dock hand by the ruin of his forearms, and he wanted a name added under a list of names already climbing the inside of one arm, a wife this time, in the same plain block as the rest. He had buried her in the spring.
Maren bent in close over the soft old skin and set the needle down and let the quiet do its work, and somewhere in the second name from the bottom he started to talk, because a stranger with her hand flat on you was the safest confessor there was.
She let him run, and when he came up for air she put the question in sideways, like slipping a hook under a fish that is looking the other way. The water out east. The red on it this summer. She'd heard it was bad.
The old man went quiet in a different register.
"Bad water," he agreed at last, not looking at her, looking at the wall.
"Always been bad out that way. My people fished it, back.
There's water you work and water you leave be, and you learn which from your daddy and you don't ask why.
" He turned his arm a little under her hand, settling.
"When the red comes up thick and the tide goes slack and just sits there.
That's hers. That's Our Lady's. You get off her water when you see it and you go home and you don't look back, and if you've got the sense God gave a crab you put a candle up for whoever she's about to be owed. "
"Owed," Maren said. Even. A word laid on the bench, not picked up.
"She don't drown people," the man said. "That's the part the tourists never get.
She collects." He said it plainly, the report of a fact, and then seemed to hear himself, and gave a short laugh with no give in it.
"Listen to me. My wife'd have had my hide.
You don't want to go asking after that, girl.
Folks that go asking after the Slackwater have a way of getting an answer. "
He would not say any more, and Maren did not push, because pushing was how you taught a man to lie to you.
She finished his wife's name and cleaned it and held the mirror, and he found it in the glass and something in his face came apart, the small private collapse she had watched a thousand strangers make, and he paid her in soft folded notes and went out into the heat. The bell did not ring for him either.
But she had it now, the first true edge of the thing. Not a legend two old men passed back and forth in a bar. A rule people lived by and taught their children and would not explain. A water you left be. A Lady who collected.
She wrote nothing down. She had learned that much from Lark.
?
Because Lark had written it down, and it had gone into the water with her.
Maren let herself think about the notebook for the first time in days, sitting in the empty shop after dark with the door shut again and the heat ticking in the walls.
The cheap drugstore one, half filled with Lark's slanting hand: the column of dead names, the dates running back the better part of two hundred years, the little inked ring of water with something sinking into the middle of it that Maren had looked at far too long and understood not at all.
She had found it three weeks before the end, in the lining of the denim jacket, and she had put it back, because asking was holding on too tight.
The denim jacket was the one Lark had pulled on the night she went out and did not come home.
Wherever the jacket had gone, into the still water or into a box in a house in Metairie that Maren had no standing to open, the notebook had gone with it. Every answer on it. Like the phone.
So she could not read what Lark had found. She could only go where Lark had gone to find it.
The main library on Loyola kept long hours, and Maren spent three evenings of them in the local-history room where the air smelled of old paper and the carpet had given up.
She sat at a long table where Lark must have sat, because Lark in her last month had taken herself off to the library she had hated her whole life and would not say why.
It undid Maren a little, every time, the picture of it.
Lark, who could not sit still for six years, who read the backs of cereal boxes and nothing longer, bent over deeds and parish records under the bad fluorescent light, chasing a thing she had decided not to frighten Maren with.
Maren chased it now. She did not know the names the way Lark had, but she had two: Vaudry, that the ink had flinched from in the bar, and she had the shape of the thing, drownings and slack tides and old water-land.
She pulled the indexes and the plat books and the yellowed parish death notices, and over three nights the shape rose out of the paper like the red rose out of the lake.