CHAPTER SEVEN
Tremé
It took Maren two days to find the shop, and when she found it, it was nothing like the thing she had gone looking for.
She had started where the city sold itself.
She walked the Quarter first, past the windows got up for tourists: the plastic skulls, the dripping purple lettering, the gris-gris sealed in cellophane with a price sticker on the back, the whole loud costume the town wore to sell strangers a shiver.
None of it was what the woman at the coroner's had been.
The woman at the coroner's had been quiet, and certain, and had looked at the worst thing in Maren's life and named it sorrow without raising her voice.
Whatever that was, it was not for sale in the Quarter.
So Maren went up across Rampart into Tremé, where the houses sat shoulder to shoulder in their faded colors and a brass band was practicing somewhere two streets over, stopping and starting.
People sat out on their stoops in the evening cool and watched her pass, a thin white girl with ink up her arms looking for something, the way they had watched a hundred such girls before her and would watch a hundred more.
She did not ask anyone. She would not have known how to ask for what she wanted.
She walked, and she let the mark lead, and on the second afternoon, on a side street she could not have named, it went warm and slow under her shirt outside a narrow storefront, and she stopped.
The window was clean. That was the first wrong thing, set against everything she had walked past in the Quarter.
Behind the glass there was no costume at all.
A shelf of candles in glass, ordered by color.
Jars of dried roots and leaves, labelled in a small firm hand.
Bottles of oil with their names written on.
A few plain cards of saints, and a worn Bible open on a stand, all of it arranged with the quiet pride of a place that knew exactly what it was and was not trying to convince anybody.
Above the door the sign read MERCIER'S, and under it, smaller, SPIRITUAL SUPPLY · ROOTS · CANDLES.
No skulls. No purple. No shiver for sale.
Maren stood on the step and felt, for the first time in three weeks, that she might have come to the right place, and felt in the same breath like a trespasser for it.
The mark lay warm against her, and then, as her hand touched the door, it cooled.
Not the cold-with-edges of a warning. Something more like reluctance, a small drawing-back, as though the thing in her skin did not want to go inside.
She went in anyway.
?
A bell rang over the door, a real one, bright and ordinary, and Maren's chest clenched at the sound of it before she could think.
Inside it was cool and dim and smelled of clean things: beeswax and dried herb and something green underneath, and the faint church-smell of old paper.
More shelves, more roots, a glass case of oils kept like a pharmacy.
And behind a wooden counter at the back, on a stool, with reading glasses down her nose and a Bible open in front of her and a cup of coffee gone cold at her elbow, sat the woman from the coroner's.
She was older than she had looked in the cold lobby.
Sixties, her silver hair wrapped in a dark scarf, a clean apron over a good dress, her hands strong and stained at the knuckles with the work of roots.
She looked up over the glasses when the bell went, and she saw Maren, and she knew her at once.
Maren watched it happen: the recognition, and behind it something that was not welcome.
Something closer to a sigh a person decides not to let out.
"I wondered," the woman said, "if you'd be fool enough to come find me." She took the glasses off and let them hang on their beaded chain against her chest. "And here you are."
"You spoke to me. At the coroner's. You looked at..." Maren stopped. Her hand had come halfway to her chest and she made it stop too. "You knew. You're the only one who's ever known."
"I said I was sorry for your trouble. That's a thing you say to anybody.
" The woman's voice was low and even and gave nothing away.
"Don't go building a church on it." She looked at Maren a long moment, the same sorting look from the lobby, taking her measure and not hurrying it. "What did you come here thinking I am?"
Maren had not expected the question, and so she answered it honestly, which was a mistake and also the only thing that would have served. "Someone who knows about this kind of thing. The water. The kind of thing that was done to me. I thought maybe you did this kind of work."
Something went hard and tired in the woman's face, an old weariness over an old insult.
"Let me tell you what I am, since you came all this way not knowing.
" She closed the Bible without marking her place; she knew it by heart.
"I'm a churchgoing woman. Sunday mornings, same pew thirty years.
The rest of the week I work roots, like my mother did, and hers, back further than anybody troubled to write down.
I heal people. I help them keep what's theirs, get back what's been taken, stand up under what's been laid on them.
Protection. Cleansing. Justice, when the law won't hand it over.
That is good work, it is old, and it is mine.
" She let it sit. "What you walked in here calling 'this kind of thing,' like it's all one dark soup.
That's what every fool tourist out there thinks I do.
It is what they have thought about my people for two hundred years, that we truck with the devil and the dead.
We don't. I want you to hear that clearly before you say one more word to me about water. "
Maren heard it. It went in and stuck, because it was true, and because she had walked in carrying the exact lazy thing the woman was naming, the city's whole purple costume, and had not known she was carrying it until it was set down in front of her.
"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it.
"I know you are." Not softening. Just fact.
"Now. You've had your look at me and I've had mine at you, and I'll tell you what I'd tell my own girl.
Go home. Whatever you've got yourself tangled in is not mine to untangle, and it is not yours to be poking at either.
" She reached for the glasses again. "There's the door. "
?
Maren did not go to the door.
"You went cold when you said it." It came out level and stubborn, the voice she used when she had decided not to move.
"At the coroner's. When you said sorry, it went cold, right here, when you looked at it.
You felt it. You knew there was something here to feel.
That's not a thing you say to just anybody. "
The woman went still on her stool.
For a moment Maren thought she had pushed too far and would be put out into the street. Then the woman set the glasses down again, slowly, and looked at Maren with something new in it, a grim recognition, the look of a person meeting a trouble she had prayed not to meet twice in one life.
"No," she admitted. "It's not nothing." She was quiet a beat.
"What's on you is not my work, child, and I need you to hear that's not me washing my hands.
It's the truth, and the truth matters here more than anywhere.
What's on you, what's out in that water east of here, it is old, and it is outside.
It is not African, and it is not from the islands.
It came across the water with the people who came here to own things, the old families, the ones who bought up marsh nobody else wanted.
My people have never once served it. We have known of it as long as we have been in this place, and what we have always known is to keep well clear.
" Her mouth twisted. "And still, every few years, some soul drowns in that water and the paper says accident, and somewhere a fool says voodoo, and it gets laid at my door.
At my mother's door. A thing we have spent three hundred years steering around, and we wear the blame for it, because we are the ones they were taught to be afraid of. "
"Les Noyées," Maren said.
The woman's eyes came up sharp. "Where'd you get that name."
"Someone who got out."
"Then someone who got out told you true, and someone who got out should have told you to run.
" She held Maren's gaze. "Yes. Les Noyées.
The drowned women. They serve a thing that lives in still water and keeps its accounts, and they have kept it fed in this parish longer than the city has had a name.
They are not mine. I will not have them be mine. "
And then, lower, as though it cost her to spend it: "I lost a girl to it, once.
Not mine by blood. A neighbor's child, sweet thing, used to mind the shop for me on Saturdays.
They got to her young. The Wading, they call it: bringing you into the water a little at a time, till you don't feel the day you go under.
I saw it come up on her. I saw it, and I told myself it was a phase, and a young girl's foolishness, and not my business to name.
Then one morning she was gone into that same red water out east, and they wrote down misadventure.
" She said the word with a flat contempt that matched the contempt in Maren's own chest exactly.
"Twenty years, and I still see the signs on her when I close my eyes.
So do not stand in my shop and tell me I don't know what's on you.
I knew it the second you came into that cold lobby.
I only hoped you would not find your way to my door. "
It was the most she had said, and the saying of it had cost her, and Maren understood she had been let further in than the woman wanted, by her own grief, against her own better sense.
"Then help me," Maren said.