CHAPTER SIX #2
It was not one drowning. It was a long, patient ledger of them.
Out in the eastern marshes, on that particular dead red water, people had been going under for as long as the records ran, in ones and twos, every few years, always given the same gentle ruling Foley had given Lark.
Misadventure. Accident. A drunk, a stranger, an unlucky local who walked out past where the bottom held.
And threaded all through the old notices, owning the land the still water sat on, were a handful of names that did not change.
Vaudry was one. There were others, old French-colonial families, the kind that had bought up marsh nobody could farm or build on a hundred years back and never would say why they wanted water.
Once, near midnight, turning a brittle page, she found a marginal mark in pencil, faint and recent against the old print.
A small ring, with a single line drawn down into the center of it.
Lark's hand. Lark had sat exactly here and seen exactly this and marked it and told no one.
Maren put her thumb over it and held it there a long time, and over her heart the mark warmed, slow and certain, the small private heat it gave off close to a true thing.
She did not have the cult. She had its wake.
A pattern of the drowned going back two hundred years, on water owned by people who would not say why they owned it, and an order the city called the Slackwater that collected what it was owed, and at the live end of all of it, this summer, on that same red water, Lark.
?
The mark led her to the rest of it on the fourth night, by the only method it had. It warmed when she turned the right way at a corner she'd had no reason to turn.
It took her off the broad streets and back into the older grain of the city, the narrow blocks where the houses leaned and the dead were stacked above the ground because the wet earth would not take them down, and it warmed her to a stop in front of a shrine set in a niche in a plastered wall.
She had walked past a hundred like it and never once looked.
A little folk-Catholic grotto, candles in red glass, plastic flowers, a figure behind a grille.
Except the woman behind the grille was no saint Maren could name.
She stood with her head bowed and her hands open at her sides and her bare feet in a painted ring of blue-gray water, and the water came up over her ankles, and her face under the chipped paint was patient and kind and a little hungry.
Beneath her, where another shrine would carry a name, someone had lettered three small words. Our Lady of Slackwater.
The candles in front of her were fresh. Someone had lit them tonight.
There were coins in the dish, and a curl of hair tied with thread, and a child's plastic bracelet, the small ordinary tokens people leave a saint they think might do them a kindness.
Except this one collected, and the people leaving them knew it, and left them anyway.
That was the part that turned Maren's stomach.
Not a cult in a black robe down some hidden stair.
A grotto in a wall on a residential street, fresh candles in the dish, in a city that walked past it every day and half knew and said nothing.
She was still standing there when she understood she was being looked at.
She could not have said how. There was no one on the street that she could see, only the leaning houses and the parked cars and the wet dark between the streetlights.
But the back of her neck had gone tight in the exact way it had gone tight three years ago in a shuttered room, the weight of being watched laid flat against her, and over her heart the mark had gone from warm to cold.
Cold with edges to it. Cold as it had gone only once before, at the coroner's, when the woman in the church clothes had looked at her chest and known.
Maren turned a slow circle in the empty street and found no one, and walked home faster than she'd have admitted to, and the cold sat on her heart the whole way and did not lift.
The woman at the coroner's. She had not let herself think about her, in the flat white roar of that morning, but she thought about her now.
Older, Black, good church clothes, hands quiet on a handbag.
Eyes that had gone to Maren's chest before they went to her face.
I'm sorry for your trouble, baby, said to the mark first and to Maren second.
She was the only soul in twenty-two years who had looked at Maren's chest, known there was a thing there to know, and been sorry rather than afraid.
Not Rowan, whose torn notebook corner was still in Maren's pocket and whose number she had not called.
This was older than Rowan, and surer, and not afraid.
She did not know the woman's name, or where to find her.
But she knew the kind of street, and the kind of shop, and that a woman like that did not hide.
Tremé, maybe, or the wards above Esplanade.
Maren would find her. Somebody in this city stood on the other side of the line from the still red water, had looked at Maren, and been sorry, and Maren was done being out here on her own in the dark with a dead girl on her skin and nobody to ask.
?
She got back to the studio a little before two.
She let herself in and stood a moment in the dark with her back to the door, getting her breath, the cold over her heart finally easing.
The shop held the day's heat as it always did, close and green, the air full of Lark.
Her mug still in the rack. Her chair in the front, pale in the streetlight that came through the window.
Maren crossed to draw the blind on it, last thing, so the morning would not wake her too early in a bed that was too big now.
Her hand was on the cord when she saw it.
On the glass of the front window, on the inside, clear in the streetlight, there was a handprint.
A whole hand, fingers spread, pressed to the pane at the height of a person standing.
It was wet. Water stood in the lines of it and ran in slow threads down the glass and pooled on the sill, fresh, as though it had been laid there a breath ago by a hand that had just come up out of deep water.
In a shut and locked shop. On a dry August night that had not seen rain in a month.
Maren did not move. She stood with the blind cord in her fist and the streetlight coming through the wet print and her own pulse loud in her ears, and over her heart, slow and deliberate, the mark turned over once and went still.
She had been hunting the Slackwater for a week. Careful, from the edges, telling no one.
It had come in through a locked door and laid its wet hand flat on Lark's window, to let her know it had been watching her do it.