Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) Read online

  Under this hasty covering was the parcel Jordan had thrown away.

  The fabric had been torn in a rough square, from a bedsheet, Anna guessed, and one that was none too clean before its ultimate sacrifice to the ragbag. The corners of the cloth were tied up, making a bundle reminiscent of the sacks cartoon hobos carried on a stick over their shoulder.

  Gingerly she closed her hand over the knotted corners of the bundle and hefted it experimentally. Soft dead weight pulled the makeshift hammock into a rubbery curve. Rust-colored spots speckled the side and pooled into a stain where the bundle had rested on something other than the trash; the pooling was on the side of the fabric, not the bottom.

  Anna set it on the bricks between her feet. Wind, still warm and heavy with moisture, gusted from all directions, carrying leaves and litter on its feathered back. It was the kind of wind that made Anna's cats rampage around the house; that made her feel wild and dark. It snatched at the cloth, fluttering it with sudden life, and she jerked her hands back. Belief in things unseen was carried on the air in New Orleans, and Anna's hardheaded rejection of superstition momentarily abandoned her.

  "I'm going in," she whispered to the spirits on the breeze. "Cover me." Smiling to herself, she teased the knots from the corners and pulled them apart.

  It was a pigeon. Dead.

  For a cold moment she believed the message was for her, a pigeon for a Pigeon. The parcel hadn't been delivered to her, however; it had been put in the garbage in such a way that she might never find it. Using the fabric to roll the bird from side to side, Anna looked it over. Its head had been crushed and its right wing twisted as if someone had wrung it the way a washerwoman would wring a mop. What she'd taken for random blood seeps from the outside were crude but intricate drawings done in blood and probably with a fingernail or stick. The figure looked like a cross on an altar with coffins or pineapples to either side. Anna had no idea what, if anything, it was supposed to mean. She turned her attention back to the bird. Despite the scribbling in blood, it was possible Jordan had found the bird dead rather than killed it. Either way a sick mind worked behind it, sick and dangerous.

  Gently she rolled the bird onto its back. A wooden skewer, slender and smooth--the kind that could be bought anywhere for backyard shish kebob--had been colored black and green with a Magic Marker, then plunged into the pigeon's breast. Blood blossomed around the puncture.

  So much for the found-dead school of thought.

  Rocking back on her heels like a Bedouin, Anna retied the corners of the cloth, then stared down the narrow brick path. The murder of an animal, however humble the beast or lowly by society's standards, always hurt her in a deep and personal way. "Bastard," she whispered, then, having gathered up the butchered bird, rose to her feet, staggered, and saved herself from falling by grabbing the trash bin, an action that dragged an ache from the soft tissue below her arm where a bullet had gone through a month before.

  Two months prior to the bullet a psychopath had smashed her ankle with a wrench, and, though these wounds had ostensibly healed, her body could no longer be trusted. Periodically the bones and flesh remembered the brutal injustice and collapsed in a welter of self-pity.

  Or revenge. If the body and the mind/spirit were not, indeed, one, but separate entities as many religions suggested, her mind had a lot to answer for. Her ankle and underarm weren't the only portions of her anatomy that had been sacrificed to whatever she believed to be the greater good at the time.

  Maybe old age was the inevitable revolution of the oppressed before the dictator is ousted from the land. Anna hoped, when the time came, the coup would be quick and not a prolonged uncivil war between flesh and spirit.

  Anna put the tortured pigeon, in its tawdry shroud, back into the trash and closed the lid. Harming animals, even those as unappealing as subway rats and city pigeons, saddened her on a level violence to humans did not. There was no point to it, nothing to be gained, no power to usurp, no obstacle removed: It was cruelty for cruelty's sake, the basest instinct made manifest.

  As the thought rolled unspoken through her mind, another rose to contradict it. This bird had been tortured and killed, but the colored stick, the markings on the cloth, suggested voodoo. Voodoo was still practiced in New Orleans, a mishmash of African beliefs and lore and superstitions that had sprung up in the South to encompass all kinds of magics--or what devotees believed were magics: spells, curses, rituals, love potions, pointing the bone--a killing curse, if Anna remembered--zombies, spirits, gods, snakes.

  It was possible her new neighbor Jordan, the tattooed gutter punk with hostility toward women who saved dogs, was into the dark arts.

  EIGHT

  Slowly Anna walked back to the cottage. The sensuous embrace of the city and the storm, of ancient trees and vine-covered walls, had changed subtly. Beneath the fecundity and the history, she sensed a core of rot, the feeling that New Orleans's endless party was in the spirit of Nero fiddling while Rome burned or musicians playing on the deck of the Titanic as the lifeboats were lowered into the sea.

  Men and women singing the blues and blowing jazz while their sons and brothers shot each other down in the streets of Center City.

  Closing the door behind her, she leaned against it and let the dark thoughts clear from her head. Over the past winter she had more or less lost her wits. This spring she had found most of them again. Still, she wasn't yet strong enough to walk on the dark side for any length of time. It was too easy to go from a dead bird in a trash can to the sorrow of the world, to see the rust and rot and gangrene rather than the beauty in her surroundings.

  "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," Anna whispered. Paul had once suggested the valley of the shadow was simply a way to describe life because in life one was in death, dying from the moment of one's birth. He didn't seem to think it was a somber thought at all, only a perfectly natural journey toward a land where death didn't hold so much sway.

  Anna shook off the arguable comfort of Paul's words. They, too, seemed to lead toward a grimness of mind she wasn't interested in.

  "Hi, Molly, it's me, Anna," she said into the cell phone. In the dark, windows open onto the balcony, she lay across the double bed in her tree house.

  "To what do I owe this honor?" her sister asked with only a hint of sourness. Anna had been actively not calling her for a while. She'd been afraid she was too crazy and Molly would spot it. Now that sanity was just around the corner, she'd felt safe enough to let her sister in.

  "Voodoo," she said.

  "What? Somebody made a little Anna doll and stuck a telephone in its ear?"

  "I'm in New Orleans, and some weirdo voodooed a pigeon and put it in the garbage where I'm staying."

  "And because I'm a psychiatrist, you figure I'm very nearly a voodoo practitioner myself?"

  Anna laughed because that was precisely what she thought. "Didn't you have to study that stuff somewhere along the line? Drugging people into zombies, behavior modification, repressed memories, multiple personalities, Rorschach tests?"

  Molly thought for a moment, the comfortable--comfortable because it was familiar--silence between the sisters strung cross-country by telephone wires or, with the advent of cell phones, without wires at all. The ultimate voodoo.

  "Actually we did. It was a long time ago. We're mostly into drug therapy these days, and doggone if it doesn't actually work. Though there are not nearly so many funny stories to tell at cocktail parties as there were in the good old days of analysis."

  "Tell me," Anna said and wriggled down more comfortably in the bed. The motion set the springs to singing like a comic chorus in a French farce.

  "Are you alone?" Molly asked as if on cue.

  "Yes. Old bed. Bed with springs, no less."

  "Ah. For a moment I thought you were having more fun than me. From what I remember, voodoo, curses, pins in dolls, spells--all that kind of thing--require belief in the power of magic on the part of the victim and a perpetrator with a
powerful personality to be efficacious--the flip side of the placebo effect, a blend of hypnosis, faith, and intimidation. If mind-altering drugs are used, the effect is considerably enhanced. There are quite a few fairly credible accounts of people dying of curses or of being made into what the popular literature would call 'zombies.' If you believe the pigeon in the garbage means you will die, then you're doomed. That is, unless you go to a graveyard, swing a dead cat around your head three times, and say, 'Devil be gone.' "

  Anna laughed. "How about Frederick?" she asked. Frederick was Molly's husband. A retired FBI agent, he now made a tidy living renting himself out as a cyber-detective, hunting mostly money but occasionally fugitives, throughout the World Wide Web.

  "Freddy? Do you know anything about voodoo?" Molly called, presumably across their spacious Upper West Side apartment. There was a moment of faraway sounds; then Molly returned. "All Frederick knows is 'voodoo science,' the term they gave to the work the two jackass psychologists came up with to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and other black holes. Is there any more to the story?"

  Starting at the levee, Anna took Molly through the many twists and turns till she was squatting on wet brick in a narrow alley fiddling around with a dead bird.

  When she'd finished, Molly said, "The guy's possibly on drugs. If not, maybe he should be."

  "I think he probably should be. During his myriad examples of bizarreness I never got the sense he was high, but there's something going on. He looks like he has a wasting disease that's burning him at his own personal stake."

  "Maybe he was the target of a vodun, a mambo, or a loup-garou--see, I did remember something. A mambo is a witch, and I think a loup-garou is a werewolf. Google it before you embarrass yourself by assuming I'm right," Molly suggested.

  Anna'd been so swayed by the pigeon it hadn't occurred to her that Jordan might have gotten crosswise with someone who believed in the practice--or believed the punk did--and was being stalked. It made sense. He had tried to hide the thing, not to use it to affect Anna's behavior, and, after all, that was the point of these things, she supposed.

  "I have to think about that," she said. "He's the kind of guy who probably doesn't make friends easily, what with the reeking clothes and penchant for sudden unexplained violence."

  "Sounds like half the people you've met in the backcountry," Molly laughed.

  Anna was offended. Backcountry people were the nicest people in the world. Since she'd just been stomped and shot by a couple, though, she didn't think it was the best time to argue the point.

  They talked a while longer. Then Anna tried Paul again, but he wasn't answering. When she'd married him, she'd chosen not to worry when she couldn't get in touch. Both his job and hers guaranteed there would be times answering phones was not reasonable. Not yet ready to sleep, she filled the funky tub--set corner to corner in the square of Pepto Bismol-colored plastic--and set the kerosene lamp on one of the solid corners.

  The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Molly's hunch was correct, that Jordan and not Anna was the target of the messenger pigeon. She hadn't been in town long enough to ruffle anyone's feathers so badly they'd resort to complex and messy magic to dispose of her. Jordan would have had to be quick to have gotten it all together between the time he discovered he and Anna were neighbors and the moment of the trash dump. Less than three hours all told; not much time for capture, torture, painting, and wrapping. Not to mention there were surely lengthy spells or incantations with this sort of thing.

  Anna had been raised without religion of any sort. Her parents neither attended church nor read the Bible. They had no objection to Anna and Molly trying out churches with their friends, going to church camps if the opportunity knocked, or weaseling into a Christmas pageant when the acting bug was upon them. Neither parent was outspokenly atheist; both bowed to the concept that there was probably something, but never evinced any particular interest in trying to guess what that something was, what form it would take, or what it required of them.

  Anna'd grown up with that, and it seemed a particularly sensible way to live. As she'd gotten older her view of believers shifted from disinterest to mild alarm. Faith could move mountains. It could also put Jesus' face on a pancake, destroy statues of Buddha, raze cities, and, in the case of voodoo, entice the powerless to feel powerful by promising that words and weeds and bits of bone could get them what they wanted or destroy what they feared or hated.

  From what Anna had seen of the commercial side of voodoo, it was more a craft than a religion. Faith was important, but so were recipes. It was hands-on, much like primitive Catholicism and other fundamentalist belief systems. One of the major tenets was that humans can barter with the gods, offer prayers or actions, sacrifices or money, and, in return, get an intervention here on earth.

  Sitting up in the tub, she pulled the plug and stared down at her body. In her own way she had made a number of animal sacrifices for her beliefs; unfortunately, the only animal she seemed willing to skewer was herself. Across her abdomen was the raised white weal of scar tissue left behind when she'd been cut with a fish gaff. The still-healing bullet wound from the through-and-through of the soft tissue under her arm was angry purple and puckered. Given the depredations of the life of a small creature at odds with bigger creatures, she figured she was in decent shape. Scars on the outside simply kept score; it was the scars on the inside one had to watch out for.

  Levering herself out of the tub, she toweled off. No electricity, no air-conditioning; the cottage wasn't hot, but the humidity was so high she didn't feel a great deal dryer out of the tub than she had in. Damp and drowsy, she padded naked to her bower and her squeaky bed.

  The last of the wind put her to sleep. She dreamed, as she often did, of those whose lives she had failed to save. That she seldom dreamed of those whose lives she'd taken was a blessing she never forgot to count.

  Geneva's set was from noon to one. Anna closed At Home in Mitford and looked out from her tree house. It had been a long time since she'd done nothing, and she was rusty at it. Awake at 6:00 A.M., and suffering the need to do something productive since she'd finished her coffee, it had taken a heroic effort not to give in and tidy the bungalow, pull weeds from the garden, do something. One of the reasons she'd retired from Port Gibson to Geneva's backyard during Paul's marathon sheriffing and priesting duties was because, at someone else's house, there was nothing to do. At home, even a home as unfamiliar as Paul's neat two-story house in Mississippi, Anna could not resist the need to stay busy. When she'd caught herself, wounded side aching, bum ankle threatening to buckle, scraping paint from a screen door at 7:00 P.M., she'd called Geneva.

  Anna loved to work, loved to push her body and her mind, loved to cover distance and to capture stillness, lift heavy objects and glide quiet as an otter through lakes. Working was a good thing. Compulsively keeping busy was a way to hide. What she was hiding from wasn't any mystery: She had a husband in Mississippi, a job in Colorado, and was not, at the moment, one hundred percent committed to either. Paul should have been a shoe-in if it came down to an either/or choice. Anna loved him like she hadn't thought possible after her first husband, Zach, had died. She had sworn to love and honor him till death them did part, and she had no objection to that.

  The only thing between her and Paul Davidson was hundreds of miles of American soil. Paul had two more years to serve out his stint as sheriff of Adams County. Though he would do it if their marriage--or her happiness--depended on it, she couldn't ask him to leave early, not when so many people counted on him.

  Their love--and their ages--being sufficient, she believed they could survive a long-distance relationship. The question she'd been avoiding with busyness and other neurosis was whether or not she could go on being a ranger. Not just being away from Paul--though that had become increasingly unpleasant as she grew to know him more deeply--but working for the National Park Service.

  There were a lot of NPS jobs that did
n't require the wilderness, guns, backpacks, compasses, and campfires. Probably a majority of the jobs were city jobs, office jobs. Geneva worked in the French Quarter. Interpretive rangers had roamed the Quarter interpreting the history for tourists until local tour guides protested. Rangers often "homesteaded," stayed at one park for the bulk of their careers, lived in towns, had children, and bought houses just like real people. Anna could get a job like that.

  For her, though, national parks--despite the fact she was about to go to one where a row of chairs and musicians made up the biggest part of the draw--were about the wild places.

  Throwing aside these thoughts as another form of busyness not suited to a lady of leisure, Anna caught up her daypack and pattered down the stairs and out into the courtyard. She hadn't seen Jordan this morning and wondered if he was back at the river walk playing punk with his tattooed pals.

  Geneva's tenant was a study in misconnections. He hung with the gutter punks--or had been with them when Anna'd first noticed him--but wasn't homeless and, according to Geneva, paid his rent on time, so he wasn't without an income. His personal hygiene was such that a person of taste and discernment wouldn't choose to be downwind of him, yet his mutt was shampooed and brushed to scented softness. He'd nearly taken Anna down for trying to keep his dog from running away, viciousness boiling off of him till she'd been surprised it hadn't manifested in frothing at the mouth or a heat mirage radiating from his dusky skin, but was charming and gentle with Geneva and Sammy.

  The man's peculiarities on her mind, Anna stopped at the trash bin intent on retrieving the sacrificed pigeon. In the dark and drizzle she hadn't studied it properly.

  The French Quarter's new garbage czar, a handsome young man who'd managed to make hauling trash a glamorous profession, was too efficient. The bin was empty.