“Good. What I needed to hear. Meet me at the hotel at nightfall.”
Of course, it was not Ellen who was the detective, but Nick. She walked far enough back to the Quarter to find a bar where she could seek shelter, then took out his hat along with the sketch. Hey Nickie, Ellen thought. We’ve got a problem. She briefly filled in the details.
“Good detective work,” Nick complimented her. “You and your mom are hired.”
Nick, I’m serious. What do we do now?
“No great mystery, Elle. Just legwork. Ask around.” And so began what felt like a demented pub crawl, going from one shuttered business to another, pounding on doors until they found someone to let them inside and look at sketches. Josephine Hebert was known mostly by face. A few folk knew the name “Joey” and that she was sometimes seen around Congo Square.
Doubt she’ll be hanging out, Ellen thought, but she has to get her corpses somewhere.
“Good thinking.” They struggled to the nearest funeral home, where they found that Josephine Hebert had instituted a “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t get strangled by the zombies that walk out the back” policy. She was also in the habit of sending them home when they got a bit ripe, but the traumatized mortician neither knew nor wanted to know where she lived.
Nick went back out into the storm, clutching his hat. Halfway down Royale, Harriet hit again. A shutter tore off a building nearby and Nick dove to safety, in the process letting go.
Ellen watched his hat go flying down the street. “Nick!” she screamed, louder than the wind, rushing after it. But as fast as she ran, a hurricane was faster and the old fedora blew up Royale until it caught on a wrought-iron balcony, plastered against the metalwork a story up.
Ellen raced. The ironwork was twisted with roses and vines, painted black, cutting into her hands, but panic numbed the pain. She was almost to the balcony when Harriet lulled and Nick’s precious hat fell to the street. Ellen jumped down, stumbling, lunging for it. For Nick.
The wind rose up again, stealing him. Twice, she almost caught the circle of felt. Twice more, Harriet taunted her. Then the hat fetched up against the legs of a child. At least, the stature and the American Hero BRICKBAT children’s jumper said child. Above that was a rubbery ebony-skinned cross between a golliwog, a cyclops, and a sea anemone.
The joker child picked up Nick’s hat in his-her-its tentacles and held it.
“My hat!” Ellen called, rushing forward. “Give it to me!”
The child’s eye went wide above its fanged mouth and it ran, Ellen chasing, her own mouth open in a wordless scream. Only when the water overtook her did she realize that it had not been her the child had been running from, but the levee breach behind them.
She tumbled end over end, swallowing mouthfuls of the muddy Mississippi, then came up, gasping and sputtering. But a lifetime on sailboats and yachts made for a strong swimmer, and a midcalf silk dress was not the least practical garment when swimming for your life.
Nick’s hat bobbed a ways away, floating like a paper boat. The other direction, the child surfaced, squalling, thrashing its tentacles. Ellen knew drowning terror when she saw it. Despite having drawn a joker designed for water, it had never learned to swim.
She prayed for Nick to forgive her, but knew he wouldn’t if she made any other choice. Wouldn’t make any other choice himself. She swam for the drowning child.
Its tentacles whipped around her, almost drowning her in the process, but she ducked down and it released her. She surfaced and caught it from behind, letting it wrap its tentacles around one arm. It was hard going, but at last she got to solid footing. “You okay, honey?”
The joker child clung to her wordlessly, but seemed unhurt. Ellen glanced back to the flooded street. Blocks away, a speck may have been Nick’s hat. The wind blew. It was gone.
Her shoes were also gone, lost somewhere in the floodwaters. But she didn’t need shoes to hot-wire a car. At this point, she didn’t even need to channel Great-Aunt Lila.
The joker child seemed enthralled by this and Ellen was glad it found larceny so entertaining. She didn’t know what she felt. Joy at having saved another human life. Fear that she would never find Nick again. Anger that she had been forced to choose. Maybe grief.
Reverend Wintergreen was onstage at the Superdome, leading prayers. Ellen wasn’t the only one who had lost someone, but she knew him. “Oh, yea,” he said, looking down at what Ellen had brought him, “suffer the little children. . . . What’s your name, my child?”
The joker child gurgled wordlessly into the microphone.
“It’s PJ!” came a chorus. Actually, a duet—Ellen turned as Rick and Mick forced their way through the crowd of joker refugees near the front. The joker child wrapped its tentacles around both their necks. “You find PJ’s mama?” asked the one with the goatee.
“No,” Ellen said. She didn’t know whether PJ was Rick and Mick’s son or niece or maybe just some child they knew. “Uh . . . PJ was alone.” Ellen paused. It was a long shot, but maybe not that long. Mick and Rick had known everyone on the seedy side in Jokertown, and New Orleans couldn’t be that different. “I’m looking for someone, too.” She took out the sketch.
It was waterlogged but intact. The twins studied it. “Oh, yeah, that’s Joey,” said the one with the goatee. “Foulest fucking mouth in the Quarter. She lives in a red shotgun over on Treme. By the old St. Louis cemetery. Can’t miss it. Hoodoo marks chalked all over the front.”
“She’s Hoodoo Mama, right?”
Rick and Mick both laughed. “Joey?” said the first. “Nah, she’s just a street punk.”
“Hoodoo Mama’s this old Creole witch, blind as a bat and older than grave dirt. Calls up hellhounds to serve her, and the dead are her eyes, even the pigeons.”
Ellen nodded. As she left, a young black woman reached into a suitcase and handed her a pair of pink sneakers, which Ellen wore back into the storm to make her way to the hotel.
Nick was gone. Nick, the brave one. He’d been with her so many years, and now a piece of her heart had been ripped out, blown away by the hurricane. But when she stepped into the main foyer of their house at the Place D’Armes, she heard a voice. Not Nick’s, but . . .
“Jonathan!” Ellen cried, throwing her arms around him. “Oh, thank God. I—I lost Nick . . .” She hugged Jonathan, not knowing what else to do, and grief finally came in great wracking sobs.
“Sorry.” Jonathan sat with her on the couch, held her. “Um, he was a brave . . . uh . . . hat.”
“My, uh, condolences,” Michelle said, “I only just met him. . . .”
Ellen scrubbed the tears fiercely from her eyes. “I know where Josephine Hebert lives.” She took a breath. “She does dead animals as well as dead people. There were some pigeons the other day that I think were her spies.”
“The creepy ones on Bourbon Street?” Jonathan asked.
Ellen nodded. “She’s got a bunch of zombies, too. Checks them out like library books.”
“Well, I’m pretty much invulnerable,” Bubbles said.
“Nice to be you,” Jonathan said. “What if she suffocates you with zombie pigeons? She’s just a kid, anyway. You already blew up an old lady on CNN. Want to do a punk kid for an encore?”
“No,” Ellen said, taking a deep breath and trying hard not to think of Nick. “Personally, I’d like to wring her scrawny little neck. But Miss Partridge didn’t think she was all bad, and all we need is for her to stop pulling this shit.” She exhaled. “And the easiest way to do that is to get her on our side. We need to talk.”
Jonathan and Aliyah hid behind Bubbles as she knocked on the door of a chalk-marked red shotgun on Treme opposite the cemetery.