Tante Ju-Ju was sitting outside her hut on a rickety stool, stirring a pot of something ominous over a fire. She was dressed like all the other voudou queens in the Order, but the skirt and the peasant blouse looked comfortable on her and her coloring was natural. Her tignon had seven points knotted into it, just like Marie Laveau’s supposedly had, and mysteriously it never slipped, even though I’d never seen a bobby pin in her vicinity.
“I hear you raised the same man twice,” she said without preamble. “Why he not stay moving after the first time?”
I explained how Gottfried had fallen, ending with, “He didn’t want to feel himself die again.”
“So why you bring him back?”
“His task wasn’t finished yet.”
“This task need doing that bad?”
“I think so.”
“You only think so?”
“Okay, I’m sure,” I said. “He’s finishing a house to raise money for a foundation that studies a condition called Stickler syndrome.”
“This syndrome, it be killing people?”
“No, but they have a lot of pain and sometimes they lose their sight and hearing. Isn’t that enough of a reason?”
“That what I be asking you.”
Okay, I was missing something. “If it were me, I’d want to come back for a task like this.”
“Why I care what you think?”
“You asked—” I stopped and tried to figure out what she was getting at. “I brought Gottfried back because the task is important to him. He doesn’t care about the charity, but he does care about leaving the legacy of the house.”
Tante Ju-Ju nodded. “Then maybe you do the right thing. What do the loa tell you?”
“I don’t talk to the loa.”
Papa Philippe winced, but it was nothing I hadn’t told him before.
“What if they be talking to you and you not be listening?” Tante Ju-Ju asked.
I didn’t have an answer to that.
She waved me away. “You go on. I talk to the loa about you. When they tell me, I tell you.”
I didn’t need Papa Philippe’s touch to tell me I’d been dismissed, but I was glad to have his company walking back down that path, even if neither of us spoke. If he hadn’t been there, I’d have been tempted to run.
“Why in God’s name did you tell her you don’t talk to the loa?” he asked once we were at my car.
“Because I don’t. Just because the first houngans were practitioners doesn’t mean that everybody needs the loa to raise revenants. I do fine without them.”
“Some people say the loa aren’t happy with that, and that’s why your revenant failed.”
“That’s not true!”
“I believe you, but would it hurt you to at least pretend to respect the loa?”
“I do respect the loa and voudou, but as a religion—it’s not my religion. For me to wear a tignon wouldn’t be showing them respect—it would be mocking them, just like it would be for me to wear a nun’s habit or a yarmulke. And you know damn well that most houngans only pay lip service to the loa.”
“There are plenty of us that believe.”
“I know you believe, Papa Philippe, but you know I don’t.”
“Dodie, it’s just clothes.”
“If it’s just clothes, then why can’t I wear mine? Look, I don’t tell the other houngans how to do their job, and all I want is for them to do the same for me. If that means I never make master, then so be it.”
“I’m not talking about making master. I’m talking about you losing your license. I’m talking about you getting ejected from the Order.”
“Because of blue jeans? I don’t wear my zombie movie T-shirts to work anymore.”
“It’s not just that. It’s everything, the attitude toward the loa, the jokes. And now you’ve not only brought back an architect to fix a house, you had to bring him back a second time. You need to tread carefully.”
“Hey, I’m not the one falling down stairs.”
He shook his head and sent me home, but I knew he was worried. Which got me worried. What if I was wrong about Gottfried? What if I hadn’t done a good job bringing him back? What if he collapsed again? What kind of job could a former houngan get?
I didn’t sleep very well.
I WAS HAPPY to see Gottfried in brand-new Converse sneakers when I picked him up the next day—plenty of tread on those babies. I was less happy to hear the apprentices whispering about me and looking at me in what they imagined was a subtle manner. One actually made devil horns at me, as if my being there could contaminate a house where dead people spent the night. I returned the greeting with a traditional one-finger salute.
“How are you today?” I asked Gottfried.
“Fine. I practiced walking last night—I won’t trip again.”
“Good. And the work is going well?”
He just smiled, which was enough of an answer.
C.W. was waiting for us on the porch of the house, but when he started to lead Gottfried in, I said, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to stick around today. Just in case.”
“If the boss doesn’t care, I don’t care.”
“All I care about is the work,” Gottfried said.
You have to admire that focus.
So I spent the day following him around, envying the fact that he didn’t have to breathe in the ever-present dust. I’d expected a world-famous architect to spend most of the day in the trailer, but Gottfried was a hands-on kind of guy. We went up to the attic to check out the roofing, down to the basement to check on mold, outside to see if the shingles were being attached properly, back inside to approve of the fixtures in the master bathroom—and that was just in the first hour. He didn’t actually sit down until nearly noon, and even then he preferred to work in the house’s kitchen so he could keep an eye on things. That was when I ran out to the nearest McDonald’s for a bag of grease, salt, and caffeine.
When I got back, Gottfried was in conference with Elizabeth. She’d managed to ignore my presence so far that day, and glared at me now. I would have stayed out of the way, but I realized Gottfried was signing his name.
“Gottfried, you know your signature isn’t valid, right?” The courts had decided that for a dead man to sign anything was the same thing as forging, and the people at Revenant House were supposed to have told him that.
“It’s just an order for supplies!” Elizabeth snapped.
But Gottfried was reading the paper in front of him. “This isn’t about the house,” he said. “I only want the papers about the job.”
“But Gottfried—” Elizabeth started to say, but when I got close enough to snoop, she snatched it up. “Sorry, my mistake. This wasn’t supposed to be in this stack.”
The afternoon was the same as the morning. We went up, we went down, we went outside, we went inside, Gottfried climbed a ladder, I stood below and wondered if I could catch him if he fell again.
Never having been on a building site that didn’t involve Legos or sand, I was surprised by the number of decisions that had to be made and the arguments that ensued. Who knew that using the wrong color of wood would totally destroy a house’s aesthetic? I didn’t even know that a house had an aesthetic.
By the time the living workers were ready to call it a day, I was exhausted. Back to Revenant House for Gottfried, and after making sure Papa Philippe wasn’t poised to issue warnings, it was home to takeout Thai food for me.
The next day was mostly the same, except a little more contentious as the arguments from the previous day escalated—Gottfried ordered one man to completely replaster the ceiling in the dining room because it swirled the wrong way and told C.W. to send back a whole load of lumber because they weren’t building an Emerald Lake shack. I tried to hide my grin when both Von Doesburg and Scarpa heard that latter comment, but I didn’t do a very good job.