She continued scrolling, wanting to make sure there weren’t any others. But no. Eddie Clement was the one and only name with the asterisk that denoted inactive membership.
Voices rose from the kitchen. Claire’s eyes darted to the door, and she held stock-still for a few seconds, listening for Sasha’s code words. They didn’t come.
Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she made a note of Eddie’s address.
“Do you want me to make you a sandwich before you go back to work, Dad?”
Sasha’s voice carried through the house.
“Damn,” Claire muttered, eliminating the screen with the addresses, backtracking through every document until the screen was empty. She half expected Mr. Drummond to appear in the doorway of the study while she brought his original document back up.
When everything on the screen looked the way it had when she got there, she slid out from behind the desk and started for the door. She was almost out of the room when she remembered something.
The screensaver had been up when she’d first gotten into the study.
Sasha’s dad called out, his voice too close to the study for comfort. “Ham and cheese, but would you mind bringing it to me? I have to get back to work.”
Claire ran back to the computer and hit the keys that would put the computer in sleep mode. She was at the study doors when she heard Mr. Drummond’s footsteps coming to the bend in the hall.
She slipped out of the study, trying to slow her breathing down. She came to the powder room just as Mr. Drummond’s feet appeared at the end of the hallway.
Ducking into the half bath, she closed the door and turned on the light. Waiting, she listened as he approached. Then she opened the door and turned off the light, trying to act surprised to run into him in the hallway.
“Oh! Hey, Mr. Drummond.”
“Hello again, Claire. Nice to see you. Tell your parents hello.”
“Will do.”
They went their separate ways, Mr. Drummond toward his study and Claire toward the kitchen, where Sasha was waiting. When she got there, Sasha looked at her with terrified eyes.
“Did you get caught?”
Claire collapsed onto the tile floor, lying on her back. “No.”
“And?”
Claire lifted her head, pulling out her phone and holding it up. “I think I got it.”
TWENTY
By the time Claire texted Xander to let him know she had an address for Crazy Eddie, it was too late for them to go looking for him. The Treme District was iffy during the day.
She wasn’t about to go there after dark.
They agreed to go the next morning. They would meet up afterward with Sasha and Allegra at the Cup.
Claire tossed and turned all night. Her dreams were full of things she didn’t understand. Fires and chanting and powder being blown in her face while drums beat out a rhythm that seemed to move through her bones, the scent of sage and verbena drifting to her on the winds of her dreams.
The smell woke her up, heart racing. Sweat slicked her forehead and dampened the hair at the back of her neck. She reached under her pillow, pulling out the gris-gris bag. Was it possible that it was the source of her dreams? That the craft her parents and the Guild believed in was real and trying to show her something she didn’t yet understand?
Lying back down on her pillow, she threw the gris-gris bag across her room.
She didn’t dream again.
Xander picked her up at ten and they headed toward Treme. They had just gotten on North Rampart when Xander reached over Claire’s knees, opening the glove box with one hand while he drove with the other.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked.
He shut the compartment and handed her something. “Giving you this.”
She took it reflexively, opening her palm to a tiny gris-gris bag on a leather cord.
“What is it?”
He took a deep breath, like he was bracing himself for something difficult. “It’s a potion I worked for protection.” She started to protest and he stopped her. “Just listen to me for a minute, okay?”
She hesitated before nodding. “Okay.”
“I’m still having dreams, Claire. And they’re all about you. I see you tied up and bleeding, just like I did that first day. I can’t see his face, but the Houngan is chanting, working a spell to use your blood.” He glanced at her, his face turning dark before he looked back at the road. “I can’t get to you, Claire. I don’t know why. But I feel far away, and the place where you are, it’s . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s hard to reach or something. I . . .” He swallowed hard, glancing at her again. “Just wear it, okay? For me?”
She looked down at it, catching a whiff of aloeswood. It was a small thing, wearing the gris-gris for Xander. And maybe it wasn’t just for him. For the first time, she had a legitimate reason to question her disbelief.
She put the cord around her neck. “I’ll wear it. Thank you.”
His face relaxed before her eyes, and she realized what it cost him, worrying about her. She reached for his hand, lifting it to her lips.
“What are we going to do if this isn’t Crazy Eddie’s address?” Xander asked, changing the subject.
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “We have to hope that someone would know where he went. My mom once told me that in New Orleans, most people spend their whole lives in the same neighborhood. I guess we have to hope she’s right.”
Xander grew quiet, and Claire turned her face to the window. Treme was a completely different world from her little corner of the city. Fascinated by the Creole architecture and the African flags flying from crumbling porches, she suddenly felt embarrassed. She’d lived in New Orleans her whole life and had never once been to this part of town.
She was thinking about that—about the fact that people and things and places could be right under your nose and you might not know them at all—when a black SUV pulled up next to the Mercedes. The panic was instinctual. She didn’t even have time to feel it build, to talk herself down. It didn’t matter that the SUV wasn’t a Range Rover. All she could see was the car that had followed her home from the Cup, the slow drive-by it had done when she’d finally reached the safety of her driveway.
A minute later, the SUV accelerated, passing them and turning right at the next corner. Claire took a slow, deep breath. Get it together. You’re losing it.
“You okay?”
She looked up, following Xander’s eyes to her fingers, nervously tapping the armrest of the door. She didn’t want to tell him about the man who’d followed her from Lafayette back to Myrtle’s, about the Rover that had seemed to be following her home. He’d only worry. He might even tell her parents, and there was no way to do that without telling them everything else.
“A little nervous,” she admitted.
“I can’t say that I blame you.”
The voice on the GPS announced that they’d arrived at their destination, and Xander pulled next to the curb. He glanced out the windows, looking for numbers on the houses as she did the same. If they were there, Claire couldn’t see them.
The street was lined with small stucco structures, the windows all barred. Many of the houses still had circles and numbers spray painted on the outside from the recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina, and Dumpsters still lined the streets in greater number than the cars parked there.
The area bore almost no resemblance to the leafy, shady New Orleans that Claire called home. This was a distant relative, stark and hard with no relief from the sun that beat down on the concrete that surrounded them.
“You ready for this?” Xander asked softly.