Floodgates (13 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Thursday

It was Faye’s day off and here she was, looking at an archaeological site. This wasn’t because she had workaholic tendencies, though sometimes she did. Okay, a lot of times she did. But that wasn’t the reason she was peering down into yet another excavation.

If she was going to be of any help at all to Jodi in finding out what happened to Shelly, it only made sense to check out the site where the woman was working just prior to her death. Joe was on Jodi’s payroll, too, so he was peering down into the same excavation. So much for their vacation plans, but the weekend wasn’t over yet. Faye was sure that there was some fun yet to be had.

As fortune would have it, work at the site had been stopped by Hurricane Katrina and had only now resumed. Under ordinary circumstances, these pits would have been long-since backfilled and the soil re-sodded. Faye and Joe would be standing in a grassy lot. Instead, Shelly’s work was continuing as if she had just stepped away for a minute.

An SUV with “Pontchartrain Engineering” emblazoned on its side was parked on the street, just as it would have been when Shelly was alive. The same workers were on-site, except for Shelly. The colorful shotgun houses, with their Victorian woodwork and their inviting porches, hadn’t changed since Shelly worked here. They had hardly changed in a hundred years. Paint had peeled and flaked away, and windowglass was flowing slowly into ripples, but the houses were what they were. They reminded Faye of the houses on Dauphine’s street, just blocks away.

Faye had the dizzying sense that time had not passed. The storm had never come. A thousand people had not died in the floods. The city where jazz was born was unchanged, and it never would change.

A short conversation with the archaeologist in charge, Dr. Al Britton, brought her back to reality.

“The flooding wasn’t too bad here in Tremé—which makes sense. It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods outside the Quarter, and our ancestors weren’t stupid. They built on high ground until there wasn’t any more high ground. So our work here wasn’t directly affected by the storm but, like everything else around here, the project suffered some setbacks indirectly traceable to the storm. For instance, we lost Shelly.”

A shadow fell over his face.

“Shelly was my right hand. Her work was technically flawless, and she had a generosity that sometimes eludes my professional peers. Even outside of academia, people are jealous of their reputations. Some of them aren’t big on giving credit where it’s due, not when keeping that credit for themselves might advance their career. Shelly wasn’t like that.”

He motioned with his head, and Faye and Joe walked with him over to another unit that was being excavated as they watched.

“The flood didn’t do our work any good, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Lots of times, we have to use pumps in these parts to keep units dry, even under the best of circumstances, so standing water in the excavations wasn’t the end of the world. We had some problems with saturated soil just slumping down into the units, but nothing that completely destroyed the validity of our work here.”

“Yet you’ve lost years in getting this work done.”

“Our personnel were scattered hither and yon, and the client corporation had plenty of better places to spend its money. Pontchartrain Engineering has had to scramble to get all of its projects back on a solid footing, and this is far from their most lucrative job. It took awhile for our project to rise to the top of anyone’s priority list, no question. But I expect it’ll be on a lot of people’s minds pretty soon. You would not believe the stuff we’re finding here. Layer on layer of cultural material.”

Faye hopped down into the unit with him and listened as he interpreted each stratigraphic zone. The significant finds had been stacked up like layers in a wedding cake.

He read the evidence to her in no particular order. Pointing to a black smear in the clay at about shoulder level, he said, “There was a housefire here in the mid-1800s. The city was rebuilt in brick, for the most part, after the 1788 fire destroyed most of the
Vieux Carré
, but brick houses can burn, too. At least their contents can, not to mention the wooden beams holding up a roof shingled in cedar. And people were still cooking in open hearths. So fires continued to be a problem, especially since the closest thing they had to a fire hydrant was a bucket brigade stretching all the way to the river.”

He pointed at a less distinct layer, further down the unit wall. “Down here, we found some evidence of Native American activity. I’m not sure whether anybody was living this far out on the natural levee in those days. The elevation is zero here—exactly sea level. That’s higher than most of New Orleans, but it wouldn’t have been all that desirable back when there was still space close to the river, around the cathedral. I’m thinking that the scattered artifacts we found at this level date back to the years when local tribes carried their canoes across a portage that was probably right near here. If you could tote your stuff from the Mississippi to the Bayou St. John, then you could get to Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico without dealing with the twists and shoals of the Mississippi south of here.”

This tracked with everything Faye had read, so she just nodded her head. Joe had disappeared, lured away by a site worker offering to show him the stone tools found in that stratum.

Joe appreciated stone tools. He made them. He used them. He treasured them for their beauty. He knew so much about them that he’d likely be able to add to the information the site team had already gleaned just by giving them a good lookover. If anybody needed to know how a stone tool was used or how it was made or why the maker chose that particular rock to knap, then Joe was the one to ask.

“We’re even finding a few things below that level, from a still earlier period. It makes sense. New Orleans is sitting on a site that has always been strategic. Even way back then, before the Europeans arrived and mucked things up, those guys traded all over eastern North America.”

Faye nodded, and said, “They needed efficient shipping lanes, too. They just used smaller boats.”

“Precisely.” Dr. Britton grinned the way people do when they’re talking to someone who’s interested in their work.

“What’s this? And this?” Faye asked, pointing to areas of dark soil just below the level of the house that had burned.

“We’re finding a number of features related to drainage at all levels during the historical period. Cesspools were everywhere in those days, because sewage had to go somewhere. Over there—” he said, straightening up in the excavation and pointing toward the street, “we’ve found something that looks like one of the ditches that surrounded each block in the city’s original design. And over there, if I’m not mistaken, is what’s left of a canal from the years just after that. It’s not on any historic maps that I know of, which is pretty cool, since we have a lot of them. Whether it was for drainage or navigation, I can’t say yet.”

The image of an old map was swimming in Faye’s mind’s eye. She stood up and looked around her, as if she expected to somehow translate the houses and trees around her now into the bird’s eye view of a map drawn in 1815.

“You say you found a canal that’s not on the maps. Wasn’t there a major canal around here somewhere? If I close my eyes, I can just see it on the old drawings. It ran diagonally to the southeast. I think it started at the Bayou St. John.”

“Amazing. Do you have a photographic memory or something?” Britton asked.

Faye shook her head. “I just remember things that I think are interesting.”

Joe appeared, leaning down into the excavation to say, “She thinks everything’s interesting.”

Britton laughed. “Photographic memory or not, you’re exactly right. There
was
a canal nearby, but it was west of here. Well, I think it’s west. I’ve lived here all my life and haven’t figured out the curve in the river yet. Anyway, over there.”

He waved a hand in a direction that Faye thought might be west. The Crescent City and its crescent-shaped streets had been confusing her since she hit town.

“It was called the Carondelet Canal,” he said. “Aren’t place names just…pretty…around here?”

Britton was still looking in the direction that was probably west, thinking about an old shipping channel with a pretty name. They waited a second for him to continue.

The archaeologist shook himself and said, “Why don’t you people just tell me to get to the point? The Carondelet started over there close to Basin Street and Congo Square and, you’re right, it went as far as Bayou St. John. People with goods to sell could float from Lake Pontchartrain down the bayou to the canal, then it was a straight shot to the city’s back door.”

Faye squatted down to study the dark soil from the 1800s, so Dr. Britton shifted his attention back to that century. “Like I said, we see drainage features everywhere, but that stratum from the early 1800s has more of those features than you’d expect. At least it does here, on this piece of property.”

“You talking about drainage and water and stuff?” Joe had an intent expression one would expect in a conversation about something more obviously appealing than sewage and rainwater. “I’ve been doing some reading about a spot right near here. There’s a story that’s been floating around for a long, long time about a man by the name of Deschanel who was trying to learn how to stop the flooding. Died trying, as a matter of fact.”

Dr. Britton’s eyebrows had risen halfway up his forehead. “Deschanel? Where’d you hear that story?”

“I got an old book out of the library. It’s full of stories about the early years of the city. Especially about water. The guy that wrote it was all about water. Lately, I am, too.”

Dr. Britton’s words were calm, but Faye could tell he was one step away from demanding that Joe get him that book
right now
. All he said was, “Wait until you see the title search for this piece of property.” His voice rose, in spite of himself. “One of its earliest owners was a man named Deschanel.”

His workers had gathered round as they noticed that their boss was losing his composure. When they learned that two old documents carrying a single name—Deschanel—tied this property and its unusual collection of ditches, cesspools, and canals to a real human being who built things like ditches, cesspools, and canals, all anybody could say was “Cool.” And that included Faye and Joe.

***

Faye sat on the front stoop of the Victorian shotgun house that occupied the land where Monsieur Deschanel’s house had once stood. She rested her hands flat on the old bricks beneath her, because she liked their chalky feel. Joe sprawled on the grass at her feet, leaning back on his elbows and stretching out his long legs.

She wiped a bead of sweat off her jaw. “It’s been an interesting morning, but I swear that I can’t see how Shelly’s work could’ve had anything to do with her death.”

Louie Godtschalk, the writer who had upset Nina so, was puttering around the site, gazing curiously into the excavations and just generally getting in the way of archaeologists who were trying to work. Faye could not believe that Joe had called a virtual stranger and urged him to come tour the site with them. Joe hardly spoke to people he
knew
.

It seemed that Joe had cornered Godtschalk after his ill-fated television interview because he’d sensed that the man shared an interest that was growing into a mild obsession for Joe—how the heck did the water here work, anyway? When Joe learned that he and Faye were talking to archaeologists who could actually
show
him the remains of canals and cesspools and such, he got on his phone and told Godtschalk to get himself over there.

Joe had always seen nature as a logical thing, a web of interlocking habitats that made the world go ’round. Once he noticed that rainwater in these parts flowed
away
from the largest river on the continent, he wasn’t going to rest until he understood the oddities of this strand in the earth’s web.

Water seemed like such a simple subject, but in New Orleans, it just wasn’t. It was, at rock bottom, the only subject. Stave off the omnipresent danger of flood, and the city lives. Fail to stave it off, and the city dies.

Joe’s fascination with the subject had driven him out of nature and into the library. It took a lot of doing to convince Joe to go indoors.

Louie Godtschalk, who looked like he was born in a library, had been so seduced by the watery history of his hometown that he’d been driven outdoors. Faye had spent the past hour talking to Dr. Britton, while watching Louie and Joe out of the corner of her eye. They had never once stopped talking.

They’d done more than talk, really. They’d walked the site, chatting about slight changes in elevation. They’d stood in each excavation and tried to read history from the earthen walls, then they’d squatted under a tree and pored through the stacks of books they’d each brought with them.

“Looks like you’ve made a new buddy,” she said to Joe, nodding in the direction of the pasty-faced academic, whose face wore a smear of mud and a beatific smile. Faye hoped the man had remembered to put on some sunscreen.

“I can’t believe we’ve read this same book.” Joe looked down at his library copy of James McGonahan’s
The Floodgates of Hell
. “And I mean the
same
book. Louie says they’re not printing it any more, and there’s only this one copy that he knows about. He turned it in last week, just in time for me to check it out.”

Godtschalk poked his head out of the excavation and beckoned excitedly to Joe, who loped over for a look. Faye couldn’t help smiling at the contrast between tall, lean, dark Joe and the pudgy little white-haired author.

Dr. Britton was seated in a lawn chair, with a sheaf of oversized papers spread across his lap. Faye watched as he leaned close to one, squinting, then beckoned to Faye with the same intellectual excitement as Godtschalk had just shared with Joe.

“You’re interested in the work Shelly did for us? Well, this is it.” He slapped at the paper in his lap. “She could discern the most telling details from an old map or an aerial photograph. Any idiot can see the route of the old Carondelet Canal cutting diagonally across these neighborhoods north of the Quarter, even though it’s been out of service for seventy years.”