“Hear that, Sheriff?” Josh turned to face the old powers of Galveston. “Outside this window are the outcasts, the exiles, the nobodies nobody wants,” he said. “Least of all me. You were right about that. Sheriff. To my shame.” Josh remembered again the sick moment when he realized that Galveston thought no more of him than he had of it. “‘You have to play the cards you’re dealt,’ my daddy told me. I don’t know how many times I must have quoted that, without once seeing what it truly meant.” He pointed out the window. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, there are my cards.”
The delegates stared at him, not understanding.
“It’s a new day in Galveston,” Josh said. “New rules. New powers. And one new Krewe. The Krewe of Rags. The Krewe of Rags,” Josh said. “Of course I’m not really a member. They gave me a lot of chances to join over the last thirteen years or so. I turned them all down. Because I just couldn’t bear to accept the cards I was dealt.”
“Is there a point to all this?” Randall Denton asked.
“Sheriff, no man on this Island hates the magic more than I do.” Josh turned away from the window. “I hate the new diseases. I hate that I have charms and weeds to give out instead of antibiotics and vaccinations. If this were 2004, I’d be in the streets with you, shooting any reveller you told me to. But it’s not 2004,” Josh said. He held up his hands, spattered white with the miracle of Joe Tucker’s blood. “The magic is coming and coming and coming, and there’s no holding it back anymore.” Josh leaned over the table by Sheriff Denton. “Those are our cards, Sheriff. That’s what life has dealt us this time around. And all we can do is play them as well as we can.”
Jeremiah Denton no longer smelled of talcum powder and freshly ironed cloth as he had in the interrogation room. Now he smelled damp and salty. Not enough sleep, no time to change before the conference. “Would I love to join the Krewe of Momus?” Josh asked. “You know I would. Would I like to see you sacrifice Deputy Lanier there and send him to rot in jail? Oh, boy, would I like that. Two weeks ago I would have jumped at your offer, sir. But not now. Not because I’m soft on the revellers,” Josh said. “Not because I’m half in love with the magic. Sloane is, you’re right about that. I’m not. But the magic is rolling over everything now. Those are the cards. Letting you run around for a few months trying to hold it back with bullets, Jeremiah Denton deciding who is human and who is not—that way truly does lie madness.” Josh shook his head. “It hurts me to turn down your lovely bribe, but the Krewe of Rags votes no, sir. We vote to fire you. And I hope any other Krewe with a parcel of common sense will do the same.”
The sheriff coughed. “There is no Krewe of Rags, Josh Cane. You are nothing. Your whole family has been nothing since you crossed the Dentons thirteen years ago.” He coughed again, harder. “I’ll have you arrested. Kyle, arrest—” Another spasm of coughing shook him, then another, then another. He bucked forward with the force of it and his tinted glasses fell to the table. The other delegates gasped.
Sheriff Denton’s eyes were smooth blind pools of Gulf water, dark sea green, with neither whites nor pupils.
“Madre de Dios,” whispered Maria Gomez. “He’s gone to Krewes!”
It was as if the sheriff had filled up with seawater, Josh thought, horrified. No wonder he was coughing all the time. He was drowning from the inside.
“Where are your principles?” Jeremiah Denton roared. Another cough racked him, and a faint briny odor eddied through the room. “Randall, where is your sense of family?”
Randall met his uncle’s terrible seawater eyes, and then gave Kyle Lanier the slightest of nods. Kyle made his way around the table. At the last moment the sheriff saw him coming and scrabbled for the gun at his hip. Kyle grabbed his wrist. “Place your hands on the tabletop in front of you,” the deputy said.
The sheriff stared at Kyle’s hand as if it were a rattlesnake. “Judas!”
Kyle twisted the sheriff’s arm up behind his back, smashed him with an elbow to the back of the head, and then drove the old man’s face down into the conference table. “Think you were going to sell me out?” he hissed. “I’ll show you the buckle end, you backstabbing old fuck.” He wrenched the armlock tighter. A strangled scream bubbled out of Sheriff Denton’s throat, followed by a stream of salt spit.
“Ah, Deputy? A little decorum?” Randall Denton said.
Sheriff Denton coughed another weak string of salt phlegm onto the table. Kyle took a deep breath. “Yes, sir,” he said in a calm, official voice. “I’ll take it from here,” he said.
“Deputy, what are you arresting him for?” Horace Lemon said wonderingly.
Kyle stared at him blankly.
“Murder,” Josh said. “The murder of Odessa Gibbons.”
“Forcible confinement of Sloane Gardner,” Kyle added.
Joshua found he was sweating violently. So much for his poker face. “Tampering with evidence,” he said. “At our trial? The hair he claimed to find in Ham’s boat?” He licked his lips. “There’s no point trying to protect him now, is there, Deputy?”
“That was wrong,” Kyle Lanier said. “I told him that was wrong, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Maria Gomez swore softly and continuously in Spanish.
Josh watched Kyle Lanier handcuff his boss. In the stories Josh’s mom had told him at bedtime, long ago, justice was always done; the bad guys died and the men in the white hats triumphed. But poker was a man’s game, his father had said, because it wasn’t fair. In real life there wouldn’t be any justice. Ten days ago, Kyle Lanier had kicked Josh halfway senseless as he lay handcuffed to a chair and unable to defend himself. Josh glanced down. The deputy was wearing the same shiny pair of boots. Now, for all Josh knew, he might have to spend the next thirty years dealing with Kyle Lanier, prominent citizen. Kyle Lanier, keeper of the peace. Josh smiled sourly. It just doesn’t get any better than this.
The sheriff was coughing and coughing. Maria Gomez kept staring from the puddled seawater on the conference table to Jeremiah Denton’s blank green eyes. “But why?” she whispered. “If he was gone to Krewes already, how could he say all those things about cleansing the Island?”
Outside, Josh knew, Ham and his crowd of roughnecks would be getting impatient, telling vulgar jokes to pass the time, or lying about how much they could drink. Doing all the things Josh had always despised. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think the thing you hate the most is the one you fear you will become.”
Chapter Twenty-three
THE RIVER
AS soon as Kyle Lanier returned to Ashton Villa to free Sloane from her house arrest, she raced down to Stewart Beach, looking for Scarlet. When she got there she found that the wooden wall between the city and the amusement park was gone, torn away by the storm. The ticket-taker’s booth was gone, too. Down below the Seawall, where Momus had held court among the hawkers and carnies, there was barely even debris left behind. The hurricane had scoured the beach clean, leaving nothing but sand and the low hiss of surf. The Genuine Human Maze was gone, and the stalls had blown away. Every huckster’s booth and winking light, every board and stick of greasepaint had been lifted up and dispersed throughout the Island, or swallowed by the sea.
Sloane climbed back up from the beach and stood on Seawall Boulevard under an aging moon, the night warm around her like a shawl. Sweat made her bangs slick. She was literally sick with fear. Her thoughts began to fall apart into panic, but she bit her lip until the pain cleared her head. You’re a Gardner. Act like it.
It had been so much easier to be Sly. It hurt so much to give a damn.
She pushed her sweaty hair back from her face. Well, then, she would have to search the streets, alley by avenue, just another desolate woman looking for a loved one lost in the storm. At least after three days in the same dress I look the part, she thought. Flotsam scavenging for jetsam.
For the next three hours she walked the streets of Galveston, calling Scarlet’s name, but the girl didn’t answer, and no one had seen her
. At last she turned back to the Seawall, and walked to the 23rd Avenue intersection, where the Balinese Room should have been. The restaurant was gone, and all traces of Odessa with it. Even the pier had been ripped away and scattered by the sea. Only two barnacle-crusted posts remained behind, slanted and lonely as the last teeth in a witch’s mouth. The sea swirled darkly around them. The Gulf had claimed Odessa’s body as surely as it had taken Sheriff Denton’s doll; there was nothing left of her godmother for Sloane to hold. She tried to close her eyes against the memory of Odessa with her throat shot out, blood spattering all over the kitchen. She was always so particular to keep that kitchen neat. Blood everywhere and no time to clean it up.
When someone springs a leak, you see, it can’t easily be patched.
Sloane stood on the Seawall and cried.
Eventually the tears dried up. She remembered lying in Odessa’s hammock, the sound of her sewing machine stopping and starting, shutters creaking and clattering in the Gulf breeze. Oh, well, another person I failed. I should be getting used to it by now. She half-smiled, remembering her godmother shaking her head over the top of a glass of Dr Pepper. You try so hard to be a good little girl, don’t you, Sloane? As if that was going to save you.
Sloane drew a breath, turned her back on all that was left of the Balinese Room, and started for home. Either Scarlet was dead, or in hiding, or maybe, just maybe, waiting for her somewhere. Sloane meant to go back to the Bishop’s Palace, where she was supposed to be taking care of her refugees. She stopped dead, standing barefoot in the middle of Broadway in that black hour long after midnight but far from dawn. The thought of staggering into the Bishop’s Palace for three hours of sleep, then to be woken before cock’s crow to deal with complaints about the revellers upstairs, to help with breakfast, to give directions to Mrs. Sherbourne and Alice Mather—it was too much to bear. She had failed her mother, and Odessa, and now Scarlet, too. She couldn’t face any more failures. Like a coward she slunk by the Palace, despising her own weakness, and headed for Ashton Villa. She would hide in the teak and porcelain luxury of her own room while whole families had lost their homes; tomorrow morning she would choose an outfit from her antique wardrobe, while Galveston’s children were lucky to wear rags. As a reward for failing everyone, she would sleep tonight in her very own rich girl’s bed. How proud her mother would have been.
She turned up the walk at Ashton Villa. Through a blur of tears Sloane saw a light flickering in one front window. She broke into a run. Pounding up the porch stairs she caught the faint strains of piano music. She yanked open the front door and ran through the foyer and into the Gold Room. There she stopped, panting and sobbing, her face wet with tears.
Miss Bettie, dead for eighty years but looking not much the worse for it, was sitting at the piano bench, playing Chopin with more feeling than skill. The great Texas belle was resplendent in an ecru evening gown and enough pearls to strangle an elephant. Her skin was dead white and luminous, reflecting a chilly glow as if lit by moonlight.
The only light in the Gold Room came from the small electric chandelier over the square piano. In the big armchair next to it sat a statue where no statue should have been. Scarlet was sitting in the statue’s lap, twisting a strand of her crinkly red hair around her finger and yawning prodigiously, like a cat. As Sloane froze at the other end of the room, Scarlet’s impossibly green eyes widened and her mouth snapped shut in the middle of her yawn. She threw herself out of the statue’s lap, pelted across the room, and leapt into Sloane’s arms. There she clung like a limpet, her elbows and knees and sharp wrists digging into Sloane’s flesh. “Where were you?” she demanded. “We were worried!”
Sloane held her and held her, rocking back and forth with her eyes closed.
Scarlet pointed at Miss Bettie, who had stopped playing. “I went down to the beach to find Grandpa, but he was gone and I met her instead. She brought me here.”
“Of course I did,” said the ghost, looking over the top of a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. “It’s my house. Where else would I go?”
“They shot Lianna,” Scarlet said. Sloane put her down. “They would have shot me, but I was too fast. I was really scared. Did she die?”
“Yes,” Sloane said.
The little girl wrapped her arms around Sloane’s leg. “There, there,” Scarlet murmured. Sloane recognized her own tone of voice. “It will be all right,” the girl said gravely.
Sloane walked slowly toward Miss Bettie’s end of the room. At first she had eyes only for the ghost, but then she found herself staring more and more intently at the statue sitting in the armchair. Light fell in glints and splinters from the chandelier, making highlights in the marble hands crossed in the stone woman’s lap. She wore a smartly tailored suit with a charcoal skirt, grey jacket, and a white blouse. She was reading a paperback book, holding it just far enough away you could tell she needed reading glasses but thought herself too young for them. “Oh,” Sloane said—a tiny, heartbroken gasp. It was her mother, Jane Gardner herself, as perfect in every detail as the statues in the Railroad Museum had been.
But this wasn’t the withered, sick woman Sloane had lifted from her wheelchair to bathe or sit on the toilet. This was Jane Gardner in her prime. The stone was so alive to every wrinkle in her cotton blouse, Sloane felt that at any moment her mother would hear a noise and look up. She would smile in her brief, busy way, and pull Sloane over to give her a brisk kiss and a chore to do. But the statue did not look up, the page did not turn, the white blouse did not rustle with any breath.
Sloane stared at Miss Bettie. “Did you do this?”
“I’m getting that question a lot these days,” Miss Bettie said with some asperity. When she shook her head, it made her pearls rattle. “No, of course not, child. I have my talents, but sculpting is not one of them.”
Sloane thought again of the old black man in the railroad museum, first reading on his pew, then hunched over a menu at the diner, and finally gone. If he had walked out into the light of Galveston’s new day…? “Is she—will she come back?” Sloane asked. A knife-thrust of dread went through her at the thought, and hope, too. Both hurt terribly, but she would have given her last breath to see her mother alive. Her heart was lost in such confusion.
“Will she live again? I don’t know.” Miss Bettie played a soft minor chord. “But Galveston has gone under the magic at last, you know. The line between our city and the Mardi Gras isn’t the only one getting blurry.” She played another little phrase on her piano, then pulled out the keyboard cover and closed it lovingly over the keys. “Come here, would you, dear?”
Still tightly holding Scarlet’s hand, Sloane approached the piano bench where Miss Bettie sat, splendidly upright. For a woman who had been dead the better part of a century, she certainly had wonderful posture.
“Finishing school,” Miss Bettie said, as if Sloane had spoken the thought out loud. “They polished us up like Mother’s good silver when I was a girl. Could I put square corners on a sheet! You’d cut your shins on them when you fell out of bed in the morning. Always liked to make my own bed. You can’t expect a hotel maid to care about a good square corner. Had to overtip at the Hyde Park hotel, the poor girl was so mortified I wouldn’t let her do it. But that’s neither here nor there.” Miss Bettie patted the piano bench beside her. “Come here, Sloane.”
Sitting next to her was like opening a freezer door. She took Sloane’s fingers and gave them a squeeze. Her hand was cold as dirt. “Did you know I died of the very same disease as your mother? We both turned to stone,” Miss Bettie said, looking at the statue of Jane Gardner with great tenderness and pity. Scarlet had crawled back into its stone lap. “I don’t know if that’s chance or fate. Or maybe something in the insulation,” Miss Bettie added, frowning. “I’d get it checked, if I were you. But perhaps we were both compressed under the burden that comes with this house, with our position in society.”
“What burden?” Sloane asked. “I always heard you spent your
time waltzing around Europe and riding camels through the Sahara.”
“That was in my youth,” Miss Bettie said with a smile. “By heaven, I cut a figure then! Even if a girl isn’t born with looks, a little personality and a large personal fortune can still carry her a good way.” Sloane laughed. “A youth is not a bad thing to have,” Miss Bettie continued. “You probably should have enjoyed yours more while you had the chance.”
“It can’t be too late—”
Miss Bettie interrupted, flapping a cold hand at Scarlet, who was perched on Jane Gardner’s stone hair, idly swinging her feet. “Girl, get off your grandmother’s head.” With a pout Scarlet slid back into the statue’s lap.
“Momus is gone and Momus is everywhere,” Miss Bettie continued. “There are a lot of changes, Sloane. A lot of work for you to do. I came back from one of those jaunts to Africa to find my worthless older brother had squandered Daddy’s money and left us two steps from the poorhouse. What a job we had keeping up appearances after that! I spent the last twenty years of my life in this town. Ran a hostel for sick women. Of course in my day ladies weren’t encouraged to enter politics. A pity. I like to think I could have kept the Maceos from taking over our Island and turning it into a sort of cut-rate Atlantic City,” Miss Bettie sniffed.
“Can we go to bed?” Scarlet said, yawning.
“Civic duty. That’s what I’m talking about,” Miss Bettie said. She held up her wrist. She was wearing the steel Rolex Sloane’s mother had given her. Frost had crept over the crystal, so Sloane could just barely make out the time: 3:27 in the morning. “I’ve been saving this for you,” Miss Bettie said, and she made as if to take it off.