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“You mean the mechanics of it? The physics of it? I don’t rightly know, pilgrim. It’s like I’ve got this antenna, you could say, and every once in a while I’ll hear or see things, like they’re beamed in from outer space or something, and there you were, barefoot and covered in filth. I could tell you were a desperate man in need of help.”
Now, I have a PhD in psychology from Johns Hopkins and my life’s work has made me skeptical about everything I’m told. But I didn’t want to question Minerva Frost. For too many reasons to count, I wanted to believe her.
“You see or hear anything about my family?” I asked. “Or Marcus Sunday?”
“I do not,” she said sadly. “But if and when I do, you will most assuredly be the first to know.”
We spoke little during the rest of the white-knuckle ride Lester Frost took us on from Baton Rouge to the western outskirts of New Orleans. At 4:22 a.m., we pulled off the I-10 and into a twenty-four-hour Phillips 66 truck stop.
“Do me a favor, and I’ll pay for your gas,” I told Lester, who looked suspicious.
“What favor?”
I handed him my cell phone and two twenties. “I can’t go in there looking like this, but I bought this phone at one of these truck stops, and I remember they sell a backup battery that you stick in the charge port. Can you get it for me?”
Lester looked ready to refuse, but his mother said, “Course he will.”
Scowling, Lester started the gas pump and then stomped off toward the truck-stop store. A few minutes later, he exited carrying the backup battery. It wasn’t fully charged as advertised, but to my relief, it started the phone, and I was able to call up Craigslist New Orleans on the browser. As Sunday had instructed me, in the Casual Encounters section, women looking for men, I posted under the headline “Waiting for Sunday.”
My message read, I’m here, Mulch. Your move.
I sat there while Lester topped off the tank and cleaned the windshield of bugs and leaves. It was still pitch-dark outside. Not even a hint of dawn.
“There now,” Minerva Frost said out of the blue.
I kid you not, a split second later, before I could even look over at her, my phone buzzed with a text.
I thought you’d given up, it read. Come alone. Or I end the game, and you lose absolutely everything.
Following that was an address on Esteban Street, in Arabi, just south of New Orleans on the east bank of the Mississippi River.
Lester Frost climbed in, said, “Give this to my mom?”
I took the coffee. Her hand came up but went far wide of the cup when I reached over the backseat with it. I had to guide her fingers to it. Her skin was as soft as a baby’s bottom, and for reasons I can’t explain, I felt calmer for touching it.
Lester reacted sourly when I gave him the address.
“Most of that area’s toast ’cause of Katrina,” he said, starting up the GTO, which rumbled so loud he had to almost shout at me. “Fifteen feet of water rolled through there when the levee broke. They found corpses in the attics. Place is haunted. I bet we get to that address and all we see is a cement pad, or sea grass, or at best a skeleton of a house.”
In the backseat, Madame Minerva said, “Arabi is a place for ghosts, Detective Cross, but the man you’re after, he’s waiting for you near there. And your family is close by, rocking in cradles.”
CHAPTER
86
THE ROCKING ROUSED NANA MAMA from a deep, dark, and puzzling place.
At first, Cross’s grandmother felt only that she was shifting side to side, as if she were floating in water, and nothing more. For a very long time, she didn’t know who or what she was.
But then she heard the pump and flush of her heartbeat in her temples, and something more high-pitched and infrequent. She smelled something sharp and medicinal. She tried to open her eyes to find the source of that tinny noise and that antiseptic odor but couldn’t.
True consciousness came maddeningly slowly, one step forward and two steps back. Her mind wavered there in a pulsing zone of gradually building sensations—touch, mouth dryness, and that smell—and then retreated to that deep, dark, and puzzling place.
Was it death?
That was her first real thought: Is it death?
Am I dying? Am I dead?
