“My mama always make it for holidays when I was little,” Annabel said, pointing to the pot. “Right now maybe don’t look like the time to celebrate, but we got plenty to be happy for. Most of us lost the houses, true, but we save the boats, and they how we earn our living, right? The family is fine, the babies safe, so you know, my dear, we ready to laissez les bons temps rouler!”
“You’re right. The important thing is that everyone’s okay. Were you able to get in contact with the other families?”
“Oh, yes, most of the boats got radios to talk a long way. We get news like that, ’cause out here in the swamp, your telephone don’t work much. We get along fine with the radio. Why, today I talk with a cousin of mine in Maine, told him we all right. He worried a lot about us.”
That caught Amaia’s attention. “How’s that possible? A maritime radio usually reaches only a few miles.”
“Oh, for sure! But it wasn’t on the radio—or, anyhow, not only on the radio. We use the boat radio to contact a shrimper somewhere with his cell phone connection, somebody like Cousin Paula in Cocodrie. We give her the number we want, and she call with the cell phone. Then she put the phone on speaker next to the mic, and we talk like that. Just one problem, though: all the boats on that channel hear you talk.”
Johnson and Amaia looked at one another. “Did you hear that?” she exclaimed, delighted by the discovery. Charbou and Johnson were impressed.
Johnson spoke to Clive. “Can you show me how to do that? We need to get in contact with someone. It’s important, more important than I can say.”
“I got it set up with Paula to talk, round eleven tonight. We can try. But right now the jambalaya ready. You got to eat a jambalaya as soon as you finish cooking it.” He waved behind them. “And it look like this crew full of hungry people.”
Johnson turned to find a line of Cajun families already lined up along the tables.
Amaia relieved Bull at Dupree’s pallet as soon as she’d finished her meal. Johnson and Charbou followed Clive and Annabel to their shrimp boat.
“He hasn’t woken up,” Bull told her, “but his fever’s gone, and he’s looking a lot better.”
Amaia sat on the floor by the pallet. She stared mindlessly through the windows that gave out onto the dark swamp, that realm of darkness the bayou dwellers claimed was inhabited by the fifolets, spirits floating above the dark surface of the water. Tiny lutins, spirits of naughty children, danced around them and sneaked up on sleeping people to braid their hair.
She took in the sounds around her. The festive noise of people sharing a meal in the next houseboat reminded her how resilient human beings could be. She heard the regular creaking of the cables securing the houseboats, a slow rhythm set by the waves. And something else, too—a low murmuring, rhythmic, like prayer. She noticed that Médora wasn’t in the room.
Peering out the window, Amaia saw the traiteur on the back porch, sitting opposite the human wreck that had once been a woman. He was holding her hands and murmuring incantations.
Dupree’s voice in the darkness startled her. “What is Gaueko?”
She jumped. “You scared me! Are you feeling better?”
“Yes,” he said. “A lot better.” He wasn’t a hundred percent yet, but at least his voice had regained its tone and vigor. “What is Gaueko? I heard you say that last night in the dark while we were staring out at the drowned city.”
She returned and settled beside him in the dim light. “Gaueko is the lord of darkness, the spirit of the night. Gauekoak are ‘things of the night.’ In the little town I come from they have legends about all kinds of magical creatures, but you can sort them into two categories: creatures of the light and creatures of the dark. The gauekoak are the shadowy spirits that wander through the streets and the mountains. They’re made of night, death, and loneliness, and they’re always seeking some unguarded access to creep into a human body. According to the legend, they can go anywhere they please until the sun rises. Then they have to scramble to find caves or rocks where they can hide from the new day. Many people in my region decorate their outside doors with a thistle—the eguzki-lore. That means ‘the flower of the sun.’ The goddess Mari gave it to human beings to ward off gauekoak. Gauekoak avoid those houses because the flower looks like a sun. My aunt always keeps one by our front door. Just in case.”
“I know what you’re talking about,” came his voice from the darkness. “Voodoo has an evil spirit called Kalfou who climbs on the chest of his sleeping victim and paralyzes him. The victim’s aware of his plight, but he can’t escape. My aunt Nana wouldn’t let me open the bedroom windows at night, even when it was over a hundred degrees, for fear that I would let Kalfou in.”
“I thought you said you were Catholic.”
“My mother was. Nana brought me up after my parents died. She took me to Sunday school and confirmation classes. We went to mass every Sunday. But she practiced voodoo as well. Maybe you find that strange?”
“Not at all. My aunt Engrasi has a psychology degree from the Sorbonne, but she consults tarot cards. Not so different.”
“And you?”
“I don’t believe in any of it. I respect people’s faith and their beliefs, of course. An investigator has to. But that’s it.”
“I suspect you weren’t always like that.”
“Like you said, you always carry with you the influence of the place where you were born. When you come from a place like Baztán, you accept the people’s beliefs. Like accepting Cajun culture out here in the swamp. I remembered the Gaueko story last night, when we were looking out at the darkness in New Orleans. I had an intuition then, a superstitious feeling that night creatures would own the city even after the sun rose. What I saw later on just confirmed that feeling. We were lost in the night of Samedi. He’d cursed New Orleans forever.”
“But you denied your folklore when we were standing out in the Allens’ field in front of that destroyed roof. Claimed you didn’t know the legends, said you couldn’t remember.”
“That was partly true. Those tales belong to a place and time that are no longer part of my life. They’re irrelevant, mostly forgotten. It’s just that lately, with the Composer’s murders and Samedi’s return, the old myths keep coming to mind, as if they are connected somehow. It’s absurd, I know. Myths from the back country of Spain come from an entirely different world than that of the Composer. But I can’t shake the feeling that some malevolent force in my past is haunting me.”
Dupree remained silent for a time. “There’s a positive side to myth. Legends caution us of danger, but they also suggest ways to protect ourselves and forestall the threat. You might say there’s always a ‘flower of the sun’ to fend off the gauekoak. Evil spirits may be powerful, but they’re not invulnerable.”
She made no comment, for she knew that no eguzki-lore in the world could stand up to the evil they were tracking now. After a long pause, she responded with apparent indifference, “They’re just made-up stories.”
“The other day, after Johnson asked about the region you come from, I got him to tell me more. He described a fertility goddess and the guardian of the woods. Even some kind of enchanted women with webbed feet who dwell in the rivers.”