Deadly Pedigree

20



Summer drew to a close, at least according to the calendar. The days still blistered New Orleans with heat. As usual, the murder rate in the city peaked, as people cracked under the strain of living in a crumbling sauna. It was shaping up to be another record year for homicide. The last of the horde of summer tourists went home, and the first of the smarter travelers began to show up, shopping in the less-crowded Quarter when the thundershowers allowed. Classes resumed at Freret. Hurricanes prowled offshore like giant prehistoric sharks, always threatening to devour the fragile city.

Out of long habit, Nick still divided the year into school-related segments. Even now, he felt a certain quickening of body and mind, an indefinable anticipation at this time of year. The luxuriant idleness of vacation scatters in fall’s gusts of decision; he had made a big one.



“Think I’ll become a C.G., or at least a genealogical record specialist,” Hawty ruminated aloud. She was typing into her computer the genealogical charts for a client who had no inkling he was a descendant of four presidents.

Sometimes, he’d already pointed out to Hawty, there are pleasant surprises in genealogy.

“You know, boss,” she continued, “I’ve been paying attention to those genealogical-magazine ads for courses at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. That might be a good investment for the firm, to send me out there.”

“The firm has a cash flow problem at the moment,” Nick replied, still immersed in the latest issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

“So what else is new? When are we getting paid by that old guy you’ve been working on for months now?”

Nick had kept the real story from Hawty, as much as he could; he didn’t want her endangered. She did not know Corban was dead.

“Well, Hawty, you’ll learn that in genealogy, money isn’t as important as truth.”

“Whatever you say, Saint Nicholas.”

Nick looked up. “Funny you should say that. I was born on Christmas Eve.”

“Yeah, I know. A firecracker stand blew up and a train derailed the same night, and the nurses had to deliver you because all the doctors were in the emergency room.”

“How did you know that? Have you been talking to my mother?”

Hawty smiled, and patted her computer. “She’s online.”

“You got to be kidding me.” But he saw she wasn’t. His own mother, a fallen woman!

Hawty had been indispensable throughout the summer. Nick had done everything but get on his knees to convince her not to drop him, as he expected she would need to, considering her heavy course load and enhanced teaching duties for the upcoming semester. Una had indeed lined up complete funding for her; Nick hoped it didn’t have anything to do with a grant from Artemis Holdings.

Genealogy was catching on in a big way, apparently. A local TV station had done a story on the growing nationwide interest in family history; a reporter interviewed Nick. The ten-second sound bite that resulted was enough to improve his business to a bothersome level. Hawty claimed her cleverly disguised plug on an Internet genealogy chatroom deserved the credit.

Whatever the cause, Nick and Hawty had done an amazing amount of work, tracing lineages for Mayflower passengers, signers of the Declaration of Independence, Revolutionary War soldiers, Seminole Wars soldiers, Mexican War soldiers, Civil War widows, territorial land grantees, and just ordinary folks who’d neglected to do anything historic except to sail from Bremen or Liverpool to Boston, Philadelphia, Galveston, or New Orleans. Hawty’s technology stunned and pleased Nick; he felt a growing, grudging fascination with the tools of the Information Age–even though his own mother had succumbed to digital seduction!

Yet, as heartening as business was, Nick felt that he was living on borrowed time. He was a pessimist at heart, and good times made him nervous. There had been no word from Natalie Armiger. The silence was disturbing. Did she somehow know that he’d been reasonably successful in Natchitoches? Had Corban’s murder ended her worries about the Zola problem? Had she accomplished what she wanted for the moment, if indeed she was the instigator of the poor man’s murder? Maybe she’d abandoned the whole project, and he would never hear from her again.

He hoped so, because he’d developed an overpowering possessiveness for the documents he’d stolen from Natchitoches. He felt responsible for their fate, responsible for the history they represented. The Natchitoches genealogical material was secure in Una’s safe-deposit box, and Corban’s envelope was slumbering in Nick’s P.O. box. The diary of Ivanhoe Balzar he treated with even more reverence. He slept with it under his pillow, and when away from his apartment, he placed it in his favorite hiding place–in the office, below a loose floorboard, under an old tattered, extremely valuable rug Hawty had bought for nine dollars on Magazine Street.

New Orleans is a batty city, where seemingly normal people do strange things for no apparent reason. Such behavior could land you in Angola, the state prison, of course, if your eccentricities are dangerous to others; or, if it’s a benign weirdness of some note, you might earn a place in local lore, so that acolytes evermore leave flowers at your burial vault. Between these two poles of infamy and fame, until you proudly rode your own hobbyhorse in the New Orleans parade, you were just a tourist, an outsider, content with only a tantalizing glimpse of the gyrating seductions beyond the beaded curtain. Nick had at last developed an appreciation of what it meant to live here: a compulsion like a voodoo spell now chanted in his ear, commanding him to save the past from unclean hands. Armiger’s hands.

Then again, maybe he’d gained some immunity for another reason: his relationship with Zola had developed into something more than simply a mutual crush born of a night’s revelry.

New Orleans hides dozens of small, exquisite restaurants for those who know to look beneath the gaudy glare and blare, each one a wonderful vintage bottle of epicurean delight. Nick thought he knew them all, but Zola surprised him with new ones. They immensely enjoyed the company of each other, and they loved to eat fine food imaginatively prepared.

At such establishments the two of them had spent many hours during that late summer, exploring each other’s souls in words and whispers, in touches over and under the table.

And finally, in bed, they had discovered a new country, full of wonders.





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