She closed her eyes and envisioned herself not as the thin, short, pale-faced redhead she was, but maybe as a stout, dark-haired, and tattooed medicine woman, crouched on her haunches as she told her story, surrounded by openmouthed, wide-eyed squaws circling the longhouse fire. She tried to hear herself, tried to listen to herself tell them the story of the Silver-Haired Man, the November Man, the one who haunted her in these late weeks of autumn. The one she saw reflected in store windows along Magazine Street and turning corners ahead of her along St. Charles Avenue. The one who lived in the blind spot over her shoulder, who hovered in her peripheral vision. The man she had seen in the soulless eyes of a sociopathic rich boy outside a party at his father’s Audubon Park mansion, who she saw everywhere around her in the bars and clubs of New Orleans at night, in the glittering ravenous eyes of brown and black and blond young men.
But when she tried listening to her other self tell the story, as soon as she started paying attention and seeing everything again, seeing Sebastian, the cattails at the water’s edge, the headlights of the oncoming train, Maureen’s invented self fell silent. The story ended and the vision disappeared into a tiny point of light, as if someone had pulled the plug on an old television. At the table in the bar, the medicine woman vanished and Maureen was left alone again with her ache and her fear and her ghost, and she had nothing to say and no one to listen to her not say it. I need to find a way, she thought. I need to find a way to tell the story to someone.
She had hoped that this first anniversary wouldn’t haunt her. The first six months after Sebastian had tried to throw her in front of a train, she still lived on Staten Island with her mother in the house she’d grown up in, on the same streets where everything bad had happened, and so it kind of made sense that those events had lingered. But this November, she had a new life, in a new city. She was a cop now, for chrissakes. A cop on indefinite paid administrative leave, she thought, which made her a cop without a gun and a badge at the moment, which wasn’t much of a cop, but a cop according to her paycheck. And she’d get her badge and her gun back. Soon.
The point was she had put a lot of work into becoming a different woman, into building herself into a new person. A real new person. And leaving behind that bastard and the places he’d taken her was a big reason she had done that work.
But then the weather had turned at the end of the month, and Maureen learned that November in New Orleans could be, if it wanted to, as cold and gray and wet and bleak as November in New York. And at the turn in the weather had come her dark turn of mind. This year should have been much different from the last. She had expected it to be different. She deserved it to be different. And when it wasn’t, she got pissed. More than pissed. Angry. Incensed. Furious.
*
The woman Maureen had been watching for more than an hour got up from her barstool, bringing Maureen back to the present. This woman was not Madison Leary. This woman was not part of a murder case. This wasn’t police work. This was something else. Something private.
Just for tonight. Which was what you said the last time, Maureen thought.
The woman pulled on her coat, flipped her long black hair out from underneath her collar, gathered her phone and her purse, and headed for the door. The bouncer opened it for her, letting the cold outside air rush into the barroom as he said good night. Maureen pulled the hood of her baggy black sweatshirt tight against the back of her neck. She longed for her father’s old blue pea coat, the one she had lost last November. The one she had left in a bloody heap on the floor of a Staten Island emergency room, soaked in Frank Sebastian’s blood.
She drew her hands into her sleeves. She carried a weapon in the front pocket of her sweatshirt. She savored its weight on her lap.
A man Maureen had also been watching emerged from the dim and narrow hall that led to the restrooms. He froze, his face scrunching in anger, when he saw the empty barstool. He looked around the bar. Maureen could tell it was all he could do to keep from screaming the woman’s name. They’d arrived at the bar at different times, the woman first and the man about twenty minutes later. Right away they had fallen into a bad argument, quickly enough that Maureen knew it was the continuation of a previous fight, badly enough that the bouncer had come over from the door to check on them. Maureen hadn’t been able to hear much of what they were saying, but she’d heard enough to know that the man had followed the woman here from another Frenchmen Street bar she’d left to get away from him.
After the bouncer’s intervention, the man had moved away down the bar, pretending, Maureen could tell, to watch the funk band that had taken the stage during the argument. But throughout the set he had kept a close eye on the object of his ire, glaring at her over his shoulder, his silver-labeled bottle of Coors Light raised to his lips.
From where she sat in the corner across the room, Maureen could see the wheels turning in his head. She could read his thoughts. She didn’t like what they told her. Her fears were confirmed by the fact that the woman had waited until the man was out of sight to make her move for the door. She wasn’t leaving. She was escaping. She was fleeing.