As she ran in circles past Solomon’s house, Maureen weighed the consequences of approaching him, of stopping her run and walking right up to him on his porch. Sweaty. Smelly. Asking for a glass of water. To see if he remembered her from the party. Or from the trouble with his son. She wondered if he even knew who she was. If he didn’t remember, would he ask her name? But Maureen never went anywhere near him. She’d never get her job back if she pulled a stunt like that. And she had no idea what she would really say to him were they ever face-to-face again.
Maybe to talk to him wasn’t what she wanted, she thought, her feet pumping under her along the track like a heartbeat. Maybe what she really wanted was for Solomon to see her. Every. Single. Day. From his rocking chair. Through the glinting windows of his mansion. In the security cameras he kept trained on the park around his house. So he would know. So he would be forced to remember her. He would know she hadn’t gone away for good. He would know that she wasn’t afraid of him, of any of them.
Not the Heaths, and not the cops and criminals alike, whom they paid off with stiff new bills passed hand to hand in unmarked envelopes. Like the envelope he had given her the night she’d worked the party. Trying to buy her, and assuming she came cheap.
4
That evening, as she rounded the turn past Bird Island out in the lagoon, Maureen could see high in the island’s trees, settling into their nests for the night, great white egrets holding their long beaks open and squawking and beating their wings, the feathers of their wingtips thin and spread wide like human fingers, silhouetted against the sky. In the lagoon, brown-and-green ducks paddled with purpose along the water’s smooth surface, their eyes fixed straight ahead, the upright triangles of their tails wagging, their V-shaped wakes splitting then fading behind them.
Maureen continued running along the track, closing in on the Heath house. She dipped and dodged as people of varied shapes and colors, wearing everything from shiny skintight biking gear to fluffy pink tracksuits, cycled, jogged, power walked, and Rollerbladed around her, talking and talking, those moving mouths always talking, to each other, to their babies, to their dogs, into their phones, or maybe all at the same time, as far as Maureen could tell.
In her own ears, music pounded. Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. An instrumental track, one of her favorites: “Hurricane Season.” She could hear nothing else around her. She ran lost in a wash of horns so loud she couldn’t think, her preferred state. The sinuous, repeating sequence of notes blasting in her ear worked like the expert combination punches of a boxer. The bass and drums and guitar rolled and thundered underneath the lightning of the horns like a runaway locomotive threatening to jump the track. But the horns were what got her, what held her. She’d never heard anything like those horns until she got to New Orleans.
The infectiousness. The irresistible raw and ecstatic power.
Where was this music when she was growing up?
As if she hadn’t gotten in enough trouble as a teenager, she thought. She could only imagine what would have become of her had she hurtled through adolescence with brass band music percolating her blood and her brain tissue along with everything else drenching her system in those days, both what came naturally and the other chemicals she had added herself.
Maureen ran past the island, putting the noisy birds behind her, and the great house appeared on her right. And there he was standing in the yard, highball glass in one hand, the man himself. Solomon Heath. He was getting nearly as regular as she. Was it he, she wondered, who had dispatched someone to search for Madison Leary? Was Solomon’s agent the man Dice had been talking about? New Orleans would be safer for his son if Leary was behind bars, or in the river. She put neither option past the man.
She kept an eye on Heath while navigating the obstacles around her.
He was looking right at her, watching her as she ran. Even from a distance, she could tell that something about him that evening was off. No smoke rose from the grill. He just stood there, not moving, halfway between his house and where the edge of his property melted into the park. Like he’d been waiting for her. In his right hand was the highball glass, tilted at an angle where it might spill its contents. In his left hand he held a short golf club against his pant leg, the club’s metal shaft glinting in the fading sunlight.
As if whatever signal he’d been waiting for had arrived, he started walking toward the park, toward her, raising his glass to his lips and drinking, never taking his eyes off Maureen. His steps were unsteady. She wouldn’t have to speed up much, she thought, to run right by him. He was in no shape to chase her, not at his age, not with the way she could run.
But she didn’t accelerate; she held that option in reserve. Instead, she slowed down, letting him know, she hoped, that she had clocked his approach.
The golf club, she decided, was a prop. Something he could lean on while he’d waited for her to run past that wasn’t a sign of weakness, like a cane. Not that she’d ever seen him use a cane. Not that he’d ever appeared to her a weak man. She noticed his steps in her direction had quickened. His gait had steadied. He was determined to intercept her.