The Map of Moments (9 page)

To his relief, Max made it to his room without encountering anyone, and was surprised to find that his key card still worked, despite the soaking it had endured.

Once inside the room he leaned against the door and let out a long breath, grateful for the sanctuary, and wishing that he would never have to go back out again. He emptied his pockets of wallet, keys, change, phone, and map, and then stripped. He dumped his shoes and pants into a plastic bag he found in the closet. It was intended for guests who wanted to send clothes out to be laundered, but Max would simply throw them away. He was tempted to toss his shirt, socks, and underwear into the bag as well, but for some reason, that seemed excessive.

He laughed, and even to his own ears it was an uncomfortable sound.

The room service menu was limited to basics and a few more elegant specials, but the last thing Max wanted was haute cuisine. He ordered a bowl of gumbo and a hamburger with French fries, then opened the complimentary bottle of water on the bureau. A drink had seemed like such
a good idea this morning, during Gabrielle's graveside service. Now the thought of alcohol made him queasy. He tipped the bottle back and drank, and that spring water was the best thing he had ever tasted.

Max took a hot shower, scrubbing himself clean of the day's strangeness. He only wished he could wash away his grief and confusion. Afterward, he put on clean underwear, cotton sweatpants, and a T-shirt, and waited for his food to arrive. They had said twenty minutes, but room service estimates were invariably wrong.

His eyes were drawn to the bureau, where the map lay folded beside his wallet and useless cell phone. It had to still be wet. He glanced toward the door, trying to will his food to come, but when no knock followed he went to the bureau and stared down at the map.

After a moment he picked it up and unfolded it. It would dry better if he left it open; that was what he told himself. But what he really wanted was to confirm that those words of the First Moment were gone. He opened the map and stared at City Park, and sure enough, the First Moment was no longer there.

The next one was even clearer than before.

“The Pere's Kyrie,” he read aloud. Though he'd never been religious, he knew a Kyrie was a kind of prayer meant to be sung. And in French,
“Pere”
meant father. But whose father?
The questions ran deeper than that. Ray had talked about following the map, gathering magic—
-yeah, he said magic
—like static, opening a window into the past so Max could get a message to Gabrielle, maybe even talk to her. No matter how much Jack Daniel's he'd drunk, and no matter what the old guy had given him in that little stone bottle, that part of the conversation remained clear in his memory. Follow the map, and then find some “conjure-man” named Matrisse.

He'd never heard such bullshit in his life.

That was what he ought to be thinking, and he knew it. But the map had dried now, and though it looked like a common tourist map of New Orleans,
it felt
like old parchment, dry and rough in texture. It was as if the map he held and the one he was looking at were two entirely different things.

Add in his hallucination in City Park, and logic brought him to answers he had difficulty allowing into his mind. Two plus two equaled four, always and forever.
Dumb-ass. After Lakeview, you should've come straight back here.
But he'd run across assholes with guns …and then he'd used the map.

Should've known better.

But how could he have known better? He hadn't believed a word crazy Ray had said.

“That's a lie,” he whispered to himself. He threw the map on the bureau. Because he had been drunk enough and full of enough sadness that he
had
believed, just a little. Hell, he'd wanted to believe.

“Yeah, two plus two equals four,” he said aloud. Which translated in his mind to another equation. If what he'd seen in the park connected to real events, and if the area had
been marsh back then, what he'd seen could have been real, and not just some drug-fueled vision.

He'd spent half a year as a history professor at Tulane, but had only basic knowledge of local history. Still, Max knew who could give him answers. What he had to decide was whether or not he wanted them.

A heavy knock came at the door. “Room service.”

“Finally.” He'd been about ready to break into the mini-bar and pay eight dollars for a tiny package of Oreos.

Only after he had gotten his food, tipped the guy, then looked for the remote control to turn on the television did he finally notice the blinking red light on his phone. Someone had called while he had been showering, and left a message. He hesitated, thinking that it might be his sister calling to check on him, either to see if he was all right or to give him crap for having come down here in the first place. Neither was a conversation he felt like having, but it couldn't hurt to listen to the message.

As it turned out, the message wasn't from his sister.

“Max, it's Corinne. You went off with Ray and never turned up back at your hotel. I came by and had a drink in the bar, called up to the room a couple of times. Anyway, I'm home now if you want to call. I figure you've got another day or so down here, and I thought we could get breakfast at Poppy's tomorrow. If you're up for it, I mean. If it wouldn't be weird or morbid or something. Anyway, call me if you want to. If not …I'm glad you came down. Thanks for not making me do that alone.”

Breakfast at Poppy's.
Why was it all the good memories hurt so much?

He ate with the TV on, but Max barely registered the zoetrope shadows dancing across the screen. He spent the time thinking about tomorrow's breakfast, wondering what he should say. By New Orleans standards, his gumbo tasted bland, but the burger was just what he wanted. When he'd finished, he set aside the tray and picked up the phone.

Corinne answered on the second ring.

“Poppy's survived Katrina?”

“Max,” she said. “Yeah, it's still there. A little worse for the wear, but Poppy's stubborn, and she loves this city so much she wouldn't know how to live anywhere else.”

“Nine o'clock all right?”

“I'll see you then.”

Poppy's sat on the corner of Dauphine Street and Iberville, still in the Quarter but off the typical tourist track. Its exterior had always reminded Max of a private club in some European city, tall windows gleaming in the morning sunlight, but with the blinds drawn. Casual passersby would presume the place closed. Its name was stenciled on the windows and painted on tiles above the door, but no operating hours were posted. There wasn't even a menu on display to those who might be walking past.

The message couldn't have been clearer:
if we don't know you, we don't want you here.

Yet in Max's experience, that wasn't the case at all. In truth, the diminutive woman from whom the restaurant gained its name simply felt that word of mouth had made her little place popular enough already, and that soliciting
casual diners would only make Poppy's less hospitable for those who truly appreciated what she had to offer.

“She's not in it for the glory,” Gabrielle had once told Max. “She's in it for the food.”

When Max walked in that morning, he could not help but smile. The restaurant brought back painful memories, but they were wonderful memories as well. He had never expected to set foot on Poppy's tile floors again, and despite all that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, it felt like a gift. The walls were painted ivory, with olive-green trim, and the floors were inlaid Italian marble. The front of the restaurant was a narrow corridor with a bar on the left and a single row of small tables to the right. He walked through to the hostess at the end of the bar.

The woman looked up, and Max recognized Poppy herself. Her auburn hair had been brighter red the last time he'd seen her, and shorter, and there were lines around her eyes that he didn't remember. But charm still radiated off her.

“Mornin’, darlin’,” she said. “One for breakfast?”

“Actually, I'm meeting someone.” He smiled at her. The woman stood about five-foot-nothing, but had a formidable air about her.

She gave him a bemused look. “I know you, don't I?”

“You have a good memory. I used to come in here sometimes with Gabrielle?”

Poppy's eyes brightened. “Oh, Gaby! Yeah. Haven't seen her for…” She trailed off when she recognized the expression on Max's face. He guessed she'd seen that same look many times recently. “She's gone, huh? The Bitch get her?”

Max almost corrected her, but then realized that to
Poppy—and other New Orleaneans—“the Bitch” was Katrina.

“Yeah. We buried her yesterday.”

“I'm sorry. She shone bright, that one. You remember her, now!
Nobody
we lost ought to be forgotten.”

“She won't be,” Max said, looking down at his feet, and the brief silence quickly grew uncomfortable.

“You want to sit, or wait up front?” Poppy asked.

He glanced at the door, but saw no sign of Corinne. “I'll sit, thanks.”

Poppy led him into the main dining room, which was as narrow as the front but had room for a row of tables against either side, just eight in all. There were three free, and she led him to one about halfway down and slid two menus onto the table.

“Get you some coffee to start?”

“Café au lait, please.”

“Coming right up, honey. And I'm sorry, again, about Gaby.”

Max nodded and watched her go. She came back with his coffee within minutes, trailed by a doughy waiter with a goatee, who introduced himself as James. He asked if Max wanted anything else while he waited, then retreated to the kitchen.

Corinne arrived a few minutes later. He'd sat himself so that he'd be positioned to see the front of the place, and the moment she came through the door he knew he wasn't going to tell her anything about the previous day. What would he say? The map felt crisp and stiff in his back pocket,
but even if he showed it to her, what would she see? A tourist map that someone had scribbled on?

“Hey. Sorry I'm late,” she said.

“I've only been here a few minutes myself.”

She slid into a chair and looked at the menu. James drifted from the kitchen as though he had some sixth sense, and she ordered black coffee.

“Do you know what you want?” she asked.

He laughed.

Corinne looked up at him over the top of the menu. “What's funny?”

“Nothing and everything. I don't have the first clue what I want. I thought I did, once, but …Anyway, that's not what you meant. I'm getting banana pancakes. Poppy does them wonderfully, with cinnamon on top.”

When James returned, Corinne ordered the spicy shrimp omelette—essentially shrimp, cayenne, Tabasco, and ham folded into the eggs. It had been Gabrielle's favorite. Max wondered whether that was why Corinne had ordered it, or if they simply had the same tastes.

“So tell me,” she said, when the waiter had vanished again. “Where'd you take off to, yesterday?”

A wave of anger went through him. “Well, you didn't leave me much choice.”

Her eyes dropped to her coffee cup, but she didn't pick it up. Hadn't even touched it. “I'm sorry about that. Ray asked for some time with you. He paid to get Gaby buried, so it was the least I could do. Anyway, I didn't think you'd mind.” She looked up. “Why, what did he do?”

The tone of the question could have been interpreted many different ways, but Max sensed a real curiosity in it, as though Corinne had a lot of questions about Ray herself.

“How well do you know the guy?”

If it bothered her that he hadn't answered her question, she didn't show it. “Hardly at all. But Gabrielle knew him really well. Up until a couple of years ago, they were inseparable. I know how weird that sounds. I mean, he's gotta be in his mid-sixties at least, and she was just a kid, maybe fourteen, when they started spending time together. But I never suspected anything funny, or dubious. They were like father and daughter. He taught her how to cook.

“We were at JazzFest and he'd set up a cart in the parking lot, selling étouffée he was fixing right there on a frying pan. It was damn fine étouffée, crab and shrimp in there, and Gabrielle demanded to know his recipe. Ray looked at her a while, like he was sizing her up, and then he said, ‘I ain't gonna tell you, little girl, but I'll teach you how to make it proper.’ That was the beginning. Her family didn't seem to mind—seemed to like the fact she was learning cooking from someone who knew his stuff. But once she got to be seventeen, she didn't see much of him, as far as I know. But obviously he still cared for her.

“Now, are you gonna tell me what you two talked about yesterday?”

Max had not known the young Gabrielle, but he knew how she could get when she wanted something. There was no stopping her. So it was easy for him to picture her going up to the old guy and demanding his recipe, and to understand how Ray could've been charmed by that. The story
had a sweetness and ordinariness to it that he wanted to embrace, but the map crinkled in his back pocket every time he shifted, and he couldn't shake off his own experience with Ray.