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Lafayette, Louisiana, USA
31st of January, 7:30 p.m. (GMT-6)
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Martinez took a long satisfying swig of her cold beer and watched the lime wedge bob in the bottle as she set it back down on the table. Despite its leisurely start, it had been a busy day. Local law enforcement rarely welcomed federal involvement, but it was necessary for them to perform the procedural song and dance in case either she or Morris had left any trace DNA in the chapel.
She was confident they wouldn’t find their fingerprints, but she couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a rogue hair or random skin cell shed in the crazy wind of the ritual. Sloppy collection and processing of evidence was an easy sell as long as they gave them a plausible scenario.
She helped herself to more chips and salsa and scanned the room one more time. Happy hour ended thirty minutes ago, but the bar was still packed with people celebrating the end of the workweek with copious amounts of alcohol. The restaurant was slowly filling up but a few empty tables remained. In the center of the dining room was one long table made by shoving multiple tables together. Based on the number of high chairs the staff had pulled out in anticipation of the large party, Martinez hoped her food would arrive shortly.
Morris had been quiet on the drive over. Except for basic pleasantries and ordering, he hadn’t said much since they left Miller’s apartment. He was obviously chewing on the case. Every so often, he made little grumbles and curious facial expressions as he thought things through and argued all sides.
While Martinez generally respected people’s processes, patience was not one of her strong points, and it only got worse when she was bored. “Penny for your thoughts?” she broke the silence.
“What?” Morris uttered when it finally registered that he was being addressed.
She pointed her beer at him. “You’re cooking up a theory. I can smell it. I know you are used to working alone, but you’ve got a perfectly good sounding board sitting right in front of you. So out with it.”
Morris grinned at her pluck but hid it behind his rum and coke. “I think our spirit is an Acadian looking for his woman, who may or may not be named Pauline. My best guess is that they were separated in the Grand Dérangement.”
“Was that so hard?” Martinez asked him facetiously, glossing over the fact that she no idea what the Grand Dérangement was. “Okay, so we give that to the analysts and see if they can find a connection. Maybe we can locate the woman before the poltergeist does, and you put him to rest before he can do any more damage.”
Morris shook his head. “The woman is most certainly dead. The Grand Dérangement happened over 250 years ago.”
“Oh,” was all she could think to say.
Morris gave her a scornful look. “You visited the Acadian Village yesterday. Didn’t you see something about it? It’s pretty much the defining event to the Acadians.”
Martinez squirmed in her seat as she bought some time with another sip of beer. She had never been called out for being unprepared. “I went there and hit the places of interest as it pertained to the missing women and left,” she replied. Her explanation didn’t wipe the judgy look from Morris’s face.
“In my defense, it seemed more important to obtain an exclusionary salting of the sole witness to a supernatural being—one that ended up being a poltergeist on steroids, I might add—than wandering a fake bayou and reading plaques. And there was nothing at the time to suggest Acadians would play a significant role in the investigation,” she argued.
Morris softened his demeanor and gave her a pass, recognizing that he’d hit some sort of nerve. “Okay, that’s fair.” He straightened up and puffed out his chest. “Time for a quick history lesson. Listen up because I’m about to school you on Acadians.”
Martinez pushed the chips and salsa to the side and leaned in. She’d never seen professorial Deacon before. “Lay it on me.”
“The Acadians were French settlers that landed in Nova Scotia in the 1600s, well before Jamestown. Things were bad for them in Europe between religious wars, disease, famine, and generally being poor, but they had one thing going for them: they were farmers who knew how to work with crap land. They made friendly with the local Indians—”
“First Nations,” Martinez interjected.
“The Mi’kmaq,” he one-upped her. “And in a spirit of cooperation, they built a nice life for themselves in the New World and grew rich from agriculture, fishing, hunting, crafts, and trade as more Europeans crossed the Atlantic.
“England and France were at war with each other all the time, and that spilled over to the New World. The Acadian real estate flip-flopped between British and French a dozen times, but there’s two things you need to know about the Acadians.
“First, the Acadians still thought of themselves as French, even though they had spent over a century in the New World. They spoke French, and their food and music was still very French. Second”—he counted on his fingers—“they didn’t care who was in charge as long as they could do their thing. British, French...it didn’t matter who officially ruled as long as they were left alone to prosper and trade. For a long time, the powers that be tolerated it because they were so far from home and needed the goods and services the Acadians provided.
“All that changed when the British came out as the definitive victors. They wanted the Acadians to swear unconditional allegiance to Britain and sign an oath. To the Acadians, that was nonsense—they were there before the British and minding their own business. In their minds, they didn’t have to sign shit. So the Acadians strung them along without actually signing because once they signed, that was all the British would need to confiscate their possessions and punish them for trading or helping the French or any of their allies.
“When the French and Indian War broke out in the middle of the 1700s, the British came down hard, demanding the Acadians promise not to help the French. But the Acadians were proud and still considered themselves French. Even if they were tempted to sign just to shut the British up and continue doing what they liked on the down low, they certainly weren’t going to do that now, just to spite the British. So the British took their stuff anyway, burned down their communities, and kicked the Acadians off the land they had worked for over a hundred years.”
Morris spread his hands out with a flourish. “That is Le Grand Dérangement.”
“That’s terrible, but I suppose Americans picked it up from someone...” Martinez snidely remarked. “What happened to the Acadians?”
“Some were shipped to one of their North American colonies, other were deported back to France. The point was to break up the Acadian community so they wouldn’t be a threat to British interests, but in reality, families were separated and a lot of Acadians died in the relocation. Not all the ships made it to their destinations,” he added gravely.
A light came on in Martinez’s brain. “Maine, Connecticut, New York, Virginia—they’re all originally British colonies,” she said, nodding. “But where does Louisiana come in?”
“The survivors regrouped afterward and some returned to the northeast, but a contingency went to Louisiana in the second half of the 1700s. They wanted to get away from British control and Louisiana was owned by Spain at the time, who was too busy trying to keep its empire together to pay attention to some French-speaking refugees living in the bayou. By happenstance, it was briefly French when Spain lost it in a war, but France sold it to America shortly thereafter to pay off war debts.”
Martinez dug deep in her memory for US history and had the Louisiana Purchase filed somewhere after Independence but before Manifest Destiny. Morris took advantage of the pause to grab a few chips from the basket and wash them down with a splash of rum and coke. All this talking woke up his appetite.
“So why are they Cajuns instead of Acadians?” she puzzled.
“Ah, now you are talking about race,” Morris warned her before proceeding. As a black man, he’d learned to be delicate about such things and gave her time to change subjects. When she made no such gesture, he continued. “The Acadians in Louisiana were far from Nova Scotia and France. Time and isolation changed their language and culture into its own thing—a French base peppered with Native Americans, African slaves, and other European groups. Over time, Acadian was abbreviated to Cajun, the same way Indian became Injun. While some Cajuns embrace all those different influences, others want to align more closely to their French ancestry.”
Martinez read between the lines and scoffed. “White people are the worst.” Morris nodded but said nothing. Sitting in a packed Mexican restaurant on a Friday night, she was light enough to get away with saying that. He was not.
“Why do you say her name may or may not be Pauline?” she brought up another point that was unclear to her. She could tell by the look on his face that he felt particularly clever for working this one out.
“Communication with undead can be tricky,” he began. “Even when you speak the same language, there is room for interpretation. Take, for example, when Zoe corrected me. Pa Janvier could be how someone addresses the male head of the Janvier household, though in true French it would be Père Janvier. But, like Zoe mentioned, it could also be translated as Father January, which English speakers would more commonly refer to as old man winter, a very distinct avatar of death. If our spirit is in Cajun country and trying to communicate the idea that he’s desperately looking for his lost love, he might just play this song, especially if none of the women spoke French.”
Martinez was getting used to his style of teaching, circling the topic before pinning it down. “Sure, like how some people on the internet reply to things with memes. They are communicating symbolically through shared metaphors.”
He gave it some thought. He would have called posting only in gifs and with memes asinine, but her way sounded more academic. “Sure, something like that.”
“Hard to believe speaking French saved Zoe’s life. Score one for language teachers everywhere,” she toasted before taking another sip of beer.
“Everyone wants to be understood and heard, which is hard to do if you don’t speak the same language,” he concurred. “But the charm she was wearing also helped. My guess is that it is some sort of family heirloom that one of her ancestors enchanted.”
Just then, the kitchen door burst open and the waiter called out “hot plate” to warn the nearby waitstaff and guests as he made his way to their table. There was no smoke and sizzle—neither of them had ordered fajitas—but the smell was amazing nonetheless. She was suddenly very glad she didn’t fill up on chips and salsa.
“I’ve got a chile relleno,” the mitted waiter announced.
“For the gentleman,” Martinez answered.
“Be careful, sir, that plate is hot,” he warned Morris as he set it down with a stack of warm flour tortillas. “Which means you must be the tamales.” He turned to Martinez and presented her with the other dish. “Bon appétit!”
While Morris started sawing into his deep fried cheese-stuffed peppers, Martinez simply stared at her plate. She was fine with the tamales being unwrapped, although she preferred to do that herself, but she couldn’t understand why they were so small and smothered in red sauce and cheese. “What is this?” she asked, confused.
“You ordered tamales. That’s how they do tamales here—delta style,” he stated it as fact. Martinez pushed the food around with a fork, suspiciously examining it from all angles. She had heard of the variant before but had never eaten it. “Trust me, they’re good,” he reassured her. “Until this morning, you’d never had oysters for breakfast and look how well that turned out.”
Martinez cut through the soft corn casing with her fork and took a bite. First impression, it was hot—like pica mucho, borderline pica demasiado. Tamales should have a spicy filling, but the masa itself should be kind of bland. That’s what roasted jalapeños and salsa were for—to add as much heat as desired. As it slid across her tongue, the surface was completely smooth. The characteristic ridges from being cooked in cornhusks were nowhere to be found.
As she chewed, she noted the difference in texture. The corn was grainer than she was used to and less fluffy than it should have been. As for the filling, the shredded pork was juicy and flavorful, which was tasty, but still all wrong. All the moisture should have been absorbed into the corn paste when they steamed it.
As she mentally dissected her food, Morris watched her like she was the dinner entertainment. “What do you think?”
“It’s good,” she said weakly. “It’s not tamales, but it’s good.” In the spirit of fairness, she took another bite.
“Do you want some of my relleno?” he offered.
“Yes, please,” she said sweetly and carefully pushed her warm platter toward him. “I’ll finish the one I’ve already started, but you can have as much of the rest as you want.” Morris flagged the waiter down for extra plates and started moving food around.
The great tamale debacle opened the door for a conversation about cooking. He told her all about how delta-style tamales—aka hot tamales—came to be and the adjustments that were made to accommodate palette and available resources. It was a lot easier and cheaper to get cornmeal and parchment paper than lime-soaked masa and dried cornhusk in the deep south in the early twentieth century. When they couldn’t afford meat, they spiced the corn mush and ate that, and the practice stuck in more prosperous times.
Morris attributed the spiciness to white people not seasoning their food enough. He hated to confirm a stereotype, but it was true—black folks need flavor. He had no explanation for boiling over steaming, except that it was less involved and only required a pot. Once the decision was made to season the corn meal and boil the tamales, if only made sense to cook them in something tasty which could be ladled over them as gravy.
Martinez told him all about the best tamales she had ever eaten: her grandmother’s goat head tamales. Martinez had the recipe, but they never turned out quite right. Plus, getting her hands on a goat head was as difficult as one would imagine. She could still remember watching her abuela work, a one-woman tamale-making machine. Her hands moved with a speed that could only be obtained by muscle memory. For every one Martinez made, she’d have three on her side and be halfway through making the fourth.
It was nice to put work away for half an hour and be social over shared food. While she declined a second beer, she didn’t object to Morris getting another rum and coke. However, she couldn’t say no to a flan, especially after skipping over the pie case at breakfast. There was only so much willpower she could muster on the road.
Martinez carved into the creamy custard with her spoon and savored the milky caramel goodness. This was definitely flan. She didn’t speak until it was finished.
“You know what I’m thinking?” she said as she put her spoon down.
“Order a flan to go for later and park it in the hotel mini fridge next to the chicken?” he teased her.
She gave him a dirty look. “No. I’m wondering what makes a spirit wait centuries before suddenly going full-on poltergeist.”
“How much do you know about poltergeists?” he asked.
“Just what I read in the twins’ primer,” she admitted.
“Then you know the basics,” he translated for her. “Undead are dead things that exist in the mortal realm, but dead things belong in the land of the dead. In order to make and maintain a connection to the mortal realm, they need power. That’s why so many corporeal undead kill things—they take the raw energy from the living and use it as fuel.”
“So zombies don’t really crave brains?” she wryly asked.
He gave her a stern look. “Are you going to take this seriously?”
She pulled herself together. “Yes. Sorry. The flan is going to my head. Please continue.”
“For undead without a body, they have to find other ways to muster energy. That’s why people often perceive cold spots before a spirit manifests—it’s using the heat in the air as fuel,” he explained. “The nastier ones have figured out how to kill people without physically harming them, things like banshees, specters, and dullahan, better known as headless horsemen.”
“Headless horsemen? Like Sleepy Hollow headless horsemen?” she asked incredulously.
“Yep, they’re real, although very rare.”
“But poltergeists are different, right? They can touch people in the mortal realm even though they are incorporeal,” Martinez anticipated his next point.
Morris nodded approvingly—she was paying attention. “Exactly. It’s quite clever when you think about it. They don’t have to expend all that energy to maintain a physical body, but they can interact with objects and people when they want.”
“But knocking a pencil off a table is orders of magnitude easier than stripping the flesh off a person,” she pointed out. “Where is it getting all that energy?”
“That’s where will comes in. You ever seen a hurricane?”
“Not in person, but I got close to a tornado working a case in Kansas,” she answered.
“Same principle,” he asserted. “When a poltergeist is triggered—and sometimes it doesn’t take much—it can work itself up into a tizzy. If it holds on tight to all its anger, pain, and frustration, it creates a circular motion that can become a vortex, sucking in all the nearby energy.” Martinez nodded. It jived with what she’d read; once a poltergeists becomes active, they escalate.
“So our spirit could have been chillin’ in the land of the dead for ages before something triggered him, causing him to make a connection with the mortal realm and going full-on ‘They’re Here’?” she extrapolated.
“Exactly. Usually, it’s not hard to find them and talk to them—figure out what triggered them and use that to disrupt and disperse that energy. That effectively severs their connection to the mortal realm. But there’s not much I can do if I can’t find the sonofabitch,” he muttered. It was the first derisive reference she’d heard him use against the poltergeist since he’d arrived in Lafayette.
“Can we summon him and jump him?” she spitballed. Her first summoning was a ghost. Granted, it was her housemates who were even nicer than Casper.
“Not a bad thought, but we don’t have enough on him to do it safely,” he dismissed the suggestion.
“He speaks Cajun music. Can we lure him out Pied Piper-style and neutralize him?” she proposed. A practitioner could lace music with magic just as easily as words.
The half a minute Morris gave this idea told her it had legs. “Possibly. I can do the ritual by force, but it’s significantly harder and it’s messy. That’s why I try to persuade them instead. Restless spirits are like pigs—you can lead them anywhere with a slop bucket, but they will dig in as soon as you try to push them from behind.”
A spark went off in Martinez’s brain. “What if we could get you more information...would that make it easier to talk him down?”
“Sure, but we don’t have much to go on. I suppose the analysts might find something with the Acadian angle, but we are talking about events that happened before the US was even a country. And last I checked, we’re all out of witnesses.”
“Human witness,” she pointed out.
He didn’t like the glint in her eye. “I don’t deal with devils,” he said flatly.
“I don’t blame you,” she agreed wholeheartedly, “but I was thinking of the guides.”
The guides were three sisters that liked to voyeuristically watch the mortal realm from their native plane. They prided themselves on being fair and neutral parties in the greater supernatural world and could show a practitioner many things, if they were so inclined. They were favored by diviners and those that scried because their price for knowledge was low compared to other beings one could summoned for information. However, they always retained the right to refuse service. The nice thing about the guides was that they had a different sense of time.
“If anyone witnessed what happened to this guy, it would be them,” she argued.
Morris mulled it over and reluctantly agreed. “They might help. They are suckers for a tragic love story. How’s your relationship with them?”
Martinez wobbled her head equivocally. She’d had a rough start; the guides only cooperated when all three reached a consensus, which could be tricky. But once she figured out that mortals were their reality TV, she learned how to adjust her sales pitch. “They haven’t turned me down in a while, but I don’t ask lightly,” she answered honestly.
When the subtext of the question sunk in, Martinez turned the tables. “Wait, why do you need me to do it? I saw you with Zoe. You could charm the scales off a fish.”
“It’s complicated,” he said with chagrin. “Let’s just say I learned the hard way that sisters talk and you shouldn’t try to play one off the others.”
She shook her head. “Oh, Deacon.” She flagged down the waiter and asked for a flan to go and the check. Morris said nothing but didn’t try to hide the smirk on his face. She shrugged, “It was a good idea and summoning makes me hungry,” she said in a low voice once the waiter was safely out of earshot. “Now, what do we need to pull this off?”