Lafayette Cemetery was a box in the middle of the Garden District. Eight-foot-high walls of whitewashed, fern-and-lichen-crusted brick formed the sides of the box, and each wall had a spiked iron gate in its middle that was chained and padlocked at night. With the resident bodies being interred aboveground, the crypts and tombs formed rows of short buildings, their curved concrete and marble roofs peeking over the wall. Maureen had no trouble understanding why New Orleans cemeteries were called “Cities of the Dead.” Sections of the cemetery were even named as if they were city neighborhoods, the pathways running through them signed like streets.
She’d been in Lafayette before. She liked it there. She had walked among the tombs on more than one afternoon, nursing a double espresso from the nearby coffee shop. The place was even a popular tourist attraction. But her visits had been during the day, when there were other people, living people, around her. Tonight, she stood with Preacher outside the walls, trying to find a way in. Apparently, there was one dead body inside that didn’t belong there.
They had checked each gate, Maureen jumping out of the patrol car at each one to inspect the locks, and the four of them remained secure. However the unaccounted-for dead person had gained entrance, it hadn’t been through one of the gates.
“Has anyone called the, uh, custodian,” Maureen asked, “or whatever he’s called?”
She really wanted to say “cryptkeeper.” The guy looked the part. She’d seen him around the neighborhood. A pale, pink-faced older white guy about her height, with long, stringy white hair streaming out from under an endless variety of old mesh-backed baseball caps. He dressed in ratty jeans and stained T-shirts and rode a rickety old bike with a radio and a rusty bell tied to the handlebars. Maureen couldn’t think of a job where dress code could be less important.
“That’s what I was told,” Preacher said. “I guess he’s on his way. We have to wait for him to ride over here.”
“We couldn’t send a car for him?” Maureen asked.
“You’re hilarious, Coughlin, you really are. We’re a chauffeur service?”
Maureen looked around, hands on her hips. The streets were quiet. She could hear the traffic light change from red to green, one light going out, the other coming on, at the nearby intersection. “Anybody else coming?”
“Beats me,” Preacher said. “I bought the call, so maybe it’s us until crime scene and the coroner’s office gets here. I didn’t sense incredible urgency.”
“So we went from babysitting live bodies on Magazine Street,” Maureen said, “to babysitting a dead one in there.”
“It would appear so,” Preacher said. “You’re wondering now how you could have missed it so much, aren’t you?”
Maureen took out her cigarettes, studied the pack, jammed it back in her pocket. She looked at the top of the wall. Wasn’t really that high. “Gimme a boost.”
“Coughlin.”
“C’mon, Sarge. Gimme a boost. I think I hear something inside the cemetery. Voices, I think. We should get in there.”
“You think I’m going to fall for that?” Preacher asked. “We wait for the man with the key.”
“How’d the dead body get in there?” Maureen asked. “Somebody tossed it over the wall? How’d anyone know about it if the place is locked up tight? Maybe someone is inside.” She bounced on her toes. Maureen noticed the security guard in front of Commander’s Palace across the street watching them. Here’s his excitement for the night, she thought. Mine, too, probably. She made a mental note to make sure she talked to the guard later. He could be the kind of witness who might actually talk to the police. “Who knows how long it’ll take anyone to get here? Gimme a boost, help me get over the wall. I can clear the scene at least, make sure it’s safe.”
“I’m willing to bet,” Preacher said, “there is no body. I bet it’s a prank, a goof. It happens.”
“Better we find out sooner rather than later,” Maureen said. “We could save a bunch of people some trouble by checking it out first.” She saw Preacher’s shoulders droop an inch or two. She knew she had him. And it wasn’t her whining that had persuaded him. She knew her logic was sound. “C’mon, let me do a little police work tonight. Please.”
Preacher handed over his radio. “I’ll get the other from the car.”
Maureen secured the radio on her belt, clipped the mic to her shoulder. “Now help me up there.”
“Let’s go around the Sixth Street side,” Preacher said. “The wall is shorter over there.”
“You’re joking,” Maureen said. “You’re stalling. The wall is the same all the way around.”
“It’s not the same,” Preacher said. “If you don’t know by now that the whole city’s crooked, I can’t help you.”
“Yeah, you can,” Maureen said. “Help me climb.”
“It’s your funeral,” Preacher said, chuckling at his own joke. He moved close to the wall. With an elaborate groan, he got down on one knee, leaning one shoulder against the bricks. “Step one is the thigh, step two is the shoulder, after that, reach up and put those young muscles to work.”
“Thanks, Preach,” Maureen said, and she started her climb.
Standing on one leg, balancing on Preacher’s shoulder, the top of the wall was at shoulder height. Grabbing with two hands, sending dust and pebbles tumbling down on Preacher, she pressed her body high enough to swing her hips atop the wall. Surprised, she realized she’d climbed atop a wide marble platform. As she stood, a cold gust of wind knocked her off balance and sent dead leaves twirling over her feet and scratching across the marble’s surface.
She steadied herself and looked down at Preacher as he struggled to his feet, dusting her boot print off his shoulder.
“You all right?” she asked. “If I have to get down and help you, it defeats the purpose.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Preacher said. “I’m not the one sneaking into a cemetery in the middle of the night.”
“I’m not sneaking,” Maureen said, though she did feel like a young girl up to mischief. “I’m doing police work.”
“Tell that to the ghosts,” Preacher said. “This is one of the most haunted places in the city. In the world, maybe.”
“Nice try,” Maureen said. “Save it for your tour guide career.” She turned in a circle. “I’m on a shelf or something up here. I can see the whole cemetery almost.”
She looked over the tops of the vaults and crypts. From her vantage point, the cemetery really did look like a ruined cityscape, maybe an old Greek or Roman village after a century or two of neglect. And okay, she had to admit, the vibe was extra-creepy. Nothing more eerie, she thought, than an empty, silent city. Not that she’d ever tell Preacher how she felt.
“You see our body?” Preacher asked.
Maureen frowned. “I do not.”
At second glance, she realized less of the cemetery was visible to her than she’d thought.
Magnolia trees rose in various spots, hiding some of the tombs. Live oaks grew on the sidewalks surrounding the cemetery, and their long, gnarled branches reached over the brick wall, hiding the inside edges and corners of the grounds in shadow. Many of the structures stood close together, creating narrow alleyways, invisible to her from where she stood. The cemetery mirrored the neighborhoods she patrolled, Maureen thought. The closer and longer that she looked at them, the more untended and mysterious, and possibly dangerous, spaces she discovered. She would have to get down from her perch and search the cemetery on foot. The longer she looked at it, the larger the cemetery seemed to grow. Searching the corners and shadows and alleyways alone would take a lot longer than she had anticipated.
“You realize what you’re standing on, right?” Preacher said.
“What’s that?” The wind was rising again. Maureen thought she heard musical notes. A flute, maybe a toy piano.
“What you’re standing on,” Preacher said, “is the mausoleum. You know, a big marble-and-concrete filing cabinet, basically, full of two centuries of human remains.”
Maureen looked down at her feet, transmitting a silent apology to the spirits of the dead. “I’ll let you know when I’ve found our body.”
She walked to the edge of the shelf. She sat, fighting the wind, letting her legs dangle, and then she dropped to the ground.
She landed with a thump. A sleeping stray cat shrieked to panicked life right at her feet, darting into the darkness. Maureen shouted and stumbled backward against the mausoleum. Startled by the noise and the commotion, two more cats shot out of the grass, launching themselves in opposite directions, shadows darting among the crypts. Maureen dropped her flashlight. She had her weapon halfway drawn before she stopped herself.
From the other side of the wall, she could hear Preacher laughing at her. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she might have heard the security guard chuckling as well.
“I’m fine,” she shouted. That she’d been so quick to draw embarrassed and frightened her. The panic felt out of character. “God, I hate cats.”
She re-secured her weapon and picked up her flashlight, shined it to the left and then to the right down the path of hard dirt and dead grass. Nothing. No body, no ghouls, and thankfully no more stray cats. The surrounding streetlights shed a pale glow on the grounds. At least she wasn’t fumbling about in the pitch-dark, she thought. The idea occurred to her, looking around, that this whole scenario could be part of some elaborate welcome-back prank. Please, God, she thought, don’t let me shoot one of my coworkers because he jumped out at me wearing a monster mask.
Her radio crackled. Preacher’s voice, “This was your idea. Get to work.”
She keyed her mic. “We got nothing as to where the body might be?”
“Inside the walls, that’s the best we got,” Preacher said.
“Fuck me.” Should’ve waited for backup, she thought.
She walked the wide grass path with careful steps, flashlight beam sweeping in front of her from side to side. She was looking for signs of foul play, for signs of a dead body, but it was hard not be distracted by her surroundings. Some of the crypts and tombs were badly neglected, crumbling, ashen, and stained, the angels adorning their peaked rooftops having lost an arm or a wing or a halo, the engraved family names all but worn away by time and weather. Other buildings shone white and new in the beam of her flashlight. Oddly, age had little bearing on condition. On one of the cleanest tombs, the inscription revealed that the most recent inhabitant had been interred more than eighty years ago. Another cold winter gust rushed along the path and Maureen heard the musical notes again. Like someone blowing into the top of an empty bottle.
Maureen caught herself reading the names and the dates and the titles inscribed on the marble slabs on the faces of the crypts. Who had been married, who had been a parent. So many children; New Orleans had proved a hard place for them. Many of them had lived brief lives, only weeks, sometimes only days. Other people had survived into their seventies and eighties, even in the nineteenth century, having lived and died in New Orleans, she thought, before the first of her starving ancestors had ever boarded a ship in an Irish port. She read many Irish names, more than she’d figured she’d see. She both wanted and didn’t want to see Coughlin on one of the nameplates. Or Fagan, her mother’s maiden name.
At the foot of each nameplate was a small marble shelf, and on some of the shelves passing mourners had placed gifts and offerings for the recent and long-ago departed. Coins. Paper flowers. Tall glass candles. A warped and browned paperback copy of King Lear. A filthy white teddy bear tucked into an old urn, Mardi Gras beads placed around his neck, the beads as dull and colorless as the ashen marble tombs. Maureen fought the urge to reach out and touch the bear’s little nose, to scratch its frayed ears.
Even those who were interred under simple headstones lay in graves elevated two or three feet above ground. The graves reminded Maureen—and the thought felt disrespectful but she couldn’t dismiss it—of flower boxes in a garden. Most of them badly neglected flower boxes, she thought, the headstones cracked and crumbling, trash caught in the high grass that surrounded them. Some of the graves were fenced with wrought iron like the gardens and yards of her neighborhood.
Hanging from a leaning segment of iron fence, Maureen spotted the source of the notes she’d heard in the wind. A set of wind chimes. They were cheap, maybe bought in a card store, or from a stall in the French Market, but they looked new. Whether they’d been placed there as a gift for a lost loved one or as a way to lead her to this particular grave, Maureen had no idea. As she got closer, she started suspecting the latter.
On the other side of the fence, a dark form lay sprawled atop a grave. Maureen keyed her mic. “Any sign of our man with the key?”
“Negative,” Preacher said. “You know, I hope dispatch wasn’t thinking we would call him.”
Maureen let that go. Things were certainly getting back to normal. “I may have something here, stand by.”
Slowly, she played her flashlight beam along the figure. Cheap blue Keds, bare ankles, cheap jeans, an oversized and misshapen blue-and-white-striped sweater. Not much protection, really, against the cold. The vic was a woman, definitely. There was something familiar to Maureen about the form. Her heart hammered at her sternum. She moved in closer. Blood, a lot of blood, stained the front of the sweater and had run onto the ground, darkening the gravel around the woman’s head. Another throat slash. Maureen’s stomach turned over. It burned. Oh man, she thought. Oh no.
She shined the light on the victim’s face. Stringy brown hair stuck to the pale cheeks, the cracked lips.
“Holy. Shit.”
Into the mic she said, “Preach, I’ve got our body. I think it’s Madison Leary.”
As if she’d heard Maureen’s voice, the woman’s eyes shot open. One was green, the other was blue. The woman gasped and gurgled. Blood sprayed into the air. Maureen’s hand shook as she held the mic. “It is Madison Leary. And she isn’t dead. Call a fucking ambulance.”
She had nothing to staunch the bleeding. She sprinted for the nearest exit.