Floodgates by Mary Anna Evans Page A

was listed as missing, I talked to everybody I knew who might have seen her there. Everybody.”
    Nina lifted her head and shoved her glasses back up her nose. Faye had seen Nina do archaeological research. She was a flippin’ bulldog. If Nina were looking for a missing friend, Faye sure wouldn’t want to get in her way. If Faye were ever missing, herself, she hoped Nina would be on her trail.
    “I talked to some people who did rescue work with her—mostly engineers she knew from the office. Charles was one of them. They’d gathered someplace in Metairie that didn’t flood, until they heard that rescuers were working at Zephyr Field, needing help they knew how to give. Once they heard that, they hustled their butts out there and got down to business right fast. You don’t mess with an engineer who’s on a mission. One of them had a company satellite phone. You know it was worth more than a pound of gold to rescuers working that week.”
    “What happened to Shelly after that?”
    “I couldn’t ever find anybody who knew. To hear people talk, she was there for days, then she just…wasn’t. If I’d had to guess, I would have said that she went looking for her parents, but they lived in Lakeview. So why in heck has her body been lying in the Lower Ninth Ward all the time?”
    Faye couldn’t begin to answer her.
    “Did Jodi show you the things found in Shelly’s pocket? Photographs and a newspaper clipping and some lists of names?”
    Nina nodded her head. “Detective Bienvenu wants me to tell her if I remember anything that’ll tell her what it all meant, but I’ve got nothing.”
    Faye could tell that Nina was nearly talked out. As they rounded the final curve of the park’s loop road, the temporary visitor’s center came into view. Matt was walking out the door toward the levee, preparing to give yet another guided tour to yet another boatload of tourists.
    Faye decided that Nina might be willing to answer one more nosy question. She nodded in Matt’s direction. “Did you know that Matt and Shelly were cousins?”
    “I did.”
    Nina’s short answer and terse tone caught Faye’s attention.
    “Don’t you like Matt?” The young man was so soft-spoken and inoffensive that Faye couldn’t imagine why Nina’s voice was so tight when she spoke of him.
    “I don’t know Matt well. He spent a good bit of time with Shelly, especially near the end, because he was dating someone she worked with. So was I, actually, but Charles didn’t like to hang out with co-workers in his spare time, so I didn’t know their crowd. Shelly, on the other hand, would hang out with anybody. When Matt started coming around her office, she made sure that he was part of her group of friends. She said it was nice to spend time with family, especially a cousin you knew when you were both kids.”
    Nina’s tone was too careful. Why didn’t she want to say whether Shelly liked Matt or not? Was she just being polite?
    Good manners trumped just about anything in this part of the world. Faye knew people who would like an ax-murderer if he was polite. She decided she wanted to see what it would take to get Nina to say something about Matt as a person.
    “So Shelly liked him.”
    “Shelly liked everybody.”
    Interesting. Nina had dodged the question a second time. Faye decided to let a little silence happen. Sometimes, a person would say whatever popped into her mind to make the silence go away. Nina’s stiff body language and guarded voice told Faye that the woman had something to say. Soon enough, she said it.
    “Shelly liked everybody,” Nina repeated. “Matt was family, so I guess she loved him. But she did say he was weird.”

Chapter Twelve
    Faye had managed to salvage the rest of the workday by propping Nina up and telling her not to think, just to screen soil. Faye had always found repetitive, slow work quieted her mind. She considered it a form of meditation. This was a good thing, because a lot of archaeological work