River Road by Suzanne Johnson Page B

since I was here last.”
    I looked around, doing a quick tally. “Yeah, Jean Lafitte shot a hole in that armchair with the fleur-de-lis upholstery and I couldn’t replace the fabric. I burned up the ceiling fan and coffee table with the elven staff. I bled all over the old sofa.”
    Since Alex had lived here briefly after the storm, trying to accordion his bulky frame onto a frilly daybed, I’d also turned the downstairs office into a proper guestroom.
    Tish didn’t respond, and I turned, expecting to see pity. Instead, she had her teeth firmly clamped together, fighting laughter. She lost the battle, breaking into a bray that made me laugh too. “That’s pathetic, DJ.”
    “Yeah.” I smiled at her, unable to shelter my heart by keeping her at a distance. I shouldn’t have tried. “I’ve missed you.”
    “How are you, really?” Tish asked. “Are you happy about all the changes, or wish things were back like they were before the storm? The relaxed borders will affect the sentinels and enforcers more than anyone else.”
    I had to think about my answer. I missed the innocence of life before the storm, not just my own innocence but the city’s. Before Katrina we all had a deep-seated naïveté that we might have our problems but somehow our foibles would never escalate into a full-out catastrophe. Katrina had been a big eye-opener.
    I shrugged. “It is what it is. There’s good and bad. Not like we can do anything about it.”
    She smiled. “Very practical. Very Gerry. You’re a lot like him.”
    I laughed. “So people keep telling me.” A comparison to Gerry wasn’t necessarily a compliment, although I knew Tish meant it that way. The Elders had viewed him as impulsive and unpredictable, and he’d died in the act of betraying them. I suspected “sins of the father,” as much as my gender and non-warrior status, kept them from giving me the job as sole sentinel. Although after today, I had to admit Alex’s steady nerves and investigative skills had been impressive.
    I pulled out the vials containing the water samples and spread another set of testing jars along my worktable. I conducted meetings at my office, but the real business of magic took place here, on this long mahogany table surrounded by shelves of books and the building blocks of spells and potions.
    While Tish unpacked her water-testing supplies, I filled her in on the day’s events in Pass a Loutre. “Any ideas on how to do this?”
    She picked up one of the vials and poured a few drops into each of three culture dishes. “I’m just going to use a commercial kit for lead and other pollutants, so we can rule them out. There will be some—there always is—but if levels are high enough to make people sick we should be able to tell. The first thing to check for is E. coli. That’ll take a while to test—we’ll have to put the water samples in a growth culture, see if we can grow a colony.”
    Ick. “How long will it take?”
    “About twenty-four hours, and it has to incubate in the fridge. Forty-eight hours otherwise.”
    I’d told Rene three days, which was cutting it close. Moldy leftovers were one thing, but I really, really didn’t want to incubate an E. coli colony in my refrigerator. “The mers can wait,” I said.
    She finished setting up her dishes, covered them so Sebastian wouldn’t wander into the E. coli forest, and set them on a shelf. “That should do it for normal pollutants—we’ll know in a couple of days. I don’t have a clue how to detect magical contamination in water, though. We’re going to have to figure out how to do that.”
    We left the worktable and eased into the armchairs near the windows. My house had weathered Katrina well. The high ceilings and soft lamps, the tall windows with their old Victorian crown molding, and the slate hearth in front of the coal-burning fireplace gave the room a solid, secure feeling. Nothing says permanence like an old house that has weathered hurricanes, high tides,