“You all right, darling?” Carver drawled.
My heart had jumped into my throat; I had to gulp to get it back in my chest. Then I managed an embarrassed smile. “Sorry. I’m fine, really, I was just…thinking.”
Carver’s lips didn’t even twitch, but the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes crinkled up the same way they had in the grocery store. It softened the sense of sadness that hung over her.
“This old church is a good place for that,” she said.
“Do you come here often?”
It probably sounded like I was asking that to be polite, but it was more than that. Whatever had happened to me—I guessed it was some kind of vision—vision type “B,” or whatever—had left me feeling shaky and unreal. Like, maybe I was an illusion too. All Lily Carver would have to do is look away, and poof! Emerra Cole would blink out of existence.
Having her react to me gave me a sense of substance.
“Well, I work here,” Carver said, “so that would be a yes.”
“You work here?”
She pointed to one of the two rooms on the second floor at the back of the church. It was the room where I’d seen the light come on while I was sitting beside Vance outside.
“That’s my office,” she said.
That’s right. She worked with Mayor Gladwyn.
“It can be cramped,” she said as she lowered her finger, “but I’d take it over one of those boring modern buildings any day.” She paused, then corrected herself. “Almost any day. In the summer, I do find myself missing the air conditioning.”
When the wrinkles at her eyes crinkled up again, I found myself smiling in return.
“Daniel Vance told me that they made this place a government building.” I shrugged. “I guess I had a hard time imagining it.”
Carver let her eyes rove over the old church. “After the town bought it, I suppose they felt like they had to do something with it.” Her eyes met mine. “I like to use it for town meetings. The benches are uncomfortable, so it keeps the meetings nice and short.”
I laughed.
Lily Carver swept her long skirt to the side and walked around the edge of the bench so she could sit beside me.
“I heard it was the oldest building in town,” I said.
“It was built in 1704,” she said. “A joint effort by the whole fort.”
“This place was an actual fort?”
“Most places with ‘fort’ in the name were forts at one time. Fort Rive belonged to the French. They used it as a stronghold against anyone they decided was their enemy at the time. The British. The native tribes—”
“Does that mean that the people who lived here were soldiers?”
“Not all of them. Most of them were normal people who were willing to fight to live here.”
Carver caught me frowning.
“What is it?” she asked.
I forced my face into a neutral expression and shrugged. “Sorry. It’s just—” I struggled to find a polite way to say it. “I find it hard to imagine anyone wanting to live here that badly.”
“Well, I’m rather fond of it.” She sounded amused.
My cheeks flushed. “No, I mean…well, yes, but—wouldn’t it have been hot? And muggy? And there must have been, like, more predators around.”
“There were, but the swamp made it worth it.”
“The swamp?”
“Life can thrive here. It’s a haven for plants and animals. You never had to go hungry. It gave them water to drink and wash with, and it was an easy road that connected them with others.”
I thought about the canoes the Chitimacha made. Some were big enough to hold forty people. A god might have taught them how to make the canoes, but it was the swamp that gave them the cypress trees, and the swamp was where they used them.
Carver went on, “They say that the swamp has a soul, you know. That it’s as alive as the creatures who live in it, and sometimes, at night, you can feel it move.”
She’d lowered her voice the same way Daniel Vance had when he was telling his stories.
“Have you ever felt it move?” I asked. I was half teasing her—but only half.
The crinkles of her eyes and the smile of her lips matched, if only for a second. “No. But there’s so much going on in there, it does feel alive sometimes.” She took a deep breath and raised her head. “Bourdin loved this place.”
“Who?”
“Gilles Bourdin.”
She pronounced the name carefully, with an accent different from her normal Southern drawl. It came out sounding like “Jill Bore-dhan,” except the J in “Jill” was more of a G-z sound.
She went on, “He was a religious leader that came down from Canada. That’s who they built this chapel for.”
Gilles Bourdin. No doubt a small man with thinning dark hair and a tendency to glare.
“What church was he from?” I asked.
“He wasn’t from any church,” Carver said. “He was a heretic, and he got into a lot of trouble because of it. That’s why he had to leave Canada. The Catholics down here didn’t like him much either, but Fort Rive was willing to take him and his followers in.”
“Why?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Why did they take him in? Were the leaders not Catholic?”
In a rueful voice, she said, “Well, the fact that he brought a lot of women with him probably helped.”
Ah, yes. The lack-of-women problem. I had no idea we could be such a hot commodity.
Carver looked toward the empty center of the room. Her eyes narrowed as if she was watching a personal vision. “But I also think that Bourdin gave the people of Fort Rive something that they couldn’t get from their half-hearted commitment to their old religion.”
“What’s that?”
The line of her jaw tightened. “Certainty.”
When she noticed how closely I was watching her, she tried to fake a smile. It never reached her eyes.
She leaned closer to me. “He taught his own original doctrines, but he taught them with conviction. It wasn’t a matter of belief. To him, they were facts.” She sat up straight again. “Unassailable truth—it’s a mighty big draw.”
I knew what she meant. This life, and my last life, were built on a moosh of uncertainty. Nowhere to stand. Nothing to hold on to. I always found myself clinging to anything that felt stable, or running away from it to avoid disappointment.
“Can you tell me anything about his religion?” I asked.
Carver tilted her head. “I didn’t know you were interested in religion, Miss Cole.”
I wasn’t. Not usually. But if she knew anything about Gilles Bourdin's personal ideology, I could learn a lot about him. That’s what I really wanted to know. I wanted to learn about the man who might have built that cabin in the swamp, the magician who was a part-time preacher—the man I’d seen in my vision.
But I couldn’t say that to Lily Carver.
“I’m interested in heresy,” I announced.
Carver smirked and gave me a look from the side of her eye. It resembled an I-know-your-type look, but there was no disapproval.
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She turned away and let out a sigh. “Let’s see. I think it was the polytheism that got him run out of Canada.”
I checked the word “polytheism” against my vocabulary archives. “He believed in more than one god?”
“He taught that there were many beings of great power who would interact with humans,” she said, “if the humans prepared themselves.”
“Prepared themselves how?”
Carver frowned to recall the information. “There were levels of knowledge that you had to reach, and each new level had certain rites and rituals that required ceremonial objects.”
I thought about the collection stored in the cabin’s attic.
“Do you know what happened to the ceremonial objects?” I asked, carefully pitching my voice to avoid sounding too interested.
“Some of them were still here when the town bought the church,” Carver said, “but most of them have been lost. Probably stolen. They would’ve been worth a lot of money—Bourdin never did anything by halves, you know.”
Or maybe they were stored somewhere else to keep them safe.
“The town’s trying to recover as many of them as possible,” Carver added, “but I don’t know if they’ve ever found any.”
My mind tripped its way over that statement, one word at a time, trying to draw out all the implications that might be hiding under the words
“The…town?” I said.
Carver nodded.
“Like, the whole town?” I said.
“Not exactly,” Carver said. “It was proposed about seventy years ago and presented to the town council by the mayor at the time—”
“Not Gladwyn?”
“No.” Carver looked amused. “Not Gladwyn.” She lowered her voice as if she was confiding something to me. “He’s got big plans to renew this town. Give it the ol’ spit and shine. Bring it up to modern times. The past doesn’t concern him. He doesn’t care for this building or the museum, but he supports renewing the order when it comes up every five years. It has to seem like he cares.”
The words burst out of me: “There’s a museum?”
So much for not sounding interested.
Carver nodded toward the room on the second floor that wasn’t her office. “To say it’s not much would be an understatement, but it’s what we have, and I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to it.”
Her face glowed with the satisfaction of association. She was working right next door to history.
By then I was bubbling with questions. The orderly, one-at-a-time method I normally forced myself to follow couldn’t rein them in. I was bouncing on the pew.
“What’s in there? Is it all his stuff? What’s the story?”
Carver laid her hand on my knee. Probably to stop the bouncing. 1704 she said? Even if it wasn’t original, the bench must have been an antique.
“Easy there.” She moved her hand. “So you’re a history nut.”
There was no question in her voice. I was a history nut—that was obvious.
She was wrong, of course. In grade school, I scraped out B’s in the subject because most of the work involved coloring or drawing something. When I’d hit middle school and Crayola was no longer part of the lessons, I lost my motivation. Dates and facts bored me. Maps confused me. I threw my homework away without looking at it and only put in enough effort to avoid an F.
My interest in this was different. It mattered. I’d seen Gilles Bourdin. I’d stood in his cabin and looked over his relics. There was a person hidden behind all those meaningless dates. Like the Chitimacha, there were stories there.
What did you think history was, Emerra?
Oh, geez. I was a history nut!—or helping Big Jacky was swiftly turning me into one!
A vision that had less to do with my legendary eyes and more to do with my excitable imagination flashed before me; I saw myself as a crotchety old woman, hanging out in a restaurant, lecturing anyone who would listen (and several people who wouldn’t), and yelling for a refill on my hot chocolate to a waiter whose name was definitely not John.
My hand went to my forehead.
Carver, ignorant of my existential struggles, continued.
“The museum has everything that belonged to Gilles Bourdin or his church. There are some religious items, some jewelry, an icon, a few silk tapestries that he must have had specially embroidered—they’re quite beautiful—but the best part of the collection is his journals.”
“He left journals?” I asked. The thought followed: I’ll bet the Torr would pay a lot to get their hands on them.
Carver nodded. “Six hand-written journals. Hard-bound. Well cared for. Priceless.”
Hmmmm. I guess the Torr would have to be content with reading them. Probably under supervision.
She went on, “That’s how we know so much about his teachings.”
“What did he teach?” I asked.
Carver's chin rose slightly, and her eyes drifted so she was looking straight ahead. Since we were facing the back of the church, the two rooms on the balcony blocked off the upper row of stained-glass windows, but below the balcony, we could see the lower row. I wondered what it would look like when the sunlight was coming in.
“He taught that truth is priceless,” Carver said, “and that seeking knowledge and wisdom is the greatest good. Power, any kind of power, was only useful for seeking more knowledge, but as you gained more knowledge, you would gain more power. He believed that the world—this life—was only one plane of existence out of an infinity of planes that stretched through eternity, and that each new plane promised new knowledge and new power. He said that, if you knew how, you could walk from one plane to another, like passing through a door, and find all that knowledge open to you. He said that there would be tests and challenges, but that was the price you paid to pass through the door.”
My growing unease made me squirm.
If you listened to it one way, it sounded like good religious fluff, a solid example of what I thought of as “cult theology.” The leader had special, esoteric knowledge, and he promised people that if they were willing to follow him, he could make them special too. It was classic.
But if you listened to it another way—if you suspected the man who’d said it might have been a magician—it sounded like something…a lot less fluffy. I didn’t know how much of it was religion and how much of it was magic.
I wanted to change the subject, but I didn’t want to change it too much—because, you know, I was in the middle of an investigation.
“You mentioned something about ‘this life,’” I said. “That ‘this life’ was a plane of existence? Is that like a dimension?”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘dimension.’ The word has more connotations now. You’re thinking of something like the multiverse theory?”
I nodded.
“The modern theory of the multiverse didn’t exist back then,” she said. “My French is far from perfect, but I think he was using the term ‘plane’ in the sense of an aspect. Or a facet. This life was only one facet of existence, and death was another. The two were side by side—different aspects of the same reality. To him, the dead were never far away.”
Her voice grew quieter and firmer as she finished speaking. The difference made me glance up. The sad lines of her face had pulled back with a subtle tension that made her look as if she was trying to see through a sheer curtain.
I remembered what Miss Durand had told me about Mrs. Carver’s husband.
“They were only through the next door,” I said softly.
Mrs. Carver gave me another smile that never reached her eyes. “Well, yes. If you believe that kind of thing.”
Even if you didn’t believe, it must have been comforting to read.
“What happened to him?” I decided to use the slightly easier to pronounce first name: “Gilles, I mean.”
“We don’t know,” Carver said. “Bourdin disappeared one day. His followers believed that he had passed through one of his fabled doors, and they kept everything ready for his return.”
“Huh.” My mind chewed over the idea. “It sounds like they were taking him pretty literally with the whole ‘door’ thing.”
Carver shrugged. “There are lots of religions that promise the return of a god or a prophet. His followers took care of the church and passed on his teachings, but after a few generations, interest dwindled.”
Okay, that thought was too much. My mind choked on it.
“Several generations?” I said.
“Yes,” Carver said.
“And they didn’t see anything weird about that? Like, considering the average human lifespan?”
“Would it make more sense if I mentioned that the knowledge of immortality was one of the things Bourdin said they could learn?”
I rolled my eyes. Of course it was.
“When most of his followers had died,” Carver said, “the town tried to sell off the church. For years no one could buy it. Then a Fort Rive boy, who’d left to make his fortune, returned and bought it. It was passed down through his family until it got too expensive to upkeep. By then it was old enough to be history, and the town bought it back to preserve it.”
“I hope they kept everything the way it was.” When Carver glanced at me, I winked. “Just in case.”
Carver’s look of confusion disappeared, and the edges of her eyes crinkled up. “Well, if Bourdin ever does come back, he’ll have to deal with the fact that we moved all his things into the museum. You have to expect things like that when you disappear for three hundred years.”
I grinned.
Mrs. Carver rose to her feet. It was a slow motion with no wasted movement, but it got the job done. “I’m sorry, darling. If you want to see the museum, you’ll have to wait for another night. I need to walk home.”
I stumbled to my feet. “Before you go, can I get you to look at something for me?”
Carver turned to me, her eyebrows arched with surprise. “Why, certainly.”
I pulled out Conrad’s phone, opened up the photo of my sketch, and handed it to her. She studied the photo while I studied her.
There was nothing in her face except curiosity.
“Does this have something to do with the lurkers?” she asked.
“This is why the lurkers are coming into Fort Rive,” I explained. “They’re looking for this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a…um…well, it’s a lamp. It’s a stone bowl, but it’s a lamp.” Since that made everything about as clear as Louisiana swamp water, I pointed, helpfully, to the top of the stem. “See the flame?”
Her eyes flicked up to meet mine. “I didn’t know the lurkers could shape stone.”
Could they? Vance had said they made knives, and I’d seen their spear points. What little stone they found, they certainly put to good use.
But I knew that wasn’t part of Carver’s implied question.
“They didn’t say they made it.” I hesitated. How much detail could I—should I—give her? “They said they were guarding it.”
Her gaze flew back to the photo. “Meaning this was in the swamp.”
I was glad she was willing to take the lurkers at their word. After Gladwyn’s skepticism, I’d wondered how much time I’d have to waste convincing people that the lurkers were telling the truth.
“Have you ever seen it before?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Carver said without looking up. Her left hand drifted toward her mouth. She put the tip of her thumb and index finger to her lips, and her narrowed eyes drank in the details.
If she was anything like me, she’d have a million questions, burning at the front of her brain. But she was also a limited Torr initiate. She knew that there were things she couldn’t ask.
She handed the phone back to me. “Am I allowed to talk to other people about it, or do I have to play it close to my chest?”
“If the person you’re talking to knows about the lurkers, you can ask them about the lamp, but otherwise…” I shook my head.
She gave me a pitying look. “Secrecy makes things difficult, doesn’t it?”
I gave her a heartfelt nod.
She put her hand on my arm. “Come on, darling. I have to lock up, and you probably need to get back to the motel. Did you ride Olene’s four-wheeler into town?”
“Oh, shoot.” I looked at Conrad’s phone. It was 6:58. “I’m going to be late!”
I dodged around like a ditz, feigning toward the pew to grab my jacket—I hadn’t brought a jacket—edging toward the door, then stopping to say goodbye because, darn it, I had manners.
“Sorry,” I said, “I have to rush. Jay’s waiting. But thank you.” I ran-skipped two steps toward the door, then turned, full circle, to cry out to her, “And…thank you!”
As I ran toward the main street, a voice in my head mocked me: A double thank you. How polite.
I didn’t have any trouble ignoring my inner heckler that time. I’d given Carver one thank you for stopping to talk to me, and another for looking at the photo. Or for not fighting me like Gladwyn had. Or for not lying to me—
An image of Darius’s slight frown appeared in my head.
—for probably not lying to me.
Really, I could’ve given her a half dozen more thank yous and meant every one of them.