The Heavens Rise

Movies had filled people’s brains with stupid ideas about private detectives, so when Arthelle saw the short, balding man with knife-slashes for eyes and a broad, ungainly smile take a seat a few feet away from her, she didn’t seem to pay him any notice. A good private detective was not a dapper, sharp-tongued fox; he was the type of guy who you wouldn’t have second thoughts about inviting into your living room, or allowing to take a seat on your bench. Allen Shire was that guy—unattractive, unremarkable, quiet; that’s why Cypress Bank & Trust gave him their most sensitive cases.

He kept his mouth shut, hoping the woman would get lost in her thoughts again so he could catch her off guard when he finally did speak. New town homes were sprouting up across the street, and beyond them, downtown’s shiny skyline etched a clear blue sky. Something about Atlanta always got him a little; as if the city had become everything his hometown of New Orleans might have been if it was just a little less corrupt, a little more above sea level, a little less easy.

“You a cop?” Arthelle Williams asked him. Her gaze was focused on two young female joggers as they passed in a burst of excited chatter. “You been followin’ me for four hours and you haven’t shot at me yet, so you must be somethin’.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Reporter?”

“Nope.”

“You lookin’ for somebody?”

“You’ve been on to me all day and you haven’t called the police? Brave woman.”

She shrugged, as if she wasn’t brave because he wasn’t all that scary.

“Figure this has got something to do with Marshall Ferriot, right?”

“That’s correct,” Shire answered.

“Well, if you’re lookin’ for the woman who tried to kill him, I’m not sure why you’re botherin’ the one who saved his life.”

“I’m not looking for Emily Watkins. I know where she is.”

“Jail, I hope.”

When he didn’t answer, she looked at him for the first time, adjusted her giant purse on her lap, craned her neck a little as if his silence had caused him to double in size. “No. Come on, now —”

“You sure hightailed it out of Lenox Hill fast, Ms. Williams.”

“They didn’t charge that girl with anything.”

“There was no one around to.”

“What are you— What do you mean?”

“I mean the person I’m looking for is Marshall Ferriot.”

The confusion passed over the woman’s deeply lined, jowly face, leaving behind a look of mild satisfied surprise. Then she laughed, the kind of bitter, sarcastic laugh people picked up from characters in movies. “Well, good for her, then.”

“Good for who?”

“Marshall’s sister. She took my advice, it looks like.”

“And that was?”

“To get her brother the hell out of town before another crazy nurse tried to kill him.”

•   •   •

“Mind control?” Danny Stevens asked for the third time since they’d started their phone call.

“I’m not trying to argue that it’s a thing here, I’m just telling you what the woman told me today, okay? And she didn’t believe it either. She thought the other nurses were all nuts, which is why she quit.”

The two men had been frat brothers back at LSU, and Danny had been Shire’s entree into Cypress Bank & Trust back when Danny started his own one-man firm. But most of the jobs they’d worked on up until now had been extensive background checks on high-profile new hires. This was the first real headache they had ever suffered together.

Before she had died the year before, Heidi Ferriot, grande dame of Uptown society turned tragic widow and bitter, shut-in nursemaid, had drawn up a will that shuttled most of her estate into a fat trust fund intended to provide medical care for her son, who had, according to the file the bank had given Shire, made one of the stupidest suicide attempts known to man and landed in a permanent vegetative state.

Heidi Ferriot and her son had evacuated New Orleans during Katrina’s approach, never to return. But as penance for abandoning the city that had made her family a small fortune, the woman had kept her money in one of the last locally owned banks in Louisiana. The only problem? Because her son had not spoken a word or responded to stimulus in almost eight years, the job of caring for him, and of receiving the hefty checks that came from the trust each month, had passed to his older sister, Elizabeth, a job the woman tended to only when she wasn’t engaged in the dogged pursuit of other women’s husbands and cocaine.

For most of the four days he’d been in Atlanta, Shire had been treated to a nonstop cavalcade of ugly stories from friends Elizabeth had stolen from, lied to or cheated on. And with each new sordid revelation, he and Danny Stevens had inched closer to the working theory that Princess Ferriot, as they’d come to call her, had saved up as much as she could from the disbursements and then hightailed it to a tropical island somewhere. As for her brother . . . well, every time they got close to discussing the awful possibility that she’d dropped him like deadweight, Shire would say it was time to alert law enforcement, and Danny would stall by saying Shire needed to interview more friends—as if the girl actually had any friends. And around and around they’d go while Shire lived it up at the Renaissance Concourse Airport Hotel, watching Delta Airlines jets take to the sky.

But now, in light of Arthelle Williams’s revelation that morning, the narrative had shifted, as his political clients like to say.

“How long were you working this nurse angle?” Stevens asked.

“It just seemed weird to me.”

“A bunch of nurses thinking an invalid is sending out . . . what? Messages? I mean, how does this mind control shit even work?”

“Look, if you want me to open up a file on the nurse who killed herself, I can, but I’m going to bill you for it. So let me just tell you now, for free, that everyone I talked to said Tammy Keene wasn’t remotely unstable or intoxicated that day. But for some reason, she used a box cutter to gut herself like a catfish when she went inside the kid’s room.”

“Let’s not get dramatic, Shire. Just curious how much of this you actually believe. That’s all.”

“I didn’t say I believed any of it. I said it was weird, is all. And the only part that matters is . . . well, now we know someone at that facility told Elizabeth Ferriot to get her brother out of town or he was going to be killed. Which means no income for Princess.”

“She won’t get any income if she stays out of contact, Shire. Six of one, half dozen of the other, as they say.”

“I know that.”

“I’m just saying. We got two questions here. And you haven’t answered ’em both. Not yet. So they’re running from the nurses, fine. But why’s she running from us?”

“Will it matter if I know where she went?”

•   •   •

The ferry landing was in a little town called Fernandina Beach, that sat just on the Florida side of the state’s border with Georgia. Apparently, there was a historic district, but all Shire could see was a few blocks of two-story brick buildings painted various pastel shades. The tallest thing in the skyline was the plume of white smoke coming from the refinery at the water’s edge.

Shire had expected at least a clutch of people at the harbor, but the blonde inside the ticket booth looked up from her copy of Twilight with a dazed expression that suggested he was the first person to ask something of her since she’d been hired. The harbor itself was tiny, just a few rows of slips around a pavilion-style restaurant that looked empty. Steel-colored clouds were knotted across the eastern horizon,