Burn- pigeon 16 by Nevada Barr Page A

trees, eaves, and vines. "I want to call Paul; see if I can catch him between things. He's being all things to all people at the moment. Port Gibson lost a deputy and a deacon. It falls to Paul to do triple duty till there are new hires."
    Neither moved nor spoke for a moment, hypnotized by the darkness and the dripping of the rain.
    M'Boya reached out a black paw, invisible but for the sheen on his fur from a patio light on the far side of the walled garden, and sank the tips of his claws into Anna's flesh. Spell broken, she pushed up from the sofa. "See you in the morning," she said to her three hosts.
    "Anna?" Geneva's voice stopped her as she was stepping through the French doors.
    "Yeah?"
    "Jordan is really a guy? This is not some cruel hoax perpetrated on the visually handicapped but massively talented?"
    "Jordan is a guy," Anna affirmed.
    Geneva groaned theatrically. "My reality has crumbled. My self-confidence at an all time low. I must ask you a personal question."
    Anna didn't much like being on the receiving end of personal questions, but she was, after all, a guest.
    "Shoot," she said.
    "Please be blunt with me. I'm a big girl. I can take it. Tell me, do you have a penis?"
    "I do," Anna replied gravely, "but it is not with me at present. More's the pity."
    Closing the doors quietly behind her, Anna paused a minute to breathe in New Orleans in spring after rain. In the mountains and deserts of the West there would be the ozone and pine, sage and dust--scents that cleared the head and the vision, made the heart race and the horizon impossibly far away and alluring.
    Here spring's perfume was lazy and narcotic, hinting of hidden things, languid hours, and secrets whispered on breath smelling of bourbon and mint. In Rocky Mountain National Park, the clean dry air scoured the skin, polished bone, and honed Anna's senses to a keen edge. Here it caressed, nurturing flesh with moisture, curling wind-sere hair. It coddled and swathed till believing in dreams and magic seemed inevitable.
    The Big Easy, Anna thought, letting the darkness carry her past the still fountain and into the guest cottage. Easy living, easy dying, easy come, easy go: It was as much a place of tides as the ocean that waited beyond the levees to reclaim it.
    The guesthouse's bedroom was on the third floor. The bath was on the second along with an armoire. A living-room-cum-kitchen took up the ground floor. Three rooms stacked one on top of the other with a zigzag ledge of a stairway that would have intimidated a mountain goat stitching them together. The building dated from the 1800s. Everything else was a hodgepodge of eras, half-finished projects, and passing fads. The bathtub was a relic of the 1970s, big and pink and square, and the kitchen and living room were an uneasy alliance of dark wood veneer paneling and fifties Formica.
    The bedroom was the saving grace. None of the bright ideas of owners over the years had made it to the third floor, and, though it was as seedy as the last gasp of a failing octogenarian and the NPS salary of Geneva, her one living heir, would suggest, Anna found it charming: worn hardwood floors, peeling white-painted cornices, yellowing wallpaper, sconce lighting, and two-inch-thick hardwood-and-antique-glass French doors opening onto a balcony twenty-four inches deep and seven feet wide.
    The room was as close to a tree house as grown-ups usually got. The place had running water but no electricity. That, too, Anna liked. She'd lit her way up the narrow stairs connecting the vertical home with a kerosene lantern with a chimney and a heavy glass base and set it on the room's only table, a battered TV tray scarred and daubed with so many colors of paint Anna guessed it had served a number of years in somebody's studio before it got recalled for house duty.
    A double bed, looking tiny after decades of queens and kings, leaned against the back wall. It had a painted iron head and footboard, the metal twisted into vines and