But there were also kids navigating their bikes around the potholes, jumping off the crumbling curbs. Dogs barked behind fences. Someone was practicing piano, the slow, awkward march of scales fighting against a distant radio on a hip-hop station. More houses showed signs of life than of death. The house we were spying on-a red and brown two-story with bars on the windows-had a planter by the front door that was already thick with violets. And, as with all the others, the X. I remembered vaguely having seen pictures of it on the news right after the hurricane, but I’d never really known what it was. So I asked.

“It’s the searcher’s mark,” Karen said. “After the hurricane, they would come through and check houses. When they were done, they’d put that on the front. It tells you who looked there, what date, and how many bodies they found. It’s one of the new symbols. You can find it on T-shirts.”

“Grim,” I said.

“There are always two sides. At least two,” Karen said. “The searcher’s X is the symbol of the death. The fleur-de-lis is the symbol of the rebirth.”

“It is?”

“Oh yes,” Karen said.

“It’s everywhere now. It never was before.”

“I thought you weren’t around before,” I said.

“I wasn’t. But I have been since. Okay. We have something.”

I put the binoculars back to my eyes. A black man in his middle thirties was walking up to the door. He had a white plastic grocery bag in one hand, and it tugged at his wrist as he unlocked the door. I watched as he went inside. None of the Glapions came out.

“They could still be in there,” I said.

“Or they might not,” Karen said. “Let’s mark this one off and hit the others. If we don’t have any luck, we can make another pass tomorrow.”

We didn’t have any luck at the next five houses either. Two, in the Ninth Ward, were ruins; the third showed signs of occupancy, but no one went in or out in the hour and a half we watched; the fourth was overrun by at least half a dozen children, all of them white; and the fifth-a duplex in an upscale neighborhood by the river-had mail waiting in the boxes for Adele Grant and Foster Middleton. Amelie, Sabine, and Daria Glapion were nowhere to be found.

“We can try again tomorrow,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

“This was a good day’s work. We’ve narrowed the field,” Karen said. “We can scratch off the two in the lower Ninth. And I think the duplex isn’t likely. It’s a white neighborhood. They’d stand out. The same with the kids.”

“So the one with the guy, or the empty one,” I said.

“I like the empty one. But if the boys are done with the van, we could also split the work. One car watches one house.”

I nodded. It made sense. Still, I felt restless. Karen slalomed through traffic, the rental blowing conditioned air against me in a losing battle against the day’s heat, and my hand tapping my knee in a slow double beat.

I was used to the idea of riders being a secret, part of a hidden world that I’d stumbled into. Driving through New Orleans, I started to wonder if that was true. I saw a Voodoo BBQ and Grill. A local football team, the VooDoo. A Voodoo dry cleaner’s. Did they know?, I wondered. Was it all supposed to be a joke and kitsch? Local color? Or did the people who named their businesses know that there were predators on the streets?

Generations had lived and died here, but the riders, the loa, had been there the whole time. Individuals or lineages. I had the sense that they were a part of the city, woven in with it, and that their presence had changed the nature of the city itself. New Orleans was only partly human. It was also something else; a great, broken, sprawling artifact. A church. A gate.

A temple…

My thumb made its double tap against my knee, paused, tapped again. I realized I’d been playing along with my heartbeat, and I knew what I’d been trying to tell myself.

“You know,” I said. “There’s someplace else we could try.”

THE VOODOO Heart Temple was at the edge of the French Quarter. If we hadn’t known to look for it, it would have been easy to miss. The street was filled with the small, desperate shops that live off the scraps of real attractions. The three-story buildings shadowed the street without cooling it. Together with the awnings over the sidewalk, the faded sign would have been easy to miss. It was in the shape of a real heart-fist-shaped and muscular with yellow deposits of fat-pierced by two long spikes. The windows were dim, but not dark. The door stood open.

“Well, there’s certainly enough room for an apartment above it,” Karen said, idling on the street. “At a guess, there’s probably an entrance in the alley behind it too.”

“All right,” I said. “How about if you take the car around to see what the back looks like. I’ll hang here and window shop until you get back. If anyone comes in or out, I can play all clueless white tourist.”

“Don’t go in,” she said.

I gave her my best Hello. Not stupid. look and slid out of the car. Karen and the minivan rolled on, turned a corner, and were gone. I walked slowly, peering in windows and trying not to look obvious. The shops were small, dim, and tacky. A lingerie shop with yellowed lace teddies in the front. A souvenir store with a display of dusty Mardi Gras beads and T-shirts. I noticed two shirts with the fleur-de-lis and one with the searcher’s X. Maybe a third of the storefronts were empty, small signs or just business cards on the doors announcing what property management company to contact if you were looking for a lease.

“Tell your fortune?”

I’d noticed the black girl sitting on the sidewalk. Her skin was the color of dark chocolate, her hair in beautiful braids, her clothes grubby and worn. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. When she smiled, she looked like raw mischief.

“Five dollars for a question,” she said. “Fifteen for a whole reading.”

I glanced up. Given where the girl was sitting, I could easily be at her side with a good view of the Voodoo Heart Temple. It would save me pretending to look through windows of closed stores, or loitering obtrusively. Besides which, the idea of a kid making up fortunes like it was a lemonade stand tickled me. I sat beside her, fished through my backpack, and came up with a ten.

“What’ll this get me?” I asked.

The girl narrowed her eyes, considering the bill like a doctor with an interesting patient at a clinic.

“Short reading,” she said.

“Done.”

She plucked the ten from my hand, pushed it deep in her pocket, and visibly composed herself. Her expression was so serious, and so clearly an imitation of the buskers and tarot readers of Jackson Square, that I couldn’t keep from smiling. The girl opened her eyes, took my right hand, and considered it. Her grip was soft as moleskin.

“You a very powerful person,” she said. “But you don’t know it. You think you do, but you don’t. You worried about your heart-will you find a man, and all like that-but you don’t need to worry. He’ll be along when the time’s right.”

“Good to know,” I said. She looked up at me, annoyed at the interruption. Something shifted behind the window of the Voodoo Heart Temple. Someone passing by the curtains, I thought.

“You don’t trust yourself,” the girl said, “but you ought to. You know more than you think. You have hard times ahead, but if you pay attention and find your real power, you’ll make it through better than when you started.”

The door of the temple shifted. I looked down at my palm, but trained my attention on my peripheral vision. I didn’t want to stare, but also I had to know when to glance up.

“And this is important, so you listen,” the girl said.

“Okay,” I said.

“It wasn’t your mama’s fault. She loves you, and she loves your daddy. She had a worm inside her when it happened, so you be gentle with her.”