I still remembered those first, tiny, unremarkable acts of rebellion: sneaking out of my bedroom window and sitting on the back lawn at midnight, wearing only my second-best socks to church on Sunday, silently reciting the lyrics to “Walk Like an Egyptian” instead of the Lord’s Prayer at night. No punishment had come, and there had been a delicious, dangerous feeling. The hint that maybe I was actually free after all.

Now, driving away from Karen and Ex and Aubrey and even Chogyi Jake, I had a similar lifting and opening feeling in my heart. Of course I was afraid, and of course I was guilty. That was very nearly the point.

I drove to the French Quarter, put the minivan in valet parking in the hotel at which I no longer had a room, and pulled out my laptop. Two Google searches and thirty seconds on MapQuest got me what I wanted. My cell phone said it was 9:24. I rechecked the web page, got the number, and dialed, crossing my fingers. A man answered.

“Hello, this is Dr. Inondé.”

“Hi,” I said. “My name’s Jayné? I saw on your Web site that you do private consultations?”

There was a quiet hiss. I imagined him rolling his eyes at another idiot tourist. I really didn’t care what he thought.

“I do,” he said, “but I am just closing the museum for the night. If you can come in the morning-”

“I’ll pay you a thousand dollars for half an hour of your time if I can talk to you right now.”

There was a heartbeat’s span of silence, then the man laughed.

“I am at your service, Miss Jayné,” he said.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

The Authentic New Orleans Voodoo Museum-as opposed to the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum or the Voodoo Museum of New Orleans-was in a space no larger than a T-shirt store a block and a half off Jackson Square. The stores around it were closed, and the sign in the window also announced that the museum’s hours had passed and to come back in the morning. A low red light still burned inside, and when I knocked, the door opened.

Dr. Inondé was, to my surprise, a white man in his early fifties wearing a Hawaiian shirt, loose linen slacks, and a ten-foot-long red-on-tan serpent as thick as my arm looped around his right thigh, up his side, and across his shoulders.

I stepped in, the acrid smell of burning twigs greeting me. The place had all the charm of a roadside attraction. Cheap red curtains draped around awkward oil paintings of famous practitioners of voodoo. One labeled “Marie Laveau” stared out from the far wall. I tried to see Amelie Glapion in the proud, dark face, but it looked more like Frida Kahlo.

“Miss Jayné,” he said with a theatrical flourish of his wrist, sitting at a low black table. “What can the world of the voudoun do for you tonight?”

As if he’d rehearsed it, a low roll of thunder murmured in the background and a pelting, angry rain began. I sat in the offered chair.

“Okay, look,” I said. “I pretty much assume you’re a fake, and I don’t really care. The French Quarter’s a small place, and I have to figure you know the competition, right?”

Dr. Inondé smiled and spread his hands, ceding me the point. His snake lifted its head, shifted its weight on his shoulders, and lay back down.

“Okay,” I said. “For a thousand dollars. What do you know about Amelie Glapion?”

THIRTEEN

Dr. Inondé shook his head slowly, a small pink tip of tongue darting out to wet his lips. What was sensual and dangerous on his snake only made him look nervous.

“Amelie?” he said. “Why do you want to know about her?”

“When you’re paying the money, you can ask the questions,” I said.

He coughed out a single laugh, squared his shoulders, and leaned back.

“You think that I’m a fake,” he said. The theatrical richness of his voice had faded, but hadn’t entirely gone. “A show for the tourists. Well, most things around here are. That’s where the money comes from, isn’t it? People come here for the music and the mystery and the hope that some pretty coed will take her top off. It’s what we have to offer. So sure, I ham it up sometimes. We all do. Amelie, though? She was the real deal.”

“Was?”

“She hasn’t been doing well these last years,” Dr. Inondé said. “She and her family didn’t evacuate for Katrina. They could have, God knows, but the Glapion clan doesn’t leave this city.”

My cell phone went off, Aubrey’s number on the display. I turned off the ringtone, letting him drop to voice mail. I’d call him back when we were done.

“Sorry,” I said. “Go on. She didn’t leave?”

“She was like the captain of the ship. If her city was sinking, she’d go down with it. She lost her daughter.”

“Sabine’s mother?”

“You know Sabine, then? Yes. Sabine’s mother, Annette. And there was a boy, Sabine’s brother. Jean-Claude was his name, but everyone called him Jaycee. I don’t know exactly how they died, but really there were so many dead. People forget that. There were bodies in the streets. Bodies in the houses. September eleventh was a terrible, terrible thing, but we lost more here. They say it’s only two thousand dead or missing, but that’s crap. They don’t know.”

The bitterness in his voice stirred something in the snake. Its huge, broad head shifted, its black tongue flickered against the man’s cheek like a kiss. Dr. Inondé smiled, took the snake’s head, and kissed it between the eyes.

“I’m fine, Doris,” he said to the serpent. “I just get angry. Yes, Amelie lost her daughter and her grandson. And she had a stroke there at the Superdome. The stress was too much for her. If there had been a hospital to take her to, maybe they could have helped, I don’t know. After the storm, she was walking with a cane, and her whole left side was just… dead-looking. Like a zombie. She’s still a force to be reckoned with, but… it isn’t the same.”

“You sound like you know her pretty well,” I said, leaning forward. The roar of water on the street surged while he shrugged. Doris the snake’s head rose and fell.

“Everyone knows her, one way or another. That’s who she is. The story is she’s a direct maternal line to the divine Marie there. And the temple? Well, that’s been part of the family forever. Amelie inherited it from her mother, and Annette was supposed to take it from Amelie. That’s the way the Laveaus did it too. Mother to daughter. Only with Annette gone, Amelie had to step back in. I hear she’s grooming Sabine, but the girl’s sixteen.”

“Grooming her for what?”

“To take over,” he said. “Run the temple, do the tourist trade. And Amelie holds rites. Invokes the spirits. I’ve never been, but from what I’ve heard it’s a hell of a show. It’s medicine too, you know. I remember it used to be Amelie would have eight or ten people a week show up at the temple instead of going to an urgent care center. Even had one boy who’d been shot, and when the paramedics were taking him to the hospital, he told them to go to the temple instead. That is how important Amelie Glapion was to this community. How do you put a sixteen-year-old girl in a position like that?”

The same way you put a twenty-three-year-old one in charge of a world-spanning empire fighting against riders, I thought. You do it because you have to. Because something went wrong.

“Maybe she thinks Sabine can handle it,” I said.

“Well, I hope she’s right,” Dr. Inondé said. “We are competing for the same money, and God knows there’s not as much as there used to be, but I would hate to think I helped them lose the family business.”

Family business. There the phrase was again, tugging at me. The dark secret of my mother’s affair, Amelie Glapion’s rider cult and temple. The two ideas had wrapped themselves around each other like snakes on a caduceus. Dr. Inondé didn’t notice my frown; he carried right on, waving a despairing hand as he did.