cool as she was, belonged outside the circle. Only now maybe she didn't. If Ex had a lover, and a lover who was really better equipped to fight riders than any of us, it was going to change things. I just didn't know how. It wasn't Ex I was jealous of, it was all of us. The little family that I'd made was changing, and nobody had asked me if I was okay with that. Maybe it was just because I had so little that protecting what was left seemed so important.
I let Karen drive, and half an hour later, we were in a decent-looking middle-class neighborhood, parked in the mouth of an alley, and peering down the street with binoculars. I had pretty much talked myself back to sane. As we drove through, I'd thought the houses looked pretty normal, apart from a bathtub ring four feet above the ground and the ubiquitous, eerie X mark that I'd seen out in Lakeview on the doors. Now that we had stopped, I began to notice other details. The yards with thick weeds and vines. Broken windows. The smell of mold and earth, like we were in the ruins of a place half reclaimed by nature.
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