Burn- pigeon 16 Read Online Free PDF

sanity, the joys of matrimony, and possibly the end of a career.
    Geneva's house was an easy walk from the Jazz Historical Park. Moving at a southern saunter, Anna enjoyed the narrow streets, the two- and three-story buildings, wrought-iron balconies heavy with ferns and flowers. Age, and two hundred years of crooked politicians taking more from the city than they gave back, overlaid everything with a sleepy decadence that was more seductive than alarming.
    Katrina might have brought much of New Orleans to its knees, but it had done wonders for the French Quarter. Anna had never seen it so clean and painted and primped. The seediness was still there. The undercurrent of lasciviousness and overindulgence that had been luring Christian leadership conventions to the area for a hundred years remained. But it smelled a lot better.
    In the Quarter, Uptown, the Garden District, in many of the neighborhoods in New Orleans, it was easy to forget the underlying menace of a city with a people who had declared war upon themselves.
    Dumaine, the street they walked down, was the home of many of New Orleans's voodoo shops, windows filled with charms and books and spells and all things pertaining to the African magic as filtered through an American--and commercial--perspective. Anna's favorite was Vieux Dieux. It always had weird displays set on a table outside the door. Today it was a tiny graveyard complete with miniature crypts.
    When they reached Geneva's door, Sammy woofed once politely. Two nine-foot-tall French windows fronted the narrow house, but both were blinded with heavy shutters peeling mauve paint. The entrance Geneva used was through an iron gate beside the house that let into an alley barely wider than Anna's outstretched arms. Beneath their feet a pathway, two bricks wide and grouted with moss, snaked between what had once been raised beds but were now low mounded hillocks of greenery spilling onto the walk.
    The peach-colored stucco of the house was to the left. To the right was a wooden fence that rose twelve feet, then was overtaken by vines, which climbed another five or ten feet, their tendrils bridging from the top of the fence to the house next door. Peeking through this dense curtain of greenery were beasts and faces, flowers, and patterns made by bits of ironwork collected over fifty years and nailed onto the fence.
    On her aunt's death Geneva had inherited not a single house but a ramshackle complex with three rental apartments and a two-car garage--unheard of in this part of town--with three brick, cavelike rooms behind it that local historians said were where the house slaves had lived. Hearing the bare-bones facts of Geneva's real estate, it would be easy to assume she was rolling in money, and she probably could have sold the buildings for close to a million dollars, but Geneva had no intention of selling.
    Probably, Anna thought, because moving would be an impossible task. Geneva's mother had been a pack rat, and the property was a maze of saved wrought iron, old tools, wooden shutters, memorabilia from the music world, and Lord knew what else. So Geneva held the property, and the property held Geneva hostage with a constant need for money to keep the roofs from leaking and the toilets flushing.
    The walkway ended in a courtyard no more than twenty feet square. It, too, was paved in brick and overgrown, vines hiding the fences to either side and mounting an assault on what had once been a carriage house but at some juncture had been made into a guest cottage. The cottage was one room wide and three tall, each of the upper rooms fronted by a tiny balcony and the walk-through sash windows common to the Old South. No lines were straight, no angle true to another. All that was rigid had cracked. That which was not rigid had warped as the house threw off the constraints of the rectangle. Vines and age blurring the edges, it looked as if the structure were melting into the garden. To accentuate the illusion a pond,