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Ruined
Paula Morris
FOR REBECCA HILL
PROLOGUE
New Orleans, the summer of l853- Yellow fever ravages the busy port city. Bells toll for the souls of the
 
dead. Boats on the Mississippi River are placed in quarantine, their cargoes left to spoil, their crews felled by
disease. Before the summer is over, eight thousand people will die.
In the city, yellow fever is known as the Stranger's Disease. Immigrants -- Italian, Greek, German, Polish,
new arrivals from the great cities of New York and Boston -- have no resistance to the fever. The Irish, who'd
traveled to New Orleans to escape their terrible famine, soon fall victim, dying within a week of the first
sinister chill.
During the day, the streets are empty. At night, mass burials take place all over town. Graveyards fill; corpses
lie rotting in piles, swelling in the sun. Gravediggers are bribed with alcohol to ignore the putrid smell and
dig shallow trenches for the bodies of the poor. New Orleans's black population -- slaves and the free people
of color -- have seemed largely immune, but in August of l853, even they start to succumb. Native-born
wealthy families -- Creole and American -- suffer as badly as poor immigrants.
The ornate tombs in the walled cemeteries, New Orleans's famous Cities of the Dead, fill with mothers and
fathers, daughters and sons. At Lafayette Cemetery, on the new,
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American side of the city, bodies are left at the gates every night. There is no room to bury these unknown
dead, and many of the corpses are burned.
In the last week of August, in the dead of night, a group of men unlock the Sixth Street gates to Lafayette
Cemetery and make their way by torchlight to an imposing family tomb. Two coffins of yellow fever victims,
both from the same family, had been placed in the vault earlier that afternoon, one on each of its long, narrow
shelves. According to local custom, once in place, the coffins should have been sealed behind a brick wall for
a year and a day.
But the coffins are still unsealed. The men remove the marble plate, covering their mouths, choking at the
smell of the bodies decomposing in the heat. Onto the top coffin, they slide a shrouded corpse, then quickly
replace the plate.
The next day, the tomb is sealed. A year later, the men return to break through the bricks. The two
disintegrating coffins are thrown away, and the bones of the dead covered with soil in the caveau, a pit at the
bottom of the vault.
The names of the first two corpses interred in the vault that terrible August are carved onto the tomb's roll
call of the dead. The name of the third corpse is not.
Only the men who placed the body inside the tomb know of its existence.
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***
CHAPTER ONE
***
TORRENTIAL RAIN WAS POURING THE AFTER" noon Rebecca Brown arrived in New Orleans. When
the plane descended through gray clouds, she could only glimpse the dense swamps to the west of the city.
Stubby cypress trees poked out of watery groves, half submerged by the rain-whipped waters, flecked with
snowy herons. The city was surrounded by water on all sides -- by swamps and bayous; by the brackish Lake
Pontchartrain, where pelicans swooped and a narrow causeway, the longest bridge in the world, connected
the city with its distant North Shore; and, of course, by the curving Mississippi River, held back by grass-
covered levees.
Like many New Yorkers, Rebecca knew very little about New Orleans. She'd barely even heard of the place
until Hurricane Katrina hit, when it was on the news every night -- and it wasn't the kind of news that made
anyone want to move there. The city had been decimated by floodwaters, filling up like a bowl after the canal
levees broke. Three years later, New Orleans still seemed like a city in ruins.
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Thousands of its citizens were still living in other parts of the country. Many of its houses were still waiting
to be gutted and rebuilt; many had been demolished. Some of them were still clogged with sodden furniture
and collapsed roofs, too dangerous to enter, waiting for owners or tenants who never came back.
Some people said the city -- one of the oldest in America -- would never recover from this hurricane and the
surging water that followed. It should be abandoned and left to return to swampland, another floodplain for
the mighty Mississippi.
"I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my life," said Rebecca's father, who got agitated, almost angry,
whenever an opinion of this kind was expressed on a TV news channel. "It's one of the great American cities.
Nobody ever talks about abandoning Florida, and they get hurricanes there all the time."
"Tail's is the only great city in America," Rebecca told him. Her father might roll his eyes, but he wouldn't
argue with her: There was nothing to argue about. New York was pretty much the center of the universe, as
far as she was concerned.
But now here she was -- flying into New Orleans one month before Thanksgiving. A place she'd never been
before, though her father had an old friend here -- some lady called Claudia Vernier who had a daughter,
Aurelia. Rebecca had met them exactly once in her life, in their room at a Midtown hotel. And now she'd
been taken out of school five weeks before the end of the semester and sent hundreds of miles from home.
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Not for some random, impromptu vacation: Rebecca was expected to live here. For six whole months.
The plane bumped down through the sparse clouds, Rebecca scowling at her own vague reflection in the
window. Her olive-toned skin looked winter-pale in this strange light, her mess of dark hair framing a narrow
face and what her father referred to as a "determined" chin. In New York the fall had been amazing: From
her bedroom window, Central Park looked on fire, almost, ablaze with the vivid colors of the dying leaves.
Here, everything on the ground looked dank, dull, and green.
Rebecca wasn't trying to be difficult. She understood that someone needed to look after her: Her father --
who was a high-powered tech consultant -- had to spend months in China on business, and she was fifteen,
too young to be left alone in the apartment on Central Park West. Usually when he was traveling for work,
Mrs. Horowitz came to stay. She was a nice elderly lady who liked watching the Channel II news on TV with
the volume turned up too loud, and who got irrationally worried about Rebecca eating fruit at night and
taking showers instead of baths.
But no. It was too long for Mrs. Horowitz to stay, her father said. He was sending her to New Orleans,
somewhere that still looked like a war zone. On TV three years ago they'd seen the National Guard driving
around in armored vehicles. Some neighborhoods had been completely washed away.
"The storm was a long time ago -- and anyway, you're going to be living in the Garden District," he had told
her. They were sitting in her bedroom, and he was picking at the
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frayed edges of her cream-colored quilt, not meeting Rebecca's eye. "Everything's OK there -- it didn't flood.
It's still a beautiful old neighborhood."
"But I don't even know Aunt Claudia!" Rebecca protested. "She's not even my real aunt!"
"She's a very good friend of ours," her father said, his voice strained and tense. "I know you haven't seen her
for a long time, but you'll get on just fine with her and Aurelia."
All Rebecca could remember of Aunt Claudia were the jangly bracelets she had worn and her intense green
eyes. She'd been friendly enough, but Rebecca had been shooed away after a couple of minutes so the adults
could talk. She and Aurelia, who was just a little girl then, seven years old and very cute, spent the rest of the
visit playing with Aurelia's dolls in the hotel bedroom.
And these were the people -- these strangers -- Rebecca was expected to live with for six months?
"Claudia is the closest thing I have to family -- you know that. Everything's arranged. End of discussion."
"There hasn't been any beginning of discussion," Rebecca complained. Because her mother had died when
Rebecca was small, and because she had no grandparents or any real family, she and her dad had always been
a tight team -- Brown, Party of Two, as they often joked. Now, all of a sudden, why was he acting in such a
high-handed manner? "You never even asked me what I think. You're just shipping me off somewhere ...
somewhere dangerous. Haven't you heard about the crime in New Orleans? And there were, like, two other
hurricanes this year!"
"Oh, Rebecca," her father said, his eyes murky with tears.
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His whole body slumped, as though she'd taken a swing at him. He put his arm around her and pulled her
close. His voice was soft. "Hurricane season is over, honey. I promise you, I won't let anything bad happen to
you. Not now, not ever."
"Oh, Dad," Rebecca said, the words muffled by his shoulder. She couldn't remember him ever acting quite
this way before. There were times when her father went quiet and broody, just sitting around the apartment
gazing at photographs of her mother and looking morose, but she couldn't remember him crying. "I'm not
really worried about bad things. It's just ... I don't want to leave this apartment and my friends and school and
everything, just to go somewhere messed-up and weird. It might be really boring."
"I hope we both have a very boring six months," he said. He drew back from her, and gave her a tired half
smile. "Believe" me, boring would be good."
Boring was exactly Rebecca's first impression of the near-empty Louis Armstrong airport. She'd wondered if
she'd be able to see Aunt Claudia and Aurelia in the crowd, but trudging from the gate, listening to the piped-
in jazz playing throughout the terminal, Rebecca spotted them at once. It would have been impossible to miss
them, she thought, her heart sinking. Claudia was dressed in some sort of gypsy costume, including a bright
headscarf and giant silver hoop earrings. She was darker skinned than Rebecca remembered, and her eyes
were a strange sea green, her gaze darting around like a bird's.
Aurelia had grown -- she was twelve now -- into a round-faced cherub, her messy dark curls tied up in a
ponytail. She
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was dressed far more formally than her mother: a black plaid skirt, a black woolen blazer emblazoned with a
gold crest, white knee socks, and lace-up shoes. This had to be the school uniform for Temple Mead
Academy, the school Rebecca would be attending as well. The uniform was even worse than she'd imagined.
Her friends at Stuyvesant High School would die laughing if they saw that prim outfit, not to mention Aunt
Claudia's Halloween-style gypsy getup. If this was what people here wore every day, Rebecca wondered,
what did they look like at Mardi Gras?
She walked as slowly as possible through the security exit and fluttered the tiniest of waves in Aunt Claudia's
direction. Her aunt's face brightened.
"Here she is!" she said, reaching out for an effusive, jewelry-rattling embrace as Rebecca approached. She
smelled of lavender and something smoky and Eastern, like incense, or maybe charred satay sticks. "Baby,
look at you! You've grown so tall!"
"Yes," said Rebecca, suddenly shy. Homesickness churned in her stomach: She would be living in a strange
house for months on end, with this odd woman she barely knew. Nobody called her "baby" in New York.
"We have a car," said Aurelia, not bothering to wait for introductions or greetings. She was wriggling with
excitement.
"That's nice." Rebecca wasn't sure if that was the right thing to say, but Aurelia beamed at her.
"We've never had a car before,, ever," she explained. Aunt Claudia caught Rebecca's hand and drew her
toward the escalator, Aurelia scampering down ahead of them.
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"FEMA money," Aunt Claudia stage-whispered. Rebecca tried to remember what FEMA was exactly --
something to do with the government, maybe. "I decided I needed it for work, before the streetcar started
running again on St. Charles."
"You work in the French Quarter, right?" asked Rebecca. Her father had given her a few pieces of
information, in his usual scattered way. He'd been completely distracted for the past two weeks, ever since he
announced that he was pulling her out of school and sending her to the Deep, Deep South for months on end.
"In Jackson Square." Aunt Claudia nodded, breathless with the exertion of walking to the one baggage
carousel surrounded by waiting passengers. "I read tarot cards. It was a quiet summer, but things are starting
to pick up again. Tourists and conventions and all that."
"Oh," said Rebecca. Suddenly her aunt's outfit was making sense: It was her office wear, in a way. Though
why her decidedly nonsuperstitious dad thought Aunt Claudia would be an ideal guardian was even more of a
mystery.
"Your father called me from Atlanta," Aunt Claudia was saying while Rebecca hauled her heavy black duffel
from the carousel, blinking hard so she didn't embarrass herself by crying. It was too soon to be missing
home and missing her father, but she couldn't help it. They'd flown to Atlanta together, because he had to
check in with his head office there before he traveled to China. They'd said a miserable goodbye, her father
flagrantly sobbing like an overgrown baby.
Rebecca had to stop herself from thinking about how much she'd miss him and how useless he'd be without
her.
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Why he'd agreed to this stupid posting, she didn't know. Usually, he never went away for more than a week.

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