“Do you?” Nora asked.

“I would if they asked me. City’s not what it once was. But nowhere is.” Mercedes had gone down into a squat to meet Gmork eye to eye. She stroked his head, his long ears. If Gmork had been a cat, he would have purred.

“What do you mean ‘nowhere is’?”

“Ah, cities are self-aware now. New Orleans used to be a little strange and wild because it was strange and wild. Now it’s strange and wild because tourists expect it of us. Internet makes it hard, too. In ’84, a missing child in New Orleans wasn’t national news. No Facebook or Twitter to make it national news. Nobody around here batted an eye at the police asking a witch for help. Now you don’t want to be the police chief that’s made a laughingstock on the world’s stage by admitting you believe in the occult.”

“Guess not,” Nora said. “How did your mother find the girl? Did she, ah, ‘see’ where she was?”

“She would chew moonflower to put herself into a trance,” Mercedes said. “She said it took her ‘into the deep.’ Where the ‘deep’ really was, I don’t know, but she never went into the deep without bringing something or someone out with her. She went in and saw the girl through a little window lying on a bed of bare wood, sunlight streaming in, beams like a church roof.”

“An attic,” Nora said. The girl had been found in her own home, the newspaper article had said. Found half-dead from hitting her head while hiding.

“She’d thought she was in trouble,” Mercedes said, rising up from her squat but still keeping her fingertips on Gmork’s dark head. “She’d broken the grandfather clock in the house by playing with it. So she’d hid. Tripped over a box or a beam, knocked herself out. Couldn’t hear everyone screaming her name. She was up there over twenty-four hours in the attic heat, passed out and dying of thirst. If Mama hadn’t found her, she would have died in a couple hours. Now she’s thirty years old. Two kids. One girl named Doreen for my mother.”

“You have a daughter, right?”

“Just the one girl,” she said. “Got it right the first time. Had her at eighteen. She’s a freshman in college now.”

Nora did quick math. Eighteen plus eighteen meant Mercedes was thirty-six years old. Maybe thirty-seven. About Nora’s age.

“Around here?” Nora asked.

Mercedes shook her head. “In Boston.”

“Boston? She’s at Harvard?”

“We’re not supposed to brag about that,” Mercedes said. “So Rosemary tells me. But we do. My mother used to wear peasant blouses every day. Now she wears Harvard t-shirts.”

“So your mom’s still alive?”

“Oh yes, the Goode women are long-lived. But she’s in Savannah, taking care of my grandmother.”

“How did you know my mother was dying?” Nora asked.

Mercedes lifted her hands. “I just saw it.”

“Did you see me coming to see you today?”

“I can’t see my own future,” Mercedes said. “It’s like trying to read a book pressed to your face. Too close to make anything out.”