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Dupre studied him for a minute, as if considering something. 'Maybe a little more than faith. Another drink?'

'Why not?' The Doctor wasn't in the least drunk, having whiled away the duller stretches of Dupre's autobiography by playing games with his brain chemistry to see how fast he could metabolise bourbon: 15.3 seconds after swallowing was his record so far. He was beginning to think, however, that he should abandon this tactic - dealing with Dupre sober was proving tiresome.

"This is lousy bourbon,' said Dupre, taking a long draught of his fourth drink. 'I don't know why I'm having bourbon anyway - it's an unrefined intoxicant. Have you ever had true absinthe?'

'Yes.'

Dupre raised an eyebrow. 'Where?'

'In Prague.' The Doctor decided to omit the fact that the year had been 1903.

'I consider it the opium of spirits.'

'Which spirits?'

'Hah!' Dupre laughed explosively. 'You parry with me. So, you think I talk with spirits?'

The Doctor caught himself before admitting that he was just literal-minded, and instead asked, 'Do you?'

'Perhaps.'

This could go on all afternoon, thought the Doctor. In fact, it has gone on all afternoon. He was about to stand up and explain that he had to leave before his head exploded with boredom, when Dupre asked, 'Why did you say "It doesn't take courage"?' He squinted at the Doctor, who was suddenly struck by the dark, dry heat in his eyes. 'You've seen things, haven't you? You have secrets.'

'I have secrets so secret I don't even know them.' Dupre smiled his thin smile. 'How intriguing. I know what mine are. Perhaps,' he said softly, 'you would like to know too.'

There wasn't much left of the drowned plantation, and what there was hadn't been preserved. Fitz and Anji picked their way over the remains of a brick foundation, speculating which rooms had been where. Around them, long wild grass waved in a soft breeze.

'How old did he say this place was?' asked Fitz, poking at a bit of brick.

'Eighteenth century. Funny that the family were still living here when it fell. Do you suppose they were still farming the land?'

'I don't know. There's something strange here, though.'

'What?'

Fitz gestured at the foundation. 'Every bit of empty land we've seen on this trip, if no one's cutting it back, it's overgrown like hell. Plants just take over in this climate. But these bricks have been exposed for over twenty years, and they're bare. The whole site is.'

Anji glanced around. It was true. The wild grass stopped a few feet from what would have been the perimeter of the house. The rest of the ground was hard-baked dirt. She crouched and scratched at it. 'It's like stone.'

'So wet nothing would burn, and now so dry nothing will grow.'

She stood up. 'Well, it's certainly odd. But do you think it has anything to do with our problem?'

'The bloke at the magic museum told the Doctor the charm is to summon a water spirit, and water destroyed this house.'

'Not much of a connection.'

'Well, no. But it's the only connection we've got so far.'

Anji looked sadly at the fallen bricks. 'I wonder how many people died.'

'Kind of grisly,' Fitz agreed. 'Maybe that's why it's not in the ghost books yet. Give it fifty more years to become a legend, let all the relatives die, no one to object to how the story's told.' 'Whatever the story is.'

Rust wasn't having a good day. He had spent the late morning trying to get some help from the Lyon police, who found his murder trivial and snickered at his accent. Additionally, the records of Flood's and Chic's phone calls and the information he needed from Federal Express were slow in coming.

He'd responded to a call from the Iberville projects with Art Reade, and they'd brought in a man they found sobbing over the body of the wife he had just stabbed. The captain was on his case because a shop owner -

never mind that it was a shop for necrofeelgoods -had been killed in the most tourist-visited section of the whole city and the papers were running scare stories.

'Wish they'd pay attention