Crescent City Connection

probably wearing jeans but Layne had hit on a central truth about him: Kenny was a born Good Boy. He just couldn’t help it, which Skip thought must be impossibly annoying to his rambunctious sister, Sheila. Yet he wasn’t a goody-goody at all.
    Somehow, he instinctively understood grown-ups’ rules, and for some reason had no wish to break them. She didn’t get it, having been not a bit like that as a child. Either she’d instinctively gotten everything wrong, or she was so appalled by what she was expected to do that her subconscious simply filtered it out, with the result that she felt like an alien in her own family. She was the child of brazenly social-climbing parents who used their children to get them into the right parlors. Skip had a way of becoming embarrassing once her parents were in—knocking over the ancient porcelain, perhaps, or innocently asking little Eugenie’s mom why she didn’t put vodka in everyone’s iced tea, since she always took hers that way.
    She still hadn’t mastered the mores of Southern womanhood and probably never would.
    Being a police officer took up a lot of the slack, since she wasn’t expected to spend all day backbiting or arranging flowers. Also, it was so eccentric a job for an Uptown girl, she could more or less march to her own tune.
    Sheila was a lot like Skip. She meant well, she was just clumsy.
    Beyond all that, Kenny had something more than social instinct—he had an abiding sweetness and openness—not exactly innocence, he was a French Quarter kid, after all. But he didn’t condemn any human activity on the basis of being different (a convenient attitude for a child whose only “parent” was a gay uncle), and he wanted to experience things. He’d insisted on going to the witches’ circle, though Uncle Jimmy had scoffed and Sheila said the whole thing gave her the creeps.
    “Good-bye, chickens,” said Dee-Dee when the three piled out the door. “Bibbity-bobbity-boo, now.”
    Kenny said, “They say, ‘blessed be,’” and Skip had no idea how he knew.
    “Well, blessed be the free-of-sneezes.”
    Dee-Dee was like that—the perennial joker. But the simple fact was, Layne’s allergy threatened the relationship. After what the kids had been through—their father had first deserted, then their mother had died—he truly would sacrifice his first love in years before he’d find Angel a nice home in the country.
    The witches, whom Skip had met on a case, were having the ritual at the home of a new member who lived in Old Metairie, about as nonthreatening a neighborhood as existed anywhere— the kind with bikes parked in the driveways and shaggy sheep dogs lying on the porches.
    The new witch was named Melinda, and nothing, to the best of Skip’s memory, like anyone else in the coven. She was a chirping, bird-boned woman in her thirties, with short blond hair and tiny features. She wore white shorts and a black T-shirt that looked as if it had been ironed.
    The other witches—all women—awaited in a living room full of Hurwitz-Mintz furniture. There wasn’t a single thing to indicate an affinity with the occult, until Kit, the high priestess, started unpacking small objects from a basket.
    She spread a scarf on the coffee table to serve as an altar cloth, and placed on it candles, a chalice, a knife in a case, and a few other more-or-less commonplace items, including a plate of cookies.
    She said, “Kenny and Layne, do you know anything about all this?”
    Kenny nodded, all eagerness. He had said something once about learning about paganism in school, and Skip suspected he’d also read up on it.
    Layne, in contrast, blushed and shook his head.
    “Well, don’t worry. It’s not spooky or anything. Every coven’s different, but in ours, which we call the Cauldron of Cerridwen, by the way, we wear different-colored robes at different times of the year.”
    “Why?” It was Kenny, of course.
    “You know about the three aspects of the goddess?”
    He shook his head.
    “Maiden, mother, and crone—and the year follows the goddess’s phases. In spring, we think of the maiden, and so we wear white—then red in summer, and black in winter.”
    They left to put on their white robes, and when they returned, the atmosphere had subtly changed, grown more contemplative.
    Kit said, “Everyone ready?”
    They were silent a moment, and then Melinda lit a white candle, saying what appeared to be a prayer to the East. Then someone lit a red one, for