Rick Riordan - The Devil went down to Austin

"Yeah, well, this was a thirtyday visit, this kid had. We had a dozen volunteer divers.

The family would come down every day to watch, until it's like two weeks later and we had to tell them- there's nothing else we can do."

"But you found him?"

"I found him, Navarre. And trust me-you don't want to know about it. I don't work recovery anymore."

Lightning did a triple play across the horizon. The cicadas woke up with the storm, humming in the woods like electricity.

Maia didn't look well-as if Lopez's story had caused a tremor under her feet, somewhere down in the centre of the dam. "I should get going, Tres. You'll get Lopez that list?"

I nodded. "Call me."

She brushed my sleeve with her fingertips, told Lopez goodbye. She walked down the dam road, leaning into the wind.

"Might be a bad time for a reunion," Lopez said, watching Maia. "You and her."

"Vic Lopez, advice columnist."

"If they find Ruby McBride in the water, Navarre, after what went down between Ruby and Garrett, the way she screwed him on that business deal-then God help your brother."

"Maia's right, isn't she? You don't believe in your own case anymore."

He laced his fingers. I noticed again the strange scars on his hands, like permanent blisters.

He saw me looking, rubbed the back of his hand with one finger. "When I was a kid-playing at this friend's house-I noticed this brown stain on his bathroom wall, like somebody had held a match close to the wallpaper. So I told his parents about it.

They didn't pay any attention, told me not to worry. But I couldn't leave it alone. I went back and touched it, thinking maybe it would rub off, and my hand went straight through. It was winter. A nest of yellow jackets had eaten its way into the insulation of the house. The brown stain was them on the other side, thinning out the wall. I put my hand straight through the paper and into the centre of their nest."

He flexed his fingers, showing me the pattern of scars. "Later the doctors told me I'd gotten over a hundred stings. I almost died. They told me the nest in the wall was the size of a washing machine.

There's the lesson, Navarre-if you're the kind who likes to touch the dark spots, maybe you should think twice."

The beach ball bounced against the dam in the wind. Lightning flashed almost overhead now.

"Clara Doebler's death bothers you more than you let on," I told Lopez. "You don't want Jimmy's death mishandled the way hers was."

"Keep your assumptions."

"I've been there," I said. "I've seen a person killed right in front of me."

Lopez kept his eyes on the storm. "No, Navarre. You have not been where I have been. It's a place you do not want to go."

Down at the boats, horns were sounding. More divers were starting to come out of the water.

"I'll see you later," Lopez told me. "Go teach your class."

He met my eyes, and just for that moment I saw the anger behind his smile-the offense I'd done him by digging too deep.

And he was right. He was giving me fair warning. It was a dark spot I did not want to touch.

I got to UT five minutes late for my class, soaked, but no one seemed to notice. My septuagenarian student, Father Time, was standing in front, regaling everyone with his last trip to Roswell.

As soon as I'd brushed the water out of my hair and sorted my lecture notes, Father Time yielded the floor with a yellowdentured grin.

"Figured it wasn't any stranger than what you'd tell us," he explained.

Just what every professor needs-a warmup act.

I did a quick roll check, realized with mixed emotions that not a single person had dropped. I hear stories from other instructors about fifty percent drop rates, classes of five or ten with an accordingly small number of papers to grade. No such luck for Navarre. Like buzzards, my students tend to stick around to the bitter end. A colleague once told me I wouldn't have that problem if I just stopped doing lesson plans, got boring, and did my part to uphold the reputation of American higher education.

Of course, that colleague never had to use teaching as an escape from PI work. He'd never had to help himself forget, at least temporarily, that his brother was a murder suspect and a woman he'd just met had disappeared.

The thunderstorm drummed on the roof while we talked about the background of the Corpus Christi plays.

I fielded the standard questions. No, we were not talking about Corpus Christi, Texas.

The medieval English hadn't yet discovered the joys of Spring Break at Padre Island. No, the plays weren't actually stage plays, but paradefloat shows, performed on travelling wagons as part of a street procession.

Yes, they really were all Bible stories. Yes, we really would read them in Middle English. Yes, they might be fun anyway.

"Corpus Christi was like Fiesta," I explained. "The Battle of Flowers, except religious."

Blank stares reminded me I was not in San Antonio anymore. A few students nodded like they'd hit Fiesta before. Most did not.

"Mardi Gras?" I tried.

Better. Still no consensus.

I searched my memory for an Austin equivalent. "Aquafest? South by Southwest?"

A tentative voice in back said, "The Gourd Festival?"

"Exactly," I said. "Just like the Gourd Festival."

A collective "Ohh." Satisfied nodding. We had bonded.

Father Time grinned at the ceiling, as if he were getting signals of approval from his friends in Roswell.

"Think of a Gourd Festival put on by the Catholic Church," I suggested. "A religious holiday, and all the entertainment based on something from the Bible."

"Dude," said a guy in the back. "That would suck."

"But if it's all you had," I countered, "if that were the only festival you were allowed every year, you'd make it count, wouldn't you?"

With that we launched into the Gourd Festival rendition of the Wakefield Noah.

It took most of the class period just to get the students used to the language, but we were rolling along pretty well by the time Noah and his wife started arguing about getting on the ark.

"Why won't she get on?" a student asked.

I let another student answer. "Typical woman. She doesn't trust her husband."

The first woman looked incredulous. "She's going to drown? She'd rather sit there and nag him than get on the boat?"

"Yeah," a younger girl in the back said. "She's cool."

A few lines later, another question stopped us. "What's Noah calling her there?

Ramskit?"

"Ram shit!" Father Time interpreted, thoroughly delighted.

We read through the fistfight between Noah and wife, the kicking and screaming, the insults. Uxor, the wife, sat down to knit in the rain while the flood came up around her ankles. Once the pleading family finally herded the old matriarch on board, the class was almost sorry to see her lose the argument and live.

"She should've held out," one contended. "Noah's a bastard."

We got to the end. The wife sent out a raven to find land. Noah sent out two doves. The raven's hunger for carrion kept him from returning, but the dove's gentleness and true heart brought it back to the ship with the olive branch.

There was a moment of silence after we read the last line.

"So women send out ravens," the girl in back said. "Is that an insult?"

We could've talked for another hour just on that point, but we were out of time. I told them we'd continue to discuss Noah tomorrow, then asked them to read the next play, The Crucifixion, on their own.

Thirty minutes later, I was sitting in Texas French Bread on Guadalupe, the rain beating down outside. My Bevington Medieval Drama was open, a blank yellow pad and portable Middle English Dictionary on top. My cell phone, a cup of coffee, a ham and cheese croissant, and a bottle of extrastrength Tylenol filled up the rest of the tabletop. All the comforts of home.