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feeling seemed to overtake her, as if her life must be hastened because she, too, would succumb to a tragic end, just as everyone she’d dared to love. This birthday, one which should have been her prime, felt too heavy to bear. Leaning her head back, she closed her eyes.
    “No, Tom,” she said aloud, “I have nothing.” She held her breath and let the water immerse her.

Ten Years Earlier
New Orleans, 1897

C HAPTER ONE

“T ell him.”
    The man’s face was pained and sweaty as he stared intensely at Mary. She noticed his eyes were a deep emerald. She didn’t usually notice such things. There was no point, she believed, in paying attention to any of their attributes, or lack thereof. No reason to bother over the broad swell of a john’s shoulders, or the cut of a jawline, or the color of his eyes. A john was a john—handsome or ugly, they were all just customers, blending together by the end of the day anyway, when the only important thing was the weight of Mary’s burlap purse.
    But this man’s gaze, his green eyes looking directly into hers, caught her. Most of the men, most of the time, their gaze looked right past her. They weren’t much interested in her face—they couldn’t care how full her lips were or how young and smooth her skin was. Or that, under the smudges of dirt and beneath the hard edge she wore, this alley whore was, arguably, pretty. Sure, pretty helped, but a pretty face wasn’t what these men came craving.
    This was Mary’s fifth john today. On the whole, he wasn’t much of a looker, his chin was too big for his face and his head too big for his body. But those eyes were warm pools that kept drawing her in. He smelled strong of tobacco—most of them did—but she could tell at least he’d had a recent bath. He gulped some air as he arched his back against the wall of Mary’s crib.
    Just a little shack, her crib was no different from the rows of other cribs that lined Venus Alley like chicken coops. There was room enough for a thin, saggy kip, and Mary also had squeezed in a tiny bedside table where johns could set their jewelry to keep in sight. She knew this was a nice touch. Likewise, she took pride in keeping her crib clean. She scrubbed it down regularly, and every night she brought home her kip and beat out any fleas that clung to its dried Spanish moss stuffing. The last thing she wanted was for a john to leave her crib itching; that was a sure way to kill any chance of a next visit. Mary liked to think of the crib as her own, and called it such, even though it wasn’t really. But soon enough, she hoped, it would come to be.
    “Tell him,” the john murmured again. He was a first-timer, and Mary suspected he wasn’t from New Orleans—she’d watched him take his billfold from his trouser pocket, setting it on the bedside table, and surmised that only a traveling man would walk around with that many bills. His origins were only important in that Mary could assess the chance that she’d ever see him again—with one-timers, she knew not to put herself out too much. Why wring yourself on someone who wasn’t likely to give you regular business? And yet, for some reason, she had a yearning to please this man beyond just supplying her body. Unlike all the others, this man hadn’t looked away, hadn’t looked beyond her, or through her. His eyes stayed locked on hers, searching, yearning to connect.
    “Tell him,” he said again. “Tell him he’s a good boy.”
    Mary leaned in, nuzzling his ear, then whispered, “You’re a good boy.”
    Suddenly, he pushed her. “Not me, ya dim whore!” he hollered. “Him!”
    He pointed to his crotch.
    The warmth instantly drained from Mary’s body. Right, she thought . . . him . Slumping a bit, she sighed to herself. She should know better by now than to let a man fool her. No matter how deeply he stared into her eyes.
    “Well?” the john demanded.
    Mary silently chided herself for having thought this john may not be trapped