The Proctor Hall Horror

by Bill Thompson

  “Hey, man, this feels like an interrogation.”

  “I merely asked you where your parents are. Is that a tough question to answer?”

  “Not at all, and I’m happy to do it. But why the sudden change in attitude toward me? We were friends the last time I saw you, and now you’re acting like you don’t trust me.”

  “Answer the question, Julien. Where are the Girards?”

  “Savannah, where my brother lives. They’re in a retirement center. Now will you please tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Have you ever heard of a doctor in Lafourche Parish named Frank Caparelli?”

  “No. Who’s he?”

  “Would it surprise you to learn that Noah Proctor died at your parents’ house in Lockport? Or were you aware of it, and you’ve neglected to mention it all this time?”

  Julien’s demeanor changed. Now he was aggressive. “Are you nuts? I’m not sure what the hell you think you’re doing, but that’s preposterous. Somebody’s feeding you lies, and you’re falling for them. You think I’m guilty of something — or my parents are. Where in hell are you getting your information?”

  “From a public record. From Noah’s death certificate. Dr. Frank Caparelli signed it, but so far it appears he doesn’t exist. The address where Noah died is your house in Lockport — Joseph and Mary Girard’s house. The cause of death is exposure. What does that mean, Julien? What happened to Noah at the house in Lockport? And who are the Girards? One thing’s for certain — they’re not your parents.”

  “What the hell are you doing? Get out of my office!”

  “You can talk to me or the police, because if I leave here without answers, that’s my next stop. Joseph and Mary have some connection to the Proctors, and that means you do too. With your help or without it, I’ll find out what you’re up to.”

  Julien’s face was flushed. He shouted, “You have it all wrong and it’s none of your business anyway. Stop meddling and get the hell out of my office!”

  Back at Channel Nine, Landry asked Jack to bring him a copy of Noah Proctor’s death certificate. In his office, he told Jack about the trip to Lockport and his bizarre confrontation with Julien Girard.

  “Sounds like you touched a nerve,” Jack said, and Landry agreed the guy’s odd behavior and unexpected belligerence signaled something was off.

  “Why would he say his aunt and uncle were his parents? What’s he trying to hide?”

  “Perhaps the man who told you that was wrong. He might be confused about Julien’s relationship to the Girards.”

  Landry removed a small journal from his pocket, turned to a page filled with handwritten notes, and laid it on his desk next to the death certificate. “Julien’s reaction proves he’s hiding something. Let’s see if this gives us any clues.”

  He grinned. “Just as I expected. On the death certificate, look at the entries Dr. Caparelli hand-printed — his address and name — and his signature. Do they resemble the handwriting in this book?”

  “Looks like a perfect match to me. Where did you get it?”

  “I pilfered it from Julien Girard’s office. There’s so much stuff crammed in there he’ll never notice it’s gone. After the way he acted, I had a hunch about this. It was my only chance, since I don’t expect an invitation back anytime soon. Now that we know who created Dr. Frank Caparelli, I want to find out why he did it.”

  Landry’s threat to go to the police was an empty one. Even if the authorities agreed that the handwriting on the forged death certificate matched what was in the stolen journal, it proved nothing.

  He sat back and considered what he had learned. Was he trying too hard to connect the dots? Julien said he had the facts all wrong, and perhaps he did.

  The Girards were Julien’s parents…or his aunt and uncle. Did it matter which? The lady claimed they raised him from birth. So what if he called them Mom and Dad? That was no mystery. Lots of people in his situation did that.

  Joseph and Mary Girard abandoned their house and disappeared. Or they moved to a retirement home in Savannah. Again, there was a logical explanation. He searched for the last name Girard in Savannah and found a hundred matches. There were two hundred retirement centers. Without Julien’s brother’s first name, he was wasting his time.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  April’s screen flashed a number she didn’t recognize. She let it go to voicemail, played it back and heard her history professor Dr. Girard ask for a return call.

  When she did, he said, “Thanks for calling me back. I wondered if we could meet somewhere.” She hardly recognized his voice; he sounded anxious and breathless.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Things have gone crazy and my life’s out of control. I want to meet with you…to talk to you in person. We shared experiences at Proctor Hall, and I need someone to share my thoughts with.”

  She understood he might be upset about the house, but something about this call bothered her — something that just wasn’t right. He’s my teacher, a single guy thirty years older than me, calling at nine p.m. asking to get together. He said this wasn’t about school. It was personal, and she was uneasy. She knew Dr. Girard from class and she liked him, but she didn’t feel comfortable talking about his feelings.

  “What are you asking?”

  “You live on campus, right? I’ll pick you up on Freret Street in front of Butler House in fifteen minutes.”

  “No reflection on you, but I’m not doing it that way. Tell me what this is about.”

  “My life. Proctor Hall. Landry Drake. Everything. I’m spinning out of control, April. That place is haunting my dreams. I can’t work. I can’t think. You were there; you experienced the paranormal activity. I want to talk to you about everything and find out if your thoughts and mine are the same.”

  April understood, because what happened had unnerved her. The jack-o’-lantern incident frightened her so much that she still couldn’t sleep in the dark. She felt sorry for him, but her instincts sent danger signals.

  “I’ll meet you at the Boot,” she offered. A popular bar a few blocks off campus, there was always a crowd. He said it would be too noisy to talk. They needed someplace quiet.

  “Dr. Girard, I’ll be frank. This call is making me nervous. I can’t help you — I can’t even help myself right now — but I’m willing to listen. If I agree to meet you, it’s going to be somewhere noisy and crowded. It’s the Boot or nowhere.”

  She arrived ten minutes earlier than he. She waved from her table and as he maneuvered through the crowd, his disheveled appearance surprised her. In sharp contrast to his classroom look, he wore a stained, untucked shirt; he was unshaven; and instead of pulling his long hair back into a ponytail, he let it hang in strands down his neck. He looked like a desperate man.

  As he walked through the bar, he stopped to speak to some students before joining her. They ordered beers, and he thanked her for coming.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he began, and she said it was nothing personal, but everybody had to be careful these days.

  “I think I’m having a breakdown. Proctor Hall has become my obsession, and today Landry Drake came around asking questions about my past. The cops gave me a lie detector test and said I didn’t exactly pass. It’s like everything’s spinning out of control.”

  She had trouble following his disjointed thoughts, and as she started to ask a question, Marisol walked over.

  “Hey, guys,” she said, obviously surprised to see April and her professor in a bar together. “How’s it going?”

  “Hey, Marisol. I need to talk to you. Back in a sec, Dr. Girard.” April led her away from the table. “He called me asking to get together. He says he’s about to have a breakdown over Proctor Hall. The house bothered me too, and I’m listening, but I don’t think I can help — or if I want to. Look at him — he’s a wreck. Something about this really creeps me out.”

  “Then you know what to do,” Marisol said. “Follow your gut, just like you would o
n a date. Cut him loose. I don’t care who he is; you gotta be careful.”

  She returned to the table and told Julien she understood his concerns. Not only was the house frightening, he had found his student decapitated in the bed and discovered the pumpkin heads. It was enough to make anyone question his sanity.

  “I think you should talk to a professional,” she said. “Maybe I should too. I don’t understand my own feelings about this, and I’m not qualified to give advice to somebody else.” She glanced at her watch. 10:15. “I need to go now; I’m sorry.”

  He said he understood and promised not to talk about Proctor Hall if she would stay long enough to finish their drinks. The conversation would do him good.

  With less than half a beer left and sitting in a crowded bar, she stayed. She asked about the projects. “Ours took a turn no one expected. With all the stuff going on, are we still eligible for an A?”

  He nodded. “You’ll get you’re a, April. After losing two team members and going through what you and Marisol have, you deserve it. Cheers to two real troupers.” He clinked his bottle with hers and they drank them down. He said he’d pay, thanked her for coming, and went to the bar to settle his tab. She walked out into the cool evening air and entered campus from the back. Her dorm was only three blocks away.

  When she missed the mandatory midnight check-in, her floor advisor called campus police. When she hadn’t returned by dawn, New Orleans’ finest descended on the campus.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  When Landry emerged from the shower, he smelled the aroma of bacon. “Save some for me!” he yelled, and Cate told him to check out the TV.

  She clicked on a news story she’d rewound and said, “Get ready for this.” The title at the bottom of the screen told it all. PROFESSOR SOUGHT IN STUDENT’S DISAPPEARANCE.

  “Julien?” he asked, and she nodded.

  The newscaster said New Orleans police went to campus around five a.m. on a missing persons report. Several people reported seeing a female student — name withheld — earlier in the evening at a popular off-campus bar. She was in deep conversation with a history professor named Dr. Julien Girard.

  Witnesses saw the girl leave Boots Bar around ten. Credit card receipts showed Girard paid the check at the same time and walked out right behind her. Neither had been seen since.

  “There is no evidence of foul play,” an NOPD spokeswoman said. “We’re looking into the relationship between the student and Girard, who’s a person of interest. We would like to speak with him. If anyone knows his whereabouts, please call the police.”

  The news astounded Landry. He’d visited Julien just yesterday afternoon. Was their confrontation connected somehow to this situation? It seemed unlikely, although Landry had learned over the years that life held few coincidences.

  Cate said, “Let’s consider the facts.” Landry had confronted Julien about the people he called his parents, who had a connection to Noah Proctor. Landry had discovered Julien forged the signature on Noah’s death certificate, and hours after their heated meeting, he’d met a student in an off-campus bar. Then they both vanished.

  At the office, he listened to a voicemail from Marisol asking him to call as soon as possible. She’d left the call at 7:15, around the time he and Cate first heard the story on the news.

  Her words came fast. “I saw them, Landry! I was at Boots last night. April took me aside and said he was creeping her out. I watched them both leave, April first and Julien a minute or two later.” She’d called the police when she saw the news report, and someone was coming to take her statement.

  “I feel terrible I didn’t do more,” she lamented. “If he abducted her, that is. I can’t imagine he’d do something like that, but the world is crazy. She said he seemed different. And he looked terrible. Rumpled clothes, hadn’t shaved or put his hair in a ponytail. Something’s really wrong, and I hope April is okay.”

  Landry said she did the right thing by telling April to heed her instincts, and it seemed the girl had followed Marisol’s suggestion. They exchanged cell numbers to stay in touch if something new developed.

  He called Shane Young, an NOPD detective with whom he had become friends as they worked together on several paranormal cases. He told the cop about his confrontation with Julien and that he stole the journal to compare the handwriting. It matched perfectly the fake doctor’s handwriting on Noah’s death certificate.

  “Sounds like a desperate man who’s not who he seemed. Did he ever give you reason to believe he might harm someone else?”

  “No, although he’s changed a lot since I met him. He used to be outgoing and happy, but lately he’s been depressed and withdrawn. But that’s no surprise. Look what he experienced at Proctor Hall. He lay in a bed covered in the blood of his own student — a headless corpse — and he found the jack-o’-lanterns on the mantel. It’s enough to make anybody question his sanity, but to me he didn’t seem like a kidnapper. Then again, who does?”

  Young said, “I’ll tell the guys on the case that you called. But I want you to do something for me. Consider that Professor Girard may be nothing like his public persona. We get cases where the perp leads a double life.”

  “Like a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you to consider. Thinking outside the box is easy for you, because of the work you do. I don’t care what’s going on at a plantation in Lafourche Parish or an abandoned house in Lockport. My focus is on a missing college student and the person who either abducted her or knows where she is.”

  They promised to keep in touch as things developed, and Landry left the office for a stroll around the Quarter. Rarely introspective, today he consider how Shane Young seemed more on target about Dr. Girard than he. Maybe it was the old forest-and-the-trees thing.

  Have I been so involved in the Proctor Hall mystery that I’m overlooking everything else? Did I accept everything about Julien at face value, ignoring the real reason he came to Proctor Hall that day? Had the house been new to him, or did he know it like the back of his hand?

  Look at it outside the box, Landry.

  Instead of an innocent bystander at Michael’s decapitation, was Julien the perpetrator? Did he carve the jack-o’-lanterns and arrange them on the mantel?

  Did he scrawl the word CRAZY in charcoal on the wall? Is Julien the person the spirit called CRAZY?

  Some of those things couldn’t have happened in the short timeframe, Landry decided. Julien had been in the bedroom with Michael for only a few minutes. He couldn’t decapitate the burly football player without creating a ruckus. They also found no murder weapon. How did he hide it that quickly?

  As for the pumpkin heads, he’d bounded down the stairs just moments ahead of the others. He had no time to pull out the pre-carved pumpkins from a hiding place, put them on the mantel, and write the word on the wall.

  Despite those facts, Landry believed Julien played a far bigger part in this story. He just hadn’t put the pieces together yet. He returned to the office, called Cate, and asked her to set up another lunch with Henri, a man on whom he relied a lot these days. Henri always knew how to find answers to questions that had none.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The frenzy of lunchtime at Mr. B’s Bistro was winding down when Landry and Cate arrived a little after one. They took a window table on the Iberville Street side, placed a wine order, and set aside the menus. Today it would be talk first, lunch second.

  He brought Henri current on things and admitted overlooking important signals when focused on a paranormal case. He wondered if they’d all misread Julien Girard’s motives — and the man himself.

  “It’s hard to imagine his being a violent person,” Henri admitted. “If it’s in his personality, he’s learned to hide it well. That said, one never really knows another person’s secrets, even those to whom you’re closest.”

  Cate laughed. “We’re aware of yours, Henri. It’s a glass of perfectly decanted Chateauneuf-du-Pape.”
<
br />   “That’s a weakness, not a secret. I’m afraid every waiter in town is aware of that foible. But Dr. Girard’s is a different story. None of us knows him well, and as humans often do, we accepted his backstory and his motives at face value. Until recently, we had no reason to question anything about the man. Landry, the matter of the forged death certificate is intriguing. And his apparent involvement with April’s disappearance is baffling. To realize we were in the company of someone so dangerous alarms me. That’s if he was involved, which might not be the case at all.”

  Landry was certain about his involvement. “I wonder what we can find out about his childhood and his parents. The cops will check his background, and Shane will give me whatever he can, but I wonder if I can find out more.”

  Cate asked about April. The girl’s disappearance worried her very much, and she wondered where he took her and if she could still be alive.