“Don’t show that to your maw-maw.”
“What? That map?”
He nodded.
“You know what it is?”
“No. But I know how she’ll react to it. And it’s better to put that off for a while. We’re not ready to jump to that link in this chain of events.”
“Maw-maw said you can see the future.”
“Yes. Most of the time.”
“Why not all of the time?”
He shrugged. “Someone’s future changes the second they know something’s going to happen and then change their course of events. It’s hard to keep track of a person when they keep changing their path.”
I hesitated to ask because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer, but I asked it anyway. “Will Lyla be okay?”
“That depends.”
“On?”
“You. You have to make your decision before I can see how it’ll affect her.”
“But I already said I would protect her.”
“I know, but you’re still holding back. You don’t fully believe everything happening before your eyes. That means you can change your mind at any time, regardless of how much you want to protect her.”
I was silent for a moment, frustrated with him and myself. He was right. Despite everything that’s happened, I was still putting logic over belief. I nodded and said, “I better go. Thanks again.”
I turned to leave. “Leigh?”
“Hmm?”
He gazed out over the cemetery. “You don’t always have to come to this place to listen to the dead. Sometimes, they find you and say what they need to say.” He turned to me with a knowing look in his eyes. “Sometimes they find you in your dreams.”
A sliver of ice ran down my back. I didn’t know how, but he knew about the warning my mother gave me, to keep Lyla away from that cabin in the swamp. I held his gaze for a moment and then left for Lucas’s truck, deliberately walking faster than I needed.
***
By the time we arrived at U.L., a light drizzle had begun. Lucas parked in the visitor lot at the Student Union. We hurried out of the light rain and into the union. From there, we crossed the building and exited through the other side where the swamp was. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is, I believe, the only college campus to have an actual swamp. The swamp, though, was little more than a big pond with trees, fish and a couple of alligators. It was a favorite hang-out of Carrie’s and mine when we went to school here. She and I would get food from the union or the nearby cafe and sit out on one of the stone benches to eat our lunch in between classes. They had signs asking not to feed the squirrels who nested in the big oak trees, but the little critters were so irresistible. They came right up to you, begging for food. I always gave them and the fish a little something.
Lucas and I quickly walked around the swamp, following the path to the quad, where we made our way to the Anthropology building via the covered walkways. The quad was meticulously tailored, as always, with the giant oak as the focal point in the center. But I noticed there were a couple more buildings now, in addition to the old red brick ones that lined the quad.
As we approached the home of the Anthropology department, Lucas stopped and looked down. “There you are.” I stopped short, baffled. I turned my eyes down, following his gaze, to the bricks that made up the walkway. Each brick held the name of a former graduate. There, among the class of 2004, was my name. I smiled a little sadly, remembering the good old days.
“Yep,” I said. “There I am. C’mon. Let’s go find this Gina person.”
When we got to the building, we went up to the second floor, where the departments of Anthropology and Sociology were located. It was our luck that Dr. Deville was available. We knocked on her office door, 203, and she greeted us warmly. “Ben called ahead of time, and said he was sending over two friends. Please, have a seat.”
We sat in the only two other chairs in her tiny office. Dr. Deville was younger than I expected, probably no more than a couple of years older than I was, which would have put her right around Lucas’ age. She was beautiful, with long black hair and dark blue eyes. She wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but she was a little thinner. She wore fashionable black-rimmed glasses that perfectly fit the frame of her face.
On the shelf behind her were rows of books, mostly with titles dealing with religion and pre-literate societies. I spied a couple of books on symbolism and hoped there was something in there that matched Lucas’ design, but I still thought he was just seeing pictures in the clouds.
“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Lucas Castille and this—”
“Is Leigh,” she finished. “Ben’s already filled me in. He spoke highly of you, Leigh.”
“Oh?” I was now more ashamed of the way I acted towards him.
“So, the two of you have something to show me?”
Lucas took out the map, unfolded it and handed it to her. She studied it well then put it down on her cluttered desk. She turned in her chair and searched through a row of books on the shelf. “I know I have something …” she muttered to herself. “Ah!” she said as she pulled out one of the symbolism books I noticed a moment before. She flipped through it quickly. Lucas gave me a hopeful look. I rolled my eyes at him, but he just smiled coyly.
“Do you recognize it?” he asked her.
Not picking her head up from the book, she replied, “No.”
I smiled triumphantly at Lucas. Now it was his turn to roll his eyes at me.
“But it is definitely something,” she said. Lucas snorted, and I gave him the evil eye. This time Dr. Deville picked up her head to look at us cautiously. Lucas gave her an apologetic gesture, and she returned to flipping through her book. She stopped on a page and stared at it and the map again. She looked at Lucas. “Where did you get this?” she asked.
“Uh, I kind of …” He looked at me for help. I just shrugged, letting him field this one on his own. He looked a little miffed about that. “It has to do with a case I’m working on,” he informed her.
“Interesting case,” she replied.
“So, you know what that symbol is?”
She nodded. “Uh huh. Either of you familiar with alchemy?”
“It’s ancient chemistry,” I said. Lucas looked at me, impressed. “I had to take a lot of chemistry classes in pre med,” I explained. I turned to Dr. Deville. “You’re saying that’s some kind of alchemy symbol?”
“Yep.” She turned the book towards us. The picture on the page was very similar to Lucas’. Under the symbol was one word printed in bold letters.
“Sulphur?” asked Lucas, reading the word aloud.
I leaned back in my chair. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged.
“What kind of case are you working on, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Lucas hesitated before telling her, “A murder investigation. A few of them, actually.”
She looked down at the map again. “And I suppose these points on the map are the places where the murders took place?” She was pretty observant. I had to hand it to her.
“I really shouldn’t be sharing any—” Lucas started.
“I’m sorry,” she interrupted. “I know I shouldn’t be asking you about any details, but I figured that Ben sent you here for a reason and not just to identify a picture on a map.”
“Why else do you think he sent us here?” I asked.
She leaned in closer to us and dropped her voice down to a tone short of a whisper, “I’ve helped Ben out on certain investigations of his own.” I grew a little uneasy. I hoped she wouldn’t say what kind of investigations. Lucas already knew too much, and I was having a hard time keeping him from finding out about my little family secret.
“His own investigations?” asked Lucas. “I know he said he worked with you before, but I assumed that had something to do with your classes.”
She nodded. “Oh yes! He gives a lecture on religious rituals every semester. But I help him out somet
imes, too. Whenever he needs information, he comes to me because, well, I’m sort of an expert in the field of,” she dropped her voice to a whisper, “spirits.”
I looked at Lucas, waiting for his reaction. I thought he would find her as loony as I did, but he looked intrigued. I held my tongue, afraid to say something rude, like, Let’s go. This woman is nuts. He leaned in closer, and I didn’t really like the way she looked at him when he did. It looked like she was enjoying the closeness.
“Spirits,” he said. It was a question.
“Yep. They’re real.” She leaned back in her chair and brought her voice back to a normal level as she waved her hand across the expanse of her bookshelf. “So many accounts of the living encountering the dead in tangible forms after they’ve been buried. It goes all the way back, past preliterate cultures, ancient Greece, before Christ. In fact, the story of Jesus is the most popular account of the dead among the living.”
I sat back in my chair, looking out on the rain that was falling outside the tiny window of her office, wising I could be anywhere but here. Bet there’s no rain in L.A. right now, I sighed to myself. She continued rambling on about ghost stories, and all I could do was picture myself on the beach in Malibu, watching the surfers trying to tame the mighty waves, while—
“… hellfire-and-brimstone kind of philosophy so common with—”
“What?” I asked, coming out of my daydream.
She looked at me, a touch of annoyance behind her blue eyes. “I was just saying that much of the negativity surrounding the idea of ghosts comes with a hellfire-and-brimstone kind of philosophy so common with religious authorities trying to control their parishioners. But some, like Ben, embrace spirits as tools to communicate with the afterlife.”
“Brimstone,” I murmured. “That’s the ancient name for sulfur.”
“That’s right,” she said, amused that I would know that. I was beginning to dislike Dr. Deville. She addressed Lucas now. “We see brimstone appear throughout the Bible, but especially in the Book of Revelation. It’s a somewhat triumphant moment when Satan and the sinful are cast into a lake of fire and brimstone as an everlasting punishment.
“A lake?” asked Lucas.
I shot him a worried look, and he returned it.
“Yes.” She was lost in thought for a moment and then quoted from the Book of Revelation. “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.”
“Thank you for your time, Dr. Deville, but we need to get going,” I said, getting up from my chair. Lucas did the same and thanked her. She looked disappointed that we were leaving so soon. Actually, she looked more disappointed to see Lucas leaving so soon.
“Well, if you need any more help, let me know.”
“We will. Thank you,” I said, as we walked out the door.
On the way back to Lucas’ truck, I muttered, “That didn’t get us anywhere.”
“What are you talking about? She identified the symbol.”
“Yeah. But what do we do with it now? We’re no better off than before we came here. We already knew the Dark Man had something to do with a lake. So much for your brilliant Dr. Deville.”
“My Dr. Deville?” He looked a little angry at first, but then the corners of his mouth curved up into a wicked smirk.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not ‘nothing.’ What’s that smirk for?”
“Nothing. You just sound a little … jealous.”
I stopped walking. He noticed and stopped, too. “What is it?” he asked.
I looked around and started sniffing the air. “You smell that?”
He sniffed, too, and looked around, alarmed. “What?”
“You don’t smell that?”
“Smell what?!”
“The ego coming off of you!”
He started walking again. “C’mon, Leigh,” he said, very annoyed. I followed, victorious with my comeback. “Sulfur has something to do with it. I can feel it,” he murmured.
“Well, what else has to do with sulfur, besides brimstone?”
He laughed. “Sulphur, Louisiana.”
I stopped again. “Oh, my God!”
“I’m not falling for that again, Leigh.”
“No! When I drove back here from Cali, I stopped to spend the night in Lake Charles, on the Sulphur side. There was—I don’t know. There was this house. I had forgotten all about it. I dismissed it because it was crazy at the time. It’s still crazy. I—”
“What? What was it?”
“I had to take some side roads because there was so much traffic on I-10 because of the construction they were doing. Anyway, I went down one road and kind of got lost. I wound up on this dead end road that led to this old house with a small barn behind it. And … oh, God. Those weren’t rabbit cages. They were dove coops.”
“Do you remember the address?”
“You kidding? I don’t even remember the name of the road. I don’t even think it had a name.”
“Do you think you could find it again? Maybe if we looked at a map?”
“I don’t know. I was pretty lost.”
“Feel like taking a road trip?”
I hesitated, “You know, I could have been imagining—”
“What if it was real? What you felt—what you saw? Isn’t it worth it to find out who killed your family? Isn’t it worth it to protect Lyla?”
I nodded in defeat. “Let me call Clothilde and tell her I’ll be late for dinner.”
11
Identity
Jesus, that woman needs a cell phone!” I said, as Lucas and I made our way to Sulphur.
“Try her again later.”
“That was the third time I’ve tried.” I huffed and put my phone back in my pocket. We were on I-10 West, past Lake Charles.
“What was the exit you took?”
“Twenty-three.”
“I see it. It’s up ahead. You went right when you got off?”
“Yeah. Well, left from my direction, but yeah, take a right.” He took the right off of twenty-three, and we drove for several miles down a back road, and then turned right on another road and then a left, according to my memory. He had given me a map, and I was studying it, trying to remember which roads I took to wind up at the creepy, forgotten house.
The sun had set, but, as always with summer, there was plenty of light left. The roads were dry. Apparently the rain had skipped this part of Louisiana. “Okay,” I said after a few minutes. “Take another right up here, at Junction Thirteen.” We turned right, and I stared out the window, trying to remember that day, looking for any landmarks, but seeing nothing but a cotton field on one side and a sugar cane field on the other.
“Anything look familiar?”
“All of it and none of it,” I said, frustrated.
“That’s okay. Take your time.”
Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 01 - Dark Bayou Page 16
