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She pressed her lips together. “It won’t help you. Might even do more harm than good stirring up that mess. You ever think of that?”
“What I think is that Rachel DeLaune deserves justice. I don’t care how long it’s been. You were there that night, Miss Esme. You may be the only person in town who can still help me piece together what happened. Will you do that?”
She was silent for a moment. “I still say no good can come from digging up the past. Sometimes it’s best to leave a body resting in peace. But I reckon you’ll keep after me until I tell you what I know. ”
Lukas smiled. “I have been known to dig in my heels. ”
“Oh, I can see that stubbornness in your eyes. Your daddy had it, too. ” She sighed wearily. “I’ll tell you what I can remember, but then I don’t want to talk about it no more. ”
Lukas nodded.
Esme gazed out the window. “I was just fixin’ to turn in when Miss Anna called me. She said something bad had happened to Sarah. ”
“To Sarah?”
“That’s what she said. A neighbor had found the child walking down the side of the road, covered in blood. They didn’t know if she was hurt bad or not because they couldn’t get her to talk. Wouldn’t say a word to nobody. Only thing they knew to do was bring her home. Mr. James finally got it out of her that something had happened at the old Duncan farmhouse. He grabbed his pistol and took off over there. Miss Anna called the doctor and then she called me. ”
“Was your grandson still living with you then? Where was he during all this?”
An infinitesimal pause before she lifted her chin and said haughtily, “My boy was right here in his bed where he belonged. I didn’t see no need in waking him up. Nothing he could do. ”
“What happened when you got to the house?”
“Miss Anna had Sarah in the bathtub washing the blood out of her hair. ”
“Why would she do that? Didn’t she realize she could have been destroying evidence of a crime perpetrated against her daughter?”
“She wasn’t thinking about nothing like that. She just wanted to get her baby girl clean as fast as she can. ”
“What did she think had happened to Sarah?”
Esme pursed her lips. “Wasn’t my place to ask questions. I just tried to help the best way I knew how. ”
“What did you do?”
“I gathered up the dirty clothes and took them downstairs. That’s when I heard Mr. James come back. He’d found Rachel at the farmhouse and carried her all the way back home. Even if he cut through the orchard and came across the field, he still had to pack her close to a mile. ”
The blood on one daughter had been washed down the drain while the other daughter’s body had been removed from the crime scene. Evidence hadn’t just been tampered with in this case. . . it had been trampled on.
“Judge DeLaune knows the law as well as anyone. Why would he remove his daughter’s body from the crime scene?”
“The doctor was already on his way to the house to see about Sarah. Makes sense Mr. James would want to get Rachel home as fast as he can, don’t it? He was too late, though. I took one look at what they’d done to that poor baby and I knew she was dead. Nobody could live through that. Mr. James knew it, too. He took her into his study and laid her out on the divan. Told me to go call Sheriff Clay, tell him to come quick. As soon as he arrived, he went into the study with Mr. James and they stayed there for a long time. When they finally came out, I heard him say he was going over to arrest Derrick Fears. ”
“But Fears had an airtight alibi for that night,” Lukas said.
Esme gave him a sidelong glance. “You think a mother won’t lie to keep her boy out of that kind of trouble?”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“That’s what your daddy thought. ”
“Maybe that was his problem,” Lukas said. “He was already dealing with a contaminated crime scene and a witness who couldn’t remember how she happened to be covered in blood. By focusing on Fears, he neglected to look for other suspects. ”
Esme studied him for a moment. “You would have done things different, I guess. ”
He smiled. “Put it this way. I’m not my father. ”
“Maybe not. ” She plucked at a button on her sweater as she turned to stare at the back of the DeLaune house. “But I still say you got his eyes. ”
Chapter 8
Lukas didn’t really expect to find anything at the DeLaune house. Footprints left on the frozen ground would have been lost once the ice started to thaw. And, too, he had to wonder if Esme had imagined the whole thing. She lived alone and was getting on in years. Her eyesight probably wasn’t as good as it used to be, and the view from her cottage was obscured by all the trees. In the dark, the barren limbs whipping over the roof might have looked like someone running up the steep slope.
But Lukas searched the grounds anyway, because in spite of her advanced years and failing eyesight, Esme Floyd didn’t strike him as the type prone to flights of fantasy. And if someone had been up on that roof in the middle of the night, he damn well wanted to know who it was.
He glanced back at the cottage, saw Esme in the window and gave a quick wave. Then he walked around to the front of the house and used her key to let himself in.
The house was cold and deathly still. Like a tomb, he thought. An apt description, since the place had seen its share of grief and tragedy. And now the owner, the last of the DeLaune family save for the youngest daughter, was in the hospital with only weeks, possibly days, to live.
Lukas lingered in the foyer as he glanced around the silent rooms, taking in the shrouded furniture and the tightly closed drapes and shutters that blocked most of the sunlight. Esme had told him that she still came over every other day to clean and air out the rooms, but the house already had an abandoned smell even though Lukas suspected there wasn’t a speck of dust to be found in the entire place.
The living room was to his left, the dining room and kitchen to his right. Straight ahead, an oak staircase with a polished banister led to a long, second-story gallery and the bedrooms.
Lukas began in the living room and made sure all the windows were secure before he slid back a set of pocket doors that led into a study. As he stepped inside, he sniffed the air. The scent of leather and pipe tobacco still hung heavy in the room.
The gloomy silence pecked at his nerves, so he opened the drapes. Sunlight flooded in and he turned, taking in the room in one sweep. Glass-fronted bookcases lined the wall behind a fine old mahogany desk, and a leather sofa and two armchairs were grouped around a brick fireplace.
In spite of the handsome furnishings, the room was nondescript, like a picture clipped from a magazine. It was understated and dignified, and yet there was a hint of something unpleasant that Lukas didn’t understand until he remembered what Esme had said earlier. James DeLaune had carried his daughter’s body back from the farmhouse and placed her in his study.
Lukas walked around the sofa, sliding his hand across the cracked leather as his gaze lifted to the carved oak mantel above the fireplace. It was crowded with photographs and they were all of Rachel DeLaune.
And in every shot, her smile charmed and mesmerized, but there was something haunting in her eyes.
If she’d lived, she would have grown into a knockout. Already at sixteen, she’d had a smoldering innocence that could drive a man wild. Maybe even compel him to kill.
Was that why she’d been murdered so viciously? Had she been the victim of a boyfriend’s jealous rage. . . or the target of a madman’s fantasy?
There wasn’t a single photograph of James DeLaune’s youngest daughter. Esme said that Sarah and her father had never gotten along, and as Lukas studied the shrine to James’s dead daughter, he began to understand what his youngest must have faced. Here in this room, Rachel’s presence was almost tangible. Here in this room, the old man had tried desperately t
o keep his favorite daughter alive, but the only way he could do that was by shutting everyone else out. Including Sarah.
Lukas reached for one of the photographs, then froze when he heard a noise over his left shoulder.
He turned, almost expecting—dreading—to see Rachel DeLaune’s ghost slipping up behind him. When he found the room empty, he let out a quick breath.
Exiting the study, he walked back through the living room to the foyer where he stood listening to the house. The noise was coming from upstairs. Someone was moving about on the second floor.
He unzipped his jacket to make his weapon more accessible as he quietly climbed the stairs, his gaze lifted to the shadows above him.
The rooms on the second floor opened onto the gallery, and as he neared the top of the stairs, he zeroed in on the door to his far right. It was slightly ajar and he could tell the sound was coming from inside that room.
Keeping his shoulder pressed to the wall, he drew his gun and gripped it with both hands, barrel pointed at the floor, so anyone waiting inside the room wouldn’t be able to knock it from his hands.
Pushing the door open with the toe of his boot, he flattened himself against the wall and waited a heartbeat before easing around the doorjamb and through the bedroom doorway. Crouching, he quickly shifted his gaze from one corner to the next, noting the position of the bed, nightstand, dresser and desk.
No one was there. The room was empty.
And it was freezing inside. Colder than anywhere else in the house. Someone had cracked a window and frigid air rushed in. Lukas hadn’t noticed the open window from the outside, but now he realized it was the source of both the cold and the sound. When the wind gusted a certain way, a tree limb scraped across the glass panes, like a bony hand trying to find a way in.
Lukas wondered if Esme had left the window open the last time she’d come over to air out the house.
Holstering his weapon, he took a quick look out the window. The tree grew right up against the house. Someone could easily scale the branches and climb onto the roof. And maybe that same someone had found a window unlocked and crawled in out of the cold last night.
Better have another look around outside, he decided. Maybe he’d missed a footprint.
As he started to turn away from the window, he saw a reflected movement behind him in the glass; his heart jumped as he whirled. His arm came up, but complacency and exhaustion slowed his reflexes. He barely deflected the blow as the lamp connected with his skull and his knees folded like the flimsy legs on Esme’s ironing board.
Ears ringing, he fell back, unable to catch himself. He sensed a motion toward the door, heard a rush of footsteps, but he couldn’t seem to focus as he crashed into the wall and slid down to the floor.
* * *
Cold air rushed over Lukas’s face, rousing him. He smelled damp earth and more faintly, the scent of something burning.
Someone leaned over him and said something, and he came alert then, throwing up a defensive arm as he reached for his gun with the other hand.
“Hey, take it easy. I’m trying to help you. ”
Slowly the face floating over him came into focus. It was Esme Floyd’s grandson. Lukas barely knew the man, but he had no trouble placing him. He’d seen Curtis around town a lot lately. He had a tendency to stand out, not because of his race, but because of his looks. Handsome and graceful with the light skin and green eyes of a Creole, he also had hints of his grandmother in his features. The wide nose and high cheekbones, the quiet dignity and keen intelligence. The way his eyes seemed to size Lukas up with one sweep.
“What happened?” he asked. “Do you remember?”
Lukas put a hand to the back of his head and tentatively touched the egg-size lump. “Somebody slipped up behind me and coldcocked me good, that’s what. I didn’t hear a damn thing until he was right on me. It’ll be hell living that down. ”
“If I were you, I’d be more concerned about the damage to my brain than my ego. You took a nasty blow to the head. ”
“I’ve had worse. Nothing a couple of aspirin won’t take care of. ” Lukas pushed himself up and tried not to react to the pain that shot through the base of his skull.
But Curtis saw the wince and said sternly, “We need to get you to the hospital. You probably have a concussion. ”
“I appreciate the professional opinion, Dr. Floyd, but like I said, I’ve had a lot worse. ” Lukas glanced at the smashed lamp on the floor, then his gaze slowly lifted. “What are you doing here anyway?”
Curtis sat back on his heels and stared at Lukas for a moment before getting to his feet. Something flared in his eyes, an icy disdain for any real or imagined innuendo in Lukas’s question. “So that’s it. You come to, see a black man standing over you and your first instinct is to assume I’m the one who hit you. ”
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