The Lost Girls of Johnson's Bayou

by Jana DeLeon

  Ginny looked taken aback. “You think someone who lives here has been spying on me?”

  “If it was a stranger, you would have already noticed him.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I must sound stupid, but all of this is so outside of my normal realm.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s not outside of mine. I can explain to you how I work tonight.”

  “What about tonight?” Madelaine’s voice sounded behind Paul.

  He turned and gave her a smile as she stepped up to Ginny’s table. “I was just trying to convince Ginny to let me buy her dinner tonight.”

  Madelaine beamed at Paul. “That’s so nice. Isn’t that nice, Ginny?” She poked Ginny, who looked remarkably guilty for a woman who hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Yes,” Ginny said, coming alive when her mother’s finger connected with her ribs. “That would be very nice.”

  “I know a couple of wonderful restaurants in New Orleans, if you’re up for the drive.”

  “Oh, I have to be at work early. Can we eat in town at Maude’s?”

  “Sorry. I forgot you guys are up before the chickens. I can pick you up at your place.”

  “You can meet me at my place. Maude’s is just a couple blocks away. I won’t be done here until six, though, so it will have to be seven or after.”

  “Seven is fine. Where is your place?”

  “I have an apartment above the café.”

  Paul smiled. “Seven, then. Nice seeing you again,” he said to Madelaine and left.

  Madelaine’s timing had been perfect. Paul had no doubt that the proud mother would share her daughter’s date with her friends. By tomorrow morning, the entire town would know that he’d taken Ginny to dinner, and his alibi would be in place.

  He had a couple of hours until he met Ginny, and he needed to get some work done. First up was making a few phone calls about the girl who’d been taken to the hospital in New Orleans after the fire at the LeBlanc School. He’d helped a woman track down her deadbeat ex about six months ago, and if memory served him correct, her mother was a nurse at that hospital. If her daughter referred him, the mother might be willing to talk to him off the record.

  If he could find the hospitalized girl—if she was still alive—he might have another lead.

  GINNY NERVOUSLY SMOOTHED her skirt under the table at the only restaurant in Johnson’s Bayou that was open nights. Paul studied the menu of home cooking and looked far too handsome and polished to be in this town. He wore tan slacks and a navy shirt that looked good next to his tanned skin. He hadn’t shaved, and the two-day growth gave his jaw that rugged look that she found so incredibly sexy. Of course, in Johnson’s Bayou, she usually saw it only on television, not sitting across the table from her at Aunt Maude’s Country Kitchen.

  “It’s more crowded than I expected,” Paul said.

  “It’s because of the festival.”

  Paul glanced around the restaurant and frowned. “I don’t want to be overheard,” he said, his voice low. “Once the table next to us leaves, I’ll tell you what I’ve found.”

  “Okay. So what do we do in the meantime?”

  Paul smiled. “We chat like any other date. Is it really that hard to pretend you’re on a date with me? I must need to work on my charm.”

  Ginny felt a blush rise up her face. “No, it’s not you. Johnson’s Bayou is not exactly a hotbed of eligible men. I don’t date much.” Try not at all.

  “Oh, c’mon. What about those two brothers who own the auto garage? I met them today and they said they were single.”

  Ginny giggled. The Moreau brothers were in their mid-eighties, at best. “They’re a little too wild for my taste.”

  Paul laughed. “You know, you’re probably right. They told me some whoppers over a burger and beer.”

  Ginny leaned a bit across the table. “Is that what you did today? Talked to townspeople to get information?”

  The family at the table next to them rose from their seats and Paul motioned his head in their direction. Once they were out of earshot, Paul said, “Mostly listened. Small-town people tend to close up if you ask too many questions. One thing that you can probably answer is why the school is still standing. I was surprised to find it, figuring it would have been torn down, especially given the circumstances.”

  “The house is owned by some real estate trust. The mayor appealed to the trust’s lawyers to tear it down, but the house is outside city limits, so he couldn’t force them to. I don’t think they wanted to absorb the cost. There are a lot of abandoned structures out in the bayou. Eventually the swamp claims them.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So did you find out anything by listening?”

  “There are a couple of people I wanted to ask you about, but first I want you to tell me about the break-in at your apartment. Did you report it to the sheriff?”

  “No. There was no break-in, per se. But I know someone had been in the apartment.”

  “Was anything missing?”

  Ginny shook her head. “But my journal was out of place. I put it in the same place in my nightstand every night.”

  Paul didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure it was moved? With the festival and your run-in with me in the woods, maybe you didn’t follow your usual protocol.”

  “I know I put it back in the same place, and the bookmark was wrong, too. Even if I got one wrong, I wouldn’t have messed up both. Besides, there was a faint smell of men’s cologne, and I don’t have anything in the apartment that smells musky.” She hesitated for a moment, not wanting to say what was on the tip of her tongue.

  Paul narrowed his eyes at her. “Whatever you’re thinking you shouldn’t tell me, I wish you would.”

  “Is mind reading one of your skills?”

  “No, but a good detective is perceptive and knows to watch body language. Yours tells me you’re holding something back.”

  Ginny sighed. “I know you’ve already said you don’t think I’m crazy, but this is still going to sound odd. I know someone was in the apartment because it felt different. From the moment I walked in the door, something felt off, almost ominous.”

  “But nothing was missing and nothing was out of place except the journal?”

  “Yeah.” Ginny looked at Paul, trying to read him as he’d read her, but all she saw was a man contemplating her words.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “If you definitely think someone was in your apartment and read your journal, then I believe that’s exactly what happened. It fits, really, if we assume someone is afraid you’re remembering. If you were, your journal is where you’d document those thoughts.”

  “But there’s nothing in there. I mean, nothing concrete. I wrote about feeling unsettled lately, but what girl in her twenties working for her mother and living in a tiny town wouldn’t feel that way?” Except her. Until someone started watching.

  “He’ll be thinking of everything in terms of what he wants to hide. If he was involved in anything that happened at the LeBlanc School, he’s not young. His mind won’t automatically go to the norm for young ladies.”

  He pulled his phone from his pocket. “I jotted down a couple of names today that I wanted to ask you about. The first one is Saul Pritchard.”

  “He’s a handyman. Does basic repair and maintenance for the people and businesses in town.”

  “Did he work at the LeBlanc School?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see him there?”

  “I don’t remember ever being at the house before the other night. If I saw him there, I don’t remember. I’m sure I’ve heard someone in town say he worked there, but I don’t remember who it was. People here don’t talk much about the LeBlanc School.”

  “Which is interesting in itself. Usually that sort of thing is huge gossip in small towns.”

  Ginny frowned. “I think it’s because it was kids. The whole thing is horrifying, and I think a lot of people are embarrassed because something was going on under thei
r noses and they never have figured out what. They’re the same way with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People here are suspicious. The rumors range from I’m the child of a witch to I was meant to be a sacrifice that escaped. Just my presence makes a lot of people uneasy. And I don’t help matters. I never had friends in school—mostly because the other kids avoided me—but I keep to myself as an adult, too. Then, when I turned down a college scholarship, some decided that I’d been cursed and couldn’t leave the town.”

  “Wow. Big imaginations some people have.”

  Ginny shrugged. “They’re simple people. Things they don’t have an answer for scare them.”

  “There’s another reason they might be scared.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some of them were involved, and they don’t want anyone to figure out what was going on.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure you’re right. I just hate to think—”

  “Ginny.” A man’s voice boomed across the restaurant.

  Ginny looked over and saw the mayor of Johnson’s Bayou making his way over to her table, his wife and two disgruntled teenagers in tow. She forced a smile on her face.

  “Hello,” she said as Mayor Daigle stepped up to the table.

  “My wife said you’re doing a brisk business at the festival.” He glanced over at Paul, the curiosity clear on his face.

  “Yes,” Ginny said. “I’ve been doing very well.”

  The mayor looked over at Paul again, then back at Ginny, clearly not about to leave until she made an introduction.

  “Oh, sorry,” Ginny said. “Mayor Daigle, this is Paul Stanton. He’s here for the festival and some fishing.”

  Mayor Daigle turned to Paul and extended his hand. “Joe Daigle,” he said as Paul shook his hand. “Stanton, huh? Any relation to Emily Stanton in Lafayette?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Paul replied.

  Mayor Daigle waited, clearly hoping Paul would give him more information, but Paul just smiled pleasantly.

  “Well, enjoy your vacation,” Mayor Daigle said finally. “I’ll let you kids get back to your dinner.” His wife said a hasty goodbye and followed her husband and teens out of the restaurant.

  “Is the mayor always so nosy?” Paul asked.

  “Yes. My mom says he had two options for a career—politician or gossip columnist.”

  “Hmm. I wonder if I could get him to talk about the school?”

  “Anything’s possible. He’ll be fishing early tomorrow morning at his favorite spot. You could always pretend to run into him and give it a shot.”

  “Good idea.” He glanced around the restaurant and leaned across the table toward Ginny. “I have another idea. I want to go back to the school tonight.”

  Chapter Six

  “No.” Ginny’s response was immediate and one she didn’t have to give a second’s thought to. “I’m not going back there. The place frightens me, and clearly, I’m not mentally sound when I’m there, since I heard screaming that didn’t exist.”

  “We don’t know for sure it didn’t happen.”

  “I do. If a child was missing from the town, I would have heard about it at the café.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Even if the child wasn’t from here, someone would have come looking.”

  “I don’t think a child was in the woods the other night.”

  “Then we’re right back to my being mental.”

  Paul shook his head. “I think being in the woods triggered a memory in you. One so strong that you thought you’d just heard it.”

  Ginny sat back in her chair, her mind trying to process what Paul was suggesting. It was absurd, yet on some level, it almost made sense. “So I’m not crazy—I’m just having incredibly lucid recall? Do you really think that’s possible?”

  “Yes. And I think going back may trigger more memories.”

  Ginny pulled at a loose thread on her napkin, torn by her desire to help Paul find his sister and her own fear of what remembering the past may bring to her own life. The truth of what happened at the LeBlanc School that night had to be ugly, but what about her own past? What if she found out things about her life before that night that changed the way she felt about her life now?

  Her temples began to throb as her pulse spiked. She looked across the table at Paul, and her heart broke just a little at the hopeful look that stared back at her. Refusing would be selfish. Refusing would mean she was allowing fear to dictate how she lived, and that was something she wasn’t prepared to do.

  “I’ll do it,” she said before she could change her mind.

  GINNY SLIPPED OUT THE back door of the café behind Paul, clutching her spotlight, and crossed the alley, where they paused a minute in the shadows. They’d both changed into jeans, tennis shoes and dark shirts to help camouflage themselves in the darkness, and now they stepped into the field between the woods and the alley and headed away from town. At first they traveled in a different direction from the place where Ginny had entered the swamp before, choosing instead to stick to the dark gap between the town’s streetlights. Midway across the field, when the town’s lights no longer reached them, they turned and headed for the trail where Ginny had entered the woods before.

  Ginny paused in front of the wall of trees, every instinct in her body telling her to run back inside and lock the doors behind her. She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, then passed her spotlight to Paul and nodded. He entered the woods and she stepped in behind him, waiting until they were a good twenty feet into the gloomy darkness before he turned on the light.

  The spotlight immediately changed the look of the swamp but didn’t reduce Ginny’s feeling of foreboding one bit. The cypress trees, heavy with moss, still closed in on her like a tomb, making her chest feel heavy, almost as if she was suffocating. She concentrated on her breathing, making sure it was steady and deep.

  “You okay?” Paul asked.

  “Yeah. How much farther?”

  “About a hundred yards or so.”

  “That far?” Ginny glanced behind her at the wall of trees and moss. She couldn’t see even a flicker of light from town, and the sky overhead was dark with clouds so that not even a sliver of moonlight was showing. She hadn’t realized she’d run that far into the woods that night, and she barely remembered her dash out, either.

  “It just feels far,” Paul said. “Don’t worry. I’m with you every step.”

  “Do you have that big gun with you?”

  Paul lifted his shirt to expose the pistol tucked into his waistband. “I don’t leave home without it.”

  Ginny nodded and he continued through the brush. As she walked, Ginny wondered what had happened that night, sixteen years ago. She remembered nothing at all about her life before waking up in the hospital a week after the fire. Madelaine told her she’d walked out of the woods right in the middle of the fire trucks as if she didn’t see or hear anything around her. The paramedics said she was in shock and rushed her to the hospital in New Orleans.

  Could Paul be right? Was she starting to remember?

  She watched the ground closely as she walked. The last thing she needed was to twist an ankle in the gnarled roots that covered the swamp floor or, even worse, have a run-in with one of the poisonous varieties of snakes that liked to hunt at night. One, two, three…she counted her steps as she walked. It distracted her very creative mind.

  All of a sudden, the woods went completely dark. She almost ran into Paul before she realized he’d stopped walking and had turned off the spotlight. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

  “We’re at the edge of the clearing surrounding the house,” he said, his voice low. “I wanted to watch and listen for a minute before we entered the house.”

  Ginny sucked in a breath. “You think someone might be in there?”

  “No, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t think about those things.”

  Ginny let the breath out, her anxiety le
ssening a bit. Paul was a detective. He would be naturally cautious. She stepped beside him and peered into the darkness toward the school. The cloudy skies made it impossible to make out more than the rooflines of the structure, which jutted up against the black sky. Stilling herself, she focused on listening instead. The sound of the night creatures sounded around them, but nothing out of the ordinary reached her ears. And more important, nothing predatory—animal or human.

  Apparently satisfied as well, Paul turned on the spotlight and motioned to Ginny as he stepped out of the brush and into the clearing surrounding the school. He picked up the pace across the clearing and into the front entry of the house, then stopped inside.

  “I looked around a little the other night, but only a cursory check to make sure the child you heard wasn’t here. All the bedrooms for the girls were upstairs. I figured we could start there.”

  “Okay,” Ginny said and followed Paul up the sweeping circular staircase to the second-floor hallway. Starting with the bedrooms made sense. If she’d lived at the school, she’d probably spent more time in her bedroom than anywhere else.

  They stepped into the first room and Paul shone the spotlight up at the ceiling, which cast a glow over the entire room. Ginny made a first pass around the small space and frowned. The room contained two twin beds, still covered with ruffled comforters and matching pillows. The material was dirty now and had been torn and picked over in spots, most likely by rodents looking for good nest-building material, but the pink fabric still showed in some places. Children’s books lay on the nightstand positioned between the two beds, and a tattered rug lay on the floor in front of the nightstand. A dresser stood behind her and she tugged on the top drawer, which seemed to stick.

  “It’s probably stuck.” Paul stepped close to her and pulled on the drawer handle. The drawer popped open and mice ran out of the top and scattered over the dresser and out of the room.

  “Oh,” Ginny jumped back from the dresser and checked her feet, making sure none of the rodents were running across them.

  Paul stepped back beside her. “I should have thought about that. Sorry.”