by Jana DeLeon
It was Helen Bourg.
A chunk of the ceiling lay on the floor at the end of the bed, dust still rising from tin sheets. That was the source of the noise Shaye had heard, but she had no explanation for the woman.
Decomposition hadn’t yet begun, so she couldn’t have been dead long, but the real question was how long she’d been shackled to her own bed and more importantly, who had done it? Had Jonathon returned home to “take care” of the person who’d shaped him into what he was?
A nightstand next to the bed had tipped over and the drawer had slid out. Shaye could see aged yellow paper and photos inside. She hesitated before inching toward the nightstand, then bent over and picked up two of the photos. The first was one of Helen Bourg holding her babies.
Her three babies!
Shaye’s pulse quickened. The photo was cracked and yellowed, but there was no mistaking the three babies with blue blankets. Sissy had never mentioned a third child. Shaye blew out a breath. Think. This was a poor woman and probably a home birth. One of the babies probably didn’t survive.
She reached down to pick up another photo and gasped. The three boys standing in front of the shack were at least ten years old. One was a couple inches shorter than the other two, but there was no doubt they were siblings. All three wore cutoff blue jeans and nothing else. Although their arms and legs were bruised and they were clearly malnourished, none of them appeared disabled. So why wasn’t anyone in Port Sulphur, including the school district, aware of the third child?
A live sibling was a game changer. It would explain why Emma saw her husband even after she knew she’d killed him. It would explain why the stalker had intimate knowledge of her life. Jonathon must have been in touch with him.
She turned to leave and a bony hand reached out and grabbed her wrist. She screamed and jumped back from the bed as the woman she’d thought was a corpse came alive. Helen jerked up into a sitting position, her face contorted in rage, her empty sockets seeming to glare at Shaye.
“Get out of my house, whore! I smell the stench of lotion on you.” Froth came out of Helen’s mouth and bubbled up on her lips. She lunged at Shaye, swinging her free arm wildly to get hold of her again, but the chain on her other arm prevented her from reaching. Her bony fingers looked more like a cadaver than a live human being. Her fingernails were yellow and curled in circles under her fingers.
Disgust, fear, and panic coursed through Shaye as she stepped backward, unable to take her eyes off the monstrosity in front of her. “Are you Helen Bourg? Who did this to you?”
“It said this was payback because of what I done to it. But I didn’t do nothing. I couldn’t turn it loose. It was evil. Just like you.”
“Me?”
“You women, always conniving, always sneaking around, stealing someone’s man, pretending you got rights you don’t. You’re all the same. And I wasn’t going to have that evil living here. It had to change. But it was wily, that one. It didn’t listen, so I had to chain it. I had to, don’t you see? I had to until it learned its place. Until it learned how to be right.”
Shaye stared at the woman, her stomach rolling, her mind racing. It sounded like nonsense, but it had to mean something. “Did your son do this?”
“It was never my son!” Helen screamed, spit flying from her mouth. “It was a monster and it had to be cleansed but now it’s loose. It’s out there and I can’t protect the world from it any longer.” The woman collapsed back on the bed, her eyeless sockets pointed at the ceiling.
Shaye clenched her hands, desperately trying to make sense of the woman’s words. She lifted one hand and ran it across the top of her head. What the hell did she do now? Call the police, certainly, and an ambulance. It was clear the woman needed medical help, but Shaye needed to know how to find that third son. The one that must be the stalker.
She shifted her pistol to her left hand and pulled her phone out of her pocket. When she dropped her gaze down to look at the phone, she saw it. A business card stuck between two floor planks, behind one of the bed frame legs. She put the phone back in her pocket and inched forward, keeping a careful eye on Helen. Without vision, the woman’s hearing had become more acute, and the last thing Shaye wanted was to feel the woman’s skeletal fingers on her skin again. Keeping watch on Helen, she leaned over and picked up the card.
Patty Hebert
Serving all your real estate needs.
Suddenly, it all made sense. Awful, horrifying sense.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Shaye ran out of the shack, pulling her phone from her pocket as she ran. No service. Shit! She leaped into her SUV and reversed as quickly as possible down the narrow path. At the end, she threw the SUV into drive and it slid in the dust before lurching forward. She tossed the phone in her cup holder, and gripping the steering wheel with both hands, she pressed the accelerator down and concentrated on staying in the center of the narrow road.
When she reached the highway, she hit the pavement and twisted the wheel, forcing the SUV to jump sideways. Before she’d gotten the vehicle straightened out, she slammed her foot down on the accelerator and it lurched forward, swinging from side to side a couple of times before the wheels finally locked onto the road and the SUV leaped forward. She grabbed her phone and checked. One bar.
She dialed Jackson’s number, praying he’d listened to her earlier and was on his way to Emma’s house. He answered on the first ring.
“It’s Patty, the Realtor,” Shaye said. “She’s the stalker.”
“What?” Jackson’s tone left no doubt that he thought she’d lost her mind.
“I know it sounds crazy, but you’ve got to trust me. Emma was going to drop her house key off to Patty. Patty will kill her. Game over!”
“Okay. Calm down. Detective Reynolds and I are already on our way.”
“How long?”
“Fifteen…twenty minutes, tops.”
The call dropped and Shaye cursed as she threw her phone onto the passenger’s seat.
Then prayed that Jackson reached Emma in time.
###
Patty stood in the bedroom doorway, a pistol trained directly at Emma. “It pleases me that you’re surprised. I worked long and hard at this disguise, and at no small expense to myself.”
Emma stared at Patty in disbelief. It wasn’t possible. Patty was tall, but her physique couldn’t possibly be confused with that of a man, and her long hair and facial features only made it that much harder to believe. Patty couldn’t be the man she saw in her bedroom that night. And besides, why in the world would Patty want to hurt her?
“I don’t understand,” Emma said.
Patty smirked. “Of course you don’t. All this time, you’ve thought your dead husband was stalking you, or should I say, my dead brother.”
“Your brother? David never told me he had a sister.”
Patty’s face flushed red. “I’m not his sister! I’m his brother. I’ve always been his brother.”
Emma’s mind whirled. Was it possible? Could Patty actually be a man?
“There were three of us…Nathan, Jonathon, and me. She called us her three blind mice because we couldn’t see things like she did, but then when your mama is a crazy bitch, it’s hard to agree with her. Nathan died when we were kids. Drowned. Mama was beside herself because Nathan was her favorite. She never beat Nathan. Never starved him. Never tied him up and cut him with a knife then laughed while he bled. Jonathon wasn’t as lucky. He looked just a little bit too much like our no-show daddy. And then there was me.”
Patty stepped closer to Emma. “I was the really unlucky one. You see, according to mama, I’d been born evil. You know why? Because I was born a woman. Mama hated women and she refused to acknowledge she’d given birth to one, so I become a boy. But she didn’t trust me to keep my secret, so she never let anyone know I existed. Until Jonathon figured out how to undo my handcuffs when I was a teenager, my entire world was four walls and a moldy mattress on the floor. I watched closely and lea
rned how to free myself, always careful to do it only when Mama passed out from her booze.”
Emma tried to process the horror Patty described, but it was so far outside of anything she knew that she couldn’t get a grasp on it.
“I didn’t want to be a woman,” Patty continued. “Women were bad, that much I knew to be true, because a bad woman stole our daddy away and left us destitute and living in a shack. I never wanted to be like the bad woman. I would never be a worthless whore. I would be a man. A man who protected my family rather than abandoning them. I shaved my head like my brothers, and we wore the same clothes. I knew I wasn’t a woman and mama started to believe, but my body betrayed me. I grew breasts and my hips widened until I could no longer fit in my brothers’ clothes.”
Emma’s heart sank. Patty was crazy. She’d known that whoever was stalking her wasn’t completely right, but Patty was so far beyond rational thought, there would be no reasoning with her. And Emma had killed her only savior. She glanced down, but Patty’s legs were hidden under one of the long skirts she always wore. She claimed her muscles were cramping earlier, but then if Patty was the stalker, she’d killed Mrs. Pearson and she was could have been lying about that as well. Still, with her MS, Patty didn’t have half the physical ability that Emma did. If Emma could launch at her before Patty got off a round, she might be able to get past. If she could get to the stairs, Emma had no doubt she could get away. Patty would never be able to keep up with her.
Patty cocked her head to the side and smiled. “You’re wondering if you can get past me. Thinking that if you can, you’ll be able to get away from a cripple. The problem is, I’m not a cripple. Never was. The MS was all part of my disguise, just like the dresses and makeup were. I knew a nurse wouldn’t be able to resist someone with a disability. And I knew my disability is what you’d see before anything else, because that’s what you were trained to do. I’m not overweight or out of shape either.”
Patty reached under her shirt with one hand and yanked. Emma heard something rip and Patty tossed a pad with breasts and stomach padding at her feet. “As soon as I left home, I had my breasts removed. Had my uterus taken out as well. No bleeding for me. No sacks of fat on my chest taunting me. It was one of those back-alley jobs, but it worked. I was finally rid of the pieces that tried to betray me. Tried to betray what I was.”
“You’re sick, Patty,” Emma said desperately. “You need help.”
“Don’t call me that! My name is Alan. Until David married you and moved to Algiers Point, I lived happily as Alan Frye, and as soon as I’m done here, that’s exactly what I’m going back to. Back to my real life. I’m burning all these whore clothes and woman things. If it weren’t for you, I could have been myself and been close to David, but you ruined it. I couldn’t look like myself or you might have guessed our secret.”
Patty reached up and pulled at the back of her head, ripping off her wig and exposing her military haircut. From her pocket, she withdrew a toilette and wiped it across her face, over and over again, until the thick, bright makeup she always wore had been almost stripped away.
Emma stared in horror at the thing in front of her. Eyeliner was smudged under her eyes and onto her cheeks. The bright red lipstick clung to her lips in blotches. She stood there, in a white blouse and blue flowered skirt, smiling at Emma, those blank black eyes locked on her. No wonder she’d thought it was David in her room that night. Without makeup, Patty’s square jawline and cheekbones were more prominent. She was a little shorter than David, but without the padding, her body was probably similar in size. Emma dropped her gaze to the chest pad and every ounce of hope drained out of her. No one would come to rescue her, because no one knew she was in trouble. She was out of options. Patty had won.
Even worse, no one would ever know what happened to her.
“He thought he could change,” Patty said. “He joined the military to get away from our childhood, thinking he could become someone else. And he came close. With you, he almost managed it, at least for a little while. The only part of his past that he couldn’t shed was me. He’d always been my protector and he didn’t know how to stop, even though he was afraid to be around me.”
Patty smirked. “Afraid I’d drag him back to the darkness. But I didn’t have to. Something happened to him on his last tour. He wouldn’t tell me what, but I could see it in his eyes. My brother was back.”
Exhaustion and despair racked Emma’s body. “Why didn’t you just kill me?”
“Because you had to pay for what you took from me. You had to feel what it was like to suffer. What it was like for your life to be on the line and to have no one who could help you.”
She was going to die. Emma knew it with complete certainty. She was trapped in this room with an insane woman who’d been bent on killing her from the beginning. She couldn’t run faster than a bullet, and a single well-placed one would be all it took to drain the life from her.
But the longer Emma stared at that smirk that Patty wore, the angrier she became. God only knew how many people Patty had hurt beyond the carnage over her brother. Emma didn’t believe for a moment that Patty had been leading a blameless life since she escaped her mother’s grasp. People like Patty didn’t magically appear. They were crafted over time.
She killed Mrs. Pearson and the paramedic. She tried to kill Corrine in order to hurt Shaye, and Shaye was the one person who believed you when no one else would.
Emma’s jaw involuntarily clenched. She was going to die, but she refused to do it quietly.
She only had time for one play, and it had to be a good one. Even without the padding, Patty was still a large woman with four inches and at least forty pounds on her. She had to move fast. She had to be strong. She had to be clever.
Emma looked beyond Patty and out the window of the bedroom across the hall, and an idea formed. She stared over Patty’s shoulder for a few more seconds, then smiled. “You stupid bitch. You didn’t know the cops were coming to meet me here. They just pulled up. So you can kill me, but you’re not going to get away with it. They’ll be inside this house and standing at the bottom of those stairs the second that bullet leaves your gun.”
Emma pointed at the window behind Patty and prayed that she took the bait. Patty frowned and turned slightly to look across the hall. That tiny loss of focus was all Emma was going to get, and she was ready to use it. As soon as Patty’s eyes shifted off of her, she launched. She’d always stayed in good shape, but her recent martial arts training had made her quick and accurate. She hit Patty in the side with her shoulder, throwing all of her body weight against the woman.
Patty lost her balance and fell into the dresser, dropping her gun in front of her. Emma tried to run past her, but Patty managed to grab her leg. Emma twisted her leg and yanked, managing to pull it from Patty’s grasp, then bolted out the bedroom door and down the stairs. She heard Patty cursing and footsteps pounding behind her.
Emma had just jumped off the last step when the first gunshot whizzed by her. Ducking, she ran for the front door, praying that she could get to her car before Patty made it down the stairs. With no weapon of her own, she’d be an easy target outside, and Patty was far beyond caring about anything but killing her. As she yanked open the front door, a second shot boomed and she cried out as the bullet grazed her arm and embedded in the wall just inches from her head.
She wasn’t going to make it.
But by God, she was going to make sure everyone on the block knew exactly who had killed her. She practically tore the screen door off the hinges as she ran through it screaming. A third shot caught her in her shoulder, and the force and pain caused her to stumble down the stairs and crash onto the sidewalk. She glanced back as Patty ran out the door and leveled her pistol at her.
Patty smiled and started whistling. Emma closed her eyes and dropped into unconsciousness as the last shot rang out.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Are you all right?” A man’s voice sounded in Emma’s dream.<
br />
She knew it was a dream because she’d died. Or maybe they had medical personnel in heaven to help the people who came through injured. Maybe she could get a position there.
“Emma? Talk to me.”
Her mind sharpened so quickly that it sent a shot of pain through the top of her head, and her eyes flew open. She jerked upright, looking around wildly, and felt a hand on her arm. She turned her head toward the man kneeling beside her and blinked, bringing him into focus.
“Jackson!” She threw her arms around him. “Oh my God.”
Jackson gently wrapped his arms around her and whispered, “It’s all right. You’re going to be all right.”
“She’s dead.” Another detective stepped up beside them. “That was a hell of a shot, Lamotte. I’ve already called for a bus. Are you all right, ma’am?”
Emma released Jackson and looked up at him. “Hell no, I’m not all right. I’ve been stalked by a crazy woman and shot…twice.”
Her lips quivered as she managed a smile. “But I’m going to be.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Emma looked up from her scrambled eggs as Shaye stepped into her hospital room and broke out into a smile. “You’re up and out early.”
Shaye stepped up to the side of her bed and placed a bouquet of flowers on the table. “I could say the same for you, about the up part, anyway.”
“Don’t worry. The out part is coming soon. I’m an impossible patient. They’ll cut me loose as soon as they can.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been shot. God, I can’t believe I am actually saying that. This whole thing has been so surreal. I still haven’t quite processed it all.” Emma shook her head. From the time the paramedics had put her into the ambulance until the doctor finally gave her something to make her sleep, her mind had raced with everything Patty had said and the things Shaye told her about Hamet and Port Sulphur. If it hadn’t actually happened, Emma would have sworn it wasn’t possible. It was all so strange. So horrifying. So evil.
