by Jana DeLeon
He pulled the dead bolt back and slowly opened the door, pausing for a moment to see if he drew any fire. When none came, he slipped out into the dark and made a dash for Justine’s car, parked closest to the door. Peering over the dashboard, he scanned the driveway and street in front of the house. No storm rocked Cypriere tonight, but the clouds covered the moon, eliminating any light source outside the rental home and down the street.
Brian waited several minutes, listening for the sound of movement, watching for even the slightest variation in the few shadows that he could make out. Finally, he moved from behind Justine’s car and around to his Jeep. The night air was still, and the only sounds were the night creatures in the swamp beyond the house. He peered over the hood of his Jeep and realized that the hood seemed to drop off at a slant.
Already knowing what he would find, he rose and walked around the Jeep to study the two flat tires on the driver’s side. The perpetrator had probably run as soon as he set off the car alarm. Disgusted, Brian walked back into the house, calling out to Justine as he entered.
“It’s Brian. Hold your fire.”
A second later the kitchen light came on and Justine stood next to the switch, her pistol still in her hand. It was then that Brian realized she wore only a thin T-shirt and cotton shorts that gave him a long, clear view of her absolutely perfect legs.
“Did you see anything?” she asked.
His thoughts broke off suddenly, which was just as well. The last thing he needed on his mind was Justine’s legs, when clearly he had a situation to manage. “Yeah, two flat tires on my Jeep. Apparently, my car alarm interrupted his work.”
Justine frowned. “Tire slashing? That seems rather juvenile after the big stunt last night.”
Brian nodded. “Yeah. Tonight definitely lacks the planning and finesse the other required. But maybe he’s improvising, since last night failed to send us running back to New Orleans.”
“Or maybe it’s someone else.”
“Maybe. But I’m not willing to yell conspiracy just yet.”
Justine nodded. “Okay, but I’m keeping the word in reserve.” She looked down at her watch. “Three a.m. Unless you were planning on doing a stakeout the rest of the night, I’m going back to bed.” She pressed the safety on her pistol and trudged back to her bedroom.
Brian watched until she closed the door behind her, trying not to think about how her legs looked even better from behind. He went into his own bedroom and shut the door, thinking a second cold shower wasn’t really a bad idea.
JUSTINE YAWNED for at least the hundredth time as she walked down Main Street from the rental house to the café. She’d tried to go back to sleep after the alarm incident the night before, but instead, had only ended up tossing and turning the rest of the night, her sleep disturbed by frantic dreams, none of which she could remember that morning.
At least Brian had respected their agreement from the day before and hadn’t insisted on accompanying her to the café. Instead, he opted to visit the local mechanic and see if he could help with the tire situation, and then pick up supplies for the rental house at the convenience store in Cypriere. He’d looked a bit surprised at her very minimalistic grocery requirements, but Justine was hardly what one would call domestic. Books had always been far more fascinating than domestic pursuits, and her usual diet consisted of whatever lo-cal microwave dinner was on sale.
The chicken-fried steak from the night before, the lack of sleep and skipping her morning run, were all conspiring to drain her energy levels, but Justine was determined to talk to Deedee, assuming the woman worked that morning.
It was barely 7:00 a.m. when she entered the café, and only a few patrons were inside, which was normal, as most of the townspeople probably made their living in the bayous and would have been at work by daybreak. A couple of old-timers looked curiously at her, but no one froze like they did yesterday.
Deedee barely glanced at Justine as she slid onto a stool at the counter. She watched out of the corner of her eye as the waitress refilled coffee mugs for the regulars. They must have asked about her because Deedee glanced back again, said something brief, then hurried away from their table. Justine couldn’t even begin to imagine why her mere presence in Cypriere seemed to have the waitress that much on edge, but she was determined to find out.
Tom Breaux stepped out of the cooler with a slab of bacon and gave her a nod. “Coffee?” he asked.
“That would be great,” Justine replied. “And the breakfast special—eggs over easy, please.”
Tom passed her the coffee, then cracked a couple of eggs open on the grill and added bread to the toaster. He had that fluid motion when working that told Justine he’d been doing this very thing for a long time. She wondered if he’d spent his entire life in Cypriere, cloaked in superstition and tradition.
“Heard you had some trouble last night,” Tom said as he turned from the grill to refill her coffee.
“So soon? Did someone confess over coffee?”
Tom smiled. “It’s an hour past daylight. Gossip’s been flying here for at least that. No one confessed, but Chris Pauley lives down the street and saw the flat tires on the Jeep when he was on his way here. He owns the mechanic’s shop at the end of the street. Figured he’d be seeing your man sometime this morning.”
“He’s not my man,” Justine automatically corrected him. “He’s here working, the same as me.”
Tom snorted. “Yeah, ‘freelancing.’ That guy’s military or cop or both.”
Justine tried to maintain a blank face, hoping to get some information out of the café owner. “Sounds like you’re making that observation from experience,” she said, neither confirming nor denying Tom’s assessment of Brian.
“I did my time in a uniform. No war going on then, at least not on paper, but I saw some action that didn’t exactly make it in the history books.”
Interesting, and something that elevated Tom from benign café owner to a very real threat. “Let’s just say Olivia wanted my stay here to be less adventurous than her own,” Justine explained. “Brian’s a friend of hers and offered to keep an eye on things while I’m working.”
Tom plated her food and slid it in front of her. He glanced to the corner where the old-timers sat, then leaned a bit toward her and lowered his voice. “If she’d really wanted things to be less adventurous, she’d have burned that cursed relic to the ground when she had the opportunity. You watch your back. Ain’t no man alive suited to fight what’s been awakened at laMalediction.”
Tom slipped away from the counter and back into the cooler. Justine stared after him, feeling the hair rise on the back of her neck. What in the world had a hard, tough man like Tom Breaux seen or heard about the house that made him so fearful? And was there a grain of truth in his fear?
She’d tried to dismiss the incident her first night in laMalediction as lack of preparedness on her part for not anticipating an early strike, but all the precautions in the world wouldn’t save her from a ghost or a very real stalker. Clearly something was going on in Cypriere—something that someone didn’t want discovered.
Justine dug into her breakfast with more fervor than usual and mentally calculated the miles she’d need to run to work off the pile of eggs cooked in bacon grease, but she didn’t skip a single bite. She languished over her coffee and kept an eye on Deedee, hoping to catch the waitress slipping out back for a break. Tom refilled her coffee regularly, but remained silent, apparently having said all he needed to say.
Justine was just about to go into coffee overload when Deedee told Tom she was taking her break and headed out the back. Justine waited a minute, then placed some money on the counter and thanked Tom for the breakfast before heading out of the café. She forced herself not to rush as she walked down the sidewalk in front of the plate-glass window of the café, trying to look normal, then slipped around the corner to the alley in the rear.
Deedee sat at a weather-beaten wooden picnic table behind the café, smoking a
cigarette. Her head jerked up as Justine stepped on some broken glass, and she stared at Justine with a deer-in-the-headlights look. Justine gave her a wave and casual hello and strolled over to the picnic table, trying to appear nonchalant.
Deedee averted her eyes and placed the cigarette between her lips. Justine noticed her hands shook as she held it in place for a draw. “Deedee, right?” Justine said, trying to sound friendly.
Deedee nodded, but didn’t raise her gaze.
Justine stopped in front of the picnic table, deliberately positioning herself in the middle of the walkway between Deedee and the back door of the café. “I’m Justine. We met yesterday.”
“I remember,” Deedee said, her raspy voice low.
“I’m doing research on the history of the house for the estate. I wondered if you’ve lived around here all your life and could tell me some of the local superstitions.”
Deedee’s eyes widened, and when she looked up, Justine could tell the woman was clearly frightened. “I can’t speak of such things,” Deedee whispered. She looked nervously up and down the alley, then back at Justine. “Speaking of them gives them power.”
“It’s just stories and lore, Deedee. Surely you can’t believe haunts would come get you if you talk about them?”
Deedee shook her head. “Not me. They’d come for you. You’re the one they want. I knew it from the first moment I saw you.”
Deedee rose from the picnic table and leaned toward Justine. “They got you here, called to you in the night when you were sleeping and got into your mind. They’re not going to let you leave until they get what they want.”
“Which is what?”
“Renewed energy. You’re the one who can sustain them.”
Justine stared. “Are you trying to tell me you think the spirits will take my soul to sustain themselves?”
“I don’t think—I know. You should get in your car and leave. Forget you ever heard of Cypriere or that cursed house. Put as many miles between you and southern Louisiana as you can manage, and never return as long as you live.”
Deedee dropped her cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it out with her foot. She stepped around Justine and hurried back into the café, without so much as a backward glance. Justine stared after her for a minute, then crossed the alley and a vacant lot to the street where the rental house was located.
If Deedee was faking her fear, Justine was impressed. The waitress had suggested Justine leave immediately and never return. Were her words a threat or a warning? Clearly Deedee was scared of something—the question was whether she was really afraid of spirits and haunts or whether she knew what was going on at laMalediction and was afraid of the person behind it.
Justine blew out a breath of frustration. An hour and a half of digging and she was no closer to a guess on what was at work in Cypriere than she had been before she got here. In fact, if anything, she was more confused. She still had no way to separate imaginary fears from the real ones, nor even a clue as to where to start looking for the very real person who’d slashed Brian’s tires and hit her on the head. Spirits didn’t slash tires or create the smell of smoke to lure you from a locked room.
Brian pulled into the driveway as she walked up to the rental house, and gave Justine a wave as he climbed out of the Jeep. “You’re just in time to help me unload,” he said.
Justine pulled a couple of paper bags full of groceries out of the backseat. “I hope you found something healthy. I just ate a month of grease at the café.”
“That bad?” Brian asked as he pulled a box of canned goods out of the back of the Jeep.
“No, it was that good. I just can’t afford to eat that way every day.”
Brian laughed. “I picked up skim milk, granola, wheat bagels and low-fat cream cheese. I was surprised at the selection at the store. They had everything on your list.”
“Sounds perfect,” she said as they entered the rental house. “So I guess Chris ‘The Gossip’ Pauley was able to fit you with some tires.”
Brian placed the box of groceries on the kitchen counter. “Wow. Word spread that fast?”
“Yep. It’s the first thing Tom brought up when I got to the café.”
Brian shook his head. “Apparently I underestimated the local news chain.”
“Or the boredom level. Probably nothing much out of the ordinary happens here. You and I account for two acts of random violence in as many days.”
“True. Chris Pauley was the guy in the café yesterday wearing the ball cap.”
“The one with the staring problem?”
“You noticed that, too? Yeah, that’s the one.”
Justine frowned. “So, did he have anything to say about your tires?”
Brian gave her a wry smile. “Oh, he couldn’t stop talking about it. Ran his mouth the entire time he worked.”
“And…?”
“We’re just bringing more trouble to this town. It had no problems before Olivia came to stay at the devil house, and so on. The gist of it ended with his advice that we leave before we cause doom and gloom to descend on heavenly Cypriere.”
Justine nodded. It sounded like the same spiel Deedee had given her but without the spirit- or soul-stealing part. “Speaking of doom and gloom, did you call our friend the sheriff?”
“Oh, yeah. He made an obligatory stop at the me chanic’s shop and essentially suggested that if we went back to New Orleans, not only would our problems cease but his would, as well.”
Justine sighed. “Seems like a recurring theme.” She filled Brian in on her conversations with Tom and Deedee.
“We’re not exactly winning any popularity contests here,” Brian said. “I expected problems after talking to John, but I guess I didn’t expect this many, this varied, or this soon.”
“And the local opposition—were you expecting that?”
“It’s pretty much exactly what I expected. We’re upsetting the mix. If they believe in the curse nonsense, then they’re going to think we’re stirring up spirits. If they’re involved in something nefarious at laMalediction, we’re going to be in their way.”
“That’s the same conclusion I came to after talking with Tom and Deedee.” She stared out the kitchen window for a moment. “I think one or both of them knows something.”
“Probably. But whether what they know does us any good or even applies to our situation is a whole other issue. That’s the biggest problem with police work. Everyone’s hiding something, but so many times it has nothing to do with the crime.”
“Everybody has secrets.” God knows she did.
Brian rubbed his jaw, his expression thoughtful. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. It’s just that some people’s secrets don’t end with murder.”
Chapter Seven
Justine put another stack of Sissy’s journals on the library table. They’d arrived at laMalediction around noon, given the late start, and Justine had spent another frustrating two hours not finding a single clue about what happened to Marilyn’s lover or where Sissy’s sister lived or whether Marilyn’s child made it safely out of Cypriere.
Despite all the rumor and myth and the obvious local fear of the estate, Justine didn’t buy for one minute that an adult male and a child had disappeared into thin air. They went somewhere, but damned if she could find a trace of them so far in the journals.
She opened a bottled water and took a long drink. Her frustration level was growing, and she needed to take a step back and collect herself. It was only her second day on the job, and neither had been a full one. She needed to control her impatience. The answers were in this library, buried on a few pages of the thousands that occupied the shelves. With systematic elimination, she’d eventually find them.
Besides, it wasn’t like Olivia had given her a deadline. In fact, Olivia had been quite clear that the job would continue until Justine found the answers the estate attorney required, or she was out of options for further research. A more pressing concern was whether the scare tactics woul
d cease long enough for her to actually do the job.
She reached for another journal and opened it to the first page, but before she could begin reading, the light in the room faded. Dark clouds swirled outside the library window, blocking the sunlight and providing fair warning that a storm was on its way. She barely had a second to wonder if Brian had noticed the storm when he stepped into the library.
“A storm’s blowing in,” he said. “Came in suddenly off the gulf, but it’s not supposed to last. I figured we could wait it out, if that’s okay with you.”
“That’s fine.”
“We’ll probably lose power,” he warned.
“I have about four hours of battery backup on my laptop, and a kerosene lamp, so I’m good for the afternoon anyway.”
Brian nodded. “Okay. I’m going to make a quick check of the perimeter of the house. Make sure the alarm is working properly. If it goes off any time in the next ten minutes or so, just ignore it.”
“Okay,” Justine replied as he hurried off down the hall. She heard the front door open and close, then saw him cross the window in front of the library on his march around the house. She gave the swirling sky one final look, then focused back on the journal in front of her. It was a more recent one, and after the time Justine figured Marilyn had the baby. She hoped Sissy would mention the father.
May 20, 1863
I knew it were wrong, but the mistress couldn’t be swayed. We stood there that night in the graveyard, waiting for something that should have never happened—something that would eventually destroy us all. I took the vow, along with the mistress and the other, and to this day, I have never spoken of that night.
But someone did, and now we’ll all pay.
Justine’s pulse increased. The graveyard? What the hell were they all doing in the graveyard? She reread the passage to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood.
