Stay Dead (Elise Sandburg series)

by Anne Frasier

  That mouth turned up slightly at the corners, and he whispered, “Someday . . .”

  For a brief second, Elise saw something in his eyes that was too deep and too scary. With David she always got the sense that he was hanging by a thread, and if he ever let go . . . And now he was inviting her to come with him.

  She pulled back a little, but his hands were still on her arms. “Someday what?” she asked, hoping he would follow her lead to the land of safe.

  He didn’t. “You. Me.”

  “Highly unlikely.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  They stared at each other for a long time. And then they both laughed. Maybe too hard, but that’s how they did these things. That’s how they handled it.

  The hair she’d put in a ponytail before leaving the hospital began to slip free, and dark strands fell around her face. David took note of her dilemma and came to stand behind her. Once in grooming position, he tugged the band free, swept back her straight hair with his palms, and redid the whole thing in a matter of a few seconds, giving her shoulders a there-you-go pat. He took rejection well.

  CHAPTER 4

  That night Elise woke up thinking she was home. Thinking she was in her bed in the Garden District. She stared into the darkness, barely able to make out the shape of a painting above her. For a disoriented heartbeat, she thought the painting was a door, and she wondered what would happen if she opened that door. She got the sense that if she opened it she’d find something she didn’t want to find.

  So odd. She didn’t remember a door in her room. And then she became cognizant of where she was. The plantation. Aunt Anastasia’s bed. That realization created a cascading sensation as her brain struggled to rearrange the puzzle that was the space surrounding her in the darkness.

  The bed, with its feather topper, was almost too soft. Elise liked a firm mattress. And it smelled. Not bad, but like the vanilla and lavender oil Anastasia used to concoct.

  “Try it, Elise. It’s so refreshing.”

  Elise would put her finger over the brown bottle, tip it, and dab the homemade perfume behind her ears.

  “The ears seem like a silly place for perfume,” Elise had said. “Why do ears need perfume?”

  “Because men like to smell a woman’s hair,” Anastasia explained. “They want to bury their faces in your hair and press their lips just here”—she touched her niece—“just below your earlobe.”

  “And you want to taste good for them?”

  “You want to taste delicious.”

  And maybe the bed smelled a bit like wine and smoke, as if the years of Anastasia’s life had soaked into the feathers. Elise remembered her aunt pulling her close, and the smell was like that. Like her arms and her clothes and her hair. The pillow, where Elise’s head was resting . . . Anastasia’s head had rested there. Elise found that knowledge both comforting and disturbing. She wanted to stuff the pillow under the bed, and she wanted to hug it and inhale deeply.

  At one point, Elise drifted back to sleep and dreamed that a bouquet of gardenias rested on the small marble-topped table next to the bed. And later, during the night when she half woke, she could still smell them. That sickening and cloying and wonderful scent. She imagined shiny black ants crawling over petals.

  Pain. Her pain medication had worn off. That explained the dreams. The weird thoughts. The constant waking.

  With the crutches under her arms, Elise thumped down the hallway and was halfway to the kitchen when she heard a splash coming from the direction of the pool.

  Her first thought was intruder, but her second was more logical. Someone else had probably been given permission to use the house. Or maybe her aunt’s open-door policy was still in play. But that theory didn’t keep Elise from returning to the bedroom to grab her gun.

  She’d never tried to use crutches and hold a gun at the same time. She briefly contemplated putting the weapon between her teeth, but finally opted for slipping the shoulder holster over her nightgown.

  Back down the hall, she leaned her crutches against the wall so her hands were free. She pulled out her Glock 17, then, favoring her good foot, lightly putting weight on the walking cast, she approached the pool room. Except for the cast, except for the shoulder holster, except for the gun, she would have looked like some heroine from a gothic novel in her white, sleeveless gown—a present from her daughter. Elise wondered if Audrey had been trying to tell her something. Be more feminine, Mom. Be more like a regular mom. Bake cookies and wear nightgowns made of cotton and a bit of lace.

  Sometimes Elise thought she’d failed Audrey just as much as Grace had failed Elise. The long hours of work. The way she was never as present as she should be. Watching a softball game, her mind would wander to the cases on her desk. To the most recent crimes she and David were working.

  Another splash.

  The door to the pool room was inches from her shoulder. Deep breath, gun braced, Elise swung into the room, scanning with her eyes and the barrel.

  In the center of the pool was a disturbance left by a diving body. As Elise watched, a black question mark rose to the surface. She blinked and stepped closer. Just a swirl. Just a shadow.

  And then, not a yard from her feet, a person exploded from the water. Elise’s eyes and mind processed an aqua swimming cap with yellow flowers. A black bathing suit. The bathing suit that had been on the chaise longue earlier, and a woman all long and willowy, with white arms.

  “Hello, Elise,” the woman said with lips as red as cherries, with a voice that was familiar in tone and inflection and softly Southern accent. “Welcome back to the plantation.”

  Aunt Anastasia.

  CHAPTER 5

  This is where the woman in the gothic novel would swoon, then awaken to find some handsome lord in a black cape towering over her, possibly trying to loosen her corset in order to revive her. Elise didn’t swoon. Instead, she kept the gun pointed steadily at Anastasia’s head and demanded to know what the hell was going on.

  Anastasia casually pushed away from the side of the pool, did a lovely sidestroke to the ladder, climbed out, grabbed a towel, and began to dry off, lifting her long, lovely legs one at a time. That’s when Elise noticed how young she was. Maybe in her late twenties.

  Without looking up, the young woman said, “You can quit pointing that thing at me anytime.”

  Elise remembered the gun in her hand. She lowered it. “You aren’t Anastasia,” she said.

  “Of course not.” The woman pulled off the swimming cap and shook out a cascade of red hair.

  Elise had never been attracted to females, but she was smitten right then and there. This had to be Melinda, Anastasia’s daughter, born after the family rift. Elise could see she had the same power as her mother. The uncanny ability to make a person—any person of any sexual orientation—fall head over heels within seconds.

  Elise was glad the power had been passed from mother to daughter. The passing of the mantle. Not of root work, but something just as strong. Something people might have called feminine wiles fifty years ago. And just as Elise had sometimes diminished before her aunt, she now felt herself become less feminine, less attractive, older, more awkward, in front of Melinda. At the same time, she knew it wasn’t the lovely woman’s fault, which made her adore her all the more. And yet Elise was suddenly excruciatingly and painfully aware of her dark, drab, shoulder-length hair. Her body beneath the gown. Not willowy, not fat, but not as toned as it used to be. Riddled with scars that she laughingly referred to as her war wounds but that she now saw as defects. Not glorious things of which to be proud, but ugly damage.

  And she thought of David. And in that moment of clarity she understood one of the reasons, maybe the biggest reason, she didn’t want their relationship to change, to move beyond what they had. She didn�
��t want him to see her body. And she particularly didn’t want him to see what Atticus Tremain had done to her.

  It was different when you met someone at your peak, married, and grew old together. Midthirties certainly wasn’t old, but Elise’s abused body was on the downhill slide, and it would never be beautiful again. She wanted to be beautiful in David’s mind. She wanted him to imagine what it would be like, what she would be like. And that imagining would be so much more than they could ever have.

  It was very unlike Elise to have such thoughts make their way to the surface of her brain. She didn’t care for them.

  “I’m sorry if I startled you,” Melinda said. “I live in Savannah, but I often drop by to do laps in the pool.”

  “Your mother loved to swim too.”

  Melinda tossed the towel over the chair. “Listen.” Her face took on a let’s-be-frank expression. “I know why you’re here. Aunt Grace is contesting the will. You have to realize how ridiculous that is. I’m Anastasia’s daughter. And she and my aunt hadn’t talked since before I was born. Why wouldn’t she leave everything to me?”

  “Grace led me to believe that they’d reconnected in the past several years.”

  “Not that I know of. My mother never mentioned her. Her sister didn’t exist as far as Anastasia was concerned.”

  “You’ve had no contact with Grace?”

  Those lovely brows drew together in puzzlement. “None. Ever.”

  Elise filed that away to ponder. “How long have the windows been painted blue?” she asked.

  “Windows?”

  “The windows and doors are painted blue.”

  “Ah, I’m not sure.”

  “Did your mother say why she painted them that color?”

  “We never really talked about it. I just thought it was an artistic choice.”

  “Structurally the building is in bad shape, yet she painted the windows and doors.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know. My mother did a lot of things that could be considered peculiar.”

  “Did she ever voice any fears? Of people? Of . . . well, evil spirits?”

  Melinda gave it some thought, and then shook her head. “Anastasia was fearless.”

  “That’s how I remember her,” Elise said. Which made the blue trim all the odder.

  CHAPTER 6

  The morning after David dropped off Elise at the plantation, he got up before dawn to jog. Located in a rough area of downtown, his apartment was on the third floor of an ancient building called Mary of the Angels. Like all of Savannah, it had a dark history. Mary of the Angels was a sad place that had once housed children orphaned by the yellow-fever epidemic, and was later turned into a home for TB patients. People claimed it was haunted, but David said that was bullshit.

  By the time he’d tugged on his gray sweatpants and black T-shirt, laced his shoes, and hit Forsyth Park, the sky was beginning to lighten and birds were singing.

  He’d started running after his son was murdered. Back then it had been the only way to wear himself out enough to sleep, and the rhythmic pace hypnotized him, lulled him into oblivion. Now he ran because he liked it, and, no matter the time of year, he preferred early morning to take a tour of a city he’d come to love.

  Never dreamed he’d ever say that, but the place had gotten to him in so many ways. Even the smell. Especially the smell. He couldn’t place it, and people from Savannah didn’t seem to notice it at all. Whenever he asked about the source, fingers pointed to the paper mill and its billowing clouds of smoke. But this wasn’t the mill. This was organic, and like nothing he’d ever smelled anywhere else. Maybe the closest it came was to a greenhouse, but that wasn’t it. No, this seemed to be mixed with the marsh at low tide and the wood from ancient buildings, the sandy soil that reluctantly held the tombstones in Bonaventure Cemetery, and the draping Spanish moss that made even the most horrid of crime scenes appear placid and peaceful.

  He sometimes found himself sniffing a handful of live-oak leaves, searching for clues to the source of the perfume, because it could almost be considered perfume. But he knew the smell wasn’t coming from the leaves. It came from everything, reaching from the past, from the blood and tears and antebellum gowns to the organic coffee and patchouli emanating from the café across from Forsyth Park. A new world perched atop dark history.

  Savannah was considered one of the most haunted cities in the world, and David might insist he didn’t believe in ghosts, but he understood the ghost thing. The souls who’d come before could be felt in every tabby brick, every trunk of every breaking tree, every narrow street, every blooming square, every pane of glass. And when you were staring at a headstone lovingly and intricately carved by a man who’d been dead for over a hundred years, you could feel a certain . . . imprint. You could imagine the sculptor’s hands moving over the stone.

  David would always be an outsider here—he knew that—but his Yankee eyes had never seen such a dark, gritty, beautiful place.

  He hit his favorite high points: several of the squares, River Street, then back through Forsyth Park. Street sweepers were out sweeping the night’s fallen leaves, the homeless were waking up, and a few tourists were already visible, standing on corners clutching whimsical maps as David wrapped up his run.

  Back in his apartment he was heading for the shower when a knock sounded on the door. He answered it to find a woman named Strata Luna standing there in all her spooky glory. Behind him, his cat, Isobel, skidded around the corner to vanish into the bedroom.

  David hadn’t seen the woman in months, and as far as he knew she’d never visited his apartment. And why was she out at this hour? Strata Luna, Savannah’s most famous madam, belonged to the night, not the mornings. But then again, she probably wasn’t someone who paid much attention to the clock, and she could pretty much do whatever she wanted since the entire city was afraid of her. Hell, the entire police force was afraid of her, which was why they looked the other way when it came to her business. But David silently accused her of being all theater, with her black veil and darkened car windows. She didn’t scare him. She’d never scared him even though it was said she could kill a man with her gaze.

  As he understood it, she was of Gullah or Geechee heritage. Both, although different, had become interchangeable, Gullah the more widely used, and even the locals weren’t sure of the difference anymore.

  With a dramatic gesture that carried with it the scent of exotic oils, she lifted the ornate veil from her face, folding it back so it fell over her shoulders. Black gloves vanished into the sleeves of her black dress, the dress itself full, falling to the floor. He found himself staring at her luminous brown skin, almond eyes, and full, red lips.

  “I have something for you,” she said.

  He backed up, never taking his eyes off her as she floated in. Her dress rustled. Like leaves. Like paper.

  She stopped in the center of his cramped apartment, inhaled, and turned to face him. “This is a nice place.”

  Vines covering the windows. Clothes tossed over the chair and couch, both pieces of furniture well shredded by his cat. Dismal, but it suited him.

  “You’re the first person to ever tell me that.” Most people begged him to move. Most people wondered why he lived in such a depressing place, a place where years ago hundreds of people had died. Of course she’d like it.

  Should he offer her something? Orange juice? Water? She’d served him tea at her pink plantation house. He didn’t have tea.

  “I’m here to help you,” she said.

  His mind tripped along, trying to figure out how she could possibly help him with anything. His first thought was a girl. One of her girls. Yeah, that was probably it. For a moment he actually gave it some consideration, and then he remembered what had happened the last time he’d used the services of Black Tupelo.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Really.”

&n
bsp; “I’m not talking about sex, but if you’re interested I have a couple of new girls I think you’d like.”

  “No. Thanks. That’s okay.”

  “I’m talking about Elise. I worry about her, and I want to help you. I know things haven’t always been . . . well, that wonderful between us. And I know you suffered, no thanks to me. I want to do something for you. Free of charge. Out of the goodness of my heart. Well, not really goodness. I want to pay my debts.”

  “Can you be a bit more specific?”

  “I’ve brought a mojo.”

  He almost laughed, but that would have been rude. “I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “You don’t have to believe for a spell to work.”

  He had to admit that when Elise went missing he’d actually thought of contacting Strata Luna to see if she could help. And then he’d gotten the call from a strange number, and he’d heard Elise’s voice.

  “It’s me,” Elise had said.

  And he’d dropped to his knees. Just dropped to his knees.

  He realized Strata Luna was still standing in the middle of the room. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked. “Glass of orange juice?”

  “I can’t stay. My driver is waiting.”

  He let out an internal sigh of relief. He couldn’t exactly imagine shooting the shit with this woman. They had absolutely nothing in common. Well, that wasn’t true. They both would forever grieve the loss of a child.

  “The mojo is for Elise,” she said.

  He looked at her blankly, and she went on to explain: “A follow-me-girl.”

  A love spell? “So why are you giving it to me? Shouldn’t you give it to her?” And who in the hell was Elise supposed to fall in love with? He backtracked in his head, trying to think of someone she might be attracted to. There was her ex-husband, but he’d remarried long ago. Seemed a good relationship. And that guy had been all wrong for her. All wrong. So who? Somebody in the department? Mason? He’d split up with his wife. Oh, God, no. Couldn’t be him.