DISHING UP LOVE

by Robichaux, KD

  “The year before the casket girls came to NOLA, a group of nuns arrived in our fair city. These nuns established a school here that housed the fille à la cassette as they looked for husbands. When Ursuline Convent was opened up for the nuns in 1734, the girls were moved to the third floor as they continued their search. The nuns would often arrange marriages for the young women, basically a one-stop shop. ‘We’ll put you up until we find you a man and can kick you out.’”

  This provoked a couple laughs around the group, everyone riveted to the story, because by his tone of voice, we all know the other shoe is about to drop.

  “But NOLA peeps were suspicious of the casket girls. Unlike most of the houses in the city, the windows along the third floor were shuttered, even nailed shut. Not only that, but after their arrival, the death toll in the city doubled. Add their pale skin, coffin-shaped bags, tightly locked and nailed shutters in a city that rarely had them—to the residents of New Orleans, it was obvious these casket girls must be vampires!

  “New Orleans is known as a hub for all things paranormal. It is possibly the most haunted city in the country. So, it’s no surprise legends spring up from locals’ encounters with girls who were, from their perspective… just plain weird.

  “Quite a few of the girls had trouble finding husbands. That is, if they lived through the yellow fever or tuberculosis that was ravaging the area. The ones who finally married often didn’t see their hubbies for extended periods of time, since many of them were fur trappers or traders, which were jobs that required lots of travel.”

  “Man, that sucks,” I murmur and squeeze Erin tight at that, realizing this would be similar to us if I were lucky enough to be in a relationship with her. Lots of travel and time away from her. I shake my head at myself. No, we’d figure it out. If she didn’t want to travel with me, then I’d come here to live in her city. Open a restaurant, maybe.

  “According to the legends, the king of France grew tired of the young women he sent over here not fulfilling their duty and instead being forced into prostitution to earn their keep, so he ordered them to be brought back home. But… once the nuns got up to the third floor of this convent to get the girls—” Ronnie points up to the windows along the top floor of Ursuline Convent. “—they were gone. The nuns looked everywhere for them, but as the story goes, the windows had been sealed shut the whole time. This, ladies and gents, is when the vampire legends really kicked up a notch.

  “The nails sealing the windows shut were blessed by the pope himself! So how in the world did these young women disappear?” Ronnie asks dramatically, and Erin tilts her head back to look at me and waggle her eyebrows. I grin down at her, enjoying being so close to her and loving that we have yet another similar interest. This woman was made for me. I can feel it to the depths of my soul.

  “More than two hundred years later, in the year 1978, two paranormal investigators came and visited the convent to see if the legends were true. They were kicked off the property for loitering but secretly returned anyway to stay the night and see what happened. While they slept, the security cameras showed the windows opening and shutting several times before stopping. And the next morning—” Ronnie points to the few steps leading up to the front of the church. “—the bodies of the investigators were found… ravaged and drained of blood.”

  “Whoa,” I breathe, taking another look at the building that suddenly seems way creepier than it had before.

  “At this time, I’ll give you a minute to take pictures and read the placards if you’d like,” Ronnie says, and a couple of women take off across the street toward the steps in front of the church. I feel Erin’s body shake a little with laughter as we watch one of the women lie across the steps, apparently pretending to be drained of blood except for her huge yardstick margherita she holds in the air while her friend snaps pictures. When she stands, she takes a swig from the straw before trading places with the other woman, who seems a little more creeped out being that close to the convent. She just stands next to the sign and holds up her finger to point at it while she gets her photo taken.

  As they make their way back to our group, we hear the excitement in their voices as they check the photos on the phone for “orbs.”

  “If we’re all ready, we’ll head to stop number two,” Ronnie prompts, and everyone gives an affirmation.

  “We are named Louisiana because at the time we were founded, King Louis the Fourteenth was the ruler of France. So we are the ‘Land of Louis.’ We had two major fires that ravaged our beautiful city, so what you see now is nothing like it looked when we were first built up over three hundred years ago, the French Quarter being the first neighborhood here. The first fire was in 1788, on Good Friday. We had eleven hundred buildings, and eighty percent of them were burnt to the ground. That means it burned down eight hundred and fifty-six buildings in one night. The next fire was in 1794, and it started just a block away from the first fire, meaning we hadn’t even had time to rebuild all the ones that had originally burned down. It burned down two hundred more,” Ronnie tells us.

  “Most of the French colonial buildings that were here to begin with were built out of cypress, and you might’ve seen all the cypress trees all over the city. It’s oily. It’s amazing for hurricanes, but oil… is used to burn. Which is why we lost nearly the entirety of New Orleans in just one fire, two—no pun intended—just added fuel to the fire. The town was devastated. But we loved our home here, so rebuilt we did. This time, we built everything out of the brick and stucco we are now known for. All these buildings, all the beautiful courtyards, it’s all Spanish architecture from when we were taken over. But more on that history later.

  “These days, we only have three of the original French buildings left. Three out of the original eleven hundred. Now, if you take a look at this building we’re standing in front of, this green and white structure was a place of residence. Notice how it looks completely out of place, like it doesn’t belong. Sort of looks like a giant version of the old man’s house in Up when they built the skyscrapers around it when he wouldn’t sell, right?”

  “Saddest movie in history,” I murmur in Erin’s ear.

  She turns wide eyes to me. “Right? I cry through the entire thing, even when I fast-forward through the first fifteen minutes.”

  “It’s the only one out of the three original French buildings that was a place of residence. Its style is called a raised French colonial,” Ronnie explains, which makes sense. The bottom floor looks like a five-car garage, and above that is a wraparound balcony encasing the second floor, where the home actually sits. “Some fun facts about this place. It was used in the movie Twelve Years a Slave and also the coffin scene in Interview with the Vampire.”

  “Oh, shit. No way! I love that fucking movie,” I whisper, and Erin nods excitedly.

  “Me too! I could show you all the places Anne Rice owns around the city,” she tells me, and I grin internally once again at her wanting to keep me around a little longer. Could this be my “in” with her? Could I possibly use her love of the city to get to know her more? I wonder just how many days I could get her to spend with me, showing me around and telling me stories of all the rich history of this fascinating place.

  “Here’s some awesome NOLA lore for you. After all, this is a haunted tour, right? In that scene, Anne Rice was super accurate in her portrayal of how funerals were done down here. It was pure chaos, everyone going in different directions, no one taking the same route. It probably looked strange if you were paying close attention to this, because nowadays, we have a funeral procession. Everyone heads to the graveyard in an organized line, flashers on, even police escorted. We’ve grown up showing respect for the dead by pulling over to the side of the road when we see a procession coming from the opposite direction. Back then though, they purposely mixed it up. They never went straight from the funeral to the graveyard for a very specific purpose.” He lowers his voice and we all lean in. “It was known as ‘spirit confusion’ and it was
done so the evil spirits couldn’t follow you into the cemetery.”

  “Ahhh,” a couple people in our group, including me, murmur, and Erin smiles up at me, seeming to enjoy my enthusiasm for gaining cool knowledge.

  We make our way down the street, stopping momentarily for Ronnie to point up at a random building. “If you look up, do you see those upward-facing spikes?” I tilt my head back and squint to see several metal spikes circling each of the poles Erin gave me the lesson about on the way to her house before we recorded the cooking part of the show. “We call those Romeo spikes. You could always tell which homes had residents with daughters, because they’d have these spikes.” A few of the tourists chuckle, but I don’t get it. Luckily, Ronnie explains further. “If the young Romeos tried to climb the poles to Juliet’s room, they were soon met with these very painfully sharp spikes. And if they did make it past them, they returned down the pole as Juliets themselves.”

  It dawns on me what he means then, and I burst out laughing.

  I shake my head, finishing off my drink, and I see Erin is done with hers as well. As we continue walking, I toss both of our empty cups into a trashcan. When our hands brush, having to walk so closely on the narrow sidewalk, I take the opportunity to casually slip my fingers through hers, lacing them together. I purposely don’t look down at her to gauge her reaction, choosing to not make a big deal about it as I glance up, noting more of the Romeo spikes on various buildings we pass by. I can feel her eyes on me, but fighting my urge to lock gazes with her, I feel her limp fingers finally tighten around mine, and something inside me eases, an anxiousness I didn’t even realize I had before, suddenly gone.

  We continue to hold hands even as we come to our next stop, and don’t let go throughout Ronnie’s next fascinating yet tragic tale.

  “Here’s where our tour takes a darker turn. I’ve told you a fun vampire story, some cool architectural history, and a pretty humorous tidbit about spikes along the galleries. But the farther along we get in the tour, the more obvious the reasons why our little town is known as one of the haunted places on earth will become. If you look across the street, this boutique hotel, now known as the Andrew Jackson, used to be a private boarding school for boys. And yet another fire broke out here, killing everyone inside, including the children. But don’t worry, the boys still live there.”

  There’s collective nervous laughter from the group, but more importantly, I note Erin wrapping her free hand around my bicep as she steps closer to me. I look down to see she’s not part of the uncomfortable chuckles. She has a distinctively sad look on her face I want to ask her about, but Ronnie starts up his story once more.

  “People, for decades, have reported the sounds of children laughing, playing, running up and down the halls. But when they open their door to tell them to quiet down, to go back to the room they surely share with their parents while visiting the city, there’s no one there. Also, for a lot of years, this was an adults-only hotel, so the sound of kids playing out in the courtyard was especially ominous.”

  I shiver a bit, a reel of every creepy movie starring ghost children playing through my mind, freaking me out a little. And I damn near scream like a little bitch when Erin uses the hand previously wrapped around my bicep to tickle up my side.

  “Woman,” I growl after jumping almost a foot away from her but never letting go of her hand. I use our connection to pull her tight against me. “You’ll pay for that, sugar.”

  “Oh yeah?” She grins.

  “Yeah. No one makes me pee a little and gets away with it.”

  She squeezes her eyes tightly closed and doubles over laughing, causing several people to turn and look at us.

  As she continues to laugh uncontrollably, I tell our confused audience, “She’s one of those people who laughs at inappropriate times. Like at funerals and… during stories of a bunch of people dying and haunting a hotel.” I shrug. “But we still love her.”

  At this, Erin’s laughter fades and she looks up at me, surprise etched into her face, I assume at my use of the L-word. Again, acting casual, I tell Ronnie, “Sorry, bro. Keep on going, please.” I gesture for him to resume his story.

  He shakes his head, a smile twinkling in his eyes. “No need to apologize. It’s very nice to see my friend enjoying herself and laughing so much.”

  By his tone, I pick up that maybe that’s not a regular occurrence, but not wanting to embarrass her in front of all the people now with their attention riveted on us, I deflect. “So they still report hearing ghost kids at this place?”

  Ronnie nods. “Yes. Not so long ago, back when we had to get our camera film developed before we got to see the pictures we took, several people wrote to the hotel once they got back home, complaining someone had snuck into their room while they were sleeping and took photos of them. But upon closer examination, the photos seemed to have been taken from above.” His voice takes on his favorite creepy tone. “As if they were floating above their bed.”

  Another collective shiver.

  “Also, lots of people say the TVs like to flip through channels on their own.”

  Our next stop is pretty crowded. Across the street is another tour group, the guide gesturing to our side of the road, so I put two and two together, discovering we’re right outside the door of a haunted hotel. Furthermore, from what I overhear Ronnie telling a couple at the front of the group, this is where our bathroom break will be. There’s a bar inside on the first floor that we’ll be able to get a drink refill if we choose to. Once the other tour leaves and the area quiets down a bit, Ronnie starts the story.

  “A few hundred years ago, the building that stood in the place of this one—the lovely and extremely haunted Le Richelieu Hotel—was a Spanish barracks during the war. Not too far away, where the jazz museum is, was the French barracks. It was called Fort St. Charles. Some of you might’ve guessed that the reason the architecture went from French colonial to Spanish is because we were taken over. The French and Spanish obviously didn’t like each other.

  “The first governor that was sent here by Spain wasn’t very effective and we ran him out of town. But unfortunately, the next one they sent, they sent with an army. Even though he was Spanish, his name was O’Reilly. As soon as he got here, he came over to Fort St. Charles and put to death twenty-four of their highest-ranking officers. And then he proceeded to make a jail out of the barracks for the rest of the soldiers. If you’re here, you probably love legends and ghost stories. So most of you probably know who Vlad the Impaler is. Much like the ruler who inspired Dracula and how he’d line the streets with heads on stakes, O’Reilly would periodically hang soldiers from the flagpoles right in front of their families, thinking it would deter anyone from trying to start a revolution. The Spanish ended up ruling us for forty years and when the French won us back, we only stayed on top for twenty days. But in that twenty days, we certainly didn’t forget about what Riley did to our men.

  “We immediately marched down here to this block, which used to be the Spanish barracks, gathered up all their officers, and returned the favor out in what is now the parking lot.

  “There have been several ghost sightings here. Most of them are of soldiers, for apparent reasons, out in the courtyard. And like a lot of places especially around here, whenever someone renovates a room upstairs, there is a lot of paranormal activity.”

  And with that creepy revelation, he gestures for us to enter the haunted building.

  Chapter 9

  Erin

  INSIDE LE RICHELIEU Hotel, I take a seat on one of the barstools to wait for Curtis to return from the restroom.

  I try to gather my rampant thoughts while I’m out of his presence. The longer I’m with him, the more time I want to spend with him. And that is not good. Normally, after holding a conversation with a man I meet, whatever happens that night, it’s no big deal just to either go home alone or kick them out soon after getting to know them in a physical way. But Curtis…

  Curtis, I want to take h
ome with me, introduce him to the sanctuary of my room, and for him to never leave. I want to let him pull me to him like he’s been doing all night, curl up against his tall, strong body that makes me feel oh so safe, even in the presence of what could be evil spirits along the tour in the dead of night, and just stay there for hours, days, weeks even. I want to binge watch our favorite shows, let him cook me any meal he can think of, and then make a dessert out of his deliciously masculine body. He makes me feel a hundred percent all woman, even though a very vital part of what makes me female does everything in its power to make me feel less than.

  I love and hate a certain part of Curtis I’ve picked up on with my psychological brain. He’s very, very observant. I can tell when he catches a peek behind my strategically placed defenses before I can reinforce them. But thankfully, he hasn’t questioned me. He’s smart, choosing to let it go, probably building a list inside his beautiful mind so he can ask me about them when we’re alone or whenever, if ever, I choose to open up to him. Even with his towering size, there’s a definite gentleness about him, in the way he handles me physically and mentally. It makes me appreciate him, but at the same time, it scares the shit out of me.

  I have very strict rules I’ve placed on myself. I don’t get close to men. I don’t let them get close to me. There is no depth to the time I spend with any of them. It’s just better this way. Then my heart doesn’t have to get broken when I’m not good enough, just me.

  “Sugar, sugar.” Curtis’s hot breath sends chills down my neck as he whisper-sings in my ear before taking the stool next to me.

  “Oh, honey, honey.” I shake my head, using the lyrics to the oldie as I cross my arms on the bar top and lay my head down, facing him. “You think we have enough time for me to take a powernap?”

  “You think you could sleep in this haunted creepy-ass hotel bar? Go ahead and we’ll catch up to the tour group later.” He chuckles.