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“Not so much. It mostly described the guy who died. Don’t get offended, okay, but I thought it was kind of cool in a morbid sort of way. I’ve never known anyone who was associated with anyone who was associated with a dead man. And a dead man with clout to boot.”
“So you’ve heard of Maxwell Burgoyne?”
“Not specifically, but they listed several of his holdings. I recognized about six of them. MamaDees Molasses and MamaDees Golden, Brown and Demerara Sugar, the LoBo record label, the FM radio station and the Pro-Max line of tools. They also mentioned a factory that makes hand-painted tiles, but I think it’s out of state. The guy had major bucks.”
“He also had a heart condition,” Roland, their receptionist, called through the open door. “He took pills for it.”
“His heart didn’t kill him, Roland,” Eden pointed out.
“No, something metal did that.” He shook a folded newspaper. “It says there were flecks of rust found in the head wound.”
“Are you hearing any of this, Henry?” Eden asked.
The boy’s eyes remained on the screen. He wore headphones in any case, but she wanted to be sure. The topic of murder wasn’t likely to rate high on his parents’ list of suitable dental office conversations.
Never one to linger on a topic, Phoebe began talking about her daughters, and Eden was able to finish her work in silence.
She’d been toying with an idea all day, but she didn’t know if it was a good one or not. What she wanted to do was drive out to Concordia where Maxwell had died. What she should do, however, was drive over to Lisa and Mary’s place and coax Lisa into going through the story again. She’d gone over it on the phone earlier today, but Lisa had been preoccupied. She’d been using her trowel as they’d talked.
“Mary talked about doing a photo shoot tonight, north of here,” Lisa had remarked. “It involves the last rays of light. Some magazine in Massachusetts that wants to do a spread on vampires and witches. She says they’ve got the witch part covered, but they’re looking for ruins where vampires might live, or unlive, or whatever it is vampires do.”
“You sound down, Lisa. Do you want to go out to Dolores’s for dinner?”
“No.” Lisa had been firm. “I’m not ready for Dolores yet. She’s the second closest person I know to a witch, and she’ll make me relive the whole nightmare again. The police have already asked me a million questions. I can’t tell them anything, and it’s frustrating. I mean, I didn’t like the man, Eden, but I swear I didn’t hit him. How many ways can I say it so they’ll understand?”
Eden understood. After all, she’d had a cop waiting outside her apartment last night with questions. True, he hadn’t been able to ask them, but only because he’d been sidetracked by an addict looking for painkillers. And then she’d been tied up at work today and she’d told Roland not to disturb her with anything except emergency calls.
Her conversation with Lisa played on while she finished Henry’s fillings, gave him the lollipop her young patients expected and stretched her cramped arm and back muscles.
“I wanted to talk to Lucille, Eden, I really did. But when we got there last night, suddenly I couldn’t face her. Mary thinks I’m flipping out, but I’m not. It’s just easier for me when I’m in a garden. Mine mostly, but any garden will do. I love the elements. They’re magical. You mix earth, water and light, a little seed, and suddenly, there’s life. Plants don’t ask questions, they simply exist and, with the proper care, thrive. I can’t imagine my life without them.”
That much Eden had realized the day she’d met Lisa. “Can I ask one more question?” she’d pressed.
“Why did I go looking for our natural father ten years after Lucille told us he was dead?”
“Right.”
“I heard her talking one night out at Dolores’s. I’d walked in from the road. They didn’t know I was there. I was passing under the window when Dolores up and asked Lucille what she would do if we ever learned the truth. Lucille wanted to know what truth, and Dolores said about our biological father being alive. I was stunned, Eden, so stunned I couldn’t go in. I turned around, drove home and went straight to my garden to think. The next day, I hired a private investigator. It took him eleven weeks. He started with Lucille and worked backward until he came up with a name.”
“Maxwell Burgoyne.” Eden thought for a minute. She’d never understood Lisa’s need to discover her birth relatives. “Maybe you should have left it alone, Lisa,” she’d said, “for all our sakes…”
Lisa hadn’t, however, and the rest couldn’t be undone with a wish.
Wishing also wouldn’t help Eden avoid Armand LaMorte for much longer. Roland said he’d called an hour ago. He’d tried again while she’d been ushering Henry out the door. There would be no more reprieves, she thought, glancing at the wall clock. Avoidance was in her hands now. If she was fast and lucky, she could make it home unobserved. Then she’d be free to do—well, whatever seemed most appropriate.
Her cell phone rang as she was unlocking her car. The display read Mary so she answered.
Her sister sounded testy. “Lisa said you wanted to talk to me, Eden.”
With her free hand, Eden unfastened her hair. “Don’t start with me, Mary. I got less than four hours of sleep last night, and I had to pull a mouthful of teeth this morning. Do you know how difficult that is?”
“I know it’s gross.”
“The before picture kind of was. The after will be good in a few days. Where are you right now?”
“En route to Montesse House. And don’t say it’s dangerous there. That’s the whole point of my trip.”
“Vampires, huh?”
“Feel flattered, Eden. Lisa told me you two had a long chat this morning. All I’ve gotten from her today is the brush.”
“Your battery’s dying,” Eden said. “Look, I’m going home for a few minutes. I’ll pick up some food and bring it to Montesse, okay?”
Mary’s response was lost in a blank spot which Eden took as a yes.
Twenty minutes later, she’d changed into drab army pants and a white T-shirt, ignored her answering machine, left a message for Lisa, fed Amorin and purchased dinner. Dusk had begun to settle by the time she reached the outskirts of the city. She noticed black clouds stacked in an angry bunch to the north and wondered if Mary’s battery had in fact been dying. An electrical storm might have disrupted the signal.
For highway driving, she turned her headlights on full and mapped out the route to Montesse in her head. She needed to leave the highway, and the road leading to the Mississippi was anything but smooth. This trip would be hard on her tires.
Her phone rang again a mile past the plantation exit. With no other cars in sight and the potholes readily visible in the thickening twilight, she read the screen, smiled and answered. “Hey, Dolores.”
“Don’t you hey me, pretty girl. You lied to the police. I’m not happy about that, not one bit.”
“No surprise there.”
“Lisa would hit herself on the head before anyone else. What were you thinking doing such a thing, putting your life in danger?”
“Why am I in danger?”
“What do you call a family curse if not dangerous?”
Silly, but Eden wasn’t about to say that to someone she loved. Instead she replied with patience, “The curse has no bearing on this, Dolores. It’s a—” Breaking off, she regarded her rearview mirror. There was a car with blue-tinted headlights behind her, she was sure of it.
“You still there?” Dolores demanded. “What’s going on? Why’d you stop talking?”
“I thought…” She saw nothing now, no car or headlights, in fact, no movement at all. “It’s okay, I guess. I just have this weird feeling I’m being followed. I see pale blue lights behind me, and I freak. Then they vanish, and I realize I’m jumping at shadows.” Which was, she reflected with a sigh, a word she really hadn’t needed to use. “Tell me, Dolores, have you spoken to a Detective LaMorte yet?”
“It’s possible. I’ve spoken to many police officers today. Told them all I didn’t make gumbo for you and me on Sunday night, no sir. Why ask me about one in particular?”
“I have a feeling he’s going to be a pain.”
“Maybe he’ll catch the killer quick and leave us with only the curse to worry about.”
“I’m not worried, Dolores.”
“Then I’ll have to worry twice as hard, won’t I? You don’t do me any favors with your unbelieving attitude, Eden. Who raised you makes no difference. It’s the blood in your veins that counts.”
“Boyer blood.”
“No, my blood. I wasn’t born a Boyer. That curse took away my brother who was a year older than me. He had no children, so the focus shifted—and if you say it must be a smart curse, I’ll put you over my knee next time I see you.”
“I believe you.” Eden bumped through a rut and bit her tongue. “Ouch.”
“You’re driving too fast like always.”
“How do you know I’m driving?”
“I hear the engine.”
“Over the stereo?”
“Music’s too loud, too.”
Suspicious, Eden demanded, “Did Mary or Lisa call you tonight?”
“No, and I don’t expect they will. When trouble comes, Mary either gets drunk or finds a man to distract her. You, you decide you’re fine and go about your business, oblivious. Lisa buries herself and her problems in her garden.”
The criticism stung. “I’m not oblivious, Dolores.”
“You want to be. You try to be. You wriggle and squirm, and only when you’re slapped in the face with an unpleasant thing do you acknowledge it exists. Where’re you driving to, anyway?”
Eden’s first impulse was to sulk and not respond. Her second was to retaliate. Her third was to take it on the chin—sort of. “Montesse House,” she answered, then waited because she knew that wouldn’t sit well.
“You’re going out there alone, at night?” Dolores uttered a colorful curse of her own. “Are you a crazy girl? That place is falling apart. It’s haunted by three ghosts, did you know that? Haunted and decaying from the foundation up.”
Eden looked back, saw nothing and felt a stab of contrition because Dolores sounded so upset.
“Mary’s there,” she explained. “That’s why I’m going. I won’t explore the house. I know it’s in bad shape. It was a wreck ten years ago when I saw it for the first time.”
“I should never have told you about it,” Dolores moaned. “Three teenage girls gonna get all kinds of ideas about a tale like that. Still, the oldest girl has sense—or so I thought. Next thing I know, you’re traipsing off together to search for ghosts just because I said the curse was placed on our family by the original owners.” Annoyance gave way to exasperation. “Why is Mary there? She keeping a still we don’t know about?”
“She’s taking pictures.”
“In the dark?”
“It won’t be dark for another hour.” Although that could change, Eden realized. Between the black clouds, a road lined with moss-shrouded live oaks and only a patch of blue left to the west, it was a bit like driving into a witch’s cauldron. “It reminds me of a vampire’s lair out here.” She heard Dolores’s hand smacking her knee.
“You’re after vampires?”
“Mainly the atmosphere. It’s Mary’s deal, Dolores, not mine. I need to talk to her away from Lisa. Something’s…” She tried to think of how to put it. “Something’s wrong. Lisa’s not herself. I can’t say what it is exactly, but she feels off to me.”
Dolores’s tone softened. “This is a difficult time for her. Lisa won’t meet a problem head-on, and dirt holds no answers.”
Eden laughed. “You didn’t sleep last night, did you?”
The old woman chuckled. “That was bad, wasn’t it? Yes, I am tired. But mostly I’m worried. Not so much about Lisa. She didn’t bludgeon Maxwell Burgoyne. It’s you and the curse, Eden. I’ve had dreams lately, bad dreams, about death and pain. I see zombielike creatures and hear old voodoo chants. I see shadows as dark as night and inside them, people whose faces I can’t make out. But they’re after you, and they’re close.”
Her ominous tone more than her words sent a shiver down Eden’s spine. Then she caught a flash of pale blue light in her side mirror and swore.
“What’s that you said?” Dolores demanded.
“Someone’s close to me all right,” Eden told her. “But he’s no zombie. This person drives a car, and he’s a lousy tail. I’ll call you later, okay? I promise, this isn’t related to the curse,” she added before she pushed End.
The headlights disappeared among the trees, but as far as Eden knew the road wound without deviation down to Montesse and stopped there. Unless he turned around, her tail would wind up directly behind her.
She spied the crumbling roof first, followed by the whitewashed columns. Four of eight remained intact. The others had broken into large pieces. Several of those pieces had been hauled away by scavengers searching for remnants of a Civil War house.
In truth, Montesse had its roots in an era prior to the war. It had been dismantled piece by piece in France and brought to North America by ship in the late seventeenth century. The Dumont family servants had taken apart, transported and reconstructed the building under the keen eye of their matriarch, Therese Dumont. However, as Dolores told the story, it was Therese’s daughter Eva who’d actually placed the curse—on her father and the woman she’d considered to be the cause of her family’s destruction.
Eden braked at the end of the road where it opened to an overgrown clearing. Leaving the engine running, she waited for the source of the headlights to appear. When it didn’t, she tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and debated her next move. She could go back and search the road, keep waiting in her car, or find Mary and do what she’d come to do in the first place. Choosing the latter, she drove on until a fallen sycamore prevented her from getting any closer.
There was no sign of Mary’s car and only river sounds audible as she slid from her seat.
Dolores insisted Montesse was haunted. Given its gloomy appearance beneath a canopy of purple-black clouds and shadows long enough to conceal a bevy of vampires, Eden had no trouble believing in the possibility. Not that she actually did believe, but if she had and if they were to manifest themselves anywhere, here would be the perfect spot.
A chorus of distant bullfrogs accompanied her as she picked her way around the ruined building. She liked the Quarter better, she decided. Noise, light and color were friendly things. Solitude, peppered with thoughts of zombies, curses and voodoo queens was downright creepy, even for a resolved non-believer.
She spent the better part of forty minutes tramping around the grounds. As a last resort, she slogged through bushes and weeds to the riverbank. A sluggish current carried the water past a shore far too wild now to accommodate a boat dock.
Although she didn’t find Mary, Eden did locate her sister’s car. It was parked on a back driveway that must have led to Montesse from one of the other highway exits.
“At least I know you’re here,” she said, nursing a scratch on her arm. “That’s something.”
Aware of the deepening twilight and the fact that she hadn’t brought her flashlight, she headed back to the house. Mary’s voice resounded eerily in her head.
Voodoo child with Carib blood, and eyes of green. This is foreseen…
Through Dolores, Eden had inherited Haitian blood. But not, she promised herself, a mystical Haitian mindset. She and Lisa had been born with green eyes.
The eldest born to eldest grown, my pain shall bear. Believe. Beware.
Dolores had been the eldest grown, and of course Eden was the eldest born—but that meant nothing. Curses had no place in the twenty-first century.
For deeds long past, chère child will reap, my vengeance curse, of death—or worse.
Worse than death was a prospect Eden preferred not to consider, at least not as it pertained to the supernatural. But she had to admit, it was difficult to ignore a thing when you had a sister and grandmother who were forever bringing it up.
Determined not to dwell on such an unpleasant subject, Eden trudged through the mini jungle that had once been Therese Dumont’s prized garden to the back terrace. Gravel and broken concrete crunched underfoot the closer she drew to the old house. She spotted a beam of light—or possibly the flash of a camera—upstairs, and called to her sister. Receiving no answer, she tried again in a less patient tone.
“Are you up there, Mary?”
She heard a sound like stone grinding against stone and attempted to pinpoint it. She was standing beneath a wide protrusion that had once been the second-story gallery. It would have wrapped around the entire house and, in the back at least, allowed for a spectacular view of the river. Eden felt certain the sound she’d heard had come from the upper wall.
When the air stilled and the sound didn’t repeat, she gave up. Absolutely nothing moved, not even the deadhead flowers hanging by a thread to their stems.
One last time, she tipped her head back and called to her sister.
To her surprise, she heard what might have been an answer. Something echoed inside the house.
