Authors: Heather Graham
She was indignant again. Defenses all in place. Well, it was true. He didn’t think much of palm readers, tarot readers, whatever readers. He didn’t believe in any of it. And he was pretty sure
she
didn’t believe in any of it, either, though he couldn’t have explained why. Maybe she just seemed too levelheaded, too real-world.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to
startle
you.”
She inhaled. He could tell from the visible pulse in her throat that her heart was beating too quickly. He
had
scared her, no matter what she said.
“So. What do you want?”
“I just thought you…I wasn’t sure…hell. I thought I should walk you home.”
She stared at him hard. “You thought I needed someone to walk me home?” Indignation and disbelief were fighting for dominance in her tone.
“It’s night. It’s dark,” he said lamely.
She looked up at him. Her tone was dry when she said, “I read tarot cards. And palms. I’m supposed to be some kind of psychic. Don’t you think I would
see
danger?”
“I don’t know. The Psychic Network went bankrupt. You would have thought one of them would have seen it coming.”
“I live here. I have lived here all my life. I know where I can walk without being in danger. And this really isn’t a bad city, no matter what people think. We have problems, sure. All cities have problems. I can see myself safely down the next two blocks to my home. And I thank you for your concern, but I’m not really sure that’s the reason you followed me.”
“No?”
“No,” she said flatly. She sighed, as if genuinely weary. “So I’ll ask you again. What do you really want from me?”
He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t lie. It would be foolish.
“I want to know more about you.”
“Me?”
“You—and the time you spent with Amelia. And what went on at night. What she saw, what she dreamed, what she said, and just what it was that scared her—and you.”
She stared back at him.
“Ghosts?” she suggested softly, almost as if she were mocking herself.
“You believe in ghosts?” he asked her.
It seemed like a genuine question, she thought. He wasn’t mocking her; he just seemed curious.
“No, of course not,” she told him.
And that was the truth, wasn’t it?
They started walking, and he mentioned that one of the reasons he had always loved the city so much was its architecture. She started telling him stories about some of the buildings they passed, and ten minutes later, they were still talking.
In her apartment.
Kendall couldn’t figure out how she’d managed to invite him in when she didn’t even like him, but he was definitely there.
She lived on the first floor of a beautiful old house built in 1816, a large shotgun that provided the current owners with four rental units, two on each side of the hallway. Her door opened into the formal parlor, and the parlor opened onto a hall that passed both bedrooms, one of which she used as an office, and then ended in the kitchen and family room, both of which had been tastefully modernized. A long counter stretched across the back of the kitchen, separating it from the family room, which opened onto the courtyard. Rather than sliding glass doors, double French doors led out to a patio and yard, which had originally been the front of the house. An alley ran behind the picket fence that marked the property line, and there was still a gate; people had once come visiting by way of what was now the rear.
“Nice,” Aidan commented.
Since he was there, she had felt obliged to offer him a drink. Now he absently swirled Scotch in his glass as he stared out the back.
“It’s home,” she said.
“You own it?”
“I rent.”
“Your shop does well?”
“Yes.”
“I guess people really do come here to dabble in voodoo and the occult,” he said.
“Most people only do it for fun,” she told him.
He turned and walked back into the kitchen, where he perched on one of the bar stools.
“What about the people who don’t do it just for fun?”
She took a long sip of her own drink, vodka and cranberry. “Voodoo is a recognized religious practice.”
He lifted a hand, dismissing her comment. “I can go online and become a minister of half a dozen different religions. Doesn’t make them real.”
“Voodoo was the religion of Haiti. It’s a mix of old African religions and Catholicism. Its practitioners pray to, or through, the saints. They believe in a supreme being, in God.”
“And that they can injure a man by sticking a pin in a doll, and that a priest can bring people back from the dead as zombies.”
“Do you have a secret communication going with the Supreme Being, God, Allah, Jehovah, or whatever you want to call him—or her?” she asked.
He had the grace to smile at that. “It’s not people’s beliefs that worry me. It’s people who play off others’ beliefs.”
She shrugged. “I…don’t mean to insult you here—honestly—but I’m not sure why you’re so convinced there’s something terrible going on. Not just bones, but whole rotting bodies were floating in the Mississippi not so long ago.”
“I know. And it was a horrible tragedy.”
“We’re still picking up the pieces on a daily basis. It just takes time. Not a day or a week, or even a month or a year. It’s going to take years—plural. And a lot of commitment.”
“I know.”
“But you’re still convinced that something’s going on.” She flushed. “Besides bums living on the plantation and me not even being aware of it.”
He shrugged, and a rueful smile played across his lips as he lifted his glass to her. “I’m sorry if I made you feel bad about that. You were just two people, one of them old and dying, in a huge old house on a big piece of property. Hell, you didn’t have to be a caregiver, though I’m grateful that you were, and you sure as hell couldn’t have been a grounds-keeper, as well. So why does all this bother me? Call it a hunch. Or maybe the bone I found at the house only seemed suspicious because of the one I found earlier, by the river.”
“Bones can turn up anywhere in this area.”
“Yes, they can.”
“But…?”
“Tell me about Amelia,” he said, surprising her with the change of subject.
Kendall’s giant black Persian cat, Jezebel, chose that moment to walk in and rub against his legs, purring so loudly that Kendall could hear her from ten feet away.
She found herself almost leaping across the room to pick up the cat, silently chastising her.
I guess I didn’t name you Jezebel for nothing,
she thought, shooing the animal toward the front of the house as she set her down.
“That’s a beautiful animal,” Aidan commented.
“Thanks,” Kendall said curtly.
He didn’t comment on the fact that it seemed to bother her that her cat had been affectionate to him.
“Amelia?” he said.
“She was exceptionally kind to me—always. We had a bond, I guess. She was intelligent, sweet, a really fine woman. She died of cancer, though I guess the lawyer told you that.”
“She took a lot of morphine for the pain, I take it?” he asked.
Kendall nodded. “Yes,” she said warily, knowing exactly what he was implying.
“And she saw things?”
“Yes.” More wariness.
“And you did—or you didn’t?” he asked. So much for pleasantry. Those eyes of his were on her again, deep blue touched by frost, and his tone had changed.
“I really don’t know what you want me to say. For about two weeks before her death, she seemed to be afraid all the time. I had dragged a cot into her room, to be with her at night. Sometimes she woke up screaming about the lights. I was always still half asleep, so I honestly don’t know if I saw the lights or not. We’re not talking huge, the-aliens-are-landing lights, just pinpricks of lights out back and from the area of the cemetery. Or sometimes she would hear things, and again, I’d be half asleep. Did I hear anything out of the ordinary? I’m not certain.”
“What
did
you hear?”
“Wind, sometimes. It can sound like a cry when it moves through the old oak trees. Rustling sounds—again, possibly the wind, or maybe squirrels. Everything can be explained, I’m certain. Except, then, at the end…”
“At the end…what?”
He was a good interrogator, she thought. His voice had softened in a gentle and encouraging way.
She took another sip of her drink. “I was only afraid at the end, I guess.” She hesitated for a long moment. “You can make fun of me, if you like. But most of the time…I felt completely safe at the plantation. As if it were…protected by the past, by a benign spirit or something. Maybe it’s just the beauty of the area, I don’t know. But at the end, Amelia did unnerve me a few times. I mean, at night, it really feels like the plantation is in the middle of nowhere. And despite the feeling of being safe in the house, I kind of grew uneasy about there being something…evil, I guess, going on around it, but if I kept quiet and stayed in bed, I’d be safe. Maybe I did hear things, maybe I didn’t, but I did sleep with a baseball bat at my side.”
“You needed a gun.”
“That would be just great. I don’t know how to shoot. I’d have blown a hole in myself or Amelia.”
He smiled at that. “You should learn how to shoot—especially if you plan on spending any more time at derelict plantations in the middle of nowhere. You know, there’s a lot worse out there than ghosts. Real live monsters.”
“Well, I don’t plan on sleeping in the wilderness anymore, so I guess I’m okay without being a sharpshooter,” she said.
“Go on. Tell me more about the end.”
Inadvertently, Kendall shivered. She hated herself for it, knowing he was watching her every move. “Nothing happened at the end. She just started talking to people I didn’t see.”
“Saying what?”
“Different things at different times.”
“Go on.”
“It sounded as if she was teaching a history class. She talked about Reconstruction—after the Civil War—and World War I, World War II, Martin Luther King…all kinds of things. She talked about being proud of the old house. She seemed happy. She seemed to be talking to…”
“Ghosts?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“But she was on a lot of morphine.”
“Of course…. I wasn’t alone with her at the end, you know. She didn’t want to die in a hospital. She’d been born in that house, and she wanted to die there. But I’m not a nurse, so I hired an RN to stay with Amelia when it was clear she was getting near the end. Still…”
“What?”
“She had been unconscious, in a coma, when she suddenly opened her eyes and sat up. She looked right at me and said goodbye, and that she loved me. Then she reached out, as if she were taking someone’s hand—you’ll never convince me she didn’t see something, some
one
—and she said, ‘It’s time. I’m ready now.’ And then she died.”
“Morphine,” he said softly. He actually said it as if he were trying to reassure her.
She looked directly back at him. “Sure.”
And then she suddenly felt uncomfortable. He was standing some distance from her, and he wasn’t threatening in any way. In fact, he was being extremely decent, almost kind. Humoring her? Maybe not. He seemed sincere, and when he smiled, or even when he just looked thoughtful, he was astonishingly appealing. It might have been his self-confidence, the fact that he didn’t just pretend not to care what others thought; he really didn’t give a damn. His height and the breadth of his shoulders made him naturally imposing, and the hardness of his features somehow made the sculpted strength of them more intriguing. There was a leashed energy about him that seemed to emit a heat, even a sexual charisma.
She wondered once again what had happened to his wife.
But she sure as hell wasn’t going to ask him.
She told herself that her sudden unease was ridiculous. Just because he was an unattached man and she was an unattached woman, that didn’t mean they were about to jump one another. Oh, God. What a bizarre thought to have pop into her head. She had disliked him the moment she met him, and she still didn’t like him. It was just that she’d stopped believing his horns and tail popped out when he was alone.
And she was aware that as a man…
As a man what?
she asked herself irritably. He thought she was a fraud.
Well, weren’t there times when she thought so herself?
She needed him out of her house. She was weary. She felt a strange weakness, and she didn’t like it. She needed the logical portion of her mind to come leaping forward, and she felt just too tired to manage it.
She cleared her throat. “I really need to get some sleep.”
“Sure.” He seemed to recover a bit himself. He had been staring at her, just as she had been staring at him. How long? Something seemed to pass across his eyes. A flicker. As if he had seen something inside her that he actually liked.
“Of course.”
He set his glass on the counter, and avoided touching her as he walked by.
“Thanks for the drink.” The words were polite. Distant. And she didn’t follow him as he walked away down the hall.
When she heard her front door close, she walked slowly to the front of the house and locked it.
To her surprise, the expected pleasure in being by herself in the apartment, with time to relax and sleep, didn’t come. Instead…
She felt uneasy.
And ridiculously, she wished that he were still with her. Her apartment usually seemed so welcoming.
Now…
It just seemed empty.
And she felt alone, as she hadn’t in years.
Jezebel let out a meow. Kendall picked up the cat and rubbed her chin against the Persian’s soft fur. She loved all animals, but with her work schedule, a cat was definitely the best choice for a pet.
“Why am I suddenly wishing you were a dog?” she asked. “Like a huge mastiff, or a pit bull?”
Jezebel just meowed again.
“You’re a big help,” Kendall told her sarcastically.
But it wasn’t the cat’s fault. Even holding Jezebel, Kendall still felt that same sensation of being alone.
And afraid.
D
eath.
It could be violent or peaceful, on a battlefield or in the streets, at home or in a hospital. It could leave a person looking as calm as if they were asleep, or torn to shreds, ravished, decayed.
In the modern world, it was quickly sanitized whenever possible. Disasters, though, meant field hospitals, temporary morgues, sometimes even mass graves and burning.
But the storm was behind them. New Orleans was getting back up to speed.
Katrina had wreaked havoc all over the city, including at the morgue. A lot here was new. Visitors entered a quietly tasteful reception area that could have belonged to any business or doctor’s office. There was music softly playing, and a young woman with a gentle voice was on duty to offer assistance.
Every effort had been made to hide the presence of death there, where so often the bereaved came for a last glimpse of those they loved. Not only that, this often ended up being the place where the police talked to the living as they tried to solve the mystery of the dead, and a calm husband did a better job of recalling what his wife had done before her death, for example.
Aidan was familiar with the morgue, having been here several times before when he was in New Orleans on a case. And like all morgues, despite every attempt to mask it, there…was still something that seemed to permeate the very walls. No music system could really drown out the tears of a mother who had lost her child. And no amount of bleach could ever fully wipe out the smell of death.
But the girl at the front was pleasant, perhaps genuinely compassionate, perhaps just a good actress after days of greeting cops, parents, siblings and friends, those who came in fear of finding out a loved one was dead, and those who were relieved that the days of caring for a loved one were over.
“Hello, Mr. Flynn,” she said.
Apparently he had met her before. Great P.I. he was, not to remember her. Good thing her name tag identified her as Ruby Beaudreaux, so he could fake it.
“Hi, Ruby.” He smiled. “I’m hoping to see Dr. Abel. Is he in?”
“I’ll see.”
She smiled and put through a call, then began to frown at the response she received from the other end. Aidan could hear Jon Abel yelling.
Ruby hung up and looked at him apologetically. “He’s really busy. Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I can wait.”
Ruby was young. She blushed easily, and she did so then. “Um, I don’t think that will help.”
“I have all day,” Aidan said pleasantly, and sat. “Just tell him that. I’ll be here—whenever he comes out.” The place was bound to have a back door, and Abel would no doubt use it. He just wanted the man to know he didn’t intend to let go.
“You want me to…call him again?” Ruby said. She looked as if he had just asked her to walk into the lion’s cage.
“Sure, if you don’t mind.”
She hesitated, then came out from around her desk. “Mr. Flynn, you have to understand. We were overwhelmed for…months after Katrina. You can’t believe how bad it was. Dr. Abel isn’t a bad guy. He’s just been through a lot, just like everyone here.”
“I do understand,” he said gravely.
“Oh.” It wasn’t a question, but she didn’t move, just stood there waiting for him to leave.
Praying
for him to leave, he thought. He was sorry for Miss Beaudreaux, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“Look, no matter what’s happened in the past, people are still dying now,” he told her. “There are still killers out there, and Dr. Abel is aware of that fact.”
“Oh, God! Are you investigating a murder?” she asked.
“A possible murder,” he said.
She nodded, straightened purposefully and walked back to the phone. She spoke quietly into the receiver, and when she hung up, she said, “I’ll lead you back.”
When she stopped outside an autopsy room, she pointed to a rack of white jackets. “You may want to suit up,” she told him.
He entered the room, slipping into a coat and mask. It looked as if Jon Abel had just started his current autopsy.
Aidan was sure that this body had been awaiting a break in the M.E.’s schedule, when the man had made time for it in order to avoid seeing him.
“I told you, Flynn, I’m busy,” the doctor said, without looking up. He made his first incision, and something green and putrid streamed from the body. One of his assistants muttered something and jumped back.
Abel looked up, clearly hoping that Aidan was also disturbed.
It
was
disturbing, Aidan thought. Death was frequently disturbing. It could be the natural end to a life long lived, but too often it was ravaged flesh and shattered bone, and horror in the open eyes of someone who had died violently. He had seen the bodies of those who had been killed in war, murdered, assassinated, even tortured. It was never easy. But he had learned not to react. Not usually.
He had reacted when he had seen Serena.
He pushed the thought from his mind. “I imagine this guy sat around in the heat a while before being discovered?” he asked.
Abel grunted—maybe granting him a modicum of respect? “Leroy Farbourg. I’m guessing he spent about a week up in a hot attic. The cops say his wife claimed she shot him by accident—shot him by accident four times. Now that ain’t easy.”
“What did she have, an Uzi?”
“Just old Leroy’s shotgun,” Abel said. He had backed away to let his assistant wash away some of the putrid fluid.
“Anything on those thighbones?” Aidan asked him.
Abel tensed with irritation. “As you can see, I’m busy.”
“You could give them to a coworker or an assistant,” Aidan suggested.
That drew a venomous stare. “Mr. Flynn, do you know how many unclaimed bodies we’ve dealt with? Wait—how many body
parts
we’ve dealt with?”
“Too many to count, I imagine,” Aidan said evenly. “But…please. When you can, look into those bones for me.”
Abel stared at Aidan. “Are you after a missing person, Mr. Flynn? Do you have a client breathing down your neck? If so, that client will have to wait until I am able to make a thorough forensic investigation. Am I clear?”
“I don’t have a client,” Aidan told him.
Abel’s silence was deadly.
“I would deeply appreciate your help,” Aidan said.
Abel rolled his eyes, but then he said gruffly, “I’ll get to those bones within the next few days. And when I do, I’ll call you.”
“All right, thanks. If I don’t hear anything, I’ll call you,” Aidan assured him pleasantly.
Abel’s scalpel cut deeply into the dead man. Aidan wondered if there was any law against the use of excessive force on the dead. But for the moment, there was nothing more he could do here. He thanked Jon Abel politely again and departed.
Kendall had heard all the stories about Marie Laveau, the famous voodoo queen of New Orleans. The woman had clearly been talented, but had she been truly psychic or only a superior practitioner of the art of listening, then drawing conclusions? Kendall’s mental jury was still out on that one. Actually, reading the tarot cards was easy. They all had several meanings. The Death card didn’t always—or even often—mean death. It frequently indicated change, the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. It was the same for all the cards. Reading tarot cards really meant appearing to be in deep concentration, asking a few carefully targeted questions and then giving answers general enough that they could never be proven wrong.
The tea leaves were a little trickier—and also a little easier. They were tea leaves, for God’s sake. No one could predict exactly how they would appear when a client had finished her cup of tea, and a clever reader could see anything she wanted in them.
Ady Murphy had been coming to see Kendall for years. She was a seventy-year-old widow, small and spry, and as sweet as could be, and she loved to have her tea leaves read. Luckily Kendall loved making up stories to tell her. Ady had six children, nineteen grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. Almost anything Kendall said would connect to one of them. Mostly, however, Kendall—just like Marie Laveau—listened. And then she carefully crafted what to say.
They were chatting now as they went back to the little room with the pretty cloth-covered table, crystal ball and stack of cards. Ady carried her teacup with her. She always had the same tea: Irish cream.
“So that rascal Amelia
did
have relatives!” Ady said. She and Amelia had met and gotten to know each other at the tea shop. They always wore similar cotton dresses, pillbox hats and little white gloves, and they had gotten on famously from day one. When Amelia was born, the family had been rich. She had died with only her house and a few trinkets. Ady had been born on a plantation, too—in a shack where her father had worked the cotton fields. There had been no running water or electricity. Amelia had never had a child; Ady had produced a football team, with all her descendants. But the women shared something special: a love of the same manners and morals. One had been white, one was black, and each one had counted herself lucky to have the other as a friend.
Actually, Ady wasn’t all black. Her skin was a lovely copper color, and she had bright amber eyes. She liked to say she knew white because she had some in her, and she was always telling Amelia and Kendall that they should have had a little black in them, that it would have made them stronger. “Nothing strong as a black woman, honey. Not even the biggest he-man out there,” Ady would say.
“I met the Flynns. They seem decent enough,” Kendall said now.
“Hmph. What decent boys wouldn’t visit a lonely great-aunt?”
“They didn’t know she existed,” Kendall explained.
“Now that’s just strange.” Ady hmphed again. “Now let’s see what the tea leaves say. Maybe they’ll tell me I’m about to win the lottery. I don’t play the lottery, of course. But maybe I will. What do you think? Should I?”
Kendall laughed. “Now, you know I won’t give that kind of advice, Miss Ady.” Though a widow, Ady was always “Miss” Ady.
“And you know I don’t gamble, child,” Ady said, and laughed. “Come on, tell me what’s in my leaves.”
Kendall rolled the cup and studied it. The leaves did seem to be forming into a very definite swirl. It was just the way they had landed on the bottom of the cup, she told herself.
She stared at them. As she did, the room seemed to…go out of focus. Of course it did, she chided herself. She was staring so hard into the bottom of the cup that her vision was blurring.
But she couldn’t look away. Her vision kept on blurring, and then it was as if she were seeing a picture at the bottom of the cup. No, she
was
seeing a picture. A whole scene. She was back at the plantation on the day Amelia died. And there was Amelia, so frail, comatose in her bed. The nurse had said that she probably wouldn’t regain consciousness.
But she did. She sat up, and Kendall started forward, taking her hand. Amelia looked at her, told her that she loved her…then looked toward the foot of the bed and smiled, and said she was ready. She reached out, and…
In the teacup picture, in the vision swimming before her mind’s eye, Kendall saw something there. Some
one.
Someone wrapped in a sheen of light was reaching out to Amelia.
Kendall almost dropped the cup as she heard a voice—Amelia’s voice—whisper in her ear.
Help Ady. Please help her.
Ady suddenly jumped to her feet, and the movement broke the spell—no,
memory,
Kendall told herself.
“Miss Ady, what is it?”
“I will
not
go to the doctor,” Ady said.
“What?”
“You just said, ‘Get to the doctor, Ady. Go right away, and they’ll be able to stop it.’”
“No, I—no. I didn’t say anything,” Kendall protested. She reached for Ady’s hand.
As she took it, she felt as if a shaft of lightning shot through her. It was knowledge. Deep, certain knowledge. Ady had cancer.
The older woman was looking at her in horror, and she herself was shaking inwardly. She’d had no idea she had spoken. And the way Ady was staring at her was frightening.
But she
knew.
“Miss Ady, I’ll take you myself. You have to get to the doctor right away.”
“I don’t like the doctor. He pokes and prods me.”
“Miss Ady, I think you’re sick, but the sickness can be stopped if we just get you help fast.”
Miss Ady looked around, clutching her little handbag to her chest. Then she stared at Kendall and frowned. “Is Luther Jr. going to win that football game Saturday night?”
Kendall told her, “I don’t know. I do know you have to go to the doctor. I’ll go with you, I promise. But you
have
to go.”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll call your daughter Rebecca,” Kendall threatened.
Ady’s oldest girl was fifty-two, a lab technician at the morgue, and a no-nonsense woman who loved her mother dearly. She sometimes came in for a tarot reading herself. “Just for fun,” she always said, and it
was
fun; she and Kendall always ended up talking about all the different things the cards could mean.
MissAdy stared at her stubbornly, frowning. “The tea leaves say I can get better?” she asked. “’Cause if not, I am not going to be poked and probed and have needles stuck in my arms. Folks like me, we’ve had a good time of it, we’ve been blessed. We don’t mind dying. We just want it to be in our own homes.”
“You’re not going to die, not if you go to the doctor,” Kendall insisted.
“Well, all right, then.”
“Come on. We’ll make an appointment for you right now,” Kendall said.
When they reentered the front of the shop, Mason, who had been showing a customer a spectacularly pretty crystal, looked up in surprise as Kendall and Ady went straight to the phone. As they called the doctor and arranged for an appointment, Mason made the sale. The gentleman who bought the crystal held the door open for Ady to leave.
“What was that all about?” Mason demanded.
“I think she has cancer,” Kendall said.
“What?” Mason looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “Since when did you start believing your own PR? Why on earth would you scare an old woman like that?”