Eden's Shadow

“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.

That meant she’d have to break her promise to Dolores—probably her neck as well. Pushing aside a tangle of vines, she backtracked through the garden.

An old pergola hung at a precarious angle above her. Like everything else, it was choked with weeds, many of them dead, all of them clinging. Thorns snagged her pants, making her grateful she’d worn a pair of old hikers.

A granite cross and a cracked marble headstone lay across the path. Eden didn’t see a raised plot, which probably meant someone had tried to make off with the stone, failed and wound up abandoning it. She looked, but couldn’t read the writing in the poor light. Respectful of its significance, she stepped over the stone and continued on toward the terrace.

Three wide steps appeared through the dense foliage. Lisa, she mused, would love to get her green thumbs on a place like this.

Eden yanked down one last vine and spotted the bottom step. Scratched, but glad to be out of the maze, she muttered, “Vampires live in cellars by day, Mary, not second-story bedrooms. Even fly-by-night magazine editors can tell the difference between a bed in a crumbling master suite and a coffin in the basement.”

A train rolled past across the river. The whistle reached her over the croaking bullfrogs.

She looked back at the fallen headstone and for a moment was tempted to get her flashlight. If the stone was Eva Dumont’s, she could tell Dolores…

“No.” She stopped the thought flat. The past was the past, over and done. No matter what Dolores believed, there were no such things as ghosts. And even if there were, if she didn’t hurt them, why should they bother her?

The grinding noise reached her again. Tilting her head back, Eden glimpsed a rectangular object above. Then she spied a blur of motion and felt a pair of strong arms wrap themselves around her. She saw dark hair and a flurry of leaves and felt her body leave the ground. A second later, she landed on her back on the garden path.

Stunned, she watched as a large white planter crashed onto the very spot where she’d been standing.

Chapter Four

It took Eden a long, startled moment to regain her breath and her bearings. When she was able to roll over, she found herself staring into the face of Armand LaMorte.

He’d managed through some bizarre midair twist to land beneath her and at the same time give her a full terrifying view of what had almost happened. While part of her was grateful, another part wanted to know what the hell was going on.

Strangely calm, she said, “Should I bother to ask?”

He narrowed his eyes at the upper balcony. “You ask. I’ll find out.”

Eden realized she was still lying on top of him. Pressing her palms into his shoulders, she pushed up, but he caught her before she could escape.

“Did you hit your head?”

She touched a sore spot above her left eye. “On yours, I think.”

Crouching, he used his thumb and forefinger to trap her chin and tip her head back. “Am I clear or a blur?”

All too clear, she thought and let her own hand fall into her lap. “I can see you, Armand. What happened?”

“Good question. If you’re not hurt, I’ll find us a good answer.”

“Don’t move,” he called as he disappeared through an ancient set of double doors.

After a moment, her gaze slid to the side. There, not ten feet in front of her, was all that remained of a rectangular concrete planter. She’d noticed it on the gallery wall when she’d stepped over the headstone in the garden.

But weren’t those pony walls as wide as the steps below? It should have taken a small earthquake to move the thing. The inside had been filled with dirt and weeds, so it must have weighed several hundred pounds.

“Eden?” Mary appeared around the side of the house. “What was that crash…?” She appeared shocked when she spied the wreckage. “Whoa. Well, that sure wasn’t here a few minutes ago. Are you okay?”

“If alive qualifies as okay, then yes.” Eden let Mary pull her to her feet, felt the ground wobble and rested her spine against one of the pergola supports. It would pass, she promised herself. She hadn’t hit the ground that hard. “As a point of interest,” she asked, “did a gorgeous man in a black shirt and jeans fly past you a minute ago?”

“I was trying to get into the cellar,” Mary replied. “And I haven’t had a sniff of a gorgeous man since the weekend. The only person other than me who’s here is B.J.”

Eden closed her eyes. “And B.J. is…?”

“Mostly grunts and muscles. I met him at a party and figured he could help me arrange the vampire scene so to speak. I’d have mentioned him on the phone, but you hung up.” She nudged a fragment of the fallen planter with the toe of her boot. “Did this thing almost flatten you?”

“Almost.”

“You have good reflexes, Eden.”

“I have a tail.”

Mary eased away from both her sister and the rubble. “What you have, babe, is a curse.” Her arms twitched. “Man, I’m so glad I’m the youngest.”

Eden left the pergola. The ground had stopped moving, but her head throbbed down to her shoulders. “When did you lose your muscle man?”

“Twenty, twenty-five minutes ago. He saw a spider.”

Eden’s gaze rose to the second story. “How strong is he?”

Mary flexed her bare arm. “He’s got biceps like Popeye and a vocabulary to match. But, hey, you need a tree felled or a door ripped off its hinges, he’s your—” She stopped. “Wait a minute, you’re not thinking… My God!” she exclaimed. “You are thinking.”

“Not very well yet, but Mary, planters as big and heavy as this one don’t just fall. It was pushed, or levered or something. I heard a grinding sound right before it came down. And don’t talk to me about vindictive ghosts. I went through that with Dolores earlier.”

Mary sniffed. “Did you go through the curse, too?”

Eden released a heavy breath. “There’s no curse, okay? People move heavy objects, voodoo rhymes don’t.”

Mary skirted the dirt mound. “Go ahead and deny, Eden. Dolores will insist it was the curse. Think about it. Even if she does live in the swamp, she’s an educated woman. True, her mind’s a little left of center, but you don’t get a degree from Loyola unless it’s deserved. So, there you are, an intelligent woman believes.”

“This is a pointless conversation.” Eden returned to the path to view the upper level. She didn’t see a flashlight beam anywhere—assuming Armand had been carrying a flashlight. Pushing on her temples with her fingers, she murmured, “I should have gone to Concordia.”

“You should go into hiding.”

“It’s a thought,” Eden agreed, but her reasons had more to do with a certain dark-haired cop than the family curse.

Mary snapped restless fingers. “I wonder if B.J. went back to the car.” Joining Eden on the path, she tapped her sister’s shoulder. “Uh, about this gorgeous guy you mentioned… You did say gorgeous, right?”

Had she? On her knees, Eden brushed dirt from the marble headstone. “Maybe,” she conceded. “I didn’t mean to.” Because it was too dark now to make out the worn letters, she abandoned her task and measured the distance between the veranda and the gallery by eye. “That wall up there is at least two feet wide, wouldn’t you say?”

“No idea. I was in and out like Speedy Gonzales. I don’t need to bump into a ghost with a bone to pick over something one of my ancestors did.”

Eden let it go. Where was Armand, and why hadn’t he come onto the gallery? “I’ll bet you drive a car with tinted headlights,” she accused under her breath.

“You’re acting a little weird, Eden,” Mary remarked.

Eden heard nerves beneath her sister’s irritation and lowered her gaze. “Someone in a car with blue-tinted headlights followed me out here tonight.”

“Okay, I’ll buy that. Just don’t go S.L. on me.” At Eden’s uncomprehending expression, Mary clarified, “Spooky Lisa. She has moments lately of, you know, going off to Mars. She’s done it before, it’s just that since Maxwell died, one wrong word and, bam, she’s in a funk.”

Not a prolonged one, but Eden knew what Mary meant. She’d seen them, too, those moments when Lisa appeared to put the world around her on hold.

Maybe in the end that’s all there was to Lisa’s sudden standoffishness. A major disappointment had led to the death of their natural father and a near murder charge. Who wouldn’t react to something so dreadful? One thing was certain, funk or not, Lisa simply wasn’t capable of committing the kind of violent act that had ended Maxwell Burgoyne’s life.

“This could be cool.” Dismissing her sister’s problems, Mary returned to the terrace.

Eden had to squint to see her. She was only twenty feet away, but darkness had pretty much settled. In fact, the shadows had grown so thick under the balcony that little more than Mary’s silver belt buckle remained visible.

“Coffin dirt,” Mary declared. The buckle dipped as she did. “I’ve lost the light, but you could hold a beam on it. We’ll make a body impression, spread the chunks of cement around.”

Eden called up to the gallery, “Armand, are you there?”

Mary’s heels clopped on the terrace tiles as she rearranged the fallen planter. “I’m no good at this. Stop shouting, Eden, and help me here. It’s incredibly… Ahh!”

Her sentence ended on a yelp. Her belt buckle vanished.

And a pair of hands seized Eden from behind…

EDEN’S REACTION was instinctive. She rammed both elbows into the stomach of the person holding her. She heard a muffled “Oomph,” and felt the hands on her shoulders tighten.

A man growled in warning, but he was cut off by the click of a trigger being drawn back.

“Let her go. Do it slowly, and move away. Now.”

Eden recognized Armand’s voice.

Whoever he was talking to released her slowly as instructed. The moment she was free, Eden spun—and did an immediate double take. A more superstitious person might have mistaken the man for a troll.

Deciding that Armand was the lesser of two evils, she backed across the uneven ground to his side. She found herself strangely fascinated by the man whose hairy arms and bushy beard appeared to be the color of a ripe tomato. “Something happened to Mary right before he grabbed me,” she said.

A break in the clouds allowed a three-quarter moon to illuminate the area. Eden started for the steps. The man opened his mouth, took a second look at Armand’s Magnum and promptly closed it.

“No problem here,” Mary called before Eden reached the terrace. “Don’t everyone rush to my rescue at once. I only tripped and gave myself a concussion.”

“Stay where you are,” Armand told her.

The redhead was downright squat, muscular to the max, but shorter than Eden’s height of five-eight by a couple of inches. Even so, his torso looked broader than a tree trunk and with arms like his, he could undoubtedly lift the front end of her car.

“Are you B.J.?” Eden asked.

“Bobby John Finnegan.” His gaze was fixed on the gun barrel aimed at his throat. “I heard voices. Reckoned one of ’em might be Mary’s.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Front of the house.” He pointed. “I used the driveway on account of I don’t like walking in tall weeds.”

“Afraid you’ll fall into Middle Earth?” Armand suggested.

“Snakes like weeds. I don’t like snakes.”

Mary strode over, probing the back of her head. “So, Eden, is this your gorgeous guy?”

Vague amusement sparked Armand’s eyes, but he kept his gun on B.J. “Do you know this man?” he asked her.

Mary shrugged. “We came here together. I didn’t know he had crawly-phobia.” She studied Armand’s features. “I guess you are sort of gorgeous, although it’s hard to tell in the dark with a weapon pointed in the general direction of my face.”

Armand tucked the gun into his shoulder holster. “Have you been inside the house?”

He directed his question at B.J. who appeared horrified by the thought. “Are you nuts? It’s bug central in there. I was looking for Mary. Saw you.” He nodded at Eden. “You were exploring down by the river and around those old shacks out back. Heard you call her name, so I knew you were looking for her, too. I’d have hollered, but you mighta wanted me to check out the shacks, and that wasn’t happening in this lifetime.”

“My hero,” Mary sneered. “Okay, I’m out of here, vampires be damned.”

Her cranky tone brought a smile to Eden’s lips. She gestured at the tangled garden. “Do you want Armand to walk you to your car?”

“My camera bag’s on the terrace.” Mary still sounded irked. “I brought a big flashlight. And B.J.’s got a second one stuck to his belt.”

“He can go, right?” Eden asked Armand.

“To New Orleans, yeah. We’ll have a chat at his place tomorrow.”

B.J. glanced at the holstered gun. “Sure, no problem. You, uh, need my address?”

“It’d help.” B.J. gave him the necessary information, cringed when Mary started along the garden path, then squared his shoulders and followed.

Arms folded, Eden stared at Armand and waited for him to speak.

“Go ahead,” she prompted when he didn’t. “I’m open to any and all explanations. Come up with a good one and I might even believe it.”

“Let me see your head.”

She slapped a palm against his chest to hold him off. “We’ve done this already, Detective. No more touching. You saved me from a falling planter and stopped B.J. from crushing my bones to powder. I’m honestly grateful for those things, but I still want to know why you followed me home last night and out here tonight.”

“I didn’t.” Smiling a little, he plucked a leaf from her hair. “You look a lot like your sister, Eden, but somehow your beauty’s more intriguing to me. Why is that?”

She smiled back. “Because I have a brother who taught me how to box in the third grade and at the same time knock a man’s front teeth out if he makes me mad by not answering my questions, maybe?”