A tremor of fear raced up her spine as she placed a hand on the knob. The door opened quietly and for a moment, Nella saw nothing inside.
Then, as the door swung wider, a shaft of sunlight fell across a child sitting cross-legged on the floor.
Head bowed, light haloing her golden hair, she cradled a doll in her arms as she rocked back and forth.
Mary Alice’s daughters were only a year apart, and they looked so much alike that it was hard to tell one from the other.
“Ruth?” Nella said softly.
No answer.
“Rebecca?”
Only silence.
“Where’s your mama?”
The little girl looked up then, her blue eyes eerily serene.
Slowly, she lifted a finger to her lips. “Shush.
She’ll hear you.”
The hair at the back of Nella’s neck lifted as she leaned down. She’d meant to offer comfort to the child, but when the doll moved in the little girl’s arms, Nella recoiled in shock.
It wasn’t a doll, she realized in horror, but a newborn baby bundled in a towel and still bloody from the birth canal.
She heard a thud against the floor upstairs and she whirled, more terrified than she’d ever been in her life. Something was so very wrong in this house.
“I’ll be right back,” Nella whispered to the child. “You stay put, okay?”
Heart hammering, she closed the door and started up the stairs.
Mary Alice’s bedroom was right off the landing.
The door was open, and as Nella reached the top of the stairs, she saw a bloody handprint on the wall outside the bedroom and a trail of wet footprints on the hardwood floor.
But Mary Alice was nowhere to be seen.
Nor were the other children.
Trying to fight off a wave of panic, Nella followed the tracks to a room down the hallway. The door was ajar and she could see something moving against the wall. She couldn’t tell what it was at first, and then comprehension struck her so hard she staggered back, fist pressed to her mouth.
Her stomach churned as she stared in horror at the shadow of a noose swinging back and forth against a sunny yellow wall.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone at the end of the hallway and she spun.
One of the little girls stood in front of the window, and the sunlight spilling in made her seem nebulous and golden, like a ghost child.
Without a sound, the girl started toward Nella.
“Are you okay?” Nella called softly, trying not to frighten the child.
When the girl didn’t answer, Nella said a little more urgently, “Where’s your mother?”
The child wore a blue dress with a matching hair ribbon. She looked angelic and sweet and it was only when she drew closer that Nella saw the blood-stains all down the front of her dress.
“Honey, are you hurt?”
The little girl shook her head. “Jacob got it on me when he grabbed my dress.”
“Is Jacob hurt?”
“No, he doesn’t hurt. Not anymore.”
Her soft voice was melodic, a tinkling bell, but the shock of her words stole Nella’s breath. “What do you mean?”
The girl’s movements were so lethargic she seemed under a hypnotic spell. She stared up at Nella with the same eerie calm as her sister. “Jacob was bad. They were all bad. Mama said they had the evil in them just like my daddy. It wasn’t their fault, but they had to be saved just the same.”
Nella drew a ragged breath, trying desperately not to let the horror of the moment overwhelm her.
“Where are they?”
“Shush.” The child put a tiny finger to her lips, mimicking her sister. “It’s still here.”
“What is?”
“The evil. Can’t you feel it?”
Nella’s heart flailed like a trapped bird inside her chest as she stole a glance over her shoulder. Somewhere down that long hallway, a floorboard creaked.
Had someone come up behind her? The other girl?
For a moment, Nella could have sworn she saw something hovering at the top of the stairs. A giant shadow that was there one moment, gone the next.
The child’s gaze was transfixed, as if she could see something that Nella could not.
It was all Nella could do not to snatch the child up and run screaming from the house. Something terrible lurked in those shadowy rooms, in the beguiling depths of that little girl’s wide blue eyes.
She bent and put her hands on the child’s arms.
“Where are your brothers? You have to tell me so that I can help them.”
The little girl’s gaze strayed to the room where the noose swung in a draft. “Mama carried them down to the swamp.”
Oh, dear God. “Can you take me to them?”
“I have to find my sissy first.”
She reached for Nella’s hand. Her tiny fingers were warm, but the fear that slid down Nella’s spine was ice cold.
Together they descended the steps, and Nella opened the door beneath the staircase.
The other girl was gone, but the baby lay wriggling on the floor. Nella reached for the tiny body.
I have to get them out of here. Lord, please help me save them….
But when she glanced over her shoulder, the hallway behind her was empty.
Ruth and Rebecca Lemay had vanished.
Two
Present day
There is no odor in the world like that of rotting human flesh, Detective Evangeline Theroux thought as she climbed out of the car.
The scent hung heavy on the hot, sticky air, an insidious perfume that stole her breath and turned her stomach. It was all she could do to stifle her gag reflex.
A group of uniformed officers stood in the over-grown front yard of the deserted house and Evangeline could feel their eyes on her. It was like they could smell her weakness and were anticipating with relish a mortifying display.
Jerks.
As if she would ever give them the satisfaction.
A female police detective wasn’t much of an anomaly these days, but there were those in the New Orleans PD who still clung to their good-ol’-boy mentality. Evangeline was accustomed to hostile scrutiny from some of her male colleagues, and she knew better than to give them any unnecessary am-munition.
Turning away from those condescending glances, she swallowed hard, though she pretended to survey her surroundings—a ghost street in the Lower Ninth Ward. A no-man’s-land of abandoned vehicles and tumbledown houses that served as an enclave for the city’s crack merchants and the homeless.
This was the section of New Orleans hit hardest by the floodwaters, and it was also the last neighborhood in the city to be rebuilt. Some referred to it as the “bad” side of the Industrial Canal because of the crime rate. Others called it Cutthroat City.
Her late husband, Johnny, had once called it home.
Evangeline mopped her brow as she waited for Mitchell Hebert to get out of the car. The swampy heat was not helping her queasy stomach. Earlier, clouds had drifted in from the gulf, bringing a cool breeze and a quick shower, but now the purplish banks had given way to a robin’s-egg-blue sky. At ten-thirty on a June morning, the temperature was already in the high nineties and the steam rising from the drying puddles felt like a sauna.
“You smell that?” Mitchell asked as he climbed out of the car. “That’s dead-body smell.”
“You think?”
The older detective eyed her suspiciously. “You don’t look so hot this morning.”
That was an understatement if she’d ever heard one. Evangeline had been up half the night with the baby, and she looked and felt like a hundred miles of bad road. But lack of sleep was the least of her problems. With the impending anniversary of Johnny’s death, she was finding it harder and harder to emerge from the dark cloud that had hovered over her since the funeral.