Cate said she imagined a man with a green eyeshade sitting at a tall desk writing each line: purchases of raw materials, capital expenditures for a new piece of equipment or a mule, and receipts from a wholesaler who bought their refined sugar.
He found the payday entries interesting — the lists of names of men and women, their hours and their meager wages. Some got silver coin and others received chits to use at a company store in Thibodaux. Although unrelated to the crimes at Proctor Hall, these books had historic value, and Henri said he’d suggest Doc donate them to the archives in New Orleans.
Once they took the downstairs hallway down to studs, the crew chief moved into the music room opposite the kitchen and began working room by room toward the back of the house. After taking out all the first-floor walls, they’d go upstairs.
Landry showed the trapdoor in the floor to the crew chief, explaining how people sneaked into the house. When it was time to remove the floors, he wanted to examine it. The walls and shelves came down piece by piece, yielding nothing, and the next room was the same.
Last was the sitting room, the one Landry hoped might hold secrets. The floorboards were still brown with bloodstains that had seeped through the carpet when Agnes and Ben positioned the Proctor family’s bodies on the couch.
A moment of excitement came when a workman pried away the bookshelf that abutted the fireplace and found a three-foot-wide space that wrapped around the brick flue. Cate was the smallest, and Landry volunteered her to squeeze down the narrow passage and look around the corner behind the chimney.
She coughed as ancient dust flew into her face. “It’s empty. No, wait! There’s something sitting on a ledge above me. Let me reach…” She raised her arm and closed her fingers around something, pulled it off its resting place, and brought it out.
Cate held a hatchet with a blade as sharp as the day it was finely honed. Dark brown stains covered the steel and the handle.
“We’ll check the DNA on it,” one of the medical techs said.
Landry said, “My guess is you’ll get a mixture of blood samples. The Proctors, Michael and who knows how many others. I’d say you found the murder weapon.”
The work shifted to the second floor. The bedrooms yielded nothing until they reached the final one, May Ellen’s haunted room. Only the interior walls were standing, and the room was open to the elements. The work crew installed scaffolds to reach the wall panels and revealed the shaft Julien had told Landry about, so cleverly concealed that no one would have seen it. Agnes had escaped down the ladder inside that narrow passage after decapitating Michael in the bed.
As they worked, everyone experienced an overwhelming feeling of depression. One compared it to being at a funeral — this was a room of sadness and tears. And moments later they discovered why.
A wooden box stood behind each of three wall panels. Julien had said the coffins would be there, but the workers didn’t know about them. Even these tough men and women were astonished once they realized what they’d uncovered.
They lowered the boxes to the ground floor with ropes, and the medical team pried up the lid of the smaller box, which held a desiccated corpse packed in lime. “Clothing indicates a female. Her head is missing,” one examiner commented.
“May Ellen Proctor,” Cate whispered, taking Landry’s hand and saying a brief prayer.
That discovery stopped work for the day. The forensic crew loaded the coffins into a van and left for Baton Rouge, and the demolition workers left for the evening as well.
As Landry drove back to New Orleans, he got a call from Lieutenant Kanter. Julien had taken a turn for the worse. He had a temperature of a hundred and five, and the meds to control his skyrocketing blood pressure no longer worked. He was in critical condition, and the next twelve hours would tell the tale for Julien.
“This morning he handed the nurse a piece of paper — a handwritten will,” Kanter advised. “He has no heirs, and he left his possessions to you. He wants to be cremated. The last line says, ‘My soul is going to hell anyway, so I might as well let my body burn too.’”
“Bizarre,” Landry said, wondering if those stacks of books and papers in his office held more revelations about this man with two lives. Perhaps he’d get to find out.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The next morning Julien Girard died, and Landry wondered what unspoken horrors the man took to the grave with him. Had they only scratched the surface? Now there would be theories and conjectures, but no more validation from one who knew the answers.
The rest of the walls at Proctor Hall came down without incident, and the crew began ripping out floorboards on the ground floor.
Under the floor of the blast-ravaged kitchen, the forensic team found bones that appeared to be human. Instead of inside a coffin, these were half-buried in the dirt.
“Ben Trimble?” Landry asked, and Henri said it matched the story Julien told them.
“Julien said Agnes dragged him under the house and left him for the animals in 2014. I wonder if he was here too. Do you think he might have helped his mother kill his own father?”
Cate said, “I’m sure of it. I wouldn’t put anything past these people.”
Near the end of the second day, they came across another box that lay under the flooring in the sitting room. It was similar to the ones they’d found upstairs. When the lid was pried up, they found another coffin, but a vastly different burial — a gruesome, unimaginable one.
This time there was no lime packed around the prone, headless body. Before them was a scene of pure horror. The female inside wore overalls and had long blond hair. Her face was contorted into a twisted grimace that even the maggots couldn’t erase. Her hands were above her chest, and the fingernails were bloody and jagged. There had been a mighty struggle inside this box.
“Look at the top — there, on the inside,” someone said. “Those are claw marks.”
“Unbelievable,” Landry said. “I think this is Marguey Slattery. Julien said he and Agnes killed her, but he neglected to mention that they buried her alive.”
The demo chief said, “I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff over the years, but I never imagined turning up bodies in the walls and floors of an old house. Who is that girl?”
Landry explained about Marguey and said the killers were caretakers — Agnes and her son, Julien. The Proctors had been dead for years by then.
The man shook his head in disgust. “What kind of person does that to a girl? You knew the people, right? Were they total psychopaths?”
Landry said, “I never saw the woman. Her son was a university professor for nearly thirty years. He was mild-mannered and friendly. He’s that guy you got to know at a bar, or the man who drives the streetcar, or the fellow who coaches your kid’s team. He’s anybody, and he’s nobody. You would have never known in a million years what was going on inside his mind.”
After the man went back to work, Cate said, “Well, are you glad you got that off your chest? It was like he asked for a street name and you told him how to get to Pittsburgh.”
Landry smiled. “I let things build up inside sometimes. I felt sorry for Julien. I believed I knew him, and even when I learned what he was, there were times he seemed to be…maybe remorseful. But was that just a ploy to appear to be like other people?”
“Nobody should feel sorry for him after seeing the girl in the box. What he and his mother did to her is beyond comprehension. He was right — he’ll spend eternity in hell. At least I hope so.”
They never found Joseph Girard’s body. Ben Trimble had said he’d take care of his brother-in-law’s corpse, and Landry assumed he buried it somewhere on the property.
Once they finished at the house, everyone left except the wrecking crew. A few days later, a plot of evenly spread dirt marked where Proctor Hall once stood.
Back at home, Cate asked, “What will become of May Ellen and the others? Will their spirits be trapped on the property forever?”
Landry paused and sai
d, “Thanks. You just gave me an idea.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The next morning he called Harry Kanter. “Follow me for a minute on something,” he began. “When I first researched Proctor Hall, I found nothing about what happened to the bodies after the massacre. Noah was the rightful heir but also the prime suspect and possibly mentally ill. The cops had three bodies — and three heads — to contend with.
“The torsos ended up in the walls at Proctor Hall. How that happened isn’t germane to my question. I want to find out what happened to the heads.”
“Good question,” Kanter said. “They would have been evidence at first. Somebody would have examined the marks to determine the type of instrument used, taken blood samples, and a million other things. But it would have been the same with the bodies. If the bodies were returned to Proctor Hall, the heads would have gone along with them. Are you certain you all didn’t miss them during the demolition?”
“Positive. They aren’t there.”
Kanter asked why it really mattered after almost sixty years.
“Because I’m going to buy the Proctors caskets and give them a burial in the Thibodaux cemetery. They deserve the respect and to be buried intact. Can you check around to see what might have happened to them?”
Harry said he’d make a call. He knew it would be difficult finding anything about a sixty-year-old cold case, but Landry had a noble goal, and he wanted to help. One thing was certain — the heads were somewhere, and the state medical examiner had the power to find out.
Forty-eight hours later, the man called with an apology. The morgue is a vast place, he said. Things get moved around, and only rarely does something go missing. Sometimes it’s the embarrassing moment when a family asks for their loved one’s remains.
In 1963 after the medical examiner was finished, the Proctor heads went onto a shelf in one of rows and rows of freezers. They were properly tagged and held awaiting instructions on where to send them. The bodies were much larger and hard to miss, and they went back to Lafourche Parish within months after the deaths.
The heads stayed as new cases arose, and other body parts were stored in front of them. Eventually they were at the rear of a very long shelf that no one ever pulled out all the way. Unfortunately but understandably, they were forgotten.
Two days later a state cop drove a refrigerated van to the funeral home in Thibodaux where the bodies were awaiting burial. An embalmer carefully prepared the heads for interment and the mortuary owner respectfully placed them and their bodies in the caskets Landry and Cate selected. The bodies were complete for the first time in decades. As a priest read from the Bible at the graveyard, Landry prayed that they were finally at peace.
The ensuing days were busy for Landry. Jack Blair became his assistant again as Channel Nine’s staff put together the new Bayou Hauntings episode featuring Proctor Hall. There were production deadlines, interviews with April, Marisol and locals in Thibodaux who related the legends, background footage, hours of voiceovers for Landry and Henri, and a hundred other details required to produce a television documentary.
The assistant professor who took over for Julien gave Marisol and April their well-deserved A grades, and the girls met Landry and Cate for coffee just before leaving New Orleans for the summer. On that day when they chose Proctor Hall as their project, no one could have imagined what sacrifices, heartbreaks and terror they would endure while trying to win a rigged competition.
Days later Cate awoke one morning and began to tell Landry about a dream.
He grinned. “You can stop right there. I had it too.”
As it turned out, it was the same for both of them. May Ellen Proctor appeared as a wispy, white phantom, her body now complete. She thanked them for helping her family and her brother Noah. “We can rest now that the house is gone,” she said. “I will never forget you.” That would be their last contact with the Proctor Hall ghosts.
Landry got a phone call weeks later from Andy Arnaud. He said he’d apologized to everyone else for disappearing, but he just couldn’t handle the horror. He worked on an offshore rig in the Gulf where nobody knew him or asked about his experiences. Yes, he still had snow-white hair. He guessed it always would be. He had heard the news about Julien Girard and asked if Marisol and April got their top grade. He promised to check in now and then, but that wouldn’t happen. His conversation with Landry only brought up memories he wanted to forget.
Landry and Cate cleaned out Julien’s office and moved everything to storage in the building where Henri had his office. Despite being a madman, Julien was a brilliant historian, and his collection of books and papers on Louisiana culture were a treasure trove of information. Landry commented that at least one good thing came from a man whose life was filled with evil.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Doc Adams moved Noah into one of Houston’s premier retirement centers. Money was no object once Doc devised a plan that would set the man up for the rest of his life.
Doc owned Proctor Hall because he’d bought it at a tax sale, but Noah was the last remaining Proctor. Doc believed the thousand-acre plantation should be his. Noah couldn’t manage his own finances, so Doc transferred the property to a trust. He and Cate were trustees, and Noah was the beneficiary of the income.
Doc leased half the property to the sugar cooperative and hired a property developer to create a subdivision on the remaining five hundred acres. Within a year there were streets, sewers and utilities, and soon beautiful homes occupied shady ten-acre lots that fronted the bayou.
Every other Sunday, Cate and Landry flew to Houston, met Doc for lunch, and the three of them went to see Noah. They sat in rockers on a shaded veranda and talked about everything from politics to the weather. Noah listened, watched them when they spoke, and Doc said he understood everything they said.
As his primary physician, Doc marveled at how well Noah adapted to a safe, secure environment. When they visited, Noah’s caregiver, a middle-aged nurse named Etta Morgan, updated them on his progress.
The kind lady was a blessing to Noah, and she spent untold hours with him. It was Etta who discovered the one thing that made Noah happy — music. She bought him an iPod and headphones and loaded music from every genre. He listened to oldies, pop, Broadway show tunes and, his favorite, classical.
“Watch what happens when he listens,” she said one Sunday afternoon. Noah’s head moved to the beautiful sounds of his favorite Bach concerto. He tapped his fingers on the chair lightly, and there was the slightest hint of a smile on his face.
On their most recent visit, they brought pizza and root beer, Noah’s favorite foods. He ate along with them, obviously enjoying the meal, and when it was time to go, they stood, Cate hugged him, and they told him goodbye.
Noah looked into their eyes and said his first words.
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