Krewe of Hunters, Volume 1: Phantom Evil ; Heart of Evil ; Sacred Evil ; The Evil Inside

by Heather Graham

  Almost. It was one thing to understand the way the human mind worked. It was another to buck against it when you were the human in question.

  * * *

  “I play a lot on Frenchman Street,” Jake told Angela. “Things have changed a lot since our season of storms. The demographics in the city have changed, and it’s kind of like a movement for survival. Let’s face it, the history here is great, but tons of the tourism comes because of Bourbon Street, for people to have a good time in the old Big Easy. So, now, you don’t hear all the different stuff you used to hear—well, not as much. The bars on Bourbon mostly have pop—Journey, Bon Jovi, hard-hitting fast stuff. Of course, everything is a contradiction. Next thing you know, the best sax player known to man will show up working at one of the tourist places!”

  “It’s always been a city of contradictions,” Angela assured him, liking the young man very much.

  “You know it well?” he asked, arching a brow as she led them at last to the entertainment slash family room. He sat at the end of the sofa and she perched at the other, winding her legs beneath her as she faced him.

  “From college,” she told him. “I grew up in Virginia, but I absolutely love New Orleans, so it does feel just a little bit like coming home. Despite the gruesome reason.”

  “So, tell me, Miss Hawkins, what do you do?” he asked.

  She hesitated. “I guess I’m a ‘finder,’ too. That’s what you do, right?”

  He nodded, shrugging. “I guess I have a certain sense for…finding people.” He lowered his voice, looking toward the door.

  “Do you?” she asked. “How do you mean?”

  He hesitated a minute, then said, “Friends of mine almost went insane. Their five-year-old was kidnapped, and two boys had been kidnapped right before. One’s body had been found. I had a dream about a child holding my hand, taking me down into an area of bayou near Slidell. I found the body of the second. And it was amazing, because when I found it, I also found the old swamp house where they were keeping my friends’ little boy. He survived. I was so grateful, but the experience shook me up—that was for certain. But I didn’t dwell on it. Knowing things, seeing events and people—it isn’t always good. Some people turn away from you; they think that you’re out to hurt them, or they want to put some distance between you and them, because there might be something really odd about you.” He paused again. “I think I lost a best friend that way.” He laughed softly. “Actually, the love of my life. But…well, if you have experiences like mine, you stay sane yourself by learning to use whatever talent you have, gift or curse, to do what you can to help stop some of the depravity and evil in the world. New Orleans is my home, so my talents came in handy when the city was in trouble.”

  “Do your ghosts come in dreams,” she said.

  “Sometimes. Yours?”

  She found herself looking to the door as well. “I get feelings that seem almost like a divining rod—and yes, I get the dreams. I—I saw something when my parents were killed in a plane crash. I saw them walking toward the light, along with a lot of other people. The therapist who worked with me afterward told me that I saw what I needed to see in order to be able to bear the grief.”

  “But you never believed that.”

  “No, but my time with the therapist made me extremely careful about what I say to other people!”

  He laughed, his green eyes still bright. “Well, I do know people who see them—ghosts—and see them easily.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “I’ll introduce you,” he said.

  “They live here?”

  He nodded.

  “Does Adam know about them? Why wouldn’t he have brought them in on this team?”

  “Well, frankly, Nikki and Brent have three small children now. I’m sure Adam would have liked to have them on a team, but they’re busy parents. I don’t believe they would work away from the city, not with their children growing up. They have their schools, their church, their sports teams…they’re good people, though. I met Adam through them, actually…” Jake paused in thought.

  “I see. And I understand—I think. Adam wants a team that will stay cohesive for a while, a group that starts out together and learns to work together,” Angela said.

  “You think Regina Holloway committed suicide?”

  Angela simply looked at him for a moment and admitted, “No.”

  “You think the house is haunted?” he asked her.

  She laughed. Once again, she chose her words. “Say I believe that a house can be haunted. Perhaps things go bump in the night—or ghosts prowl the hallways. I don’t think that ghosts pushed Regina Holloway over the balcony.”

  “Good conclusion.”

  The voice came from the doorway and Angela turned quickly to see that Jackson Crow had finished whatever work he was doing and stood there, watching them. She felt color flood her cheeks. Just how long had he been there?

  “I wanted you to let Jake know that he needs to go ahead and pick a room,” Jackson said, his blue eyes as enigmatic as ever. “The rest of the crew will be arriving soon. You might want to get settled. The two maids who worked in the house when Regina was alive won’t come back to work here, but they should be here in a few minutes to show us where the linen can be found, towels, cleaning articles, all that.”

  “All right, I think I’ll go ahead and take that third room in the hallway where you two are,” Jake said. “And I’m pretty good at picking up after myself. I can cook, too,” he assured them.

  * * *

  “I’ll help you,” Angela said.

  “I just have my guitar and my bag,” he said.

  “I’ll get the guitar for you—and treat it like gold,” Angela assured him. “You wouldn’t want to drop it on the way up the stairs.”

  “Sure,” he said, and they both walked past Jackson. Angela felt that he watched them, and she wondered why. She was equally curious as to why she was suddenly trying to avoid him.

  Because the meeting over the pickax remained between them—and she didn’t really want him knowing that, despite her credentials, she definitely still had her vulnerabilities.

  She wasn’t sure. She was confident, and she knew how to keep her own counsel. But there was something about the way that he looked at her…

  She usually didn’t care, she realized. She wanted Jackson Crow to like her.

  * * *

  “Hi!”

  The fourth member of his team, Whitney Tremont, had just rung the bell. She’d been born and bred in New Orleans just like Jake, but with the difference that Jake came from an “English” background and Whitney was pure Creole.

  She was, he thought, a compelling little bundle of energy. She was little, no more than five-two or five-three, slim, with curly hair and hazel eyes, and skin the color of amber. She had a smile that was infectious, and a soft, sweet voice.

  They had sent him another child.

  No, there was a keen intelligence in her eyes. She had been a straight-A off-the-charts student; she had studied ethnicity, religion, philosophy, modern and ancient beliefs, while also receiving her degree in film from NYU. Her maternal great-grandmother was a noted contemporary voodoo priestess, and owned a shop called As You Believe up near Rampart Street. She had helped the local police crack down on a cult of would-be voodoo worshippers who had taken it upon themselves to bastardize the beliefs for the sake of human sacrifice—two young people had died during blood-drinking rituals. According to her file, she had a chameleon-like ability to slip into any group and be accepted as one of them—and somehow manage to film or video events and people who had never allowed such a thing before. Her expertise was cameras and film, and Jackson knew that she, like Will Chan, whom he had yet to meet, had been brought in for their work with cameras and sound.

  “Hi,” he said, reaching for her large, tapestry travel bag. “Come on in. Whitney, right? Miss Whitney Tremont.”

  “Jackson Crow. Love the name,” she assured him.

&n
bsp; “Thanks.”

  “So, you’ve already been digging up bodies—I’m late to the party,” she said.

  He grimaced. “A skeleton. Angela Hawkins found it.”

  “I’m impressed, and the majority of the people in the city are convinced that now all the ghosts who might not have been busy yet will be crawling out of the woodwork. Anyway, if they do, I’m hoping that we catch them on film. I have a lot of equipment out in the van.”

  He looked over her head. There was a fellow in the driver’s seat who looked so much like her that he had to be her brother. The man waved to him; Jackson waved back.

  “I’ll open the courtyard gate. And call the troops to help. Well, the two who are here now,” Jackson told her.

  “Okay,” Whitney said. “That’s my brother, Tyler, over there. I’ll get him to come around the corner,” she said cheerfully.

  Whitney went out; he called for Angela and Jake, and soon they were all in the courtyard, meeting Tyler and hauling heavy boxes out of the van. They decided to set up in the grand entry slash ballroom, so Jackson shut off the alarm entirely in order for them to open the middle courtyard doors and take the shortest route.

  It didn’t take them more than thirty minutes to bring everything in.

  Tyler was as tall as his sister was short, ranging a good foot over her head. He was as pleasant with the others as if he had been leaving his sister at summer camp, but when he was actually ready to leave, he gave her a huge hug and said seriously, “You be careful, and you don’t take any chances, and you don’t go getting your nose in where it shouldn’t be.”

  “I’m all grown up now, Tyler,” she reminded him, but she hugged him in return.

  “She has a tendency to rush in—right into people who have guns,” he said.

  Jackson grinned. “We’ll watch out for her. I promise.”

  Tyler nodded. “Adam wouldn’t have set her up with you if you weren’t good people. And if she wasn’t going to be safe.” He paused, looking around. “So this is the Newton house. It doesn’t look like a dark torture chamber, but…I’m sure it’s creepy as hell at night. You all be careful, huh? I remember when the kid took a header when the cops were after him about a decade ago. Brought it all back. And now Mrs. Holloway…it’s a shame, and it may just be that the place is bad.”

  “We’ll all be looking out for each other,” Jake said solemnly.

  Hugging his sister and warning her to call him, Tyler left at last.

  Jackson looked at the four members of his team and the mass of boxes in the living room. “Well,” he said.

  Whitney shrugged. “It’s not bad, really! Somebody else is in film, right?”

  “Will Chan, but he’s not here yet,” Jackson said.

  “We follow orders well,” Angela assured her.

  “And I’m way brawnier than I look,” Jake added, laughing.

  “That’s good. Because you can all start while I check the doors, windows and the alarm system again,” Jackson told him. “Here are the rules—no one opens the gate without me knowing it. We’re going to be opening the balcony doors from our bedrooms, so I’ll have the alarm set during the day so that we can do that. Though it will sound if we don’t key ourselves in and out of the front door—everyone understand?”

  “Yes, and thank God! I can’t imagine not going out on that beautiful balcony,” Whitney said. She didn’t seem the least disturbed by the house—simply fascinated.

  “We’ll dig on in and help Whitney start getting set up,” Angela assured him.

  “I won’t be that long.”

  He was long, though. Longer than he intended.

  None of them had been up to the third floor yet. After taking the grand stairway to the second floor, he briefly checked each of the rooms on the front end of the house, and came around to the middle section, and the stairway there. He went up to the third level. Thankfully, the middle section was one big expanse of space. With remnants from the decades that the house had stood.

  No one had gotten up here yet to start on the cleaning. The area was rife with dust; it almost felt as if he took a step back into a different time. Dressmakers’ dummies were along the wall, near one of the three dormer windows. Jackson checked them; the alarm wires were in place. Clothing on the dummies ranged from an antebellum ball gown to a World War II–era swing skirt.

  A huge old sewing machine was in another corner, and a wire crate held toys from eons past, wooden soldiers, dolls that might have been collectibles, croquet mallets, balls and wickets. More—he couldn’t discern everything in the container.

  He walked through the low hallway at the one end, arriving at the area over the ballroom, and discovered that it had been set up as a row of dormitory-style rooms, and he assumed that the rooms had been slave quarters for the household staff at one time, and servants’ quarters at another.

  It was slow going, but he checked each of the dormer windows. He walked back through the main storage room and through the low-ceilinged hallway to the last ell; here, he found just two rooms, both of them large, and both of them empty. But the alarm wires were in place, and the windows were secure. He walked back down to the second floor and went through all the motions, finally reached the first, and checked that all the windows not facing the courtyard were secure.

  The place was huge. Despite the fact that the police had searched the premises, and despite the alarm system, Jackson still wondered if there hadn’t been a way for someone to slip in—uninvited, and unknown.

  Back in the ballroom he discovered that his crew had been busy. There was a set of television screens arranged at the far end of the room, cables, cords, lights and more equipment aligned against the wall.

  “We’re trying to decide which rooms should get the cameras first,” Angela told him. She stared at him peculiarly.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You look like a ghost yourself,” Whitney said, giggling.

  “Like you’ve been playing in a pail of plaster,” Jake added. “You went up to the attic? I’m guessing there hasn’t been a cleanup crew there.”

  He groaned and looked at his arm. The sleeves of his cotton shirt were white.

  Once again, the doorbell rang and he walked to the door, expecting the remainder of the team.

  A tall, slender woman of African descent stood there as straight as a ramrod, and as ancient as one. She frowned, seeing Jackson, and murmured something that seemed to be a prayer against curses.

  Angela swiftly came running to the door, catching the woman’s hand. “Hi, I’m Angela. Jackson is just dusty—can we help you?”

  “Gran-Mama!” Whitney cried. “You’re early.”

  Jackson spun back to look at the old woman. Angela had reached out a hand to invite her in.

  “Who are you?” Jackson demanded.

  “I am Mama Matisse. Whitney didn’t tell you that she asked me to come?” the woman asked. “Whitney, child! I don’t come where I’m not invited!”

  “Gran-Mama,” Whitney began, her face chalky, “I just haven’t had time to talk to them yet.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Jackson said. “You’re a priestess? A voodoo priestess?”

  “Yes. But I am also Whitney’s great-grandmother,” the woman explained.

  Jackson wasn’t sure whether or not to be indignant at her demeanor. But he had the feeling that this woman could help them, and that the wisdom in her eyes ran deep. He bowed his head slightly. “Whitney didn’t mention you, but, please, yes, stay, help us.” He cast Whitney a frowning glare; she lifted her hands helplessly.

  “Gran-Mama—Mama Matisse—was friends with both the maids who worked here. And she knew Regina and the senator. I thought you might want to hear what she can tell us,” Whitney said.

  Jackson nodded at her. “I’ll run up and take a two-minute shower. Mama Matisse, Whitney will take you into the kitchen and get you some coffee or water or whatever. Please?”

  “I am here to help you,” Mama Matisse said with tremendous
dignity. “I will do my best. You see, the police have not much cared for what I’ve had to say, but I can tell you this—the very day that Regina Holloway died, her maid, Rene, came running over to tell me that there were ghosts in this house. There were ghosts, and there is tremendous evil, and whether or not they are one and the same, that you must discover.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mama Matisse drew a long bony finger down her teacup as she sat at the kitchen table. “Whitney asked me to come here today because of the maids—and because I was here, and worked with Regina Holloway,” Mama Matisse explained.

  “You worked with her?” Angela looked from Mama Matisse to Whitney.

  “Regina Holloway was very fond on my great-grandmother, and believed in her wisdom,” Whitney explained.

  Mama Matisse nodded gravely. “The maids will not come back in this house, Trini or Rene,” she assured Angela. “They are afraid. They have taken money from the senator to live on while they look for new positions. They need to keep working in this city, so if you were to try to call them and ask them questions, they would not come to you with a ghost story. They don’t mind if I speak to you in their stead. If you question them, if the police question them again, they will not speak about the ghosts, and that is all that there is to it. But they have talked to me, and I don’t believe they care that I talk to you.”

  “Thank you,” Angela said.

  “They are afraid that people will think that they are crazy,” Mama Matisse said. “Loco, as Trini says,” she added.

  “My great-grandmother is considered to be extremely wise,” Whitney said. “Many, many people come to her. Whether they are voodooists, Jewish, Buddhists, Christian or whatever.”

  “I promise you, we’re not going to repeat anything that you say,” Angela assured her.

  Mama Matisse looked at her. “If you were to repeat what I say on behalf of the maids, it wouldn’t matter. I have said it, and not them.”

  Angela nodded. Mama Matisse did not easily trust people, but Whitney had asked her to come, and so here she was.