Phantom Evil

by Heather Graham

Page 40

 

  Poor Sidney Story must have been mortified when it became known as Storyville, which reigned supreme in sexual entertainment for twenty years, until the federal government decided that it was far too well-known—and that it corrupted the soldiers and sailors based there. Storyville was closed, and now existed no more.

  Moving on, Angela discovered that Abraham Lincoln, as a young man, had seen the slave markets in New Orleans, and some of what he had seen had cemented his determination that slaves must be freed.

  “You know, he’s known as our most psychic president,” Whitney said. “He believed in destiny, and foretold his own death in a dream. ”

  “Do we ever really foretell anything?” Angela asked her. “Or do we create our world ourselves with the way we view it?”

  “I don’t think he created John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theatre!” Whitney said.

  “Good point,” Angela told her.

  They entered the new exhibit, and the very first display there was on the Madden C. Newton house. They walked straight to the model of the home, as it had been when Madden C. Newton had carried out his reign of terror.

  “Look—the one ell is still divided here,” Whitney said. “When the house was built, that was actually a separate building. ”

  “One of the reasons all those people are shown marching on the house is that he didn’t get rid of a corpse fast enough—people smelled it, they figured out that he was responsible for the disappearances, and the police burst in on him,” Angela said.

  “Oh, Lord. It is amazing, how very, very bad human beings can be. ”

  Angela walked over to read the page on the exhibit. There were drawings, and one photograph of Madden C. Newton in court. She had seen him in her dreams; of course, there had been a picture of him in the book she owned, so she might have sent the image to her imagination.

  “He looks like any man,” Whitney said.

  “Not really. Look at his eyes. The bastard was demented,” Angela said.

  They both fell silent, reading, and then wandered apart in slightly different directions.

  “Hey! Come over here,” Whitney said after a minute.

  Angela walked over to her. The man’s death warrant was on display, along with a newspaper sketch of his public execution—a hanging.

  “Ugh,” Whitney said. “The body was left to hang there for three days. No one knows exactly when he was cut down. There had been orders for the disposal in ‘an unmarked grave purchased by the city,’ but no one seems to have recorded the plot number. ”

  “Interesting,” Angela agreed, walking over to read along with Whitney. “You would have thought that they might have burned the bastard alive and thrown his ashes to the wind. ”

  “Too medieval!” Whitney said, laughing.

  Angela walked back over to look at the model of the house, noting the difference in the architecture now, with the entire structure pulled together as one.

  She went through the entire exhibit again, but it didn’t give her anything new on Madden C. Newton. She saw pictures of many of his victims—Matthew Brady and other photographers at work during the Civil War had made portraits common and possible by then. She was most touched by one certain portrait; it was that of a family, husband, wife, son and daughter.

  She knew the children. They remained in her room.

  “That’s them, isn’t it?” Whitney asked her.

  “Yes. ”

  Whitney was quiet for a minute. “Jenna is certain that you—that you managed to release people from the basement when you found the skeleton of Nathaniel Petti under the floor. I wonder why the children can’t move on. Their bodies were discovered long ago—they were buried with their parents. ”

  “I don’t know, I think they’re trying to tell me what happened. But I’m not sure if they mix up what happened to them with what happened to Regina. They want me to know something, and they just haven’t managed to do it yet. ”

  “Why do you look so perplexed?” Whitney asked her.

  Angela turned to Whitney. She grimaced and decided that they had agreed just to say whatever they were thinking—if one of them was slightly unhinged, certainly, they all were.

  “I saw another face in the room. When I was drying off after my shower, I looked in the mirror—and there it was. A woman’s face. I was hoping that maybe I’d see who she might be while we were here. ”

  “Why, was she scary?” Whitney asked. “I’d love to really see the way you do. There’s something special about you—it seems that specters want to be seen by you. ”

  “Sure, it’s endless fun. They tap on the shoulder, scare me to death and disappear!” Angela said. She looked at the model of the house again, and then down the aisle at the extension of the exhibit. She felt that she should be seeing something here and now, but she didn’t. She glanced at her watch. “Time to meet up to head back, so it seems. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” she said, starting ahead. Then she stopped suddenly, looking at the last bit of the exhibit, around the corner before the exit. “Oh!” she said.

  Angela walked around to join her.

  On the wall, a black silhouette against white, was a simple scene of a hanging. Because of sound systems throughout, they could hear the sound of a rope scraping against a scaffold. The man at the end of the rope was Madden C. Newton; it was a giant cutout from a sketch they had seen earlier.

  A sign above read: The Wages of Sin And Wicked Evil!

  Madden C. Newton had deserved his death; in Angela’s mind, he had deserved far worse.

  But there was something about the silhouette on the wall and the sound piping through that was unnerving. As she stared at the wall, she almost expected the image to turn to her; she thought that she would see his eyes, the terrible eyes that she had seen in her dream.

  In her mind, she could almost hear the children screaming again….

  The children had found a certain justice; their killer had been caught, tried and executed. Yet they remained behind.

  And the other woman, the one who had stared at her in the mirror…

  She had looked through all the pictures. There was no image of that woman here.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, and she left Whitney still staring at the wall, and hurried to the exit.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When Jackson arrived with Will and Jenna at Café du Monde, Jake Mallory was already at one of the outside tables, his long legs stretched before him. It wasn’t busy, but there were people coming and going. A musician played out on the street, doing a decent rendition of a Billy Joel tune. Tourists walked by him, some dropping money in his open guitar case. Across the street, in front of Jackson Square, a girl painted in silver portrayed a statue, much to the amusement of a number of children gathered before her.

  Cars moved along on Decatur Street, occasionally horns sounded with impatience.

  Jake stood and waved, seeing Jackson. They came over to join him around the small circular table. Jake dragged another chair over so they would have room when Angela and Whitney arrived, and then plopped down again. A waiter was quickly there, and they ordered their cups of café au lait or iced tea or coffee, along with two orders of beignets.

  “Well, this will be my third. I’m imagining that I’ll be a bit wired tonight,” Jake said.

  “How did it go? You were back quickly,” Jackson said. The weather was still pleasant. It would hold another month, maybe, and then the dead heat of summer would set in.

  “Badly,” Jake said. “Someone there was onto me. ”

  “Oh?” Jackson said.

  “I knocked at the church door, just like yesterday. A young woman answered—another young one. I don’t know how young. Too bad she wasn’t obviously underage and pregnant; I could have called the cops. I started out saying that I’d been in the day before, and that I was interested in the church. And before I knew it, a
fellow in something like a friar’s cape came out and told me that he knew my kind, I had Satan in my soul, and I wasn’t for his church. I tried to argue with him, but I had the feeling he was armed beneath his cape—and I wasn’t. So I got out. ”

  “That’s an interesting development,” Jackson said.

  “They may not have ‘made’ Jake,” Jenna suggested. “It might all be over the fact that Gabby Taylor disappeared. I mean, they may not know anything about who he is—but they may be suspicious of him because soon after he showed up, she disappeared. ”

  “True,” Jackson said. He slid his sunglasses down his nose; he could see that Angela and Whitney were walking down St. Ann Street toward Decatur; they would be with them any minute. He smiled, watching the two. So striking in their different ways, Angela a snow princess, and Whitney exotic with her honey skin and dark hair. They paused at the light, talking to one another, and he was pleased to see that they might have been friends since childhood, they seemed so comfortable together.

  They were a team. A good team, he decided. For a minute, he felt an edge of fear. It was impossible not to remember his last team. Good people, also. Three of them dead.

  They had to be vigilant at all times. They had to have one another’s backs at all times, and they had to learn to trust one another, and no one else. Of course, no one came into this without knowing the risks. And still, he knew that he was responsible, and he wouldn’t relive the past.

  “Jackson?”

  He started and looked at Will.

  “Yes?”

  “How are we ever going to get closer to Blake Conroy? Or, for that matter, what can we do about Martin DuPre and the Church of Christ Arisen?” Will asked. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to do nothing. We could at least confront the senator with what we know and get the slimy bastard out of politics. ”

  “We will, we will, all in good time,” Jackson assured them.

  He stood as the two women arrived, and they weaved their way through the other chairs and tables to reach them. As they sat, Whitney said, “Oh, that feels good. We’ve been walking for hours now!”