by Linda Ladd
“No, it’s dark when he drags them out of the boat. The boy hears the tree branches rustling and crickets singing, but he feels sick to his stomach from the cloth and he can’t stay awake.”
“What happened when the boy first woke up?”
“He’s scared because his arms are tied up over his head on the ceiling beam, and his little sister’s taped to a chair. He can see where the man tattooed him. It hurts him real bad and it’s bleeding. When he twists around on the rope enough, he sees that he did it to the girl, too. Then the man in the red mask comes back and he’s hitting the boy with a whip that has lots of knotted ends on it. He hurts him awful bad. He likes to hurt him. He laughs when he hits him with his whip. He doesn’t like the boy as much as the girl.”
Nick took another deep inhalation. Hell, he didn’t want to hear the rest of this story, either. “Tell me about the little girl. What happened to her?”
“She stops yelling and crying for the boy after a while. Then it gets all quiet, and the boy’s afraid she’s dead, that he shot her with a gun like he shot their mama and papa.”
“Did the man ever tell them why he had them? Why he was doing the bad things to them?”
“He says the boy ruined his life. He says they’re bad kids and he’s got to punish them. He says he’s their daddy now and they better get used to it.” Gabe started getting restless again, kicking out with his legs.
“Did he ever take off the red mask?”
“No. He changes it sometimes, but usually it looks like a snake with feathers on it.”
“Does the boy know the man?”
Gabe was quiet for a few seconds, while they all held their breaths.
“Sometimes, he thinks he does, thinks he knows the voice somehow, but then he’s not sure.”
“Does the boy ever see his face without the mask? Even a glimpse of him?”
“No. He always wears it. He whispers and growls and screams at them.”
“What else did he do?”
“He paints his face to look like a skull and he makes a place with lots of candles around and ties them to chairs and makes them watch him kill animals. He pushes them into dark tunnels and makes them crawl through, and then he jumps out and scares them, or grabs them and shakes them or hits them with the whip.”
“Oh, God,” Claire muttered from across the room. She stood up. “I don’t think I can listen to this.”
Claire now looked absolutely ashen, but it was Jack’s face that troubled Nick. Jack looked like he was going to kill somebody with his bare hands.
“Do either of you want me to stop?”
“No, don’t. We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to get him.” That was Jack, through gritted teeth and rigid with determination. He didn’t look so hot.
Claire nodded, too, but she didn’t look quite as sure as Jack. Nick looked back down at Gabe, who had quieted now and was lying completely still.
“Did they ever get outside the house? Can you see them escaping?”
“The boy gets up on his toes and tries to pull the boards off the window. He can’t do it, because he’s kinda sick, but then he finally he gets one off. He opens the window and pushes the little girl outside. And then he squeezes out, too, but he has trouble because he’s bigger and he feels so weak and tired ’cause the man beat him and his back’s bleeding. He takes the girl’s hand, and they run as fast as they can. It’s so dark in the woods, and bugs are bitin’ them all over, and she’s still sleepy from the pills she took. They stop runnin’ away when they get to a brick wall. It’s too high! They can’t climb over it!”
Gabe was becoming agitated again, his voice loud and frightened. Nick said, “You aren’t there, Gabe. You aren’t there. You’re just watching them, like a movie.” When Gabe grew quiet again and his breathing calmed, Nick said, “What do they do then?”
“The boy grabs her hand and they run beside the wall, and then they see the cemetery and the white crypts, and they get scared. The girl sees a white cross in the moonlight, and she runs to it and thinks Jesus has come to save them. It’s on top of the crypt, and the boy pushes her inside and tells her to hide there, to hide and not make a sound and he’s gonna go get help and come back and get her. Then he runs as fast as he can into the swamp and tries to find somebody to help them.”
When Gabe stopped his narrative, Nick hesitated, afraid to push him too far. “Did the man catch the boy?”
“He catches up to him and gets on top of him and chokes him and hits him in the face with his fists and hits him so long and so hard that the boy can’t move anymore. Then he pushes the boy in the water and leaves him there in the dark.”
“What happened to the little girl? Did she stay in the crypt?”
“He doesn’t know! He doesn’t know! He’s got to get somebody and go back and get her! He’s got to find her before the man gets her!”
When Gabe cried out and writhed restlessly on the couch, Claire ran to him and put her arms around him. Gabe clutched her and wept hard, wracking sobs into her shoulder. “Bring him back, Black! Bring him out of it! He’s had enough.”
Nick waited until Gabe calmed down a little, then he started to bring him out of the trance. “Gabe, listen to me. You aren’t going to feel the pain, or the fear, or the cruelty committed against you or your little sister. You will not feel that, you will not remember that, you’ll only remember how you escaped and if you ever saw the man’s face or a fleur-de-lis carved into the porch banister. You will no longer feel guilt at surviving, Gabe. It was not your fault what happened to your sister. It was not your fault what happened to your parents. None of it was your fault. You will know you did everything you could to save your sister, but the man was bigger and stronger than you. You did all you could. You were just a child. You will be able to talk to us about what you can remember, without feeling rage or sadness or hopelessness or helplessness. I’m going to wake you up now. When you open your eyes, you’ll feel good. You’ll feel safe and calm and relaxed and all the guilt you’ve been carrying on your shoulders all these years will fade away. I will count backwards from five, and you’ll wake up and feel free and wonderful and whole again. Do you understand me, Gabe?”
Gabe nodded. Black began to count, and Gabe opened his eyes on cue. Claire said, “It’s okay, Gabe. It’s okay now. You did fine.”
Leaning back against the sofa, Gabe said, “He wore masks the whole time. I never saw his face. He whispered in this terrible scary voice when he talked to us. He played cruel games with us. I got away, but Sophie didn’t.”
“Can you remember anything about the house, Gabe? Anything at all?” That was Jack, pushing him, distraught and appalled because he now knew what his own sisters had probably endured.
Claire said, “Did you see any kind of carving outside the house?”
“I saw the fleur-de-lis. I saw it when he was carrying me over his shoulder that first night and his flashlight moved across it when he climbed the steps. Is that what you’re talking about?”
“You were held inside Rose Arbor,” Nick told him. “I think that’s pretty obvious now.”
Gabe looked around at them. “Where’s that?”
Claire said, “Jack owns it now. That fleur-de-lis is still on the post out front. I noticed it myself. It’s big and hard to miss when you walk up the front steps.”
Nick stood up. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Is there a cemetery on your property, Jack? Maybe we can find something out there.” He hesitated and glanced at Jack and then at Gabe. “There may be graves out there. You both understand that?”
Jack looked repulsed, probably realizing he’d been living in the house where his baby sisters might have been tormented and murdered. But his face was set in stone. Claire shivered but looked determined.
Jack said, “I know exactly where that cemetery is. It’s got the white wall around it, and it’s close to the swamp, just like Gabe said. I duck hunt down there sometimes. The crypts are up on a slope that overlooks where the rive
r overflows and floods the lowlying land at the back of our property.”
“How do you feel?” Nick asked Gabe, handing him a bottle of water.
Gabe took it and drank deeply before he answered. “It’s strange. Like a dream I was walking through. Not Sophie and me but two little kids. I don’t remember him hurting me anymore, the pain, I mean.”
“That’s good. That’s very good.”
“Are you up to going out there, Gabe?” Jack asked.
Nick could tell Jack was going, come hell or high water, with Gabe or without him.
“Yes. I’m going. Maybe I’ll remember more once I’m there.”
That was all they needed. Nick took his car and drove, and nobody said much of anything all the way out to Rose Arbor. He stopped at the front gate, punched in the code, and drove up to the house. When they got out, Gabe looked up at the dark mansion. “It was here?” he said, looking at Claire.
“Yes.” She turned her flashlight up and focused it on the newel post.
Gabe moved up the steps and ran his fingers over the deep grooves. “This is what I saw.”
Jack went inside and turned on the porch lights and foyer lights and then flipped on a floodlight out at the fountain. When he came back outside, Nick asked him how far it was to the cemetery.
“About a quarter of a mile, I guess. It’s pretty much overgrown woods and swampy areas now. Some of the crypts out there date as far back as the 1700s.”
They started off with Jack taking the lead. Gabe was able to keep pace, probably due to an adrenaline surge and his need to know. The night had gotten colder, and their path around the side of the house was dark. They had flashlights, and they followed Jack down through a stand of live oak trees. As they skirted the perimeter of his property, both sides of their path were overgrown with dead and tangled vines and thickets and wild ivy growing out of control. Lots of the gray Spanish moss hung down and brushed their hair like ghostly fingers. Startled birds fluttered out of their hidden beds in the bushes and took wing up into the tree branches. Nick knew when they had neared the swamp because of the smell of the stagnant water and the sound of a nutria rat splashing into the water.
Up ahead of them, Jack stopped and shined his flashlight through the trees, a cone of smoky white light focused on a crumbling cemetery wall. “There. See the crypts? Some are destroyed, but a few of them are still standing.”
They all focused their flashlights on the area that he indicated and swept them around like searching beacons at a movie premier.
“Does this look like the place, Gabe?”
He nodded. “Sophie tripped right here and fell down. That’s when we heard him coming and panicked. So I dragged her up and we ran up there to the cemetery to hide.”
Gabe started across the damp ground, and the rest of them followed, watching where they stepped on wet, spongy dirt that sank a bit under their weight. Then they saw the pale, ghostly crypts in the gloom. Many were crumbling from centuries of wind and rain and hurricanes. Others were covered with weeds and fallen branches. Gabe made his way up the incline to the closest crypt. It sat atop the ground and was about six feet high and eight feet long. He knelt and tried to tear away the weeds with his good arm until he uncovered a rotted wooden door.
“This is where I hid Sophie. Right here.” His voice clogged tight, and he couldn’t say anything else. He sat down on the ground, as if spent.
They gathered around him and focused their lights on the crypt’s door. With some effort, Jack shoved back the rusty bolt on what was left of the splintered wood.
Gabe started to scramble inside, but Claire stopped him. “Let me, Gabe. You’ve done enough.”
Bending down, she flashed her light around the interior and then moved into the dank dark place where poor little Sophie must have crouched in terror so many years ago. Nick squatted down and saw that there was nothing inside at all, no coffin, no moldering corpse, thank God. Before he could stop him, Gabe pushed past him and crawled in behind her. Nick and Holliday watched from the door and held their flashlights where they illuminated the interior. Claire and Gabe were brushing away leaves and gravel and scraping away dirt in search of anything that could help them. After a while, Claire glimpsed something buried in the dirt because she dug it out and held it up against the light. It was a necklace, crusted with grime from decades in the crypt when the water seeped up and turned the ground into mud. She brushed off the dirt as best she could and held it up to the light by its broken chain. When Gabe saw it, he grabbed it out of her hand and squeezed it in his fist. “Sophie got this crucifix the day he took us. For her birthday.”
Claire put her arms around him, and they all watched as he gripped his little sister’s necklace and wept for the innocent little girl that he had left behind in that crypt all those many years ago.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Their emotions were scraped absolutely raw, and it took some time to get themselves back under control, but they had to. Claire was certain now that they were standing on a serial killer’s dumping ground. No telling how many bodies were buried under the moldy dirt of that ancient graveyard. Once Gabe was calm enough and Black was talking through it with him, she got on her phone and called Russ Friedewald. Jack told her that Rose Arbor was located inside St. James Parish so Russ would have to call his counterpart there and arrange a two-department task force to search for other victims. After she’d run their findings past him, Russ immediately ordered in the entire parish forensics team and all available detectives, replete with floodlights and recovery equipment.
By the time the sun came up, and a rolling blanket of ground fog wisped like smoke over the surface of the still green water and crept silently among the centuries-old crypts in the crumbling cemetery, the task force had already gathered and uncovered three small human skeletons. Everybody on scene feared they would find more before the day was done.
Black helped dig, and so did Jack, who wore a dead expression on his face. One that Claire couldn’t stand to look at. Gabe had returned to the house, tired and too weak to help, unable to stand on his feet any longer. They toted buckets of cold dirt from the sunken graves amid the crypts, and she knew why Jack looked so determined. They all knew why.
Even so, when another skeleton was discovered, that of a young child found in a shallow grave only feet from where Gabe had left his sister, Jack was still not prepared when Nancy Gill brushed dirt off a scrap of rotted cloth. Tattered red fleece with the face of Rudolph on the front, the tiny red pom-pom still attached to his nose. Claire’s heart ached when Nancy carefully lifted the shredded remnant of the nightgown with gloved hands and placed it on a sheet of evidence paper.
Jack stood as if frozen and stared down at his little sister’s garment with such mute and terrible anguish that Claire took hold of his arm and tried to turn him away from the grave. “You should go inside, Jack. Let us do this.”
Jack didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to hear her. Nobody said anything out of compassion for his shock and pain so the chatter of awakening birds was the only sound in the cool, early morning quiet. Suddenly, he fell to his knees beside the tiny skeletal remains, his fists clenched on his knees. Then he looked up at them again, and his eyes were so ice-cold, so deadly, that he was frightening to behold. His muscles were flexed into rock, and he was quivering with suppressed rage.
Concerned, Black put his hand on his Jack’s back. He kept his voice very low. “You need to go back to the house, Jack. Just like Gabe did. You’ve seen enough. You’ve done enough. Come on, I’ll go with you. We’ll talk about it there.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Nancy and Claire exchanged worried glances, and after a moment, Nancy began digging again. Claire helped her, but Black stayed close to Jack, apparently afraid he was going to lose it at any minute. Ron Saucier staked out the new grave site, and then he slowly and methodically and expertly extracted a second small skeleton. It was the other twin, buried in her matching, ragged Christmas nightgo
wn, an innocent child who had barely lived three years on the earth before a real-life bogeyman had crept into her house and taken her away forever. Now everything was eerie, dreadful, and intense, with everybody on the scene quiet and respectful of Jack’s burgeoning grief.
Then, abruptly, after about ten minutes of watching Saucier and Nancy carefully remove the remains, and without a word to anyone, Jack stood up, turned around, and headed at a quick clip back to the house. Black watched him for a moment, glanced at Claire, and then went after him. After a little while, Claire walked back to the house, too, and found Black inside the foyer.
“How is he?”
“Not good, but he’s holding up, I guess. I tried to prepare him for this when he hired Booker, but he was so determined to find out what happened to his sisters that he didn’t realize how hard this was going to hit him. I think we need to stay with him. He’s in the library.”
Rose Arbor’s library was downstairs, in the back and on the south side of the house. It was a large rectangular room with windows facing the backyard swimming pool. Polished cherrywood paneling and bookcases lined three walls. Jack was sitting behind a huge mahogany desk. His elbows were propped on the glossy surface, his face buried in his palms. A large Tiffany lamp, its edges decorated with open-winged dragonflies, was switched on and threw a circle of light on his hair. A large book lay on the desk in front of him.
Black motioned Claire over to a chair in front of the desk, but he remained standing. Claire could tell that he was very concerned about his friend. “Jack? Are you going to be all right? Can we get you anything?”
Holliday raised his face, and she knew instantly that he wasn’t all right. Far from it. His eyes were red and swollen, his expression empty and forlorn. His words came out hoarse. “Now I know what happened. He probably did the same things to them that he did to Gabe and his sister. I can’t stand thinking about it. It makes me sick to my stomach to think what they went through, the awful things he did to them. They were just babies, Nick. Innocent little babies.”