Die Again

by Thompson, Bill

  “I’ll be darned! I see now why you want to go inside, but it doesn’t change how I feel about it. I’ve experienced enough from out here, with it coaxing me to come across the street. It wants something from me, and I don’t want to find out what.”

  “How about you?” Landry asked Tiffany. “If you’ll go, my girlfriend Cate will come too.”

  Cate’s eyes widened and she snapped, “Maybe your girlfriend Cate can make up her own mind about that.” She smiled at Tiffany. “If you want to go, I’ll come along. God knows I’ve followed Landry into some crazy stuff before. This is just one more.”

  “It’s not that I want to. There’s something I can’t explain, like an urgency in my head that’s pulling me. Kayla, I’m scared. Come with me.”

  Her friend would have no part of it and said she’d meet her in the bar at their hotel when Tiffany’s adventure was over.

  “Don’t do it,” Jack insisted. “I’m warning you, don’t go in there.”

  Landry removed the lock and pushed the gate open. As they stepped across the threshold and stood in a long dark passageway, a powerful gust of chilly air swept down the corridor and encircled them like a dust devil for several seconds. Tiffany flailed her arms and screamed, “Get me out of here!” Trembling, she collapsed to the stone floor and begged to leave.

  “We shouldn’t have done this,” Cate said, helping her out to the street.

  Landry followed. He could poke around the building another time. As usual, Cate was right — Tiffany was going through an emotional trial exacerbated by something within these walls. He had as much as insisted she come, and he apologized to her for his insensitivity.

  The homeless man nodded as Landry described what had happened during the brief time they were inside.

  “Why the hell did you go in there anyway? You should have listened to me.”

  Tiffany asked them to walk with her to the end of the block. “I’ll be fine once I’m off this street,” she said, and declined Cate’s offer to accompany her to her hotel.

  “I’d like to hear about your dreams,” Landry said as they reached the corner. “Could we get together before you leave town?”

  “No. I understand why you’re interested. It’s what you do. But ‘ve been having these dreams since I was a child, and fifteen minutes ago I had a huge revelation. I don’t know why they happen, but now I know where. This place terrifies me, and I’m never coming back. Thanks for walking me to the corner.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  After staying up until two, they slept late on Sunday morning. Last night, a little shaken after the ghost tour, they had drunk a bottle of Chardonnay and tried to make sense of the evening.

  Cate arose first, opening the tall doors that led from his bedroom to the balcony-cum-fire escape overlooking St. Philip Street. Landry squinted as bright rays of sunshine flooded the room. “Looks like another beautiful day,” she said, darting back inside as a guy across the street stepped onto his own balcony and looked at her. She laughed, “Guess I need to put on clothes before I open the doors.”

  Ted Carpenter hosted a brunch at Brennan’s for station employees riding in the parade. Landry and Cate joined them at nine in the cozy Morphy Room upstairs for Bloody Marys, mimosas and eggs Hussarde. At ten fifteen they boarded a bus and traveled to Napoleon Avenue, where a long line of floats stood like giant statues, and marching band members from a dozen high schools milled around waiting for the parade to begin.

  They climbed a twelve-foot ladder and boarded Channel Nine’s float, which was designed as a TV newsroom. The four evening news anchors sat up high while everyone else stood around the sides, tossing goodies to the crowd.

  With considerable fanfare, toasts and merriment, the parade began right on time at eleven. As the tractor pulling their float rounded the corner onto St. Charles, people lining both sides of the street started screaming for beads. Cate and Landry got into the spirit along with the others, and by the time the parade ended on Tchoupitoulas almost three hours later, an exhausted Cate said that was one experience she’d never forget.

  Around three they walked through the Quarter to Landry’s apartment, dodging throngs of revelers in the streets. The Calypso ball didn’t begin until nine, so they crawled in bed for a short nap, leaving the doors wide open to hear the sounds of Mardi Gras in the Quarter.

  Cate used the guest bathroom to fix her hair and put on makeup. As she dressed, Landry quipped that if she didn’t speed things up, they’d miss the ball.

  She laughed. “I’m taking my time. I don’t get much chance to wear fancy clothes. Ever, in fact. Don’t criticize me for trying to be the belle of the ball. I want to be the one who wears the glass slipper!”

  At nine a sedan and driver provided by WCCY took them to the Roosevelt Hotel, and the ride was a blessing. With Mardi Gras just days away, many streets were barricaded to allow pedestrian traffic only. A twenty-minute walk to the hotel would have been impossible in Cate’s floor-length purple satin dress and spike heels.

  Although the Blue Room of the Roosevelt wasn’t the fanciest meeting room in New Orleans, it was arguably the most famous. Since the 1930s, the venue welcomed the cream of New Orleans society, who dined and danced to the music of such greats as Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey and his brother Jimmy.

  As Landry and Cate located their table, Ted joined them, commiserating with Landry how they weren’t meant to be wearing tuxedos. They visited the bar, filled their plates at sumptuous buffet stations, and danced one number after another. When Landry declared her the most beautiful woman in the room, she joked that it was time to slow down on the alcohol.

  He shared with his boss about last night’s ghost tour, the woman who dreamed for years about a building on Toulouse Street she’d never seen, and a homeless man who had the same dreams. He added, “We went inside the building ourselves for a minute, and it felt to me like something was going on in there. Spooky stuff.”

  “Was it spooky enough for a Bayou Hauntings episode?

  “It’s too early to tell, but I’m intrigued. We’ll see where it goes from here.”

  At the stroke of midnight, their big boss from Chattanooga was regally introduced as King of Calypso while purple, green and gold streamers cascaded down from the ceiling. The king and his queen led the guests in a celebratory dance, after which the party wound down.

  Landry and Cate left soon afterward. It had been a long, incredible day, and she had her heels off within seconds after entering the sedan for the short drive home.

  “Thanks for an amazing time,” she said as she kissed Landry good night. They snuggled down under the duvet and were asleep in minutes.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next morning Ted rapped on Landry’s office door and said, “I came by earlier to see how you enjoyed the party last night, but you were concentrating on whatever’s on your computer. Are you researching that building on Toulouse, and have you turned up anything interesting?”

  Landry smiled. Ted’s enthusiasm was refreshing, and his barrage of questions was typical. But Landry never volunteered information in the early stages. Some tales ended up as incredible adventures while most didn’t. This one was just beginning.

  “Sorry, Ted. I sometimes tune out things around me when I’m concentrating. Yeah, I’m looking into that building, but it’s too early to tell.”

  Ted shook his head. “’Too early to tell’ won’t cut it after I saw you working hard earlier. You’ve already found something — I can feel it. Give me a hint!”

  Ted was a diehard Bayou Hauntings fan. He considered his job as station manager boring compared to the adventures Landry had experienced in the two years he’d been with WCCY-TV. He’d tagged along with Landry’s film crew visiting spooky houses, eerie buildings and haunted cemeteries, and he loved every minute. That was why he wouldn’t accept a brush-off from Landry. He wanted more.

  Landry leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “There must be thousands of
ghost stories about the French Quarter, and I’m surprised I never heard this one. It’s a hell of an interesting story. Sometime around 1800 a wealthy young couple named Lucas and Prosperine LaPiere bought property on Toulouse and built the building that’s the focus of the story. He ran a brokerage business on the ground floor and lived upstairs with his family. Across a courtyard in the back was another building where his servants lived.

  “At some point he hired — or perhaps owned — a beautiful quadroon named Elberta, who was a house servant. As happened often in those days, at some point she became his mistress. Long story short, Elberta soon had her rich sugar daddy in her clutches. He allowed her to live in the house instead of in the servant quarters, and he engaged in such scandalous behavior as taking her out with him in public. It didn’t take his wife long to figure out what was going on. In 1832 she caught the lovers in flagrante in her husband’s bedroom and pushed the girl off the balcony. An enraged Lucas LaPiere attacked his wife and tried to push her off too, but you know the old saying. Hell hath no fury. Lucas’s wife was one pissed-off woman, and he ended up over the railing instead of her.

  “Now two bodies lay below, and Madam LaPiere ordered one of her teenaged servant boys to dig a hole under the paving stones next to a fountain in the courtyard. When he finished, she knocked him out with a shovel, tossed him in with the others, filled it up and replaced the stones.”

  “She buried him alive?”

  “According to the legend.”

  “What happened to the woman?”

  “I found nothing about her so far. If it’s not tragic enough that slaves were considered property, it seems none of her other servants spilled the beans. The cops could have arrested her for harming a servant, although I doubt that happened much. I wonder how she explained away their disappearances.”

  “And what about her husband — what was his name, Lucas?”

  “She was a ritzy high-society lady, and maybe she made up some story about him dying out of town. I found nothing online about his death or where they’re buried.”

  “Let me get this straight. She killed her husband and his lover, she buried a kid alive, and you aren’t sure yet if you have a story. My God, what more does it take?”

  Landry held up a finger and smiled. “It’s a legend, Ted. Sometimes these stories have a factual basis, and sometimes they’re pure fiction. All this happened more than two hundred years ago. These stories take on lives of their own — they get embellished in the retelling until they become like this one — almost too bizarre to believe. I agree with you that it’s a great story. Finding all this out was the easy part, but a lot of the pieces are missing.

  “Now comes the rest — deciding if it really happened, what the girl’s dream has to do with it, and if it’s worth pursuing. If it is, we have the logistics to consider. Will the owner let me poke around inside the building? Can we get permission to tell the story and shoot footage? You know the drill. Yes, this is one ghastly story, but I haven’t scratched the surface yet. And please keep this to yourself for now. The less who know I’m working on it, the less hassle I’ll have.”

  “You got it. it sounds interesting so keep in touch.”

  It certainly does, Landry mused as he walked down the hall to get more coffee. If the girl was honest about a recurring dream about a building she’d never seen, there just might be some meat on this story’s bones.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Wanting to observe the old building in the daytime, Landry walked to Toulouse. Across the street in the recessed entrance of a vacant building lay Jack Blair's box, a filthy sleeping bag, an empty half-pint of whisky, and a Styrofoam food container crawling with ants. The man wasn’t around.

  He looked up at the structure and recalled what he’d read about its architecture. The first level was taller than the building next door because of an entresol between the first and second floors. Common in French Quarter architecture, entresols were low-ceilinged mezzanines — glorified crawl spaces accessible either by going up through a trapdoor in the first-floor ceiling or down through the second-story floor. Lucas LaPiere had operated a slave brokerage company on the ground floor, and Landry figured they used the entresol for storage. Five shuttered doors opened onto a second-floor balcony, and above that were three dormer windows jutting out from the roof.

  Plywood covered two of the street-level arched doorways. The third one, a little wider than the others, held the gate they'd walked through two days earlier. The lock was still open, and he pushed aside the creaky door.

  Light filtered down into the courtyard at the end of the long corridor they traversed earlier. In the dust he saw where their footprints ended and Tiffany had collapsed to the floor. He glanced in the rooms off the hallway. The last tenant never reopened after Hurricane Katrina blew through in 2005, and lots of rubbish, boxes and broken furniture remained. He could explore the rooms another time; today his mission was to see the infamous courtyard where a killer murdered three people and buried their bodies.

  The ancient fountain still stood in the patio. Chipped and covered with years of bird droppings, its green water emitted a nauseating smell, but he was glad to see it. Not only did the legend speak of a fountain, it was in Tiffany’s dreams. More meat on the bones.

  Landry knelt and examined the flagstones. After two hundred years he didn't expect to see evidence of burials, but as he touched the smooth rocks, he wondered if the legend was true.

  On the second floor above the archway he'd passed through stood a row of tall windows that once had been double doors. They would have opened onto the balcony from which Prosperine LaPiere allegedly threw two people to their deaths. Both it and the staircase that once ran up from the courtyard were gone.

  Someone shouted from the street, "Hey! Hey, you. Come out here!"

  Crap, I'm busted! Landry looked down the hallway as he scrambled for a reason to be trespassing. A figure stood silhouetted in the front doorway.

  "You, mister! Come here!"

  "Who is it?" Landry shouted, wondering why the man hadn't come inside.

  "Get out. That place is dangerous!"

  "Jack? Jack Blair, is that you?" He walked down the hallway and found the homeless man. "It's me, Landry Drake. From the other night. Do you remember?"

  "Bits and pieces," he slurred, backing away on unsteady legs.

  "You said then you'd never been in here. It scared you because it tried to lure you inside. Why do you say it’s dangerous?"

  "There’s something evil inside. You were in the courtyard, right where they buried the bodies..."

  The man's face clouded over and he stared at Landry through bloodshot eyes. "Wonder why I said that? I don't know about any bodies."

  "Are you talking about the legend?"

  "No tellin’, mister. Those words just came into my head. I drink sometimes, remember? I don't know what I'm talking about."

  "You've never been inside, yet you know there are bodies?"

  "I heard stories, that's all. You're asking too many questions. I need to rest." He walked across the street and sat on the stoop that was his home. Landry followed and apologized for being pushy.

  "I've spent the morning researching this building," he explained. "According to legend, back in 1832 a woman murdered her husband and his mistress by throwing them off the balcony into the courtyard. She ordered a servant to dig a hole by the fountain, and then she buried him alive. It's a fascinating ghost story. Have you heard it?"

  "Not in the way you think. Things come into my head, like a movie's playing in there. Sometimes I see a woman dressed in black standing on the balcony, looking at the fountain. That's the same balcony and fountain you're talking about, right?”

  "The balcony's gone but I saw the fountain, and I want to find out if there are bodies under the stones."

  "Why in hell do you want to do that? Are you nuts?"

  "Because it's what I do. I'm an investigator."

  "Oh, yeah. It's coming back in bits and pieces, l
ike I said. You're the supernatural guy on TV."

  Landry said, "Will you go inside with me? I’m curious to see if you get any unusual vibes."

  "Mister, you may have a death wish, but keep it to yourself. Don't start coaxing me like the building sometimes does. Now go away. I need some peace and quiet."

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jack had no idea of the time. Since the noise from Bourbon Street had died down, it must be the wee hours before dawn.

  It puzzled him to find he wasn’t in his box. He stood on a balcony in front of tall, open doors. Expecting to see a pretty girl dressed in white, he looked inside.

  What pretty girl? I've never been here before.

  Instead of a girl, an older woman in a long black dress was looking out at him. Remembering why he came, he drew back in shock. She lured him here, forcing him to walk deep inside the old building, climb the staircase, and now —

  The woman took a menacing step towards him and Jack backed up to the railing, the top half of his body leaning over it as she came closer, smiled and whispered, "You'll die for your sins." She reached to touch him, her outstretched arms and long fingernails just inches from his face.

  When he went over the rail, his jacket snagged on a jagged piece of metal, slowing his fall. The copious amount of alcohol in his body gave him a sense of calmness instead of panic. He grabbed the bottom of the railing and fell into the dirt below.

  Jack ran. He pushed through the gate, stumbled into the street and headed for the corner. For once, he needed light and people instead of the darkness and solitude that were his friends. Until now nothing scared him, but now something in there was eerie as hell.

  He reached Bourbon Street and careened straight into a throng of rowdy revelers. One drunk kid pointed and said, "Look guys, a bum. You look like you've seen a ghost, buddy! Here. You need this more than I do.” He handed Jack a to-go cup half-full of something. Jack didn’t care what it held. He just knew he needed it, and he took a deep swig.