Phantom of the French Quarter

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Phantom of the French Quarter Page 10

by Colleen Thompson


  She shook her head. “I’m going straight inside, locking the front deadbolt, and double-checking all the other doors and windows. Then you’re going home until tomorrow morning.”

  “You’ll keep the phone with you?”

  She nodded. “I’ve got you on my speed dial.”

  “You have any trouble, you call 9-1-1 first, then me, and if you need to, you shoot that scum-sucking killer full of holes.”

  “As Swiss cheese, Reuben. Promise.”

  At the door, she waved to show him she was fine, then closed it behind her and quickly turned the deadbolt. She tried to count to ten, to check to see if he would really drive away. But with her fear for Marcus building, she made it only to three before she turned and sprinted up the stairs, her heart nearly bursting with her panic.

  Reaching her grandmother’s room, she fumbled for the key and shouted, “Marcus, are you all right? Are you in there?”

  Please, God, let him be inside. Let him still be breathing.

  Perspiration beading her flesh, she twisted the key inside the lock and prayed he wasn’t playing possum inside, setting her up to jump her. With Reuben’s warnings ringing in her ears, she took out the gun and turned the knob before using her foot to push the door.

  It swung open in a smooth arc before it banged against the wall behind it. Ahead of her, shadows twisted, cast by the fluttering curtains. But nothing else inside moved, and the only light spilled from the half-closed bathroom doorway. “Marcus?” Was he gone already? “Marcus, are you in there?”

  Her gaze swept over the furnishings as she wondered whether he could be hiding somewhere, waiting for her to be foolish enough to step inside. But it was the memory of him passed out inside the truck and the worry that she’d made a foolish mistake in not calling the paramedics that had her edging inside. One step, two…and then she cried out, spotting his bloodstained hand in the bathroom doorway.

  “SHH, DON’T TRY TO TALK. Just lift your head and have some water.”

  Marcus blinked in the light, then squinted to see Caitlyn hovering above him, her beautiful face lined with worry.

  His head felt weighted to the floor by anchors, but he managed to raise it enough to drink. Blissfully cold, the water traced a soothing path from throat to stomach, its taste so welcome that he groaned.

  “Here, let’s sit you up,” Caitlyn said. “Lean your back against the cabinet.”

  With her help he succeeded, grimacing when he forgot himself and tried to push himself up off the tile, an act that sent pain shooting through his right arm.

  “Take these.” She pushed several pills toward his mouth, her fingertip lingering a bare moment against his lips.

  He took them without protest and swallowed them with more water.

  “Tylenol,” she explained. “And a couple of antibiotics I had from a while back.”

  He nodded, though his head pounded with the movement. And then he must have dozed.

  When he woke again, he was still slumped against the cabinet. Once he shrugged off the towel she’d thrown over him, he saw that his arm had been neatly bandaged. She must have cleaned up what he’d discovered to be a through-and-through wound.

  Head spinning, he cursed every action movie hero he had ever seen wincing after a “mere flesh wound” and returning to the fray. Instead, he lay here, feeling bulldozed, while Caitlyn…

  He smiled, recalling how close he had come to trying his luck with the sheer drop beneath the window when he’d realized she was outside hiding his truck. Covering his presence instead of calling the police.

  Surely that must mean he still had a chance to explain. To be certain she was safe before he turned his back on New Orleans—on her—forever.

  “Caitlyn?” In the instant it took for her name to reverberate in the small bathroom, he dared to hope that she would answer. That his angel would listen to his explanation, would even tell him she understood his motives. But Caitlyn didn’t answer, and by the time he pulled himself upright and staggered to the bedroom door, he found it locked again, so firmly that he wondered if she would ever trust him again.

  THE DOLLS HAD WHISPERED warnings, telling him that she wouldn’t be true, that she loved another.

  Even after he had brought his offerings, his tributes to her beauty, she locked herself inside her crumbling castle of a dollhouse. But she didn’t stay by herself, or hadn’t for more than a few minutes.

  Even when she emerged, so deliciously alone, others watched out for her. Eyes that peeked through white lace curtains. Hands that twitched toward phones in their eagerness to call the law down on his head.

  But for all their precautions, the time was creeping steadily, inexorably nearer. The time—this very night, he swore, as his heating blood pounded throughout his aching body—when he would take her, killing anyone who stood in his way.?…

  Especially the thieving bastard who sought to steal his doll bride. The doll bride who would reign over her silent legion of attendants.

  She would be silenced, too, once he claimed his rights as her groom. He would see to it. He would have to.?…

  For as hard of hearing as his mother now was, she never had been able to abide the sound of screams.

  Chapter Twelve

  When was it, Caitlyn wondered, that she had passed the point of no return? Had it been when she had lied for Marcus, then hidden a pickup she had never seen before? Or had it happened when she’d invited him inside? Or perhaps her loss of sanity had been preordained from the very start, from the moment she had knocked the camera out of his hands, an accident that had shattered not only his lens but her future?

  Whenever it had happened, things had gone too far. She couldn’t just keep a man who’d been shot—a possible murderer, for God’s sake—either a prisoner or a pet inside her house.

  She couldn’t afford to be this crazy. She had to get him out. Twice she reached for the phone, first meaning to call Reuben, and then the number Detective Robinson had given her. But each time she ended up folding her arms over her roiling stomach and pacing the confines of her kitchen.

  I could let Marcus go…give him back his keys and escort him out at gunpoint.

  But the idea of freeing a man wanted for a woman’s murder left her just as unsettled as the thought of keeping him there. And if she refused to listen to him, how would she ever find out what had really happened between him and Paine? Presuming that anything that Marcus told her could be trusted…

  Distracted by her quandary, she missed Sinister’s beeline for her ankles and was deaf to his cries for a belated dinner. Feet tangling around the Persian, Caitlyn yelped and tried to catch herself on the kitchen table. Her hand struck the carton of her mother’s things and overturned the box, dumping it onto the floor before she recovered her balance.

  “Stupid hairball,” she said, as Sin sped off to safety. Looking at the mess, she felt like sentencing the little demon to dry kibble for a month.

  Kneeling beside the box, she began picking up an odd assortment: a stuffed lamb—perhaps Jacinth’s—a baby’s rattle that might have belonged to either one of them, a few dried-out old lipsticks, and a pretty hair-brush, its back carved with a fleur-de-lis inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

  Then she came upon the photos. Pictures of her family—her whole family—the first Caitlyn had ever seen. Besides the tiny blond-fuzzed infant that must have been her, she recognized her sister, an adorable, round-cheeked toddler, and their dad, a strapping, handsome man with the same dark hair and eyes as Jacinth.

  But what took her breath away was the fact that in every photo she found, her mother’s face had been blacked out, the ballpoint pen digging so deep that in many cases holes had been left in the photos. Staring at the damage, Caitlyn felt sick. What could her gentle, hardworking mom possibly have done to provoke such hatred?

  Desperate for a clue, she looked at what remained of her mother’s image. Here and there, she caught a glimpse of blond hair, longer than the short and easy cuts Caitlyn recalled her mo
ther favoring. She was slimmer, too, her curves set off by colorful blouses and skirts that nearly reached the knee. Appealing, tasteful outfits, and Caitlyn saw nothing in them to reinforce Max Lafitte’s cruel words.

  “She was young and pretty, that’s all,” she told Sinister as he sauntered back into the kitchen. “Young and pretty and happy with my father. And you were jealous of them, Max. You were jealous of what they had.”

  Caitlyn said the words aloud, needing to believe them, and because Sin didn’t argue, she forgot her grudge and fed him, willing herself to forget the man lying in her grandmother’s suite upstairs.

  Afterward she picked up the last of the box’s scattered contents, including a shabby-looking copy of the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon. When a worn cover separated, one last snapshot slipped out.?…

  Despite its faded colors, Caitlyn gasped to see it, half convinced that she was looking at a picture of herself.?…

  Of herself and not the mother who had looked so much like her in her youth that if she were here now, they might have been mistaken for twins.

  LIKE A CAGED TIGER, Marcus paced the cramped confines of his two-room prison.

  “Better get used to it,” he mumbled, thinking that wherever the state of Pennsylvania sent him after he was extradited, his cell would undoubtedly be far smaller and much more Spartan. Worse yet, he would never be alone in prison, never again have the freedom to relax his guard for a moment.

  At that moment, though, he would have given everything he owned for company, as long as it was Caitlyn and he could see and speak to—and touch, some desperately delusional corner of his brain prayed—her. Did she intend to leave him locked here, injured and alone, all night?

  As he walked, his arm throbbed out a painful rhythm, barely diminished by the mild painkiller he had taken. His mind, too, refused to allow him to rest as, again and again, his instincts, finely honed by years as a fugitive, warned him to find some way out of this trap before she called the police.

  Once more he went to the window, this time sticking his head out to search for some means of climbing down that wouldn’t involve a broken leg or, worse, his neck. But rather than a way out, a movement quickly caught his eye. A person hidden in the shadows beneath the live oak tree, inside the wrought-iron fence surrounding the mansion’s front yard.

  Marcus’s mind flashed to the girl’s nude body that had been so recently left there. Had the killer come back with yet another hideous “present” for Caitlyn to find? Or, this time, did he mean to have the real focus of his obsession rather than a stand-in?

  Rushing to the bedroom door, Marcus started hammering and rattling the locked knob. “Caitlyn, open up! There’s someone hiding out front.”

  Whoever it was, Marcus dared to hope he might be frightened off by the noise. When Caitlyn didn’t answer, he made another run at the door, but the heavy wood remained impossibly solid. He called her name again, thinking that she had to have heard the banging and the shouting.

  “Get your gun!” he ordered. “I swear, someone’s outside.”

  The answering silence swallowed him whole, sending his adrenaline into overdrive. Could the killer have gotten in the house by this time?

  He checked the window but could no longer make out the figure that had been there. Was Caitlyn failing to answer because she couldn’t—not while she was being strangled by whatever her stalker had pulled tight around her neck?

  With the marrow-freezing thought, Marcus stepped back, preparing to make one final run at the door.

  That was when he noticed the vulnerable hinges. Hinges whose pins he could pry free, if he could only find something to use as a tool.

  AFTER HEARING MARCUS BANGING, Caitlyn had been halfway upstairs when she understood that he was yelling about someone out front and urging her to get her gun.

  She froze in her tracks, her legs encased in concrete. But his persistent, increasingly desperate shouts convinced her to check out his claim.

  Pistol trembling in her hand, she turned around and crept back downstairs. Rather than flipping on the front lights as she would have liked to, she crept into the darkened living room and peered out the front window.

  She stared until her eyes watered but saw nothing but darkness so impenetrable, she might have had a hood thrown over her head. Hoping for a better angle, she crept to the second window and pushed the velvet curtain to one side.

  Quivering, she aimed her gaze toward the streetlight, and this time she made out several silhouettes. Most, she recognized, were from the bent boughs of the live oak, bearded here and there with moss that nodded in the night breeze, and the prison bar-like wrought iron of the gate.

  Among them, she distinguished a different sort of shape, stooped and slender, a form carved of obsidian. Caitlyn squinted, pressing her face to the glass and letting the dark curtain fall behind her to block the light trickling in from the hall.

  Yet she had no idea what the thing was until it broke free of the surrounding darkness and rushed directly at her, like a bat bursting from the screaming mouth of hell.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Shrieking, Caitlyn tried to back away but got tangled in the curtains. Frantically, she fumbled with the gun, bringing it upward just as, on the other side of the glass, no more than two feet before her, a face burst from the darkness.

  A woman’s face. Ashen, gaunt and wrinkled, it was lit up from below, by the flashlight she was aiming upward.

  A trick! Caitlyn’s rational mind shouted. A trick to frighten children while telling scary stories.

  But it was horrifying nonetheless, with Eva Rill’s monstrous mouth twisting, shaping curses, shouting through the glass in words so loud they vibrated the panes.

  “Away with you!” she shrilled, the ancient voice crackling with power. “Leave New Orleans forever. Leave here. Leave him alone!”

  From upstairs, Caitlyn heard a loud bang, a sound she ignored as she focused on the threat before her.

  “Get out of here, you lunatic. The police are on their way!” she screamed at the old woman. “Go now, or I’ll shoot.”

  The crone dropped her chin and leveled a deadly, dark-eyed gaze at Caitlyn. “You don’t fool me, little girl. You’re not a killer, you’re a sacrifice. A victim, pure and simple. His victim, if you won’t go. You’re running out of time.”

  From the folds of her black cloak, the old woman drew a pistol of her own, a long-barreled antique, a gun that looked so ancient, it might have been a stage prop.

  With a cry of terror, Caitlyn dove sideways, the heavy curtain falling back in place to block both her view and Eva Rill’s.

  As footsteps thundered down the stairs, a loud blast, then a second, were followed by the tinkling of glass. Heart slamming against her breastbone, Caitlyn looked up from the floor where she had fallen to see twin bullet holes in the thick fabric, the streetlight dimly shining through them.

  So much for the idea that the old woman’s gun had been a stage prop.

  “Caitlyn!” Marcus’s voice echoed in the dark entryway. “Are you hurt?”

  It occurred to her that she should have been frightened that he’d escaped his makeshift prison. But her horror over having nearly been killed trumped every other worry.

  “She’s right outside. She tried to shoot me!”

  “Did she hit you?” he asked.

  Caitlyn forced her brain to slow down, to take inventory of her body. “I’m okay, I think. But she’s still out there.”

  “Stay down,” Marcus ordered.

  But she was already scrambling away from the window, climbing to her feet and running toward him to throw herself into his arms. At Marcus’s grunt of pain, she reflexively jerked back, recalling his injury.

  Recalling her fear of him, and the reason for it.

  When she moved, he caught her wrist in his good hand.

  Caught her wrist and snatched away the gun.

  Marcus headed toward the back of the house, searching for a way out.

 
“No, wait!” called Caitlyn, as she weighed the risks of following him against the threat from outside. Choosing the devil she knew, she said, “Don’t go.”

  He turned his head, surprise flaring in his eyes, before he asked, “Just who is it I’m chasing? You said ‘she.’”

  “It’s Eva Rill—the old woman from your photo. But stay inside, please. She has a gun, and she’ll shoot.”

  “I think we’ve established that,” Marcus said dryly. Spotting a back door, off the kitchen, he unlocked the deadbolt. “Lock up after me, and turn off the downstairs lights. Then keep away from all the doors and windows.”

  “She could hurt you.”

  “She’s the one who’d better worry.” Taking a deep breath, he mentally pushed back the pain of his injured arm and stepped through the open door.

  Outside, he waited, listening for her to do as he’d asked and get back from the door, before bending down and slipping toward the front of the house.

  Navigating the deepest shadows, he stalked an enemy who might very well be lying in wait, planning to blast away at the first sign of movement. Who might very well be working in concert with the man who had brutally murdered two young women.

  He crept forward, the hand holding the gun growing slick with perspiration, and all his senses straining for a shape, a sound, a scent, that didn’t belong. But it was a taste that warned him—the electric bite of raw adrenaline—a bare instant before a shot splintered the darkness.

  He dove behind the live oak, the same tree he had earlier run into with his pickup. This time it proved a lifesaver, its thick trunk shielding him from the bullet that cracked against the wood.

  Popping back out, he aimed the pistol in the direction of the sound. But he held his fire, hearing the clunk of a vehicle’s door closing. Rushing toward it, he froze, stunned as a pair of headlights jumped onto the sidewalk and a huge black car barreled toward him.

 

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