by Jana DeLeon
Admit he’s a god and get it over with.
“Fine. He’s a god!” she yelled into the cavernous entry.
Her words bounced off the walls, echoing back at her. And then another followed them.
“I don’t know that God talks to mortals anymore...least not out loud.”
Alaina whirled around as Amos exited the hall to the laundry room and strode toward her.
“Amos! You gave me a bit of a scare.”
The ancient caretaker shuffled across the marble floor, his arthritic knees making progress slow. “A woman who shouts at God shouldn’t be startled so easily.”
“No, I wasn’t... I was... Never mind. What can I do for you, Amos?”
“Came over to bring you this.” He held up a lantern. “It’s probably old-fashioned to you, but it’s a good source of light when the power goes out. Better than using a flashlight if you need to light up a room.”
Alaina took the lantern from Amos. “Are we supposed to have another storm tonight?”
“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”
She let out the breath she’d been holding. All day, she’d been working herself up to sleeping in the bedroom, but the last thing she needed piling on was another storm and the loss of electricity. “That’s good news.”
Amos nodded and turned to leave.
“Wait... I... The other day, you said that my mother would come visit me.”
“Yep.” His delivery was matter-of-fact and his expression one of complete seriousness.
“You do know she’s dead, right?” She watched him closely as soon as she delivered those words, hoping that she hadn’t upset some great balance of denial.
“’Course I know that.” Amos gave her an indignant look. “I’m old, not senile.”
“Then how...”
He stared at her for several seconds, his brown eyes almost black in the dim light, wisps of silver hair that needed a trim and a comb stuck out in all directions. Her pulse ticked up just a bit and with every passing second of silence, she could feel it growing stronger—louder.
“I seen her myself,” he said, his voice low and reverent. “Wouldna believed it if someone else had made the claim, but it’s hard to deny what’s right in front of you.”
“You saw...” Her voice caught in her throat. “You saw my mother?”
Amos nodded. “The first time was right after she passed. The master took you all away and the house was empty. A storm was brewing and I came to make sure everything was closed tight. When I left you girls’ room upstairs, I saw her walking toward me on the landing.”
“Oh.” Alaina covered her mouth with her hand. That was the same place she’d seen her mother in her memory earlier. “How did she look?”
“Sad. Like she was lost. As she got closer, I could see her lips moving like she was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear nothing.”
Alaina frowned. The caretaker’s experience was nothing like her memory. Her mother had looked happy and vibrant, but then in her memory, she’d been alive and about to spend time with her children. If ghosts really did exist, couldn’t they be sad?
“I seen her several times since that one,” Amos continued. “Always before a storm. Always sad and trying to speak to me. I wish I could hear her.” Amos rubbed his eyes with his fingers and Alaina could see his eyes were misty.
“She was a good woman,” he said, “just like her mother. I miss her every day.”
“Oh, Amos.” She felt the tears brimming in her eyes. “I miss her, too.”
He gave her a single nod and stared at the floor as if sharing his feelings embarrassed him. “If she’s gonna talk to anyone, I figure it will be one of you girls.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Well, if you don’t need anything, I best be going before it gets dark.”
“I’m fine. Thank you. Be careful walking home.”
“Always am. Mystere Parish swamps ain’t nothing to be casual about. Getting casual can get you stuffed in a pine box.” He turned around and shuffled back toward the laundry room.
Stuffed in a pine box.
Alaina shook her head. The man had a way with words.
* * *
CARTER PACED HIS CABIN, not even glancing at the baseball game playing on television. Alaina’s vandalism story bothered him for several reasons, but the main one was that he knew she was holding something back. She may not know who’d vandalized her former boss’s car, but she had her suspicions, and she wasn’t sharing them with him. Which meant something could be coming his way and he wasn’t prepared.
It was time to do a little digging into Alaina LeBeau’s past.
He grabbed a beer and carried his laptop to the breakfast table. The police database was probably a waste of time. Based on William’s description, the law firm she’d worked for in Baton Rouge wouldn’t have run the risk of employing a criminal, so Google was what he had to work with.
He logged on to the internet and typed her name into the search box. Unless a person had achieved some level of fame, it was rare to find much about them using a simple internet search. Social and professional networking websites were often the only places people had an online presence.
The screen refreshed with the search results and his eyes widened. Pages and pages of results on Alaina, and the headlines weren’t good—Child Serial Rapist Goes Free, Legal System Fail, Death of Another Child by Acquitted Serial Rapist.
He grabbed his beer and took a big drink, then clicked on the first link and began to read. An hour later, he got up from the table, dumped out his now-warm beer and paced back and forth from the kitchen to the living room—all ten steps of it.
At best, he’d hoped to find a couple of leads—angry businessmen whose merger didn’t go through, or a useless son who didn’t inherit as expected—but he hadn’t expected to find that Alaina had been the lead defense attorney in such a sordid case. A case where winning had been the worst thing possible.
Her client, a seventeen-year-old boy accused of indecency with a child, had gone free, the jury acquitting him of all charges. Two weeks later, he’d attacked and murdered a six-year-old girl, this time the entire thing caught by a security camera. Techniques in the murder matched those used in the molestation of other children and two other murders he hadn’t been linked to before this one. Details about the techniques that had never been released by the police.
No doubt existed this time. The boy was responsible for this attack and murder and had been for all the others. By doing a great job, Alaina had helped set a child killer free.
He stopped pacing and stared out the window into the pitch-black swamp. What the hell had she been doing as lead on a case like that? William told him she worked civil and business cases. He’d never mentioned criminal work and couldn’t have known about this case or he would have told him up front.
The entire thing stank to high heaven.
Suddenly, he remembered a guy he’d met at a law enforcement conference in Baton Rouge the year before. He was a state prosecutor and had given Carter his card with his cell number in case he was ever in town. Carter opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out a stack of business cards. Finally, he located the right one and grabbed his cell phone.
The prosecutor, Rob, answered on the second ring. “Carter Trahan. Are you in town and looking for a good time?”
“I wish. Unfortunately, I’m hard at work.”
“I thought you chucked NOLA and moved to some bayou town with ten people and a hundred gators? Don’t tell me you’ve run into a hotbed of crime.”
“Just a single problem,” Carter replied, “but with the potential to be red-hot.”
“Sounds intriguing. I’m assuming you didn’t call me to shoot the breeze, so how can I help?”
“A woman returned here recently to settle her mother’s estate. The will is strange and requires her to stay here for a bit. She was an attorney in Baton Rouge and there’s the off chance that trouble from one of her cases might
follow her here.”
“Who’s the attorney?”
“Alaina LeBeau.”
Rob whistled. “That was one screwed-up mess that I thank God every day I had no part in. There’s no shortage of news coverage on that case, so I assume you’re not calling me about anything you can find online?”
“No. I read the reports and they seem straightforward as do the facts.”
“But?”
“But there’s something that doesn’t make sense to me. I can’t find another reference to Alaina LeBeau handling criminal cases.”
“She hasn’t,” Rob confirmed.
“Then why make her lead on something this big?”
“I can tell you what I suspect, but you’re probably not going to like it.”
Carter sighed. “She was scapegoated.”
“You got it. The case had stench all over it, but word is the father of the killer—a state senator—is a longtime friend of the partners of the law firm Alaina worked for. The only reason to put a junior attorney with zero experience in criminal proceedings as the lead is so she’d be available to take the fall if things went south.”
“And this went so far south it’s renting space in Antarctica.”
“You got it. So what exactly got you calling me at 10:00 p.m. on a Friday night? I know it’s not general curiosity.”
Carter repeated what Alaina had told him about the vandalism.
“And the police think it has something to do with the case?” Rob asked.
“She says the police aren’t committing to anything, but they felt she should be informed just in case.”
“Standard covering-your-butt stuff. So again, what’s got you calling me at 10:00 p.m.?”
Carter smiled. “You must be hell in a courtroom.”
“Only if you’re a bad guy or a defense attorney.”
“Fair enough. The truth is, I have a bad feeling about it. I can’t put my finger on why, but ever since Alaina arrived in town, something has felt off. And now you’re probably regretting ever giving your phone number to a delusional person.”
“Not in the least. Look, I’ve spent more hours than I can count working with cops. The best ones have this sixth sense about things. I don’t know how to explain it—certainly, there’s no scientific explanation—but I’ve seen it firsthand. If your instincts are telling you that trouble is coming, I recommend you be on the lookout.”
“Thanks, Rob.”
“No problem. Give me a call next time you’re in Baton Rouge.”
“You got it.” Carter disconnected the call. He understood completely why Alaina had dodged his question on suspects. She was probably still mortified, and if he’d pegged her properly, felt guilty and responsible.
He ran one hand through his hair, his emotional side and logical side waging a war. Logically, he knew the only person responsible for horrid acts was the person committing them, but that was a very black-and-white view of life. The reality was, he believed all sorts of things contributed to something taking place. Life was more often many shades of gray.
His emotional side argued that if high-end attorneys didn’t do such a good job defending the guilty, more of them would be in prison where they belonged instead of back out on the streets with innocents at their mercy. That argument and one too many run-ins with shady defense attorneys were the final straws in Carter’s calling it quits with the NOLA Police Department and heading home.
Now he had his worst nightmare in his lap. A defense attorney who’d successfully freed a monster, and it was his job to protect her from her own actions.
William owed him huge for this. Huge.
Chapter Eleven
Alaina’s arms ached as she dried off her tired body. Apparently, all those hours spent at the gym didn’t prepare one for painting and Olympic-level cleaning. On the plus side, she’d made significant progress with the kitchen and was very pleased with the result. Only the overgrown shrubbery outside the kitchen windows put a damper on the cheerful room. First thing tomorrow, she was going to ask Amos if he had some tools to help her tackle the brush. It wouldn’t be the most professional job, but she could at least clear some of it away to allow in more sunshine.
She pulled on her sleeping wear and slipped into flip-flops, thinking she’d tackle some upstairs floors tomorrow so she could actually go barefoot, a habit her adoptive mother always griped about, but one she was never able to shed. Her long hair was dripping wet in the humidity, but a towel dry was all it was getting. Then it went on top of her head, held there with a clip. It was going in a ponytail again tomorrow anyway.
She hung the towel over the shower rod and left the bathroom, ready to collapse in bed. Before she’d taken three steps on the landing, the lights in the entry downstairs clicked off. She froze, listening for the sound of someone moving downstairs, but only silence greeted her. Glancing down the hallway, she saw the lamp next to her bed still glowing. It wasn’t a power outage.
She slipped off her flip-flops and hurried to her room to grab her cell phone.
No signal.
She held in a stream of cursing, angry once again at her vulnerable state. When her mother had drafted her strange inheritance requirements, she’d had no idea what position she’d be putting her children in.
The squeaking of a door hinge downstairs had her reaching for her pistol and car keys. Time to get out of the house and get help. Peering out the patio doors, she bit her lip. She’d told Carter she had no problem springing over the balcony and running, and that much was true, but an inspection of the kitchen courtyard that morning had revealed massive thornbushes directly below the balcony. Jumping now could cause more injuries than she could run with.
She shoved her cell phone and keys in her yoga pants pockets and mentally reviewed her plan. All she had to do was hurry downstairs and out the front door. If she couldn’t see the intruder in the dark, then he couldn’t see her either, and she’d remain barefoot to mask her steps. Gripping her pistol with both hands, she slipped out of the bedroom and down the hallway.
The dim light from the lamp faded away as she inched down the hallway. By the time she reached the top of the stairwell, she had only enough light to make out the first few steps. She released the pistol with one hand and placed it on the railing as she slid her foot forward to take the first step down.
She must have miscalculated, or lost her balance, because the next thing she knew, she was lurching forward onto the stairs, then tumbling over and over, her limbs banging against the hard marble. She yelled out both in pain and terror, then her head slammed against one of the iron balusters and everything went black.
* * *
CARTER JOGGED as fast as possible down the overgrown path through the swamp to Amos’s cabin. He’d been calling Alaina since early this morning, but she’d never answered or returned any of his calls and text messages. He’d waited a couple of hours, thinking she might be sleeping in after all the work she’d done in the kitchen, but when the morning approached ten o’clock and she still hadn’t contacted him, he’d driven to the house.
Her car was in the driveway, but pounding on the front door hadn’t brought any response. Even worse, when he’d dialed her number again, he could swear he heard the faint ring of her cell phone on the other side of the door. He’d hurried around back, remembering Alaina mentioning the day before that she wanted to remove some of the brush from the kitchen patio, but it was clear she hadn’t started work there yet.
That was when he’d decided she might have gone to see Amos for tools, and took off for the caretaker’s cabin, trying to remain calm. Alaina was under no obligation to tell him or anyone else her every move, especially if she did all her moving in Calais. Nor was she required to be strapped to her cell phone, and even if she was, it was still her choice to take calls. Maybe she was busy and didn’t want to be bothered. When he was working on a project at his cabin, he tended to ignore the outside world in favor of speed and efficiency.
Amos was just e
xiting the toolshed when Carter stepped out of the overgrown trail and into the clearing where the caretaker’s quarters stood. Carter called out a greeting and Amos looked at him and frowned.
“Carter? What are you doing all the way out here? Aren’t you on duty?”
“I’m looking for Alaina. Have you seen her?”
Amos shook his head. “Not since last night. She’s not at the big house?”
“Her car is there, but she’s not answering.” Carter’s pulse quickened. “I need your key.”
The caretaker’s eyes widened and he pulled the keys from his pocket and indicated a black iron one to Carter. “That’s the one. I’ll be along behind you.”
Carter took the key and broke out in a run up the trail, cursing at himself as he went. The dead brush scratched his bare forearms, but he didn’t slow. He’d had a feeling something was wrong that morning. Why hadn’t he driven out here right away? His mother had told him not to ignore things like this and he’d gone and done it anyway. If something had happened to Alaina, he’d never forgive himself.
He burst out of the trail and into the courtyard, then skidded to a stop in front of the doors. The massive iron key turned easily and he pushed the door open and ran inside, yelling for Alaina. His voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling was the only sound that greeted him. He started to turn toward the kitchen, when he heard a groan coming from the stairwell.
He rushed up the stairs and found Alaina crumpled in a ball midway up the giant circular staircase. Her hand covered the side of her head and dried blood covered her fingers.
“Alaina!” He dropped to his knees and checked her pulse, then blew out a breath of relief when the strong heartbeat pounded against his fingers. Gently tapping her cheek with his fingers, he called her name.
She groaned again and slowly opened her eyes. When her eyes locked on Carter, she lurched upward, then clutched her head with both hands and sank back down, closing her eyes again.
“Don’t move,” he told her. “You’ve cracked your head. At best, you’ll be dizzy and nauseous. At worst, you’ve got a concussion.”
“What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” she asked.