by Jenna Ryan
Rosemary studied the old woman’s face. “If Desdemona could get herself here, why didn’t she go to Nightshade instead?”
Flora shook her head. “As the crow flies, here is miles closer than town. Given her state of delirium when she arrived, my guess is she wasn’t thinking clearly when she left Mad Mama’s. She kept mumbling about Billy and how his driving scared her half to death. She also said I shouldn’t worry about the shop, that Billy would go back and lock it up before he left.”
“Before he left?” Again, Rosemary’s gaze flicked to Tanner’s face, but his expression told her nothing. “Did he tell her where he was going?”
Flora’s lips curved into an obscure smile. “Not that she mentioned, but it’s likely she believes Billy’s gone after whoever tried to shoot her. Which might or might not be necessary, judging from the blood I told you I saw.”
Tanner had obviously heard enough because he brushed past Flora and came into the room. “We have to drive by the shop on the way to Bluewater. I’ll stop in and take a look. You and Rosemary get her ready to go. I’ll prep the truck.”
“Talk of Billy annoys him,” Flora observed when Tanner was gone. “I understand that. I’m not big on doll-power myself, and I come from a background of the bizarre.” She dragged a smaller cot out of the corner. “This has wheels. If we can slide her onto it, we should be able to keep any head movement to a minimum. Tell me, Rosemary, do you have siblings?”
“I had a stepbrother.” Rosemary dealt with the raw pain that sliced through her heart. “He died a week and a half ago.”
“Leshad had him killed.”
Rosemary’s eyes came up. “How do you know about Leshad?”
“I hear things.” Flora patted Desdemona’s hand. “But I don’t think you believe that, do you?”
“Not really. Do you know Crucible?”
“I know who he is. Unfortunately, he also knows who I am. I’m sure he thinks I have strong mental powers. I told you before, I don’t, and that’s the truth, whether he believes it or not.” Her soft gray eyes traveled past Rosemary to the empty doorway. “My sister had the sight. Her given name’s not important. She loved animals, so everyone called her Fauna. I love plants, which made me her counterpart, Flora. Fauna was born with a heart defect. She died from an aortic aneurism when she was sixteen. I was a year younger and devastated by her death. I became a wild child. My mother, God rest her, despaired that I’d ever straighten my life out.”
Rosemary unhooked the cot while Flora inspected the bandage on Desdemona’s head. “Did you leave the swamp?” she asked.
“I did, and in a rage. I was very pretty, very angry and very reckless. I slept with men. Lots of men. Rich, poor, old, young, good, bad, I really didn’t care. I didn’t have Fauna, and I didn’t have the sight. All I had was my body and a hunger for something I never could put my finger on. I got pregnant. Twice. Two different men, two years apart. I gave birth to two beautiful daughters.”
Rosemary pushed the cot up close to the bed. “Did you raise your daughters, or were you too young to cope?”
“I tried to cope,” Flora said, then she sighed. “But, yes, I was too young. Impoverished, too. My mother…” She stroked Desdemona’s hair. “Well, let’s say my mother wasn’t happy with me. I imagine she still isn’t.”
Although she thought she knew where this story was headed, Rosemary said nothing, merely nodded when Flora suggested they slide Desdemona from the bed to the cot.
After it was done, Flora handed her a fresh throw. “You’ve seen the woman with no eyes, haven’t you?” Her tone was sorrowful yet accepting. “I don’t know this for sure one way or the other, I’m simply going by Desdemona’s delirious ramblings. You’re Twila Black’s great-granddaughter, which is something I do know, thanks to the modest amount of ESP I told you about when we met outside Mad Mama’s shop.”
“Is that how you also know about Leshad and Crucible? Through your ESP?”
“To some degree. But I have other more tangible sources, as well. Leshad wants you, Rosemary. You’re Twila’s great-granddaughter, and that makes you his enemy.”
Her frustration mounting, Rosemary gripped the other woman’s arm. Nothing sparked or flashed, but she thought she felt a glimmer of fear. “Why am I his enemy? Please tell me. Ben didn’t have time for details, and if Leshad has an aura Madeleine thinks I should be able to read, well, I’m not getting it.”
Flora breathed out heavily. “I’m sorry, I really am, but I don’t have the answers you want. Maybe I’m not supposed to. All I can tell you is that you’re not alone. Leshad wants me dead, as well. And he’ll use any means at his disposal to bring that about.”
A shiver feathered along Rosemary’s spine. “Is it voodoo he’s afraid of, or the blood connection?”
“For you, it could be simply the blood. For me, it’s Mad Mama, which adds voodoo into the mix. Madeleine and I share blood and more, Rosemary. In the swamp, my home, I’m called Flora, but my given name is Phoebe. Madeleine Lessard was my mother.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
As he drove, Tanner regarded the black clouds overhead, and more warily, the flickering tongues of lightning that darted around the edges. “Crucible’s wanted Phoebe since before I stopped doing dirty deeds for him,” he said to Rosemary. “The contention is if Madeleine had the sight, it’s possible, even likely, that she passed that ability on to her daughter. She’s done some credible work to alter her appearance—lost weight, colored and straightened her hair. She’s even changed the way she moves. File videos of her show a very different woman.”
“Good. If she can hide from Crucible, it’s possible she can do the same from Leshad. Are we almost at the antique shop? I think Desdemona could use a break.”
He regarded her via the rearview mirror. They’d made Desdemona as comfortable as possible on the backseat. But rough roads made for brutal travel. In an attempt to buffer the worst of the bumps, Rosemary had gone to her knees and was using her hands and arms to keep Desdemona stable.
“Five minutes,” he said. “Give or take. Any chance you can hold back the rainstorm we seem to be heading into?”
Her hiss was pure frustration. “Tanner, for the hundredth time, I sense things, I’m not a weather magician.”
“You slugged Skeeter.”
“I slapped him. Unfortunately, rain clouds can’t be slapped, slugged or made to go away on command.”
“Been trying for a while, huh?”
“Ever since we left Flora—sorry, Phoebe’s cabin.”
“For all our sakes, I’d stay with Flora.” Picking up his phone, he used the speed dial and at the same time navigated a tricky mud and slime slope. “Come on, old man, answer.”
“It’s about damn time,” Hobby grumbled back two rings later. “I’ve left three messages for you in the past hour.”
“Been busy, Hob. Talk fast before I lose the signal.”
“I’ll give it to you straight. Ethan Grimes was born Ivan Dracorsczy in Warsaw, Poland. He came to the U.S. after the Soviet regime fell apart and very quietly changed his name to Ethan Grimes. He repaired clocks and watches in a small shop in Queens, had no family, no debts and probably not much of a social life. He died in 1999 at the ripe old age of seventy-eight. It took me three days of digging to come up with that. Your Ethan Grimes appears to be an identity thief. You’re welcome. I’m going to bed.”
Tanner digested the information. He couldn’t say he was surprised by any of it. Depressed though—yeah, he was definitely that. “Okay, thanks. Drinks are on me next time I see you.”
“Which won’t be for some time if I’m a very lucky man. I missed buying a gleaming ‘39 Chevy truck on account of you. Even the damn chrome was perfect.”
Tanner glanced at the clouds. Were they getting blacker? Lower? “I won’t bring my problems to your doorstep,” he promised. “Could use one more favor, though.”
“Before or after I catch up on the multiple hours of sleep I lost on account of the last fa
vor I did for you?”
“You choose. Skeeter, aka Philippe Denis DuCayne. I need his current medical status. I know he’s unstable, but I want to know if he’s also considered dangerous. And whether he was released from a hospital psych ward or escaped from one.”
Hobby blew out a weary breath. “There goes my shuteye. I hope Ben’s step is worth all this, Tanner.” His tone roughened. “You take care of yourself, you hear? I’ll be in touch.”
“I had an uncle with the same attitude as your friend,” Rosemary remarked at length. “He pretended to be all mean and cranky, but inside he was a marshmallow. He insisted Ben and I were spoiled, that our allowances were way too high, yet every time we visited him, which was about once a month, he slipped each of us a twenty-dollar bill.”
Tanner checked his in-box for messages. “When I was a kid, if I had twenty bucks, my old man’d sniff it out and swipe it. Or beat on me until I told him where I’d hidden it. That’s a quick story, not a complaint, juvenile psychologist lady. I don’t reopen old wounds. Scars are scars. We all have ‘em. It’s how we heal that defines us.”
“Well, that puts me in my place. Where’s your father now?”
“Dead. He drank himself into an early grave. Looked like eighty when he was fifty-five. I buried him with an empty bottle of Jack Black, a ten-dollar bill and not an ounce of remorse.” He nodded at the windshield. “We’re here. You and Des hang with Louis. I’ll inspect the scene, see if her would-be killer left any clues.” He upped the volume on Desdemona’s perennial favorite, Louis Armstrong, left the engine running, and hopped out with his Glock and his rifle ready.
Thunder rumbled loud and harsh through a sky so black it felt like some kind of preternatural nightfall. The clouds, he reflected, were bound to crack open any moment now and unleash God knew what—rain, wind, lightning, Armageddon—on the entire swamp. Five minutes, he promised himself, no matter what he discovered.
It didn’t surprise him that the antique shop was locked. But not by Billy the doll. If Desdemona could drive herself bleeding and delirious to Flora’s cabin, she could lock a door. Always go with the simple answer, Hobby had told him once. He and Ben had taken that advice. Only Traynor had deemed it bullshit. The best-laid plans, in his jaded opinion, had nothing to do with simplicity.
Sidestepping the memory, Tanner used the key Desdemona kept hidden in her rioting porch planter to gain entry into the shop.
He smelled the dried blood instantly, a stale coppery scent layered over dust, old wood and age.
A flip of the light switch revealed a number of reddish-brown streaks, smears and one large splat on the wall to his right. Gauging the angle, Tanner let a grin touch his lips. It looked like the shooter had taken a direct hit. How serious a hit remained to be seen, but Desdemona wasn’t the only person who’d left here wounded.
Assuming her assailant had left.
The floorboards made an unholy racket as he walked the aisles. Nothing stirred except dust motes and a draft moaning high in the rafters.
With the rifle slung over his shoulder, he drew out his phone and started to dial. He had his thumb on Send when he felt it crawl over his skin. A breath of air from the grave. “Fuck,” he said softly and bracing, turned to regard what in life had undoubtedly been Madeleine Lessard.
When she didn’t move or speak, he gestured with his phone. “Why the swamp witch disguise, Madeleine? I’m not someone you need to intimidate. Or is your appearance a test of my fortitude?”
“This is how Leshad left me, minus a crude doll he added that was meant to mock me. Leshad scoffs at what he fears most. But if you pay attention, you’ll notice he only scoffs after what he fears can no longer harm him. Or so he thinks.”
“Who is he, Madeleine? I know he has a name other than Leshad.”
“He does, yes, but I don’t know it. If I did once, the knowledge is, as cousin Lucien suggested, lost to me.”
“You’ve shown yourself to Papa Lucien?”
“No. In my present state, I have the advantage of getting around. You’re not telling Rosemary everything you know. Why?”
“Because everything I know might make her run. She runs, she dies. Maybe not right away, but eventually. Tell me, have you ever shown yourself to Crucible?”
“That would serve no purpose. In fact, I suspect it would only make matters worse.”
“There’s an interesting remark. Why worse?”
A hand, little more than brittle bones covered with tissue-thin skin, made a dismissive gesture. “Do you honestly think your Crucible believes in such as me? His mind allows for certain oddities, nothing more than that. You have a broader spectrum of belief. You’re very angry with your friend.”
“A knife stuck in my back tends to piss me off. I’m not withholding anything Rosemary needs to know. I think Leshad’s Reaper took a bullet in this shop. Now he’s crawled into a hole to recharge and ramp up his mad. When he crawls back out, he’ll take aim at me. I’m in his way, and he doesn’t like obstacles. I assume you know Desdemona’s outside, bleeding and unconscious thanks to him.”
“You and Rosemary will see that she’s delivered safely.” Something wet—blood, tears, a mixture of both?—glistened in her ravaged eye sockets. “Leshad is evil,” she warned him. “He’s been that way for many years, perhaps almost as many years as he’s been alive.”
“Babies aren’t born evil, Madeleine.”
“But they learn quickly and not always as we would wish. My conflict with Leshad is an old one. Rosemary’s isn’t. His intentions are not as you might suspect. But then you understand smoke and mirrors very well, it seems.”
It also seemed he’d just been put in his place by a ghost.
“Don’t give up on everyone in your life, Sean Tanner.”
She gave the impression of gliding backward, across the floor to the miniature rocking chair. For an instant before she faded from sight, he saw, or thought he saw, another face, either visible through hers or superimposed over it.
It was the painted wooden face of Billy the doll.
* * *
Fierce peals of thunder caused the ground to shudder and sent animals scurrying for shelter. Tanner debated detouring to Nightshade so Desdemona could be transferred to St. Margaret’s by qualified paramedics. Yet even as he voiced the suggestion, a crease formed between Desdemona’s eyes, and she made a fitful sound.
“I think she wants us to take her,” Rosemary translated.
Some days, Tanner reflected, it didn’t pay to wake up, let alone get up. He drove on, through eerie patches of wind and rain that eventually escalated into a full-blown electrical storm.
At the hospital, workers and visitors alike watched in awe as the sky split apart at fifteen-second intervals.
“Maybe we should spend the night here,” Rosemary suggested once Desdemona had been safely admitted. “For obvious weather-related reasons, but also because I’m still worried. That was a long, hard drive. The doctors say Desdemona’s stable, but they said the same thing about my grandfather after he had a mild heart attack. Eleven hours later, he died.”
“Different doctors, different medical issues.” In the parking lot, Tanner battled an urge to look over his shoulder for no idea what. Ghost, doll, an old friend carrying an Uzi.
He didn’t want to talk on the emotionally charged trip back to the Marie. But Rosemary kept looking behind them at Bluewater, and he didn’t need to read her mind to know what she was thinking. Her body language said it all.
Finally, lowering the volume on Iron Maiden, he regarded her. “Staying there would have put a lot of innocent people at risk. I figure Des shot the Reaper, but it’s doubtful he’s dead. I saw drops of blood, not a river of it, leading to the door.”
She stared straight ahead. “I know what you saw, Tanner. I can’t help it, I feel responsible. Not guilty, because I didn’t cause any of this, but facts are facts. If I hadn’t come in contact with Desdemona, she wouldn’t be lying in a hospital right now.”
> “I took you to see her, Rosemary.”
“But I came to you in the first place.”
Running extremely low on patience, Tanner cast her a dark look. “Get off the fucking carousel and deal, lady. You came, I took, Des wound up.”
She sent him a smoldering look. “I did, you did, and she did. I am dealing. You’re just irritated because not only did you see Madeleine’s spirit at the antique shop, but you were forced to have a conversation with it—her, as well.”
The air between them crackled with more electricity than the storm outside. “You’re not in my head,” Tanner said evenly, “so how the hell do you know what happened at Madeleine’s shop?”
She tugged her cap lower, sat back and crossed her arms. “I eavesdropped.”
“How?”
“The usual way.”
“Usual for you, or for those of us who are forced to blunder through life without the benefit of a listening device in our heads?”
She glared at him out of the corner of her eyes. “I swear I’m going to search and study and practice until I master the art of turning humans into toads.”
“Great. Let me know how that goes.” With a twist of his wrist, he boosted Iron Maiden up to ear-splitting volume, shoved the storm noises to the back of his mind and drove.
The hazy outline of Madeleine’s death mask in the windshield only fuelled his temper. “Get the fuck out of my sightline,” he snarled, and ignoring Rosemary’s mistrustful frown, whipped the steering wheel to his left in an effort to shake the image off.
It worked. Madeleine’s features faded to black, but not before he heard her whisper, “Anger is its own worst enemy, Sean Tanner. Who will learn that lesson first, I wonder? You or the one Leshad calls the Reaper?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lightning flashed wildly over the roof of the still-distant bayou hotel. If lights burned inside, Rosemary couldn’t see them on the long approach. But at least she could hear herself think, courtesy of a talent she’d discovered that allowed her to shut out a riot of storm noise, vexation and heavy metal music.