South of Hell (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)

by P J Parrish

  “Oh…” Amy was grimacing.

  “What’s wrong?” Dr. Sher asked.

  “I didn’t do it! Don’t beat me, don’t beat me!”

  “Who’s beating you?”

  “Miz Phoebe,” Amy whispered. “She hates me so much. But I didn’t take her comb! He gave it to me and said it was mine to keep! He told me to hide it, but Miz Phoebe found it. It’s mine! Mr. Amos gave it to me!”

  “Amy, move ahead,” Dr. Sher said firmly. “Go to a time when you are happiest. Can you do that?”

  Amy’s breathing deepened again, and her expression became calm. For a long time, the room was quiet. Then Amy slowly brought up her arms, as if she were cradling something. She began to hum softly.

  “Don’t cry,” she murmured. “Mama’s here, Charles. We’re safe now, Charles, we’re safe in the corn.”

  Louis felt a trickle of sweat make its way slowly down his back.

  “Charles is your son, Amy?” Dr. Sher asked.

  She nodded.

  “Who is Charles’s father?” Dr. Sher prodded.

  Amy took a long time to answer, and when she did, it was in the softest of whispers. “Amos.” Her face creased into a frown that made her look suddenly much older. “Miz Phoebe tried to kill Charles. She took him one night and went to the creek to drown him. Amos stopped her. We…Amos has built us a house out in the cornfield. He is good to me.”

  The mantel clock chimed two times.

  Dr. Sher’s face had a sheen of sweat on it. She drew a handkerchief from her pocket, dabbed at her face, and looked down at Amy.

  “I want you to go to the time when your breathing problems first started, Amy,” she said.

  Amy didn’t respond.

  “Can you do that? Can you tell me about the first time you felt like you couldn’t breathe?”

  “I don’t…”

  “I’m here with you, Amy,” Dr. Sher said softly. “It will be all right, I promise.”

  The room fell quiet again.

  “It’s dark tonight, no drinking gourd to light the way,” she said. “But the preacher says there’s a parcel coming. So I light a candle and put it in the parlor window.”

  For a moment, Amy said nothing more.

  “I am afraid,” she whispered.

  “Why are you afraid?” Dr. Sher asked.

  “The wind blows from the south tonight,” Amy said.

  A loud click made Louis jump. Dr. Sher waved a hand toward him, then pointed at the small tape recorder on the table near Amy’s head. She made a flipping motion with her hand. Louis realized she wanted him to turn over the tape. He did so, then returned to his place beside Joe.

  Again, it was silent, except for the sound of Amy’s breathing.

  “He’s here,” Amy said suddenly.

  “Who?” Dr. Sher pressed.

  “He calls himself John.” Amy whispered another word that, to Louis, sounded like “lapel.” Then she was quiet again.

  “He is so thin, and he is coughing,” she said. “His clothes are ragged. I give him one of Amos’s old coats and take him to the hiding place. It is so cold there, and I feel bad about leaving him, but he will be safe here until the shepherd comes.”

  A small smile came to Amy’s face.

  “He tells me about his wife, Fanny, back in New Orleans.” The smile faded. “She was taken from him. His son, too. Leaves stripped from the trees…

  “He misses them so much. He says someday, when he is a free man, he will go back and find them.” Amy’s eyes fluttered. “He shows me her locket.”

  Louis stiffened. Another long silence. He felt Joe shift on the cushions beside him. She had moved forward, her eyes intent on Amy’s face.

  Amy’s face…

  It had grown tight and contorted, and Louis had the crazy thought that she looked like someone who was staring down the barrel of a gun. He had seen that look before, because he had been the one holding the gun, and he had never forgotten that look on the other person’s face. Like he had no skin, and every nerve was exposed.

  “Amy? What’s happening, Amy?” Dr. Sher said.

  “Horses,” she whispered. “I hear horses and now dogs. The soul catchers are coming.”

  “Who?” Dr. Sher pressed.

  “I have to get back to the cellar. I see the horses by the barn and the men. The horses make clouds in the air.”

  “Amy, who is there with you?”

  “I can’t let them find John.”

  “Amy, where are you?”

  “No, not the cellar. John is there. The corn…I have to get to the corn.”

  “Amy—”

  “Run to the corn, make them chase me, so they won’t find John.” She began to pant, like she was out of breath. “Oh…oh! Oh, God!”

  “What’s happening?”

  “They caught me…they are dragging me into the barn. Amos! Where are you? Amos, help me!”

  “What is—?”

  “They’ve tied me to the hook and are pulling me up. My blouse, they ripped off my clothes…oh, it’s so cold. The horses are screaming.”

  “Amy—”

  “They’re whipping me…but I won’t tell them. I won’t tell them where John is. They want to find him and take him back. I won’t tell, I won’t tell…”

  Suddenly, Amy began to cry. Dr. Sher leaned forward and put her hand over Amy’s.

  “What is it, dear? Tell me.”

  “Amos,” she whispered. “He is here. I can see him. I loved him, and he did this to me.”

  Amy’s hands came up to cover her face as she cried. Dr. Sher pulled back, her face pale.

  Amy began to gag. Louis felt Joe tense, and he looked at her. She was holding a hand over her mouth, her eyes brimming.

  “What’s happening, Amy?” Dr. Sher said.

  “I…can’t…breathe.”

  Dr. Sher leaned forward. “Why? What’s happening to you?”

  Amy hands came up, as if she were warding off a blow. “They are burying me. But I am not dead yet.” She gagged and drew in a hard breath. “Charles!”

  Amy went limp. It was quiet.

  Dr. Sher picked up Amy’s wrist to feel her pulse. She looked to Louis and Joe and nodded, mouthing, “She’s okay.”

  “Amy?” Dr. Sher said softly after a few seconds.

  It took a long time, but finally, a whisper. “Yes?”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Floating. They want me to rest now.”

  “They?”

  Amy didn’t answer.

  The clock chimed again. Louis looked to the mantel. It was two-thirty. A soft sound made him look back at Amy. She was humming. Hugging herself, rocking gently back and forth as she lay on the settee. The humming became words.

  …we poor souls will have our peace,

  there’s a better day a-comin’—

  Will you go along with me?

  There’s a better day a-comin’,

  Go sound the jubilee…

  Louis listened, not moving a muscle. He didn’t know the words, yet something about the song was familiar. Then he realized where he had heard it, or a song very much like it, once before. At his mother’s funeral back in Mississippi, the “going home,” as they had called it. A cluster of women in black softly singing his mother home as he stood apart, listening.

  It was time to bring Amy out of her trance. Louis watched as Dr. Sher began to count backward from ten. “You will remember all this when you wake up, Amy, but you won’t be afraid,” Dr. Sher said.

  And with that, Amy opened her eyes. She sat up, self-consciously pulling the top of her blouse closed. Her cheeks were dotted with color. Louis thought she looked like someone who had just emerged from a nap.

  But Dr. Sher? She was pale, her red bangs plastered to her forehead with sweat. And Joe? She was standing over by the piano, her back to them. When had she gotten up off the sofa? Louis hadn’t even felt it.

  “How do you feel, dear?” Dr. Sher asked.

  It took a second
or two for the doctor’s question to register. “I’m fine,” Amy said.

  “Do you remember what just happened?”

  Amy nodded. “I didn’t help things, did I?”

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Sher asked.

  “I couldn’t remember anything about Momma,” Amy said.

  Dr. Sher took Amy’s hand. “That will come.”

  Amy shook her head. “But I need to help. Can we try again?”

  “No, dear,” Dr. Sher said. “You’ve done enough for today.”

  Louis looked to Joe. She was staring at Amy. Suddenly, Amy got up and went to her. She wrapped her arms around Joe’s waist and rested her head on Joe’s chest.

  Joe hesitated, then put her arms around Amy.

  For a moment, Louis couldn’t decipher what he was seeing in Joe’s face. Then, suddenly, he knew what it was. He had seen the look before, on the face of his foster mother, Frances, when she found out her husband had been in love with another woman for the last thirty years. Frances’s world had shifted, because that one thing had forced her to question everything she believed to be real and solid.

  Louis rose and went outside to the porch. He blinked in the bright sunlight and pulled in a breath of the crisp air. A breeze kicked up, sending the chimes tinkling. Louis focused on the spinning whirligig bird out on the lawn, thinking about Amy’s story.

  As moving as it was, he knew it wasn’t real. Amy believed it was. And if he had read the look on Joe’s face correctly, so did she.

  He could almost understand that her growing attachment to Amy was clouding her judgment. He had warned Shockey that his obsession with Jean had made him useless as a cop. And now Joe’s willingness to accept this past-life thing was becoming just as dangerous.

  Louis turned to look in through the window. He could see Joe and Amy talking quietly. He had to find a way to prove to Joe that she was wrong.

  Chapter Thirty

  The hotel room suddenly had become too small. First, Joe had opened the sliding glass door, letting in the cool night air. When that didn’t work, she sent Amy to the bedroom with her new sketchbook and colored markers. Finally, Joe had asked Louis to go out and find some take-out Chinese, knowing it would take him a while.

  Still, the walls closed in.

  Slipping on a sweatshirt, Joe took her glass of wine and her books out onto the balcony, leaving the sliding glass door open a bit so she could hear Amy.

  But Amy didn’t seem to need her watchful eye. Ever since they had returned from Dr. Sher’s house that afternoon, Amy had been oddly calm. The need for long naps was gone. The asthma attacks had disappeared. The girl seemed to have suffered no ill effects from the latest session, despite the belief that she apparently had recalled her own brutal murder.

  “I can only guess that by excising this confabulation, Amy is finding a place in her personality now to accommodate it,” Dr. Sher had told Joe and Louis afterward. “If it has somehow brought her some peace, I suggest we don’t question why.”

  Joe leaned her head back in the chaise, put up her feet, and closed her eyes, letting the cold night air wash over her.

  Peace. She was the one who craved it now.

  There had never been a time in her life when she felt more unsettled. Maybe when she was ten, when her father died. The hole he left had never completely healed, but she had gone on, grown up, found her footing in life.

  But now, this new unease, this felt like the ground was shifting beneath her. Part of it, she knew, was because she had compromised her integrity as a cop on this case. She had bent the rules once thirteen years ago and vowed she would never do it again. But now she had.

  Still, it went deeper than that.

  Watching Amy this afternoon, she realized that everything she believed in had been turned upside down.

  Joe set the glass aside and pulled the zipper of her sweatshirt to her chin. Her hands moved over the three books in her lap. Dr. Sher had given them to her that afternoon. Louis had no interest in them, but Joe had spent most of the evening reading them.

  There was a slender paperback about life-regression therapy written by the Miami psychiatrist Dr. Sher had mentioned. One of its ideas was stuck in her mind: everyone is reincarnated with the same “family” of souls over and over.

  The second book was by a Canadian psychiatrist named Ian Stevenson, Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. Xenoglossy, Dr. Sher had told her, was a paranormal phenomenon in which a person is able to speak a language that he or she could not have acquired by natural means.

  Joe picked up the third book, titled Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. It was a scholarly compilation of cases documented by Stevenson, who had devoted his life to researching children in India who claimed to remember previous lives.

  This book she hadn’t been able to set aside as easily. Stevenson himself admitted that the lack of physical evidence made it hard for people to accept his argument for reincarnation. But his cases of twenty children who could remember past lives was chilling in its authority.

  Joe set the books aside.

  She didn’t need a fancy word like xenoglossy to tell her why Amy could sing in French. The fact that there was a piano roll in that farmhouse was concrete, real.

  But the other things? After what she had seen today, she wasn’t sure Amy’s vivid memories of her “life” as Isabel could be explained away as easily.

  And that, more than anything, was what was leaving her feeling so lost.

  Joe looked out over the clear night sky, focusing finally on the waning white moon.

  Tonight, she had thought about calling her mother. Florence Frye, with her astrology books and visits to psychics. Her father had cheerfully ignored his wife’s “dipping her toes into the occult ocean,” as he called it. But Joe, growing up, had been mildly embarrassed by her mother, hiding the tarot cards when her friends came over, wincing whenever her mother would ask her date what his sign was.

  When she was fourteen, Joe had started going to the Presbyterian church down the block. Her mother teased her that she was going only to be with Troy, the boy she had a crush on. That was part of it, but it was also wanting to feel that she was part of a “normal” family, and going to church was what “normal” families did on Sunday. But sitting on the hard wooden pew, mouthing along with the hymns, listening to the deep voice of the minister warning about “the devil prowling around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour,” she felt strange, like she was putting on a dress that was two sizes too big to impress someone she didn’t care about.

  She never returned to church after that. Her work as a police officer—the single thing that most defined her—became her religion. And it depended on what was tangible, what was provable by evidence. Even that time in Miami, when the department had brought in a psychic to find a missing child, even when the psychic was able to describe the drainage ditch where the child’s body was found, even then, Joe had remained a skeptic.

  But now? After what she had witnessed that afternoon in Dr. Sher’s home, after hearing the terror in Amy’s voice? No matter what Louis said, that was “proof” enough for her.

  Louis…

  Joe pulled her sweatshirt tighter around her shoulders.

  The fissure she had felt between them before had widened. Tonight, he had picked up one of the reincarnation books, looked at it, and tossed it back onto the bed. He didn’t say anything, but she read his thought in his face: What is happening to you, Joe?

  “Miss Joe?”

  Joe swiveled. Amy was standing at the open door.

  “Something wrong?” Joe asked, immediately tense.

  “I’m not sure,” Amy said. She ventured out onto the balcony. “It’s going to rain real bad,” she said.

  Joe was about to say it was the clearest night they had seen since she had come to Ann Arbor. But the seriousness of Amy’s face kept her quiet.

  “Can I come out and sit with you?” Amy asked.

  Joe hesitated.

&
nbsp; “Please?”

  Amy was backlit by the living-room light, so Joe couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see what was bothering her. “Okay. But go put on a sweater first.”

  Amy disappeared, and when she came back, she was wearing one of Joe’s sweatshirts and had brought a blanket from one of the beds.

  There was only the one lounge chair on the balcony. Amy stood there, clutching the blanket, until Joe finally scooted over. Amy wedged herself into the small space left and carefully spread the blanket over them both.

  Joe could feel the press of sharp hipbones against her own, could smell the strawberry of Amy’s just-shampooed hair. She could feel the tension in her own body at this unfamiliar closeness. Even as she could feel the softening of Amy’s muscles and skin.

  For a long time, it was quiet, with just the occasional drifting up of car noises from five floors below.

  “Something’s wrong,” Amy said softly.

  “What is it?” Joe said.

  Amy was silent.

  “You can talk to me, Amy,” Joe said. “Don’t you know that now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Then tell me what it is.”

  “I’m not sure. I feel like something bad is going to happen to me.”

  “Does this have anything to do with what you remembered today at Dr. Sher’s?” Joe asked.

  “No, that’s past now,” Amy said. “This is something that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “You know we’ll protect you, Mr. Kincaid and I,” Joe said.

  “I know. But you’re going home soon.”

  Joe hesitated. “Not until I’m sure you’re okay.”

  Amy was silent.

  “Do you believe me?”

  She felt Amy nodding slowly.

  Again, they were quiet for a long time.

  “Something else is wrong,” Amy said. “With you and Mr. Kincaid.”

  The closeness kept Joe from turning to see Amy’s face. “Why do you say that?” Joe asked.

  “I can…sometimes I…” Amy let out a long breath. “Never mind.”