Eden's Shadow

“Don’t you hey me, pretty girl. You lied to the police. I’m not happy about that, not one bit.”

“No surprise there.”

“Lisa would hit herself on the head before anyone else. What were you thinking doing such a thing, putting your life in danger?”

“Why am I in danger?”

“What do you call a family curse if not dangerous?”

Silly, but Eden wasn’t about to say that to someone she loved. Instead she replied with patience, “The curse has no bearing on this, Dolores. It’s a—” Breaking off, she regarded her rearview mirror. There was a car with blue-tinted headlights behind her, she was sure of it.

“You still there?” Dolores demanded. “What’s going on? Why’d you stop talking?”

“I thought…” She saw nothing now, no car or headlights, in fact, no movement at all. “It’s okay, I guess. I just have this weird feeling I’m being followed. I see pale blue lights behind me, and I freak. Then they vanish, and I realize I’m jumping at shadows.” Which was, she reflected with a sigh, a word she really hadn’t needed to use. “Tell me, Dolores, have you spoken to a Detective LaMorte yet?”

“It’s possible. I’ve spoken to many police officers today. Told them all I didn’t make gumbo for you and me on Sunday night, no sir. Why ask me about one in particular?”

“I have a feeling he’s going to be a pain.”

“Maybe he’ll catch the killer quick and leave us with only the curse to worry about.”

“I’m not worried, Dolores.”

“Then I’ll have to worry twice as hard, won’t I? You don’t do me any favors with your unbelieving attitude, Eden. Who raised you makes no difference. It’s the blood in your veins that counts.”

“Boyer blood.”

“No, my blood. I wasn’t born a Boyer. That curse took away my brother who was a year older than me. He had no children, so the focus shifted—and if you say it must be a smart curse, I’ll put you over my knee next time I see you.”

“I believe you.” Eden bumped through a rut and bit her tongue. “Ouch.”

“You’re driving too fast like always.”

“How do you know I’m driving?”

“I hear the engine.”

“Over the stereo?”

“Music’s too loud, too.”

Suspicious, Eden demanded, “Did Mary or Lisa call you tonight?”

“No, and I don’t expect they will. When trouble comes, Mary either gets drunk or finds a man to distract her. You, you decide you’re fine and go about your business, oblivious. Lisa buries herself and her problems in her garden.”

The criticism stung. “I’m not oblivious, Dolores.”

“You want to be. You try to be. You wriggle and squirm, and only when you’re slapped in the face with an unpleasant thing do you acknowledge it exists. Where’re you driving to, anyway?”

Eden’s first impulse was to sulk and not respond. Her second was to retaliate. Her third was to take it on the chin—sort of. “Montesse House,” she answered, then waited because she knew that wouldn’t sit well.

“You’re going out there alone, at night?” Dolores uttered a colorful curse of her own. “Are you a crazy girl? That place is falling apart. It’s haunted by three ghosts, did you know that? Haunted and decaying from the foundation up.”

Eden looked back, saw nothing and felt a stab of contrition because Dolores sounded so upset.

“Mary’s there,” she explained. “That’s why I’m going. I won’t explore the house. I know it’s in bad shape. It was a wreck ten years ago when I saw it for the first time.”

“I should never have told you about it,” Dolores moaned. “Three teenage girls gonna get all kinds of ideas about a tale like that. Still, the oldest girl has sense—or so I thought. Next thing I know, you’re traipsing off together to search for ghosts just because I said the curse was placed on our family by the original owners.” Annoyance gave way to exasperation. “Why is Mary there? She keeping a still we don’t know about?”

“She’s taking pictures.”

“In the dark?”

“It won’t be dark for another hour.” Although that could change, Eden realized. Between the black clouds, a road lined with moss-shrouded live oaks and only a patch of blue left to the west, it was a bit like driving into a witch’s cauldron. “It reminds me of a vampire’s lair out here.” She heard Dolores’s hand smacking her knee.

“You’re after vampires?”

“Mainly the atmosphere. It’s Mary’s deal, Dolores, not mine. I need to talk to her away from Lisa. Something’s…” She tried to think of how to put it. “Something’s wrong. Lisa’s not herself. I can’t say what it is exactly, but she feels off to me.”

Dolores’s tone softened. “This is a difficult time for her. Lisa won’t meet a problem head-on, and dirt holds no answers.”

Eden laughed. “You didn’t sleep last night, did you?”

The old woman chuckled. “That was bad, wasn’t it? Yes, I am tired. But mostly I’m worried. Not so much about Lisa. She didn’t bludgeon Maxwell Burgoyne. It’s you and the curse, Eden. I’ve had dreams lately, bad dreams, about death and pain. I see zombielike creatures and hear old voodoo chants. I see shadows as dark as night and inside them, people whose faces I can’t make out. But they’re after you, and they’re close.”

Her ominous tone more than her words sent a shiver down Eden’s spine. Then she caught a flash of pale blue light in her side mirror and swore.

“What’s that you said?” Dolores demanded.

“Someone’s close to me all right,” Eden told her. “But he’s no zombie. This person drives a car, and he’s a lousy tail. I’ll call you later, okay? I promise, this isn’t related to the curse,” she added before she pushed End.

The headlights disappeared among the trees, but as far as Eden knew the road wound without deviation down to Montesse and stopped there. Unless he turned around, her tail would wind up directly behind her.

She spied the crumbling roof first, followed by the whitewashed columns. Four of eight remained intact. The others had broken into large pieces. Several of those pieces had been hauled away by scavengers searching for remnants of a Civil War house.

In truth, Montesse had its roots in an era prior to the war. It had been dismantled piece by piece in France and brought to North America by ship in the late seventeenth century. The Dumont family servants had taken apart, transported and reconstructed the building under the keen eye of their matriarch, Therese Dumont. However, as Dolores told the story, it was Therese’s daughter Eva who’d actually placed the curse—on her father and the woman she’d considered to be the cause of her family’s destruction.

Eden braked at the end of the road where it opened to an overgrown clearing. Leaving the engine running, she waited for the source of the headlights to appear. When it didn’t, she tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and debated her next move. She could go back and search the road, keep waiting in her car, or find Mary and do what she’d come to do in the first place. Choosing the latter, she drove on until a fallen sycamore prevented her from getting any closer.

There was no sign of Mary’s car and only river sounds audible as she slid from her seat.

Dolores insisted Montesse was haunted. Given its gloomy appearance beneath a canopy of purple-black clouds and shadows long enough to conceal a bevy of vampires, Eden had no trouble believing in the possibility. Not that she actually did believe, but if she had and if they were to manifest themselves anywhere, here would be the perfect spot.

A chorus of distant bullfrogs accompanied her as she picked her way around the ruined building. She liked the Quarter better, she decided. Noise, light and color were friendly things. Solitude, peppered with thoughts of zombies, curses and voodoo queens was downright creepy, even for a resolved non-believer.

She spent the better part of forty minutes tramping around the grounds. As a last resort, she slogged through bushes and weeds to the riverbank. A sluggish current carried the water past a shore far too wild now to accommodate a boat dock.

Although she didn’t find Mary, Eden did locate her sister’s car. It was parked on a back driveway that must have led to Montesse from one of the other highway exits.

“At least I know you’re here,” she said, nursing a scratch on her arm. “That’s something.”

Aware of the deepening twilight and the fact that she hadn’t brought her flashlight, she headed back to the house. Mary’s voice resounded eerily in her head.

Voodoo child with Carib blood, and eyes of green. This is foreseen…

Through Dolores, Eden had inherited Haitian blood. But not, she promised herself, a mystical Haitian mindset. She and Lisa had been born with green eyes.

The eldest born to eldest grown, my pain shall bear. Believe. Beware.

Dolores had been the eldest grown, and of course Eden was the eldest born—but that meant nothing. Curses had no place in the twenty-first century.

For deeds long past, chère child will reap, my vengeance curse, of death—or worse.

Worse than death was a prospect Eden preferred not to consider, at least not as it pertained to the supernatural. But she had to admit, it was difficult to ignore a thing when you had a sister and grandmother who were forever bringing it up.

Determined not to dwell on such an unpleasant subject, Eden trudged through the mini jungle that had once been Therese Dumont’s prized garden to the back terrace. Gravel and broken concrete crunched underfoot the closer she drew to the old house. She spotted a beam of light—or possibly the flash of a camera—upstairs, and called to her sister. Receiving no answer, she tried again in a less patient tone.

“Are you up there, Mary?”

She heard a sound like stone grinding against stone and attempted to pinpoint it. She was standing beneath a wide protrusion that had once been the second-story gallery. It would have wrapped around the entire house and, in the back at least, allowed for a spectacular view of the river. Eden felt certain the sound she’d heard had come from the upper wall.

When the air stilled and the sound didn’t repeat, she gave up. Absolutely nothing moved, not even the deadhead flowers hanging by a thread to their stems.

One last time, she tipped her head back and called to her sister.

To her surprise, she heard what might have been an answer. Something echoed inside the house.

That meant she’d have to break her promise to Dolores—probably her neck as well. Pushing aside a tangle of vines, she backtracked through the garden.

An old pergola hung at a precarious angle above her. Like everything else, it was choked with weeds, many of them dead, all of them clinging. Thorns snagged her pants, making her grateful she’d worn a pair of old hikers.

A granite cross and a cracked marble headstone lay across the path. Eden didn’t see a raised plot, which probably meant someone had tried to make off with the stone, failed and wound up abandoning it. She looked, but couldn’t read the writing in the poor light. Respectful of its significance, she stepped over the stone and continued on toward the terrace.

Three wide steps appeared through the dense foliage. Lisa, she mused, would love to get her green thumbs on a place like this.

Eden yanked down one last vine and spotted the bottom step. Scratched, but glad to be out of the maze, she muttered, “Vampires live in cellars by day, Mary, not second-story bedrooms. Even fly-by-night magazine editors can tell the difference between a bed in a crumbling master suite and a coffin in the basement.”

A train rolled past across the river. The whistle reached her over the croaking bullfrogs.

She looked back at the fallen headstone and for a moment was tempted to get her flashlight. If the stone was Eva Dumont’s, she could tell Dolores…

“No.” She stopped the thought flat. The past was the past, over and done. No matter what Dolores believed, there were no such things as ghosts. And even if there were, if she didn’t hurt them, why should they bother her?

The grinding noise reached her again. Tilting her head back, Eden glimpsed a rectangular object above. Then she spied a blur of motion and felt a pair of strong arms wrap themselves around her. She saw dark hair and a flurry of leaves and felt her body leave the ground. A second later, she landed on her back on the garden path.

Stunned, she watched as a large white planter crashed onto the very spot where she’d been standing.

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