Heart Of Evil
Heart Of Evil
Heather Graham
Emerging from the bayou like an apparition, Donegal Plantation is known for its unsurpassed dining, captivating atmosphere, haunting legends and now a corpse swinging from the marble angel that marks its cemetery's most majestic vault.A corpse discovered in nearly the same situation as that of Marshall Donegal, the patriarch killed in a skirmish just before the Civil War. Desperate for help traditional criminologists could never provide, plantation heiress Ashley Donegal turns to an elite team of paranormal investigators who blend hard forensics with rare often inexplicable intuition.Among the "Krewe of Hunters" is an old flame, Jake Mallory, a gifted musician with talent stretching far beyond the realm of the physical, and a few dark ghosts of his own. The evil the team unveils has the power to shake the plantation to its very core. Jake and Ashley are forced to risk everything to unravel secrets that will not stay buried even in death.
Praise for the novels of Heather Graham
“An incredible storyteller.”
—Los Angeles Daily News
“Graham wields a deftly sexy and convincing pen.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fast-paced and suspenseful read that will give readers chills while keeping them guessing until the end.”
—RT Book Reviews on Ghost Moon
“If you like mixing a bit of the creepy with a dash of sinister and spine-chilling reading with your romance, be sure to read Heather Graham’s latest … Graham does a great job of blending just a bit of paranormal with real, human evil.”
—Miami Herald on Unhallowed Ground
“Eerie and atmospheric, this is not late-night reading for the squeamish or sensitive.”
—RT Book Reviews on Unhallowed Ground
“The paranormal elements are integral to the unrelentingly suspenseful plot, the characters are likable, the romance convincing, and, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Graham’s atmospheric depiction of a lost city is especially poignant.”
—Booklist on Ghost Walk
“Graham’s rich, balanced thriller sizzles with equal parts suspense, romance and the paranormal—all of it nail-biting.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Vision
“Heather Graham will keep you in suspense until the very end.”
—Literary Times
“Mystery, sex, paranormal events. What’s not to love?”
—Kirkus on The Death Dealer
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author HEATHER GRAHAM has written more than a hundred novels, many of which have been featured by the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild. An avid scuba diver, ballroom dancer and mother of five, she still enjoys her South Florida home, but loves to travel as well, from locations such as Cairo, Egypt, to her own backyard, the Florida Keys. Reading, however, is the pastime she still loves best, and she is a member of many writing groups. She’s a winner of the Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and is currently vice president of the Horror Writers’ Association. She’s also an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. She is the founder of The Slush Pile, an author band and performing group.
For more information, check out her Web sites:
TheOriginalHeatherGraham.com,
eHeatherGraham.com
and HeatherGraham.tv.
You can also find Heather on MySpace and Facebook.
Heart of Evil
Heather
Graham
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Dedicated with gratitude
to the beautiful Myrtles plantation,
and to Teeta LeBleu Moss, owner,
Teresa David, the General Manager,
Hester Eby, Director of Tours,
Taryn Lowery, Tour Guide
and to Scout and Sprout
and The Peace River Ghost Trackers
And to Dennis, Jason, Shayne,
and Bryee-Annon Pozzessere;
Teresa Davant, Kathy Pickering, Kathy DePalo,
Juan Roca, Bridget LeVien, Matthew Green,
Phinizy Percy Jr., and Connie Perry.
Prologue
Blood.
She could see it, smell it.
Hear it.
Drip … drip … drip …
The air was heavy with black powder, and the brilliant red color of the blood seemed to form a mist with the powder, and she was surrounded by a haze, a miasma of gray-tinged crimson. The day was dying, becoming red, red like the color of the blood seeping to the ground, making that terrible, distinctive noise. Drip, drip, drip …
Ashley Donegal was there. She wasn’t even sure where there was, but she knew that she didn’t want to be there.
Suddenly, the mist seemed to swirl in a violent gust, and then settle softly, closer to the ground. It parted as she walked through. She could see her surroundings, and, at that moment, she knew. She was in the cemetery. She had played here so often as a child—respectfully, of course. Her grandfather never would have had it any other way. Those elegant tombs, all constructed with such love, and an eye to the priorities of the day. The finest craftsmen had been hired, artists and artisans, and the place was truly beautiful. Angels and archangels graced the various tombs, winged cherubs, saints and crosses. She had never been afraid.
But now …
From a distance, she could hear shouts. Soldiers. Ridiculous. Grown men playing as soldiers. But they did it so well. She might almost have been back in time. The powder came from the howitzer and the Enfield rifles. The shouts sounded as the men played out their roles, edging from the river road to the outbuildings and then the stables, to the final confrontation on the lawn and in the cemetery. The blood would come from stage packets within their uniforms, of course, but …
This was real blood. She knew because it had a distinctive odor, and because, yes, damn it, she could smell it. Nothing smelled like real blood.
She looked at the ground, and she could see the puddle where the blood was falling, but she was afraid to look up. If she looked up, she would see a dead man.
But she did so anyway. She saw him. There was a hat pulled low over his face, but soon he would lift his head.
He did. And she saw a man in his prime, handsome, with strength of purpose in the sculpture of his face. But there was weariness in his eyes.
Weariness and death. Yet they were just playacting; that past was so, so long ago now….
She didn’t speak. Neither did he. Because his face began to rot. It blackened, and while she watched, the scabrous decaying flesh began to peel away. Soon she was staring into the empty eye sockets of a skull.
She started to scream.
Above that sound, she could hear someone calling to her. Someone calling her name. The sound was deep, rich and masculine, and she knew it….
It was Jake! He would help…. Surely he would help.
But she could only stare at the skeletal mask in front of her.
Smell the blood.
And scream.
A strange sound in the middle of the night awoke Ashley. She sat up with a start and realized she was doing the screaming. She clamped her own hand quickly over her mouth, embarrassed and praying that she hadn’t roused the household. She waited in silence; nope, no one.
That was pretty pathetic. It must have been a horrifically pathetic scream. If she ever really needed to scream, she’d probably be out of luck.
Lord, that had been some nightmare.
She didn’t have nightmares. She was the most grounded human being she knew; hell, she had grown up next to a bayou full of alligators and cottonmouths, and she had lived in a downtrodden area of New York City near Chinatown in order to afford NYU. She knew all about real monsters—ghosts were creations to reel tourists in.
So …
With a groan, she threw her head back on her pillow and glanced at the clock. She needed to sleep. In a week’s time, they’d be celebrating Donegal Plantation’s biggest annual event: the reenactment of the skirmish here that had cost her ancestor his life.
Ah, yes, and she had been dreaming about the skirmish—or the reenactment?
That was it, she thought, grinning. She was dreaming about the events at Donegal Plantation because they were preparing for the day.
History was always alive at Donegal. The plantation house was furnished with antiques, most of which had been in the family forever. There was an attic room that contained more artifacts from the Civil War than many a museum, down to letters, mess kits, knapsacks, pistols, rifles and bayonets. Still, the reenactment remained a major undertaking.
But they’d been running it since before she had even been born. It was rote by now. All the same, there was still plenty of bustle and confusion, along with everything that had to happen before the event could take place, including a mound of paperwork on her desk that had to do with the “sutler’s tent,” the pop-up shop where period clothing and curios and other paraphernalia, such as weapons and antiques, were sold. Which meant registrations and taxes. Then there was the insurance they needed for the day, and the officers to direct traffic and so on.
That was it. She just had a lot on her mind.
And the reenactment always reminded her of Jake. He’d never been a soldier, North or South. But he’d dressed up, and he’d played his guitar and sang music from the era. And sometimes she had played with him, and he’d always known how to make it just right, to bring back the past, with the light of truth.
She eased down in her covers, determined to forget both her anxiety and Jake.
Not so easy, even though it had been a long time since Jake had been in her life.
Finally, she started to drift again. She was comfortable; she loved her bed and her room, even if she had lived here her whole life other than college. Though she loved to learn about new people and new places, she also loved to be home.
She started again, certain that she had felt a touch; something soft and gentle, smoothing her hair, stroking her cheek.
She sat up. Moonlight streamed into the room, and there was no one else here; with so many guests around, she had locked her bedroom door. She looked at her pillow and decided that she had merely rubbed against a side of the pillowcase.
As she did so, she glanced at her dresser.
There was something different about it. She studied it for a moment, wondering what it was.
Then she knew.
She kept a picture of her parents there, on her dresser. It had been taken almost twenty years ago. They were together, holding her between them, when she had been five. It had been developed in sepia tone, and they’d had it done when one of the guests at a reenactment had found a way of making nice money by pretending to be Matthew Brady, the famed Civil War photographer. Throughout the day, he had answered historical questions about photography and its place in the Civil War.
As was the custom of the day, none of them was smiling, but there was still something exceptionally charming about the picture. There was a light in her father’s eyes, and just the hint of a curl at her mother’s lips. Her father’s arm was around her, his hand coming to rest tenderly on her mother’s shoulder. She was sandwiched close between them, and in her mind, the picture had been filled with love. It had become an even greater treasure when she had lost them.
It usually faced at a slight angle toward her bed.
The picture was turned away, as if someone had been looking at it from a different angle. It was such a little thing, but …
Maybe someone had wandered into her room. Cliff ran the property and she ran the house, but they employed extra housekeepers in the main house when they had guests. They hadn’t had guests in the house in the last few weeks, but the house was usually open, and her grandfather loved to walk anyone staying on the property through it. Depending on his mood, a tour could get long.
And the picture …
She turned over, groaning. It was just the angle of the picture.
Jake Mallory should have slept well, with a hard case finally settled.
But he didn’t.
The odd thing about his nightmares was that they were a recent phenomenon. When he had begun to realize and make use of this gift or curse—those things he somehow knew—there had been no dreams.
During the summer of the storms, during Katrina and the flooding, they had all been so busy. While it had been happening, he’d never explained to his coworkers that he was so good at finding the remains of the deceased because they called out to him; they spoke to him. It was heartbreaking; it was agony. But the dead needed their loved ones to know, and so he listened. And he didn’t dream those nights.
Later, the dreams had come, and they were always the same.
He was alone in his small, flat-bottomed boat, though he’d never been alone during any of the searches.
He was alone, and the heat of the day had cranked down to the lesser heat of the night, and he was searching specifically for someone, though he didn’t know who. As the boat moved through the water that should have been a street, he began to see people on the rooftops, clinging to branches here and there, and even floating in the water.
They saw him; they reached out to him. And he felt like weeping. They weren’t living people. They were those who had lost the fight.
As he drifted along, he looked back at them all, men and women, old and young, black and white and all colors in between. He wanted to ease their suffering, but he could no longer save them. Their faces had an ashen cast, and the bone structure was sucked in and hollow; they didn’t seem to know that there was nothing he could do for them anymore. In the dream, he knew that he, like many law-enforcement officers, scent dogs and volunteers, would be called upon to find the dead in the future.
But now he was seeking the living.
They called out to him; they were trying to tell him something. Bit by bit, he saw they were trying to show him the way. He thought that there should have been sound, but there was none. He didn’t hear his passage through the water, and nothing emitted from the mouths of the corpses he passed.
Then he saw the figure on the roof far ahead. He thought it was a woman. She seemed to be in something flowing, which was not unusual. Many victims, living and dead, had been found in nightgowns or boxers or flannel pajamas. What was strange was that she seemed to be the only one alive. She was in tremendous peril as the water rose all around her. He felt that there was something familiar about her, but he didn’t understand what it was that seemed to touch him. The light of the full moon turned her hair golden and gleaming, her white gown flowed in the breeze. Amidst the destruction, she was a beautiful survivor.
He tried to get closer.
The watery road grew more clogged and congested. Downed tree branches and appliances floated by. A soaked teddy bear with big black button eyes stared at him sightlessly as it drifted. He ached inside; it was an agony to fight the river, but it was also something he knew he had to do. Especially when she waited; when he could save her. He just had to reach her before the water level rose higher and higher, and swept her away.
He grew close …
And that was when he felt the darkness at his back.
He tried to turn, but he could not. The wind had picked up, and the effort was too much. No matter how he strained, he couldn’t see what evil thing seemed to be tracking him.
There was suddenly sound. The woman. She was calling out to him.
She called him by name.
But he could feel the thing behind him gaining on him. He could almost reach out for her, but he had to turn, had to find out what seemed to be breathing fetid air down his back….
She called out again.
Jake!
If they were to survive, to outrun whatever horror was behind him, they would have to do so together.
Jake!
Her voice rang out almost as clearly as if she were next to him in the boat.
But the darkness was on him, so close….
He could feel it then, enveloping him, crushing the sound of her voice as it did.
And he woke with a jerk.
Jake sat up in bed, deeply disturbed by the reappearance of his frequent dream. For the first time, he knew who he had seen on the roof of the house, about to be swallowed up by the floodwaters.
It was Ashley. Ashley Donegal.
He stood and stretched, irritated. The clock on his mantel indicated it was still early.
He swore and got dressed. He knew why he’d had the dream—and made Ashley the woman on the rooftop. He knew the date. The reenactment was coming. Donegal Plantation would be busy and alive; Ashley would still hurt from the fact that her dad had passed away and would no longer be playing Marshall Donegal, his ancestor. But she’d never show it. She’d be the grand mistress of the ceremonies, beautiful and regal in her Civil War attire.
He wondered if he would ever fall out of love with her. And then he wondered if the dream had meant something more. Angela—who seemed to have the best sixth sense in what the FBI called their special unit—had told him that dreams could open many doors. In REM sleep, the mind was at the stage where dreams came, and those dreams could easily focus on what the conscious mind rejected. When she was trying to reach memories of the past, she often used sleep.
If that were the guide, he could easily convince himself to think that Ashley now wanted him. Needed him. And that this was the sign.
Of course, that was just Angela’s way of seeking the ghosts of the past—even in their own group, they weren’t sure about all the rules of seeking out the help of ghosts.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh at himself or not.
Their team was legitimate; they were on-the-books federal agents. They had just spent days at the local training facility, improving their weapons skills, computer literacy and understanding of the mission policy.
But they were a one-of-a-kind unit, and their true designation wasn’t written down anywhere. Among themselves, they were the Krewe of Hunters; on paper, they were Adam Harrison’s Special Unit. In bizarre situations, they were supposed to smoke out the fakers—and find what might really be remnants of the past.
The world was filled with ghost hunters and would-be ghost hunters. The problem that most people didn’t see was the fact that few ghosts would really appear for a television crew. Some ghost lore did seem to be true. There were the residual hauntings—ghosts that played out a situation, such as a battle scene at Gettysburg, over and over again. And there were intelligent hauntings: ghosts that lingered for some reason. Ghosts didn’t seem to have rules. Some could find certain individuals who saw them as clearly as day; they could carry on long conversations, appear and disappear, and interact. Sometimes ghosts were frightened of the living, and they hid, and only someone with a real ability to suspend disbelief could coax them out. It was complicated; he was still learning. Sometimes ghosts tried to warn those they cared about when something evil was about to occur, and ghosts often entered into the REM sleep of those they hadn’t managed yet to really touch in the conscious world.
So the dream meant that Ashley needed him….
Or he wanted the dream to mean that Ashley needed him.
He stood up and walked over to his hotel window and looked out over the dark streets of the French Quarter. There was so much history here. So many lives had been lived; so much drama had taken place. Sometimes it was impossible to believe that the energy of the past didn’t remain. Ghosts didn’t have to be old; he knew that himself, though he hadn’t wanted to accept the truth until he had met Adam Harrison and become a part of the unit Adam had started for the FBI. He had been glad of his ability to feel where people were; to imagine that he heard them telling him to come, please. Sometimes he had even been able to find the living. And sometimes he had heard the voices of the dead, when he hadn’t known that they were dead.
His “gift” had cost him Ashley.
So why now, all these years later, was he seeing her, adrift, about to be engulfed, and yet reaching for him, even as he reached for her?
1
“Ah, dammit! I don’t want to be a Yankee,” Charles Osgood said.
It was there; it had finally come, and Ashley was grateful.
And the semi-drama going on here surely meant her mind had been trying to warn her that the day was not going to come without its share of trouble, because it was already proving to be one hell of an afternoon.
Morning had brought the business of breakfast, visitors pouring onto the property to spend time at the campsites. Now they were coming close to the main event of the day, the reenactment of the battle that had taken place at Donegal Plantation.
She’d never expected the real trouble to come over the sad situation of an ailing faux-Yankee.
“Dammit!” Charles exclaimed again.
Ashley thought that the man sounded like a petulant teenager, though she knew that he didn’t really want to argue. Not on a day like today. He flushed as the words came out of his mouth, and cast her a quick glance of dismay. She wasn’t even the one handing out the assignments, though she was the only Donegal among them now. The relish the group was taking in telling Charles his new role unsettled her a bit. Charles Osgood was the newest in the “cavalry unit” of reenactors, which meant that he got the assignment to play for the other side. Yet this seemed to be turning into a college hazing; they were all friends, and they were usually courteous to one another.
“Charlie, come on! Being a Yankee will be fun. Okay, so they were jerks—well, the ones here—who couldn’t spy on a neon sign, couldn’t hunt, couldn’t shoot…. But come on! Being a Yank will be fun!” Griffin Grant teased.
Ashley shook her head; how could grown men be so immature?
In her mind, although she truly loved the living history that took place at the plantation, she thought the units clinging to so-called glory were nothing more than inane. The event had ended with the death of one her ancestors—not a party.
“Hey, hey, all of you!” Ashley said, addressing the men around her and using the voice she would utilize when working with one of the school groups—the grade-school groups. “I know you all like to cling to the magical illusion that the antebellum South was a place of beauty, grace and honor—where men were men. Real men, hunting, riding, brawling—but honorable. Yes, we reenact what was. But this is now, and that was then! None of you would seriously want to go back to the Civil War, and no one here is prejudiced. The slavery of any person was a horrendous way of life.”
“Ashley—you’re making it sound like being a real man is bad thing!” Cliff Boudreaux commented, laughing. Cliff, horse master at Donegal, was clearly amused and having a good time.
“Well, of course, Ashley, it’s not like we take this too seriously,” Griffin Grant said, staring back at her as if she was the one who didn’t understand the question. Griffin was a striking man in his early thirties, sleek and slick, a CEO for a cable company in New Orleans, though his ancestors had lived out here, two hours down the road from the big city. “We know reality—and like it. But this is important playacting!”
She groaned softly.
They were good guys, really.
It was playacting, and for the playacting they were able to believe truly with their whole hearts that it had been about nothing other than states’ rights. Ashley knew all the statistics about the fighting men—most of the men who fought and died for the South during the war couldn’t have begun to have afforded a slave—and war was seldom caused by one issue. But her parents and her grandfather had never been the types to overlook the plantation’s complicated history. Cliff was part of that with his gold-green eyes, bronze-colored skin and dark tawny hair. She knew that half their visitors were immediately enthralled with him. He was one of the reenactors on the Southern side because of the Donegal blood that ran in his veins. Early on, a Donegal widower had fallen in love with a slave, creating the first racial mix in his background. In the 1920s, his great-grandfather had married a Donegal cousin, something that caused a serious scandal at that time in history, but which now gave both halves of the family a sense of pleasure and pride. She wasn’t sure how to count second and third or twice-removed relatives, so she considered Cliff to be her cousin.
History was history. Donegal was steeped in it, good and bad, and they didn’t hide any of it.
“Charles, they’re right. It’s a performance, you know,” Ashley said. “It’s a show, maybe even an important show in its small way. It’s where people can see the weapons of the day, the uniforms that were worn. And, actually, remember, this particular fight started because men had a bar brawl—and then an excuse to fight because the war was getting underway. You’re all examples of keeping history alive, and I’m so grateful to all of you.”
Charles stared back at her blankly; the other men were smirking.
Why didn’t they all get it? They were actors in a show, hopefully teaching American history, with several perspectives, along the way. But some things died really slowly here, in plantation country. Family was still everything. Loyalty to hearth and home, kin, parish and state. They’d been wrong; they’d been beaten, and they knew it, but still, only one side of the cast of players was considered to be elite. And the reenactors could be incredibly snobbish.
That made Charles Osgood the odd man out.
Toby Keaton cleared his throat and then said softly, “Charles—come on. You’re lucky to be in with the 27th Bayou Militia Cavalry Unit. Most of the time, the fellows taking part in the reenactments here are direct descendants of those who fought before. You’ve got to see the truth of this thing. You claim your place in the ranks through marriage—your stepfather was an O’Reilly, and I know he raised you, but, you know, in other old Southern units, that wouldn’t count.” Toby was forty-four, and Ashley’s next-door neighbor at Beaumont, his Creole plantation, though they both had acres and acres of land. Toby grinned as if to cut the harshness of his words. “Newcomer—odd man out. You’re a Yankee if I’ve ever seen one!”
“Great! So now I’m a newcomer—and that makes me an outsider?” Charles asked, staring around the room. “Come on, guys, you’ve just got to understand. This will really make it look as if I don’t belong here at all!”
He gave his appeal to the others gathered at the horse master’s office in the old barn at Donegal Plantation that day—Cliff Boudreaux, Griffin Grant, Toby Keaton, Ramsay Clayton, Hank Trebly, all still with property in the general area, John Ashton, tour director from New Orleans, and Ashley herself. The “Yankees” were gathering in the old smokehouse—a separate building, and now a small apartment. Charles would be joining them soon; all of the reenactors gathered together for their roundtable discussions on the war, but each side met separately first on the day of the reenactment to make sure that every member knew the character he was playing. Later, they’d all meet back here to make sure that everyone was apprised of all the safety factors involved.
One, Charles, so it seemed, would have to play a Yankee, and go join the group in the apartment. They were short a Yankee, and that’s the way it was. All of them belonged to Civil War roundtables, and these days, none of them really cared about sides—they just liked to discuss tactics and procedure. They often met in the dining room at Donegal; Ashley loved to listen, because they also knew their history, and they spoke about events in the lives of many of the key players in the war, and the fact that the generals had often been best friends before they had been forced to choose sides in the bloody conflict. They knew about weapons, uniforms, sad stories about treason and resisters, draft riots, food, clothing, trade and so much more.
“Charles,” Cliff Boudreaux said patiently. “We’re all just teasing you here, really. We’re short on Yankees today, on account of Barton Waverly being sick with the flu. We’re pretty desperate. And that’s the rule; newcomers play Yankees when our brothers from up North ask for help. Hell, remember that year when half of us were laid up with the croup? Three of them Yankees had to come play Southern boys. We’re not doing anything bad to you—really.”
Ramsay Clayton was seated across the table from Cliff. Ramsay looked like an artist; he was tall, with a wiry muscle structure, long dark hair and classical features. He owned a small place down the road, but he spent a lot of time in New Orleans, where he sometimes showed his work at Jackson Square and sometimes had showings at the galleries. He grinned at Charles. “Yeah, and don’t forget, the Yankees won. Hell, come to think about it, where were all the Southern boys when we were losing this thing?” he asked lightly. “Ah, well. Born in our day and age, it’s easy to look back at the South’s part in the Civil War and wonder, ‘What the hell were we thinking?’”
Ashley smiled. She liked Ramsay. He was a good guy.
“Well, I wish I could just step up to the plate, but I can’t. I can’t play a Yankee—I just can’t,” Toby Keaton said. “Hell, my great-great-great-whatever grandfather was the first one to answer Marshall Donegal’s call for volunteers. He was one of his best friends. I think he’d roll in his grave if I played a Yankee. Good God! I own a plantation! Wouldn’t be fitting for me to play a Yankee. Lord knows, it could be bad for business.”
Hank Trebly grinned. “Well, I’m just big sugar. I don’t really give a whit. I see the war as over, over, over, and that’s the way it is. Lord A-mighty! The damn thing ended in 1865.” Hank owned the property next to Donegal, and his ancestors had owned it forever. The old plantation had been replaced by a sugar refinery years ago. He was a small man, in his early forties, and his business meant everything to him.
John Ashton shrugged. “My family might have been here, but I don’t care,” he said. “The Civil War means my income these days—tourists love to go back. But I love ‘em all. Yankees, rebels, Brits, Brazilians! Bring them on. They all spend money and take tours.”
“And what happened here was in 1861, for God’s sake, before the thing had really even gotten going,” Griffin said, shaking his head. “Come on, now! My ancestor went on to die at the Second Battle of Manassas—now, that’s a damned big battle. We’re here to teach, and to remember everything that happened in the past—and how it made us what we are today. Let’s have fun, folks. C’mon—I come out here to forget the office and programming and statistics, computers and red tape. I don’t care who plays what. It’s just for a good time.”
“I spend most of my time in New Orleans, art on the square and all that—you can call me a doughboy for all I care. It’s the spirit of this thing,” Ramsay said. “And Lord knows, what happened here couldn’t even be called a battle. My ancestor and most of the Southern boys except for Marshall survived, but, as we’ve all pointed out now—the North won. We are living the United States of America. This wasn’t even really a battle.”
He was right. What had taken place late in 1861 hadn’t even been a battle. Drinking downriver, toward New Orleans, two Yankee spies had heard about Donegal’s then-owner—Marshall Donegal—preparing a major summons to area troops to prepare them for an invasion of New Orleans. In trying to draw Marshall Donegal’s men out further on the subject, they had all gotten into a fistfight when one made a ridiculous statement about Northerners being chickens. The two Confederates suspected the men of being spies, and had run back to Donegal. The spies went back to their headquarters, but they were spies, and thus their numbers were small. On each side, six men were mustered—and, rather than be executed as spies if they were caught, the Union men donned their uniforms.
The fighting had ranged from the stables to the porch of the main house and out to the chapel and cemetery—ending when Captain Marshall Donegal had died of a bayonet wound in his own family graveyard. The enemy had “skedaddled,” according to the Southern side; the rebels had been left in utter defeat, according to their Northern counterparts.
Now, the “battle” was something that taught history, and, largely due to its small size—and the fact that the current owner of the plantation, Ashley’s grandfather, Frazier Donegal, was a history buff and glad to welcome the units on his property—it was a popular event. “Living history” took place frequently at Donegal, as often as once a week, but an actual reenactment was done only once a year. Sometimes the actors doing the reenactments were involved in other locations. Some belonged not just to Civil War units, but Revolutionary War units, and it just depended on where the biggest shindig was going on. Luckily, most of the men who could claim to have had ancestors in the brawl loved the plantation and the nearly exact-to-the-past-moment location of the place, and they usually made this reenactment a priority.
Donegal House was surely one of the prettiest places left on the river road, with memories of the antebellum era held in place. The great house still maintained a gorgeous front. It had been built with magnificent Greek columns and wraparound porches, and elegant tree-shaded entries stretched forever before the front and back doors. The currently used stables, housing only six horses, were next to the house, while the larger stables needed in a bygone era were far back from the house, to the left, riverside, and offered three apartments for those who wanted to stay for the night. The old smokehouse and servants’ quarters were available for rent as well, and sometimes they even rented out five of the rooms in the main house. With Beth there, Ashley’s extraordinarily talented friend and chef, and the efforts they were making with the restaurant and the crazy business that came along with the reenactment, they had chosen this year just to let rooms in the outbuildings.
All this—living history and their bed-and-breakfast rentals—was done to survive into the twenty-first century. But the Donegal family had been letting the place out for nearly thirty years now. And the living history and the reenactments were the true highlights to be found here, distinguishing it from other great plantations along the river.
“Okay, sure. You all are right,” Charles said. “It’s over. Long over. Hell, the Yankees did win the war.”
Cliff laughed. “Still hard to convince my mama and a few other folks I know that it’s true. But thanks, Charles, that’s great. The Yanks are good guys. Man, it’s sad to think back, though, huh? We would have wound up being enemies.”
“Who knows what our feelings would have been back then?” Ashley asked. “We might have chosen to fight for the North.”
“It was a different time, a different lifestyle,” Griffin pointed out. “You’re all indignant now about injustice, but you didn’t live back then. You didn’t grow up in an economy of cotton and sugar.”
“Rich men wanted to stay rich,” Ramsay agreed dryly.
“Who’s being Marshall Donegal today?” Charles asked.
“That would be me,” Ramsay said. “I’ve done it the past five years.” He was quiet a minute; he had done it since Ashley’s father had passed away. “Ashley could don a uniform herself, but she thinks we boys should just be boys. So I get the honor.”
Ramsay was trying to move quickly past the mention of her father, Ashley knew. He had been gone five years now; he had died shortly after her mother. She had accepted their loss—and she knew as well that there would still be a little core of pain when she thought about them, even if she lived to be one hundred. Inwardly, she winced. She hadn’t just lost her father that day; that had been the end of her and Jake. Her fault, her call, and she still wasn’t sure why. He had frightened her, she thought. It seemed he had scratched the surface of something, and she didn’t want to know what was beneath. And still, to this day, she knew that although she had closed the door, she missed Jake. And missing Jake had colored everything else in her life.
“He died,” Charles reminded him. “Marshall Donegal was killed, you know,” he added quickly.
“Well, as we’ve said, the war is long over, so I guess they’re all dead now anyway,” Ramsay pointed out.
“Gentlemen,” Ashley said, speaking at last, “I want you all to know that you are greatly appreciated. You’re all such wonderful actors, taking on whatever role is needed, whenever it’s needed! Charles, the Yankees are great guys. Michael Bonaventure lives in town, and his ancestors lived there as well, right in the heart of the French Quarter. His family left when the war started, because Bonaventure’s ancestor was fighting for the Union. Hadley Mason is from Lafayette, but his ancestors agreed with the Northern cause as well. It will be fun for you to be a Yankee. It’s acting, just like when we act out the encampments. And I truly appreciate you taking on the role.”
“It’s really amazing,” Griffin said. “We do get all tied up in what was. The way the past still has so much to do with the present! Charles, come on, you’re a stepchild. We all really had ancestors back then who were involved with this thing. You’re welcome among us—totally welcome. But, hey, if I had come in on this recently, I’d be happy just to be a part of it all.”
Charles Osgood offered Ashley a weak smile. “Sure. You know me—I’m just happy to be here.”
To Ashley’s surprise, Ramsay Clayton suddenly spoke up again. “Charles, I have an idea. Some of those guys really are my friends. My good friends. I’ll be a Yankee today. You be Marshall Donegal.”
Charles opened his mouth, stunned, and stared at Ramsay. “Oh! Oh, no. I couldn’t take that honor away from you!”
“You get killed, you know,” Ramsay reminded him.
“Oh, like you said, they’re all dead now. I just couldn’t—I really couldn’t.”
“Hey, I think I want to be a Yankee for once,” Ramsay said. “It’s cool. You be Marshall Donegal, and I’ll be a Yankee. No arguments—it’s decided. I’ll be a winner for a change!”
“I don’t know what to say!” Charles told him.
“Say thanks, and let’s get on with it. We have to finish planning this thing,” Ramsay said.
“I’m going to be Marshall Donegal!” Charles said, still awed.
Ashley lowered her head, hiding her laughter. These guys really were like children when it came to the reenactment. They were so dedicated. But it was really good, she reminded herself. They kept history alive. It had been on a trip to Europe with her parents when she had seen the quote that meant so much to her: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It was the philosopher George Santayana who had written those words, and she had seen them above the gates of a concentration camp. So, whether history was sterling or not—pitting man at his best and his worst—it was necessary to remember.
The reenactors did a fantastic job. Although there had been only a small encampment at Donegal Plantation at the time, they recreated a larger one, complete with a medical tent, where surgeries were acted out, officers’ quarters and tents for enlisted men.
“This is a right nice place to meet, but we need to get to business,” Griffin said, winking at Ashley.
“Yeah, Ramsay, looks like you need to skedaddle!” Cliff teased.
“I’m out of here!” Ramsay said, rising. He looked around. “Sadly, I do like Cliff’s digs better than being cramped up in an apartment!”
Griffin was right: they were in a nice place to meet. The office/living quarters in the stables were extremely pleasant; there was no heavy smell of hay, horses or droppings in any way, since the office had long ago been fitted out with air-conditioning and an air purifier to boot. There were a number of trophies along with books on horses, horse care, tack and maps on the shelves around the old massive desk with its iMac and printer. It was the horse master’s realm. No matter the state of riches or poverty the Donegal Plantation might be in, there was always a horse master. These days, the horse master did more than look after the six horses that remained. He was a tour guide, overseer—though they didn’t grow anything other than a few flowers now and then and a tomato plant or two—and general man about the house.
Ashley stood and gave him a shove. “Our apartments are beautiful. Get on out of here, and get this all moving!” She spoke with teasing force. “I’m going out to check on the camp setup and see that everything is running smoothly, then get ready. I’ll leave you gentlemen to agree on the final assignments and action. The day is moving on. We need to be prepared to start with the battle at sundown.”
“Hell, I hope they got a uniform that will fit me!” He winked. Ramsay was a good guy. He had a small house that had once been a working plantation, but his land had been eaten up over the years. Plantation actually meant farm, and Ramsay had no farmland left at all. He spent most of his time in the city, where he actually was a working artist making a nice income.
“I’m off to join the Yankees!”
“Thanks!” Charles Osgood lifted a hand to Ramsay, and then to Ashley, looking dazed. He was getting the prime role for the day, and he still seemed to be surprised.
It didn’t mean as much to Ramsay, Ashley thought, watching him as he walked from the stables to the old barn. He was from here; he’d been born a part of it all. He’d played soldiers over and over again, and though it had been magnanimous of him to hand over the role, she wasn’t sure that Ramsay hadn’t decided that being a Yankee might not be that bad a thing for the day. After all, they ended the day with the Pledge of Allegiance and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Even if they did begin it with a rousing chorus of “Dixie”!
She left Cliff’s to make a quick check of the horses. “Thank God you darlings don’t care if you’re Yankees or rebels!” she said affectionately, pausing to rub Abe’s ears. She saw that the tack for the Northern cavalry was ready for each of the mounts, saddles and saddle blankets set on sawhorses and the bridles with their insignias hanging from hooks right outside the stalls. Abe, Jeff, Varina, Tigger, Nellie and Bobby were all groomed and sleekly beautiful, ready to play their parts. She paused to give Varina a pat; she loved all the horses, but Varina was her special mare, the horse she always chose to ride.
Leaving the stables, Ashley paused for a moment to look across the expanse of acreage to the left, where the tents of the living encampment had been set up. She could see the sutler’s stretch of canvas, and she walked over to see who was working that day. Tourists—parked way down the river road—were milling around the goods for sale. She heard children squealing with delight as they discovered toys from the mid-nineteenth century, just as she heard women ooh and aah over some of the corsets and clothing. She saw that a crowd had gathered around the medical tent where reenactors were doing a spectacular job of performing an amputation. The patient let out a horrific scream, and then passed out. Dr. Ben Austin—playing his ancestor, also Dr. Ben Austin—stood in an apron covered in stage blood and explained the procedure. Ben would later be part of the battle reenactment, but for now, he was explaining medicine. Ashley reached him in time to capture part of his spiel.
“Amputation was frequently the only choice for a Civil War surgeon, and field surgeons could perform an amputation in as little as ten minutes,” Ben told the crowd. “Chloroform existed, but it was scarce. The South had alcohol. When the surgeon could, he would do everything in his power to make the traumatic operation easier for his patient, but at major battles, the pile of amputated limbs could easily grow to be five feet tall. There was no real understanding of germs, and more men died from disease than from wounds or bullets. To carry that further, more men died in the Civil War than in any other American war, and more men died at Sharpsburg, or Antietam, as those of you from the North might know it, than died during the D-Day invasion.”
Ben saw Ashley watching him and lifted a bloody hand. Well, it was covered in faux blood from the faux surgery. Ben knew how to be dramatic. She smiled and waved in return and went on, stopping to chat with some of the women who were cooking, darning or sewing at the living-encampment tents. There were soldiers around as well, explaining Enfield rifles to little boys, whittling, playing harmonicas or engaging in other period activities. One laundress was hanging shirts and long johns out to dry—a nice touch, Ashley thought.
“When the war started, the North already had a commissary department—and the South didn’t,” Matty, the sutler’s wife, was explaining to a group who stood around the campfire she had nurtured throughout the day. “Hardtack—dried biscuits, really—molasses, coffee, sugar, salted beef or pork and whatever they could scrounge off the land was what fed the soldiers, and the South had to scramble to feed the troops. Didn’t matter how rich you were—you were pretty much stuck with what could be gotten. There were points, especially at the beginning of the war, during which the Southern soldiers were doing all right. They were on Southern soil. But war can strip the land. What I’m doing here is boiling salted beef and trying to come up with something like a gravy to soften up the hardtack. With a few precious spices, salt and sugar, it won’t be too bad. A few people can taste, if they like! Of course, I’ve made sure that our hardtack has no boll weevils. The soldiers were fighting every kind of varmint, big and small, to keep their own food.”
Everything seemed to be in perfect order; Ashley’s dreams had been for nothing.
Except, of course, that the reenactment always made her think about Jake.
They were due to leave soon, within the next few days, but since Adam Harrison’s group was still in New Orleans, they finished with the training they were doing there, and waiting for the move, Jake had agreed to go wandering around the French Quarter with his fellow newly minted agent, Whitney Tremont.
“I must admit, I’m going to be sorry to leave New Orleans,” Whitney said. She stared out toward Jackson Square. “There was so much paperwork after the Holloway case, it felt like we were picking up the pieces for days at first. But it’s been nice to have this bit of time to get ready for our move, since we’re all taking up residence in the D.C. area. Though, I’m ex-cited—I mean, we’re going to have offices, Jake. Like really cool offices, in a building in Alexandria—with help! A forensics lab! State-of-the-art equipment.”
Jake grinned. “Yes, it’s going to be interesting to get settled in.”
Whitney grinned back. Her skin was like the café au lait that sat before them. He knew that the others had thought the two of them might wind up together, but what they had formed instead was a friendship, deep and binding.
“But it was good, I think—just being thrown together as freelancers of a sort for our first case. Don’t you think?” she asked. “But federal positions … though I don’t think we really get to stay in those fancy buildings that often, do you?”
“We’re like any other team or unit for the FBI, I believe. The cases come in, and I’m assuming that Adam Harrison and Jackson Crow decide what looks like something we should take on. We’ll get to discuss the situation then. And make the plans.”
“Do you think that any of us could put a case forward?” she asked.
“Sure.” He smiled. “Let’s face it, Whitney, we are an experiment in paranormal investigations. We’re unique, and I’m sure there are those who will make fun of the ‘Krewe of Hunters’ unit.”
“Not anymore. Not after the Holloway case,” she said proudly.
“We have to keep proving that we’re good at what we do,” Jake said. The name “Krewe” they’d given themselves had begun as a joke, but they’d become a real crew through their passion for the work.
“Hmm,” Whitney said, twirling her straw in her iced café au lait. “It’s here somewhere.”
“Here? What’s here? Sometimes you make no sense.”
That made her laugh. “Only sometimes? I think that our new case is going to be here. Somewhere in Louisiana.”
“We’re about to move to Alexandria,” he pointed out.
“I don’t know … I just have a feeling. I don’t think we’ll be going yet. You wait and see.”
“What makes you think that?” Jake asked. Whitney’s prowess was with film, sound and video. But she also seemed to have amazing intuition. Of course, they had all been gathered into the group because of their intuition, their ability to solve problems where others could not, but where Angela Hawkins was quiet, finding what she found without much ado, and Jackson would always be the skeptic, Whitney went in wide-eyed, eager for whatever might not be considered normal.
“Feelings and logic, that’s kind of the Krewe of Hunters motto, right?” she asked.
He laughed, but something was knotting in the pit of his stomach. “I think it’s supposed to be logic—and then feelings,” he told her. He gazed idly across the street. The mule-drawn carriages were starting to arrive in front of Jackson Square. An early-morning tour group was forming on Decatur Street. One of the history tours, he thought.
“Well, of course, good old Jackson, he’s still swearing solving cases is all logic, and we all know that he knows best,” Whitney said.
Jake wasn’t really paying attention. He had seen the tour-group leader come out—he wasn’t sure where she had come from. Of course, there were a number of restaurants and bars in the area, and some had been open forever. It was New Orleans. No one frowned if you discovered you were dying for that 8:00 a.m. drink.
The tour guide was a blonde woman dressed in Civil War attire. Her bonnet hid her face, but she was tall and statuesque, and he had a feeling that she was going to be an attractive woman before he saw her face. Assured, probably in her mid to late thirties, she moved among the chattering crowd as they waited.
She was coming toward the sidewalk, politely excusing herself as she did so, but people didn’t seem to notice as she made her way through them, which said a lot for the good nature of the group, since she was wearing a respectable day dress with large hoops.
She paused when she reached the sidewalk.
Jake started. She was staring straight at him, and she smiled, but her smile seemed to be very sad. Her mouth moved. He squinted. He wasn’t all that much at reading lips, but it was almost as if he could hear her.
“We’re waiting, we need you. Hurry,” he thought she said.
“Jake?”
“Huh?” He turned back to look at Whitney.
“Want to move on?” she asked.
“Yes, sure,” he agreed. He stood and left a tip on the table, having already paid the waiter.
When he glanced up again, the tour had moved on down toward the cathedral. He didn’t see the woman, but they would be walking in the same direction.
“Whitney,” he asked as they did so, “did you understand what that woman was trying to say?”
“What woman?”
“She was the guide for that group that’s ahead of us. She looked right over at us and said something,” Jake told her.
Whitney arched a delicately formed brow. “First, I didn’t see the woman, but I wasn’t looking. And second, if she’d spoken from across the street, unless she’d been yelling, how could I have heard anything she had to say?”
He shrugged. “Good point.”
They walked up St. Ann Street, took a pedestrian thruway as they passed by the square, then turned in right in front of the cathedral, where the tour group had now paused.
The woman wasn’t with them. There was a man in a top hat and frock coat leading the tour.
Jake stopped short.
“Hey! Hey there, remember me?” Whitney said, nudging him.
“Just a second,” Jake said. He knew that the man would finish his spiel about St. Louis Cathedral, and then allow the group to take pictures.
This guide, however, apparently liked to hear himself speak. He added in several personal anecdotes regarding the cathedral, before allowing his group to disperse for pictures.
When the group finally thinned, Jake approached him. The fellow, in his mid-twenties, saw them coming.
“The tour offices are actually on Decatur, sir, if you’re interested in any of our offerings. We do history tours, ghost tours, vampire tours, plantation tours—”
“Actually, we’re locals and could do the tours,” Jake said, interrupting him with a pleasant tone. “I’m just curious—why did you all change tour guides at the last minute?”
The man frowned. “We didn’t. I’ve been scheduled for over a week to do this tour.”
Jake frowned. “I saw a woman with your group. She was dressed in antebellum clothing, bonnet and all.”
“Oh, she was probably heading for Le Petit Theatre,” the tour guide said. “They’re doing several performances of Our American Cousin. She’s a bit early to be in costume for the matinee, but I imagine you saw one of the actresses.”
“Oh, well, thanks,” Jake said.
“Why?”
“Oh, I just thought she was trying to tell me something,” Jake said.
“If she was trying to tell you something, wouldn’t she have just done so?” the man asked.
Jake was irritated by the tone; frankly, he hadn’t liked the man since he’d heard him giving his own life’s history along with the tour.
He felt Whitney’s hand on his arm.
He forced a smile. “Thanks, thanks for the help,” he said.
Whitney pulled him along. “Jerk,” she said.
“Ass,” Jake agreed.
“I meant you,” Whitney teased. “No, sorry—he was a jerk. But come on now! We don’t have any reason to go to the theater.”
“But we’re going to pass it!” Jake protested.
“Let it go, Jake. You saw an actress, and you thought she had something to say. Without sounding just as jerky as that jerk, it’s true—if she’d really wanted to talk to you, she would have come on over. I don’t want to help you stalk a woman, Jake.”
“I don’t want to stalk her. I want to know who she is,” Jake said.
But they did pass right by Le Petit Theatre. He couldn’t help but stop to read the playbill and look at the pictures of the actors in the show.
“She’s not here,” he said.
“Well, God knows, this is New Orleans. Maybe she’s just a kook who likes to dress up in Southern belle attire, though God knows why, the heat can be a bitch. Forget it, Jake.”
Jake agreed. He didn’t know why it was bothering him so much that he’d seen the woman and hadn’t been able to talk to her.
That wasn’t true. He did know. There had been something vaguely familiar about her, although he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.
“Jake? Are you okay?” Whitney asked.
“Fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
“It’s nothing, really. Hey, nothing that car bombs tonight after dinner with the group won’t cure, right?” he said, setting an arm around her shoulders as he led her down the street.
Car bombs weren’t going to fix anything. He was truly disturbed by the woman.
Why was she so familiar? Was she real, or was she in his imagination? Had he brought his dream world to the surface, and did he want her to be from Donegal?
It was absurd, even for a ghost hunter, to believe that someone from the past was calling out to him, trying to reach him.
Logic—and then feelings. That was Jackson Crow’s motto. It was only logical that he think about Ashley now, and logical that even after all these years, he wanted her to need him.
Logic …
Somehow, it just wasn’t working. Feelings were taking over. And thoughts of Ashley and Donegal Plantation.
2
Ashley surveyed the expanse of the property one last time; everything was going extremely well. Children were playing and laughing, the camp looked wonderful and there were activities going on everywhere.
She headed for the house. It was time for her to become Emma Donegal and get ready for the evening’s battle.
But as she walked toward the house, she slowed, paused and looked over at the cemetery. The gate was locked.
Still, a creeping feeling of unease swept over her.
She shrugged it off; a dream was a dream. Good God, she’d dreamed once that she’d kissed Vance Thibault in high school one day, and she loathed him! She hurried on toward the house, trying to forget her unease.
Her grandfather, Frazier Donegal, was sitting on the back porch. She grinned; he looked spectacular, she thought. Frazier was eighty-three, but he showed little sign of slowing down. Today he was dressed in a frock coat, pinstripe breeches and high riding boots—a pure gentleman of the age with his full head of snow-white, a Colonel Sanders mustache and goatee, and bright blue eyes. She worried about him constantly; his health was good, but he was eighty-three.
He was really in the mood today, though, she thought. He was sipping a mint julep. He didn’t even like mint juleps.
“There you are!” he said. “I was starting to wonder.”
Ashley sat in one of the wicker rockers across from him. “Last-minute details in the stables,” she told him. “Charles Osgood didn’t want to be a Yankee.”
Frazier rolled his eyes and shook his head. “It works, you know, for the property, it works. But why on earth everyone always wants to be on the losing side, I’ll just never know. Did he finally accept his assignment?”
“He did—but Ramsay Clayton stepped in at the last minute to let him play Marshall Donegal,” Ashley said.
“Oh?”
“I don’t think Ramsay cares. It’s all play to him,” she said.
“Ramsay is a good fellow. You think he was trying to appear magnanimous in front of you?” Frazier asked.
Ashley shook her head. “There’s never going to be anything between Ramsay and me, Grampa, there just isn’t.”
He lifted his hands. “I was just asking about his motives.”
Ramsay had asked Ashley out the previous year; she had always liked him. He was a good artist, and a handsome man, but she had never felt the least bit of chemistry with him. He had accepted her wish that they just maintain a good friendship. Ramsay had been on the rebound, having broken up with his longtime lover. She wondered if she was still on the rebound—even if she had been the one who had run from Jake.
“I honestly believe Ramsay just doesn’t care,” Ashley said. “I think he’ll have fun saying, ‘Oh, Lord! I had to be a Yankee.’ No, Ramsay isn’t trying to impress me. Griffin even asked me to be his friendly companion for a dinner he had—and I said no. They all understand that the friendships we have are too important.”
“Well, then, good for Ramsay. And you—you better get dressed,” Frazier told her.
“Yep, I’m on it.”
She rose and walked into the house from the riverside.
The original architects had taken advantage of the river and bayou breezes when they had built the house. It hadn’t been changed much since the day it had been built. One long hallway stretched from the front of the house to the back, and before the advent of air-conditioning, the double doors on each end had often been kept open. The house had one unique feature: double winding staircases to a second-floor landing that led to the six bedrooms, three on each side of the house on that floor. The stairway to the third floor, or attic, where there were still two rooms that could be guest rooms or let out to renters, was on the second floor, bayou side, of the house.
Beth Reardon was in Ashley’s room, sitting at the foot of the bed and drawing laces through her corset.
Her skin was pure ebony; she was tall, regal and beautifully built. But she had chosen to get into the action. She was wearing a cotton skirt and cotton blouse and her hair was wrapped up in a bandana. She gazed over at Ashley. “Hey! Time is a-wasting, girl. Where have you been?”
“Settling an argument over who had to be a Yankee,” Ashley told her.
“Yankee. That’s the North, right?” Beth asked. Beth was from New York, and before that, her family had lived in Jamaica. Her accent, however, was all American, and none of her ancestors had been in the United States during the Civil War.
Ashley frowned.
Beth laughed. “Just kidding! Come on, I took history classes.”
“Sorry!” Ashley said.
“You should be. Let’s get you in this ridiculous contraption. So, people really churned butter in these things? No, wait—your relatives sat around looking pretty while the slaves and servants churned the butter, right?”
“Actually, in our family, everyone worked. And I think that everyone had to sweat when churning butter. Most of the time, the plantation mistress had to work really hard.”
“Supervising?”
“And making soap and doing laundry and all the rest,” Ashley said. “Well, maybe if you were really, really, really rich you just sat around. We were rich, but not that rich, and if we’re ever going to be rich again, it’s up to you, since I can barely boil water.” Beth had come to work at Donegal as the chef less than a year ago, determined to make the restaurant one of the most important in the South.
“Anyone can boil water,” Beth assured her. “And you cook okay. You’re not great, but, then, you are one hell of a storyteller. Step into the skirts already, I’m dying to see this show.”
Arranging the layers of clothing that constituted the formal dress of a Southern plantation mistress took some time. They both laughed over the absurdity of the apparel that had been required in Louisiana despite the heat and the humidity. Ashley told Beth, “It’s worse for the guys. The authentic uniforms are wool—those poor little puppies just die out there.”
“Well, honey, I think I’m glad that I’m the unpaid help for this shindig, then,” Beth told her, grinning.
“Cotton like this—it’s nothing. And I do love the bandana! Poor Emma.”
“Yes, it really was poor Emma,” Ashley told her. “Lots of the soldiers left journals about what happened at the battle. It was only after the war that the rumors about Emma having killed her husband got started. It’s as if someone wanted to sully her name. Of course, nothing that we can find was written about her having been charged with the crime.”
“But it was a different time. Maybe she did the unthinkable. Maybe she took a lover. Maybe even, God forbid, he was a Yankee or a carpetbagger!”
“Maybe,” Ashley agreed. “From all the family lore, she loved her husband, she was devastated when he died, and she managed to hold on to the property and raise her children here, even though the South lost and carpetbaggers did sweep down on the South. Carpetbaggers were even more despised than Yanks,” she explained. “They were the people who weren’t fighting for a cause—their cause was just to prey off the vanquished and get rich.”
A few minutes later, Ashley was ready, and they headed back to the porch that faced the river. A crowd had already gathered, since the schedule for the day was printed out on brochures that attendees could pick up at the entrance to the property. A high-school student, seeking extra credit in history, was usually given that job.
Ashley came out to stand next to her grandfather, looking out over the property as she could see it from the back porch. Bright tape in blue and gray cordoned off the areas where the reenactors would move during the events, though they no longer went into the cemetery for the moment of Marshall Donegal’s death and the tactical retreat of the two surviving Union soldiers.
She found herself staring at the cemetery off to her left again. An odd tremor washed over her, but she quickly forgot it and looked at Frazier.
“Nice crowd today,” he said quietly. Ashley squeezed his hand.
The small band—posing as the military band that had been part of Marshall Donegal’s cavalry unit—launched into the haunting strains of “Dixie.”
Frazier Donegal began to speak midway through, giving an excellent history lesson. He didn’t shy away from the slavery question, admitting that cotton was king in the South, and sugarcane, and both needed workers. The citizens of the South had not invented slavery; many had clung to it whether, in their hearts, they accepted the injustice or not. Few men like to admit they were wrong or cruel to their fellow human beings. And they had hardly been magnanimous when it meant they would also lose their livelihood. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was history. Then as now, prejudice was not something with which a man was born—it was something that was taught. He spoke with passion, conviction and sincerity, and a thunderous round of applause greeted his words; he would have been a great politician, Ashley thought. Except that he had never cared about politics; he had always cared about people.
The first roar of close fire sounded from the stables area, and people screamed and jumped. It was all sound and black powder. There was no live ammunition at the reenactment.
The Yankees, mounted on their horses, rode in hard from the east, dismounting at the stables to use the buildings as defensive positions as they began their attack.
Ashley went on to introduce herself as Emma Donegal. She told about the beginning of the war, and how her husband, Marshall Donegal, famed for his exploits in the Mexican-American War more than ten years earlier, had returned to the military, raising a cavalry unit for the Louisiana militia that would be ready to join the Confederate army at any time. But federal forces were always spying in Louisiana. It would be the Union naval leader, David Farragut, a seasoned sailor, who would assault New Orleans and take the city in 1862, but before that time, Union forces snuck down regularly to survey the situation and report back on the Confederate forces guarding the city. The battle at Donegal Plantation began when the federal spies who had participated in the bar brawl rode swiftly to the plantation in uniform, hoping to engage the Confederates before they could summon more men. At Donegal Plantation, however, four of the spies died at the hands of the small Confederate force to be found there, and the only Confederate casualty was Marshall Donegal himself, who had succumbed to the onslaught of the federals, killing three before falling in a pool of his own blood. She explained that history longed to blame her—Emma Donegal—but she was innocent. Truly, she was innocent! The world hadn’t changed that much; people loved to talk, and everyone wanted there to be more to the story. There simply wasn’t. She and her husband had been married thirteen years; they had four children they were raising happily together. She was heartsick at her husband’s death and survived her grief only because she had to keep food on the table for her children.
Of course, she knew the story like the back of her hand. She told it well and was greeted with wild applause when she pointed across the yard. “There! It all begins!”
And thus began the round of shots that made the expanse of land between the stables and the house rich and ripe with black powder. The federals had been traveling with a small, easily maneuvered six-pound howitzer, and in their attempts to seize the property, they sent their bronze cannon balls sailing for the house and ground. In fact, they had missed. At the time, their attempts to use the small cannon had done little but rip up great chunks of the earth. Today, it caused the air to become heavy with black powder.
“The Confederates had to stop the attack before the barn, stables and outbuildings could be set afire,” Frazier Donegal announced from the porch, with a microphone, his voice rich and deep and rising well above the screams and shouting.
Though there was no live ammunition, the small fight clearly taught onlookers just how horrendous it must have been for men in major battles. As the Confederates and federals fought here with guerilla tactics, Ashley asked the crowd to imagine thousands of men marching forward side by side, some of them able to reload three times in a minute. The carnage was terrible. The Civil War was considered to be the last of the ancient wars—and the first of the modern wars.
The defenders split, most of the men rushing the stables from the front. But the Yankees had come around the other side, and in their maneuvering they escaped the body of men they had been determined to fight. One of the attackers was killed at the stables; the others made it around to the cemetery, attempting to use the old vaults as shields. But Marshall Donegal had come around the other side, and while his men were held up, he met up with the attackers at the cemetery.
The fighting originally ended inside the cemetery, but now they ended it just outside, the only difference from that day to this. First, the crowd wouldn’t be able to see any of the action if it occurred there, and, with that many people tramping through, historic funerary art could be destroyed. And so, Charles Osgood, as Marshall, brought down several of the enemy and perished, brutally stabbed to death by bayonets, in front of the gates. The two surviving federal men—Justin Binder and Ramsay—raced toward the stables, whistling for their mounts. They leapt atop their horses and tore for the river road.
Frazier announced, “And thus did the fighting at Donegal Plantation come to an end.”
They said the Pledge of Allegiance, and then the band played “Dixie” and then “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” After the burst of applause that followed the last song, people began to surround the actors—who had remained in the battle positions where they had fallen—as they came to their feet, and they all seemed to disappear into the crowd as they were congratulated, questioned and requested for picture-taking opportunities. Then, at last, the crowd began to melt away, and the sutler began to close down his shop.
Darkness was falling in earnest.
It had been a tremendous success; standing on the porch and watching the crowd ebb, Ashley told herself that she’d been an idiot, letting a dream get to her.
But, as she looked out, it seemed that the plantation was covered in a mist again.
It was the remnants of the black powder from the guns, she told herself.
The mist bore a reddish color. Bloodred.
The sun had set in the west; it was due to the dying of the day.
Whatever the explanation, the entire scene was eerie.
A breeze lifted, and she had the odd feeling that somehow everything had gone askew and changed, and she had somehow entered into a world of mist and shadow herself.
“Well, old girl,” Frazier said quietly, smiling as he set a hand on Ashley’s shoulder. “Another wonderful day. Thank you for all your hard work on this.”
Ashley smiled. Her grandfather was happy. She adored Frazier, and she was always glad when he was happy. She worried about him constantly—driving him crazy, she knew. He had always been somewhat bony—though dignified! But now he seemed thinner, his cheeks hollow. He was old; but a man’s life span could be long, and she wanted him with her for many more years. Now he was smiling, basking in the pleasant glow of the day’s success.
“Come on. Let’s head into the parlor,” Frazier said. “I think we should probably be there to toast our actors and friends, eh?”
The family and some friends—including the soldiers for the day—traditionally retired to the riverside parlor for drinks and unwinding.
“You go on,” Ashley said. “I’ll be right there, I promise. I just want to see that everyone is really moving on.”
Her grandfather gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I’m sure Beth has already put out all manner of delicious little snacks, despite the fact we told her that chips would do. I’ll go supervise my liquor cabinet,” he said, wiggling his white brows.
She grinned. “You’d better do that. Ramsay will say that he deserves your hundred-year-old Scotch for being so generous!”
Frazier pantomimed real fear and then walked on into the house. Ashley was exhausted and ready for a fine glass of hundred-year-old Scotch herself.
But she left the porch to walk around to the front for one last look. Jerry Blake, one of the off-duty officers they hired for traffic and crowd control, was still out by the road, waving at the last of the cars to get them safely on their way. She lifted a hand to him and shouted, “You coming in, Jerry?”
He waved back at her and shouted in return, “No, thanks! I’m on my way home. I have an early patrol shift tomorrow. See you, Ashley!”
A minute later, she saw him check that the day visitors’ cars were all gone. Then he headed for his own car.
The buzz of chatter from inside filled the new silence. She followed the sound to the front parlor, where the reenactors were gathering. Looking around, she had the same strange sense of time encapsulated that she had felt before; none of the soldiers had changed out of their uniforms yet, and she was still in her Emma Donegal attire. Even Beth, who had seemed to get a tremendous sense of entertainment out of the day, was still in her 1860s garb. Some of the men had cigars, and they were allowed to smoke them in the house that night. Only the beer bottle in the hand of Matty Martin, the sutler’s wife, provided a modern note.
Matty came over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Why, Mrs. Emma Donegal, you do create a mighty fine party, a mighty fine party! What a day!”
“Why, thank you, Mrs. Martin,” Ashley said, inclining her head regally as a plantation mistress of the day might have done.
Matty dropped the act for a minute. “Oh, Ashley, we sold so much! And I can’t tell you how many people ordered custom uniforms. I’ll be sewing my fingers to the bone for the next months, but what a great day we had.”
“I’m so glad,” Ashley told her. She walked for the buffet with its crocheted doily and poured herself a Scotch whiskey—it wasn’t a hundred years old, but it would do. Others came up to her and she responded—so many friends, and everyone involved in the reenactment. The men bowed and kissed her hand, still playing elite gentlemen of the era.
Ramsay grinned when he was near her. “I’d say ninety percent of the fighting men never tasted a good brandy, so I’m sure glad we get to be the rich of the past.”
She smiled, and agreed. “Wouldn’t it be something if we could have Lee and Grant, and Davis and Lincoln, and show them all that the war created the country we have now?”
Griffin walked over to them, lifting his glass. “Grant was an alcoholic. A functional one, but an alcoholic. No relation, of course. My Grant family was Southern to the core. Cheers!”
“You’re a cynic, Mr. Grant,” Ashley said, inclining her head.
Griffin laughed. “Not at all. We strive for an understanding of history around here, right?”
“We do,” Ashley agreed. “And, historically, many of them were truly honorable people. Can you imagine being Mrs. Robert E. Lee—and losing a historic family home, built by George Washington’s stepgrandson and filled with objects that had belonged to George and Martha? Remember, Arlington was a home long before it became a national cemetery!”
“Cheers to that, I suppose,” Griffin said. “Whiskey, Mrs. Donegal? Why, my dear woman, you should be sipping sherry with the other wives!”
“I need a whiskey tonight!”
Ramsay and Griffin laughed, and she joined them while she listened to her guests chatting. Some of the other men argued history, too—and she saw that everyone involved in the actual reenactment had shown up. Cliff, Ramsay, Hank, Griffin, Toby and John—and the Yankees, Michael Bonaventure, Hadley Mason, Justin Binder, Tom Dixon and Victor Quibbly, along with John Martin, of course, and Dr. Ben Austin.
Everyone but Charles Osgood. She couldn’t imagine that he wasn’t there. He must have been thrilled to death with the day.
“Hey, where’s Charles?” Ashley asked, interrupting a rousing discussion of Farragut’s naval prowess.
A few of those close to her quit talking to look around.
“I haven’t seen him since he very dramatically died of his wounds,” Ramsay said. “I ‘skedaddled’ right after and rode out with Justin, before we rode back to take our fair share of the applause.”
“Cliff?” Ashley asked.
Cliff shook his head. “No, I was with the soldiers who came rushing in too late when Charles was being besieged by the enemy. I thought he just stood up and bowed when everyone was clapping. I don’t remember seeing him when you and Frazier started talking … or when the band played.”
“He’s probably outside somewhere. I’ll call his cell,” Ramsay said. He pulled out his phone and hit a number of buttons.
Ashley watched him. She realized the others had already turned away and were becoming involved in their conversations again.
Ramsay shook his head at her. “No answer.”
Cliff cleared his throat. “Not to be disrespectful in any way, but maybe he met a girl and—got lucky.”
“Yeah for Charles!” Justin Binder said, lifting his glass. He was somewhat tipsy—if not drunk—Ashley thought. Good thing he was staying on the property. The others were all still playacting; they were entrenched in the past.
They didn’t want to look for someone they obviously believed was just off enjoying his own star turn. But …
“He would have wanted to be here tonight,” Ashley said stubbornly. “He was so thrilled to be taking the part of Marshall Donegal. I’m going out to see if his car is still here.”
Ramsay lifted a hand. “Sorry, don’t bother, Ashley. He didn’t drive. He came with me. I told him that I couldn’t give him a ride back since I was going to stay at the house out here for a while, but he told me he’d hitch a ride back in with someone. Said he didn’t have to be back to work until Tuesday morning and for me not to worry.”
“Gentlemen, perhaps a search is in order,” Frazier said. “A Civil War parlor game of sorts.”
They all stared at him blankly.
“Exactly,” Ashley said, relief coloring her tone. “Find the lost rebel. Beth will create a five-star private meal for a party of four, payable to the man—or woman—who finds Charles!”
“I will?” Beth said. She looked at Ashley. “Um, it will be—sumptuous!”
“It’s a lot of property to cover,” Ramsay murmured.
“We need to organize, then,” Griffin said. “It will be fun. Yankees take the cemetery side, and rebels search out the bayou side.”
“Is that fair?” Griffin asked. “If he’s still around, old Charlie would be by the cemetery, don’t you think?”
“I pick scouting detail!” Justin said.
“Yes! Let’s find Charles!” Toby said.
“I’ll check out the area around the oaks out front,” Matty Martin offered. She was watching Ashley and seemed to realize that Ashley was seriously worried. “John, you can come with me. It’s mighty dark out there, even with all the lights from the house and the property floodlights.”
“Of course, my dear,” John told her. “They should have let women fight the war,” he muttered, following her out.
Hank laughed. “Yeah, imagine, mud wrestling at its best.”
“Hank!” Cliff admonished. “War is always a serious affair.”
“Well, of course it is,” Griffin said. “War is very serious—but we’re not at war. We’re playing a game. We’re looking for old Charles. Hey, Ashley, if no one wins …”
“Well, at some point, we’ll just all have dinner,” she told them.
“Great!” Beth muttered to her. “Now I get to cook for all of them!”
“It’s good that I’ve got the bayou side!” Toby Keaton said. “Borders my property.”
“I’ll take the cemetery,” Frazier said.
“You will not. It’s dark and dangerous in there,” Ashley told him.
“Not for me, dear. It’s memories for me,” he said softly, and quickly turned away. Neither of them wanted to think about Ashley’s parents, entombed in the majestic family vault.
“Grampa, please—you need to be here as everyone returns,” Ashley said.
“I’ll take the cemetery,” Ben offered. “I’m really familiar with the living and the dead,” he added and winked. “Just give me one of the big old flashlights at the back door. I’ll be fine.”
Ben would be fine. He was a big, strapping man in his mid-forties. Besides, he’d attended funerals for both her parents and knew the cemetery well.
Ashley wanted to take the cemetery herself; that dream had to have been a sign.
No, that would be insane. Ben knew what he was doing. She wasn’t going to let a dream dictate what she did in her life.
“Okay, so where are we going?” Beth asked Ashley.
“The stables?” Ashley suggested.
“I’ll come with you and stand there, but I’m not going near the horses!”
An hour later, they had finished the actual search as best they could in the night.
Ramsay went to speak with the guests who were staying in the rooms that had been the old stables, and the Yankee contingent spoke with those in the other outbuildings. Cliff went to his office, wondering if Charles might have slipped in there to rest.
They all searched, from the river to the road, from the sugar fields to the bayou, but there was no sign of Charles Osgood. By midnight, all the searchers were back at the house.
“Ashley, really, he must be out somewhere else,” Cliff told her.
She looked at Ben. “You searched everywhere in the cemetery? There are so many paths, little roads between all the vaults.”
Ben sighed. “Ashley, I searched. But we can all take another look.”
She nodded.
“That was actually not a suggestion,” Ben said.
“It’s all right. I’ll go myself,” Ashley said.
“We’ll help,” Ramsay said, tugging at Cliff’s sleeve.
“I’ve still got the key, so I’ll come, too,” Ben said.
Ashley led the way, wondering why she thought that she’d really find Charles in the cemetery, just because she’d had a dream.
But she was determined.
Ben opened the lock on the gate, though, of course, they could have all crawled over the stone wall.
Ashley headed straight for her family tomb. The real Marshall Donegal had died there.
The last interment had been her father’s. The usual little pain in her heart sparked—it always came when
she thought about him, and her mother. And tonight, especially, she missed Jake.
There was no sign of Charles there, and no sign that he had been there.
She almost fell, she was so relieved.
The tomb glowed white beneath the gentle touch of the moon, dignified in its decaying majesty. She heard the three men calling to one another from different sections of the graveyard, and she followed a voice to reach Cliff. He looked at her. “Ashley, Charles left. Whether he was spirited away by aliens or not, I don’t know. But he isn’t here. This isn’t any parlor game, is it? You’re really worried.”
“I am. Did you go in the chapel?” she asked.
“You think that Charles is hiding in the chapel? Or kneeling down, still thanking the good Lord for the chance to be Marshall Donegal?” Cliff asked dryly.
“Please, Cliff?”
He groaned. He walked around the ell that would lead them to the chapel, in the far corner near the embankment of the river. The chapel had carved oak double doors, which creaked when he opened them. He fumbled for the light switch, and light flared in the lovely little place with its stained-glass windows, marble altar and old mahogany podium.
The place was empty.
“Happy?” Cliff asked her.
“No. I can’t help it—I’m worried,” she told him.
He just shook his head. “Come on. Let’s just go.”
They walked back to the house, where the others were still milling on the back porch—many of them having retrieved their drinks.
“So, the bastard did get lucky!” Ramsay said, laughing. “Hell, if I had foreseen that, I’d have had him play Marshall Donegal a couple of years ago!”
“I’m going to call the police,” Ashley said, looking at her grandfather.
“He’s been missing just a few hours,” Beth pointed out. “He might have thought that he said good-night to everyone. There’s so much confusion going on when the fighting ends. I mean, I thought it was amazing—it really was living history. But it’s mass confusion. I can only imagine a Gettysburg reenactment.”
Ashley realized that everyone was staring at her—skeptically. They had searched and searched, and grown bored and tired. But she couldn’t help her feelings of unease, even while they all stood silent, just staring at her.
The river breeze brought the chirp of the chickadees—her senses were so attuned to her home area that somewhere, distantly, down the bayou, she thought she could hear an alligator slip into the water. This was her home; she knew these sounds.
They were normal; they were natural. But the sounds of the darkness weren’t reassuring to her now.
“Grampa, I think we need to report this to the police,” she repeated.
“Great. He’s probably at some bar in the big city, bragging about the fact that he got to play Marshall Donegal today,” Ramsay said. “And they’ll drag him out and he’ll act like a two-year-old again.”
Frazier stared at Ashley and nodded. If she wanted to call the police, they would do so.
The parish police were called, and Officer Drew Montague, a nice-enough man whom Ashley had met a few times over the years, took all the information.
“You say you all saw him just a few hours ago?” he asked. Montague had a thick head of dark hair and eyebrows that met in the middle.
“Yes,” she said.
“What makes you think that he’s actually missing? Perhaps there’s a woman involved. Is he married? Look, Miss Donegal, you know that we appreciate everything that you do for the area, but … we’re talking about a grown man who has been gone just a few hours,” the officer said.
“He was proud of the role he was playing. He would have stayed,” Ashley insisted.
Officer Montague shifted his weight. “Look, I’ve taken the report, and I’ll put out a local bulletin to be on the lookout for him, but he’s an adult. An adult really needs to be gone for forty-eight hours before he is officially missing.”
Frazier spoke before Ashley could. “Anything you can do will be greatly appreciated. We’re always proud that the parish is about people, and not just red tape and rules.”
Montague nodded. “Right. Well, I’ll get this moving, then. We’ll all be on the lookout for Mr. Osgood.”
Ashley thanked him. The others had remained behind, politely and patiently waiting. Now it was really late, and once again there were a number of weary men and women—all still in Civil War–era attire—staring at her.
Officer Montague left, mollified by Frazier Donegal over the fact that he had been called out on a ridiculous mission.
“I’m sorry,” Ashley said to the others. The evening had started out as a party and turned into a search committee.
“Hey,” Cliff said, grinning, “I don’t have far to go home.”
“We’re staying in the stables anyway, kid,” Justin Binder told her. He had played a Yankee, and happily. His family hailed from Pennsylvania.
Griffin laughed and gave her an affectionate hug. “You made me sober up, which is good. I am driving.”
“Me, too,” John Ashton said. He held her shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Charles is just fine. I’m sure of it.”
She thanked them all and said good-night, and they drifted away, some to the old outbuildings where they were staying, and some to their cars, parked in the lot out front and down the road.
She stood on the porch with Beth and her grandfather.
She couldn’t tell whether they thought she was being ridiculous or not, they were both so patient.
Beth gave her a kiss on the cheek and said, “We still have about sixteen guests, and the household. I’ve got to get up early to whip up our spectacular plantation breakfast.”
Ashley bid her good-night. It was down to her grandfather and herself, and Frazier was going to wait for her to be ready to head off to bed.
“Something is wrong. I can feel it, Grampa,” she said.
He set an arm around her shoulder. “You know … I have an old friend. I’ve been meaning to call him for a long time—tonight seems a good time to have a chat with him. If Charles really is gone, he may be able to help us. His name is Adam Harrison. I don’t know if you remember meeting him—I see him up in Virginia and D.C. sometimes. He worked for private concerns for many years, finding the right investigators for strange situations. Then the government started calling him, and his projects were all kind of combined for a while, civilian and federal. But he’s got a special unit now, and he’s got federal power behind him on it. His people are a select group from the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. I’ll give him a call. We’ll get someone out here to help by tomorrow. And if Charles turns up, no harm done.”
She lowered her head. Adam Harrison. She knew the name. His unit had been involved in solving the death of Regina Holloway—it had been all over the media because she was a senator’s wife. And she knew, too, that Jake Mallory was part of that unit. She might not be a part of his world, but she hadn’t been able to miss it when she’d seen his name in the papers. She had broken off something that had been real with Jake, because he had terrified her … because he was certain that he had spoken with her father, after he had died. And now….
Now Frazier was going to call Adam. Of course, it could come to nothing. She was panicking over a missing man because of an equally irrational dream.
She looked out on the beautiful expanse of their property. The river rolling by. The moon high over the clouds. The vaults in the cemetery silent and ghostly and opalescent in the pale glow of night.
Jake, I’m so … scared.
Something was wrong. It was the oddest thing; she felt that she really understood the expression I feel it in my bones. Something wasn’t right about Charles’s disappearance, and she knew it.
It was almost as if the past had truly merged into this eerie and haunting reality, and the collision of time here was not going to go away.
Interlude
He’d known for a long time what he’d had to do. The voice had been telling him for years.
At first, of course, he had ignored it. The vision he’d seen of the past hadn’t been real. But then he’d known. He’d known who he was, and he’d come to know that the voice wouldn’t go away until he’d done what needed to be done. And he’d carefully planned it all out, though things had gone a bit strangely today. Didn’t matter, though, who was playing Marshall Donegal. It didn’t matter at all. Because, of course, an actor was just an actor.
It was Donegal Plantation itself that needed to repay the old debt. That old debt could only be repaid one way.
With blood.
God bless a crowd. There was nothing in the world like mayhem, nothing like hundreds of witnesses to pull off an escapade such as he had planned, and to do it perfectly.
There had been a horde surrounding them. One particular brunette was the right age, exceptionally pretty and with a Massachusetts accent. When she spoke, there was an r on the name Linda, and there was no r on the car she had “pahked” down the river road.
She had giggled when she spoke to Charles, so it was easy to whisper in the man’s ear in his moment of greatest achievement and convince him that the girl was waiting to meet him.
And in the madness surrounding everyone engaged in the action then, it was easy enough to meld into the crowd himself, and to swiftly disappear, and hurry to the river road.
And there was Charles.
He’d approached Charles with a smile.
And, of course, Charles was smiling as well. At least he would go in a state of sheer happiness. It might even be a kindness. How many people got to die that happy?
Poor, dumb Charles—he never suspected a thing. After the initial whack, he never even felt the prick of the needle.
He’d thought it all out, exactly where he’d send Charles, because it all had to be done in plain sight. In plain sight, people never really knew what they saw.
There were tourists heading to their cars. But they’d never notice two fellows in uniform chatting by a car. Not at an event like this. People liked to dress up.
Maybe everyone wanted to be someone else, someone they weren’t.
But to them, it would just appear that they were two cronies, faces covered by their broad-brimmed hats, leaning against one another as they chatted and laughed over a joke.
Then … hide the body. Or if he had been seen, “help” an inebriated friend into a car.
He would need more time for the pièce de résistance. Initially, it had taken him less thantwenty minutes to stash Charles and rejoin all those rejoicing over the day.
He had never felt more victorious. The difficult part, of course, would be to hide his anticipation for all that was destined to follow.
It didn’t seem that anything could go so impossibly well.
Ashley, damn her, though. Leave it to Ashley to be worried about Charles! Still and all, it did make the entire plan more exciting. Now, with the evening at a close, he was feeling elated.
The place had settled down; though everyone had been willing to look for Charles, only Ashley had been really concerned. He had played with the idea of actually disposing of poor old Charles immediately, but now he was satisfied that he had decided he should make it something more dramatic—and allow time between the reenactment and the beginning of the end.
Oh, he had worked with the others. He had searched so hard. There might have been just a few minutes when he feared someone would actually search the cars, but Charles hadn’t driven.
It had almost been as if he’d been part of the plan.
Now he sat next to good old Charles.
This was necessary. The voice had said that it had to be done, and his ancestor made him know that nothing could be right until then.
He’d never realized that he’d enjoy it all so much.
He patted him on the back. Charles didn’t move. The drug was holding, but he’d administer more. He didn’t want the big lug waking up.
He needed him alive until the time was right.
Every time he’d been at Donegal recently, he’d felt as if he were being pushed harder and harder. The past was the past—so they all said. But it wasn’t. The past created the present, and he knew now that he had to use the present to set the past right. It wasn’t crazy; he’d heard the voices in his head. A collective consciousness that seemed to scream through history.
Now, maybe, the voices would stop.
3
Car bombs didn’t exactly do it for him, but Jake indulged in a few anyway.
“Cheers!” Jenna said, dropping her shot glass into her Guinness, and swallowing down the mixture.
“Cheat!” Will said to Whitney. “You poured your shot in—you just drink the whole thing.”
“Hey, you drink it your way, and I’ll drink it mine!” Whitney protested.
“You’re not doing it the Irish way,” Will said, looking to Jenna for help.
“Drink it however you like!” Jenna said, smiling sweetly at Will.
There was a small room in the back of the bar, and Jake, Will Chan, Jenna Duffy and Whitney Tremont had it to themselves that night, so it was nice. Jackson Crow was back at the hotel with Angela Hawkins. They’d all just met for the first time on the Holloway case, and Jackson, the skeptic, had quickly fallen in love with Angela—despite their different approaches to their work. Go figure. The entire team respected and admired them both, and they were glad that the two were indulging in some quality time together.
And for Jake, it felt good to be in the bar with his coworkers.
During the Holloway case, they had gotten to know one another. Will and Whitney were excellent with cameras and sound systems; Jenna was a registered nurse, something that could always come in handy when traipsing through strange landscapes and old buildings. His own expertise was computers—and computer hacking. He could usually find any piece of information on any site, public, private or even heavily coded. Yet they’d all had certain unusual experiences in life that had led them to being excellent investigators—and, together, able to discern deeper, darker undercurrents to the event they researched. Now, they also had badges. After the Holloway case, it had been deemed that they would continue to work together, and they would do so with all proper credentials as FBI agents.
“Now, quit whining over the way a woman drinks her drink,” Jenna said and turned, leaning an elbow on their table, to talk to Whitney. She had brilliant green eyes and red hair, and a smile that could melt ice. “I want to know what else I’ve missed. The World War II museum, the Civil War museum, plantations, the zoo …”
“Shall we have another drink?” Whitney asked.
But before Jenna could answer, they all heard their phones buzz.
“Text from Jackson,” Whitney murmured.
“Meeting in the morning,” Jenna said, the slight Irish lilt in her voice grave.
“Hmm. Do you think that means that we’re not heading to Alexandria?” Will asked.
“It means something is up,” Whitney said, looking at Jake.
“I’ll pay the bill,” Jake told them.
They walked back to their hotel slowly and silently, each wondering what they’d discover in the morning. After they parted, Jake sat up a very long time.
It became morning at last. Ashley didn’t feel as if she’d slept at all. The dreams continued to plague her, only now she was Emma Donegal, leaving the house in the aftermath of the battle to find the bloody body of her husband. And when she woke herself from the dream, she could have sworn that deceased Confederate soldier was sitting in the wingback chair by the doors to the second-story wraparound porch. She was more tired from being in bed than she was from being awake.
A shower helped revive her a little. Dressed and ready for the day, she headed down to the kitchen. Once it had been a gentleman’s den, and then it had been an office, and then, when it was no longer deemed necessary to have the main kitchen in an outbuilding, it had become a wonderful, bright kitchen. The walls were a pale yellow. There was a center granite worktable with stools around it, and suspended racks that held several dozen shining copper cooking utensils. A breakfast nook held a table that sat eight.
Beth was just pouring milk from a carton into serving pitchers. “Coffee is on. None of the guests have made it in yet,” she said cheerfully.
“What’s for breakfast?” Ashley asked.
“Down-home comfort food this morning,” Beth said. “Corn bread, blueberry muffins, bacon and cheese omelets, and country cheese grits. Want to grab a plate and eat before it starts getting crazy?”
“Sure,” Ashley said. She watched as her beautiful friend made art out of an omelet and shook her head as Beth handed her the plate full of light, fluffy eggs.
“Grits are in the bowl, corn bread is sliced and in those baskets,” Beth said.
Ashley helped herself. “I’m going to waddle across the lawn soon,” Ashley told her.
Beth grinned. “I doubt it. You’re too fond of those awful creatures out in the stables. You get plenty of exercise.” She shivered.
“I can’t believe that you’re afraid of horses.” Ashley laughed.
“I told you—one of the bastards bit me when I was a child!” Beth said.
“Well, ours won’t bite you. You should try riding Tigger. She’s a twenty-year-old sweetie. She moves like an old woman.”
“Then she may be crotchety as one, too,” Beth said. “No, honey, you stick to your horses, and I’ll stick to cooking.”
Ashley dutifully bit into her omelet, and it was delicious. As she was finishing, guests began to stream by her, heading in for breakfast or stopping to clear their tabs. They’d be down to eight guests that night; the reenactment had taken place on a Sunday, and many of those who came for the reenactment managed to take off the Monday if they had a regular workweek. By Monday night, they were usually down to just a few guests.
She heard Frazier speaking with people on the other side of the stairway, his tone rich and filled with humor as he told old family tales and pointed out certain portraits on the walls.
Ashley took her place at the desk to fill out the registry and books—by hand; people actually signed her guest book, and she wrote personal thank-yous—and then could have sworn that someone had approached her. She looked up, but she was alone. For a moment, her brows knit in consternation, but people milled throughout the lower level of the house now and any one of them might have stopped nearby. She gave her concentration back to the project at hand.
She heard a throat being cleared then, and looked up—this time, someone was there. Justin.
He sat in the one of the period wingback chairs that faced the desk.
She frowned. “Are you checking out? I thought you were staying a few days.”
“I am staying another few days, Ashley. I just stopped to see how you’re doing,” he told her.
She liked Justin. At forty, he was a widower, though years before, he had brought his wife with him, and she had played at being a camp follower—with great relish. They had been married for years before he had lost her to cancer. But Justin still came.
“I’m fine, thanks. Nancy’s got the girls?” His mother-in-law, Nancy, now came along to help Justin with his ten-year-old twin girls. Hard to be a “fighting federal” and keep an eye on twins.
“Yes. Any word on Charles?”
She set her pen down. “No. But I haven’t tried calling anyone this morning. Everyone on that search party last night is weary of me torturing them, so … If he’s been found, I’ll be called right away.”
He reached across the desk and put his hand on hers, giving a comforting squeeze.
“Ashley, you are part of the charm of this place. You really care. None of us thinks you were torturing us. I was thinking of taking the family for a horse ride later, and I know that Cliff does a lot of the riding tours, but I thought you and I could make another search of it, too.”
She was surprised. “Sure! And thank you.”
“Jeanine and Meg don’t ride well. They don’t get a chance to go riding often enough. You still have two horses calm as the Dead Sea, right?”
“Nellie is our sweetest. And Tigger is a good old girl if I’ve ever known one. Nellie loves him, so they’re great on a ride together. They’ll be perfect for the twins.”
Justin grinned and stood. “Nancy’s bringing the crew in for breakfast. Say an hour or two?”
“Two hours will work for me.”
Justin thanked her. She finished with paperwork and realized she was constantly looking up, certain that she was going to see a Confederate soldier staring at her.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she reminded herself. But saying the words out loud sounded defensive. “I don’t. I really don’t!” she said to the empty room.
Irritated with herself, she went out to the stables. Justin’s family would be out soon.
Ashley saddled Varina and stroked her mane. The farmer they had bought her from when Ashley had been a teen had been an avid fan of Varina Davis, the one and only first lady of the Confederate States of America. Because she had been named Varina, they named Nellie’s last colt Jeff, for Jefferson Davis, the one and only President of the Confederate States. That morning, she and Justin chose Varina and Jeff as their mounts, while she assigned Nellie to the younger, slightly more timid of Justin’s twin girls, and Tigger to the other, while Nancy, Justin’s mother-in-law, was on the slightly more spirited Abraham.
Ashley took the girls around the paddock a few times, just going over the basics. Justin had been right about their experience, but they were smart little girls with common sense, and Ashley thought they would do well.
Ashley gave her attention to the girls as they rode around the outbuildings and then toward Beaumont, the Creole plantation “next door.” The girls were delighted by the ride, waving to everyone they passed while traversing the house and outbuildings area and then concentrating on their father’s and grandmother’s admonitions to be on the lookout for wildlife.
“Are there alligators?” Meg, the bolder of the twins, demanded.
“Yes, by the bayou. But they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone. We won’t dismount anywhere near the bayou. Now, you don’t want to bring a small-sized dog or even a medium-sized dog out there. They look like dinnertime to the alligators,” Ashley told them. She was listening to the girls; she was looking everywhere. They had searched last night, but it had been dark. Now it was daylight, and, hopefully, if Charles Osgood had come out here and fallen, hurt himself or had some other trial, they might find him now.
“We don’t have a dog,” Jeanine, Meg’s sister, younger by five minutes, said.
“Can we get a puppy, Dad?” Meg asked.
“Soon enough,” Nancy said, grinning at Ashley.
“Why not now?” Meg asked.
“Because Daddy is busy,” Nancy answered. Nancy was one of those women who had gone to a beautiful shade of silver-white naturally.
“Watch for animals, girls,” Ashley interceded. “We’ll be close enough to see the alligators basking in the sun. These woods aren’t that dense, but with all this land, every once in a while a black bear or a cougar wanders across the road. I know that you see nutria—”
“What are nutria?” Meg interrupted.
“They’re the largest rat, essentially,” Justin said.
“Ugh!” Jeanine said.
“The buggers were brought over years ago, in the 1930s, and they’ve multiplied into the millions,” Ashley explained. “There’s actually a bounty on them, because they can be so destructive. But they don’t hurt people. The animal that you do have to be careful of in these parts is the cottonmouth snake. But it likes water, too, and we’re not going in the water. Animals usually leave you alone as long as you leave them alone.”
“Watch for herons!” Justin said.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing a cougar,” Meg announced.
“They’re shy, too. But we’ll see what we see,” Ashley assured them.
They counted seven herons, two raccoons, an armadillo and three owls up in the trees. When they came to the bayou, Ashley pointed out two alligators sunning on the opposite bank. As she did so, she saw that staff members at Beaumont were engaged in their work already. A man dressed in a droop hat, cutoff denim and a dotted cotton shirt was standing by a wagon that showed freshly hewn sugarcane. Another, dressed more like an early nineteenth-century Louisiana French businessman, was giving a tour.
She looked up toward the second story of the plantation house, where the family had lived. A man was standing there, dressed in a Confederate uniform frock coat.
Ashley blinked against the light. He looked like …
Like her ancestor, Marshall Donegal.
The man lifted a hand to her.
Yet when she blinked again, he was gone. Her imagination at work again. Of course, she was still concerned about Charles Osgood. But he was due back to work the next morning. If he didn’t turn up by then, the police would have to get involved at a serious level.
She realized that Justin was watching her.
“Are you okay, Ashley?” he asked.
“I’m fine. The light is playing tricks, that’s all. I thought I saw a Confederate soldier at the window. Toby Keaton does workshops and tours on the real workings of a sugar plantation over there. We do the Civil War—keeps me sending tourists to him, and him sending them to Donegal Plantation,” she said. Would she have told the truth if Jake were here? Jake, who seemed to know what the dead were saying.
“You have Charles Osgood on your mind,” Justin said.
“I do. I can’t help it.”
They rode along the bayou for a while, and then Ashley led them around the second trail to head back to the house. The girls chattered the whole time.
Justin nudged Jeff and the horse trotted up next to Ashley again. “I know you were hoping to find Charles,” he said.
“I am worried, Justin, really worried,” she said.
“He’ll show up. But let him know how worried you were. That will make him feel good,” Justin told her.
Ashley offered him a smile. “Sure, thanks.”
Back at the stable, Ashley tried to keep her mind busy, letting the girls help her with the saddles and bridle and tack. She taught them how to groom their horses.
As she put away the last of the brushes, Justin strode over to her. “Great. Now Jeanine doesn’t want a puppy anymore. She wants a horse.”
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Heather Graham
Emerging from the bayou like an apparition, Donegal Plantation is known for its unsurpassed dining, captivating atmosphere, haunting legends and now a corpse swinging from the marble angel that marks its cemetery's most majestic vault.A corpse discovered in nearly the same situation as that of Marshall Donegal, the patriarch killed in a skirmish just before the Civil War. Desperate for help traditional criminologists could never provide, plantation heiress Ashley Donegal turns to an elite team of paranormal investigators who blend hard forensics with rare often inexplicable intuition.Among the "Krewe of Hunters" is an old flame, Jake Mallory, a gifted musician with talent stretching far beyond the realm of the physical, and a few dark ghosts of his own. The evil the team unveils has the power to shake the plantation to its very core. Jake and Ashley are forced to risk everything to unravel secrets that will not stay buried even in death.
Praise for the novels of Heather Graham
“An incredible storyteller.”
—Los Angeles Daily News
“Graham wields a deftly sexy and convincing pen.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fast-paced and suspenseful read that will give readers chills while keeping them guessing until the end.”
—RT Book Reviews on Ghost Moon
“If you like mixing a bit of the creepy with a dash of sinister and spine-chilling reading with your romance, be sure to read Heather Graham’s latest … Graham does a great job of blending just a bit of paranormal with real, human evil.”
—Miami Herald on Unhallowed Ground
“Eerie and atmospheric, this is not late-night reading for the squeamish or sensitive.”
—RT Book Reviews on Unhallowed Ground
“The paranormal elements are integral to the unrelentingly suspenseful plot, the characters are likable, the romance convincing, and, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Graham’s atmospheric depiction of a lost city is especially poignant.”
—Booklist on Ghost Walk
“Graham’s rich, balanced thriller sizzles with equal parts suspense, romance and the paranormal—all of it nail-biting.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Vision
“Heather Graham will keep you in suspense until the very end.”
—Literary Times
“Mystery, sex, paranormal events. What’s not to love?”
—Kirkus on The Death Dealer
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author HEATHER GRAHAM has written more than a hundred novels, many of which have been featured by the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild. An avid scuba diver, ballroom dancer and mother of five, she still enjoys her South Florida home, but loves to travel as well, from locations such as Cairo, Egypt, to her own backyard, the Florida Keys. Reading, however, is the pastime she still loves best, and she is a member of many writing groups. She’s a winner of the Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and is currently vice president of the Horror Writers’ Association. She’s also an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. She is the founder of The Slush Pile, an author band and performing group.
For more information, check out her Web sites:
TheOriginalHeatherGraham.com,
eHeatherGraham.com
and HeatherGraham.tv.
You can also find Heather on MySpace and Facebook.
Heart of Evil
Heather
Graham
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Dedicated with gratitude
to the beautiful Myrtles plantation,
and to Teeta LeBleu Moss, owner,
Teresa David, the General Manager,
Hester Eby, Director of Tours,
Taryn Lowery, Tour Guide
and to Scout and Sprout
and The Peace River Ghost Trackers
And to Dennis, Jason, Shayne,
and Bryee-Annon Pozzessere;
Teresa Davant, Kathy Pickering, Kathy DePalo,
Juan Roca, Bridget LeVien, Matthew Green,
Phinizy Percy Jr., and Connie Perry.
Prologue
Blood.
She could see it, smell it.
Hear it.
Drip … drip … drip …
The air was heavy with black powder, and the brilliant red color of the blood seemed to form a mist with the powder, and she was surrounded by a haze, a miasma of gray-tinged crimson. The day was dying, becoming red, red like the color of the blood seeping to the ground, making that terrible, distinctive noise. Drip, drip, drip …
Ashley Donegal was there. She wasn’t even sure where there was, but she knew that she didn’t want to be there.
Suddenly, the mist seemed to swirl in a violent gust, and then settle softly, closer to the ground. It parted as she walked through. She could see her surroundings, and, at that moment, she knew. She was in the cemetery. She had played here so often as a child—respectfully, of course. Her grandfather never would have had it any other way. Those elegant tombs, all constructed with such love, and an eye to the priorities of the day. The finest craftsmen had been hired, artists and artisans, and the place was truly beautiful. Angels and archangels graced the various tombs, winged cherubs, saints and crosses. She had never been afraid.
But now …
From a distance, she could hear shouts. Soldiers. Ridiculous. Grown men playing as soldiers. But they did it so well. She might almost have been back in time. The powder came from the howitzer and the Enfield rifles. The shouts sounded as the men played out their roles, edging from the river road to the outbuildings and then the stables, to the final confrontation on the lawn and in the cemetery. The blood would come from stage packets within their uniforms, of course, but …
This was real blood. She knew because it had a distinctive odor, and because, yes, damn it, she could smell it. Nothing smelled like real blood.
She looked at the ground, and she could see the puddle where the blood was falling, but she was afraid to look up. If she looked up, she would see a dead man.
But she did so anyway. She saw him. There was a hat pulled low over his face, but soon he would lift his head.
He did. And she saw a man in his prime, handsome, with strength of purpose in the sculpture of his face. But there was weariness in his eyes.
Weariness and death. Yet they were just playacting; that past was so, so long ago now….
She didn’t speak. Neither did he. Because his face began to rot. It blackened, and while she watched, the scabrous decaying flesh began to peel away. Soon she was staring into the empty eye sockets of a skull.
She started to scream.
Above that sound, she could hear someone calling to her. Someone calling her name. The sound was deep, rich and masculine, and she knew it….
It was Jake! He would help…. Surely he would help.
But she could only stare at the skeletal mask in front of her.
Smell the blood.
And scream.
A strange sound in the middle of the night awoke Ashley. She sat up with a start and realized she was doing the screaming. She clamped her own hand quickly over her mouth, embarrassed and praying that she hadn’t roused the household. She waited in silence; nope, no one.
That was pretty pathetic. It must have been a horrifically pathetic scream. If she ever really needed to scream, she’d probably be out of luck.
Lord, that had been some nightmare.
She didn’t have nightmares. She was the most grounded human being she knew; hell, she had grown up next to a bayou full of alligators and cottonmouths, and she had lived in a downtrodden area of New York City near Chinatown in order to afford NYU. She knew all about real monsters—ghosts were creations to reel tourists in.
So …
With a groan, she threw her head back on her pillow and glanced at the clock. She needed to sleep. In a week’s time, they’d be celebrating Donegal Plantation’s biggest annual event: the reenactment of the skirmish here that had cost her ancestor his life.
Ah, yes, and she had been dreaming about the skirmish—or the reenactment?
That was it, she thought, grinning. She was dreaming about the events at Donegal Plantation because they were preparing for the day.
History was always alive at Donegal. The plantation house was furnished with antiques, most of which had been in the family forever. There was an attic room that contained more artifacts from the Civil War than many a museum, down to letters, mess kits, knapsacks, pistols, rifles and bayonets. Still, the reenactment remained a major undertaking.
But they’d been running it since before she had even been born. It was rote by now. All the same, there was still plenty of bustle and confusion, along with everything that had to happen before the event could take place, including a mound of paperwork on her desk that had to do with the “sutler’s tent,” the pop-up shop where period clothing and curios and other paraphernalia, such as weapons and antiques, were sold. Which meant registrations and taxes. Then there was the insurance they needed for the day, and the officers to direct traffic and so on.
That was it. She just had a lot on her mind.
And the reenactment always reminded her of Jake. He’d never been a soldier, North or South. But he’d dressed up, and he’d played his guitar and sang music from the era. And sometimes she had played with him, and he’d always known how to make it just right, to bring back the past, with the light of truth.
She eased down in her covers, determined to forget both her anxiety and Jake.
Not so easy, even though it had been a long time since Jake had been in her life.
Finally, she started to drift again. She was comfortable; she loved her bed and her room, even if she had lived here her whole life other than college. Though she loved to learn about new people and new places, she also loved to be home.
She started again, certain that she had felt a touch; something soft and gentle, smoothing her hair, stroking her cheek.
She sat up. Moonlight streamed into the room, and there was no one else here; with so many guests around, she had locked her bedroom door. She looked at her pillow and decided that she had merely rubbed against a side of the pillowcase.
As she did so, she glanced at her dresser.
There was something different about it. She studied it for a moment, wondering what it was.
Then she knew.
She kept a picture of her parents there, on her dresser. It had been taken almost twenty years ago. They were together, holding her between them, when she had been five. It had been developed in sepia tone, and they’d had it done when one of the guests at a reenactment had found a way of making nice money by pretending to be Matthew Brady, the famed Civil War photographer. Throughout the day, he had answered historical questions about photography and its place in the Civil War.
As was the custom of the day, none of them was smiling, but there was still something exceptionally charming about the picture. There was a light in her father’s eyes, and just the hint of a curl at her mother’s lips. Her father’s arm was around her, his hand coming to rest tenderly on her mother’s shoulder. She was sandwiched close between them, and in her mind, the picture had been filled with love. It had become an even greater treasure when she had lost them.
It usually faced at a slight angle toward her bed.
The picture was turned away, as if someone had been looking at it from a different angle. It was such a little thing, but …
Maybe someone had wandered into her room. Cliff ran the property and she ran the house, but they employed extra housekeepers in the main house when they had guests. They hadn’t had guests in the house in the last few weeks, but the house was usually open, and her grandfather loved to walk anyone staying on the property through it. Depending on his mood, a tour could get long.
And the picture …
She turned over, groaning. It was just the angle of the picture.
Jake Mallory should have slept well, with a hard case finally settled.
But he didn’t.
The odd thing about his nightmares was that they were a recent phenomenon. When he had begun to realize and make use of this gift or curse—those things he somehow knew—there had been no dreams.
During the summer of the storms, during Katrina and the flooding, they had all been so busy. While it had been happening, he’d never explained to his coworkers that he was so good at finding the remains of the deceased because they called out to him; they spoke to him. It was heartbreaking; it was agony. But the dead needed their loved ones to know, and so he listened. And he didn’t dream those nights.
Later, the dreams had come, and they were always the same.
He was alone in his small, flat-bottomed boat, though he’d never been alone during any of the searches.
He was alone, and the heat of the day had cranked down to the lesser heat of the night, and he was searching specifically for someone, though he didn’t know who. As the boat moved through the water that should have been a street, he began to see people on the rooftops, clinging to branches here and there, and even floating in the water.
They saw him; they reached out to him. And he felt like weeping. They weren’t living people. They were those who had lost the fight.
As he drifted along, he looked back at them all, men and women, old and young, black and white and all colors in between. He wanted to ease their suffering, but he could no longer save them. Their faces had an ashen cast, and the bone structure was sucked in and hollow; they didn’t seem to know that there was nothing he could do for them anymore. In the dream, he knew that he, like many law-enforcement officers, scent dogs and volunteers, would be called upon to find the dead in the future.
But now he was seeking the living.
They called out to him; they were trying to tell him something. Bit by bit, he saw they were trying to show him the way. He thought that there should have been sound, but there was none. He didn’t hear his passage through the water, and nothing emitted from the mouths of the corpses he passed.
Then he saw the figure on the roof far ahead. He thought it was a woman. She seemed to be in something flowing, which was not unusual. Many victims, living and dead, had been found in nightgowns or boxers or flannel pajamas. What was strange was that she seemed to be the only one alive. She was in tremendous peril as the water rose all around her. He felt that there was something familiar about her, but he didn’t understand what it was that seemed to touch him. The light of the full moon turned her hair golden and gleaming, her white gown flowed in the breeze. Amidst the destruction, she was a beautiful survivor.
He tried to get closer.
The watery road grew more clogged and congested. Downed tree branches and appliances floated by. A soaked teddy bear with big black button eyes stared at him sightlessly as it drifted. He ached inside; it was an agony to fight the river, but it was also something he knew he had to do. Especially when she waited; when he could save her. He just had to reach her before the water level rose higher and higher, and swept her away.
He grew close …
And that was when he felt the darkness at his back.
He tried to turn, but he could not. The wind had picked up, and the effort was too much. No matter how he strained, he couldn’t see what evil thing seemed to be tracking him.
There was suddenly sound. The woman. She was calling out to him.
She called him by name.
But he could feel the thing behind him gaining on him. He could almost reach out for her, but he had to turn, had to find out what seemed to be breathing fetid air down his back….
She called out again.
Jake!
If they were to survive, to outrun whatever horror was behind him, they would have to do so together.
Jake!
Her voice rang out almost as clearly as if she were next to him in the boat.
But the darkness was on him, so close….
He could feel it then, enveloping him, crushing the sound of her voice as it did.
And he woke with a jerk.
Jake sat up in bed, deeply disturbed by the reappearance of his frequent dream. For the first time, he knew who he had seen on the roof of the house, about to be swallowed up by the floodwaters.
It was Ashley. Ashley Donegal.
He stood and stretched, irritated. The clock on his mantel indicated it was still early.
He swore and got dressed. He knew why he’d had the dream—and made Ashley the woman on the rooftop. He knew the date. The reenactment was coming. Donegal Plantation would be busy and alive; Ashley would still hurt from the fact that her dad had passed away and would no longer be playing Marshall Donegal, his ancestor. But she’d never show it. She’d be the grand mistress of the ceremonies, beautiful and regal in her Civil War attire.
He wondered if he would ever fall out of love with her. And then he wondered if the dream had meant something more. Angela—who seemed to have the best sixth sense in what the FBI called their special unit—had told him that dreams could open many doors. In REM sleep, the mind was at the stage where dreams came, and those dreams could easily focus on what the conscious mind rejected. When she was trying to reach memories of the past, she often used sleep.
If that were the guide, he could easily convince himself to think that Ashley now wanted him. Needed him. And that this was the sign.
Of course, that was just Angela’s way of seeking the ghosts of the past—even in their own group, they weren’t sure about all the rules of seeking out the help of ghosts.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh at himself or not.
Their team was legitimate; they were on-the-books federal agents. They had just spent days at the local training facility, improving their weapons skills, computer literacy and understanding of the mission policy.
But they were a one-of-a-kind unit, and their true designation wasn’t written down anywhere. Among themselves, they were the Krewe of Hunters; on paper, they were Adam Harrison’s Special Unit. In bizarre situations, they were supposed to smoke out the fakers—and find what might really be remnants of the past.
The world was filled with ghost hunters and would-be ghost hunters. The problem that most people didn’t see was the fact that few ghosts would really appear for a television crew. Some ghost lore did seem to be true. There were the residual hauntings—ghosts that played out a situation, such as a battle scene at Gettysburg, over and over again. And there were intelligent hauntings: ghosts that lingered for some reason. Ghosts didn’t seem to have rules. Some could find certain individuals who saw them as clearly as day; they could carry on long conversations, appear and disappear, and interact. Sometimes ghosts were frightened of the living, and they hid, and only someone with a real ability to suspend disbelief could coax them out. It was complicated; he was still learning. Sometimes ghosts tried to warn those they cared about when something evil was about to occur, and ghosts often entered into the REM sleep of those they hadn’t managed yet to really touch in the conscious world.
So the dream meant that Ashley needed him….
Or he wanted the dream to mean that Ashley needed him.
He stood up and walked over to his hotel window and looked out over the dark streets of the French Quarter. There was so much history here. So many lives had been lived; so much drama had taken place. Sometimes it was impossible to believe that the energy of the past didn’t remain. Ghosts didn’t have to be old; he knew that himself, though he hadn’t wanted to accept the truth until he had met Adam Harrison and become a part of the unit Adam had started for the FBI. He had been glad of his ability to feel where people were; to imagine that he heard them telling him to come, please. Sometimes he had even been able to find the living. And sometimes he had heard the voices of the dead, when he hadn’t known that they were dead.
His “gift” had cost him Ashley.
So why now, all these years later, was he seeing her, adrift, about to be engulfed, and yet reaching for him, even as he reached for her?
1
“Ah, dammit! I don’t want to be a Yankee,” Charles Osgood said.
It was there; it had finally come, and Ashley was grateful.
And the semi-drama going on here surely meant her mind had been trying to warn her that the day was not going to come without its share of trouble, because it was already proving to be one hell of an afternoon.
Morning had brought the business of breakfast, visitors pouring onto the property to spend time at the campsites. Now they were coming close to the main event of the day, the reenactment of the battle that had taken place at Donegal Plantation.
She’d never expected the real trouble to come over the sad situation of an ailing faux-Yankee.
“Dammit!” Charles exclaimed again.
Ashley thought that the man sounded like a petulant teenager, though she knew that he didn’t really want to argue. Not on a day like today. He flushed as the words came out of his mouth, and cast her a quick glance of dismay. She wasn’t even the one handing out the assignments, though she was the only Donegal among them now. The relish the group was taking in telling Charles his new role unsettled her a bit. Charles Osgood was the newest in the “cavalry unit” of reenactors, which meant that he got the assignment to play for the other side. Yet this seemed to be turning into a college hazing; they were all friends, and they were usually courteous to one another.
“Charlie, come on! Being a Yankee will be fun. Okay, so they were jerks—well, the ones here—who couldn’t spy on a neon sign, couldn’t hunt, couldn’t shoot…. But come on! Being a Yank will be fun!” Griffin Grant teased.
Ashley shook her head; how could grown men be so immature?
In her mind, although she truly loved the living history that took place at the plantation, she thought the units clinging to so-called glory were nothing more than inane. The event had ended with the death of one her ancestors—not a party.
“Hey, hey, all of you!” Ashley said, addressing the men around her and using the voice she would utilize when working with one of the school groups—the grade-school groups. “I know you all like to cling to the magical illusion that the antebellum South was a place of beauty, grace and honor—where men were men. Real men, hunting, riding, brawling—but honorable. Yes, we reenact what was. But this is now, and that was then! None of you would seriously want to go back to the Civil War, and no one here is prejudiced. The slavery of any person was a horrendous way of life.”
“Ashley—you’re making it sound like being a real man is bad thing!” Cliff Boudreaux commented, laughing. Cliff, horse master at Donegal, was clearly amused and having a good time.
“Well, of course, Ashley, it’s not like we take this too seriously,” Griffin Grant said, staring back at her as if she was the one who didn’t understand the question. Griffin was a striking man in his early thirties, sleek and slick, a CEO for a cable company in New Orleans, though his ancestors had lived out here, two hours down the road from the big city. “We know reality—and like it. But this is important playacting!”
She groaned softly.
They were good guys, really.
It was playacting, and for the playacting they were able to believe truly with their whole hearts that it had been about nothing other than states’ rights. Ashley knew all the statistics about the fighting men—most of the men who fought and died for the South during the war couldn’t have begun to have afforded a slave—and war was seldom caused by one issue. But her parents and her grandfather had never been the types to overlook the plantation’s complicated history. Cliff was part of that with his gold-green eyes, bronze-colored skin and dark tawny hair. She knew that half their visitors were immediately enthralled with him. He was one of the reenactors on the Southern side because of the Donegal blood that ran in his veins. Early on, a Donegal widower had fallen in love with a slave, creating the first racial mix in his background. In the 1920s, his great-grandfather had married a Donegal cousin, something that caused a serious scandal at that time in history, but which now gave both halves of the family a sense of pleasure and pride. She wasn’t sure how to count second and third or twice-removed relatives, so she considered Cliff to be her cousin.
History was history. Donegal was steeped in it, good and bad, and they didn’t hide any of it.
“Charles, they’re right. It’s a performance, you know,” Ashley said. “It’s a show, maybe even an important show in its small way. It’s where people can see the weapons of the day, the uniforms that were worn. And, actually, remember, this particular fight started because men had a bar brawl—and then an excuse to fight because the war was getting underway. You’re all examples of keeping history alive, and I’m so grateful to all of you.”
Charles stared back at her blankly; the other men were smirking.
Why didn’t they all get it? They were actors in a show, hopefully teaching American history, with several perspectives, along the way. But some things died really slowly here, in plantation country. Family was still everything. Loyalty to hearth and home, kin, parish and state. They’d been wrong; they’d been beaten, and they knew it, but still, only one side of the cast of players was considered to be elite. And the reenactors could be incredibly snobbish.
That made Charles Osgood the odd man out.
Toby Keaton cleared his throat and then said softly, “Charles—come on. You’re lucky to be in with the 27th Bayou Militia Cavalry Unit. Most of the time, the fellows taking part in the reenactments here are direct descendants of those who fought before. You’ve got to see the truth of this thing. You claim your place in the ranks through marriage—your stepfather was an O’Reilly, and I know he raised you, but, you know, in other old Southern units, that wouldn’t count.” Toby was forty-four, and Ashley’s next-door neighbor at Beaumont, his Creole plantation, though they both had acres and acres of land. Toby grinned as if to cut the harshness of his words. “Newcomer—odd man out. You’re a Yankee if I’ve ever seen one!”
“Great! So now I’m a newcomer—and that makes me an outsider?” Charles asked, staring around the room. “Come on, guys, you’ve just got to understand. This will really make it look as if I don’t belong here at all!”
He gave his appeal to the others gathered at the horse master’s office in the old barn at Donegal Plantation that day—Cliff Boudreaux, Griffin Grant, Toby Keaton, Ramsay Clayton, Hank Trebly, all still with property in the general area, John Ashton, tour director from New Orleans, and Ashley herself. The “Yankees” were gathering in the old smokehouse—a separate building, and now a small apartment. Charles would be joining them soon; all of the reenactors gathered together for their roundtable discussions on the war, but each side met separately first on the day of the reenactment to make sure that every member knew the character he was playing. Later, they’d all meet back here to make sure that everyone was apprised of all the safety factors involved.
One, Charles, so it seemed, would have to play a Yankee, and go join the group in the apartment. They were short a Yankee, and that’s the way it was. All of them belonged to Civil War roundtables, and these days, none of them really cared about sides—they just liked to discuss tactics and procedure. They often met in the dining room at Donegal; Ashley loved to listen, because they also knew their history, and they spoke about events in the lives of many of the key players in the war, and the fact that the generals had often been best friends before they had been forced to choose sides in the bloody conflict. They knew about weapons, uniforms, sad stories about treason and resisters, draft riots, food, clothing, trade and so much more.
“Charles,” Cliff Boudreaux said patiently. “We’re all just teasing you here, really. We’re short on Yankees today, on account of Barton Waverly being sick with the flu. We’re pretty desperate. And that’s the rule; newcomers play Yankees when our brothers from up North ask for help. Hell, remember that year when half of us were laid up with the croup? Three of them Yankees had to come play Southern boys. We’re not doing anything bad to you—really.”
Ramsay Clayton was seated across the table from Cliff. Ramsay looked like an artist; he was tall, with a wiry muscle structure, long dark hair and classical features. He owned a small place down the road, but he spent a lot of time in New Orleans, where he sometimes showed his work at Jackson Square and sometimes had showings at the galleries. He grinned at Charles. “Yeah, and don’t forget, the Yankees won. Hell, come to think about it, where were all the Southern boys when we were losing this thing?” he asked lightly. “Ah, well. Born in our day and age, it’s easy to look back at the South’s part in the Civil War and wonder, ‘What the hell were we thinking?’”
Ashley smiled. She liked Ramsay. He was a good guy.
“Well, I wish I could just step up to the plate, but I can’t. I can’t play a Yankee—I just can’t,” Toby Keaton said. “Hell, my great-great-great-whatever grandfather was the first one to answer Marshall Donegal’s call for volunteers. He was one of his best friends. I think he’d roll in his grave if I played a Yankee. Good God! I own a plantation! Wouldn’t be fitting for me to play a Yankee. Lord knows, it could be bad for business.”
Hank Trebly grinned. “Well, I’m just big sugar. I don’t really give a whit. I see the war as over, over, over, and that’s the way it is. Lord A-mighty! The damn thing ended in 1865.” Hank owned the property next to Donegal, and his ancestors had owned it forever. The old plantation had been replaced by a sugar refinery years ago. He was a small man, in his early forties, and his business meant everything to him.
John Ashton shrugged. “My family might have been here, but I don’t care,” he said. “The Civil War means my income these days—tourists love to go back. But I love ‘em all. Yankees, rebels, Brits, Brazilians! Bring them on. They all spend money and take tours.”
“And what happened here was in 1861, for God’s sake, before the thing had really even gotten going,” Griffin said, shaking his head. “Come on, now! My ancestor went on to die at the Second Battle of Manassas—now, that’s a damned big battle. We’re here to teach, and to remember everything that happened in the past—and how it made us what we are today. Let’s have fun, folks. C’mon—I come out here to forget the office and programming and statistics, computers and red tape. I don’t care who plays what. It’s just for a good time.”
“I spend most of my time in New Orleans, art on the square and all that—you can call me a doughboy for all I care. It’s the spirit of this thing,” Ramsay said. “And Lord knows, what happened here couldn’t even be called a battle. My ancestor and most of the Southern boys except for Marshall survived, but, as we’ve all pointed out now—the North won. We are living the United States of America. This wasn’t even really a battle.”
He was right. What had taken place late in 1861 hadn’t even been a battle. Drinking downriver, toward New Orleans, two Yankee spies had heard about Donegal’s then-owner—Marshall Donegal—preparing a major summons to area troops to prepare them for an invasion of New Orleans. In trying to draw Marshall Donegal’s men out further on the subject, they had all gotten into a fistfight when one made a ridiculous statement about Northerners being chickens. The two Confederates suspected the men of being spies, and had run back to Donegal. The spies went back to their headquarters, but they were spies, and thus their numbers were small. On each side, six men were mustered—and, rather than be executed as spies if they were caught, the Union men donned their uniforms.
The fighting had ranged from the stables to the porch of the main house and out to the chapel and cemetery—ending when Captain Marshall Donegal had died of a bayonet wound in his own family graveyard. The enemy had “skedaddled,” according to the Southern side; the rebels had been left in utter defeat, according to their Northern counterparts.
Now, the “battle” was something that taught history, and, largely due to its small size—and the fact that the current owner of the plantation, Ashley’s grandfather, Frazier Donegal, was a history buff and glad to welcome the units on his property—it was a popular event. “Living history” took place frequently at Donegal, as often as once a week, but an actual reenactment was done only once a year. Sometimes the actors doing the reenactments were involved in other locations. Some belonged not just to Civil War units, but Revolutionary War units, and it just depended on where the biggest shindig was going on. Luckily, most of the men who could claim to have had ancestors in the brawl loved the plantation and the nearly exact-to-the-past-moment location of the place, and they usually made this reenactment a priority.
Donegal House was surely one of the prettiest places left on the river road, with memories of the antebellum era held in place. The great house still maintained a gorgeous front. It had been built with magnificent Greek columns and wraparound porches, and elegant tree-shaded entries stretched forever before the front and back doors. The currently used stables, housing only six horses, were next to the house, while the larger stables needed in a bygone era were far back from the house, to the left, riverside, and offered three apartments for those who wanted to stay for the night. The old smokehouse and servants’ quarters were available for rent as well, and sometimes they even rented out five of the rooms in the main house. With Beth there, Ashley’s extraordinarily talented friend and chef, and the efforts they were making with the restaurant and the crazy business that came along with the reenactment, they had chosen this year just to let rooms in the outbuildings.
All this—living history and their bed-and-breakfast rentals—was done to survive into the twenty-first century. But the Donegal family had been letting the place out for nearly thirty years now. And the living history and the reenactments were the true highlights to be found here, distinguishing it from other great plantations along the river.
“Okay, sure. You all are right,” Charles said. “It’s over. Long over. Hell, the Yankees did win the war.”
Cliff laughed. “Still hard to convince my mama and a few other folks I know that it’s true. But thanks, Charles, that’s great. The Yanks are good guys. Man, it’s sad to think back, though, huh? We would have wound up being enemies.”
“Who knows what our feelings would have been back then?” Ashley asked. “We might have chosen to fight for the North.”
“It was a different time, a different lifestyle,” Griffin pointed out. “You’re all indignant now about injustice, but you didn’t live back then. You didn’t grow up in an economy of cotton and sugar.”
“Rich men wanted to stay rich,” Ramsay agreed dryly.
“Who’s being Marshall Donegal today?” Charles asked.
“That would be me,” Ramsay said. “I’ve done it the past five years.” He was quiet a minute; he had done it since Ashley’s father had passed away. “Ashley could don a uniform herself, but she thinks we boys should just be boys. So I get the honor.”
Ramsay was trying to move quickly past the mention of her father, Ashley knew. He had been gone five years now; he had died shortly after her mother. She had accepted their loss—and she knew as well that there would still be a little core of pain when she thought about them, even if she lived to be one hundred. Inwardly, she winced. She hadn’t just lost her father that day; that had been the end of her and Jake. Her fault, her call, and she still wasn’t sure why. He had frightened her, she thought. It seemed he had scratched the surface of something, and she didn’t want to know what was beneath. And still, to this day, she knew that although she had closed the door, she missed Jake. And missing Jake had colored everything else in her life.
“He died,” Charles reminded him. “Marshall Donegal was killed, you know,” he added quickly.
“Well, as we’ve said, the war is long over, so I guess they’re all dead now anyway,” Ramsay pointed out.
“Gentlemen,” Ashley said, speaking at last, “I want you all to know that you are greatly appreciated. You’re all such wonderful actors, taking on whatever role is needed, whenever it’s needed! Charles, the Yankees are great guys. Michael Bonaventure lives in town, and his ancestors lived there as well, right in the heart of the French Quarter. His family left when the war started, because Bonaventure’s ancestor was fighting for the Union. Hadley Mason is from Lafayette, but his ancestors agreed with the Northern cause as well. It will be fun for you to be a Yankee. It’s acting, just like when we act out the encampments. And I truly appreciate you taking on the role.”
“It’s really amazing,” Griffin said. “We do get all tied up in what was. The way the past still has so much to do with the present! Charles, come on, you’re a stepchild. We all really had ancestors back then who were involved with this thing. You’re welcome among us—totally welcome. But, hey, if I had come in on this recently, I’d be happy just to be a part of it all.”
Charles Osgood offered Ashley a weak smile. “Sure. You know me—I’m just happy to be here.”
To Ashley’s surprise, Ramsay Clayton suddenly spoke up again. “Charles, I have an idea. Some of those guys really are my friends. My good friends. I’ll be a Yankee today. You be Marshall Donegal.”
Charles opened his mouth, stunned, and stared at Ramsay. “Oh! Oh, no. I couldn’t take that honor away from you!”
“You get killed, you know,” Ramsay reminded him.
“Oh, like you said, they’re all dead now. I just couldn’t—I really couldn’t.”
“Hey, I think I want to be a Yankee for once,” Ramsay said. “It’s cool. You be Marshall Donegal, and I’ll be a Yankee. No arguments—it’s decided. I’ll be a winner for a change!”
“I don’t know what to say!” Charles told him.
“Say thanks, and let’s get on with it. We have to finish planning this thing,” Ramsay said.
“I’m going to be Marshall Donegal!” Charles said, still awed.
Ashley lowered her head, hiding her laughter. These guys really were like children when it came to the reenactment. They were so dedicated. But it was really good, she reminded herself. They kept history alive. It had been on a trip to Europe with her parents when she had seen the quote that meant so much to her: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It was the philosopher George Santayana who had written those words, and she had seen them above the gates of a concentration camp. So, whether history was sterling or not—pitting man at his best and his worst—it was necessary to remember.
The reenactors did a fantastic job. Although there had been only a small encampment at Donegal Plantation at the time, they recreated a larger one, complete with a medical tent, where surgeries were acted out, officers’ quarters and tents for enlisted men.
“This is a right nice place to meet, but we need to get to business,” Griffin said, winking at Ashley.
“Yeah, Ramsay, looks like you need to skedaddle!” Cliff teased.
“I’m out of here!” Ramsay said, rising. He looked around. “Sadly, I do like Cliff’s digs better than being cramped up in an apartment!”
Griffin was right: they were in a nice place to meet. The office/living quarters in the stables were extremely pleasant; there was no heavy smell of hay, horses or droppings in any way, since the office had long ago been fitted out with air-conditioning and an air purifier to boot. There were a number of trophies along with books on horses, horse care, tack and maps on the shelves around the old massive desk with its iMac and printer. It was the horse master’s realm. No matter the state of riches or poverty the Donegal Plantation might be in, there was always a horse master. These days, the horse master did more than look after the six horses that remained. He was a tour guide, overseer—though they didn’t grow anything other than a few flowers now and then and a tomato plant or two—and general man about the house.
Ashley stood and gave him a shove. “Our apartments are beautiful. Get on out of here, and get this all moving!” She spoke with teasing force. “I’m going out to check on the camp setup and see that everything is running smoothly, then get ready. I’ll leave you gentlemen to agree on the final assignments and action. The day is moving on. We need to be prepared to start with the battle at sundown.”
“Hell, I hope they got a uniform that will fit me!” He winked. Ramsay was a good guy. He had a small house that had once been a working plantation, but his land had been eaten up over the years. Plantation actually meant farm, and Ramsay had no farmland left at all. He spent most of his time in the city, where he actually was a working artist making a nice income.
“I’m off to join the Yankees!”
“Thanks!” Charles Osgood lifted a hand to Ramsay, and then to Ashley, looking dazed. He was getting the prime role for the day, and he still seemed to be surprised.
It didn’t mean as much to Ramsay, Ashley thought, watching him as he walked from the stables to the old barn. He was from here; he’d been born a part of it all. He’d played soldiers over and over again, and though it had been magnanimous of him to hand over the role, she wasn’t sure that Ramsay hadn’t decided that being a Yankee might not be that bad a thing for the day. After all, they ended the day with the Pledge of Allegiance and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Even if they did begin it with a rousing chorus of “Dixie”!
She left Cliff’s to make a quick check of the horses. “Thank God you darlings don’t care if you’re Yankees or rebels!” she said affectionately, pausing to rub Abe’s ears. She saw that the tack for the Northern cavalry was ready for each of the mounts, saddles and saddle blankets set on sawhorses and the bridles with their insignias hanging from hooks right outside the stalls. Abe, Jeff, Varina, Tigger, Nellie and Bobby were all groomed and sleekly beautiful, ready to play their parts. She paused to give Varina a pat; she loved all the horses, but Varina was her special mare, the horse she always chose to ride.
Leaving the stables, Ashley paused for a moment to look across the expanse of acreage to the left, where the tents of the living encampment had been set up. She could see the sutler’s stretch of canvas, and she walked over to see who was working that day. Tourists—parked way down the river road—were milling around the goods for sale. She heard children squealing with delight as they discovered toys from the mid-nineteenth century, just as she heard women ooh and aah over some of the corsets and clothing. She saw that a crowd had gathered around the medical tent where reenactors were doing a spectacular job of performing an amputation. The patient let out a horrific scream, and then passed out. Dr. Ben Austin—playing his ancestor, also Dr. Ben Austin—stood in an apron covered in stage blood and explained the procedure. Ben would later be part of the battle reenactment, but for now, he was explaining medicine. Ashley reached him in time to capture part of his spiel.
“Amputation was frequently the only choice for a Civil War surgeon, and field surgeons could perform an amputation in as little as ten minutes,” Ben told the crowd. “Chloroform existed, but it was scarce. The South had alcohol. When the surgeon could, he would do everything in his power to make the traumatic operation easier for his patient, but at major battles, the pile of amputated limbs could easily grow to be five feet tall. There was no real understanding of germs, and more men died from disease than from wounds or bullets. To carry that further, more men died in the Civil War than in any other American war, and more men died at Sharpsburg, or Antietam, as those of you from the North might know it, than died during the D-Day invasion.”
Ben saw Ashley watching him and lifted a bloody hand. Well, it was covered in faux blood from the faux surgery. Ben knew how to be dramatic. She smiled and waved in return and went on, stopping to chat with some of the women who were cooking, darning or sewing at the living-encampment tents. There were soldiers around as well, explaining Enfield rifles to little boys, whittling, playing harmonicas or engaging in other period activities. One laundress was hanging shirts and long johns out to dry—a nice touch, Ashley thought.
“When the war started, the North already had a commissary department—and the South didn’t,” Matty, the sutler’s wife, was explaining to a group who stood around the campfire she had nurtured throughout the day. “Hardtack—dried biscuits, really—molasses, coffee, sugar, salted beef or pork and whatever they could scrounge off the land was what fed the soldiers, and the South had to scramble to feed the troops. Didn’t matter how rich you were—you were pretty much stuck with what could be gotten. There were points, especially at the beginning of the war, during which the Southern soldiers were doing all right. They were on Southern soil. But war can strip the land. What I’m doing here is boiling salted beef and trying to come up with something like a gravy to soften up the hardtack. With a few precious spices, salt and sugar, it won’t be too bad. A few people can taste, if they like! Of course, I’ve made sure that our hardtack has no boll weevils. The soldiers were fighting every kind of varmint, big and small, to keep their own food.”
Everything seemed to be in perfect order; Ashley’s dreams had been for nothing.
Except, of course, that the reenactment always made her think about Jake.
They were due to leave soon, within the next few days, but since Adam Harrison’s group was still in New Orleans, they finished with the training they were doing there, and waiting for the move, Jake had agreed to go wandering around the French Quarter with his fellow newly minted agent, Whitney Tremont.
“I must admit, I’m going to be sorry to leave New Orleans,” Whitney said. She stared out toward Jackson Square. “There was so much paperwork after the Holloway case, it felt like we were picking up the pieces for days at first. But it’s been nice to have this bit of time to get ready for our move, since we’re all taking up residence in the D.C. area. Though, I’m ex-cited—I mean, we’re going to have offices, Jake. Like really cool offices, in a building in Alexandria—with help! A forensics lab! State-of-the-art equipment.”
Jake grinned. “Yes, it’s going to be interesting to get settled in.”
Whitney grinned back. Her skin was like the café au lait that sat before them. He knew that the others had thought the two of them might wind up together, but what they had formed instead was a friendship, deep and binding.
“But it was good, I think—just being thrown together as freelancers of a sort for our first case. Don’t you think?” she asked. “But federal positions … though I don’t think we really get to stay in those fancy buildings that often, do you?”
“We’re like any other team or unit for the FBI, I believe. The cases come in, and I’m assuming that Adam Harrison and Jackson Crow decide what looks like something we should take on. We’ll get to discuss the situation then. And make the plans.”
“Do you think that any of us could put a case forward?” she asked.
“Sure.” He smiled. “Let’s face it, Whitney, we are an experiment in paranormal investigations. We’re unique, and I’m sure there are those who will make fun of the ‘Krewe of Hunters’ unit.”
“Not anymore. Not after the Holloway case,” she said proudly.
“We have to keep proving that we’re good at what we do,” Jake said. The name “Krewe” they’d given themselves had begun as a joke, but they’d become a real crew through their passion for the work.
“Hmm,” Whitney said, twirling her straw in her iced café au lait. “It’s here somewhere.”
“Here? What’s here? Sometimes you make no sense.”
That made her laugh. “Only sometimes? I think that our new case is going to be here. Somewhere in Louisiana.”
“We’re about to move to Alexandria,” he pointed out.
“I don’t know … I just have a feeling. I don’t think we’ll be going yet. You wait and see.”
“What makes you think that?” Jake asked. Whitney’s prowess was with film, sound and video. But she also seemed to have amazing intuition. Of course, they had all been gathered into the group because of their intuition, their ability to solve problems where others could not, but where Angela Hawkins was quiet, finding what she found without much ado, and Jackson would always be the skeptic, Whitney went in wide-eyed, eager for whatever might not be considered normal.
“Feelings and logic, that’s kind of the Krewe of Hunters motto, right?” she asked.
He laughed, but something was knotting in the pit of his stomach. “I think it’s supposed to be logic—and then feelings,” he told her. He gazed idly across the street. The mule-drawn carriages were starting to arrive in front of Jackson Square. An early-morning tour group was forming on Decatur Street. One of the history tours, he thought.
“Well, of course, good old Jackson, he’s still swearing solving cases is all logic, and we all know that he knows best,” Whitney said.
Jake wasn’t really paying attention. He had seen the tour-group leader come out—he wasn’t sure where she had come from. Of course, there were a number of restaurants and bars in the area, and some had been open forever. It was New Orleans. No one frowned if you discovered you were dying for that 8:00 a.m. drink.
The tour guide was a blonde woman dressed in Civil War attire. Her bonnet hid her face, but she was tall and statuesque, and he had a feeling that she was going to be an attractive woman before he saw her face. Assured, probably in her mid to late thirties, she moved among the chattering crowd as they waited.
She was coming toward the sidewalk, politely excusing herself as she did so, but people didn’t seem to notice as she made her way through them, which said a lot for the good nature of the group, since she was wearing a respectable day dress with large hoops.
She paused when she reached the sidewalk.
Jake started. She was staring straight at him, and she smiled, but her smile seemed to be very sad. Her mouth moved. He squinted. He wasn’t all that much at reading lips, but it was almost as if he could hear her.
“We’re waiting, we need you. Hurry,” he thought she said.
“Jake?”
“Huh?” He turned back to look at Whitney.
“Want to move on?” she asked.
“Yes, sure,” he agreed. He stood and left a tip on the table, having already paid the waiter.
When he glanced up again, the tour had moved on down toward the cathedral. He didn’t see the woman, but they would be walking in the same direction.
“Whitney,” he asked as they did so, “did you understand what that woman was trying to say?”
“What woman?”
“She was the guide for that group that’s ahead of us. She looked right over at us and said something,” Jake told her.
Whitney arched a delicately formed brow. “First, I didn’t see the woman, but I wasn’t looking. And second, if she’d spoken from across the street, unless she’d been yelling, how could I have heard anything she had to say?”
He shrugged. “Good point.”
They walked up St. Ann Street, took a pedestrian thruway as they passed by the square, then turned in right in front of the cathedral, where the tour group had now paused.
The woman wasn’t with them. There was a man in a top hat and frock coat leading the tour.
Jake stopped short.
“Hey! Hey there, remember me?” Whitney said, nudging him.
“Just a second,” Jake said. He knew that the man would finish his spiel about St. Louis Cathedral, and then allow the group to take pictures.
This guide, however, apparently liked to hear himself speak. He added in several personal anecdotes regarding the cathedral, before allowing his group to disperse for pictures.
When the group finally thinned, Jake approached him. The fellow, in his mid-twenties, saw them coming.
“The tour offices are actually on Decatur, sir, if you’re interested in any of our offerings. We do history tours, ghost tours, vampire tours, plantation tours—”
“Actually, we’re locals and could do the tours,” Jake said, interrupting him with a pleasant tone. “I’m just curious—why did you all change tour guides at the last minute?”
The man frowned. “We didn’t. I’ve been scheduled for over a week to do this tour.”
Jake frowned. “I saw a woman with your group. She was dressed in antebellum clothing, bonnet and all.”
“Oh, she was probably heading for Le Petit Theatre,” the tour guide said. “They’re doing several performances of Our American Cousin. She’s a bit early to be in costume for the matinee, but I imagine you saw one of the actresses.”
“Oh, well, thanks,” Jake said.
“Why?”
“Oh, I just thought she was trying to tell me something,” Jake said.
“If she was trying to tell you something, wouldn’t she have just done so?” the man asked.
Jake was irritated by the tone; frankly, he hadn’t liked the man since he’d heard him giving his own life’s history along with the tour.
He felt Whitney’s hand on his arm.
He forced a smile. “Thanks, thanks for the help,” he said.
Whitney pulled him along. “Jerk,” she said.
“Ass,” Jake agreed.
“I meant you,” Whitney teased. “No, sorry—he was a jerk. But come on now! We don’t have any reason to go to the theater.”
“But we’re going to pass it!” Jake protested.
“Let it go, Jake. You saw an actress, and you thought she had something to say. Without sounding just as jerky as that jerk, it’s true—if she’d really wanted to talk to you, she would have come on over. I don’t want to help you stalk a woman, Jake.”
“I don’t want to stalk her. I want to know who she is,” Jake said.
But they did pass right by Le Petit Theatre. He couldn’t help but stop to read the playbill and look at the pictures of the actors in the show.
“She’s not here,” he said.
“Well, God knows, this is New Orleans. Maybe she’s just a kook who likes to dress up in Southern belle attire, though God knows why, the heat can be a bitch. Forget it, Jake.”
Jake agreed. He didn’t know why it was bothering him so much that he’d seen the woman and hadn’t been able to talk to her.
That wasn’t true. He did know. There had been something vaguely familiar about her, although he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.
“Jake? Are you okay?” Whitney asked.
“Fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
“It’s nothing, really. Hey, nothing that car bombs tonight after dinner with the group won’t cure, right?” he said, setting an arm around her shoulders as he led her down the street.
Car bombs weren’t going to fix anything. He was truly disturbed by the woman.
Why was she so familiar? Was she real, or was she in his imagination? Had he brought his dream world to the surface, and did he want her to be from Donegal?
It was absurd, even for a ghost hunter, to believe that someone from the past was calling out to him, trying to reach him.
Logic—and then feelings. That was Jackson Crow’s motto. It was only logical that he think about Ashley now, and logical that even after all these years, he wanted her to need him.
Logic …
Somehow, it just wasn’t working. Feelings were taking over. And thoughts of Ashley and Donegal Plantation.
2
Ashley surveyed the expanse of the property one last time; everything was going extremely well. Children were playing and laughing, the camp looked wonderful and there were activities going on everywhere.
She headed for the house. It was time for her to become Emma Donegal and get ready for the evening’s battle.
But as she walked toward the house, she slowed, paused and looked over at the cemetery. The gate was locked.
Still, a creeping feeling of unease swept over her.
She shrugged it off; a dream was a dream. Good God, she’d dreamed once that she’d kissed Vance Thibault in high school one day, and she loathed him! She hurried on toward the house, trying to forget her unease.
Her grandfather, Frazier Donegal, was sitting on the back porch. She grinned; he looked spectacular, she thought. Frazier was eighty-three, but he showed little sign of slowing down. Today he was dressed in a frock coat, pinstripe breeches and high riding boots—a pure gentleman of the age with his full head of snow-white, a Colonel Sanders mustache and goatee, and bright blue eyes. She worried about him constantly; his health was good, but he was eighty-three.
He was really in the mood today, though, she thought. He was sipping a mint julep. He didn’t even like mint juleps.
“There you are!” he said. “I was starting to wonder.”
Ashley sat in one of the wicker rockers across from him. “Last-minute details in the stables,” she told him. “Charles Osgood didn’t want to be a Yankee.”
Frazier rolled his eyes and shook his head. “It works, you know, for the property, it works. But why on earth everyone always wants to be on the losing side, I’ll just never know. Did he finally accept his assignment?”
“He did—but Ramsay Clayton stepped in at the last minute to let him play Marshall Donegal,” Ashley said.
“Oh?”
“I don’t think Ramsay cares. It’s all play to him,” she said.
“Ramsay is a good fellow. You think he was trying to appear magnanimous in front of you?” Frazier asked.
Ashley shook her head. “There’s never going to be anything between Ramsay and me, Grampa, there just isn’t.”
He lifted his hands. “I was just asking about his motives.”
Ramsay had asked Ashley out the previous year; she had always liked him. He was a good artist, and a handsome man, but she had never felt the least bit of chemistry with him. He had accepted her wish that they just maintain a good friendship. Ramsay had been on the rebound, having broken up with his longtime lover. She wondered if she was still on the rebound—even if she had been the one who had run from Jake.
“I honestly believe Ramsay just doesn’t care,” Ashley said. “I think he’ll have fun saying, ‘Oh, Lord! I had to be a Yankee.’ No, Ramsay isn’t trying to impress me. Griffin even asked me to be his friendly companion for a dinner he had—and I said no. They all understand that the friendships we have are too important.”
“Well, then, good for Ramsay. And you—you better get dressed,” Frazier told her.
“Yep, I’m on it.”
She rose and walked into the house from the riverside.
The original architects had taken advantage of the river and bayou breezes when they had built the house. It hadn’t been changed much since the day it had been built. One long hallway stretched from the front of the house to the back, and before the advent of air-conditioning, the double doors on each end had often been kept open. The house had one unique feature: double winding staircases to a second-floor landing that led to the six bedrooms, three on each side of the house on that floor. The stairway to the third floor, or attic, where there were still two rooms that could be guest rooms or let out to renters, was on the second floor, bayou side, of the house.
Beth Reardon was in Ashley’s room, sitting at the foot of the bed and drawing laces through her corset.
Her skin was pure ebony; she was tall, regal and beautifully built. But she had chosen to get into the action. She was wearing a cotton skirt and cotton blouse and her hair was wrapped up in a bandana. She gazed over at Ashley. “Hey! Time is a-wasting, girl. Where have you been?”
“Settling an argument over who had to be a Yankee,” Ashley told her.
“Yankee. That’s the North, right?” Beth asked. Beth was from New York, and before that, her family had lived in Jamaica. Her accent, however, was all American, and none of her ancestors had been in the United States during the Civil War.
Ashley frowned.
Beth laughed. “Just kidding! Come on, I took history classes.”
“Sorry!” Ashley said.
“You should be. Let’s get you in this ridiculous contraption. So, people really churned butter in these things? No, wait—your relatives sat around looking pretty while the slaves and servants churned the butter, right?”
“Actually, in our family, everyone worked. And I think that everyone had to sweat when churning butter. Most of the time, the plantation mistress had to work really hard.”
“Supervising?”
“And making soap and doing laundry and all the rest,” Ashley said. “Well, maybe if you were really, really, really rich you just sat around. We were rich, but not that rich, and if we’re ever going to be rich again, it’s up to you, since I can barely boil water.” Beth had come to work at Donegal as the chef less than a year ago, determined to make the restaurant one of the most important in the South.
“Anyone can boil water,” Beth assured her. “And you cook okay. You’re not great, but, then, you are one hell of a storyteller. Step into the skirts already, I’m dying to see this show.”
Arranging the layers of clothing that constituted the formal dress of a Southern plantation mistress took some time. They both laughed over the absurdity of the apparel that had been required in Louisiana despite the heat and the humidity. Ashley told Beth, “It’s worse for the guys. The authentic uniforms are wool—those poor little puppies just die out there.”
“Well, honey, I think I’m glad that I’m the unpaid help for this shindig, then,” Beth told her, grinning.
“Cotton like this—it’s nothing. And I do love the bandana! Poor Emma.”
“Yes, it really was poor Emma,” Ashley told her. “Lots of the soldiers left journals about what happened at the battle. It was only after the war that the rumors about Emma having killed her husband got started. It’s as if someone wanted to sully her name. Of course, nothing that we can find was written about her having been charged with the crime.”
“But it was a different time. Maybe she did the unthinkable. Maybe she took a lover. Maybe even, God forbid, he was a Yankee or a carpetbagger!”
“Maybe,” Ashley agreed. “From all the family lore, she loved her husband, she was devastated when he died, and she managed to hold on to the property and raise her children here, even though the South lost and carpetbaggers did sweep down on the South. Carpetbaggers were even more despised than Yanks,” she explained. “They were the people who weren’t fighting for a cause—their cause was just to prey off the vanquished and get rich.”
A few minutes later, Ashley was ready, and they headed back to the porch that faced the river. A crowd had already gathered, since the schedule for the day was printed out on brochures that attendees could pick up at the entrance to the property. A high-school student, seeking extra credit in history, was usually given that job.
Ashley came out to stand next to her grandfather, looking out over the property as she could see it from the back porch. Bright tape in blue and gray cordoned off the areas where the reenactors would move during the events, though they no longer went into the cemetery for the moment of Marshall Donegal’s death and the tactical retreat of the two surviving Union soldiers.
She found herself staring at the cemetery off to her left again. An odd tremor washed over her, but she quickly forgot it and looked at Frazier.
“Nice crowd today,” he said quietly. Ashley squeezed his hand.
The small band—posing as the military band that had been part of Marshall Donegal’s cavalry unit—launched into the haunting strains of “Dixie.”
Frazier Donegal began to speak midway through, giving an excellent history lesson. He didn’t shy away from the slavery question, admitting that cotton was king in the South, and sugarcane, and both needed workers. The citizens of the South had not invented slavery; many had clung to it whether, in their hearts, they accepted the injustice or not. Few men like to admit they were wrong or cruel to their fellow human beings. And they had hardly been magnanimous when it meant they would also lose their livelihood. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was history. Then as now, prejudice was not something with which a man was born—it was something that was taught. He spoke with passion, conviction and sincerity, and a thunderous round of applause greeted his words; he would have been a great politician, Ashley thought. Except that he had never cared about politics; he had always cared about people.
The first roar of close fire sounded from the stables area, and people screamed and jumped. It was all sound and black powder. There was no live ammunition at the reenactment.
The Yankees, mounted on their horses, rode in hard from the east, dismounting at the stables to use the buildings as defensive positions as they began their attack.
Ashley went on to introduce herself as Emma Donegal. She told about the beginning of the war, and how her husband, Marshall Donegal, famed for his exploits in the Mexican-American War more than ten years earlier, had returned to the military, raising a cavalry unit for the Louisiana militia that would be ready to join the Confederate army at any time. But federal forces were always spying in Louisiana. It would be the Union naval leader, David Farragut, a seasoned sailor, who would assault New Orleans and take the city in 1862, but before that time, Union forces snuck down regularly to survey the situation and report back on the Confederate forces guarding the city. The battle at Donegal Plantation began when the federal spies who had participated in the bar brawl rode swiftly to the plantation in uniform, hoping to engage the Confederates before they could summon more men. At Donegal Plantation, however, four of the spies died at the hands of the small Confederate force to be found there, and the only Confederate casualty was Marshall Donegal himself, who had succumbed to the onslaught of the federals, killing three before falling in a pool of his own blood. She explained that history longed to blame her—Emma Donegal—but she was innocent. Truly, she was innocent! The world hadn’t changed that much; people loved to talk, and everyone wanted there to be more to the story. There simply wasn’t. She and her husband had been married thirteen years; they had four children they were raising happily together. She was heartsick at her husband’s death and survived her grief only because she had to keep food on the table for her children.
Of course, she knew the story like the back of her hand. She told it well and was greeted with wild applause when she pointed across the yard. “There! It all begins!”
And thus began the round of shots that made the expanse of land between the stables and the house rich and ripe with black powder. The federals had been traveling with a small, easily maneuvered six-pound howitzer, and in their attempts to seize the property, they sent their bronze cannon balls sailing for the house and ground. In fact, they had missed. At the time, their attempts to use the small cannon had done little but rip up great chunks of the earth. Today, it caused the air to become heavy with black powder.
“The Confederates had to stop the attack before the barn, stables and outbuildings could be set afire,” Frazier Donegal announced from the porch, with a microphone, his voice rich and deep and rising well above the screams and shouting.
Though there was no live ammunition, the small fight clearly taught onlookers just how horrendous it must have been for men in major battles. As the Confederates and federals fought here with guerilla tactics, Ashley asked the crowd to imagine thousands of men marching forward side by side, some of them able to reload three times in a minute. The carnage was terrible. The Civil War was considered to be the last of the ancient wars—and the first of the modern wars.
The defenders split, most of the men rushing the stables from the front. But the Yankees had come around the other side, and in their maneuvering they escaped the body of men they had been determined to fight. One of the attackers was killed at the stables; the others made it around to the cemetery, attempting to use the old vaults as shields. But Marshall Donegal had come around the other side, and while his men were held up, he met up with the attackers at the cemetery.
The fighting originally ended inside the cemetery, but now they ended it just outside, the only difference from that day to this. First, the crowd wouldn’t be able to see any of the action if it occurred there, and, with that many people tramping through, historic funerary art could be destroyed. And so, Charles Osgood, as Marshall, brought down several of the enemy and perished, brutally stabbed to death by bayonets, in front of the gates. The two surviving federal men—Justin Binder and Ramsay—raced toward the stables, whistling for their mounts. They leapt atop their horses and tore for the river road.
Frazier announced, “And thus did the fighting at Donegal Plantation come to an end.”
They said the Pledge of Allegiance, and then the band played “Dixie” and then “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” After the burst of applause that followed the last song, people began to surround the actors—who had remained in the battle positions where they had fallen—as they came to their feet, and they all seemed to disappear into the crowd as they were congratulated, questioned and requested for picture-taking opportunities. Then, at last, the crowd began to melt away, and the sutler began to close down his shop.
Darkness was falling in earnest.
It had been a tremendous success; standing on the porch and watching the crowd ebb, Ashley told herself that she’d been an idiot, letting a dream get to her.
But, as she looked out, it seemed that the plantation was covered in a mist again.
It was the remnants of the black powder from the guns, she told herself.
The mist bore a reddish color. Bloodred.
The sun had set in the west; it was due to the dying of the day.
Whatever the explanation, the entire scene was eerie.
A breeze lifted, and she had the odd feeling that somehow everything had gone askew and changed, and she had somehow entered into a world of mist and shadow herself.
“Well, old girl,” Frazier said quietly, smiling as he set a hand on Ashley’s shoulder. “Another wonderful day. Thank you for all your hard work on this.”
Ashley smiled. Her grandfather was happy. She adored Frazier, and she was always glad when he was happy. She worried about him constantly—driving him crazy, she knew. He had always been somewhat bony—though dignified! But now he seemed thinner, his cheeks hollow. He was old; but a man’s life span could be long, and she wanted him with her for many more years. Now he was smiling, basking in the pleasant glow of the day’s success.
“Come on. Let’s head into the parlor,” Frazier said. “I think we should probably be there to toast our actors and friends, eh?”
The family and some friends—including the soldiers for the day—traditionally retired to the riverside parlor for drinks and unwinding.
“You go on,” Ashley said. “I’ll be right there, I promise. I just want to see that everyone is really moving on.”
Her grandfather gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I’m sure Beth has already put out all manner of delicious little snacks, despite the fact we told her that chips would do. I’ll go supervise my liquor cabinet,” he said, wiggling his white brows.
She grinned. “You’d better do that. Ramsay will say that he deserves your hundred-year-old Scotch for being so generous!”
Frazier pantomimed real fear and then walked on into the house. Ashley was exhausted and ready for a fine glass of hundred-year-old Scotch herself.
But she left the porch to walk around to the front for one last look. Jerry Blake, one of the off-duty officers they hired for traffic and crowd control, was still out by the road, waving at the last of the cars to get them safely on their way. She lifted a hand to him and shouted, “You coming in, Jerry?”
He waved back at her and shouted in return, “No, thanks! I’m on my way home. I have an early patrol shift tomorrow. See you, Ashley!”
A minute later, she saw him check that the day visitors’ cars were all gone. Then he headed for his own car.
The buzz of chatter from inside filled the new silence. She followed the sound to the front parlor, where the reenactors were gathering. Looking around, she had the same strange sense of time encapsulated that she had felt before; none of the soldiers had changed out of their uniforms yet, and she was still in her Emma Donegal attire. Even Beth, who had seemed to get a tremendous sense of entertainment out of the day, was still in her 1860s garb. Some of the men had cigars, and they were allowed to smoke them in the house that night. Only the beer bottle in the hand of Matty Martin, the sutler’s wife, provided a modern note.
Matty came over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Why, Mrs. Emma Donegal, you do create a mighty fine party, a mighty fine party! What a day!”
“Why, thank you, Mrs. Martin,” Ashley said, inclining her head regally as a plantation mistress of the day might have done.
Matty dropped the act for a minute. “Oh, Ashley, we sold so much! And I can’t tell you how many people ordered custom uniforms. I’ll be sewing my fingers to the bone for the next months, but what a great day we had.”
“I’m so glad,” Ashley told her. She walked for the buffet with its crocheted doily and poured herself a Scotch whiskey—it wasn’t a hundred years old, but it would do. Others came up to her and she responded—so many friends, and everyone involved in the reenactment. The men bowed and kissed her hand, still playing elite gentlemen of the era.
Ramsay grinned when he was near her. “I’d say ninety percent of the fighting men never tasted a good brandy, so I’m sure glad we get to be the rich of the past.”
She smiled, and agreed. “Wouldn’t it be something if we could have Lee and Grant, and Davis and Lincoln, and show them all that the war created the country we have now?”
Griffin walked over to them, lifting his glass. “Grant was an alcoholic. A functional one, but an alcoholic. No relation, of course. My Grant family was Southern to the core. Cheers!”
“You’re a cynic, Mr. Grant,” Ashley said, inclining her head.
Griffin laughed. “Not at all. We strive for an understanding of history around here, right?”
“We do,” Ashley agreed. “And, historically, many of them were truly honorable people. Can you imagine being Mrs. Robert E. Lee—and losing a historic family home, built by George Washington’s stepgrandson and filled with objects that had belonged to George and Martha? Remember, Arlington was a home long before it became a national cemetery!”
“Cheers to that, I suppose,” Griffin said. “Whiskey, Mrs. Donegal? Why, my dear woman, you should be sipping sherry with the other wives!”
“I need a whiskey tonight!”
Ramsay and Griffin laughed, and she joined them while she listened to her guests chatting. Some of the other men argued history, too—and she saw that everyone involved in the actual reenactment had shown up. Cliff, Ramsay, Hank, Griffin, Toby and John—and the Yankees, Michael Bonaventure, Hadley Mason, Justin Binder, Tom Dixon and Victor Quibbly, along with John Martin, of course, and Dr. Ben Austin.
Everyone but Charles Osgood. She couldn’t imagine that he wasn’t there. He must have been thrilled to death with the day.
“Hey, where’s Charles?” Ashley asked, interrupting a rousing discussion of Farragut’s naval prowess.
A few of those close to her quit talking to look around.
“I haven’t seen him since he very dramatically died of his wounds,” Ramsay said. “I ‘skedaddled’ right after and rode out with Justin, before we rode back to take our fair share of the applause.”
“Cliff?” Ashley asked.
Cliff shook his head. “No, I was with the soldiers who came rushing in too late when Charles was being besieged by the enemy. I thought he just stood up and bowed when everyone was clapping. I don’t remember seeing him when you and Frazier started talking … or when the band played.”
“He’s probably outside somewhere. I’ll call his cell,” Ramsay said. He pulled out his phone and hit a number of buttons.
Ashley watched him. She realized the others had already turned away and were becoming involved in their conversations again.
Ramsay shook his head at her. “No answer.”
Cliff cleared his throat. “Not to be disrespectful in any way, but maybe he met a girl and—got lucky.”
“Yeah for Charles!” Justin Binder said, lifting his glass. He was somewhat tipsy—if not drunk—Ashley thought. Good thing he was staying on the property. The others were all still playacting; they were entrenched in the past.
They didn’t want to look for someone they obviously believed was just off enjoying his own star turn. But …
“He would have wanted to be here tonight,” Ashley said stubbornly. “He was so thrilled to be taking the part of Marshall Donegal. I’m going out to see if his car is still here.”
Ramsay lifted a hand. “Sorry, don’t bother, Ashley. He didn’t drive. He came with me. I told him that I couldn’t give him a ride back since I was going to stay at the house out here for a while, but he told me he’d hitch a ride back in with someone. Said he didn’t have to be back to work until Tuesday morning and for me not to worry.”
“Gentlemen, perhaps a search is in order,” Frazier said. “A Civil War parlor game of sorts.”
They all stared at him blankly.
“Exactly,” Ashley said, relief coloring her tone. “Find the lost rebel. Beth will create a five-star private meal for a party of four, payable to the man—or woman—who finds Charles!”
“I will?” Beth said. She looked at Ashley. “Um, it will be—sumptuous!”
“It’s a lot of property to cover,” Ramsay murmured.
“We need to organize, then,” Griffin said. “It will be fun. Yankees take the cemetery side, and rebels search out the bayou side.”
“Is that fair?” Griffin asked. “If he’s still around, old Charlie would be by the cemetery, don’t you think?”
“I pick scouting detail!” Justin said.
“Yes! Let’s find Charles!” Toby said.
“I’ll check out the area around the oaks out front,” Matty Martin offered. She was watching Ashley and seemed to realize that Ashley was seriously worried. “John, you can come with me. It’s mighty dark out there, even with all the lights from the house and the property floodlights.”
“Of course, my dear,” John told her. “They should have let women fight the war,” he muttered, following her out.
Hank laughed. “Yeah, imagine, mud wrestling at its best.”
“Hank!” Cliff admonished. “War is always a serious affair.”
“Well, of course it is,” Griffin said. “War is very serious—but we’re not at war. We’re playing a game. We’re looking for old Charles. Hey, Ashley, if no one wins …”
“Well, at some point, we’ll just all have dinner,” she told them.
“Great!” Beth muttered to her. “Now I get to cook for all of them!”
“It’s good that I’ve got the bayou side!” Toby Keaton said. “Borders my property.”
“I’ll take the cemetery,” Frazier said.
“You will not. It’s dark and dangerous in there,” Ashley told him.
“Not for me, dear. It’s memories for me,” he said softly, and quickly turned away. Neither of them wanted to think about Ashley’s parents, entombed in the majestic family vault.
“Grampa, please—you need to be here as everyone returns,” Ashley said.
“I’ll take the cemetery,” Ben offered. “I’m really familiar with the living and the dead,” he added and winked. “Just give me one of the big old flashlights at the back door. I’ll be fine.”
Ben would be fine. He was a big, strapping man in his mid-forties. Besides, he’d attended funerals for both her parents and knew the cemetery well.
Ashley wanted to take the cemetery herself; that dream had to have been a sign.
No, that would be insane. Ben knew what he was doing. She wasn’t going to let a dream dictate what she did in her life.
“Okay, so where are we going?” Beth asked Ashley.
“The stables?” Ashley suggested.
“I’ll come with you and stand there, but I’m not going near the horses!”
An hour later, they had finished the actual search as best they could in the night.
Ramsay went to speak with the guests who were staying in the rooms that had been the old stables, and the Yankee contingent spoke with those in the other outbuildings. Cliff went to his office, wondering if Charles might have slipped in there to rest.
They all searched, from the river to the road, from the sugar fields to the bayou, but there was no sign of Charles Osgood. By midnight, all the searchers were back at the house.
“Ashley, really, he must be out somewhere else,” Cliff told her.
She looked at Ben. “You searched everywhere in the cemetery? There are so many paths, little roads between all the vaults.”
Ben sighed. “Ashley, I searched. But we can all take another look.”
She nodded.
“That was actually not a suggestion,” Ben said.
“It’s all right. I’ll go myself,” Ashley said.
“We’ll help,” Ramsay said, tugging at Cliff’s sleeve.
“I’ve still got the key, so I’ll come, too,” Ben said.
Ashley led the way, wondering why she thought that she’d really find Charles in the cemetery, just because she’d had a dream.
But she was determined.
Ben opened the lock on the gate, though, of course, they could have all crawled over the stone wall.
Ashley headed straight for her family tomb. The real Marshall Donegal had died there.
The last interment had been her father’s. The usual little pain in her heart sparked—it always came when
she thought about him, and her mother. And tonight, especially, she missed Jake.
There was no sign of Charles there, and no sign that he had been there.
She almost fell, she was so relieved.
The tomb glowed white beneath the gentle touch of the moon, dignified in its decaying majesty. She heard the three men calling to one another from different sections of the graveyard, and she followed a voice to reach Cliff. He looked at her. “Ashley, Charles left. Whether he was spirited away by aliens or not, I don’t know. But he isn’t here. This isn’t any parlor game, is it? You’re really worried.”
“I am. Did you go in the chapel?” she asked.
“You think that Charles is hiding in the chapel? Or kneeling down, still thanking the good Lord for the chance to be Marshall Donegal?” Cliff asked dryly.
“Please, Cliff?”
He groaned. He walked around the ell that would lead them to the chapel, in the far corner near the embankment of the river. The chapel had carved oak double doors, which creaked when he opened them. He fumbled for the light switch, and light flared in the lovely little place with its stained-glass windows, marble altar and old mahogany podium.
The place was empty.
“Happy?” Cliff asked her.
“No. I can’t help it—I’m worried,” she told him.
He just shook his head. “Come on. Let’s just go.”
They walked back to the house, where the others were still milling on the back porch—many of them having retrieved their drinks.
“So, the bastard did get lucky!” Ramsay said, laughing. “Hell, if I had foreseen that, I’d have had him play Marshall Donegal a couple of years ago!”
“I’m going to call the police,” Ashley said, looking at her grandfather.
“He’s been missing just a few hours,” Beth pointed out. “He might have thought that he said good-night to everyone. There’s so much confusion going on when the fighting ends. I mean, I thought it was amazing—it really was living history. But it’s mass confusion. I can only imagine a Gettysburg reenactment.”
Ashley realized that everyone was staring at her—skeptically. They had searched and searched, and grown bored and tired. But she couldn’t help her feelings of unease, even while they all stood silent, just staring at her.
The river breeze brought the chirp of the chickadees—her senses were so attuned to her home area that somewhere, distantly, down the bayou, she thought she could hear an alligator slip into the water. This was her home; she knew these sounds.
They were normal; they were natural. But the sounds of the darkness weren’t reassuring to her now.
“Grampa, I think we need to report this to the police,” she repeated.
“Great. He’s probably at some bar in the big city, bragging about the fact that he got to play Marshall Donegal today,” Ramsay said. “And they’ll drag him out and he’ll act like a two-year-old again.”
Frazier stared at Ashley and nodded. If she wanted to call the police, they would do so.
The parish police were called, and Officer Drew Montague, a nice-enough man whom Ashley had met a few times over the years, took all the information.
“You say you all saw him just a few hours ago?” he asked. Montague had a thick head of dark hair and eyebrows that met in the middle.
“Yes,” she said.
“What makes you think that he’s actually missing? Perhaps there’s a woman involved. Is he married? Look, Miss Donegal, you know that we appreciate everything that you do for the area, but … we’re talking about a grown man who has been gone just a few hours,” the officer said.
“He was proud of the role he was playing. He would have stayed,” Ashley insisted.
Officer Montague shifted his weight. “Look, I’ve taken the report, and I’ll put out a local bulletin to be on the lookout for him, but he’s an adult. An adult really needs to be gone for forty-eight hours before he is officially missing.”
Frazier spoke before Ashley could. “Anything you can do will be greatly appreciated. We’re always proud that the parish is about people, and not just red tape and rules.”
Montague nodded. “Right. Well, I’ll get this moving, then. We’ll all be on the lookout for Mr. Osgood.”
Ashley thanked him. The others had remained behind, politely and patiently waiting. Now it was really late, and once again there were a number of weary men and women—all still in Civil War–era attire—staring at her.
Officer Montague left, mollified by Frazier Donegal over the fact that he had been called out on a ridiculous mission.
“I’m sorry,” Ashley said to the others. The evening had started out as a party and turned into a search committee.
“Hey,” Cliff said, grinning, “I don’t have far to go home.”
“We’re staying in the stables anyway, kid,” Justin Binder told her. He had played a Yankee, and happily. His family hailed from Pennsylvania.
Griffin laughed and gave her an affectionate hug. “You made me sober up, which is good. I am driving.”
“Me, too,” John Ashton said. He held her shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Charles is just fine. I’m sure of it.”
She thanked them all and said good-night, and they drifted away, some to the old outbuildings where they were staying, and some to their cars, parked in the lot out front and down the road.
She stood on the porch with Beth and her grandfather.
She couldn’t tell whether they thought she was being ridiculous or not, they were both so patient.
Beth gave her a kiss on the cheek and said, “We still have about sixteen guests, and the household. I’ve got to get up early to whip up our spectacular plantation breakfast.”
Ashley bid her good-night. It was down to her grandfather and herself, and Frazier was going to wait for her to be ready to head off to bed.
“Something is wrong. I can feel it, Grampa,” she said.
He set an arm around her shoulder. “You know … I have an old friend. I’ve been meaning to call him for a long time—tonight seems a good time to have a chat with him. If Charles really is gone, he may be able to help us. His name is Adam Harrison. I don’t know if you remember meeting him—I see him up in Virginia and D.C. sometimes. He worked for private concerns for many years, finding the right investigators for strange situations. Then the government started calling him, and his projects were all kind of combined for a while, civilian and federal. But he’s got a special unit now, and he’s got federal power behind him on it. His people are a select group from the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. I’ll give him a call. We’ll get someone out here to help by tomorrow. And if Charles turns up, no harm done.”
She lowered her head. Adam Harrison. She knew the name. His unit had been involved in solving the death of Regina Holloway—it had been all over the media because she was a senator’s wife. And she knew, too, that Jake Mallory was part of that unit. She might not be a part of his world, but she hadn’t been able to miss it when she’d seen his name in the papers. She had broken off something that had been real with Jake, because he had terrified her … because he was certain that he had spoken with her father, after he had died. And now….
Now Frazier was going to call Adam. Of course, it could come to nothing. She was panicking over a missing man because of an equally irrational dream.
She looked out on the beautiful expanse of their property. The river rolling by. The moon high over the clouds. The vaults in the cemetery silent and ghostly and opalescent in the pale glow of night.
Jake, I’m so … scared.
Something was wrong. It was the oddest thing; she felt that she really understood the expression I feel it in my bones. Something wasn’t right about Charles’s disappearance, and she knew it.
It was almost as if the past had truly merged into this eerie and haunting reality, and the collision of time here was not going to go away.
Interlude
He’d known for a long time what he’d had to do. The voice had been telling him for years.
At first, of course, he had ignored it. The vision he’d seen of the past hadn’t been real. But then he’d known. He’d known who he was, and he’d come to know that the voice wouldn’t go away until he’d done what needed to be done. And he’d carefully planned it all out, though things had gone a bit strangely today. Didn’t matter, though, who was playing Marshall Donegal. It didn’t matter at all. Because, of course, an actor was just an actor.
It was Donegal Plantation itself that needed to repay the old debt. That old debt could only be repaid one way.
With blood.
God bless a crowd. There was nothing in the world like mayhem, nothing like hundreds of witnesses to pull off an escapade such as he had planned, and to do it perfectly.
There had been a horde surrounding them. One particular brunette was the right age, exceptionally pretty and with a Massachusetts accent. When she spoke, there was an r on the name Linda, and there was no r on the car she had “pahked” down the river road.
She had giggled when she spoke to Charles, so it was easy to whisper in the man’s ear in his moment of greatest achievement and convince him that the girl was waiting to meet him.
And in the madness surrounding everyone engaged in the action then, it was easy enough to meld into the crowd himself, and to swiftly disappear, and hurry to the river road.
And there was Charles.
He’d approached Charles with a smile.
And, of course, Charles was smiling as well. At least he would go in a state of sheer happiness. It might even be a kindness. How many people got to die that happy?
Poor, dumb Charles—he never suspected a thing. After the initial whack, he never even felt the prick of the needle.
He’d thought it all out, exactly where he’d send Charles, because it all had to be done in plain sight. In plain sight, people never really knew what they saw.
There were tourists heading to their cars. But they’d never notice two fellows in uniform chatting by a car. Not at an event like this. People liked to dress up.
Maybe everyone wanted to be someone else, someone they weren’t.
But to them, it would just appear that they were two cronies, faces covered by their broad-brimmed hats, leaning against one another as they chatted and laughed over a joke.
Then … hide the body. Or if he had been seen, “help” an inebriated friend into a car.
He would need more time for the pièce de résistance. Initially, it had taken him less thantwenty minutes to stash Charles and rejoin all those rejoicing over the day.
He had never felt more victorious. The difficult part, of course, would be to hide his anticipation for all that was destined to follow.
It didn’t seem that anything could go so impossibly well.
Ashley, damn her, though. Leave it to Ashley to be worried about Charles! Still and all, it did make the entire plan more exciting. Now, with the evening at a close, he was feeling elated.
The place had settled down; though everyone had been willing to look for Charles, only Ashley had been really concerned. He had played with the idea of actually disposing of poor old Charles immediately, but now he was satisfied that he had decided he should make it something more dramatic—and allow time between the reenactment and the beginning of the end.
Oh, he had worked with the others. He had searched so hard. There might have been just a few minutes when he feared someone would actually search the cars, but Charles hadn’t driven.
It had almost been as if he’d been part of the plan.
Now he sat next to good old Charles.
This was necessary. The voice had said that it had to be done, and his ancestor made him know that nothing could be right until then.
He’d never realized that he’d enjoy it all so much.
He patted him on the back. Charles didn’t move. The drug was holding, but he’d administer more. He didn’t want the big lug waking up.
He needed him alive until the time was right.
Every time he’d been at Donegal recently, he’d felt as if he were being pushed harder and harder. The past was the past—so they all said. But it wasn’t. The past created the present, and he knew now that he had to use the present to set the past right. It wasn’t crazy; he’d heard the voices in his head. A collective consciousness that seemed to scream through history.
Now, maybe, the voices would stop.
3
Car bombs didn’t exactly do it for him, but Jake indulged in a few anyway.
“Cheers!” Jenna said, dropping her shot glass into her Guinness, and swallowing down the mixture.
“Cheat!” Will said to Whitney. “You poured your shot in—you just drink the whole thing.”
“Hey, you drink it your way, and I’ll drink it mine!” Whitney protested.
“You’re not doing it the Irish way,” Will said, looking to Jenna for help.
“Drink it however you like!” Jenna said, smiling sweetly at Will.
There was a small room in the back of the bar, and Jake, Will Chan, Jenna Duffy and Whitney Tremont had it to themselves that night, so it was nice. Jackson Crow was back at the hotel with Angela Hawkins. They’d all just met for the first time on the Holloway case, and Jackson, the skeptic, had quickly fallen in love with Angela—despite their different approaches to their work. Go figure. The entire team respected and admired them both, and they were glad that the two were indulging in some quality time together.
And for Jake, it felt good to be in the bar with his coworkers.
During the Holloway case, they had gotten to know one another. Will and Whitney were excellent with cameras and sound systems; Jenna was a registered nurse, something that could always come in handy when traipsing through strange landscapes and old buildings. His own expertise was computers—and computer hacking. He could usually find any piece of information on any site, public, private or even heavily coded. Yet they’d all had certain unusual experiences in life that had led them to being excellent investigators—and, together, able to discern deeper, darker undercurrents to the event they researched. Now, they also had badges. After the Holloway case, it had been deemed that they would continue to work together, and they would do so with all proper credentials as FBI agents.
“Now, quit whining over the way a woman drinks her drink,” Jenna said and turned, leaning an elbow on their table, to talk to Whitney. She had brilliant green eyes and red hair, and a smile that could melt ice. “I want to know what else I’ve missed. The World War II museum, the Civil War museum, plantations, the zoo …”
“Shall we have another drink?” Whitney asked.
But before Jenna could answer, they all heard their phones buzz.
“Text from Jackson,” Whitney murmured.
“Meeting in the morning,” Jenna said, the slight Irish lilt in her voice grave.
“Hmm. Do you think that means that we’re not heading to Alexandria?” Will asked.
“It means something is up,” Whitney said, looking at Jake.
“I’ll pay the bill,” Jake told them.
They walked back to their hotel slowly and silently, each wondering what they’d discover in the morning. After they parted, Jake sat up a very long time.
It became morning at last. Ashley didn’t feel as if she’d slept at all. The dreams continued to plague her, only now she was Emma Donegal, leaving the house in the aftermath of the battle to find the bloody body of her husband. And when she woke herself from the dream, she could have sworn that deceased Confederate soldier was sitting in the wingback chair by the doors to the second-story wraparound porch. She was more tired from being in bed than she was from being awake.
A shower helped revive her a little. Dressed and ready for the day, she headed down to the kitchen. Once it had been a gentleman’s den, and then it had been an office, and then, when it was no longer deemed necessary to have the main kitchen in an outbuilding, it had become a wonderful, bright kitchen. The walls were a pale yellow. There was a center granite worktable with stools around it, and suspended racks that held several dozen shining copper cooking utensils. A breakfast nook held a table that sat eight.
Beth was just pouring milk from a carton into serving pitchers. “Coffee is on. None of the guests have made it in yet,” she said cheerfully.
“What’s for breakfast?” Ashley asked.
“Down-home comfort food this morning,” Beth said. “Corn bread, blueberry muffins, bacon and cheese omelets, and country cheese grits. Want to grab a plate and eat before it starts getting crazy?”
“Sure,” Ashley said. She watched as her beautiful friend made art out of an omelet and shook her head as Beth handed her the plate full of light, fluffy eggs.
“Grits are in the bowl, corn bread is sliced and in those baskets,” Beth said.
Ashley helped herself. “I’m going to waddle across the lawn soon,” Ashley told her.
Beth grinned. “I doubt it. You’re too fond of those awful creatures out in the stables. You get plenty of exercise.” She shivered.
“I can’t believe that you’re afraid of horses.” Ashley laughed.
“I told you—one of the bastards bit me when I was a child!” Beth said.
“Well, ours won’t bite you. You should try riding Tigger. She’s a twenty-year-old sweetie. She moves like an old woman.”
“Then she may be crotchety as one, too,” Beth said. “No, honey, you stick to your horses, and I’ll stick to cooking.”
Ashley dutifully bit into her omelet, and it was delicious. As she was finishing, guests began to stream by her, heading in for breakfast or stopping to clear their tabs. They’d be down to eight guests that night; the reenactment had taken place on a Sunday, and many of those who came for the reenactment managed to take off the Monday if they had a regular workweek. By Monday night, they were usually down to just a few guests.
She heard Frazier speaking with people on the other side of the stairway, his tone rich and filled with humor as he told old family tales and pointed out certain portraits on the walls.
Ashley took her place at the desk to fill out the registry and books—by hand; people actually signed her guest book, and she wrote personal thank-yous—and then could have sworn that someone had approached her. She looked up, but she was alone. For a moment, her brows knit in consternation, but people milled throughout the lower level of the house now and any one of them might have stopped nearby. She gave her concentration back to the project at hand.
She heard a throat being cleared then, and looked up—this time, someone was there. Justin.
He sat in the one of the period wingback chairs that faced the desk.
She frowned. “Are you checking out? I thought you were staying a few days.”
“I am staying another few days, Ashley. I just stopped to see how you’re doing,” he told her.
She liked Justin. At forty, he was a widower, though years before, he had brought his wife with him, and she had played at being a camp follower—with great relish. They had been married for years before he had lost her to cancer. But Justin still came.
“I’m fine, thanks. Nancy’s got the girls?” His mother-in-law, Nancy, now came along to help Justin with his ten-year-old twin girls. Hard to be a “fighting federal” and keep an eye on twins.
“Yes. Any word on Charles?”
She set her pen down. “No. But I haven’t tried calling anyone this morning. Everyone on that search party last night is weary of me torturing them, so … If he’s been found, I’ll be called right away.”
He reached across the desk and put his hand on hers, giving a comforting squeeze.
“Ashley, you are part of the charm of this place. You really care. None of us thinks you were torturing us. I was thinking of taking the family for a horse ride later, and I know that Cliff does a lot of the riding tours, but I thought you and I could make another search of it, too.”
She was surprised. “Sure! And thank you.”
“Jeanine and Meg don’t ride well. They don’t get a chance to go riding often enough. You still have two horses calm as the Dead Sea, right?”
“Nellie is our sweetest. And Tigger is a good old girl if I’ve ever known one. Nellie loves him, so they’re great on a ride together. They’ll be perfect for the twins.”
Justin grinned and stood. “Nancy’s bringing the crew in for breakfast. Say an hour or two?”
“Two hours will work for me.”
Justin thanked her. She finished with paperwork and realized she was constantly looking up, certain that she was going to see a Confederate soldier staring at her.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she reminded herself. But saying the words out loud sounded defensive. “I don’t. I really don’t!” she said to the empty room.
Irritated with herself, she went out to the stables. Justin’s family would be out soon.
Ashley saddled Varina and stroked her mane. The farmer they had bought her from when Ashley had been a teen had been an avid fan of Varina Davis, the one and only first lady of the Confederate States of America. Because she had been named Varina, they named Nellie’s last colt Jeff, for Jefferson Davis, the one and only President of the Confederate States. That morning, she and Justin chose Varina and Jeff as their mounts, while she assigned Nellie to the younger, slightly more timid of Justin’s twin girls, and Tigger to the other, while Nancy, Justin’s mother-in-law, was on the slightly more spirited Abraham.
Ashley took the girls around the paddock a few times, just going over the basics. Justin had been right about their experience, but they were smart little girls with common sense, and Ashley thought they would do well.
Ashley gave her attention to the girls as they rode around the outbuildings and then toward Beaumont, the Creole plantation “next door.” The girls were delighted by the ride, waving to everyone they passed while traversing the house and outbuildings area and then concentrating on their father’s and grandmother’s admonitions to be on the lookout for wildlife.
“Are there alligators?” Meg, the bolder of the twins, demanded.
“Yes, by the bayou. But they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone. We won’t dismount anywhere near the bayou. Now, you don’t want to bring a small-sized dog or even a medium-sized dog out there. They look like dinnertime to the alligators,” Ashley told them. She was listening to the girls; she was looking everywhere. They had searched last night, but it had been dark. Now it was daylight, and, hopefully, if Charles Osgood had come out here and fallen, hurt himself or had some other trial, they might find him now.
“We don’t have a dog,” Jeanine, Meg’s sister, younger by five minutes, said.
“Can we get a puppy, Dad?” Meg asked.
“Soon enough,” Nancy said, grinning at Ashley.
“Why not now?” Meg asked.
“Because Daddy is busy,” Nancy answered. Nancy was one of those women who had gone to a beautiful shade of silver-white naturally.
“Watch for animals, girls,” Ashley interceded. “We’ll be close enough to see the alligators basking in the sun. These woods aren’t that dense, but with all this land, every once in a while a black bear or a cougar wanders across the road. I know that you see nutria—”
“What are nutria?” Meg interrupted.
“They’re the largest rat, essentially,” Justin said.
“Ugh!” Jeanine said.
“The buggers were brought over years ago, in the 1930s, and they’ve multiplied into the millions,” Ashley explained. “There’s actually a bounty on them, because they can be so destructive. But they don’t hurt people. The animal that you do have to be careful of in these parts is the cottonmouth snake. But it likes water, too, and we’re not going in the water. Animals usually leave you alone as long as you leave them alone.”
“Watch for herons!” Justin said.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing a cougar,” Meg announced.
“They’re shy, too. But we’ll see what we see,” Ashley assured them.
They counted seven herons, two raccoons, an armadillo and three owls up in the trees. When they came to the bayou, Ashley pointed out two alligators sunning on the opposite bank. As she did so, she saw that staff members at Beaumont were engaged in their work already. A man dressed in a droop hat, cutoff denim and a dotted cotton shirt was standing by a wagon that showed freshly hewn sugarcane. Another, dressed more like an early nineteenth-century Louisiana French businessman, was giving a tour.
She looked up toward the second story of the plantation house, where the family had lived. A man was standing there, dressed in a Confederate uniform frock coat.
Ashley blinked against the light. He looked like …
Like her ancestor, Marshall Donegal.
The man lifted a hand to her.
Yet when she blinked again, he was gone. Her imagination at work again. Of course, she was still concerned about Charles Osgood. But he was due back to work the next morning. If he didn’t turn up by then, the police would have to get involved at a serious level.
She realized that Justin was watching her.
“Are you okay, Ashley?” he asked.
“I’m fine. The light is playing tricks, that’s all. I thought I saw a Confederate soldier at the window. Toby Keaton does workshops and tours on the real workings of a sugar plantation over there. We do the Civil War—keeps me sending tourists to him, and him sending them to Donegal Plantation,” she said. Would she have told the truth if Jake were here? Jake, who seemed to know what the dead were saying.
“You have Charles Osgood on your mind,” Justin said.
“I do. I can’t help it.”
They rode along the bayou for a while, and then Ashley led them around the second trail to head back to the house. The girls chattered the whole time.
Justin nudged Jeff and the horse trotted up next to Ashley again. “I know you were hoping to find Charles,” he said.
“I am worried, Justin, really worried,” she said.
“He’ll show up. But let him know how worried you were. That will make him feel good,” Justin told her.
Ashley offered him a smile. “Sure, thanks.”
Back at the stable, Ashley tried to keep her mind busy, letting the girls help her with the saddles and bridle and tack. She taught them how to groom their horses.
As she put away the last of the brushes, Justin strode over to her. “Great. Now Jeanine doesn’t want a puppy anymore. She wants a horse.”
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Heather Graham
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Ужасы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Emerging from the bayou like an apparition, Donegal Plantation is known for its unsurpassed dining, captivating atmosphere, haunting legends and now a corpse swinging from the marble angel that marks its cemetery′s most majestic vault.A corpse discovered in nearly the same situation as that of Marshall Donegal, the patriarch killed in a skirmish just before the Civil War. Desperate for help traditional criminologists could never provide, plantation heiress Ashley Donegal turns to an elite team of paranormal investigators who blend hard forensics with rare often inexplicable intuition.Among the «Krewe of Hunters» is an old flame, Jake Mallory, a gifted musician with talent stretching far beyond the realm of the physical, and a few dark ghosts of his own. The evil the team unveils has the power to shake the plantation to its very core. Jake and Ashley are forced to risk everything to unravel secrets that will not stay buried even in death.