Eventually they had to get out. He got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and headed downstairs to meet the workmen, while she dried her hair.
As soon as he was gone, she reached into her bag and found the diary she had stuffed in it when she packed.
She could tell by the aroma wafting up the stairs that he had made coffee. She went downstairs, poured herself a cup, then headed up to the attic and the rocker where she had liked to sit and read when Amelia was alive.
Jeremy and Zach arrived just minutes after the workmen. Aidan met them downstairs, and they looked over the contractor’s schedule again. The electricity would be off all day Monday, as would the water. By the end of the week, though, except for a bit of detail work, the house would be done according to the work plan. A new kitchen, something they would want eventually, would take another week, at least, at a later date, since all the appliances, counters and cabinets would have to be special-ordered. And a cleaning crew had been scheduled to come in and spiff up the stables, which were being called into use for the party.
Just as they finished speaking, a car came up the drive. Aidan, shielding his eyes from the sun, saw that Vinnie was driving, accompanied by another member of the band and Mason.
“Good, you’re all here,” Vinnie said, hopping out of the car. Mason followed, looking up at the house, and the other guy—Gary, Aidan thought—came last.
“What are you three doing out so early?” Aidan asked, walking over to them.
“We’re not trying to be pains in the ass,” Gary said quickly, shaking Aidan’s hand and grinning at Jeremy and Zach. “We just want the gig.”
“The gig?” Zach asked.
“Playing for the benefit,” Gary said.
Vinnie’s face had gone a slightly mottled shade of red, but he spoke quickly. “I asked Aidan about it last night. He said it was your call, Jeremy.”
“And I said they should come ask you right off,” Mason said with a shrug. “Strike while an iron is hot, you know?”
Jeremy looked at his two brothers. “Why not?”
“Best band on Bourbon Street,” Zach agreed.
Vinnie just stared at them. “That easy?”
“Yeah, that easy,” Jeremy said.
“Cool,” Vinnie breathed.
“Told you,” Mason told him, setting his arms around his friends’ shoulders.
“Yeah, you told us,” Gary agreed. He looked around. “Where do you think you’ll want us to set up? You guys going to have a haunted graveyard or anything like that?”
“No,” Aidan said sharply. Maybe too sharply. “We’ll limit events to the stables, maybe the downstairs of the house. But since there hasn’t been a horse around in years, the stables will be the best place.”
“Great,” Vinnie said, then pumped their hands one by one. “It’ll be great. You have to sit in with us, Jeremy. And the publicity we’ll get from this, well, it’s priceless. Thank you.”
Aidan couldn’t help it. He still felt a slight reservation. Had he been right to erase Vinnie from his mental suspect list? Even though Vinnie hadn’t lied about taking Jenny back to her B and B, what was to say that he wasn’t the person she’d gone out to meet later?
Then there was Mason. Always at the store, always at the bar. And now studying the house as if he’d never seen it before. Aiden knew he’d been out there, so why stare at it now…unless he was looking for something that might give him away?
“The place looks great,” Mason told them.
“First time you’re seeing it?” Zach asked.
“Oh, hell, no,” Mason said, laughing. “Vinnie and I both used to come out here with Kendall. You know, when she was staying with Amelia.”
“Right,” Aidan said.
At that moment Kendall suddenly came tearing out of the house, brandishing a book. “I’ve figured it out!” she cried.
They all turned to stare at her.
“Hey, guys. Hi. What are you doing here?” she asked, her glance moving from Vinnie to Mason to Gary.
Vinnie picked her up and spun her around. “It’s official! We got the gig!”
“Super!” she said, as he set her down.
Aidan watched the two of them. They were close. Brother and sister close. Was it possible that Vinnie could be a sadistic killer and Kendall truly have no idea?
“What was that you were saying when you ran out here?” Aidan asked her.
She looked at him, then Jeremy and Zach. “I found out the truth about Sloan and Brendan,” she said, smiling again.
“Are you talking about that old story again?” Vinnie asked.
She nodded, obviously feeling triumphant. “They didn’t kill each other. Not the way we always heard it.”
“Kendall, stop. You’re about to ruin the one good ghost story that goes with this place,” Vinnie objected.
“No, actually, it makes it an even sadder ghost story.” She lifted the book she’d been holding. “This starts out as Fiona’s diary, and it’s charming. She talks about her secret wedding to Sloan. Brendan was there, so he knew they were married. Then Sloan rode off to fight again. Almost a year later, Sloan went AWOL when he was on a mission close to home. Meantime, a couple of Union soldiers came out from the city. But here’s the thing—they weren’t just a couple of greedy bastards, out to see what they could steal. One of them was a killer. He used his position with the military to “interrogate” women, and then he killed them. He’d been using this property to kill them and hide their bodies for a while. Fiona heard something one night, so she slipped out to see what was going on and saw him leaving, and that was when she looked around and saw what he’d done. What he’d been doing for a while. But he saw her, and after that, she was afraid every day. She wrote everything down in her diary, but she knew no Union officer was going to listen to her, so she was waiting for Brendan to get back, so she could tell him and he could report what was going on. But he didn’t come back in time. The killer, a man named Victor Grebbe, didn’t come just to harass her and to steal from her, but to kill her. She knew when she saw him ride up that she was going to die, so she gave the diary to Henry, the caretaker, who had stayed on to help her. She didn’t want him to die, too, so she told him to take the diary and the baby Sloan never even got to see and hide.
“Grebbe found her, then, and Sloan rode up just in time to see her die when Grebbe chased her onto the balcony and she threw herself off to get away from him. He shot and wounded Grebbe, and then Brendan showed up. He didn’t recognize Sloan, probably thought he was a deserter from the Confederate army, attacking a Union officer. So they did shoot each other, but they never intended to. And they weren’t fighting over Fiona.”
“How on earth can you know all that from Fiona’s diary?” Aidan asked. “She was dead once she went off the balcony.”
Kendall opened the book to a page near the end. “See where the writing changes? This was written by Henry, the free black man who had stayed on the property to be with Fiona. When it was all over, he finished the story just before he took the baby—Sloan and Fiona’s baby—with him to hide out until the war was over. The baby was named Declan Flynn, and when he was about ten, Henry brought him back to New Orleans, where he put in a claim for the property, and somehow, they won it back.”
“Cool,” Mason said.
“Wow, that will really help you publicize the event,” Vinnie said.
“I’m not so sure we need that much publicity,” Jeremy said. “We have to limit attendance to a couple hundred people, and I think we can guarantee that many tickets already. Then again, this is a matter of history, so it’s important for people to know the truth, and good publicity can’t hurt, right?”
“Well, I think it’s wonderful to know that the cousins never meant to kill one another, war or no war—publicity or no publicity,” Kendall said. “And at least Brendan managed to shoot Grebbe before he died.” She smiled grimly. “Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I want to go back and read this over again.” She turned to her fr
iends. “Congrats, guys. And hey, Gary, here’s your new beginning.” She waved and went running happily back toward the house.
Aidan caught Vinnie and Mason looking at him speculatively after she left.
The house was full of workmen, but that didn’t bother Kendall.
She didn’t want to stay in the house. She wanted to head out to the cemetery, but she didn’t want to be seen. She didn’t want anyone stopping her, and she didn’t want to have to explain why she was sure there was some kind of a clue out in the cemetery. And she certainly didn’t want to try explaining to Aidan that she was convinced Fiona was trying to communicate with her in dreams, much less that she had seen Henry—several times.
The workers didn’t pay any attention to her as she passed, which made it easy enough to slip out, skirt around the stables and head through the trees to the burial ground.
She’d been in the cemetery before, including for Amelia’s service, but today she was looking at tombs she had never really paid much attention to before. She bypassed the stones she had read a dozen times and skipped the family mausoleum. She forced her way through the overgrowth and took a closer look at some of the in-ground graves, especially those whose stones had been broken by the growing roots of large trees.
The cemetery looked strange. It had been dug up in places, and then dirt had been packed in little mounds over the graves again.
Aidan? It must have been Aidan or one of his brothers; she couldn’t imagine that he would have let anyone else dig up what was now his family cemetery.
She went from grave to grave, glad of the breeze coming up from the river, and even glad that she could hear the noise of hammers and saws, along with the shouts of the workmen.
She headed for the tomb that held Fiona MacFarlane Flynn.
And then she saw, just steps away, a sarcophagus she had never paid much attention to before; the etching in the stone was old, and time and lichen had obscured it.
Heedless of her fingernails, she worked at the old writing until it was finally legible, though still difficult to read. The burial had taken place in 1887. The inscription read Henry LeBlanc, and below that, “Savior of this House.”
She hesitated, sitting on the grave. The wind picked up suddenly, but she wasn’t afraid. “Either I’ve lost my mind, or you’re haunting this house, this city, and you know there’s a man here killing people again,” she said softly. “You wanted everyone to know the truth back then—that’s why you finished Fiona’s diary—and you want us to know the truth now, too, don’t you? Well, we do know the truth now, Henry. We know there’s a man killing women, and we’ll catch him. I promise.”
She stood up, surprised that she didn’t feel the ease and relief she had expected. The air turned cold, as if warning her that nothing at all had been solved.
Then it hit her. A bone-chilling fear, like the fear she had felt in her dream. There was something bad here, something evil.
She spun around, as if convinced an evil entity was there at that very moment, watching her every move.
Waiting. Crouched and ready to spring.
“Kendall?”
She jumped and spun around. Aidan was walking toward her. The chill, and the feeling of being watched, faded away.
He was staring at her strangely, but she forced a smile, her heart still thundering.
“I wanted to find Henry’s grave, and I did,” she told him.
He nodded, reaching out to her.
She took his hand and asked, “Aidan, were you in here, digging up graves?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Looking for bones.”
“Aidan, it’s a graveyard. Of course there are bones.”
He looked at her and smiled as he brushed her hair back from her forehead. “Actually, I was looking for disturbed bones, or a suspicious lack of bones.”
“Oh.”
He paused, staring around the cemetery. She realized that she must have looked around exactly the same way before, as if sure there were something there, something that just couldn’t be found.
“Let’s go. Everybody wants to go get some lunch. Hungry?” he asked her.
“Sure.”
They walked away holding hands, but when she looked back, a cloud had darkened the sun, casting the graveyard in shadow.
And in that shadow, she could have sworn she saw Henry. But he wasn’t standing by his own grave, nor by Fiona’s. He was standing in front of the Flynn family tomb and pointing to the door.
Then the clouds shifted, and he was gone.
18
The rest of Sunday proved to be uneventful.
They all went to lunch at an old house that had been turned into a restaurant, and as Aidan sat there, feeling warm and comfortable, he thought how nice it would be if only he could trust his own house.
It was a ridiculous thought, and it had come to him unbidden. He dismissed it quickly and turned his mind back to the conversation. With Vinnie and Mason there, it was his chance to see a whole different side of Kendall.
“I still think it’s a shame Kendall didn’t stick to her original plan,” Vinnie said.
“Plan?” Aidan asked her.
She flushed slightly. “I wanted to found a local theater. A place for adults and kids to take classes and perform, where new plays and new actors could all get a chance together, and people could learn stagecraft, set design…” She shrugged. “I never really fleshed it out.”
“It was still a great dream,” Vinnie said.
She shrugged. “We needed a venue. I had lots of friends who would have worked for nothing to get it off the ground, but the rents everywhere were astronomical. So…when the shop came up, I figured I could make it work. End of story.”
“Maybe not,” Jeremy said. “Maybe you could supervise the decorations and activities for the Halloween bash.”
“I’d love to do it,” she said. “And I can do great things with no budget, so you can put all the money you make into Children’s House.”
“Great. That’s settled, then,” Jeremy said.
“I can tell you one good way to get people excited,” she said. “Hire some of the mule carriages from the city. I have friends who will do it for practically nothing, given the publicity they’ll get. People can park in that open area to the left of the house, then take a carriage ride back to the stables. I know some good catering places that will be happy to handle the food for cost. And I’m assuming you’ll let someone do tours of the main house. People would pay extra for that, you know.”
They were all staring at her blankly.
“Wow. Good thing she’s on the team,” Zach said.
She smiled. “I’m just happy to help. Amelia would have loved it.”
It should be fun, she thought. Would be fun. Except…
Except that the house was haunted. She was sure of it.
She didn’t understand why she still felt so spooked. They had found out the truth about the Civil War Flynns, and soon the record would be corrected and everyone would know that the cousins hadn’t killed each other out of malice or because of some romantic rivalry. Surely that would please the ghosts, right? But Henry was afraid of something in the present, not the past. He’d pointed to the family tomb and looked at her as if she should understand what he was getting at.
A chill swept up her spine, even as she sat there smiling at the others.
Okay, so Henry was out to help her.
Then what the hell did the dreams mean?
And why had her feet been dirty?
She refused to think about it and ruin the day.
That night, as soon as she fell asleep, Kendall found herself in the cemetery again. Henry was standing by the family tomb again, and though he was speaking this time, she couldn’t understand him. Suddenly a look of horror crossed his worn features, and he pointed behind her.
She could feel cold breath on her neck. Someone coming after her.
She struggled to wake up, and this time
, she managed it, and without screaming out or awakening Aidan. He was asleep at her side, the rise and fall of his chest even and rhythmic. She curled closer to him and hoped that she would fall asleep again, this time without being plagued by dreams.
She lay awake for a while, wondering what to do. Should she tell Aidan that Henry’s ghost was trying to keep watch at the Hideaway, and that he also seemed to be warning her about a killer in the cemetery? Aidan was already digging up the cemetery, anyway. What would he do if she flat-out told him that ghosts were speaking to her?
Ruby Beaudreaux was at reception when Aidan stopped by the medical examiner’s office to pick up the bones and other potential evidence. Abel had been pleasant about the idea of him coming by to pick everything up, but he was suspicious that trouble might still be in the offing.
“I’ll go tell Dr. Abel that you’re here,” she told him.
As he waited in the outer room, he was startled when Rebecca came out.
“Rebecca, hi, how are you?”
“In a mess this morning, I’m afraid.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Besides a hit-and-run on Rampart and a dead woman in a house waiting to be demolished?” she asked wearily. “Abel is on the warpath. Someone snuck in here last night and went through our bones.”
“Your bones?”
“We have drawers of them, actually. We use them for comparisons, showing juries at trial…all kinds of things. Anyway, things back there are a mess, bones everywhere, nothing labeled. I have to get back in there before I wind up in trouble—I’m on skull collection. Call me later if you think I can help you.”
“Thank you, Rebecca,” he told her.
Had someone broken in just to steal the bones he had discovered? Or had the break-in occurred for some other reason entirely? His money was on the former.
Jon Abel, his hair once again in a state of disarray from his fingers continually running through it, made his appearance just seconds after Rebecca left. “I’m sorry, Flynn, but it’s going to take me some time to find your bones or even figure out if I still have them.”