The Secret of Cypriere Bayou

Chapter Four

John glanced in his rearview mirror at Olivia’s car. Despite being stuck in a good foot of mud, it had started right up and was managing the drive to laMalediction. It figured. He’d hoped an out-of-commission vehicle would send her running to the city for a replacement, at least for a couple of days, but no such luck. Now he needed a plan to work around Olivia Markham without her alerting the attorney that something was suspicious.

He parked in front of the mansion and waited until Olivia pulled up beside him. She was smiling when she got out of the car. “I’m so relieved it’s running,” she said and reached back into the car to pop the trunk.

John couldn’t have disagreed more, so he just nodded and looked over at the boxes in her trunk. Whatever Olivia Markham was doing at laMalediction, it looked like she’d packed enough for a long stay. “There’s no food or supplies at the main house. I picked up bread and lunch meat for myself, but I wasn’t expecting company.”

Olivia waved one hand at the boxes. “I brought supplies,” she said. “Just some bagels, peanut butter, chips and drinking water. I’ve gotten in the habit of traveling with a minimal amount of food. I figure in another day or two, I should be able to drive back into town, right?”

“Probably.” He held in a sigh. Apparently, it was going to take more than bad weather, a reported haunted house, flaky electricity, no cell phone connection and a lack of groceries to get rid of her.

“Do you need some help moving that stuff inside?” Maybe he could figure out why she was here and that would give him an angle.

“Seriously? That would be great.” Olivia pulled the first box out and shifted it to balance. “The boxes are all electronics, so please be careful.”

Electronics? John grabbed a large box from the trunk and followed her into the house. Seemed a strange hobby at a house that lost power every time it rained.

Olivia stopped in the entryway. “I don’t suppose you know of a library or study in the house? A place with a good desk or table for working?”

John nodded. The library was where he’d found the pink button. “There’s a library straight back past the stairwell, then turn left down the hall.”

“Great.” Olivia headed toward the hallway. “I didn’t know if you’d taken stock of the house yet or were only concentrating on the outside maintenance.”

John followed behind her, his mind forming an idea that just might get him around Olivia until he could get rid of her. “Actually, I’m supposed to be working on the main house, but I didn’t want to disturb you this morning, so I worked in the drive. I’m an early riser.”

Olivia stepped into the library and placed her box on a long, dusty table in the center of a room with floor to ceiling bookcases on every wall. “I love this,” she said, looking around the room. “All it needs is a good cleaning.”

John placed his box on the table. “I’m not going to disturb your work if I go about my business upstairs, am I?”

“I doubt it. What are you doing, exactly?”

“Right now,” he said, as he formulated the lie, “I’m just assessing everything and making a list of necessary repairs so that Wheeler can order the supplies I need. I do a lot of banging wood and moving stuff, though.”

Olivia waved a hand in dismissal. “I’ve trained myself to write in almost any circumstance. I acclimate to the sounds of a new house quickly, so your work shouldn’t bother me at all.”

John stared at her for a moment, not certain what to say. A writer? He would have understood if she was an antique dealer looking to catalogue the furniture or a real estate agent looking to get a contract on the house, but why in the world would someone choose laMalediction as a place to write a book? “You’re writing a book?”

Olivia nodded. “I know. Most people find it strange, but this is my niche. I stay in a reputed haunted house and write a ghost story about it. My next book is due soon and it will be set at laMalediction.”

“Haunted houses? Do you believe in that sort of thing?”

Olivia pursed her lips. “I think a fair statement would be that I don’t limit the universe to what I understand. I’ve seen things I can’t explain, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation.” She smiled. “The good news is I don’t spook easily, so you won’t have to worry about catering to a damsel in distress.”

John nodded, feeling his options lessening by the second. “I’ll go grab another box,” he said and left the library.

I don’t spook easily.

She said that like it was a good thing.

OLIVIA DROPPED the filthy sponge in a bucket of dirty water. Three hours of scrubbing and the room was finally fit for habitation. She sank down on the floor and leaned back against one of the now-sparkling maple bookcases. It really was a beautiful room. In fact, everything she’d seen of the house so far was gorgeous. It was a shame that no one lived there enjoying it, although she guessed most people wouldn’t enjoy being sequestered out in the bayou with only a small town of strange people and a swamp of all kinds of creatures as company.

A crash above her caused her to jump and she slowly pulled herself up from the floor. John Landry had been making good on his noise-making promise. He’d been banging and knocking upstairs as long as she’d been cleaning downstairs. She sometimes wondered if he was creating more work.

She grabbed the bucket, headed to the kitchen, and dumped the dirty water in the sink. She rinsed the bucket and placed it upside down in the sink to dry, then pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator and rubbed it across her forehead before taking a huge swig of it. The humidity was something she’d expected to encounter but it was worse than what she’d imagined, especially with no air conditioning.

She grabbed a bag of potato chips from the kitchen counter and headed back to the library. Unpacking and setting up her laptop and printer was next on her list, then she’d be ready to work. No more excuses. She smiled when she thought about all the ideas that were already flowing through her mind for the book, and then stopped short when she stepped into the library.

Something is wrong.

She scanned the empty room. Nothing seemed out of place, but yet, she knew it wasn’t like she’d left it. All five of her boxes were still stacked at one end of the long table and at the other end of the table was a lamp. She felt her breath catch in her throat. A lamp that used to sit on a tiny table on the far wall.

Taking a step closer to the table, she checked her boxes more closely. They were still sealed and didn’t appear to have been shuffled around at all. A loud thump upstairs caused her to jump. Her water bottle slipped out of her hands and onto the floor.

Get a grip. It’s just John, you know, the man you told you didn’t spook easily.

Could John have moved the lamp just to mess with her? She thought about her trip to the kitchen, trying to recall if she could still hear him banging around when she’d been cleaning the bucket but she’d grown so used to the noise that she simply didn’t know. Surely, that was it. He was playing a joke on her. Trying to prove she wasn’t as tough as she thought she was. She crossed her arms across her chest, suddenly chilly in the previously stifling room.

Well, it wasn’t a very funny joke, and she wasn’t going to stand for it.

She picked up her water and set it on the table with a thump, then strode down the hall and up the stairwell, ready for battle. She found John in a bedroom at the back of the house, probably positioned over the library downstairs, and he was covered all over with something white.

One glance at the gaping hole in the ceiling and the mess surrounding him on the floor gave her a clear idea of where the white substance came from. “What happened?” she asked.

He was standing on a stepladder with his head poked up in the hole in the ceiling. Leaning down a bit, he looked out at her. “Ceiling fell in is what happened. Didn’t you hear all that noise earlier?”

She remembered the loud crash she’d heard when she’d just finished cleaning. “That was the ceiling? Wow. I guess you were standing under it.”

“Unfortunately. I thought the light fixture was loose but it was the entire ceiling that was sagging. I barely touched it and the whole thing came crashing down on me.” He stepped down the ladder and retrieved a water bottle from the dresser, leaving white tracks everywhere he stepped.

Olivia stared at the white shoe prints then back into the hall. It was dusty and dirty, but not a single white ring in sight.

“Did you need something?” he asked.

“No. I just thought I ought to check and make sure everything was okay…you know, with the noise.”

John narrowed his eyes at her. “So you thought I might be injured but waited a good five minutes to come up and check?”

“Yeah,” Olivia said as she backed out of the room. “Sorry, you’re right. I should have checked sooner, but I was pouring out a bucket of dirty water.” She pointed down at his feet. “You might want to take your shoes off before you walk around much more. Not that the place is clean or anything.”

John glanced down at his feet and frowned. “You’re right. No sense making it worse.” He looked back up at the ceiling and sighed. “This is going to be a real mess to fix.”

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Olivia said and fled down the hall.

She checked the front door, but the dead bolt was still securely in place. A quick check of the back door in the kitchen revealed the same thing. He could have taken his boots off before coming downstairs. That would make perfectly good sense, especially if he didn’t want her to hear his footsteps on the marble flooring in the entry. But Olivia would swear by his expression that he hadn’t even noticed the state of his boots until she’d pointed it out.

Unless he was a very good actor.

Olivia hurried back to the library, determined to hook up her computer, contact Wheeler and make sure she had all the information she could get on John Landry. She stopped short in the doorway.

The lamp was back in place.

JOHN WATCHED Olivia flee the room and shook his head. For someone who claimed she didn’t spook easily, the woman looked like she’d seen a ghost. She’d obviously come upstairs for a reason, but whatever that reason was, she’d changed her mind about it. He didn’t believe for one minute it was the crash that had brought her scurrying up the stairs. If she had been that worried about it, a bucket of dirty water would have been the last thing to detain her.

He’d thought about pushing the issue, but finally decided that if something was bothering Olivia, that would likely only work in his favor. Staring back up at the ceiling, he sighed. He’d had no intention of creating more work for whoever replaced him, but that’s exactly what he’d managed to do. He dug through the pile of Sheetrock and pulled out the light fixture that had attracted his attention in the first place.

It was coated with Sheetrock dust and any chance of gaining a fingerprint was probably long gone, but he wanted to make sure he hadn’t been imagining things. He wiped the dust off the light fixture’s ceiling plate with the bottom of his shirt. Just as he’d thought—scratches lined the bottom of the ceiling plate close to the screws that held the fixture in the ceiling.

There was no way to tell if the scratches were new, but John would bet everything they were. The ceiling plate had been wiped clean. That’s what had drawn his attention to the fixture in the first place—a shiny plate in a room of otherwise dusty items. He’d brought in the ladder hoping to get a closer look, but when he’d placed a hand on the ceiling to steady himself, the whole thing had come crashing down.

He looked at the light fixture. Maybe the old caretaker had been aware of the ceiling problem and started taking the fixture down to make the repair. He placed the light fixture on the floor and blew out a breath. He was wasting time. It didn’t matter what the old caretaker had intended, or if every upstairs ceiling dropped down on him.

He had to find his sister.

Despite Olivia staying out of his way, this afternoon had been a total waste. He’d found nothing new. No indication that his sister had been on the second floor. And maybe she hadn’t been. If she’d even made it to laMalediction, maybe she’d run into trouble before she’d ever gotten the chance to do much poking around.

He ran one hand through his hair, scattering Sheetrock dust around him. What if he’d made a mistake about her destination? What if she’d scheduled her visit to laMalediction on her calendar and changed her mind? If his sister had never been to this house, he was losing valuable time here. If only he could find evidence, anything that told him for certain that she’d been here. The pink button was a sketchy clue, at best.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. No messages, but at least it had decent signal strength. He pressed the number for the New Orleans police department and asked for the captain.

“Landry?” Captain Reeves answered the phone. “Where the hell are you? Harrison’s been by your apartment twice and says your phone’s turned off.”

“I went to visit an aunt my mom used to check on. She lives out a ways in the bayou. Cell phone signal’s sketchy.”

“An aunt, huh? So your sister’s missing and your mom’s in the hospital, and you want me to buy that you took vacation time to visit some old lady?”

“Yes, sir,” John replied, keeping his voice steady. If the captain found out he was at laMalediction after Wheeler had forbidden the police to enter the property, he’d have John’s badge. “Is there any news?”

The captain was silent for a moment and John was afraid the man was going to call him on his lie. The captain was no one’s fool and knew John about as well as anyone did. Well enough to know that John wouldn’t bail on the investigation without a really good reason—like a lead that the police didn’t have the authority to pursue.

“Not much. Harrison was just here and said they found a store clerk about twenty miles outside of New Orleans on I-10 who remembers your sister filling up there five days ago.”

John felt his pulse quicken. He’d driven past that filling station on the way to laMalediction. Rachel could have been pursuing another house in the same direction, but there was no mention of another house on her calendar until weeks later. At least it was something. “Is the filling station guy certain it was Rachel?”

“Yeah. I got the impression he liked what he saw. Described her and her car pretty well and seemed certain when Harrison showed him the picture.”

“But no indication of where she was going?”

The captain hesitated. “He says she asked about Cypriere.”

“Damn! I knew it. Now, are you going to get a warrant?”

“I hung up with the district attorney right before you called. It’s thin, probably not enough for a warrant, but he’s going to ask one of the judges for a favor given this is a cop’s family. The judge has a cousin who went missing twenty years ago and was never found. The D.A. thinks he’ll be sympathetic.”

“How soon can we get access?” If he didn’t have to hide, he could flood the house and grounds with men and equipment. No sneaking around and making excuses. No more hiding behind a stepladder or a chain saw.

“The judge he thinks will give the warrant is out of town for two days.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me! Tell him to get another judge.”

“There isn’t another judge who’s willing to put his neck out. The D.A.’s already asked around on this and been told no. There’s entirely too many things that could have happened to Rachel between that filling station and wherever she was headed. Unless someone can put her in Cypriere, then none of the other judges are willing to risk it.”

“I don’t have to tell you how much time has passed.”

“No, you don’t. I don’t like it any more than you do, but I have to tell you John that if you do anything to risk this investigation, it will not be good for your career. Do not go near that property until we have a warrant. Are we clear?”

“Crystal.”

“I mean it, Landry. Do not set foot in Cypriere.”

“No problem.” John closed the phone. He hadn’t really lied. He had no intention of setting foot in Cypriere, the town. If his sister was going to be found, he had a feeling it would be at laMalediction.

He tucked the phone into his pocket and headed downstairs. There had been no sign of Rachel on the second floor, so he’d save the attic until last. The basement was his next destination and he’d seen an access door in the kitchen. He hurried into the kitchen and almost collided with Olivia.

A camera slipped in her hands, and she clutched it to keep from dropping it. He grabbed her shoulders to steady both of them. “Sorry. I keep forgetting there’s someone else here.” He looked down at the camera and blinked. “Nice camera.”

Olivia frowned. “Yeah, it is. I found it in the cabinet when I was putting up my supplies. I thought maybe it was yours. I was coming to ask.”

John’s pulse began to race. He’d bought that exact model for his sister for Christmas. “No, but maybe the old caretaker kept it here to take pictures for Wheeler.”

Olivia shrugged and handed him the camera. “Maybe so. Guess you’ll need it then. I’d start with that ceiling upstairs if I were you. It didn’t come down by itself. If there’s a leak somewhere it can get way worse for you.”

John took the camera and turned it on, pleased that the batteries were good. “You’re absolutely right. I think I’ll do that now.” He left the kitchen, studying the display on the camera. Twenty-two pictures stored.

Maybe one of them would give him a clue to finding Rachel.

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