The Curse of a Single Red Rose (Haunted Hearts Series Book 7) (16 page)

He wiped his sweaty forehead with the tail of his t-shirt and motioned toward the wall. “You go first.”

Elsa understood. He wasn’t being a coward. They both knew that she had been given the supernatural assignment of facing the secrets behind the wall. It was right that she should go first.

****

Nick stared at the picture of Jane Doe that he kept in the photo gallery on his phone. He didn’t want to forget her. He might be the only person on the planet that remembered she ever existed.

How long ago had it been? Eight months. A ruin porn photographer had broken into the boarded up hotel and found the body of the woman. Nick sighed with heavy regret. Because of the dismal lack of evidence and the fact that no one had come forward to identify her and claim her remains, he might never be able to give her a name.

He hadn’t yet made a plea to the public for help. For some reason, his gut told him a public appeal would ruin any chance he had of finding out who she was. It was a strange instinct and counterintuitive to the usual handling of unidentified victims. The incorrect inclusion of her case with the French Quarter Killer’s other victims had diminished Nick’s chances of finding her killer to almost nothing. Any leads he might have followed had probably gone stone cold. Too much time had passed. Before long, a new case would land on his desk, and he’d have to relinquish Jane Doe to the cold case file room.

From his first glimpse of her lifeless body, Nick had questioned whether she was a victim of the French Quarter Killer. Sure, her killer had tried to make it look that way, but so much about the scene had been off. Nick had argued endlessly with his Uncle Ed about whether or not the woman’s death was connected to the first serial killing a few weeks earlier. If he had gone with the theory that a serial killer was stalking the women of the quarter, then maybe he would have worked the first case that way and perhaps prevented at least one, maybe more, of the three deaths that had followed. But he hadn’t. He’d been so convinced that the second murder was unrelated that he hadn’t given the possibility of a serial killer a serious thought.

He still believed Jane Doe’s killer had mocked the first killing. Not imitated or copycatted it. Mocked it.

All his life, he’d heard about the hauntings in the hotel and about that God-forsaken curse. Did anyone really believe the hotel was cursed? Her killer must have. She’d been found with a single red rose stuck between her teeth. The killer hadn’t gotten the curse right. Didn’t the legend say the victim always had the rose clutched in her hand? The curse’s victims had all died on the scene, so the legend said. Jane Doe had been dumped after she had been tortured and her blood drained from her lifeless body.

Despite the large amount of debris in the hotel, there’d been no physical evidence of the crime. No trace. No DNA evidence. Nothing to tie her body to anybody else or even a primary murder scene. It was as if she’d been killed by a phantom.

He shook the stupid thought off. It played right into that crazy curse legend.

Nick was about to do something sorta, kinda, a teeny bit illegal. Okay, it was straight in-your-face illegal. The scene had been released months ago. He couldn’t go to Les Wakefield and ask his permission to go back into the hotel without alerting the man that he was investigating him for the murder of Jane Doe. Once again, he had no evidence that Wakefield was involved in the woman’s death, just a nagging gut instinct.

So there Nick was. Breaking and entering.

To his surprise, the front door was unlocked and partially open. That provided him with an excuse to enter. He could say he was investigating a potential break in. He stopped and called it in, just to cover his butt in case something bad came of the idea. With that task done, he settled his twitchy nerves knowing back up was only a call away. Someone might question why a homicide detective was investigating a possible break in, but he could say that he already had a legitimate interest in the property.

There, he’d rationalized what he was about to do, freeing him to do what he needed to do.

He pushed the door open and entered the front lobby. A smoky haze clouded the interior of the hotel. Weird. The night outside wasn’t shrouded in fog. A long sniff satisfied him the place wasn’t on fire.

He sprayed the bright glow of his flashlight around the lobby. The hotel had been cleared of debris, and it was obvious the new Les Wakefield was in the process of renovations. Work had ceased, more than likely because his foreman had been injured in the accident involving Dallas Thoreau’s car.

Hit and run. There sure seemed to be a lot of hit and run accidents associated with the Thoreau family. Coincidence? Nick didn’t believe in coincidence.

Discouragement threatened to sink him. He had too many cases on is desk that might never be closed. Lack of evidence. Lack of cooperation from witnesses. Lack of leads. Nick grew tired of the recurring nature of crime, the endless cycle of crime and sometimes punishment. His efforts never seemed to put a dint in his caseload. New cases replaced closed cases. Always. Nothing ever changed.

He sighed and refocused his thoughts. A thorough forensic sweep had been done in the hotel when Jane Doe was first found. McVey had been in the hotel for weeks snooping around looking for anything that might have been missed or that might have appeared after they’d released the scene. He’d found nothing.

The woman had been dumped in the corner room on the third floor. His eyes strayed up the stairs. Weariness seeped into his soul as he climbed the first few steps. Why was he doing this off the record?

Just as he reached the landing, the distant sounds of banging vibrated from the third floor. A shiver of dread snaked up his spine, and the haunting rumors flashed across his mind. No, he didn’t believe in that crap despite all the stories Dylan Hunter and Sophia Cannon had told him about the things they’d seen at Wakefield Manor. Even his friend, Charlotte Soileau, the sheriff of St. Denis Parish, had told him an unbelievable story about seeing the ghost of Celia Wakefield running around the town of Wakefield in an old Ford Galaxie.

No. There was no ghost on the premises. Someone was making the noise, someone living and breathing and up to no good.

He pulled his service weapon from the holster on his side and raised it to the ready position. With a slow and steady pace, he ascended the stairs to the third floor, keeping his back to the wall. The banging boomed louder the higher he ascended. No, the rattling noise wasn’t his imagination.

Nick slid along the walkway pressed against the outside wall of guest rooms, his left side toward the corner where the two wings of the old hotel met. A blood-curdling shriek followed by a scream split the night air. His heart stalled and then restarted with a hard jerk. The sudden threat of restless malice rushed over him. He jiggled all the doorknobs on his way down the walkway. The door of the corner room was ajar. He stuck his weapon through the crack, pushed the door open, and entered the room sideways, exposing as little of his body as possible to the potential threat.

In the hazy darkness, he could make out the outlines of two people. He watched as the male used a metal object to bust through the far wall. The command to cease their actions wadded up like a ball of cotton in his throat. He shook his head, trying to remove the fuzziness that suddenly clouded his judgment. Dark fear burst across his psyche. The trembling began in his hands, and he feared he might discharge his weapon by accident, so he lowered it to dangle at his side.

When the flashlight one of them held flashed across a face, he recognized Elsa Madsen. Seconds later, Collin McVey’s voice suggested she go through the hole he’d made in the wall.

That was a bad idea. Collin should go first. That’s what a man did. Nick’s momma had raised him that way. Although, when acting like a man, he had to remember not to insult a woman. Sometimes, it was a fine line between treating women right and treating them the way they wanted to be treated. What a woman said and what she meant sometimes didn’t match, and women often confused the snot out of Nick. His momma had always taught him
when in doubt, leave it out
.

He flipped the light switch on the wall near the door. “What are you two doing in here?”

Both of them screamed as if Nick was chasing them with a chain saw.

As soon as their shrieks pierced the heaviness in the air, the weight of whatever had been oppressing him lifted, as if something had been pushing him back and the force of resistance had disappeared in the light.

Elsa slapped her hand on her chest and recovered first. “Never mind what we’re doing here. What are you doing here?”

He considered her question a moment. She had a right to ask, and he’d prepared his defense of his actions on the street before entering the hotel, but after all his inner debates and well-thought out rationalizations, the truth was a better alternative. He sensed the two of them needed the truth instead of excuses. Needed it desperately. In fact, he sensed that was why they were there, Collin McVey with a crowbar in his hand and Elsa Madsen with a scared as crap expression on her face. And neither of them had considered turning on the lights. What the hell was that about? Did they think they were ghost hunting?

But of course, that’s exactly what they were doing.

“Jane Doe won’t let me sleep. I need to give her a name. So I came back to the scene hoping I could find something to tie her death to her killer.”

Collin’s shoulders relaxed. “I’ve gone over every inch of this place, but I haven’t been able to find anything to help you with that.” He glanced at the hole. “Everywhere except behind this wall.”

Nick glanced at Elsa. How much could they say in front of her? Had McVey told her about Nick’s investigation into Les Wakefield yet? McVey had wanted permission to tell her, had insisted it was past time for her to know what was going on. Nick had agreed. For Elsa’s safety around Les Wakefield, she needed to know. McVey would have told her anyway, with or without Nick’s permission.

McVey apparently interpreted Nick’s questioning look. “She knows.”

Elsa offered Nick a small smile. “I want to help.” She paused and seemed unsure of herself. “I think I can.”

“How can you do that?”

He’d had months to figure it all out. How could Elsa Madsen do anything to solve the mystery that he hadn’t already considered?

She answered his question, easily and without hesitation. “I’m being guided toward the truth. It’s here in this hotel behind that wall.” She pointed toward the large gash in the plaster. “I’m supposed to find out what’s back there.”

“Why you?”

She licked her lips. “I don’t know. I wish…I wish this had been given to someone else.”

This what? Despite her vague wording, Nick had a bad feeling he knew exactly what she meant. Some crap was going to go down before Elsa would finally be able to define
this
. Nick knew it. Just as surely as he knew he was part of whatever was about to happen. If he was going to insist on finding Jane Doe’s killer, he was going to have to pay the price for his insistence.

Nick’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He yanked it out and checked the display. His girlfriend Jerilyn had texted him with her panic code.

Chapter Twelve

Once Moreau turned on the guest room light, the atmosphere no longer carried the weight of something viciously sinister. The heavy sense of oppression that had surrounded them as they climbed the stairs and entered the corner room had dissipated.

Why hadn’t they turned on the lights? That was the kind of dumb move made by fifth-rate actors in third-rate Halloween horror movies.

Elsa stepped through the rupture in the wall and stopped just inside the entrance. She lifted her hand in front of her face and couldn’t see her fingers. Odd. The light seemed to stop right at the wall behind her, as if it hadn’t enough energy to pass the thin barrier of plaster.

Inside the dark hall, the oppression returned, weighing on her, both physically and mentally, heavier than ever. The darkness clawed at her ability to remain calm. The light had made all the difference. She stepped a few paces to her left and ran her hand along the wall, searching for a switch, but she couldn’t locate one in the dark. After a few heart-pounding moments, she gave up her search, clung to the wall, and waited for the men to climb through the hole.

The detective’s voice drifted through the opening. “I’m not dead or dying. No matter what you think you saw, no one here is dead.”

Elsa wasn’t so sure about that. She could feel death all around her, pressing against her, immobilizing her with a sudden rush of fresh fear. It seemed strange that she should be able to identify the feeling of death so easily, never even questioning the validity of her instincts. She pushed her back harder against the wall, craving the comfort of something solid behind her.

Collin squeezed through the opening and stopped beside her, their shoulders brushing for a moment. If not for the whiff of peppermint on his breath, she wouldn’t have known who stood next to her.

“Why don’t you turn on the light?” His voice trembled in the darkness next to her.

Waves of heat radiated from his body. She inched closer to him. Warmth erupted where their skin touched. The overwhelming urge to fall into him and bury her face in his shoulder seized her emotions. “I can’t find the switch.”

“Then use the flashlight in your hand. You still have it, don’t you?” There was no condemnation or sarcasm in his words, yet a huge question hung on the end of his suggestion.

Still, she remained rigid in the darkness, afraid to move. “Why didn’t we turn the lights on when we first got here?”

He ran his hand down her arm, pried the flashlight from her fingers, clicked it on, and aimed the beam upward between their faces. His eyes locked with hers. He touched her face, and it seemed the bond that already existed between them added cords of steel to its strength. “In this together, right?”

She nodded, drew in a deep breath, and then exhaled slowly. She could face it, whatever it was, if Collin was with her.

How Collin had become so important to her so quickly mystified her. Perhaps what they’d seen and experienced had pulled them together faster than months of normal dating. Maybe her hyper-aware state amplified every emotion. If that was the case, then the expression on his face told her that he was experiencing the same intensity of feeling that she was. She was in no hurry to break the moment, and it seemed that neither was he.

Collin swallowed hard and then splashed the light away from their faces and around the space. “I don’t see any skeletons.”

So he had seen what she had. She’d had no doubt that he had.

The farther reaches of the narrow hall disappeared into black nothingness where the flashlight’s beam proved too weak to penetrate the darkness. She reached out to touch the opposite wall only a few feet in front of her, but she stopped before her fingers met the plaster. When she had leaned on the guest room wall a few days ago—the same wall that now had a hole in it—the plaster had vibrated against her back and then the otherworldly light had appeared in the center of the room. An inaudible voice had drilled a haunted message into Elsa’s soul. Stop him, the voice had said, and from that moment, Elsa had reluctantly accepted the mission that had been thrust upon her.

What if touching the interior hidden wall caused another paranormal disturbance? Was she ready to stir up the spirits that lived in the hotel? She shivered from her head to her toes. Had she experienced so much paranormal phenomena that she no longer questioned her belief in the supernatural? Well, yeah. It wasn’t everyday that a person had direct communication with her great aunt’s bones.

Collin slipped an arm around her waist. “Three doors. Which one do we open first?”

His touch steadied her pulsing nerves. She forced her mind to concentrate on their mission. The entry she’d read about the hotel in the old historical book flashed across her memory. “This must be the servants’ quarters.”

“Of course.” Collin uttered the two words as if what she’d just said had revealed a truth long hidden.

She finally touched the wall. Nothing happened. It didn’t vibrate or melt. Her emotions collapsed, leaving her with an enormous letdown. She suddenly wanted to cry but pushed back her tears. “Delia DeCuir must have lived here.”

“Who’s Delia DeCuir?” Moreau’s voice thudded into them from the dark.

Both Collin and Elsa jerked at the sudden volume of his question. She’d almost forgotten he was with them.

Elsa answered his question. “She’s the woman who died here during Hurricane Betsy.”

Collin splashed light across Moreau’s face.

Moreau shielded his eyes from the beam. “Betsy? Didn’t that happen in…1966?”

“Sixty-five.” Elsa and Collin muttered the correction in unison.

Collin moved the light away from Moreau’s eyes, and the dark covered the man once again.

“My Great Aunt Celia died at Wakefield Manor in 1967.”

Her mind had made the connection between the two deaths days ago. From then on, the two women had been linked in her thoughts, but as far as Elsa knew, her great aunt had never stayed in the Royale Chateau or even been to New Orleans. Had Delia ever visited Wakefield Manor?

The link was there. In Elsa’s memory somewhere. She’d heard it or read it or seen it. She just hadn’t been able to put it together yet.

“So the bones the sheriff found belonged to a relative of yours?”

“My grandfather’s sister.”

“Did you know that when you moved down here?”

Elsa shook her head, but of course, Moreau couldn’t see her non-verbal answer. “I didn’t know the sheriff had found her bones until a few days ago.” If he asked questions, she’d give him more answers, but she didn’t want to talk about her father’s aunt. The idea of having to tell the story created a knot of apprehension in her gut.

“Delia died two years earlier, huh? Where did they find her body?” Moreau was obviously trying to see the connection. Maybe he had sensed the link as well.

“In the hotel, but I’m not sure exactly where.”

“This place creeps me out.” Moreau’s words tripped through the darkness toward Elsa. “It has ever since I came here to investigate Jane Doe’s murder. All murder scenes are a bit… They all give off a weird vibe, but this one… It felt different.”

Elsa didn’t have to ask. Moreau’s Jane Doe had been found in the corner room on the third floor.

“The person you were talking to on the phone…” She was probably sticking her nose where it didn’t belong, but curiosity was eating her up.

“My girlfriend. She warned me there was going to be a dead person in here. When she says stuff like that… She never knows if it means someone’s dead already or someone’s going to die.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his head. “Yeah, I know that sounds nuts. But she has this gift…” He stopped as if daring them to laugh at him or mock him. When neither of them spoke, he continued. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she showed up here. She does that. Shows up when she thinks I’m in trouble.”

It seemed his girlfriend knew a lot about dead people. Strange. But then… Were his girlfriend’s comments any stranger than the things that had happened to Elsa over the last few weeks? Or the old woman’s strange comments when she’d gone back to Wakefield Manor alone? What had the woman said?

The scene came back to her, vivid as if it had just happened.

“I am Chlotilde. I have seen and I have heard.” She placed her free hand on her chest. “In my heart. In my mind. In my soul.” A kindly smile crept across her lips. “Your Celia is not here. Her spirit left when they took her bones. If you want to find her, you must follow her bones.”

Elsa yanked her arm free. “Is there some reason I need to find her bones?”

“My dear child, of course there is. You must let her speak to you. She has a message you must hear before it is too late.”

“What message?”

“Well, now, if I knew that, I would tell you myself.” With those cryptic words blowing on the suddenly rising wind, Chlotilde turned and headed toward the woods that surrounded the house.”

Collin pointed his light toward the door on the left. “Right. So… Are we going to find out what’s behind those doors?”

A moan of dread slipped past Elsa’s lips.

The coroner pulled the slab out of the wall. Lumps jutted out, causing the bag to have an unusual shape, not human at all. Elsa shivered, knowing that nothing but bones hid underneath the black vinyl. The coroner unzipped the bag and pulled the flap back to reveal the skull.

Time seemed to stand still.

Elsa reached toward the skeleton’s arm. The coroner moved to stop her, but Sheriff Soileau interfered and allowed Elsa to touch her Great Aunt Celia, a woman she had never met but had heard about all her life.

As soon as her skin met the bone, her mind filled with Celia’s voice.

“Elsa…”

She shook her head, hoping to dislodge the nightmare that had taken over her mind. But it wasn’t a dream.

“You must stop him or he will kill again. His heart is evil.”

No words passed Elsa’s lips, yet she asked her question, her inner thoughts reaching out to Celia. “Who are you talking about? How do I stop him?”

“Behind the wall.”

“What wall?”

“The truth is behind the wall.”

Visions of the wall on the corner room of the Royale Chateau Hotel flickered across Elsa’s memory.

“You must stop him or his evil will become part of you forever. Don’t let my death go unavenged.”

She backed away from the bones of Celia Madsen Wakefield.

“I can’t do this.”

“You must. You are the only one who can. You are the only one who can see how Delia and I are linked.”

Violent shaking jerked her back to reality. The connection with Celia’s bones evaporated. The room appeared sterile, as if nothing supernatural had happened there.

“Elsa, are you all right?”

She blinked, scanned her surroundings, and then stared at Sheriff Soileau. “I need to get out of here.”

Collin slipped his arm around her, and she snapped back to the present moment.

“You okay?”

“Not really.” She dislodged his arm and moved toward the door.

A beam of light passed over her for a second. Moreau reached out and wrapped his hand around her upper arm. “Are you sure you want to do this? We might be stirring up stuff that doesn’t want to be stirred up. Jerilyn is never wrong about these things. We might be walking into something bad.”

Moreau was right. They were walking straight toward death, but Elsa needed to face it if she was going to stop it.

Their stalling was reducing her patience to almost nothing. It was time. She lunged toward the door before anyone could stop her, twisted the knob, and flung it open. Still nothing supernatural happened.

She backed away from the open door and searched the dark until she found Collin’s arm. “We both saw the skeletons, right?”

“What skeletons?” Moreau had come late to the party, and of course he’d want explanations for every strange thing they said to each other.

Annoying. Really annoying. She didn’t feel like explaining anything to anybody. Hadn’t he taken that hint earlier?

The vision danced in her head again, and she couldn’t stop the scene from replaying.

“We both saw them…through the hole in the wall…two of them…choking each other.” Collin’s clipped tone suggested he didn’t want to talk about what they’d seen either.

“You saw it at the same time?”

“No. Separately.”

Moreau stepped around them, sprayed light into the darkened room beyond the door, and moved forward. The
click click
of a toggling light switch shattered the unnatural quiet. The room remained dark.

Collin flicked the beam of his flashlight toward the useless switch. “The lights only work when they want to.”

Elsa entered the room, and her gaze followed the beam as Moreau slowly passed it around the small space. The glow of his flashlight revealed a twin bed and a short dresser. Personal effects scattered across the top of the dresser. A few pictures hung on the walls. The detritus of a truncated life had been encapsulated by time. Delia had left her imprint, and her presence had never been erased, trapped in a time warp.

An emotional connection to the dead woman swept through Elsa’s psyche, and the sharp disruption of Delia’s natural life seeped into her consciousness. Anger. Pain. Regret. Fear. A cold wave passed over Elsa and left nausea in its wake. She grabbed the doorframe and hung on for a long moment. Forcing her body to move, she dropped onto the bed, most of which remained shrouded in darkness, and curled her fingers around the edge of the mattress.