Chapter 4

I couldn’t breathe.

The sensation gripped me, like being held, but not in a good way. The weight from before, the unseen force that had been pressing against my chest all day, turned into a straitjacket, wrapping around me, and squeezing. The warm rain kept falling and the tropical air continued to bend young trees to the point of breaking, but I couldn’t feel any of that, only icy cold fingers closing around my throat.

“Marguerite!” Mr. Hood rushed over and took me by the arms, shaking me slightly.

I blinked and stared, tried to bring him into focus. But for the craziest second, all I could think was…run.

Mrs. Hood and Naomi crowded up behind him. “Is she quite all right?”

We meet again…

I ripped away and staggered back. But it wasn’t Mr. Hood that I stared at. It was the mansion. Big and boxy and covered by vines of bougainvillea, it sat back from the street, barely visible through the frame of moss-covered oaks. The front porch sagged. Dark windows stared like the sightless eyes of Desiree’s dolls.

“Ohhh, it’s quite extraordinary, isn’t it?” Naomi murmured.

“Something bad happened here, didn’t it?” Mrs. Hood realized. “That’s why you’re so pale.”

Don’t be afraid…

The huge, dark coil inside me tightened. I wanted to rip away and run, even as I wanted to step closer, and see. Touch.

Feel.

It made no sense.

“There are stories,” I said, tightening my fingers around my umbrella. Harmony had told me. She’d been to this house several times, as recently as the weekend before. She’d been inside, explored every room. She said it was amazing, beautiful but sad, as if life had moved on and forgotten, but that the house remembered.

Everything.

Whatever had happened there still happened, over and over, an invisible movie trapped on eternal repeat.

“The house dates back before the Civil War,” I recited. “Built by a sugar baron as gift for his wife.” I took a step back, as if I could pull myself far enough back, the web would release me. “But as so often happened, she never lived to see it complete.”

“I saw in some documentary that many of the mansions ended up occupied by Union soldiers,” Mr. Hood said.

“They did,” I said. “As did the White Jewel—that’s what the house was known as back then. Bijou Blanche. The Union soldiers turned it into a field hospital.”

Mrs. Hood gasped.

Naomi stepped closer, lifting a hand to the shoulder-high iron-gate surrounding the property. Even in its current state of neglect, the huge red hibiscus blooming profusely lent a haunting beauty.

“Years went by. The house was purchased by a merchant and his wife, who died shortly after they moved in. He lived out his years there, alone, until he drank himself to death, leaving the property to his daughter and her husband.”

Mrs. Hood shot me a nervous glance.

“Richard was also a merchant and traveled for months at a time, leaving Adelaide home alone. One morning a neighbor was pruning her roses when she heard screams.” I paused, swallowing against a strange burn in my throat. “And then a pregnant Adelaide came running from the house.”

The web gripping me locked tighter.

“In a night dress of white,” I whispered hoarsely. “Streaked with red.”

Mrs. Hood winced.

“The neighbor tried to approach her, but she was wild and incoherent, her face scratched up, her eyes like dark pools, her hair falling in matted tangles, and before the neighbor could stop her, Adelaide had run off.”

The rain slowed, slipping like tears down a crumbling statue of an angel, standing in the exact spot where Adelaide had last been seen.

“The police were called. Inside they found everything in perfect order—except for one room. A secret room,” I said lowering my voice. “Upstairs, at the end of the hall—where the Union soldiers had piled their dead.”

Despite the drizzle, Naomi lifted her camera and started to snap like crazy.

“What was in the room?”

I heard Mr. Hood’s voice, but it came at me through a distorted tunnel.

“According to the police?” I mused. “Only an overturned chair. Maybe she fell, they speculated. Maybe she hit her head and became disoriented.” For effect, I paused. “That could explain the broken glass,” I murmured. “But not the gouges.”

The odd combination of rain and shadow and light from the street lamps made Mrs. Hood’s dark brown eyes glow. “Gouges?”

“On the floorboard and the walls,” I said, trancelike. “Deep and rough and frantic, like those of a trapped animal, thrashing and clawing, desperate for escape. There are those who say the whole room bled.

“But those who were there, those who claimed to know someone who knew someone, said it was the smell that turned the veteran cop white as a ghost, and sent him straight to his priest,” I whispered. “Pungent and earthy. Not human.”

Naomi released the fence and stepped disjointedly back. I could see that she was shaking.

“Adelaide’s husband returned from sea a few days later, and refused to believe that she was gone. He insisted he heard her, at night, crying for him. And he smelled the gardenia that she always wore. It is said he would run from room to room, throwing open doors and lighting candles—searching.

“His friends and family said that was the absinthe he’d turned to, slowly rotting his brain.”

“I’ll never let you go…”

I jerked back, twisting toward Mr. Hood. But he had his wife in his arms, and they were murmuring quietly to each other while Naomi wandered toward the angel statue.

There was no one else there.

I shivered, like I had so many other times since arriving in New Orleans. It wasn’t called the most haunted city in America for nothing.

“He’s still there, isn’t he?” Naomi asked, lowering her camera. “Waiting for his wife.”

“There are those who say on a quiet still night you can still hear doors opening and closing,” I whispered, as against my chest, warmth radiated from my mother’s dragonfly pendant. “And footsteps running.”

Maybe that’s why my heart started to drum really hard, because of the tragedy of it all, of fate and eternity and all those empty dark spaces in between.

Or maybe not.

“And even in the dead of winter,” I murmured, “if you close your eyes when you inhale, it’s possible to catch the faintest trace of gardenia…”

Lafayette Cemetery always got to people. Even those who thought they were prepared. Even those who’d seen pictures or been to other New Orleans cemeteries. There was just something about walking between the two sentinel oaks that had stood there for so long, and seen so much, and through the gate of wrought iron.

One step, and the world of the living fell away, and the dead took over.

“Lost souls,” I said quietly. “Old souls. Tortured souls.” To my surprise the words didn’t feel silly or forced.

“They gather in the dance of the shadows,” I continued, and for a fleeting second, I again thought of soul mates, and wondered if they, too danced, “swaying quietly to the whisper of eternity.”

And then I said no more. I wanted the Hoods and Naomi to have their own experience, for their own impressions to form as they explored the haunting, timeless beauty of the weathered tombs, where crosses crumbled and angels wept and the vampire Lestat had hidden his valuables.

I’d been here several times, and I knew the stories, but as I turned and saw a man kneeling in the rain, with his head bowed and his hands clenched around the ornate iron fence surrounding a beautiful old crypt, a profound sadness gripped me.

The rain started again, this time harder, the wind shoving it in violent sheets across the tombs. Maybe that’s why he looked up. I knew it wasn’t because of me. I hadn’t moved.

But the second our eyes met, all of that fell away.