The Lost Girls of Johnson's Bayou (7 page)

“Good idea.” He glanced around the restaurant and leaned across the table toward Ginny. “I have another idea. I want to go back to the school tonight.”

Chapter Six

“No.” Ginny’s response was immediate and one she didn’t have to give a second’s thought to. “I’m not going back there. The place frightens me, and clearly, I’m not mentally sound when I’m there, since I heard screaming that didn’t exist.”

“We don’t know for sure it didn’t happen.”

“I do. If a child was missing from the town, I would have heard about it at the café.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Even if the child wasn’t from here, someone would have come looking.”

“I don’t think a child was in the woods the other night.”

“Then we’re right back to my being mental.”

Paul shook his head. “I think being in the woods triggered a memory in you. One so strong that you thought you’d just heard it.”

Ginny sat back in her chair, her mind trying to process what Paul was suggesting. It was absurd, yet on some level, it almost made sense. “So I’m not crazy—I’m just having incredibly lucid recall? Do you really think that’s possible?”

“Yes. And I think going back may trigger more memories.”

Ginny pulled at a loose thread on her napkin, torn by her desire to help Paul find his sister and her own fear of what remembering the past may bring to her own life. The truth of what happened at the LeBlanc School that night had to be ugly, but what about her own past? What if she found out things about her life before that night that changed the way she felt about her life now?

Her temples began to throb as her pulse spiked. She looked across the table at Paul, and her heart broke just a little at the hopeful look that stared back at her. Refusing would be selfish. Refusing would mean she was allowing fear to dictate how she lived, and that was something she wasn’t prepared to do.

“I’ll do it,” she said before she could change her mind.

G
INNY SLIPPED OUT THE back door of the café behind Paul, clutching her spotlight, and crossed the alley, where they paused a minute in the shadows. They’d both changed into jeans, tennis shoes and dark shirts to help camouflage themselves in the darkness, and now they stepped into the field between the woods and the alley and headed away from town. At first they traveled in a different direction from the place where Ginny had entered the swamp before, choosing instead to stick to the dark gap between the town’s streetlights. Midway across the field, when the town’s lights no longer reached them, they turned and headed for the trail where Ginny had entered the woods before.

Ginny paused in front of the wall of trees, every instinct in her body telling her to run back inside and lock the doors behind her. She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, then passed her spotlight to Paul and nodded. He entered the woods and she stepped in behind him, waiting until they were a good twenty feet into the gloomy darkness before he turned on the light.

The spotlight immediately changed the look of the swamp but didn’t reduce Ginny’s feeling of foreboding one bit. The cypress trees, heavy with moss, still closed in on her like a tomb, making her chest feel heavy, almost as if she was suffocating. She concentrated on her breathing, making sure it was steady and deep.

“You okay?” Paul asked.

“Yeah. How much farther?”

“About a hundred yards or so.”

“That far?” Ginny glanced behind her at the wall of trees and moss. She couldn’t see even a flicker of light from town, and the sky overhead was dark with clouds so that not even a sliver of moonlight was showing. She hadn’t realized she’d run that far into the woods that night, and she barely remembered her dash out, either.

“It just feels far,” Paul said. “Don’t worry. I’m with you every step.”

“Do you have that big gun with you?”

Paul lifted his shirt to expose the pistol tucked into his waistband. “I don’t leave home without it.”

Ginny nodded and he continued through the brush. As she walked, Ginny wondered what had happened that night, sixteen years ago. She remembered nothing at all about her life before waking up in the hospital a week after the fire. Madelaine told her she’d walked out of the woods right in the middle of the fire trucks as if she didn’t see or hear anything around her. The paramedics said she was in shock and rushed her to the hospital in New Orleans.

Could Paul be right? Was she starting to remember?

She watched the ground closely as she walked. The last thing she needed was to twist an ankle in the gnarled roots that covered the swamp floor or, even worse, have a run-in with one of the poisonous varieties of snakes that liked to hunt at night. One, two, three…she counted her steps as she walked. It distracted her very creative mind.

All of a sudden, the woods went completely dark. She almost ran into Paul before she realized he’d stopped walking and had turned off the spotlight. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“We’re at the edge of the clearing surrounding the house,” he said, his voice low. “I wanted to watch and listen for a minute before we entered the house.”

Ginny sucked in a breath. “You think someone might be in there?”

“No, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t think about those things.”

Ginny let the breath out, her anxiety lessening a bit. Paul was a detective. He would be naturally cautious. She stepped beside him and peered into the darkness toward the school. The cloudy skies made it impossible to make out more than the rooflines of the structure, which jutted up against the black sky. Stilling herself, she focused on listening instead. The sound of the night creatures sounded around them, but nothing out of the ordinary reached her ears. And more important, nothing predatory—animal or human.

Apparently satisfied as well, Paul turned on the spotlight and motioned to Ginny as he stepped out of the brush and into the clearing surrounding the school. He picked up the pace across the clearing and into the front entry of the house, then stopped inside.

“I looked around a little the other night, but only a cursory check to make sure the child you heard wasn’t here. All the bedrooms for the girls were upstairs. I figured we could start there.”

“Okay,” Ginny said and followed Paul up the sweeping circular staircase to the second-floor hallway. Starting with the bedrooms made sense. If she’d lived at the school, she’d probably spent more time in her bedroom than anywhere else.

They stepped into the first room and Paul shone the spotlight up at the ceiling, which cast a glow over the entire room. Ginny made a first pass around the small space and frowned. The room contained two twin beds, still covered with ruffled comforters and matching pillows. The material was dirty now and had been torn and picked over in spots, most likely by rodents looking for good nest-building material, but the pink fabric still showed in some places. Children’s books lay on the nightstand positioned between the two beds, and a tattered rug lay on the floor in front of the nightstand. A dresser stood behind her and she tugged on the top drawer, which seemed to stick.

“It’s probably stuck.” Paul stepped close to her and pulled on the drawer handle. The drawer popped open and mice ran out of the top and scattered over the dresser and out of the room.

“Oh,” Ginny jumped back from the dresser and checked her feet, making sure none of the rodents were running across them.

Paul stepped back beside her. “I should have thought about that. Sorry.”

“At least none of them ran across my shoes. Then I would have had to burn a perfectly good pair of Nikes.”

Paul gave her a rueful smile. “There’s still plenty of opportunity. We need to check all the drawers. See if there’s anything here that might give us an indication of what happened.”

Ginny glanced around the room again. “Why is everything still here? Some of the furniture has to be valuable, or must have been at one time, but it’s all sat here untouched. It’s creepy.”

“Yeah. It kinda surprised me, too. I figured someone looking to make a quick buck would have picked it over years ago.”

“Maybe not,” Ginny said. “The New Orleans newspaper carried the story about the fire, but it never made national news that I can recall. Only people from Johnson’s Bayou knew that the police never identified a next of kin or even a friend of the headmistress. I believe some company in New Orleans owns the property, although they clearly didn’t care enough to sell off the assets.”

“Not having a legal right to things doesn’t stop people from looting.”

“Oh, people in Johnson’s Bayou don’t avoid the house because they’re afraid of breaking the law.”

“Then what are they afraid of?”

Ginny shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. I heard the whispers when I was a child. People thought the headmistress was a witch and the girls were sacrificed in some ritual. Given that her body was never found and she’s completely disappeared, people are more willing to believe the extraordinary.”

“Is it extraordinary?”

Ginny stared at Paul. “You’re serious? You believe in witchcraft?”

“No, but I believe that some people believe in witchcraft. If the headmistress was one of them, then the locals’ suspicions might have merit.”

“Then what happened to her?”

“The easy answer—she became someone else. New identity, new past, new town.”

Ginny shook her head, just beginning to realize how many questions needed to be answered about that night. How many avenues of investigation Paul might have to pursue before he got the answers he sought. “Then I guess we better get a move on. There’s a lot of things we don’t know.”

Paul pulled open all the drawers on the dresser and the nightstand, but no other four-legged surprises jumped out at them. He placed the spotlight on top of the dresser with the light still shining on the ceiling to illuminate the room and pulled a flashlight from his back pocket. “I’m going to start on the next room. Are you okay in here?”

“As long as everything in the room is bipedal, I’m fine.”

“I’ll open the drawers next door before you check out the room, then I’ll start searching the rooms across the hall. Yell if you find anything interesting.”

Ginny nodded and began to pull clothes out of the dresser drawers. They were dry-rotted, and many of them crumbled in places when she pulled them from their resting spot. She cringed a bit when she saw bugs on the end of the garment, but when she realized they were dead, she flicked them off with her fingernail. Carefully, she felt each garment for anything that might be hidden inside, and when the drawer was empty, she stuffed all the clothes back inside and moved on to the next drawer, repeating the process.

The dresser yielded nothing at all of interest and Ginny moved to the nightstand. The nightstand drawer held a stack of fabric and a box of thread. Ginny pulled the stack out and opened up the square piece of cloth with the neat hem. It was dingy and rotting, but the square was the same as the blue gingham valances in the café. Ginny felt a lump in her throat and choked it down. They were normal little girls who worked on their sewing and reading books before going to bed.

What had they felt when the fire started? When they realized they were going to die?

She picked up one of the books from the desktop and used the swatch of fabric to wipe the cover. Dust billowed up and she dropped the fabric back in the drawer then waved her hand in front of her face, sneezing as she got a nose full of the dust. She opened the book and looked inside the first page to see if there was an inscription that gave any clue to the owner, but the inside page contained no writing, nor did any of the others.

She picked up the next book and flipped through the pages, not expecting to find anything, when a page toward the end caught her eye. Slowly, she turned the pages back one at a time, trying to figure out what had grabbed her attention. And then she gasped.

It was the design—the circles that she used in her jewelry.

She drew her finger lightly over the circles, the sensitive tip of her finger picking up the tiny difference in texture of the ink used to draw the circles. Paul had been right. The circles came from her past. And now she knew for certain that she’d been in the LeBlanc School. But had she drawn the circles in the book or had someone else, maybe Paul’s sister?

She flipped the book back to the front cover and studied the title and artwork. It wasn’t familiar. Not a single thing fired in her mind that let her know she’d seen the book before. Frustrated, she closed the book. She needed to show it to Paul and get his thoughts. He had a way of making sense out of this mess.

As she turned to leave the room, the window behind her shattered and she felt something whiz by her head. Before she could even register what had happened, Paul rushed into the room and threw her to the floor as another pane of glass shattered behind them. She covered her head with her arms, the shards of broken glass nicking her bare skin as it fell around them.

Paul had covered most of her body with his own when he’d tackled her, but now he moved to his hands and knees. “Get into the hallway. Do not stand.” He motioned for her to get ahead of him, so Ginny crawled out of the room and into the hallway, where she slumped against the wall on the other side of the bedroom door.

The spotlight in the bedroom clicked off and the entire hallway pitched into darkness, not even a sliver of light making its way in. A couple of seconds later, Paul placed the spotlight on the floor next to her and turned on his small flashlight. He pulled his pistol from his waistband and checked the clip.

“Someone was shooting at me,” Ginny said, everything that had just happened suddenly falling into place. “But I didn’t hear a shot.”

“He’s using a silencer. Gunfire would attract attention.”

“I can’t believe it. Why in the world would anyone shoot at me?”

Paul hesitated for a moment, then replied, “Because they have a lot to lose if your memory returns.”

He rose from the floor and clicked off his flashlight, pitching the hallway back into darkness. “Stay put and keep the spotlight off.”