Heart of Evil

Page 13

And it was fresh blood that dripped beneath his dangling feet.
A killer might still be here, watching from the shadows that melded with the mist in the darkness of the graveyard.
Donegal Plantation. Few plantations rivaled it. A haunting opaque white shimmer in the moonlight, the building rose up on the bank in all its majesty. It sat before Jake Mallory as it had all his life; a stunning representation of a bygone era.
Nowadays, the very circumstances that had defeated those who had lived here long ago were the ones that made the area a place of such amazing history and beauty. The war had scarcely begun when the Union might had throttled the city and parish of New Orleans, and, for miles around the city center, the surrender that had seemed like such a tragic disaster had kept enemy forces from laying waste to the magnificent houses that had been built when cotton had been king.
He remembered the first time he had come here; his parents were friends with Ashley’s parents. He remembered the first time he saw her, hiding behind her mother’s skirts. She had been five; he had been eight.
Compare that to the last time he had seen her. The way the light had gone out in her eyes. She had built a wall around her heart and soul that was as impregnable as brick.
He was still damaged goods himself. He had learned to cope with what he was because of Adam Harrison and the team he had put together in a way he had never managed on his own. Maybe because he had discovered that he wasn’t so strange. Still, the images that lived in his mind would always create a divide with Ashley.
There had been good times, though. Their parents had played as a team in pool tournaments. Jake and Ashley had come along, played in the various game rooms offered by different venues, shared sodas and snacks. But more than pool had kept them together as friends when they’d been really young. Once, they’d been part of a garage band together; they’d been pretty good at that, too. And when the three years between them had seemed unbridgeable and they spent most of their time within a year of their own age group, Ashley had come to him upon occasion with her dating dilemmas, or to comment on his dating choices. He smiled as he thought about Ashley and remembered the way her lips would purse when she was trying to tell him something. Somehow, someway, Ashley had retained something of the Southern belle in her behavior; the word bimbo would not cross her lips, nor would she tell him that his latest crush was a slut, a tramp or trailer trash, nor would she use any other such derogatory term. The question was always, “Seriously, Jake, is she what you’re really looking for? I’m not certain that her behavior is really…nice. But, hey, you want what you want, right?”
Nighttime here really seemed to be a time warp back to the past. Tonight, the house, seen through the veil of oaks that led to the sweeping entrance, seemed to stand guard upon a hill. A soft breeze caused the branches to sway in the ethereal light, and the path to the house might have led right into a different time and dimension. There was nothing to mar the perfection of the picture; whatever cars might have been there were hidden away in the car park, and the view he saw was one of sheer magnificence.
He drove up the vast and sweeping, oak-lined drive from the road. Once upon a time, the road had been a carriageway, and the rear entrance from the road had not been considered a grand entry at all. The grand entry had faced the river. Some things had changed. The mighty barges bringing cotton downriver were outdated. Still, with the working sugar mill and Beaumont plantations as the nearest neighbors to Donegal, and both a mile away, the view of Donegal, even by night, was spectacular.
It was quiet when he parked; yet just yesterday there had been hundreds—possibly thousands—of people crawling all over the place, from the reenactors to the visitors who flocked here on the day of the actual reenactment. That thought made him smile as well—in comparison to the real battles that had taken place during the war, the skirmish here had been nothing. But Donegal Plantation had always been home to those who knew how to survive. When Marshall Donegal had been killed, Emma Donegal had raised her son and daughters on her own, and she had kept the plantation thriving, even under Union rule. It was sad—and probably not at all fair—that legend had her as the one to slip out into the skirmish and kill her husband. Her motive was supposedly the fact that she didn’t agree with his management of the plantation, or with the management of their slaves, several of whom he was supposed to have slept with, along with quadroons at the quadroon balls in New Orleans, and the wives of a few of his best friends. Their daughters, too. But those rumors weren’t anything new. People loved to speculate. He knew that neither Ashley nor Frazier believed in the rumors regarding Emma, and he didn’t take them very seriously, either.
He parked the car directly before the house and got out. He knew that he wouldn’t be out here at all, and the team wouldn’t be on call, if Adam Harrison hadn’t been old friends with Frazier Donegal.
An inexplicable discomfort settled over him. It was late, of course, and he was miles and miles away from Bourbon Street, where the parties were just hitting their stride. Out here, the world was sleeping.
Still, he hesitated.
Lights in the large old stable building showed him that tourists were still quartered there, and he even saw some light emitting from the smaller stables, still in use, behind the large barn structure.
The house looked ominously quiet.
He walked around the side of the house, not certain why he was experiencing such a distinct impression that something was wrong. And then he knew. As he stood there, he saw a figure in white come tearing out of the graveyard.
For a split second, he was paralyzed. She looked like a phantom, a stunning vision from the past, a gorgeous ghost in a long, flowing white gown, her golden hair caught in the wind.
It wasn’t a ghost; it was Ashley.
She looked just as she had looked in his dream: a shimmering figure standing upon a roof with the floodwaters rising. She looked as she had looked, reaching out for him and yet trying to warn him of something horrible and dark that loomed behind him. Her fingers had slipped through his…
He couldn’t let that happen now.
He raced across the grounds, hearing earth and gravel crunch beneath his feet. “Ashley!” he called her name.
She stopped; she stared at him with huge blue eyes the size of saucers, like a doe caught in the headlights of a car.
She still saw him as a pariah.
“Ashley,” he called again. She screamed and started to run away.
They hadn’t parted that badly. She wasn’t seeing him, she realized. She was still imagining whatever nightmare had caused her to run.
She turned just as he reached her, and they collided and fell to the ground. She struck out at him from below, and he caught her arms, perplexed and yet aware that she could deliver a solid blow if she chose. She seemed to be fighting for her life.
“Ashley! It’s me. Jake. Jake Mallory!”
She went dead still. He realized that she was trembling violently.
“Ashley, it’s Jake. Come on, Ashley, whatever else, you’ve known me all your life! It’s Jake. What is it, what are you running from?”
Her trembling subsided.
“I found him,” she said. “I found him.”
“Found who, Ashley?”
“Charles. Charles Osgood.”
Dead. She’d found him dead, of course. No one acted like this unless they had seen something really terrible. Certainly not Ashley Donegal.
“Where?” he asked, easing back.
He wanted to fix things for her. This was Ashley. Certainly, one of the most beautiful women he had ever known and once loved. He wanted to hold her and tell her everything would be all right….
But it wasn’t, of course. She had found a dead man.
He rose quickly, taking her hand to bring her to her feet. “Where, Ashley?” he asked again, his tone quiet but authoritative.
She blinked and seemed to gain possession of herself again. “The graveyard. The family vault,” she said.
“And he is dead? You’re certain?”
“Oh, yes.”
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911, and carefully gave the address and the situation. Ashley stared at him while he did so. If Jackson Crow was already on the case, then they had federal jurisdiction. But they needed a medical pathologist out here now, and, naturally, they’d have to work closely with the local police.
“Go on inside,” he told her. “The police are coming.”
She shook her head. “I’m with you. I’m not moving. I mean, I’m not moving if you’re not moving.”
“Someone needs to tell your grandfather.”
“He’s smart—he’ll figure it out when he hears the sirens.”
“When he hears the sirens, he’ll be worried about you.”
“I’m staying with you!”
He wondered if she was actually so shaken that she was afraid to head for the house herself—afraid, perhaps, of everyone on her property now.
“All right, but we need to keep a distance from the actual…scene,” he said.
“Corpse,” she said dully.
He walked back to the cemetery. She hadn’t released his hand. She wasn’t going to.
They had to part momentarily to slip through the gate without opening it further, and Jake was loath to make any changes to the scene. A stone cherub seemed to follow their passage through the rows of vaults, shimmering beneath the moonlight.
He didn’t have to ask her to lead him; he knew exactly where to find the Donegal vault.
It was the largest, the most ornate and the most beautiful in the graveyard. When they turned the corner in the center to reach it, he stopped, trying to take in everything that he saw before the local authorities came to assess the situation.
There was the vault. Cherubs and gargoyles guarded the iron-gate doors and the four corners of the tomb. High at the front was a life-size angel, and, caught upon its foundation by the heavy canvas straps of a period backpack, was the body of a man. He hadn’t known Charles Osgood, and if he hadn’t seen many a portrait of Marshall Donegal, he wouldn’t have known that this wasn’t a trick of time, that they hadn’t gone back approximately one hundred and fifty years to discover a dead cavalry man in the cemetery.