Phantom Evil

Page 4

Andy Devereaux was telling the truth when he said that he liked the senator; Jackson wasn’t sure that investigating what had already been investigated and ruled a suicide was more important than the other cases in his workload.
“I’ll bother you as little as possible,” he promised.
“You bother me when you need to. I understand there are others coming?” Andy asked.
“Five,” Jackson said. “They’re here to inspect the house, more than anything else. A woman named Angela Hawkins is due tonight. She’s good at talking to people, so she’ll probably have a few conversations with the senator and those around him. I—”
“What’s inspecting the house going to do?” Andy asked. “I’m telling you that our forensics people are damn good.”
“And I don’t have a problem in the world believing that,” Jackson assured him. “And that means you know this house.”
“Yes, I do,” Andy told him. Hands on his hips, he looked around. “It sure is a beautiful place. No one mucked it up too much, modernizing it. Back before the 1880s, the kitchen was on the outside. They attached the place after that point, according to the plans. Added the second two stories over there, and added it all on together. It became an academy for young ladies in the 1890s, but…”
“But there was a suicide. One of the girls went out a third-story window,” Jackson said.
“You’ve done your reading,” Andy said approvingly. “Some say there was just an evil presence in the house, and it caused people to do bad things. The local rags picked it up at the time. There’s rumor the girl was pregnant, but there wasn’t an autopsy on her. The parents wanted her interred right off, and they were rich and they got their way. The records still exist, they just don’t say much,” Andy told him. “I’ve got copies of all the old stuff at the station—the house has become a bit of an obsession for me.” He paused for a minute, and then said, “I guess that history is why you ghost people are here, right?”
“We’re not ghost people,” Jackson said.
Andy shrugged. “Sure. But it’s odd, I’ll say that. It all goes back to Madden C. Newton. He was pure evil, and evil doesn’t just go away.”
CHAPTER TWO
No one answered Angela Hawkins’s knock on the door. She’d arrived at twilight. For a moment, she appreciated the fine lines of the house, and the size of it. She’d been in New Orleans plenty of times before, and she had always loved the city and the architecture.
But Jackson Crow was supposed to have been there.
She had a key, but she didn’t want to take him by surprise. He had been an ace agent who had brought down one of the country’s most heinous serial killers of recent times.
He might be quick on the draw.
Hopefully, a member of the Behavioral Science Unit of the bureau would have the sense not to shoot her, but she did know that he’d been out on leave, and she really didn’t want to die that way.
She knocked again, saw the bell and rang it, and waited, and no one came. He was in the city, she knew, because she’d received a terse text from him. At the house. She hadn’t even known how to reply. Good? Good for you, hope you’re comfortable?
About to board the plane, seemed the simplest response.
She checked her phone. She had received another text from him. At the station.
What station? She had to assume he meant the police station. Wherever, he wasn’t here. She used her key and entered the house.
She paused in the entry, the door still open, hoping that the atmosphere inside wasn’t overwhelming. It wasn’t. It wasn’t depressing. The room was simply beautiful, huge, and when she flicked the switch by the door, a glittering chandelier dead center came to life, casting glorious prisms of light about the room. Amazing that something so beautiful could have remained so for almost two hundred years. People had a tendency to destroy the old to make way for the new, something that was sometimes necessary. But that progress had kept the house so pristine and so unchanged it was just short of miraculous.
She left her luggage and carry-on at the door, pausing to delve into her bag for the book she read on the plane. It was a little out-of-print bargain she had managed to acquire from a show with which she traded frequently. One nice thing about her side job was that her antiques business created a network of friends with strange and awesome things—including books. Might as well find a place to wait until Jackson chose to show himself.
Departing the entrance hall was like entering a different home; the foyer might have remained in limbo for centuries, while here the modern world had burst in hard. An entertainment room caught her eye. She didn’t have a good sense of dimension, and could only think that the TV screen was huge; it was surrounded by cabinets that offered all manner of audiovisual equipment. Here, too, there was plenty of space for visitors; there was a wet bar—just in case the kitchen, right around the corner, she believed, was too far—a refrigerator, microwave station and a half-dozen plush chairs, recliners and sofas. Entertainment had definitely been done right.
Moving into the kitchen, she was met with a pleasant surprise. The room was absolutely beautiful, remodeled and state-of-the-art with an enormous butcher-block workstation in the center with rows of pots and pans and cooking utensils above it on wire stainless-steel hangers. The sink and counter area had a large window that was a bypass to a counter outside on the courtyard. There was a massive refrigerator-freezer combination, dishwasher, trash compactor, microwave, all manner of mixers, and all was shining and immaculate.
The senator’s wife had intended to entertain, so it seemed.
There were eight chairs around the kitchen table, and Angela drew one out and took a seat. She opened the book she had found—her true treasure trove of information on the house.
In 1888, Jack the Ripper terrorized the denizens of White-chapel; in 1896, the man known as H. H. Holmes was hanged, having confessed to the serial killings of at least twenty-seven victims before he was hanged. Before that, New Orleans had its own monster, Madden Claiborne Newton. While the mystery of the identity of Jack the Ripper makes him one of the most notorious fiends to find his way into the pages of history, Holmes far surpassed his body count—as did Madden C. Newton.
Angela paused. She looked around the kitchen and felt nothing. It was so modern. Yet, this was still the home in which the atrocities had taken place.
She flipped a few pages.
Newton’s first murder (in New Orleans, at least) was suspected to be that of Nathaniel Petti, the bankrupt planter from whom he had purchased the property. Nathaniel Petti was a desperate man, selling his New Orleans “townhome” to Newton for whatever he could. He had already lost the family plantation on the river, and while Lincoln’s plan after the Civil War had been that the North should “forgive their Southern brethren,” the death of the strong and humane leader left many in the country in a mood for vengeance, and the laws during Reconstruction were often brutal on the native inhabitants of the South. Such was the case in New Orleans. Nathaniel was being taxed into the grave. He disappeared after the sale to Newton, who was newly arrived from New York City. Petti’s wife and child had died during the war years, and the official assumption—if there were such a thing at the time—was that Petti had left, unable to bear the pain of being in New Orleans. While martial law became civil law, politics created almost as much of a war as that which had been fought. While the Freedman Act became law, the “old guard” of the South rose, and organizations such as the KKK came to life. Race riots in 1866 cost more than a hundred souls their lives, and there could be little worry given to the fact that one disenfranchised man had disappeared.
This set the stage for Madden C. Newton to begin his reign of terror.
To this day, it is not known whether or not he killed Petti; what is known is that Petti disappeared, and the motto of the day for the Reconstruction populace was, “Good riddance!”
Angela twisted the book to read the old, fraying dust jacket. It had been written by a man named James Stuart Douglas, born and bred in New Orleans in 1890, when the Civil War, and the era of Reconstruction, would have been fresh in historical memory. There was definitely a bit of skew in his telling of the story.
According to Douglas, the killer, Newton, found those who had newly arrived in the city, and offered them a place to stay. He also found those who were suddenly homeless—apt to leave the city and look for an income somewhere else. The first known murder had been of the Henderson family from Slidell. They had been about to leave for the North, searching for a place where Mr. Henderson could find work. His son, Percy, had been twelve; his daughter, Annabelle, had been ten. All four of the Hendersons had perished after accepting Newton’s offer of hospitality. The children had been brutally killed with an ax in the room where they had slept; Mr. and Mrs. Henderson had died after being tied to chairs in the basement, cut to ribbons and allowed to bleed to death. Newton had found watching people bleed to death particularly stimulating. Before Newton’s execution, twenty-three known victims later, he described his crimes, and told police where to find most of the bodies.
Angela stopped reading again. No wonder the house was on all the ghost tours in the city.
Darkness had come. She reminded herself that she wasn’t afraid of the dark.
Maybe that wasn’t true—here. The house suddenly seemed to be alive with shadows. It was probably a bad idea to read the book when she was alone and night was coming on. She wasn’t really afraid of the dark, but she didn’t want to start seeing things in her mind’s eye that weren’t there.
She sat still for a minute, thinking about the past. She could recall the day of the plane crash she had survived—but which had killed her parents and everyone else on board—at any given time.
So clearly.
She was incredibly lucky to be alive.
Alive and still so aware of the strange events that had occurred when she had opened her eyes with flames and sirens all around her…