Nick stood up. “Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Is there a cemetery on your property, Jack? Maybe we can find something out there.” He hesitated and glanced at Jack and then at Gabe. “There may be graves out there. You both understand that?”
Jack looked repulsed, probably realizing he'd been living in the house where his baby sisters might have been tormented and murdered. But his face was set in stone. Claire shivered but looked determined.
Jack said, “I know exactly where that cemetery is. It's got the white wall around it, and it's close to the swamp, just like Gabe said. I duck hunt down there sometimes. The crypts are up on a slope that overlooks where the river overflows and floods the low-lying land at the back of our property.”
“How do you feel?” Nick asked Gabe, handing him a bottle of water.
Gabe took it and drank deeply before he answered. “It's strange. Like a dream I was walking through. Not Sophie and me but two little kids. I don't remember him hurting me anymore, the pain, I mean.”
“That's good. That's very good.”
“Are you up to going out there, Gabe?” Jack asked.
Nick could tell Jack was going, come hell or high water, with Gabe or without him.
“Yes. I'm going. Maybe I'll remember more once I'm there.”
That was all they needed. Nick took his car and drove, and nobody said much of anything all the way out to Rose Arbor. He stopped at the front gate, punched in the code, and drove up to the house. When they got out, Gabe looked up at the dark mansion. “It was here?” he said, looking at Claire.
“Yes.” She turned her flashlight up and focused it on the newel post.
Gabe moved up the steps and ran his fingers over the deep grooves. “This is what I saw.”
Jack went inside and turned on the porch lights and foyer lights and then flipped on a floodlight out at the fountain. When he came back outside, Nick asked him how far it was to the cemetery.
“About a quarter of a mile, I guess. It's pretty much overgrown woods and swampy areas now. Some of the crypts out there date as far back as the 1700s.”
They started off with Jack taking the lead. Gabe was able to keep pace, probably due to an adrenaline surge and his need to know. The night had gotten colder, and their path around the side of the house was dark. They had flashlights, and they followed Jack down through a stand of live oak trees. As they skirted the perimeter of his property, both sides of their path were overgrown with dead and tangled vines and thickets and wild ivy growing out of control. Lots of the gray Spanish moss hung down and brushed their hair like ghostly fingers. Startled birds fluttered out of their hidden beds in the bushes and took wing up into the tree branches. Nick knew when they had neared the swamp because of the smell of the stagnant water and the sound of a nutria rat splashing into the water.
Up ahead of them, Jack stopped and shined his flashlight through the trees, a cone of smoky white light focused on a crumbling cemetery wall. “There. See the crypts? Some are destroyed, but a few of them are still standing.”
They all focused their flashlights on the area that he indicated and swept them around like searching beacons at a movie premier.
“Does this look like the place, Gabe?”
He nodded. “Sophie tripped right here and fell down. That's when we heard him coming and panicked. So I dragged her up and we ran up there to the cemetery to hide.”
Gabe started across the damp ground, and the rest of them followed, watching where they stepped on wet, spongy dirt that sank a bit under their weight. Then they saw the pale, ghostly crypts in the gloom. Many were crumbling from centuries of wind and rain and hurricanes. Others were covered with weeds and fallen branches. Gabe made his way up the incline to the closest crypt. It sat atop the ground and was about six feet high and eight feet long. He knelt and tried to tear away the weeds with his good arm until he uncovered a rotted wooden door.
“This is where I hid Sophie. Right here.” His voice clogged tight, and he couldn't say anything else. He sat down on the ground, as if spent.
They gathered around him and focused their lights on the crypt's door. With some effort, Jack shoved back the rusty bolt on what was left of the splintered wood.
Gabe started to scramble inside, but Claire stopped him. “Let me, Gabe. You've done enough.”
Bending down, she flashed her light around the interior and then moved into the dank dark place where poor little Sophie must have crouched in terror so many years ago. Nick squatted down and saw that there was nothing inside at all, no coffin, no moldering corpse, thank God. Before he could stop him, Gabe pushed past him and crawled in behind her. Nick and Holliday watched from the door and held their flashlights where they illuminated the interior. Claire and Gabe were brushing away leaves and gravel and scraping away dirt in search of anything that could help them. After a while, Claire glimpsed something buried in the dirt because she dug it out and held it up against the light. It was a necklace, crusted with grime from decades in the crypt when the water seeped up and turned the ground into mud. She brushed off the dirt as best she could and held it up to the light by its broken chain. When Gabe saw it, he grabbed it out of her hand and squeezed it in his fist. “Sophie got this crucifix the day he took us. For her birthday.”
Claire put her arms around him, and they all watched as he gripped his little sister's necklace and wept for the innocent little girl that he had left behind in that crypt all those many years ago.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Their emotions were scraped absolutely raw, and it took some time to get themselves back under control, but they had to. Claire was certain now that they were standing on a serial killer's dumping ground. No telling how many bodies were buried under the moldy dirt of that ancient graveyard. Once Gabe was calm enough and Black was talking through it with him, she got on her phone and called Russ Friedewald. Jack told her that Rose Arbor was located inside St. James Parish so Russ would have to call his counterpart there and arrange a two-department task force to search for other victims. After she'd run their findings past him, Russ immediately ordered in the entire parish forensics team and all available detectives, replete with floodlights and recovery equipment.
By the time the sun came up, and a rolling blanket of ground fog wisped like smoke over the surface of the still green water and crept silently among the centuries-old crypts in the crumbling cemetery, the task force had already gathered and uncovered three small human skeletons. Everybody on scene feared they would find more before the day was done.
Black helped dig, and so did Jack, who wore a dead expression on his face. One that Claire couldn't stand to look at. Gabe had returned to the house, tired and too weak to help, unable to stand on his feet any longer. They toted buckets of cold dirt from the sunken graves amid the crypts, and she knew why Jack looked so determined. They all knew why.
Even so, when another skeleton was discovered, that of a young child found in a shallow grave only feet from where Gabe had left his sister, Jack was still not prepared when Nancy Gill brushed dirt off a scrap of rotted cloth. Tattered red fleece with the face of Rudolph on the front, the tiny red pom-pom still attached to his nose. Claire's heart ached when Nancy carefully lifted the shredded remnant of the nightgown with gloved hands and placed it on a sheet of evidence paper.
Jack stood as if frozen and stared down at his little sister's garment with such mute and terrible anguish that Claire took hold of his arm and tried to turn him away from the grave. “You should go inside, Jack. Let us do this.”
Jack didn't answer. He didn't seem to hear her. Nobody said anything out of compassion for his shock and pain so the chatter of awakening birds was the only sound in the cool, early morning quiet. Suddenly, he fell to his knees beside the tiny skeletal remains, his fists clenched on his knees. Then he looked up at them again, and his eyes were so ice-cold, so deadly, that he was frightening to behold. His muscles were flexed into rock, and he was quivering with suppressed rage.
Concerned, Black put his hand on his Jack's back. He kept his voice very low. “You need to go back to the house, Jack. Just like Gabe did. You've seen enough. You've done enough. Come on, I'll go with you. We'll talk about it there.”
“I'm not going anywhere.”
Nancy and Claire exchanged worried glances, and after a moment, Nancy began digging again. Claire helped her, but Black stayed close to Jack, apparently afraid he was going to lose it at any minute. Ron Saucier staked out the new grave site, and then he slowly and methodically and expertly extracted a second small skeleton. It was the other twin, buried in her matching, ragged Christmas nightgown, an innocent child who had barely lived three years on the earth before a real-life bogeyman had crept into her house and taken her away forever. Now everything was eerie, dreadful, and intense, with everybody on the scene quiet and respectful of Jack's burgeoning grief.
Then, abruptly, after about ten minutes of watching Saucier and Nancy carefully remove the remains, and without a word to anyone, Jack stood up, turned around, and headed at a quick clip back to the house. Black watched him for a moment, glanced at Claire, and then went after him. After a little while, Claire walked back to the house, too, and found Black inside the foyer.
“How is he?”
“Not good, but he's holding up, I guess. I tried to prepare him for this when he hired Booker, but he was so determined to find out what happened to his sisters that he didn't realize how hard this was going to hit him. I think we need to stay with him. He's in the library.”
Rose Arbor's library was downstairs, in the back and on the south side of the house. It was a large rectangular room with windows facing the backyard swimming pool. Polished cherrywood paneling and bookcases lined three walls. Jack was sitting behind a huge mahogany desk. His elbows were propped on the glossy surface, his face buried in his palms. A large Tiffany lamp, its edges decorated with open-winged dragonflies, was switched on and threw a circle of light on his hair. A large book lay on the desk in front of him.
Black motioned Claire over to a chair in front of the desk, but he remained standing. Claire could tell that he was very concerned about his friend. “Jack? Are you going to be all right? Can we get you anything?”
Holliday raised his face, and she knew instantly that he wasn't all right. Far from it. His eyes were red and swollen, his expression empty and forlorn. His words came out hoarse. “Now I know what happened. He probably did the same things to them that he did to Gabe and his sister. I can't stand thinking about it. It makes me sick to my stomach to think what they went through, the awful things he did to them. They were just babies, Nick. Innocent little babies.”
Claire sat there and remembered her own dead child and what had happened to him and left the comforting to Black. Her own pain overtook her quickly, thinking about her darling Zach, with his blond curls and huge blue eyes and happy laugh. She tried to push it back behind the thick wall she'd constructed to keep herself sane. But this time she couldn't quite pull it off. Zach had only been two years old when he died in her arms. She shut her eyes and forcibly willed the image out of her head. Oh, God, she still missed him so much. She missed him every time she saw a toddler in a grocery store or heard a lullaby or saw a Pampers commercial or smelled Johnson's Baby Powder. She would never get over it, never. She clasped her hands tightly together and tried desperately to force down the terrible grief overwhelming her.
Black said, “He's a monster, Jack. Rest assured, they'll get him. Sooner or later, they will get him.”
“I should've believed Jenny when she came to me. I should've checked outside because he was out there, in our yard, just waiting for us to go to bed.”
“Nobody could've known your sisters were in danger, not in their own home, in their own beds, on Christmas Eve. Your parents didn't know, either. Nobody knew. Don't blame yourself. It's not your fault. Jack, listen to meâit's not your fault.”
Holliday did not respond, but it was easy to see that he was struggling with guilt and remorse, much as Gabe was. All their lives, they'd been affected by the murders in their families, senseless murders committed by the same savage killer. Decent people always blamed themselves. Claire had blamed herself for a lot of things, too, for many years until Black had come along and helped her work through some of it. But not all of it, not all of it.
Claire hesitated. She took a deep and bracing breath. It was going to take Jack months to come to terms with this horrible crime, maybe even years. She knew that full well. Right now, she needed to tell him what he wanted to hear. The more he heard it, the better off he would be. “Black's right, Jack. We're very close to him now. He's gonna pay for destroying your family. Hear me, Jack? He's not getting away with it, not anymore. We will get him. He won't ever do this to another little kid.”
“I'm going to kill that fuckin' bastard. I want him dead. That's all I want. I want him dead. I want to do it myself and make him suffer the way they suffered.”
“Yeah, we all do,” Black answered in his quiet shrink mode. “But you're not going after him. Claire is on this case, and she'll find him. Just give her time, and she will find him.”
“That's right, Jack. It's pretty clear now that this is the same guy who killed Madonna and Wendy, and we're getting close to him. I can feel it. It's just a matter of time.”
Jack's jaw was clenched tight, his fists were clenched tight, his entire body was clenched tight. Helplessly, they stood by and watched him endeavor to pull himself together and rein in his thirst for vengeance. It took him a while. Both of them stayed with him, but Claire sat there and thought about the beautiful house around them. How it must have looked before, when it had been abandoned and the sadistic killer had kept children in the cellar and brought them upstairs to torment them, maybe in this very room. She could almost see their frightened faces and hear their terrified screams.
She wondered how many times it had happened throughout all the years gone by. How many little ones had cowered in that root cellar below their feet and heard the monster moving around upstairs and preparing his terrible games? Had he found another lair when Jack's grandfather had bought this house for his wife? Where was he taking his victims now? Was another child out there somewhere right now, screaming for help in some other dank cellar?
“I'm going to take them back to Colorado. I want them buried beside our parents.”
“I think that's a good idea,” Black said. “I'll go with you, if you want. We can take the Lear so you can have complete privacy.”
More silence ensued, while Jack stared off into space. After a few minutes, he spoke again, and more calmly. “I couldn't remember exactly where this was, but I finally found it. Maybe it will help you, Claire.”
Claire realized that he was talking about the book lying in front of him. It was an oversized volume, bound in expensive Moroccan leather, a rich maroon trimmed in gold. A filigree clasp held the pages together. There was no title or author's name.
“What is it?”
“My grandmother commissioned a history of this house when she bought it and began the renovations. Somebody owned this place when he kept them here. If this was where he came to commit his atrocities, somebody connected with this house has got to know something, remember something about him.”
Claire thought about it a moment. “Yes, and I think Old Nat knows more than we think. I want to question him. He took care of this place for years, as far back as when Gabe's parents were young. Rene showed me a picture of them sitting out on the front steps, a bunch of kids when they were in high school. He said Old Nat was the one who let them hang around out here.”
“The old man's been with my grandmother forever. That's all I know about him. He keeps to himself.”
“Does he have a family?”
“I don't know. It never mattered to me who took care of this place. He was just here, grandmother's old caretaker. Eccentric, but harmless. At least, I thought he was.”
“Is he from around here?”
“I don't know where he's from. Cajun, I guess. Do you really think he could've brought other victims out here?”
“He's had opportunity and he's been around for years. He could even be the killer. Or more likely, he could know who the killer is.”
Black picked up the book and started turning the pages. “It says here that the foundation was laid in the mid-1780s. A Frenchman named Louis Bernard, who was a wealthy sugar planter, built this house for his new bride.” He thumbed farther into the book. “Looks like it survived hurricanes and fires, and was used by Union troops during the Civil War. Okay, here we go. It says it fell into disrepair in the early 1940s, was boarded up and abandoned and then fell into ruin.”
Claire moved closer and looked over his shoulder. Jack just sat and watched them. “Okay, this looks a lot like the picture at Rene's house. It shows the front gallery and the steps. This must be how it looked when your grandfather bought the place.”
“Who did he buy it from?” Claire asked Jack quickly.
“I don't know.”
“Well, somebody felt secure here, comfortable enough to lock up people in the cellar without any fear of getting caught.”
“Here we go,” Black said, “It says here that Jack's grandfather bought the property from a French family who moved down to Haiti. Says they just abandoned the house and immigrated to the islands.”
Black looked down at Jack for a moment. Claire thought Jack looked way too shaky to stick around for this kind of discussion.
Apparently, Black did, too. “Okay, Jack, you need to go upstairs and lie down. Gabe's up there. I can give you something to help you rest. Let us handle this for now. When you're ready, we'll tell you everything you want to know.”
“No way.”
Claire frowned, but then she said, “I think everything points to Old Nat. He's been around for decades, and it sounds like he might've been squatting out here until your grandmother hired him on. And he overreacted way too much to my coming up to the house that first night. What was he afraid of? Do you think he's capable of murder, Jack?”
“I don't know him, like I said. He's always been out here, taking care of things. Just like Yannick's been doing over on St. Charles Avenue. He does his job, then he goes home, I guess. I don't keep up with either one of them.”
“Where does he live?” Black asked.
“Back behind the property. Down close to the swamp. It's out in the other direction from the cemetery.”
Claire said, “I'm going to go down there and talk to him. You two stay here.”
“Yeah, right,” said Black.
Claire didn't mind Black having her back. He was up to it and fully capable. And always armed, too, at least since he'd met her, which was always a plus. She trusted him implicitly. But Jack. Jack was teetering on the verge of completely falling apart. And he'd already vowed to kill the murderer.