He guided the boat to the dock and eased the nose of it onto shore. Frowning, he scanned the area around them one more time before cutting power to the engine. Holt would never admit it to anyone, but the dolls were sort of unnerving. For whatever reason, the sight of them reminded him of death, and he’d seen far too much of that overseas.
Alex looked back at him as the engine wound down. “I didn’t see anything,” she said.
“Me, either, but that doesn’t mean someone’s not out there. They could be waiting until we’re on land and easier to pick off, especially since we got away the last time.”
“There’s a comforting thought.”
“Sorry, but I need you to be alert and ready for anything. If you’re on edge, you have an advantage.”
Alex nodded. “So do we head to the cabin?”
“Yeah. I have a copy of the warrant. If Mathilde Tregre is there, I can present her with it. If not, I plan on leaving a copy tacked to the door. Maybe if she knows we have the right to be here, she won’t shoot at us.”
“Assuming it’s her that took the shots in the first place.”
“Exactly. We’re dealing with a bunch of unknowns here. Are you ready?”
Alex glanced at the dolls surrounding the dock. “As ready as I’m getting.”
“I’ll take the lead, but follow closely, and keep your gun ready.”
Holt stepped past Alex and onto the bank, then reached back to offer her his hand getting out of the boat. As soon as both her feet hit ground, he headed down the trail that they’d taken before to the cabin.
They moved slower than he would have liked to, but moving faster made it harder to listen for other creatures, especially the careful, bipedal kind. The path showed no sign of recent passage, but any footprints left the night before would have been washed away in the storm. And whoever shot at them might have taken a completely different route to the dock. There was no telling how many paths and trails were carved through the island. The old woman and her ancestors had occupied the island for over a hundred years. Plenty of time to create multiple paths, both for hunting and being hunted.
As they closed in on the cabin’s clearing, he stopped and peered out of the foliage, looking for any sign of life in the tiny structure. The swamp was eerily quiet, as if every living creature were holding its breath, just waiting for his next move. Finally, he motioned to Alex to stay put and crept out of the brush to the side of the cabin. Once safely pressed against the structure, he waved at Alex to join him, then eased along the side of the cabin and around the corner to the front door.
The door was still unlocked as he’d left it. He peered around the corner, but the cabin was empty. Broken glass crunched beneath his feet as he stepped inside. He studied the cabin for a minute, then looked over at Alex, who was standing silently beside him.
“Doesn’t look like anything’s been moved,” he said.
“No. You’d think if she’d been back here, she would have at least cleaned up the glass in the doorway.”
“You’d think,” Holt agreed.
Alex bit her lower lip. “So what now?”
Holt blew out a breath. “I guess we start poking through the brush like we did yesterday. There’s no rain in the forecast today, so at least we have that on our side.”
“How big is this island?”
“About ten square miles, give or take for erosion.”
Alex shook her head. “There’s no way we can cover that in a day—not every inch. And if the woman has Erika, she can easily move her away from whatever area we’re searching. She’s got the advantage here. In a big way.”
“Yeah,” Holt agreed. “But we don’t have another option. The trail we were on the other day didn’t seem to be well used. Let’s try around behind the cabin and see if we can find another entry point there.”
Holt pulled the copy of the warrant from his wallet and pushed it over a nail in the center of the front door on their way out. A fairly defined trail started behind the cabin, almost in the center of the clearing, so they started down it.
“No footprints,” Holt noted. “No one’s passed here since the storm.”
“Do you think she could have another cabin on the island?”
“Could be multiple cabins. Even if she did minimal maintenance, they would offer her places to escape the storm or different starting locations for hunting and fishing.”
“And herb gathering. Most of those jars in the cabin had roots and dried plants in them.”
“Yeah,” he acknowledged, but didn’t say more. He still didn’t know what to think about the woman and her glass jar collection. He knew people still believed and practiced the old ways, and Mathilde Tregre would be a prime candidate given her family history on the island and reclusive tendencies. But he deliberately kept that line of thinking from his investigation because he didn’t want to think about the other side of it—did it work?
They progressed slowly through the swamp for about an hour before reaching the shore on the opposite side. Holt looked across the channel into the swamp, but there was no sign of life anywhere near. The trail hadn’t contained any forks along the way, so clearly it was intended to reach this bank.
“Maybe she uses it to reach this side for fishing,” Holt suggested.
“The distance across the island is shorter than the length, right?” Alex wiped her brow with the back of her hand. “Maybe we should try to walk alongside the bank for a bit and see if we find anything.”
Holt nodded. “Let’s try the right side first. It doesn’t look as dense.”
But before he took a single step, a scream rang out through the swamp. Alex clenched his arm with both hands and stared at him, wide-eyed.
Holt pointed to the right and whispered, “It sounds like it came from that direction.” He checked his pistol and motioned for Alex to follow him.
They crept through the brush along the bank, listening for movement, but the swamp had gone quiet again. Suddenly, Alex stopped short and tugged on his sleeve. She pointed to the brush ahead of them. Holt stood still and finally he heard the faint sound of weeping. All thought for safety aside, he rushed through the brush in the direction of the crying. He burst through a hedge of dense brush and found himself face-to-face with a twelve-foot alligator.
“Stay back,” he yelled at Alex, but it was already too late. As she slid to a stop beside him, the alligator swung its enormous head toward them.
That’s when Holt saw that it had something bloody clasped in its jaws. He sucked in a breath when he realized it was a human leg. He heard Alex stifle a cry and knew she’d seen it, as well.
The alligator hissed, his gaze locked on Alex.
“Can you shoot him?” she whispered.
“Too close, and if I miss…” He didn’t have to finish his sentence. Alex had grown up in the swamp and knew the odds as well as he did.
“We passed a cypress tree about twenty feet back,” she said.
He nodded, but didn’t take his eye off the alligator. He saw the animal’s front leg quiver and a wave of fear washed over him. If the animal rose up on his legs, he would strike. Even a beast that large could move much faster than a human.
The alligator’s gaze was fixed on Alex. He hissed again and began to lift up his body to strike.
“Go!” Holt jumped in front of Alex and pushed her back toward the tree.
The alligator leaped forward, and he spun to the right, barely dodging the razor-sharp teeth of the beast. He knew he had only seconds to get away before the alligator managed to swing his body around and launch at him again. Praying that Alex was safely off the ground, he spun around again and bolted for the tree.
He heard the marsh grass crunching as the alligator threw his entire length forward through the brush. Every muscle in his body strained as he pushed his body to the limit to cover the distance to the tree before the alligator closed the gap to him. It was only twenty feet, but seemed much farther before he leaped in the air and grabbed the lowest branch of the cypress tree, dropping his pistol as he went. He felt a tug on his jeans and heard the material rip as he pulled himself up into the tree, narrowly escaping the deadly jaws of the alligator.
He swung his leg over the branch and leaned back against the trunk of the tree in a sitting position. “That was close,” he said.
“Too close.”
One look at Alex’s face told him just how close it had been. All the color had washed completely from her face. Her eyes were wide as saucers and she picked involuntarily at the branch she clung to.
“Are you sure he didn’t get you?” she asked, her voice cracking.
“Just the end of my jeans.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so close to death. Even the shooter from the other night hadn’t sent him into overdrive the way the alligator had.
“What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to fire a warning shot,” Holt said. “See if I can scare him off. But I’ll need your pistol. I dropped mine when I jumped into the tree.”
“Even if you scare him off, that doesn’t mean he won’t come back. He’s fast, Holt. Faster than I’ve ever seen before.”
“I’m well aware of that, but I can’t make a kill shot from this angle, and we can’t sit in this tree waiting for him to die.” Holt moved sideways on the branch a bit to give himself a better view of the alligator.
“Hand me your gun,” he said, and Alex passed him her pistol.
He aimed at the ground just to the side of the alligator and fired a single bullet. The instant the bullet struck the ground, the alligator whirled around and scurried through the brush. A huge splash followed seconds later.
“Do you think that belongs to the person who screamed?” Alex pointed to what was left of the leg that the alligator had left in front of the tree.
Holt gave a mental sigh of relief as he gave the leg a closer look and determined it belonged to an adult and not a child.
“We need to find out,” he said. “They may need help.”
“If that’s their leg, it’s too late to help.”
“They might not be alone.”
Alex nodded and Holt dropped out of the tree and onto the ground. He tucked the pistol in his waistband and reached up to assist Alex in climbing out of the tree. Once she was safely on the ground behind him, he edged through the brush back toward the clearing where they’d encountered the alligator.
The brush across the clearing showed signs of passage. Branches were broken off shrubs and the marsh grass was flattened. Holt studied the bank, looking for any sign of their man-eating friend, but he couldn’t see any bubbles on the water, a telltale sign that an alligator was resting below the surface. He hurried across the clearing, Alex close behind, and followed the trail of broken branches deeper into the swamp.
He almost tripped over the woman who was lying in a bunch of marsh grass. She was old, and her long silver hair stuck out in every direction. He felt a rush of relief pass over him as he noted both legs were intact. But the woman was injured. Her arm was covered in blood and she wasn’t responsive when he called out.
Alex gasped when she peered around him, but then she pushed past him and dropped to the ground, her medical training taking over. “Her pulse is strong,” she said.
“Did she pass out from blood loss?”
Alex shook her head. “Not unless she lost a lot more than what we see here. Likely, it was fright and stress and age.” She looked up at Holt. “She’s the witch woman.”
“Mathilde Tregre. I figured.”
The woman stirred and then her eyes popped open. She stared at Alex and then tried to push herself up.
“Wait,” Alex said, holding her shoulders. “You’ve been injured. I need to tie off your arm and get the bleeding to stop.”
The woman’s eyes flashed from Alex to Holt, her fear evident.
“I’m a doctor,” Alex said. “Do you understand?”
“The gator?” the woman asked.
“Gone,” Holt said.
“He had a piece…a leg it looked like,” she said. “I was on him before I realized it. He got a bite of my hand, but I managed to pull away before he could clamp down.”
“You’re lucky,” Alex said. She removed her belt and placed it around the woman’s arm.
“Are you Mathilde Tregre?” Holt asked.
The old woman winced as Alex tightened the belt on her arm. “I’m Mathilde. I hope you weren’t here looking for the rest of whoever that alligator had in his mouth.”
“No. We’re looking for a little girl.”
Mathilde jerked her head up to stare at Holt. “And you figured the witch woman must have taken her.”
“We found a pink barrette in your cabin yesterday,” Alex said. “It belonged to the little girl who’s missing.”
Mathilde studied Alex for a moment. “Is it your little girl?”
“She’s my cousin’s daughter.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“But you have the barrette.”
“I was saving it. For the full moon.”
“You were going to do a reading?” Alex asked.
Mathilde nodded. “Ain’t no kids been on this island since I was a kid. Ain’t none belongs here. It’s a dangerous place, but it’s my place.”
“Ms. Tregre,” Holt said. “I need to ask you some questions, but it’s more important that we get some medical attention for your hand.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“If that’s what it takes to get you to the hospital, then yes.”
“I ain’t got nothing to hide. Didn’t all them years ago and don’t now. ’Course that won’t stop the lies, will it?”
“I’m only interested in the truth,” Holt assured her.
“Then you’d be the only one.”
“Can you make it back to your cabin?” Holt asked. “I can go back and bring the boat around, but that will take longer.”
“I’m fine to walk,” Mathilde said. “Probably in better shape than either one of you.”
Holt looked up at Alex, who nodded.
Satisfied that Mathilde was healthy enough to make the trek, he helped Alex lift her to a standing position.
“If you feel dizzy,” Alex instructed, “let me know and we’ll rest.”
“Stop your fussing,” Mathilde said. “I’ll be fine.”
Alex looked over at him. “Should we… I mean, we ought to…the leg.”
The leg.
He needed to get what was left of it back to Vodoun. There was always the slim chance that it contained some identifiable characteristic.