Page 24 of Devil's Haunting
My great aunt.
Fuck.
“This one belonged to my great aunt,” I whisper the words, hating them.
As curious as I am, I don’t want to find out she suffered a similar fate to Blanche. No one deserves to live a life filled with heartbreak and betrayal. No one deserves to feel like they’re afflicted by a curse they can’t break.
Tripp wraps his strong arms around me and pulls my back against his front. Just as I relax against him, the sound of the lock disengaging fills the room. We turn toward the sound and see that the lock is no longer flipped.
All I can do is shake my head. I’m not even surprised anymore.
“I guess I need to get to reading and find out what happened to Marilyn because, clearly, we were meant to find this journal.”
Tripp huffs out a breath and doesn’t say anything. I get it. He doesn’t believe. I didn’t either, but after the things I’ve experienced since moving into this house, I can no longer deny that the veil between the living and the dead is thin.
Maybe Marilyn’s words can give me some hope for a solution to this mess. As much as I love this house, I won’t be living the rest of my life alongside the stories, ghosts, and memories of the past. They deserve to be put to rest.
CHAPTER 10
HAMMER
As I park my bike in the French Quarter, I’m tempted to try and talk my woman out of this adventure. Again. But I know it won’t do a damn bit of good.
She’s been on a mission for the last few days, ever since we found Marilyn’s journal.
I wish she hadn’t found out that her great aunt lived a life like the one Blanche found herself in, but she did. It was so damn similar that it was heartbreaking. The stories Cherie heard about this house were absolutely about Marilyn. And now Laiken feels like she needs to pick up the pieces of history left behind and fix it, in their memory.
Marilyn admitted to killing her husband in her journal along with his mistress. The only good thing was that there were no children involved this time around. If I had to guess, Mr. Landry was sterile, and he didn’t live long enough for a lot of questionsto be asked about it.
It’s not as if Marilyn married into the family, uncovered the man’s mistress, and she snapped. It took years of her enduring emotional and physical abuse while being taunted by the affair for her to kill the man.
She lasted longer than many people would have. But she also didn’t feel like she had any option but to stick around and try and endure. Part of that was the influence of the expectations of her generation, but the other part was she felt like her family abandoned her.
Because they did.
Marilyn wasn’t under any illusion about what her family thought about her and the assumptions they made about why she chose to marry into the Landry family. It isolated her and made her an even better victim for her husband.
Marilyn was never charged for the death of her husband and the maid. Hell, they couldn’t even fully investigate their disappearance because no bodies were ever found. If I had to guess, their bodies are somewhere on the estate grounds.
I won’t be going to look for them. No fucking thank you.
Since Marilyn didn’t have a child or family, including when it came to the Landry family, she devoted a lot of her life to investigating the history of the house and the family. She wanted to break the cycle that seemed to start with Blanche, Desiree, and Phillip.
She didn’t just research the history of the home, she also dived deep into Voodoo and the role it played in everything that happened in the house. Her goal was to break the curse, which she believed in completely.
I’m not sure I can blame her for believing in the curse considering her story was so similar to Blanche’s. The biggest difference is that it wasn’t the mistress who took down the cheating asshole. Marilyn stepped up and took care of the problem herself.
But all the research Marilyn did has led us to a night out in the French Quarter. We’re looking for a Voodoo Priestess, one whose power matches Desiree’s since she was the one who started this ball rolling.
Rene is the name of the woman Marilyn was trying to track down before she got sick and passed. Marilyn blamed the curse, and her getting too close to breaking it, as the reason she got sick in the first place.
Now we’re out on the hunt for a woman named Rene. As if that is enough to go on when it comes to tracking someone down in a place like New Orleans.
So far, the only good thing about this night is that I had my woman on the back of my bike. The feeling of her being wrapped around me was even better than I knew it would be. It is right where she belongs, where she was always meant to be.
Now, we’re walking around the French Quarter and not the touristy side of it. No, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t have me on edge the way I am.
Instead, we’re exploring the seedier side of the area. I’m not sure what we’re looking for other than a Voodoo Priestess. Is she going to have a neon sign to tell us where she is? Somehow, I doubt it.
