Page 72 of Haunted By You
“Why would Gigi have this?” Erielle asked, taking the picture next.
“Allison, can you look him up on your phone? See if you can find anything about him?”
“Marie’s coming,” Allison said, not seeming to pay attention to what was going on with the picture. “She says she doesn’t have the journal, doesn’t remember seeing it after she got out of the dumpster.”
“No, neither do I,” Erielle said.
Hattie pushed to her feet. “That leaves one option. We’ll discuss it when Marie gets here.”
Sam’s mind spun, dragging him back to the house, to Millicent’s icy fury, to the moment she’d come for him. Had she thought hewasEdmund? Or worse—did she hate him for the blood they shared?
The thought turned his stomach.
God. That meant the children she’d killed… weren’t they his relatives? His great-aunts or uncles? Were their spirits trapped in that cursed house too?
Hattie left and brought back the breakfast platters—eggs, sausage, pancakes. Erielle took the picture and tucked it back into the pages of the red book, which she leaned against the window, out of the way of the food.
The sound of a motorcycle down the quiet street signaled Marie’s arrival. The bell rattled as she shoved through the door and pulled a chair up to the table.
“Does she have it?” she demanded.
“Does who have what?” Erielle asked. “I have the red book.”
Marie was already shaking her head. “Leslie. Does Leslie have the journal?”
“My mom? Why would she have it?” Sam asked. He was feeling battered by all the information hurtling at him the past few days.
Hattie and Marie exchanged a look that apparently communicated volumes.
“If none of us has it, stands to reason she does,” Hattie said, nudging her plate toward Marie.
“Why?” Sam asked again, at the end of his patience.
Marie pulled Hattie’s coffee cup over and took a sip, made a face, then pushed it back, stood and helped herself to a clean cup from behind the counter, then returned to her seat. Once she filled it halfway with coffee, she dumped in a bunch of creamer and sugar until the liquid turned pale. When she noticed everyone watching, she scowled.
“What? This is how my grandmother drank it every day for decades. Good enough for her, good enough for me.” She took a fortifying sip, looked at Hattie once more, then zeroed in on Sam. “I know I said I wouldn’t tell you what happened to me and Leslie in the swamp, but that was when I thought Leslie had put it behind us. Apparently she has not.
“When we were girls, teenagers, your mama was obsessed with the legends of the swamp, of the pirates, especially after I told her what I’d seen at that one party. One night, we had a sleepover at my house, because, you know, my parents were a little more lax. And Leslie brought a Ouija board. Now, how she got it, I don’t know, because her parents were strict. And it was a nice one, not one like you buy at Target or whatever. It was actually pretty beautiful, carved wood, with designs around the edges. She said she got it in New Orleans, but again, I don’t know how she snuck it past your grandparents.”
Sam had heard the stories of how strict his grandparents had been. He also couldn’t imagine them allowing her to purchase the board, or, really, to even take her to New Orleans. His mother had always said she’d raised her own kids with a lighter hand because of how strictthey’dbeen. He couldn’t reconcile his gentle mother with the teenager Marie described.
“We—the three of us, Leslie, our friend Helen, and me—snuck out of the house and went down to the swamp, to the same clearing where we’d been for the party. Leslie wanted to see if she could summon him. I didn’t know who he was at that point, didn’t find out until later, but I knew he hadn’t actually been there that night.”
Hattie passed her a glass of water, and Marie took it gratefully, gulped half of it down before pushing it back across the table.
“Wish that was a beer.” She looked at Hattie. “You don’t happen to have a beer?”
Hattie rose silently and went into the kitchen, returning with a flask. “Rufus don’t know I know he keeps this back there.”
Marie opened it, sniffed, winced, then took a healthy swig. She set it on the table and stared at it for a moment before working up the nerve to resume her story.
“We sat in the clearing, right where the fire had been, and Leslie set up the board, and we sat around it. I should say, I was game, but Helen was scared half to death. And it didn’t help that, well, the air seemed to crackle around us once we pulled out the board. It was definitely…different than any other time we’d been in the swamp.
“I don’t know how Leslie knew what to do—this was in the days before the internet, you know, but she placed the planchet on the board, and a couple of candles near it, and she started calling for the spirits.”
Beside him, Erielle shivered, and Sam took her hand on top of the table, holding it between both of his, needing her touch as much as she seemed to need his.
“Remember, I didn’t know what the boy’s name was at that point, so we weren’t focused on him. I mean, we thought we were, but we opened up too much, and…” She took another swig, no longer holding Sam’s gaze but looking at the flask—or back at the memory she was describing. “The candles flickered. Columns of white appeared around us. I don’t know how many, but too many, and they all wanted to be heard at once. As I looked back on it, I told myself your mama’s eyes didn’t turn black, but she looked up and they were, they were black as the night around us.”
