Phantom of the French Quarter

But the detective wasn’t finished. “Let’s get back to the old woman,” she said. “This Mrs. Rill, was she acting strange on your tour last night?”

Caitlyn sighed. “I thought the black veil and the dress seemed odd. But we saw weirder last night—everything from piercings and a rainbow Mohawk to a bunch of handsy frat boys with more hurricanes than sense inside them,” she said, referring to a drink popular with Bourbon Street revelers. “So, no, I didn’t notice one quiet little old lady in particular.”

“Until she showed up at four in the morning to accuse you of theft.”

When Caitlyn nodded, the detective wondered aloud, “How would she know where you lived in the first place?”

“Why don’t you ask her? I gave you her number at least an hour ago.”

Last night the old woman had insisted she take it down so Caitlyn could call her if she “decided to return” the missing ring.

“I went ahead and tried it after I showed you in here. The number’s to a mortuary over in the Garden District. They never heard of any Eva Rill.”

The female detective leaned in even closer, piercing Caitlyn with a needle-sharp gaze. “How ’bout you?”

Shocked by the woman’s sudden change in tone, Caitlyn snapped, “Me? Are you—are you insinuating that I know Mrs. Rill, or made up the story about her coming to threaten me last night? Why? Why would you think such a—”

Sound echoed through the small room as Detective Robinson tore a sheet of paper off her pad and then ripped it several times. “Let me show you why, Ms. Villaré,” she said as she printed large block letters, one to a scrap.

She turned the letters around, allowing Caitlyn to read: E-V-A R-I-L-L.

Leaning in, the detective asked her, “You’re absolutely certain you don’t have anything you want to tell me?”

“Like what?” Caitlyn shot back as she watched the dark hands rearranging letters, sliding them around like the pieces in a shell game.

Sliding them around until they spelled her own name: V-I-L-L-A-R-E.

AN OLDER SILVER CHEVY RUMBLED like low thunder beside the wrought-iron fence that hemmed in a Grand Lady. Or at least that was what his mother would have called the towering white plantation-style mansion, with its Greek Revival columns and elegant two-story veranda.

Beside the house stood a venerable live oak, its twisted Spanish moss-cloaked branches reminding Marcus of an old man scowling at the threadbare fugitive parked near his front door.

“Just keep driving,” Marcus told himself. But his gaze remained fixed on the Villaré house, a place that whispered his name more loudly than anywhere he’d wandered.

But then, New Orleans’s siren song had been calling from the first moments he had smelled the Mississippi River’s muddy perfume, heard the raucous strains of Preservation Hall jazz, and tasted the café au lait and beignets he’d sampled near Jackson Square. By the time he’d made it to the cemetery yesterday, what was meant to be a brief visit for a few shots had taken on the weight and texture of homecoming.

As well it might, for the New Orleans he’d left at the age of five was the last place he had felt safe. The last place his mother’s arms had ever held him.

Now it was the last place, the riskiest place, he could possibly be. And the Villaré mansion was by far the most dangerous spot in it.

Forget it. Forget her, breathed a voice he recognized as reason’s.

Yet after one last look around, Marcus climbed out of the car he’d chosen for its anonymity, a Chevy whose plates were regularly, if not quite legally, traded.

Beneath a steel-gray sky he approached the front gate, his palms sweating in the sultry afternoon heat. The tips of his fingers made damp impressions on the manila envelope containing the print. Not the photograph he’d gone to the cemetery specifically to capture, but an inadvertent image he couldn’t talk himself into ignoring any more than he could forget the two blondes, one living and one dead, he had seen this morning.

You still have time to turn around.

Iron hinges creaked and he was inside, telling himself he could be safe and away in seconds as he walked up the steps and knelt beside the oversized front door. Before he could slide the envelope beneath the mat and leave, the door cracked open as far as the chain latch would allow.

“Reuben’s calling the police now.”

His gaze snapped to Caitlyn Villaré’s face, peering from behind the door.

Rising slowly so he wouldn’t scare her, he offered her the envelope. “Camera’s broken, but there were shots still on the memory card,” he told her. “Including one I thought you might find interesting.”

Rather than reaching for the envelope, she scowled at him. “Why did you leave earlier? Why did you run from the police?”

He tried a smile. “Didn’t run. I just left. Who has time to waste getting tangled up with—”

“I don’t like being lied to, Ethan.” Her gaze intensified, breaching levies he had spent years building.

“All right, then.” He drew a deep breath and said, “I’m Marcus,” without understanding why. He hadn’t revealed his name in years now. Hadn’t thought he ever would again.

“How did you find me…Marcus?” she asked.

If speaking his real name after so long was a relief, hearing it on her lips brought such a rush of pleasure that he couldn’t speak until she began to close the door, apparently giving up on an answer.

“Your website had a number,” he explained, wondering what had happened again. “It was easy doing a reverse search on the net to find the address.”

“Of course,” Caitlyn murmured. “I guess that you and the old lady must have had the same idea. Jacinth really was right about not using our home number for the business.”

“She was right. It’s not safe.”

Caitlyn rolled her eyes. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

He snorted and then glanced over his shoulder. “Take the photo. Give it to the cops when they show up.”

“Why?” she asked. “What’s in the picture?”

He shook his head, while behind him, thunder murmured, an uneasy harbinger of predicted storms. “Nothing, maybe. Could be just another cemetery visitor. A widow, out to see her—”

“Let me have that.” The door strained against the taut chain, and Caitlyn’s hand shot out, pale and delicate.

Marcus knew he should shove the envelope at her and take off. But if her pit bull of an assistant really was here, wouldn’t he be pushing forward to deal with Marcus himself by now? Innocent as she seemed, Marcus suspected the sweet-faced blonde had lied to him about Reuben’s presence. Maybe she had lied about the police being on the way, too.

Looking into her vulnerable green eyes, he thought of lingering to find out if he was right. Then he reminded himself that his future and his freedom weren’t his alone to gamble.

But his instinct to protect wasn’t listening to reason, so he slid the eight-by-ten out of the envelope and pointed to a figure he hadn’t noticed out in the cemetery that morning. Using his laptop and a portable photo printer, he’d enlarged a detail near the margin: a tiny, shriveled woman peering from behind a houselike tomb. Silhouetted by the shadowed dawn, she’d been caught in the act of lifting a black veil from her face, a movement that revealed the furtive malevolence of her expression.

“I have to leave,” he said to Caitlyn, “but I thought you should have this. It may be nothing, but—”

“Wait, Marcus. Let me look at that.” Unlatching the door, she snatched the print from his hand and studied it intently, noticing that a smoke-gray Persian cat had emerged and was winding around her ankles. “This is my customer, from last night’s tour. The one who lost her ring.”

“The ring the dead woman was wearing?” he asked, putting together the pieces.

Caitlyn gave him an appraising look before nodding at the photo. “She stood right here on this doorstep at four this morning. Shrieking like a banshee that I stole the thing.”

Marcus glanced over his shoulder before saying, “To lure you to that cemetery. To that body.”