The Curse of a Single Red Rose (Haunted Hearts Series Book 7) (12 page)

Elsa’s breath hung in her parched throat. She took another gulp of tea, but that didn’t seem to relieve her discomfort.

She forced her question past her dry mouth. “How do you know the presence is Celia Soileau?”

“She says she wants to come home.”

“You’ve actually heard her speak?”

Grace’s gaze focused on a point across the expansive lawn. “It has to be Celia. She’s the only woman in the plantation’s history who ever left The Grove that really didn’t want to leave.”

Elsa absorbed the information Grace had given her. Hadn’t the spirit at the hotel called out Celia’s name? Her great aunt had been named Celia. How many Celias were in this tale?

Chapter Nine

Sheriff Charlotte Soileau of the St. Denis Parish Sheriff’s Department leaned back in her desk chair and closed her eyes. She’d been silent so long Elsa thought she’d gone asleep.

“Thank you for seeing me.” She offered her gratitude in the hopes of pushing the woman out of her silent state.

The sheriff snapped out of whatever fog she’d been in and opened her eyes. “You said you might have information about a Jane Doe.”

“I heard that you found the remains of a woman out at the Wakefield Plantation cemetery. I think she might be my great-aunt Celia.

“Why do you think that?”

“She ran away when she was eighteen with a man named Les Wakefield.”

Soileau stared at her, but didn’t even twitch. This was going to be a rough conversation if Soileau didn’t do more to contribute to it.

Elsa tried again. “They vanished. My family has been looking for them ever since. A deputy from Nashville came down here and talked to the sheriff back then…in 1967…I think his name was Perot…but the sheriff said no one had seen anyone who looked like Celia. The deputy thought he was lying because Perot wouldn’t even ask around or help the guy look for her. After that, my grandfather hired a private investigator, but the man could never find any trace of Les Wakefield or Celia.”

“I’ve heard the same story about Perot not wanting to help the deputy.”

So Collin had been right. Maybe Soileau had found the remains of Celia.

Her excitement died when the sheriff leaned forward and propped her elbows on her desk. Her eyes riveted on Elsa as if she was still trying to figure her out. Like the woman questioned her credibility.

“I’ve been in contact with the county sheriff’s office in Nashville. I wanted to know the name of the woman the deputy had come all the way down here to find. I asked them to look at old missing persons case files, but either they didn’t have the time or they didn’t have the inclination to search for answers to a fifty-year-old mystery. When it comes to asking for information from larger jurisdictions, it’s hard to push them to consider a cold case when there are so many fresh ones to deal with.”

“Can I ask you something?”

The sheriff seemed to jolt out of her inspection of Elsa. “Sure.”

“Why are you staring at me like that?”

“It’s just…you look nothing like her. I would expect you to be…darker.”

Her comment confused Elsa. Where they talking about the same woman? “How do you know what she looks like? Surely, the remains you found were…” She didn’t know the right phrase to use.

“There wasn’t much left but bones and the clothes she was wearing.”

“Then how…”A flash of insight rushed Elsa. “You know what she looks like because you’ve seen her, haven’t you?” The woman didn’t look old enough to be around in the 1960s.

The sheriff jerked as if Elsa had punched her in the face. “What makes you think that?”

Now that was an interesting response.

“Because…because…I don’t know.” She twisted in her seat. The hard wood chair was not comfortable on Elsa’s backside. “Someone I know told me strange things happen at Wakefield Manor.”

“Dylan Hunter?”

She shook her head in the negative. She’d heard of Dylan but had never met him.

“Sophia Cannon?”

Once again the sheriff had guessed wrong.

She couldn’t let the woman go on guessing forever. “Collin McVey.”

“Oh yeah, McVey.” The sheriff pushed her chair back from her desk and rose to her feet. “I’ve never met him, but I’ve heard of him. He worked for Dylan out at the manor for a while, didn’t he?”

Elsa nodded. “Until things got so weird neither of them wanted to work out there any longer. I’m guessing some of those things were…could have been…paranormal.” She threw the word
paranormal
out there just to get the sheriff’s reaction. Elsa had the feeling they’d been tiptoeing around the subject.

The sheriff bit her lower lip until Elsa was sure it would bleed. Then she surprised Elsa by asking another odd question. “Why was Celia’s hair dark and your hair is light?”

The sheriff was right. Celia’s hair had been dark. “I don’t know for sure. I never met her. Maybe because she and my grandfather had two different mothers.”

“That might explain the difference.” Soileau circled her desk and opened her office door. Was Elsa being dismissed? She hesitated to follow the sheriff out the door. Elsa still had a hundred million questions.

“Come on, Miss Madsen. I want to show you the clothes she was wearing.”

They twisted through the interior area of the office filled with desks, traveled down a long corridor to a file room at the back of the building, and slipped through a partially opened fence gate.

“You don’t keep your evidence locked?” The question had slipped out of her mouth before she could stop it.

The sheriff slapped at the hinge on the gate. “Lock’s busted. Someone broke in here a few months ago.” Soileau grunted. “Never even tripped the alarm. Thankfully the intruder didn’t manage to get into the main office. If he had I would think my deputy on duty would have heard the noise. No, I don’t put anything in this cage that I want to keep. Look around you. This stuff is just old office junk.”

The significance of the breaking and entering played around the edges of Elsa’s consciousness. The sheriff seemed to dismiss it as inconsequential, but Elsa wasn’t so sure that she should. She watched as the sheriff unlocked a door and motioned her outside. Soileau locked the door behind them and pointed toward a shed not more than ten yards away from the building.

“What I want to show you is in the new storage locker. I check every morning and every evening to make sure this building hasn’t been broken into. It has a state of the art alarm system that notifies me directly.” She paused and glanced back at Elsa. “I wanted it that way. For security reasons. Can’t be too careful about who I trust around here.”

The sheriff tapped a code into security lock. The door buzzed, and Elsa followed the sheriff inside. The interior was neatly organized and practically spotless, an interesting counterpoint to the messy storage area they had just passed through.

“Here….” The sheriff unlocked a file drawer. None were labeled, but every filing cabinet had its own numbered lock. “This is what I want you to see.” She removed a large, clear plastic bag with the word evidence across the front blazoned in white on a red background.

Soileau broke the seal and dumped the contents onto a steel table.

Elsa’s gaze locked on the orange dress with the large white polka dots. After a long minute, she finally spoke. “Her name was Celia Madsen. She was born in Nashville, Tennessee.”

“Considering the history around this case, I need more than just your word.”

The sheriff was serious. Dead serious.

Elsa pulled a faded photograph from the pocket of her jeans. She’d brought it with her just in case she needed it. “Maybe this will help give you some assurance that I know who she was.”

The woman in the photograph had dark hair, dark eyes, and a warm smile. It was the last photo taken of her before she disappeared. Celia Madsen had been so proud of her brand new orange dress with the large white polka dots.

She offered the sheriff the picture, but the woman stepped back from it as soon as her eyes focused on the image. Her hand covered her mouth. The fear in the sheriff’s eyes seemed to fill the entire room.

“Okay, you are acting really weird.” Elsa moved toward the door.

“Please, wait. I should tell you…” She seemed to snap back into professionalism. “I’d like to confirm your relationship to the deceased with a DNA test. Will you let one of my deputies take a mouth swab?”

Elsa hesitated. The whole conversation had a surreal feeling. “I guess so.” She waited a half second. “But first, I want to know why you’re acting so strange toward me.”

“You look so much like her. Yeah, her hair and her eyes were dark, but other than that, you look just like her.”

Elsa’s grandfather used to tell her the same thing.

She pointed toward the dress still lying on the steel table. “If that was my great-aunt, then she’s been dead since the sixties. You’re not that old. There’s no way you were even born yet when she died. How do you know what she looks like? You told me you didn’t know who she was.” Then the obvious smacked Elsa in the face. They’d danced around the subject but never quite dove into a full discussion of it. “You’ve seen her ghost.” Not a question. A statement.

“I thought she’d come back…”

“When I walked into your office.”

Soileau shoved the dress back into the plastic, yanked off a piece of tape, and resealed the bag, initialing it before placing it back into the file cabinet. She nudged it and the drawer shut with a
bang
, making them both jump. With a flourish, Soileau made a notation on a log stuck on a clipboard hanging on the nearest support post.

She turned toward Elsa, frenetic excitement simmering in her demeanor. “Would you…I don’t know… This is gonna sound weird, but would you like to see all the places I’ve seen her?”

Strangely, Elsa wanted the sheriff to take her on the ghost tour. Wanted it desperately. The need to make a connection with her Great Aunt Celia had seeped into every fiber of her being, digging deep into her soul.

****

Sheriff Soileau had already taken Elsa to Boudreaux’s Stop & Get where a couple of old men nearly got into a fistfight over a board game. The sheriff had quickly steered her away from the commotion. After Soileau had purchased a fountain drink, she had stood on the front porch of the grocery staring up the road.

“A woman driving an old Ford Galaxy came into town one day and stopped here at the store. She got out of her car and went inside. When she came back out, she hadn’t bought anything, even though she said she’d come to town to buy some milk. She acted like she was scared out of her mind, so I introduced myself, thinking if she needed help she’d tell me so. She said she was Celia Wakefield. Then she got into her car and drove away.” She had told Elsa her story in a monotone flat as the river delta.

“I didn’t even consider the possibility that the woman might be an apparition. She seemed so real. Ghosts don’t appear on the front porches of country stores, do they? Not in the broad daylight. I’ve never believed in ghosts, and besides, ghosts always appear at night when it’s dark and spooky. Don’t they?” She had glanced at Elsa as if hoping Elsa would agree with her.

The sheriff appeared competent otherwise, but her ghost story had made her seem sketchy.

They’d then traveled out to the old manor house a few miles away from the town of Wakefield. The turn off the highway and the long drive down the dirt road with the oak limbs crossing over it had taken them further and further into the shadows and farther and farther away from the Mississippi toward the area where the swamp came closest to the river. The house had been situated on a narrow strip of land in between the two bodies of water. The river veered away from the property once it flowed past the house, and the landscape broadened into what once would have been sugar cane fields. The oak trees lining the driveway hid all of that. Elsa wouldn’t have known the pastureland or the swamp was nearby if the sheriff hadn’t driven a ways down the road to show her the extent of the Wakefield property.

When Elsa stepped out of the sheriff’s SUV, humidity drenched her exposed skin, and her lungs filled with heavy air. A layer of slick sweat covered her arms, and a stream of liquid rolled down her backbone. It was as if she had been exercising in one hundred degree heat.

The sheriff stalled a few feet from the front steps of the two-story house.

Elsa stood behind her, stared over her shoulder, and studied the building for a long moment. “That must have been a beautiful house when it was first built.”

“I’m sure it was.” Soileau turned toward her, an odd expression on her face. “We’re not going inside.” The way Soileau said it there could be no argument. She rolled her shoulders as if working out the tension in her back. “Every time I go inside the house, I feel as if something is trying to… I don’t know how to describe it. I lose my sense of time and space and balance. I almost lose myself.” She’d trailed off as if she’d never had those thoughts before and the implications of what she’d just said scared the hell out of her.

Sorrow hung in the air around them. How could a house give off such an aura of desperation? Like it was alive and grieving. Elsa stepped around her and moved closer to the steps that led up to the damaged front porch. “So what happened to you here?”

“I thought the woman in town was real and that her husband might be abusing her. Just seemed so from the strange way she acted. I’ve seen that kind of behavior before in abused women.”

Elsa imagined Soileau had seen all sorts of things in her years in law enforcement.

“Bobby said…”

The sheriff was quiet for a long moment.

“Bobby
was
a friend of mine.”

Elsa thought she heard the woman stuff back a sob. Strange that the sheriff felt she had to explain who Bobby was and even stranger that she emphasized the past tense to describe their relationship.