The Curse of a Single Red Rose (Haunted Hearts Series Book 7) (13 page)

“Bobby said he saw Les and Celia on the front porch. Les kind of snarled at her, and she ran around to the back of the house like she was scared of him. I think…I believe Bobby was seeing the ghosts of the couple that came down here in 1967. This place can make you see things…see people that aren’t really here.”

The sheriff had moved to stand next to Elsa. They both gazed at the front door. Elsa felt as if the house was staring back at her and sizing her up. She tried to shake off the uneasy sensation of being scrutinized, but she couldn’t get out from under the strong vibe the house emitted. It was as if someone or something controlled her emotions and her reactions to them. As if the house was making her absorb its negative energy.

She hated the feeling. It sickened her. She placed a hand over her nauseous stomach.

Elsa didn’t dare interrupt as Soileau continued. “So I came out here to talk to the husband. I just wanted to make sure the wife was all right. That she didn’t need help. So I knocked on the door, and she opened it. I asked her if I could talk to her husband, and she offered me lemonade. It was like…she responded to me, but she didn’t exactly answer me. I followed her toward the back of the house, toward the kitchen. She went through the kitchen door ahead of me, but when I pushed through into the room…” She shuddered, and her face drained of color. “The kitchen was a wreck, and Celia was not there. She had never really been there.” She finally turned her head toward Elsa. “She was wearing that dress.”

Elsa wrapped her arms around her middle, suddenly chilled from the inside out.

Soileau laughed, a short mirthless burst of noise. “If I told people around here about my experience, they’d have a recall election tomorrow. Do you know how difficult it is to be a female sheriff in a small parish like St. Denis? It took me a long time to earn their confidence. Telling anyone I’ve seen a ghost would kill my credibility despite the fact people say this old house has been haunted for years and years.” She sniffed. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

“Your secret is safe with me.” Indeed it was. Elsa didn’t want to talk about her experience at the hotel. “I’ve been through some things that have no explanation, so I understand.”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Elsa?”

“I didn’t used to.”

“But you do now?”

Elsa nodded.

“If your DNA shows a family match to the Jane Doe, then I’ll get the coroner to release the remains to you.” The sheriff had shifted toward official business, until she uttered her next statement. “Maybe if your family could give her a proper burial, she can rest in peace.”

They’d made it back to the sheriff’s vehicle. Elsa stood by the SUV and stared at the house another moment before sliding into the passenger’s seat. When she glanced back one more time as the sheriff headed down the drive, she saw a burst of bright white light flare and then disappear in an upstairs window.

The sheriff was talking, but Elsa only caught the last part of the last sentence. “Did you just say that Les and Celia keep coming back?”

They made the turn off the property onto the highway.

“Yeah, every fifteen or twenty years or so, another couple named Les and Celia Wakefield will show up here and claim to be the real owners. The bank will give over the property, and then the bank manager will find out the man claiming to be Les Wakefield is an imposter. This time, we did DNA testing to make sure the man was really a Wakefield heir. This time there’s no Celia...”

Soileau licked her lips and then set off talking again. Funny but the woman didn’t seem the overly talkative type.

“It’s like Les and Celia have to replay the same scenario over and over again until they get it right. Like everyone involved is in some kind of time warp. That’s why when you walked in the door I looked at you odd. I thought it was happening again.”

“No. I don’t think so. My name is definitely Elsa. I’m managing the renovation work on the Royale Chateau Hotel for Les…the current Les. The one you did the DNA test on.” She laughed at the thought of being Les’s new Celia. “I’m not going to be his Celia. The guy creeps me out.”

“Yeah, from what I’ve heard, he has that effect on people. Still…if I were you, I’d be careful around him. I’d be careful around anyone named Wakefield. There’s something wrong with the whole bunch of them.”

Soileau remained silent the rest of the trip, staring straight ahead through the windshield. Her mind seemed to be absorbed in grim thoughts because the expression on her face would have alarmed anyone who had witnessed it.

Elsa had given Soileau’s deputy the mouth swab for a DNA sample and left the Sheriff’s office before she could sort out all of her impressions into something that made sense. By the time she rolled onto the entrance ramp to I-10 headed back toward New Orleans, she realized she hadn’t asked the sheriff about her possible family connection to the Soileaus who used to own The Grove. The woman’s stories about ghost sightings had totally obliterated any other questions she might have asked, and asking her about the first Celia—Celia Soileau Wakefield—would have fit right into their conversation.

Once again, Elsa felt as if her thoughts were being held prisoner in her head, trapped and unable to find escape. A load of oppression weighed on her consciousness, a feeling of utter helplessness to control certain thoughts and actions.

No, she wasn’t going to give in to it, and she certainly wasn’t going to give in to fear. Without giving it another thought, she turned her car around at the next interchange and headed back to the manor house. She had to find out why her great aunt’s spirit had refused to leave Wakefield, Louisiana, and the plantation with the same name.

Maybe the sheriff didn’t want to go inside the plantation house, but Elsa did. The guilty thought that she should wait and bring Collin with her nagged at her conscience. She ignored the insistent little voice that told her she was making a very bad mistake going alone.

****

The manor house loomed over Elsa. She pushed past her fears and took another step toward the front door. Her feet had just landed on the warped boards of the porch when a voice startled her from behind.

“If you’re looking for your Celia, she’s left. You won’t find her here.”

Elsa gasped and twisted around. Pressing her hand on her chest, she struggled to regain her equilibrium. Perhaps the house had spooked her more than she had been willing to admit, even to herself.

“My Celia?” Elsa managed to speak the two words past a parched throat.

“You’ve come looking for her, haven’t you, child?” The woman’s thick accent echoed around her.

Elsa blinked. She stepped back, and the rotten board beneath her foot shifted a little. She hopped to a safer spot.

The old woman smiled. Despite her otherworldly appearance, she didn’t exude a menacing demeanor. Just the opposite. The old woman seemed safe. “Be careful. The wood is old. Older than me.”

Had Elsa come face to face with an… No, the woman seemed too real to be an apparition.

The woman cackled, and the first impression that she might be dangerous crossed Elsa’s mind.

“No, I am not a ghost.” She slapped her thigh as if the thought was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

When she had finally managed to stop laughing, the woman took a step closer, reaching out her hand to Elsa. Skin touched skin before Elsa could move away. The woman’s touch warmed her chilled arm, all the way from her wrist to her shoulder.

“I am Chlotilde. I have seen and I have heard.” She placed her free hand on her chest. “In my heart. In my mind. In my soul.” A kindly smile crept across her lips. “Your Celia is not here. Her spirit left when they took her bones. If you want to find her, you must follow her bones.”

Elsa yanked her arm free. “Is there some reason I need to find her bones?”

“My dear child, of course there is. You must let her speak to you. She has a message you must hear before it is too late.”

“What message?”

“Well, now, if I knew that, I would tell you myself.” With those cryptic words blowing on the suddenly rising wind, Chlotilde turned and headed toward the woods that surrounded the house.

“Wait, come back. Please tell me…”

But the woman had disappeared into dark nothingness on the edge of the woods, as if she had walked through a portal into another dimension.

Elsa rushed from the front porch and turned to stare up at the house. Maybe she didn’t need to go inside after all. With her heart bouncing up and down in her chest, she raced to her car and took the gravel road back to the highway as fast as she could without wrecking her vehicle.

The need to be in the same room with Celia’s bones pressed on her until her body zinged with jolts of nervous electricity. She pulled over onto the side of the road. The only thing in her stomach was the iced tea she’d had at The Grove. It came all the way back up, leaving the sour taste of gastric juices behind.

She wiped her mouth and fixed her gaze toward the town of Wakefield. Apparently, her conversation with the Sheriff of St. Denis Parish wasn’t quite over yet. The sheriff’s SUV approached her and stopped right in front of her, front end to front end. When the sheriff stepped out of her vehicle, her cordial attitude toward Elsa had disappeared. Any hope of viewing Celia’s bones before she left St. Denis Parish melted in the hot Louisiana sun.

“You went back out to the house, didn’t you?” The sheriff’s disapproval landed hard on Elsa.

What was the point of lying? “Yes, I did, but it was a mistake.”

The sheriff’s attitude softened a bit at her admission. “What happened?”

“I met a creepy old woman who told me I needed to listen to Celia’s bones.”

The sheriff studied her for a long moment. “Do you want to do that now?”

Her offer surprised Elsa. She nodded. “I think I have to.”

“Okay, then. Follow me back to town. I’ll take you to the morgue.”

The sheriff got into her SUV, turned her vehicle around, and waited for Elsa to pull onto the highway behind her.

Chapter Ten

Collin owned a shotgun-style duplex painted a subtle shade of lemon yellow and accented with an even subtler shade of lime green. Elsa would have never put those two colors together on the exterior of a house, but Collin had chosen just the right shades to make it work without looking like he’d chosen a football team’s school colors. Next door to the house painted lavender and fuchsia, his choice of color scheme seemed downright understated.

She had insisted on staying with him after the accident, just until he recuperated and just in case he needed help, since he had refused to let his mother or any of his other relatives stay with him. He had so many. Elsa was a bit jealous of his large family, but she would never tell him that. Sometimes it didn’t seem that he appreciated what he had in them.

So far he hadn’t asked for much assistance. Collin, as it turned out, was stubborn, like most men, and insisted on doing things for himself. It had been difficult to get him to stay in bed as long as the doctor had prescribed. Mary Pat had knocked on the front door several times to check on him and clearly wasn’t happy that Collin had chosen Elsa to nurse him through his recuperation instead of her. Elsa thought Collin was being a butthead, and told him so, repeatedly.

After a few days, the situation had become unsustainable because Elsa was getting no sleep hunched over in a chair in the corner of his room, so she’d gone back home and only went to his house a couple of times a day to check on him. She usually came over in the morning to make sure he woke up and ate something for breakfast, and then she would return late in the afternoon and stay until he practically passed out for the night.

It was past the point Collin needed someone monitoring his condition, but it seemed the man had put some sort of spell on her that was nearly as strong as the supposed curse of the red rose. He didn’t want her to stop her visits, and she didn’t want to quit going over to his house to see him.

No matter what her head had to say about it, her heart was shoving her in the opposite direction. Straight toward Collin. Every time she thought about how close they were getting, her heart nearly jumped out of her chest and panic set in. She wasn’t prepared for what her heart was pushing her toward. Was she? Yet their new relationship, as yet not fully defined, was in the process of morphing into romance. It was coming at her too fast. No, she wasn’t ready.

Falling in love wasn’t an option. She still had so many things she wanted to do before she settled down, with or without a man in her life. When the hotel job was over, she had planned on moving on to somewhere else. The idea of relocating to wherever her work took her had appealed to her. She could go where she liked with nothing to tie her to any place in particular. The search for a connection to the man who had disappeared with her father’s aunt Celia at an old abandoned, haunted hotel had lured her to New Orleans with a sense of adventure. The sheriff in St. Denis Parish had helped her solve the mystery of Celia’s disappearance. After she’d viewed Celia’s bones, she felt she had one more thing she had to do before she could leave. When that was done, she could go with a clear conscience.

There should have been nothing or no one holding her in New Orleans any longer. No one except Collin. Were her growing feelings for the man enough to keep her in Louisiana? She wasn’t sure.

Besides, she still had the feeling Collin wasn’t telling her everything he knew. When she was away from him, her screaming sixth sense kept blasting an alarm in her mental ear suggesting that what he wasn’t saying might be a deal breaker. So far, she’d chosen not to confront him, but the inevitable day had finally arrived. She could put it off no longer. It was time for her to either stay or leave. The mushy, tentative in-between time was over.

Collin had been off the job for days, and his restlessness was about to erupt, so she needed to concentrate on preventing that explosion. Telling him she was about to leave wasn’t going to help the situation.

Once he had become able to spend the day without company, she had gone back to work, not at the hotel, but on another project. Thankfully, she’d been able to step into another renovation when that job’s project manager had gone into the hospital unexpectedly. Her father had told her about the opportunity when she’d explained to him about the halt in the project at the hotel. It seemed his connections reached farther than Tennessee.

The crew on the new job wasn’t as easy to work with as Collin and his people. The antagonistic attitude of the foreman at the Darlington site made her appreciate the working relationship she’d had with Collin.

She really wanted to go back and finish the hotel, but Les Wakefield had put the Royale Chateau renovation on hold indefinitely. When she told him about the discrepancy and explained the problems it had already caused, he hadn’t seemed the least bit concerned or at all anxious to correct the plans. No sense of urgency. His attitude had aggravated the snot out of her. Threats of lawsuits if she didn’t finish the job had been followed by indifference to correcting the error in the plans. It appeared the only thing he really wanted was her continued presence at the job site, to which she had politely informed him she needed to work and there was nothing to do at the hotel until the problem was resolved. She suggested that any lawsuit he brought against her would be without merit because he’d been the one to break the contract by not providing her with workable plans. She had been willing to go back to the job. He’d been unwilling to make that happen.

She hadn’t heard from him since their barely restrained argument, not until that morning before she left for Wakefield. That had been an odd conversation.

The day was at an end, finally. She had gone home and changed into a fresh set of clothes, blue jeans and a navy shirt, and then she’d headed out to Collin’s house. The night air held a sea’s worth of moisture, and a fine sheen of perspiration popped out on her exposed skin as soon as she exited her car. Humidity and Elsa were mortal enemies. The moisture in the air gave her already unruly hair a mind of its own. She patted the back of her head to make sure the ponytail elastic had corralled the wayward strands that always seemed to get loose.

She had opened the gate to the miniscule front patio when a sudden noise startled her. The
clang
reverberated through the heavy night air as if echoing through a fog. She twisted on her heel to see what had caused the noise. A black cat with white tips on its paws raced past her toward the other side of the street. The cat must have bumped against the trashcans. It was a nightly occurrence, and it always startled the crap out of her. She placed a shaky hand over her heart and waited a moment or two before moving again.

A partially cloudy sky played hide and seek with a full moon. One moment, she could see the world around her, and the next, the neighborhood was shrouded in darkness. She picked up the pace and rushed up the three steps to Collin’s front door. Just as she inserted her key into the lock, a cold chill crawled up her spine, a distinct counterpoint to the humidity that clung to her.

Once again, she twisted around to view the scene behind her. The street was empty. Lights blazed in windows up and down the short block. Cars clung to the curb in front of every house. Finding a spot to park was a daily chore. She gazed up and down the street, peering into the semi-darkness. She stood still a long time, listening to typical night noises. Nothing moved.

She shuddered and turned the key Collin had given her. Once she entered the brightly lit house, her jitters dispelled as if they had never been. The smell of sautéed onion met her nose, and her stomach rumbled with hunger. So Collin had felt up to cooking. Her mouth watered in anticipation. The man knew his way around a kitchen.

“Collin, whatcha cooking?”

She walked straight through the living room into the kitchen, where she found him standing over the stove stirring something yummy-smelling in a cast iron skillet.

“Crawfish etouffee.”

She moseyed up behind him and leaned over the skillet to inhale a long whiff. Until she’d moved to New Orleans, she’d never eaten crawfish. She still couldn’t make herself eat boiled crawfish, but she had come to love it in a roux-based etouffee.

“Anything I can do to help?” She asked even though she knew he’d say there wasn’t.

“Sit down.” He nodded toward the kitchen table. “You’ve had a long day.”

He had no idea.

Was the man well enough to stand over a hot stove? Whether he was or not, there he was. She watched the ripple of his upper arms as he moved about adding spices to the mixture in the skillet. He wiped his hands on a towel and turned toward her with a warm smile on his face and an oh-so-familiar sparkle in his eyes.

Collin’s smile could get to her. Staying single suddenly seemed less desirable than it had only a few minutes before. She had to say something to mask the fact that her heart had just happy danced in her chest.

She dropped into a chair and propped her elbows on the tabletop. “You know, I still can’t get used to the way this house has no interior hallway.”

He laughed. “That’s the way these houses were built.” He studied her a moment. “So what’s on your mind? And don’t say
nothing
, because I can see
that
look in your eyes.”

Had he gotten to know her that well? In just a few short weeks?

She drew imaginary circles on the tabletop, unwilling to meet his gaze. “Les wants to know when we’re going to restart the work on the hotel.”

The topic wasn’t really what was on her mind, but it would do.

She waited for the firestorm, but it didn’t flare into a blaze. When the work would resume was a recurring conversation for which they had both grown weary. Finally, Elsa had given up on the possibility that the project would ever continue, but she hadn’t voiced her opinion to Collin yet. She had never wanted to ruin the easy-going way that had developed between them. She was about to change all that.

He turned back toward the stove and stirred the etouffee. “Has he had new prints drawn up?”

That was always the question.

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

That was always the answer.

He laid his spatula on a spoon rest next to the stove and spoke with his back still toward her. “We can’t do the work without a good set of plans. He understands that, doesn’t he?”

“He promised them to me tomorrow. I’m supposed to meet him in the lobby of the Sherwood, and he’ll give them to me.”

It didn’t matter if Les had the plans or not. Tomorrow, she would tell him that she considered the contract broken and tell him she was leaving town as soon as the job she was finishing up was completed.

“You just said you didn’t know if he had the plans redone or not. Now you’re saying he’ll have them tomorrow. Which is it?”

Why wouldn’t he face her? “He says he’ll have them, but I don’t know…”

“You don’t trust him, and for good reason. So he wants you to meet him again? That might be another attempt to get you alone with him. I don’t like it.” He turned, leaned against the kitchen counter, and crossed his arms over his chest. The scowl on his face would have sent a snake scurrying for cover. “I don’t want you meeting him without me.”

She snorted to cover her discomfort. “You’re not my bodyguard, Collin.”

“I’m asking you nicely if you will let me go with you so I won’t have to worry about what’s happening to you while I’m stuck here.”

She sighed. He was making it difficult to tell him of her plans.

“You don’t have to be stuck here.” She motioned toward the steaming food in the skillet. “Looks to me like you’re getting around pretty good. It might be time for you to get out of the house.” That wasn’t what she wanted to say, so she drew in a deep breath and hit him with what she had intended to say. “I told him I was waiting for you to recuperate before we went back to the job. Les wants me back on it with or without you. He said he’d sue me if I didn’t honor my contract.”

“What are you going to do?”

That was the question.

“I’m going to tell him…” She couldn’t do it. The look in his eyes. The look on his face. He thought they were in it together. “I’m going to tell him that I won’t do the job without you.”

What had she done? She couldn’t take her words back. There would be no changing her mind. She’d just bound herself to stay with the man until the hotel job was done. But what if it never resumed and was never completed? Would that mean she would remain in New Orleans indefinitely?

Suddenly, the idea didn’t seem so horrible.

The tension in Collin’s face relaxed as if he’d read her mind and had known the internal struggle she’d just gone through.

“I want to go to the hotel before I can’t get back into it again. And I don’t want to go alone.” After she’d seen Celia’s bones and heard her message loud and clear, she had to go back to the hotel.

Suspicion sparkled in his eyes. “Whatever for?”

She stared at him a very long moment, trying to come up with a good answer quickly. Then, the truth settled over her psyche. “I think you know why.”

He sighed and rubbed the back of his head. “It’s best to let the spirits alone. You shouldn’t bother them and get them upset. They don’t take kindly to being disturbed.”

She shivered as she recalled the last time she had been inside the hotel. “I don’t want to stir them up. I’m not talking about… When I go back there… I want to go inside that corner room in the daytime.”