The Lost Girls of Johnson's Bayou (20 page)

Ginny smiled. Madelaine always had a way of making her feel protected and loved and, most important, normal. “So why the question about taking precautions?” Ginny mused. “Why the enthusiasm over locks and a security system if he’s so sure there’s nothing going on?”

Madelaine shook her head. “Maybe he’s just hedging his bets in case he’s wrong. Then if something happens he can at least say he followed up and suggested extra security precautions.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he knows something he’s not telling us. Something that makes him think there’s that slight chance I may be telling the truth.”

P
AUL WAVED TO THE CLERK sweeping the sidewalk in front of the hardware store as he jumped in his truck with the bag of locks. He’d made sure to spread the word about his project and had no doubt that within minutes, residents of Johnson’s Bayou would begin to gossip that the young stranger was changing locks for the café owner and her single daughter.

But all Paul could think about was what he’d found in Saul’s house. He had no idea what to make of it and couldn’t wait to get back to the café and tell Ginny and Madelaine what he’d found. His cell phone rang and he glanced at the display.

Unknown caller.

He frowned and answered the call.

“It’s Kathy.”

Paul clenched the phone as soon as he heard the anxiety in her voice. “What’s wrong? Are you calling me from somewhere safe?”

“Yes. I’m at a friend’s house watching her kids while she goes to the doctor. I know you said not to contact you until you let us know it’s safe, but I had to talk to you.”

“Has something happened?”

“I had a dream last night…a horrible nightmare. I woke up screaming and scared John half to death. He’s beside himself with worry, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Can you remember the dreams?”

“Some, but it’s not complete. I remember flashes but not the whole.”

Paul reached for his pad of paper and pen in his glove box. “Tell me what you remember.”

“I’m sitting in a dark place. There are boxes surrounding me and just a crack of light, like a crack in a door. I’m peering through it and there are two people arguing—a man and a lady. He’s yelling at her, but I can’t remember the words.”

“Can you describe them?”

“Something is hanging down from the ceiling and blocking them from the waist up. She’s wearing a long black skirt and high-heeled shoes. He’s wearing black slacks and black dress shoes.”

“Are you hiding somewhere, or did someone put you there?”

“I’m not sure, but it feels like I’m hiding. In the dream, I’m scared of being caught.”

“Is there anything else you remember?”

“Yes. I have a pad of paper and I’m writing on it. There’s a drawing, with circles, and then words, but I can’t read what they say. Then the dream shifts and I’m peering into a dark room. Girls are huddled on the floor in the center of the room surrounded by a ring of burning candles. Just outside the ring is a table.

“I’m staring at the table,” she continued. “I know I’m terrified, but I don’t know why. Then someone in a black robe grabs one of the girls from inside the circle and I start to scream. And that’s when I woke up, screaming, just like in my dream.”

Paul felt the hair rise on the back of his neck as his sister described her dream. No way did two different women share the same fictional nightmare. It wasn’t a bad dream—they were remembering. On the same night, no less.

“What do you think it all means?”

“I don’t know,” Paul replied, not wanting to frighten Kathy any more than she already was before he understood more of what was happening.

“Has Ginny had dreams?”

“Just once that I’m aware of.” He could still remember her eyes, wide with fright, her body drenched in sweat, and the scream…as if someone were torturing her. Suddenly a thought occurred to him, so odd and unnatural that he almost didn’t ask, but he had to know. “Out of curiosity—what time did you have the dream?”

“When I looked at the clock it was two minutes past midnight.”

The same time Ginny had awakened screaming.

M
ADELAINE
, G
INNY AND
P
AUL regrouped in Ginny’s apartment when he returned to the café in order to avoid being overheard. Ginny could tell that Paul had something important to tell them simply by the amount of nervous energy rolling off of him. The energy was infectious and Ginny found herself hurrying her mother, who was ironing the new tablecloths, to drop everything and get upstairs.

Paul had barely closed the apartment door behind them when Ginny said, “You found something.”

“I found a whole lot of something.”

He told them about finding Saul’s shack and the mess he saw when peeking inside, then his discovery that the door was unlocked and his decision to look inside. When he described the refrigerator covering the hidden stairwell, both Madelaine and Ginny gasped.

“What was down there?” Ginny asked, afraid to imagine what he’d found in the hidden basement.

“You’re not going to believe it,” Paul said, shaking his head in obvious disbelief. “It was a huge room—easily twice as big as the shack above it—completely furnished with top-of-the-line everything. Leather furniture, an enormous big-screen television, hundreds of DVDs, a gourmet kitchen…it looked like a fancy penthouse apartment.”

Ginny stared at Paul, her jaw dropping. Of all the things in the world she’d thought she may hear, this was so far out of the realm that she was stunned silent. She looked over at Madelaine, who stared at Paul in complete disbelief.

Paul pulled out his cell phone and showed them the pictures he’d taken in Saul’s basement. They gasped as he scrolled through something so far removed from what they’d imagined the man’s house to possess.

“You’re right,” Madelaine said finally, “I wouldn’t believe it if you weren’t standing there saying it and showing us those pictures. What in the world…it boggles the mind.”

“So he gets money from some mysterious source that can’t be traced,” Ginny said, “and instead of moving or building a nicer house, he constructs a luxury basement. Why?”

Paul shook his head. “I’ve rolled a million ideas around in my head, but not a one of them answers that question to any satisfaction. But then, given the strangeness of the person in question, who knows?”

Paul hesitated for a moment, glancing from Madelaine to Ginny before continuing. “I found something else in the storage shed out back—an ATV. With a bullet hole in the tank.”

Ginny sucked in a breath and Madelaine brought one hand up to cover her mouth. “It
was
him,” Ginny said.

“Given the four-wheeler and the unaccounted-for deposits, it doesn’t look good,” Paul said. “But we can’t be certain. Someone else could have used the ATV. The shed wasn’t locked.”

Madelaine narrowed her eyes at Paul. “Does someone pay him twenty-five-thousand a year to borrow that ATV? The man was being paid for something—be it taking action or keeping silent.”

Paul nodded. “But which one?”

“I don’t know,” Madelaine said, “but I guess I better get downstairs and see what he’s up to.”

Madelaine shot Ginny a look as she closed the apartment door behind her, and Ginny knew her mother was giving her an opportunity to clear the tension between her and Paul. Ginny let out a sigh. She’d done an awful job of masking her emotional turmoil if Madelaine had picked up on it so easily, but then her mother had always been tuned to her. Maybe that was just how mothers were, DNA or no.

An uncomfortable silence settled in the apartment as Madelaine’s footsteps faded away on the stairs. Ginny struggled to find the right way to open the conversation, to tell Paul that she understood why he wouldn’t want a future with her and why she didn’t blame him, but when she opened her mouth to speak, he spoke instead.

“Kathy called me.”

Ginny felt her pulse quicken. “But you told her not to. Is something wrong?”

Paul sat on the couch and motioned for Ginny to join him. She perched on the edge of the couch next to him, certain he was about to tell her something she didn’t want to hear.

“She had a dream last night—a nightmare—that freaked her out.” Paul stared over Ginny’s shoulder at the wall for a moment, then looked back at her. “Her dream was like yours, except like she’d seen it from a different angle, from inside the house instead of outside.”

Ginny sucked in a breath and felt her chest constrict. “How is that possible?”

“I think…I think maybe what you both dreamed is what actually happened. It explains why you dreamed it from a child’s point of view, why you had similarities in your dream, and—”

“Why both of us are alive,” Ginny finished for him. “We both hid and weren’t in the room with the other girls. That’s why we’re alive.”

Paul nodded and the compassion and caring that was so obvious in his delivery, in his expression, sent a single tear sliding down her cheek.

“How did we get away? Why didn’t they know we weren’t there?”

“I’m not sure, but I think you were both new. I think that’s why neither of you remembers the other girls but you remembered the circles. Maybe you came to the school at the same time as my sister. Maybe when the man and woman realized you weren’t in the room with the other girls, it didn’t matter because you didn’t know what they were covering up.”

“They didn’t know that we saw the girls die.”

“Neither of you had any memory after being rescued. All these years and you haven’t shown any signs of remembering.”

“Until now.”

Paul nodded.

“That means you were right—it’s someone I know. The woman had to be the headmistress, but the man…that blurred face in my dreams is someone from Johnson’s Bayou.”

“I’m so sorry, Ginny. When I think about what you and Kathy went through…well, it makes sense that you forgot. It was your mind’s way of saving you.”

“What happened to them—the girls?”

Paul hesitated for a moment and Ginny knew he was going to tell her something unpleasant. “The description with the robe and mask, the black candles…it sounds like a cult.”

Ginny sucked in a breath. “You think he was going to sacrifice that girl? That table was an altar?”

“I had Mike check and there were several cults under investigation in the New Orleans area at that time. They had factions in surrounding bayou towns. The LeBlanc School could have been a front for one of them.”

“But what was going on at that school? All those girls and no one to claim them. I intentionally kept myself from thinking about it all these years. I’m a coward.” Ginny stared down at the couch.

“You’re not a coward,” Paul said and placed his hand over hers. “You were surviving. And if you hadn’t put it all out of your mind, he would have come after you before now. Before you were better prepared to deal with it.”

Ginny gave him a small smile. “Before you were here to help me.”

Paul squeezed her hand. “We’re going to get through this, and then your life can be about the future and not the past.”

The future.

Paul’s words hung in the air as if to tease her with possibilities that she knew would never be. She raised her gaze to his and realized just how close to her he was. He leaned in to kiss her and her body responded before her mind could put on the brakes.

His lips had barely brushed her own when Paul’s cell phone rang, sending Ginny springing up from the couch in a panic. What was she thinking? Why was she dragging this out when it would only hurt her in the end? She hurried into the bathroom, not even glancing back at Paul. Knowing that if she looked at him, the tears that were threatening to fall would spill over.

Chapter Sixteen

Paul jumped up from the couch after Ginny, pulling his phone from his pocket as he rose. He started to go after her, to stop her from avoiding the conversation they clearly needed to have, when he noticed the display.

It was Kathy’s home phone number.

He answered the call, trying not to imagine why Kathy would ignore his warnings and call from her home.

“Kathy’s gone!” John’s frantic voice sounded over the phone. “I came home from work and the stove was on, but she’s nowhere. Her car is in the driveway. Her purse is on the kitchen counter. But the police won’t do a damned thing until she’s been missing for twenty-four hours because there’s no sign of forced entry. What the hell did you get us involved in?”

Paul’s heart fell. This was exactly the situation he’d tried so hard to avoid. “I’m on my way,” he said and pulled his keys from his jeans pocket.

Ginny stepped out of the bathroom, her worry apparent. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Kathy’s missing.”

Ginny’s hands flew up to cover her mouth. “Oh, no,” she said as Paul checked the clip on his pistol then shoved it back in the waistband of his jeans. “I’m coming with you—and no arguing.”

Paul closed his mouth, knowing words wouldn’t make a bit of difference, and in reality, if Ginny was with him, he wouldn’t have to worry about her. She grabbed her purse from the coffee table and they rushed downstairs, almost colliding with Madelaine, who was just starting up the stairs.

“What’s wrong?” Madelaine asked.

Paul filled her in and Madelaine’s eyes widened.

“He’s gone,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

“Who’s gone?” Paul asked.

“Saul. When I came back downstairs, he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.” She stared at Paul. “Do you think he could have crept upstairs and heard us?”

Paul struggled to control the panic threatening to break through. “I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.” He looked directly at Madelaine. “I need you to lock the doors, open the front windows of the café and stay up there until we get back. No one will risk coming after you while you’re window dressing—at least not in daylight.”

Madelaine gave Ginny a quick hug. “Be careful.”

P
AUL MADE THE DRIVE to John and Kathy’s house in twenty minutes flat, breaking at least five laws along the way. John was standing at the front door when they pulled up, and the look on his face broke Paul’s heart all over again. His truck had barely come to a complete stop in the driveway before both of them jumped out and rushed inside.