Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 11
On top of that, the woman driving the car that killed Bess Little had not only been a visitor in town who disappeared immediately following the accident, she’d been a small Asian woman. She'd managed to pass county lines before sheriff’s deputies could stop her and question her. The deputy told Christina the case was still open for lack of being able to interview the woman.
Donovan and Wade both looked at Christina as she relayed this information to them. "Do you think it's the same woman we picked up in the Ozarks?"
"I wouldn't put it past them," Christina said. “This set of random attacks and accidents started four years ago, and with nothing prior to that. In fact, the townspeople say that, except for one or two hospital cases of severe illness—walking pneumonia, or the like—nothing had hurt the Littles in the past twenty years. Then suddenly, four years ago, they start turning up dead. There’s a rash of crimes where the Littles are the victims—and all perpetrated by strangers. In fact, even the flu case seems to be the same.”
Donovan must have frowned at her, because Christina nodded and continued. “The sick ones had all met in town with someone the week before they turned up in the hospital. They met in the back room of the one restaurant with the door closed. And none of the locals can give me any identification of the person they met with. He was average—height, coloring, way he carried himself. So on. No one knew his name, including Bob over at the motel.”
Donovan blinked. Bob kept track of everyone. Donovan would bet his MD license that—barring floods or hurricanes—Bob still had records of families that had come through in the seventies. The information Christina had gathered was far too much of a coincidence.
The hunters had systematically come after the Littles, attacking them not just with silver bullets, but by any means possible. They'd winnowed the population down as much as they could.
Wade looked back and forth between the two of them. "It gets worse."
"What?" Donovan looked now to his friend, shocked. He couldn’t imagine what “worse” might entail.
Wade had not gone into town and interviewed people. He’d been out at the homestead with Donovan. So Donovan thought he'd seen, or heard, what Wade was going to report already. But it seemed now that Wade had more to tell.
"Bess was one of the elders. She was medically trained, delivered the babies, treated most of the diseases. When our people get cancer, they generally don't go to the hospital. It means they can't change. They can't run. X-rays will show some differences. Sometimes doctors want to study us, and we can’t let that curiosity grow.”
Donovan understood that. He’d been asked to become the subject of a paper for a physician in Los Angeles when Eleri had taken him in to the hospital. He, too, had begged off.
“We don't always know if medications will affect us the same as the general population." Wade continued. “Things like morphine might make someone talk or reveal things. They might make us change right there in the hospital, deluded into thinking that it was safe.”
Donovan hadn't really thought about that. He and his father had not been to the hospital when they were ill, but he'd thought it was more because they were poor than anything else. As a teenager, he'd learned otherwise. Wade kept going.
"Jefferson Little, as Christina said, was the patriarch of this family. The three names you said, those people wound up in the hospital with the flu, but there was another who stayed home. He died. I didn't put it together before this. But those four, they were out and they were meeting with that man because he'd told them he had information. He'd somehow convinced them he was one of us."
"You know this story?" Donovan asked.
"Somewhat. The Littles contacted my family about what this man said he could provide. They vetted him, contacted all the elders, and more. There was a vote. I was called in for that vote. It was big. But they met with him and nothing really came of it. It turned out his information only corresponded to things we already had. Ultimately, I guess he wasn't trying to share information. He was trying to make the elders here as sick as possible, and hopefully kill some of them."
Wade looked back and forth.
Christina nodded in support of his statements. “It was Flu A.”
Donovan blinked. You did not want to tangle with Flu A. “It could have easily killed all four of them. It’s actually more shocking that it didn’t, given their ages. So these people were systematically taking out the elders.”
Donovan turned the subject a bit. "Wade and I found evidence that they were hunting on this land long before the Littles were burned out. There are shells from pistols and shotguns Wade swears his people don't use. There are old sites littered with shells that don’t belong to the Littles.
“I would have done better with Eleri or GJ here, but on my own, I’m passable. I found places where there were soil samples worth checking. We ran a few field tests, picking a spot just from the smell that Wade and I sensed. Those revealed there was human blood in the soil."
Christina looked back and forth at them. “But that could be from anything.”
Now Donovan and Wade shook their heads together.
It was Wade who answered her. "It's been a year. We still smelled it. It means that there was enough blood soaked into the dirt that someone lost all of it, right there. That kind of blood loss means death. So the things you got were the things that the townspeople knew about, the things that they saw evidence of or things that had been reported. But Donovan and I found even more evidence of murders here on the property, long before the family was burned out."
21
Eleri headed out the next morning. Grandmere had declared her “spell-free” the night before. At first, Eleri thought that meant the theory that she’d been cast on was wrong. But Grandmere had set her straight.
“No, it only means that if it was a spell, it was by someone strong enough to dissipate that spell before we thought to look for it.” She’d paused for a thoughtful moment. “I’m not sure I like what you’re getting into.”
Eleri wasn’t sure either, but it was too late. She was already into it.
Driving around the French Quarter again, she started in the area she expected the house to be in–a neighborhood that was as far as she thought she might have gotten on foot. She drove a grid pattern, checking every possible spot she could for the beautiful courtyard home. She slowed down and took long-winded turns as she carefully inspected her surroundings for clues. Using her turn signals as best she could, she still managed to piss off a handful of tourists and locals alike.
She'd asked Grandmère if she wanted to ride along with her, but her great-grandmother had refused, as Eleri had expected she would. She couldn't recall ever having seen Grandmère in a car. Certainly not driving one—and, as she thought back further and further, not riding in one, either.
Grandmère had not come to visit them in Kentucky or Virginia when Eleri was a child, nor even when she’d been an adult. In all cases, whoever was going to see Grandmère had traveled to her, to the same small house in the Lower Ninth Ward. Grandmère, it seemed, relied on public transportation—and public transportation wouldn't make a grid. It wouldn't do a systematic sweep and find the specific house Eleri was looking for. Now she drove her car back and forth, the bright sun in her eyes until a series of sharp turns brought the sun behind her.
She had to backtrack to fill in her chance to see the side streets. After three hours of cruising back and forth in the French Quarter, she was tired out. Occasionally, she would get excited about finding streets and buildings that looked familiar or gave her a vague sense that she had been here before. Again, she thought to herself, the architecture in New Orleans was so clear. The city had a style and a voice. It was wonderful when she was playing tourist, but incredibly hindering when she was looking for a specific building and had no idea where it was.
She was three hours in when she got hungry and realized she needed a sandwich and a break. And a soda, too—something to keep her going. Wearing herself out would do no one any good. She needed to find the house, and though she knew the bone she had dug up was merely a distraction—albeit a seemingly pertinent one—she still had to find Emmaline.
Deep in her heart, she knew Emmaline’s body was here. So, while the lead she'd followed had not panned out, she still believed that this was where it would end, where she would be able to find the closure she needed. The evidence to tie up the knots of Emmaline’s case lay in New Orleans, and so did the pieces that might begin whatever massive undertaking would be required to fix the emotional gaps in her parents. She knew it would be far easier to close Emmaline's case with the missing children division of the FBI than to deal with her family. Still—for herself—Eleri found the task necessary. So, she would look for the courtyard home and also continue to look for her sister.
She was sitting in a small café, enjoying a fried shrimp po' boy—a place that she decided she needed to make note of, so she could come back and have this sandwich again—when her phone pinged. Donovan.
She'd been checking in with him, and she'd spoken a little bit to Avery the night before. Not that anything was solved, but at least she now knew that things between her and Avery had reached a level she could call “okay.” She appreciated Donovan keeping tabs on her, telling her where he was, and making sure that she was safe, now that the FBI no longer had a stake in her whereabouts.
Though Donovan and Grandmère got on like a house on fire, Grandmère wasn't exactly the kind of source you could trust if you were trying to follow someone’s whereabouts. Her lack of cell phone and transportation were just part of the hindrance.
This time, all Donovan texted was, "Call me."
She knew he was on a case in Montana. It was his first case without her, and she felt a bit of a pang in her heart. Would he enjoy working with other agents more than her? She almost sounded like a jealous girlfriend, but a partnership as FBI agents was at least as attached as any other relationship or a marriage might be, if not more. Married people rarely entrusted their lives to each other. Eleri and Donovan, in the short time they'd known each other, had depended on each other for survival more times than she could count.
Since she was sitting and staring into space and almost finished with her sandwich, she took advantage and rang him back.
"How's the Montana case?" she asked, already relatively up-to-speed with the idea that they were investigating the property the Littles had owned and lived at prior to moving to the Ozarks and combining the Little and de Gottardi families there.
"Beyond disturbing," was his two-word reply.
She hadn't really expected that. Eleri had thought he and Wade and Christina would find a few pieces of information that were useful to the case. In fact, she'd gotten the distinct impression from Westerfield that was all their SAC had expected as well. He'd merely wanted to know that he'd sent agents and that they'd closed the case.
From Donovan's tone, the situation was much more complex than they'd predicted. Donovan's next words confirmed that. "It appears someone was here—or, perhaps, several people. Possibly the same organization we saw in the Ozarks. And they’ve been hunting the Littles for at least the past four years."
"Hunting them? Like we saw outside of Bull Shoals?"
"Well, yes, there's evidence of that. But there's more. The attacks on this family include car accidents, a mugging that turned into a murder, and even an incidence of bio-warfare."
"What?" Eleri asked, stunned. Her mind was racing to Ebola or poisoned water supplies.
But that wasn't what Donovan responded with. "They met with someone who said he had information. He was checked out through the family council and vetted. Then, this man came in and gave everyone who attended the meeting a case of flu A."
"That could be a coincidence," Eleri said. Flus were often highly contagious, and the people who were exposed to them were susceptible at different rates, depending on their exposure to other things. The Little family lived on an isolated farm, schooled their children there, grew their own vegetables, and left only when necessary. Thus, their level of inoculation to airborne and fluid-borne diseases was likely low. Eleri couldn't even begin to account for the altered physiology that people like Donovan and Wade had. While she wouldn't have suggested that being a changeling had an impact on the immune system, it was entirely possible that it did.
She mentioned these things to Donovan, and even as she said it, she realized she was being ridiculous. The man was a former medical examiner. He held an MD. He understood infectious diseases, probably far better than she did. If he believed that this was an incidence of bio-warfare, then probably he was right. She apologized and said so.
"No," he said, "The points you make are all valid, and if it was not for the other pieces of evidence, I would have agreed with you. But the other deaths have come in shockingly high numbers starting four years ago, and all targeted at the elders and at specific people in the family who are possibly the most useful. It appears that someone outside was undermining the family and trying to collapse it."
"Wow," Eleri replied. "Do we need to warn the de Gottardis in the Ozarks?" Even as she asked, she realized Wade was right there with Donovan. "Oh, Wade's on it, isn't he?" she asked, chagrinned. They didn’t need her help with this case. She was off duty. She needed to remember that.
"Yes," Donovan replied, and she wondered for a moment if this week away, as short as it had been, meant her investigative skills were going completely out the window. So far in this conversation, she'd merely suggested things to people who were experts and given out ideas for actions that were already under way.
"Eleri," he said, "there's also evidence of Lobomau here."
"The Littles weren't involved with Lobomau at all, were they?"
"No. They were emphatically not involved. They disowned family members systematically if there was any hint of involvement with Lobomau."
"Wow," she breathed, thinking that was a harsh punishment for what might have amounted to a teenage mistake.
"Yeah. And I have to tell you something else, too. Wade gave me a map of ..." He paused for a moment, and Eleri knew what was coming. "... our kind of people all over the US, but I asked him specifically for one with Lobomau, and we put it together last night.”
They are in New Orleans, she thought. Though, before she could put thoughts together about what that meant—if anything—Donovan shocked her again.
“It’s not that they’re in New Orleans. Of course, they are. It’s that, in the past decade, their numbers there have exploded.
Eleri, you have to watch out."
22
When Eleri hung up after talking with Donovan, she stayed in her seat in the tiny café for a few more moments. Her food was eaten, the wax wrapper for the sandwich spread out on the table in front of her. Only crumbs of bread crust and small dabs of mayonnaise remained from her sandwich.
She was disturbed by more things than she'd like to admit—including her inability to find the dark peach courtyard house. Donovan's revelations about what had happened at the Little farm had shocked her. GJ's grandfather— and whatever group Dr. Murray Marks was involved in—seemed to be doing far more damage than just showing up on a whim and trying to take people out.
Apparently, before it was over in the Ozarks, they’d learned Dr. Marks was quite the zealot. He and his people believed that Donovan's kind were remnants of an ancient and dark evil—magic, even. Eleri almost laughed. She sat in New Orleans, searching for a building that she believed was hidden from her by exactly that same kind of magic—although if this was dark or light, she couldn't tell.
She was even more unnerved by Donovan's revelations about the Lobomau. According to him, the Lobomau had begun exploding in population in New Orleans in the last decade.
She'd asked him to clarify that. "Is that a phrase of speech, ‘a decade’? Is it a general timeframe, or is it more literal?"
He'd replied that he meant it literally. Wolves like him had been there for a long time. Their population in the city had grown steadily in the last seventy years—well within the averages of wolves moving into other big cities—although he'd been disturbed by that, too. But recently, in New Orleans, the growth of wolves like him had been far greater. They’d been turning up at a higher rate than in other cities, like New York or Los Angeles. So it was clear that New Orleans was a place for “his kind.”
Yet when he and Wade used only the data that they knew were from Lobomau and made a map just of those populations, the numbers in NOLA exploded. It was exponential, and had begun to increase almost exactly ten years ago. In fact, they'd even seen reduction in Lobomau population in several other cities, or stagnation.
But New Orleans? New Orleans was now full of them. Eleri was left wondering who passing her on the street right now might be a wolf—or Lobomau. Why were they coming here? She was bothered by his description of the ongoing and systematic attack on the Littles, though there was nothing she could do about any of it sitting here in this small café. Her stomach was now full and her mind back on track. The call from Donovan had jolted her again.
So she left the cafe, headed back to the car, and resumed her gridding of the city. It was another hour of slow driving before she saw it. There, on her right—nestled amid other stately homes in white, gray, and pale blue—stood the peachy-orange courtyard home.
Eleri drove past, trying not to look like she was rubbernecking the place, but she was. Her heart rate kicked up as she made a very large loop around the block and drove the street again, this time in the other direction, passing slowly in front of the house.
She breathed in deeply, not realizing how much she had doubted that it even existed until she felt the relief, seeing it there. But now, she knew that just looking at it as she drove past was not going to be enough.
She felt couldn't afford a third pass in the car. There was every possibility that this was where she had been spelled. If the house existed, then it stood to reason there were actually human bones in the courtyard.
