Outside the window behind Rebecca Lemay, the sky darkened to cinder and Evangeline could see heat lightning in the distance. Her gaze lit on the weapon she’d placed on the dresser. It was so close and yet as useless as a severed limb.
“How did you get in here?” she asked.
“The girl who watches the baby…I saw her put the key underneath a rock by your front porch.”
So she’d used Jessie’s key to let herself into the house. Evangeline thought about the molted snakeskin she’d found, and her heart pounded even harder. “Have you been in here before?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rebecca said. “The only thing that matters now is that you hear my side of the story.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
Her cheek still rested on J.D.’s head as she cradled him snugly against her bosom. “It was a long time ago, but I still remember everything about that day. Mama was acting so strange. I didn’t understand why, but I sensed something bad was about to happen. For days, I’d had this awful tightness in my chest. It was like trying to breathe underwater. I even dreamed one night that I was drowning….” She cuddled J.D. even closer and he whimpered again in his sleep.
“Mama hadn’t really been herself since Daddy left, but this was different. It was like…something had taken hold of her. Possessed her…” She paused to draw a long breath. “She started cleaning the house like a mad woman. I thought company might be coming, but we never had visitors. Even the church people stopped calling. Mama always kept a spotless home, but that day she scrubbed and mopped and dusted until every room sparkled. She worked at it for hours, on into the night. I could hear her downstairs after we’d put the boys to bed. Working and working. She and my sister. When I went down to see about them, they were on their hands and knees, scrubbing the same floor Mama had mopped that very afternoon. She didn’t even look up at me, but my sister told me to go on back to bed and leave them alone. They had work to do and I was too little to help.”
Her voice had gotten slightly higher as she told the story, and the years seemed to melt from her face so that Evangeline could see clearly the child from the photograph. A little girl whose innocence had been so fractured by her mother’s obsession that she was never going to be whole.
She was still looking at Evangeline, but her eyes were losing their focus as she slipped back into the past.
“I woke up just after dawn and my sister’s bed was empty. I figured she and Mama were still working. I got up and dressed. When I came out into the hallway, I heard a sound from Mama’s bedroom. Like a moan or a soft cry. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was scared to go in there and see, and yet I couldn’t stay away. I thought Mama might need me. So I eased down the hallway and opened her door.”
Evangeline stood motionless in the doorway. Their gazes made contact, but somehow she knew the woman couldn’t see her. Her features were slack and her voice had taken on the numb monotone of someone under hypnosis.
“The sheets were covered with blood. I thought Mama must have hurt herself and now she might be dying. But then I saw my sister at the foot of the bed. She had a doll in her arms, and I couldn’t understand why she would be playing house with Mama lying there hurt so bad. Then I heard the doll cry and I realized that it was a baby. Mama had just given birth. That seemed so strange to me because I didn’t even know she was…that way. I wanted to see the baby, but my sister said no. That would just make everything so much harder. She told me to go back to our room and close the door. She’d come get me when it was over.”
“When what was over?” Evangeline asked in a hushed voice. Because she knew. She already knew what was coming.
Rebecca Lemay fell silent for a moment, her face in silhouette as she half turned to the window. “When Mama…when it started, I didn’t understand what was happening at first. Not until I saw…” She trailed off on a deep shudder that racked her whole body. “Then all I could think about was saving that baby. So I took it downstairs and crawled into the whispering room.”
“What’s the whispering room?” Evangeline’s heart was still thudding against her chest.
“It was a little space underneath the stairs where Mama used to make us go when she needed some peace and quiet. We weren’t allowed to make any racket in there. All we could do was whisper. I stayed in there for a long time with the baby. Until all the screaming finally stopped.”
The taste of bile filled her mouth as she pictured that horrifying scene.
Rebecca Lemay took a step forward, her eyes wide and shimmering and childlike. “You understand what I’m telling you, don’t you? It didn’t happen like she said. It wasn’t me. It was her. My sister, Ruth. She was the one who always helped Mama take care of the boys.”
It took a moment for Evangeline to fully comprehend her meaning. “How did she help take care of them?”
“She dressed them in the morning and combed their hair for church and listened to their prayers at bedtime. She even read them Bible stories when Mama had the headache. She was Mama’s little helper. God’s little warrior. That’s what Mama always called her.”
“What else did she do?”
Rebecca Lemay’s eyes gleamed with madness.
“She helped Mama save them.”
Evangeline could see the swirl of blue lights outside her living room as she leaned a shoulder against the wall, feeling oddly detached from the chaos inside her house.
Two uniforms stood just inside the front door, one scribbling on a clipboard while the other was on his cell phone. Another two were outside canvassing the yard while crime scene techs were busy dusting for prints in the nursery and at the back door where Rebecca Lemay had made her escape.
NOPD always turned out in full force for one of their own.
Although maybe she wasn’t as much of an outsider as she’d always thought. Nash had said there were those within the department who had tried to protect her from the details of Johnny’s death. And right now, Evangeline would be hard-pressed to make the argument that these guys were treating her with anything but camaraderie, sympathy and the utmost respect.
Mitchell arrived a few minutes after the first squad car, and J.D. had been screaming at the top of his lungs by then. All the commotion and Evangeline’s adrenaline had terrified him, and it had taken her a long time to calm him.
Finally, after a bottle, he’d gone back to sleep and she’d put him down on her bed and barricaded him with pillows. She’d left the door ajar and planted herself just outside so that she would be able to hear him if he so much as whimpered.
As soon as the tech came out of the nursery, she motioned him over.
“Did you find anything?” she asked anxiously.
“I lifted some prints off the crib. Once we eliminate yours and the sitter’s, we can run them through the computer. We can also check for a match with the prints we found at the Courtland crime scene. Who knows? We might get lucky.” He didn’t sound too hopeful, though.
Mitchell, who was standing beside Evangeline, shook his head in disbelief. “Just when you think a case can’t get any more peculiar, now we’ve got a pair of twisted sisters to deal with.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
After the tech left, Evangeline glanced up at Mitchell. “Look, I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you earlier about the interview with Lena Saunders. Ruth Lemay. Whoever the hell she is.” She shook her head in confusion. “It’s your case and you deserved to know. But Lapierre specifically told me not to say anything to anyone until she had a
