“Now two bodies lay below, and Madam LaPiere ordered one of her teenaged servant boys to dig a hole under the paving stones next to a fountain in the courtyard. When he finished, she knocked him out with a shovel, tossed him in with the others, filled it up and replaced the stones.”
“She buried him alive?”
“According to the legend.”
“What happened to the woman?”
“I found nothing about her so far. If it’s not tragic enough that slaves were considered property, it seems none of her other servants spilled the beans. The cops could have arrested her for harming a servant, although I doubt that happened much. I wonder how she explained away their disappearances.”
“And what about her husband — what was his name, Lucas?”
“She was a ritzy high-society lady, and maybe she made up some story about him dying out of town. I found nothing online about his death or where they’re buried.”
“Let me get this straight. She killed her husband and his lover, she buried a kid alive, and you aren’t sure yet if you have a story. My God, what more does it take?”
Landry held up a finger and smiled. “It’s a legend, Ted. Sometimes these stories have a factual basis, and sometimes they’re pure fiction. All this happened more than two hundred years ago. These stories take on lives of their own — they get embellished in the retelling until they become like this one — almost too bizarre to believe. I agree with you that it’s a great story. Finding all this out was the easy part, but a lot of the pieces are missing.
“Now comes the rest — deciding if it really happened, what the girl’s dream has to do with it, and if it’s worth pursuing. If it is, we have the logistics to consider. Will the owner let me poke around inside the building? Can we get permission to tell the story and shoot footage? You know the drill. Yes, this is one ghastly story, but I haven’t scratched the surface yet. And please keep this to yourself for now. The less who know I’m working on it, the less hassle I’ll have.”
“You got it. it sounds interesting so keep in touch.”
It certainly does, Landry mused as he walked down the hall to get more coffee. If the girl was honest about a recurring dream about a building she’d never seen, there just might be some meat on this story’s bones.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wanting to observe the old building in the daytime, Landry walked to Toulouse. Across the street in the recessed entrance of a vacant building lay Jack Blair's box, a filthy sleeping bag, an empty half-pint of whisky, and a Styrofoam food container crawling with ants. The man wasn’t around.
He looked up at the structure and recalled what he’d read about its architecture. The first level was taller than the building next door because of an entresol between the first and second floors. Common in French Quarter architecture, entresols were low-ceilinged mezzanines — glorified crawl spaces accessible either by going up through a trapdoor in the first-floor ceiling or down through the second-story floor. Lucas LaPiere had operated a slave brokerage company on the ground floor, and Landry figured they used the entresol for storage. Five shuttered doors opened onto a second-floor balcony, and above that were three dormer windows jutting out from the roof.
Plywood covered two of the street-level arched doorways. The third one, a little wider than the others, held the gate they'd walked through two days earlier. The lock was still open, and he pushed aside the creaky door.
Light filtered down into the courtyard at the end of the long corridor they traversed earlier. In the dust he saw where their footprints ended and Tiffany had collapsed to the floor. He glanced in the rooms off the hallway. The last tenant never reopened after Hurricane Katrina blew through in 2005, and lots of rubbish, boxes and broken furniture remained. He could explore the rooms another time; today his mission was to see the infamous courtyard where a killer murdered three people and buried their bodies.
The ancient fountain still stood in the patio. Chipped and covered with years of bird droppings, its green water emitted a nauseating smell, but he was glad to see it. Not only did the legend speak of a fountain, it was in Tiffany’s dreams. More meat on the bones.
Landry knelt and examined the flagstones. After two hundred years he didn't expect to see evidence of burials, but as he touched the smooth rocks, he wondered if the legend was true.
On the second floor above the archway he'd passed through stood a row of tall windows that once had been double doors. They would have opened onto the balcony from which Prosperine LaPiere allegedly threw two people to their deaths. Both it and the staircase that once ran up from the courtyard were gone.
Someone shouted from the street, "Hey! Hey, you. Come out here!"
Crap, I'm busted! Landry looked down the hallway as he scrambled for a reason to be trespassing. A figure stood silhouetted in the front doorway.
"You, mister! Come here!"
"Who is it?" Landry shouted, wondering why the man hadn't come inside.
