confusion, I call out, “Sean? Sean, is that you?”
A dark brown forehead and saucer eyes rise above the footboard of my bed. A nose and mouth follow, the mouth agape in wonder. I’m looking into the face of a black girl of about eight. She has the frozen look of a child who has entered a familiar yard only to find a strange dog waiting for her.
“Who are you?” I ask, half wondering if the girl is real.
“Natriece,” she says, her voice almost defiant. “Natriece Washington.”
I glance around the room, but all that registers is the sunlight pouring through a crack in some curtains. “What are you doing here?”
The girl’s eyes are still wide. “I be here with my auntie. I didn’t mean to make no mess.”
“Your auntie?” The smell of acetone is stronger now.
“Miss Pearlie.”
Suddenly it all comes rushing back. The phone call from Sean. The corpse in the house on Prytania Street. The zoned-out night drive to Natchez. What an irony to find that you do crazier things sober than you ever did drunk.
“What time is it?”
The child gives an exaggerated shrug. “I don’t know. Morning time.”
Pushing down the covers, I crawl to the foot of the bed. The contents of my forensic dental case are spread across the floor in disarray. Natriece is holding my camera; its flash must have caused the “lightning” that awakened me. Among the instruments and chemicals on the floor lies a spray bottle of luminol, a toxic chemical used to detect latent bloodstains.
“Did you spray any of that, Natriece?”
She solemnly shakes her head.
I gently take the camera from her grasp. “It’s all right if you did. I just need to know.”
“I might’ve sprayed a little bit.”
I get out of bed and pull on my pants. “It’s okay, but you need to leave the room while I clean it up. That’s a dangerous chemical in that bottle.”
“I’ll help you clean up. I knows how to clean.”
“Tell you what. Let’s go visit your auntie, and then I’ll come back and deal with this. I haven’t seen Pearlie in a long time.”
Natriece nods. “She told me nobody was out here. She just unlocked the door to get Mrs. Ferry’s wash.”
I take the little girl’s hand and lead her to the door, then flip off the light and walk into the hall. Natriece lingers behind, standing with her back to me, looking into the dark room. “Did you leave something?” I ask.
“No, ma’am. I just looking at that.”
“What?”
“That there. Did I do that?”
I look over the girl’s head. On the floor near the foot of my bed, a greenish blue glow hovers in the darkness. The luminol has reacted with something on the carpet. The chemical registers false positives with several compounds, one of them household bleach.
“It’s all right,” I tell her, dreading my mother’s reaction to the mess Natriece has made.
“Freaky,” she says. “That looks like
Stepping around Natriece, I look down at the luminescence on the floor. It’s not diffuse, as I had thought, but well defined. Suddenly, an eerie numbness spreads through my body.
I’m looking at a footprint.
I felt the same numbness twenty-three years ago, when my grandfather turned away from the first corpse I ever saw, knelt before me, and said, “Baby, your daddy’s dead.”
“Natriece, stay back.”
“Yessum.”
Actually, it isn’t a footprint at all, but a boot print. I only register this fact because now another ghostlike image has taken shape beside it. The image of a bare foot, much smaller than the boot.
A child’s foot.
With slow insistence, a percussive hiss intrudes into my concentration. Subtly at first, but growing steadily to a soft roar. It’s the sound of rain drumming on a tin roof. Which makes no sense, because the slave quarters has a shingle roof-not tin-and I’m standing on the first of two floors. But I’ve heard this sound before, and I know it for what it is. An auditory hallucination. I heard the same metallic patter a week ago, at the Nolan murder scene. Just before my panic attack. I was staring down at the retired CPA’s naked corpse and-
A rapid beat of footsteps startles me from my reverie. Natriece has bolted down the hall. A scream cuts the air in the bedroom.
Checking my watch, I wait for the glowing footprints to fade. False positives generally fade quickly, while the luminescence caused by the hemoglobin in blood lingers like an accusation.
Thirty seconds pass. I look around the bedroom, this strange shrine to my childhood. Then I look back at the floor. A minute now, and the glow shows no sign of diminishing.
“Come on,” I whisper. “Fade.”
My hands are trembling. I want to run for Pearlie, too, but I’m no longer a child. My eyes blur from the strain of focusing so hard. Could that be the imprint of my own foot? Bloodstains can endure for decades on some surfaces.
I’ve been drinking for over fifteen years. I’ve been sober now for forty-eight hours. I’ve never needed a drink so badly in my life.
Chapter 6
Inside my mind, instinct is at war with itself. As I stare down at the two glowing footprints, half of me wants to run, the other half to lock the door. I want photographs of the prints, but to get them I’ll have to act quickly. Once the chemical reaction that causes the blood hidden in the carpet to luminesce is complete, it can’t be repeated.
The front door of the house bangs shut.
Someone raps sharply on my bedroom door. A rush of deja vu tells me that rhythm belongs to Pearlie.
“Catherine Ferry?” calls a throaty voice as familiar to me as my mother’s. “You in there, girl?”
“I’m here, Pearlie.”
“What you doing home? Last time you came back was…I don’t know when. Why you didn’t call ahead?”
I can’t waste time trying to explain the situation. “I’ll be out in a few minutes, okay?”
Grabbing my car keys, I slide up the window, climb out, and run to my car. Tripod in hand, I climb back into the bedroom, close the curtains, and set up the tripod almost directly above the footprints. Pearlie is still knocking on the door. After mounting the camera and aiming it downward, I switch on the lights and shoot a reference photo of the floor. Then I close down the lens aperture by two f-stops, take a ruler from my dental case, and switch off the overhead light. The ruler has copper wire wrapped around the inch markings. The copper will fluoresce when sprayed with luminol. Laying the ruler alongside the glowing footprint, I spray both ruler and bloodstain with more of the chemical and wait.
“What you doing in there?” Pearlie demands. “Did Natriece mess up something?”
“I’m all right!” I snap. “Just give me a minute.”
I hear the muted chatter of Pearlie interrogating the little girl.
As the greenish-white glow begins to increase in intensity, I open the camera shutter with the cable release and look at my dive watch. To capture the faint glow of luminol in the dark, I need a sixty-second exposure. My hands are shaking badly, but the cable release will keep the camera from vibrating. This time the tremor isn’t from
