Heart of Evil

“Shall we have another drink?” Whitney asked.



But before Jenna could answer, they all heard their phones buzz.



“Text from Jackson,” Whitney murmured.



“Meeting in the morning,” Jenna said, the slight Irish lilt in her voice grave.



“Hmm. Do you think that means that we’re not heading to Alexandria?” Will asked.



“It means something is up,” Whitney said, looking at Jake.



“I’ll pay the bill,” Jake told them.



They walked back to their hotel slowly and silently, each wondering what they’d discover in the morning. After they parted, Jake sat up a very long time.



It became morning at last. Ashley didn’t feel as if she’d slept at all. The dreams continued to plague her, only now she was Emma Donegal, leaving the house in the aftermath of the battle to find the bloody body of her husband. And when she woke herself from the dream, she could have sworn that deceased Confederate soldier was sitting in the wingback chair by the doors to the second-story wraparound porch. She was more tired from being in bed than she was from being awake.



A shower helped revive her a little. Dressed and ready for the day, she headed down to the kitchen. Once it had been a gentleman’s den, and then it had been an office, and then, when it was no longer deemed necessary to have the main kitchen in an outbuilding, it had become a wonderful, bright kitchen. The walls were a pale yellow. There was a center granite worktable with stools around it, and suspended racks that held several dozen shining copper cooking utensils. A breakfast nook held a table that sat eight.



Beth was just pouring milk from a carton into serving pitchers. “Coffee is on. None of the guests have made it in yet,” she said cheerfully.



“What’s for breakfast?” Ashley asked.



“Down-home comfort food this morning,” Beth said. “Corn bread, blueberry muffins, bacon and cheese omelets, and country cheese grits. Want to grab a plate and eat before it starts getting crazy?”



“Sure,” Ashley said. She watched as her beautiful friend made art out of an omelet and shook her head as Beth handed her the plate full of light, fluffy eggs.



“Grits are in the bowl, corn bread is sliced and in those baskets,” Beth said.



Ashley helped herself. “I’m going to waddle across the lawn soon,” Ashley told her.



Beth grinned. “I doubt it. You’re too fond of those awful creatures out in the stables. You get plenty of exercise.” She shivered.



“I can’t believe that you’re afraid of horses.” Ashley laughed.



“I told you—one of the bastards bit me when I was a child!” Beth said.



“Well, ours won’t bite you. You should try riding Tigger. She’s a twenty-year-old sweetie. She moves like an old woman.”



“Then she may be crotchety as one, too,” Beth said. “No, honey, you stick to your horses, and I’ll stick to cooking.”



Ashley dutifully bit into her omelet, and it was delicious. As she was finishing, guests began to stream by her, heading in for breakfast or stopping to clear their tabs. They’d be down to eight guests that night; the reenactment had taken place on a Sunday, and many of those who came for the reenactment managed to take off the Monday if they had a regular workweek. By Monday night, they were usually down to just a few guests.



She heard Frazier speaking with people on the other side of the stairway, his tone rich and filled with humor as he told old family tales and pointed out certain portraits on the walls.



Ashley took her place at the desk to fill out the registry and books—by hand; people actually signed her guest book, and she wrote personal thank-yous—and then could have sworn that someone had approached her. She looked up, but she was alone. For a moment, her brows knit in consternation, but people milled throughout the lower level of the house now and any one of them might have stopped nearby. She gave her concentration back to the project at hand.



She heard a throat being cleared then, and looked up—this time, someone was there. Justin.



He sat in the one of the period wingback chairs that faced the desk.



She frowned. “Are you checking out? I thought you were staying a few days.”



“I am staying another few days, Ashley. I just stopped to see how you’re doing,” he told her.



She liked Justin. At forty, he was a widower, though years before, he had brought his wife with him, and she had played at being a camp follower—with great relish. They had been married for years before he had lost her to cancer. But Justin still came.



“I’m fine, thanks. Nancy’s got the girls?” His mother-in-law, Nancy, now came along to help Justin with his ten-year-old twin girls. Hard to be a “fighting federal” and keep an eye on twins.



“Yes. Any word on Charles?”



She set her pen down. “No. But I haven’t tried calling anyone this morning. Everyone on that search party last night is weary of me torturing them, so… If he’s been found, I’ll be called right away.”



He reached across the desk and put his hand on hers, giving a comforting squeeze.



“Ashley, you are part of the charm of this place.



You really care. None of us thinks you were torturing us. I was thinking of taking the family for a horse ride later, and I know that Cliff does a lot of the riding tours, but I thought you and I could make another search of it, too.”



She was surprised. “Sure! And thank you.”



“Jeanine and Meg don’t ride well. They don’t get a chance to go riding often enough. You still have two horses calm as the Dead Sea, right?”



“Nellie is our sweetest. And Tigger is a good old girl if I’ve ever known one. Nellie loves him, so they’re great on a ride together. They’ll be perfect for the twins.”



Justin grinned and stood. “Nancy’s bringing the crew in for breakfast. Say an hour or two?”



“Two hours will work for me.”



Justin thanked her. She finished with paperwork and realized she was constantly looking up, certain that she was going to see a Confederate soldier staring at her.



“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she reminded herself. But saying the words out loud sounded defensive. “I don’t. I really don’t!” she said to the empty room.



Irritated with herself, she went out to the stables. Justin’s family would be out soon.



Ashley saddled Varina and stroked her mane. The farmer they had bought her from when Ashley had been a teen had been an avid fan of Varina Davis, the one and only first lady of the Confederate States of America. Because she had been named Varina, they named Nellie’s last colt Jeff, for Jefferson Davis, the one and only President of the Confederate States. That morning, she and Justin chose Varina and Jeff as their mounts, while she assigned Nellie to the younger, slightly more timid of Justin’s twin girls, and Tigger to the other, while Nancy, Justin’s mother-in-law, was on the slightly more spirited Abraham.



Ashley took the girls around the paddock a few times, just going over the basics. Justin had been right about their experience, but they were smart little girls with common sense, and Ashley thought they would do well.



Ashley gave her attention to the girls as they rode around the outbuildings and then toward Beaumont, the Creole plantation “next door.” The girls were delighted by the ride, waving to everyone they passed while traversing the house and outbuildings area and then concentrating on their father’s and grandmother’s admonitions to be on the lookout for wildlife.



“Are there alligators?” Meg, the bolder of the twins, demanded.



“Yes, by the bayou. But they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone. We won’t dismount anywhere near the bayou. Now, you don’t want to bring a small-sized dog or even a medium-sized dog out there. They look like dinnertime to the alligators,” Ashley told them. She was listening to the girls; she was looking everywhere. They had searched last night, but it had been dark. Now it was daylight, and, hopefully, if Charles Osgood had come out here and fallen, hurt himself or had some other trial, they might find him now.



“We don’t have a dog,” Jeanine, Meg’s sister, younger by five minutes, said.



“Can we get a puppy, Dad?” Meg asked.



“Soon enough,” Nancy said, grinning at Ashley.



“Why not now?” Meg asked.



“Because Daddy is busy,” Nancy answered. Nancy was one of those women who had gone to a beautiful shade of silver-white naturally.



“Watch for animals, girls,” Ashley interceded. “We’ll be close enough to see the alligators basking in the sun. These woods aren’t that dense, but with all this land, every once in a while a black bear or a cougar wanders across the road. I know that you see nutria—”



“What are nutria?” Meg interrupted.



“They’re the largest rat, essentially,” Justin said.



“Ugh!” Jeanine said.



“The buggers were brought over years ago, in the 1930s, and they’ve multiplied into the millions,” Ashley explained. “There’s actually a bounty on them, because they can be so destructive. But they don’t hurt people. The animal that you do have to be careful of in these parts is the cottonmouth snake. But it likes water, too, and we’re not going in the water. Animals usually leave you alone as long as you leave them alone.”



“Watch for herons!” Justin said.



“I wouldn’t mind seeing a cougar,” Meg announced.



“They’re shy, too. But we’ll see what we see,” Ashley assured them.



They counted seven herons, two raccoons, an armadillo and three owls up in the trees. When they came to the bayou, Ashley pointed out two alligators sunning on the opposite bank. As she did so, she saw that staff members at Beaumont were engaged in their work already. A man dressed in a droop hat, cutoff denim and a dotted cotton shirt was standing by a wagon that showed freshly hewn sugarcane. Another, dressed more like an early nineteenth-century Louisiana French businessman, was giving a tour.