Moon Bayou Read online

  Sigh… Mary Lou’s family didn’t know the half of it. I had been a happy normal wife and mother in Orange County until ten years ago, when an evil vampire attacked me. It’s made my life since kinda scary and, let’s face it, weird.

  Luckily, Mary Lou, the closest person to me in the world, had kept my many secrets. Of course, I have Allison Lopez in my corner too. She started out as a blood donor—she got some kind of kinky thrill from it—but had evolved into my BFF through our unique bond. Though, after I learned that drinking human blood made the Dark Master inside me stronger, I’d sworn off the stuff. It’s a bit like settling for TV dinners all the time when steak is cheap, but I’m not going to let a craving bring about the end of the world as we know it.

  Allison kept quiet about my secrets, too, so far, but she tended to keep things all ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ Though I guess I really needed to at least text her; she’d be hurt if I didn’t.

  Being wined and dined by Detective Bordelon and her boyfriend sounded like a good idea, but I at least needed to call my sister and kids first to let them know I made it here in one piece.

  “Darryl says the Morgue closed as a bar after a couple of the girls disappeared.” She set down her Android. “And the owner’s sister hung herself in the upstairs lounge. The tour still exists, and maybe some of the guides will remember Wendy—it starts across the street from Pat O’Brien’s, so we’re meeting him there for drinks and shrimp, if that’s okay by you.”

  Her guy was named Darryl Piggott, she mentioned on the way down to the police parking lot. They’d only been seeing each other a few months, but she hoped it would turn into something pretty serious for the two of them. I didn’t need to read her mind to see she’d gone overboard for the dude; she lit up from inside like a candle when she talked about him. Yet, at the candle’s core lurked something cold and hard, shielded from my gaze.

  “What does Darryl do?”

  “He is a musician,” Bordelon said. “He plays stringed instruments: string bass, banjo, jazz guitar. Since everybody in New Orleans is a musician of some kind, he’s got a regular job, too. He’s a ghost hunter.”

  “He’s a what?” I asked. That was a job?

  “Well, they call it paranormal investigator. He does it for the Travel Channel; writes, produces, and directs. They go into haunted buildings all over Louisiana”—she pronounced it ‘Loosiana’—” put their instruments up all over the place, and spend the night there. When they record flashes of energy and video anomalies, they call them ‘orbs.’ That’s how he knew all about the Morgue Bar. It’s all bullshit, but, hey! At least it pays the bills, right? Here we are.” She stopped next to a late model maroon Caprice Classic and unlocked it. It was so old she used an actual key, not a fob.

  “Cop car. I’m not taking mine, I’ve pulled a double shift startin’ early tomorrow.” We both got in, and she started the engine. “We’ve got a real manpower shortage now because we lost so many officers after Katrina.”

  “Killed?”

  “Indicted. Or got out of Dodge before they were. Don’t suppose you’d like to apply for a job here?” She’d obviously pulled my jacket up onto her computer screen before asking me out. It had told her I was a trained former federal agent who’d worked for HUD for a number of years.

  I snorted. “So you don’t believe in the supernatural?”

  “Hell, no, hon. I’m a police officer! I believe in reality. You know, stuff I can touch and see.” The tires squealed slightly as she turned onto Tulane Avenue, already going about twenty miles per hour over the posted limit.

  I could have told her that not everything was what it seemed. Beginning with me.

  Chapter Four

  Pat O’Brien’s Bar on St Peter’s Street was one of the biggest tourist attractions in the city.

  Even Detective Sherbet told me to check out its signature drink, the Hurricane, when I mentioned I was headed to the Big Easy on the Lo case. The historic old French colonial building enclosed a courtyard with a fountain and several bars, including one where a jazz piano player took requests. We got a table and ordered Hurricanes—the price included the glass they came in—while we waited for Bordelon’s boyfriend. The drink turned out to basically be just rum and fruit punch.

  I have a problem with alcohol; as I said, it has no effect on me whatsoever. For seven or eight years after I was attacked and turned into a vampire, I couldn’t digest food or any drinks except white wine. Or go out in the daylight. However, the alchemist Archibald Maximus forged a pair of gold rings for me, which I wore everywhere. The one with the garnet allowed me to eat human food, which I enjoy, though it still holds no nutritive value; the opal allows me to withstand sunlight, which comes in handy in Orange County. It really helps to be able to at least fake being normal. And it’s way cheaper than going through a gallon of sunblock a week.

  Speaking of faking, the moment Darryl Piggott showed up, I could tell he was trouble.

  For one thing, he looked nearly ten years younger than Bordelon. It would have been okay, I guess, except for how obvious it struck me that he wasn’t anywhere near as into her as she was into him. He was tall, covered in spikes and tattoos and had a goatee and a ponytail; a typical hipster poseur and an obvious hustler. His thoughts seemed as shallow as a rain puddle, yet like Kathy Bordelon, a part of his mind remained cold, calculating, and closed off to me.

  I also didn’t like the naked way he checked me out in front of her. Completely disrespectful. His black T-shirt had said ‘SAPS’ on it in green Day-Glo letters, so I innocently asked him if he was a sap.

  “Southern Area Paranormal Society. You guys ordered yet?” he asked.

  Kathy and I had spread the Wendy Lo file on the table, along with that of Wendy’s missing roommate, Angela Jenkins, a perky-looking young blonde. Both of them looked so sweet-faced and pretty in these color scans of their college photos that, tough cookie though I am, I instantly wanted to adopt them. If and when I ever found them.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t seem a likely outcome. Strangely enough, my gut instinct—which admittedly had been totally haywire ever since I’d left LAX—kept telling me both girls were still alive somewhere, somehow, in some form when logic told me I should stick to looking for their graves… maybe in one of the many cemeteries up at the top of Canal Street.

  “Thought we’d start her on the alligator bites and shrimp gumbo, since she’s new in town,” Said Kathy.

  “Hope you have a hearty appetite.” Darryl gave me a significant look before returning to his smartphone messages.

  Weird. It felt almost like the meal, including the Hurricane, was some kind of test.

  “I better take this,” he added, staring at the screen, and disappeared into one of the bar lounges on the other side of the courtyard.

  Kathy waited a few minutes and went after him, leaving me on my own, so I took the opportunity to check my iPhone messages. After feeling a stab of panic at the time, I realized I was now two hours ahead of Fullerton. I had only one text from my sister asking me to let her know when I got here, and nothing from the kids.

  Kingsley also hadn’t texted, but given his situation, I hadn’t expected anything. It’s hard to type when your thumbs have turned into claws. The next text came from Cindy Wesendonck, chairperson of our high school reunion committee—great, my twentieth was only two weeks away. I still hadn’t filled out the little form where it said ‘Please share with us your most significant life experiences.’ Like, WTF was I gonna write? ‘Becoming one of the eternal undead?’

  Hey, everybody lies to their high school classmates at their reunion. They probably would all just assume I did that too. You know, boasting about my career.

  I also had several texts from Fang, my first (online) contact in the world of vampirism and the supernatural, who had turned out to A: be my local bartender, B: a wanted murderer, C: had fallen in love with me, and D: eventually become a real vampire. He’d had a sexual relationship with Detective Rachel Hanner, an olde
r vampire, who Kingsley killed after Hanner kidnapped and murdered my ex-husband Danny in the caverns under the Los Angeles River spillway.

  That wasn’t even the weirdest and most complicated thing that had happened to me lately.

  Fang might have cooled his jets where romance was concerned, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still care. His texts sounded increasingly frantic: Message me back soonest! and Talk to me, Moondance!

  ‘Moondance’ was my Internet moniker and had remained his pet name for me.

  I called Mary Lou and spent maybe ten minutes chatting with her and the kids. Even at twelve, Anthony’s having some separation anxiety. I think this is the first time I’ve gone out of state since I had him. Tammy’s much calmer. I wonder if she’s sensing something? Anyway, everything back home sounded normal, so I let the call end faster than I wanted since I sat at a table waiting for people to come back.

  Still no sign of Kathy or Daryl, so I shot a

  Hey, dude, what’s up? texted back to Fang. I figured my hosts probably ran back to one of Pat O’Brien’s many restrooms for a quickie hump.

  Moondance—thank God. Kingsley says you’re in New Orleans?

  I sent back: Yes, on a case. Why? What was the big deal?

  That city is the last place you want to be! America’s oldest and most populous vampire community lives there! Have you gone crazy? Didn’t Maximus warn you? There’s all kinds of political bullshit you could get snarled in.

  I shrugged. I hadn’t talked to Archibald or anyone else except Sherbet and Kingsley before catching my plane, but I didn’t see what it had to do with me. Okay, maybe the local ‘vampire community’ had something to do with my case—what I’d seen at the coroner’s office showed it was certainly active—but if a vampire had killed Wendy Lo, I’d treat him or her just like I would any other mad dog. I’d put them down.

  Chapter Five

  Kathy and Darryl chose that moment to show up again, all apologies, and then the waiter brought us our appetizers. The gator bites were round breaded chunks of alligator meat, deep fat fried, and tasted kind of like a cross between chicken and whitefish. While we chatted, I thought over what Fang told me and decided he sounded a bit too hysterical to be serious.

  Seriously, the 1860s? ‘Madame Samantha Lune de Californie?’ The whole thing sounded loony to me. He was right about one thing: the sooner I got out of here, the happier I’d be.

  Maybe I’d broadcasted my thoughts to the others.

  “How long are you planning to be in town for?” Kathy asked.

  “Just a few days.”

  “If you’re still here in a couple weeks, you’ll get to see how we do Halloween. That’s our second-best holiday after Mardi Gras.”

  Our entrees arrived, and we ate up while the guy at the piano bar sang local hits like Tell it Like It Is and Jambalaya (On the Bayou).

  “Seriously, honey, you really should stick around,” said Piggot, giving me his most soulful Svengali stare from beneath the metal spikes and rings that studded his eyebrows. “We’ll treat you right.”

  Yeah, I just bet. He ate Cajun fried chicken and oysters—which he kept trying to push on me—but I could tell he really wanted a chick sandwich.

  “Yeah, Sam, we know plenty of dudes who’d love to meet you,” Kathy added, catching his vibe. Poor woman probably had to put up with this kind of behavior every time they went out.

  “Sorry, guys. I need to get back home to my children. Plus, there’s my boyfriend. He’s the jealous type—he’d tear anyone he caught me with to pieces.” Literally.

  “Oh, I know. I have a boy of my own,” she said, becoming teary. By now, she was on her second Margarita. “Lives with his daddy in Slidell now.”

  It wasn’t easy steering the conversation back to the ghost tour and the two missing girls. When I did, Piggott went off on a long tangent about filming overnight in the Old Ursuline Convent two blocks away in an attempt to solve the riddle of the mysterious Ursuline Vampires—or ‘Casket Girls,’ as they were known to history.

  “The Casket Girls were New Orleans’ first vampires,” he said. “They were sent over here in 1718 by the French government as wives for the first colonists, but when it came time for them to disembark from their ship, turned out they were all asleep in coffins. Some of ‘em turned hooker, the rest appeared to die and ended up stored on the third floor of the convent in their coffins. Legend has it they’re the ancestors of the Casquette Krewe, who are the natural enemies of the Tête de Morts. Anyhow, you’ll get to see all that on your tour.”

  “And the tour guide can answer all my questions about the missing girls?”

  “Hell, yeah. Anybody can, it’ll be ole Chaz.” Piggott glanced at his Nokia. “Shit! It’s just about due to leave—we need to buy you a ticket.”

  Turned out ‘we’ meant me. I was the only one of the three of us who bought a $50 tour ticket (after I’d paid nearly half the check at Pat O’Brien’s—though I guess it would be more accurate to say the Los bought it for me, since it came out of the four grand in expense money I’d asked for up front. Still, it was obvious New Orleans would turn out to be pretty expensive, especially if I kept letting myself get played for a sucker.

  Chaz turned out to be a gap-toothed old hippie with grey dreadlocks and a blue corduroy beret, who assured me over and over that he’d get to me in a minute—in between selling tickets to groups of German tourists and a few extremely drunk college kids. The tour booth stood just off Bourbon Street, the brightly lit main drag, in front of the Reverend Zombie’s Voodoo Shop, across St. Peter Street from our bar. The area was closed to car traffic, so boisterous crowds filled the streets around us. People called down from the wrought-iron balconies; somebody threw a big plastic cup full of beer from one of them, which exploded on the pavement in front of us.

  “Don’t look at me—I’m not on duty,” said Kathy, stepping around it as Chaz went into his carny-style performance for the tour group. Obviously, he was a frustrated actor… and expected a big tip, as he jokingly reminded us several times.

  Our first stop was St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square, where we picked up a few more tourists wearing ‘vampire-hunter’ T-shirts, then on to the haunted Maison Lalaurie, where slaves had been tortured and murdered upstairs. Our group had grown to sixteen by my count, including Kathy, her boyfriend, me, and the tour guide. Next up was the Old Ursuline Convent, a big white building where the vampires were supposed to return every night to their coffins on the third floor.

  “Hasn’t anybody checked it out to find out for sure?” asked one of the vampire hunters skeptically. She was a large woman carrying a black duffel bag with her ‘vampire killing kit’ inside it, which frankly made me a little nervous.

  I knew from personal experience how it felt to be hit with a silver bullet—or a silver-bladed dagger. My immortality could come to a sudden end even at the hands of an amateur as the result of some dumb accident.

  “Well, sure we have. My man Darryl Piggott here with the Southern Area Paranormal Society spent a night filming inside it, right?”

  “You can buy the DVD from the Travel Channel,” Darryl said.

  “Not only did his team observe many unexplained etheric manifestations, there’s also the fact that the third floor is like totally shuttered up with silver nails blessed by the Pope in Rome and bricked up from the inside!” Chaz flung an arm to point at the boarded windows. I felt a chill at his melodramatic words, but maybe not the way any of the rest of the group did.

  What effect would holy water or silver nails blessed by the Pope have on me? I didn’t want to know.

  After we paid brief visits to a few haunted hotels—“Sorry we can’t go inside, guys, but we don’t want to get busted for trespassing, right?”—I managed to get Chaz to myself for a few minutes on our way up St. Louis Street to the main cemeteries.

  “Want to tell me about Wendy Lo and Angela Jenkins?” I asked.

  “Oh, both of ‘em were really nice chicks, really, you know, tog
ether,” he said. I noticed he referred to them in the past tense.

  “Were you around when they disappeared?”

  “Hell, yeah—I was their supervisor. I don’t normally do these gigs myself, but we’re shorthanded and college is back in session, so hiring and training new people ain’t so easy.”

  “You mean they both worked for you? Did they both go missing on the same night?”

  He shook his head. “No way. Angie was just a temp—she had some kind of day job, I forget what. When Wendy split, Angie was all freaked out and took over the groups because she had this theory that if she did, she’d find out what happened to her roomie. Guess she did. One night, she didn’t show, so I figured she’d gave it up. Next thing I know, Kathy’s back down here asking me questions—just like you’re doing. That’s the only way I knew Angie was missing, too.”

  “What’s your theory about what happened to Wendy?”

  He shrugged. “This is N’Awlins. People go missing all the time, ‘specially in summer. We’re the murder capital of the country, always have been. Tell you what I told Kathy—I’ll take you on the tour, do everything just like those two little ole’ gals used to do it, right? I’ll even take you to the last place anybody ever saw Wendy alive, Cemetery No. 1. Hey, come to think of it, the Basin Street train station is right next door, and sometimes we duck in there to let one of our group use the john. I’ve got a key you can use to get in. I don’t think you’ll find much in there after all these weeks; they do get around to cleaning up once in a while.”

  The St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is where the famous voodoo queen Marie Laveau is buried, and the Glapion family crypt where she rests was our final stop on the tour, a white stucco shed with a big bronze marker inset on one side of the sealed door. Scrawled Xs covered its walls. Flowers and clamshells with offerings on them sat around a few big, flickering outdoor candles on the gravel in front of it.