Blood on the Bayou: A Cafferty & Quinn Novella by Heather Graham Read Free Book Online Page A

informed her that Natasha was waiting in the courtyard.
    Natasha was wearing a colorful dress and a turban to match, all in shades of orange and gold that enhanced the dusky quality of her skin. She sat at one of her wrought iron tables, a pile of books at her side. She rose and enveloped Danni in a hug, and then indicated they should both sit.
    “No music tonight?” Natasha asked.
    Danni shook her head. “Tell me what you know?”
    “Quite a bit, actually. I went and looked up the old murders as soon as I heard what happened.”
    “The young women killed twenty years ago?” Danni asked.
    “No, I went way further back, all the way to Melissa DeVane.”
    “I don’t remember the name. Was she one of the victims?”
    “She was, but not twenty years ago. When the French lost this area to the Spanish, Spain didn’t even send a governor right away. The French more or less refused to acknowledge what was going on. I know you’ve heard of Count D’Oro.”
    “He wanted the Good Witch of Honey Swamp—”
    “Melissa DeVane.”
    She connected the dots.
    “Count Otto D’Oro was a horrible man. Richer than can be imagined. He had many mistresses, and many of them disappeared. Nothing could be proven against the man. He was very powerful. It was said that he had his own army of enforcers. He was into everything. Prostitution, gambling, piracy, you name it. But Melissa lived out in Honey Swamp. She was reputed to be able to cure the sick, to make crops grow, even to bring the rain. She never did anything evil. And she was beautiful. Naturally, D’Oro wanted her.”
    “And she didn’t want a thing to do with him.” Danni could tell where the story was going.
    “But he kept insisting. The story goes that she caused rain and a flood, leaving him trapped with some of his minions in the swamp. He was furious, so he waited for the floodwaters to recede, then sent his minions to get her. He tied her to a tree and threatened to burn her alive. She said that she’d rather kiss flames than him. Supposed eyewitness accounts claim that the rains came again when he tried to burn her. In the end, though, it couldn’t rain enough to dampen his enthusiasm. Eventually, he got a fire going. And that was when she cursed him. People say that he then turned into the rougarou —because his soul had been consumed by evil. And, as you’ve heard, he was eventually hunted down. Even his own people turned on him. And, he, too, was finally burned alive and the murders in Honey Swamp came to an end. Here’s the thing. He carried a cane with a silver wolf’s head. Like the cane of the mannequin in your window.”
    “I need to get that display down,” Danni said. “What about the cane?”
    “Apparently, D’Oro had some kind of an evil magician, or warlock, or whatever one chooses to call such a man in his employ, nowhere near as gifted as the white witch and certainly nowhere near as beautiful. The silver wolf’s head on the cane absorbed the brunt of the curse, and that’s what made D’Oro become a rougarou rather than falling victim to one himself.”
    “You think that the cane causes the evil?” Danni asked. “But it’s not in any museum that I’ve ever heard about. And D’Oro wasn’t buried. His ashes were left to disperse into Honey Swamp, along with whatever was left of his bones.”
    “That would make one assume that, somewhere in Honey Swamp are the remnants of that cane,” Natasha said. “Unless, of course, someone found it.”
    “That’s a long shot,” Danni said.
    Natasha was thoughtful. “It brings us back to the question of what evil is. Greed, lust? Hatred?”
    “The world and the human mind are complex, Natasha. People kill for a lot of reasons. They torture and commit atrocities for their own goals and agendas. And then again, is someone with a totally fractured mind evil or just broken?”
    “I don’t know about every circumstance,” Natasha said. “But what’s going on here is evil, by any