Midnight Bayou

uneasy business, too. People say Josephine Manet was a hard woman, proud and cold. People started counting on their fingers, but the baby, she don’t come for ten months.”
    “That room upstairs. It must’ve been the nursery. They’d have kept the baby there.”
    “Most like. There was a nursemaid. She married one of Abigail’s brothers later. Most of the stories about the Hall come from her. It seems a couple days before the end of the year, Lucian was off in New Orleans on business. When he came back, Abigail was gone. They said she’d run off with some bayou boy she’d been seeing on the side. But that doesn’t ring true. The nursemaid, her name was . . . Claudine, she said Abigail never would’ve leftLucian and the baby. She said something bad had to have happened, something terrible, and she blamed herself because she was off meeting her young man down by the river the night Abigail disappeared.”
    A dead girl on the tester bed in a cold room, Declan thought, and the pasta lodged in his throat like glue. He picked up the fizzy water, drank deep. “Did they look for her?”
    “Her family looked everywhere. It’s said Lucian haunted the bayou until the day he died. When he wasn’t looking there, he was in town trying to find a trace of her. He never did, and didn’t live long himself. With him gone, and the twin his mother favored by all accounts, dead as well, Miss Josephine had the baby taken to Abigail’s parents. You’ve gone pale, Declan.”
    “I feel pale. Go on.”
    This time, when she broke off a hunk of bread, she buttered it, handed it to him. Her grandmama was right, Lena thought, the man needed to eat.
    “The baby was my grandmama’s grandmama. The Manets cast her out, claiming she was a bastard and no blood of theirs. They brought her to the Rouses with the dress she had on, a small bag of crib toys. Only thing she had from the Hall was the watch pin Claudine gave to her, which had been Abigail’s.”
    Declan’s hand shot out to cover hers. “Is the pin still around?”
    “We hand such things down, daughter to daughter. My grandmama gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday. Why?”
    “Enameled watch, hanging from small, gold wings.”
    Color stained her cheeks. “How do you know?”
    “I saw it.” The chill danced up his spine. “Sitting on the dresser in the bedroom that must have been hers. An empty room,” he continued, “with phantom furniture. The room where Effie saw a dead girl laid out on the bed. They killed her, didn’t they?”
    Something in the way he said it, so flat, so cold, had her stomach dropping. “That’s what people think. People in my family.”
    “In the nursery.”
    “I don’t know. You’re spooking me some, Declan.”
    “You?” He passed a hand over his face. “Well, I guess I know who my ghost is. Poor Abigail, wandering the Hall and waiting for Lucian to come home.”
    “But if she did die in the Hall, who killed her?”
    “Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to find out, so she can . . . you know. Rest.”
    He wasn’t pale now, Lena thought. His face had toughened, hardened. That core of determination again. “Why should it be you?”
    “Why not? It had to be one of the Manets. The mother, the father, the brother. Then they buried her somewhere and claimed she ran away. I need to find out more about her.”
    “I imagine you will. You’ve got a mulish look about you, cher. Don’t know why that should be so appealing to me. Talk to my grandmama. She might know more, or she’ll know who does.”
    She nudged her empty plate back. “Now you buy us some cappuccino.”
    “Want dessert?”
    “No room for that.” She opened her purse, pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
    “I didn’t know you smoked.”
    “I get one pack a month.” She tapped one out, ran her fingers up and down its length.
    “One a month? What’s the point?”
    She put the cigarette between her lips, flicked the flame on a slim silver lighter. As she had with the first bite of pasta, she sighed over that first deep drag. “Pleasure, cher. There are twenty cigarettes in a pack, thirty or thirty-one days to a month. ’Cept for February. I dearlylove the month of February. Now, I can smoke up the whole pack in a day, and just about lose my mind for the rest of the month. Or I can dole them out, slow and careful, and make them last. Because there’s no buying another pack before the first of the month.”
    “How many do you bum from other people during