The Whispering Room

Sixteen

The next morning, Evangeline pulled to the curb in front of the address Lapierre had given her the day before. It was a little before nine, and she was glad to have a few minutes to herself before interviewing the mysterious Lena Saunders.

Evangeline hauled out the notes she’d scribbled earlier at the station, but she found it impossible to focus her thoughts. Her eyes burned from fatigue, and she squeezed them closed for a moment against the blinding sunlight that bounced off the windshield of a parked car.

She hadn’t slept much the night before. Too much on her mind.

On the heels of Nathan’s disclosure had come the news of her parents’ impending separation. She supposed the trouble in that marriage had been brewing for a long time, too, but she’d managed to convince herself they’d work things out. If their relationship had survived the hell her brother, Vaughn, had put them through back in his youth, she would have thought they could weather any storm.

Apparently, she’d been wrong about that, too.

Was there such a thing as a healthy marriage these days? she wondered.

Her parents. Mitchell and Lorraine. And now the memory of her and Johnny’s marriage was tarnished with doubt.

Glancing at her watch, Evangeline saw that it was almost nine. She climbed out of the car and took a moment to gaze around the neighborhood. Lena Saunders lived only a few blocks over from Meredith Courtland in the Garden District. The houses along this street were slightly smaller, but the yards and gardens were just as well kept, the white facades of the homes just as sparkling in the summer heat.

Out on the street, two boys rode by on bicycles, ball gloves swinging from their handlebars. They laughed and clowned as they sped through the lawn sprinklers, and Evangeline wondered for a moment what her life would be like when J.D. reached that age.

She watched the boys until they were out of sight, and then she turned and started up the walkway. The bushes were still dripping from the sprinklers, and the air smelled of wet grass and honeysuckle.

The door was opened by a young man in linen pants, leather sandals and a thin cotton shirt. His light brown hair was stylishly cut, and behind the thick black frames of his glasses, green eyes twinkled with good humor.

“You must be Detective Theroux,” he said, stepping back from the door so that she could enter. “Come on in. Lena is expecting you.”

He led her from the light-flooded foyer into a large room decorated in gray and black with punches of red. The layout of the house reminded Evangeline of the Courtland home, but the clean, minimalist furnishings were a far cry from Meredith Courtland’s lush, eclectic style.

But the view from the French doors was exactly the same—a sun-drenched courtyard and sparkling pool.

“I’m Josh, by the way.” He waved toward a spec-tacular leather sofa in silver. “Make yourself at home. I’ll go tell Lena you’re here.”

After he left the room, Evangeline wandered over to the French doors and stood admiring the garden. She and Johnny had always talked about landscap-ing the tiny backyard of their home, but there’d never been enough time or money and neither of them had much of a green thumb anyway.

Johnny.

She closed her eyes.

How she hated this. Hated having doubts about a man she’d once trusted more than anyone. Hated having her memories of their time together now stained with a terrible suspicion.

“You must be Evangeline.”

She glimpsed the woman’s reflection in the glass a split second before she spoke.

Evangeline turned.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I should call you Detective Theroux. It’s just…you look so young!”

Thin, blond and elegant, Lena Saunders was dressed in snug black pants and a sleeveless black sweater that gave her a chic, artsy flair. Evangeline put her age at somewhere around forty, though she wasn’t sure why. The woman’s face was still smooth and taut and as pale as alabaster.

When she took Evangeline’s hand, her skin was cold, as if she’d just come indoors from a brisk, wintry day.

“Let’s sit,” she said and, leading the way, she perched on the silver sofa while Evangeline took the matching chair to her right. As they settled in, Josh appeared quietly in the doorway.

“Can I get you ladies something to drink? Coffee, tea?”

“Nothing for me, thanks,” Evangeline said.

“I’ll have coffee, black,” Lena told him.

He cocked a brow. “Decaffeinated, I assume. Otherwise, you’ll be climbing the walls by noon and that won’t be pleasant for either of us.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Stop fussing. You’re getting on my last nerve.”

“What else is new?” he said with a grin before vanishing down the hallway.

Lena turned back to Evangeline. “Josh is my assistant, but sometimes he acts as if he’s my guardian.”

“I heard that!” he yelled from down the hallway.

Lena ignored him. “You must be curious as to why I was so insistent on speaking only with you today.”

“I am,” Evangeline said. “Captain Lapierre mentioned that you knew my late husband.”

“Johnny, yes.” She smiled faintly. “A lovely man. Such wonderful manners. A true Southern gentle-man.”

“He had his moments,” Evangeline murmured, feeling an all-too-familiar pang of loneliness.

“He was very helpful and so patient. Never acted as though my calls were an inconvenience, although I’m sure my questions got to be tedious for him after a while.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?” Evangeline asked curiously.

“Oh, it’s been a few years. I was so sorry to hear about what happened. You must have been devastated.”

“It’s been a rough time,” Evangeline admitted.

“I can imagine. He always spoke so highly of you. I could tell he was very much in love.”

Evangeline’s heart gave a painful thud as she glanced down at her hands.

“I’m sorry,” Lena said. “I don’t mean to bring up painful memories.”

“No, it’s fine.”

They both fell silent for a moment as Lena busied herself with the coffee service Josh had brought in.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some coffee?”

“No, I’m good.” Evangeline was fascinated by the woman’s hands. They were smooth and pale with the long, elegant fingers of a pianist.

“How did you know Paul Courtland?” she asked when Lena had settled back against the leather sofa with her coffee.

“I didn’t know him. In fact, I never met the man, although I spoke with him once on the phone. I tried to explain why I thought his life might be in danger, but unfortunately, he didn’t believe me. You may not, either,” she warned.

“I’m here to listen to whatever you want to tell me,” Evangeline said. “But if you know who killed Paul Courtland, we can just skip to the chase as far as I’m concerned.”

“I can give you a name,” Lena said slowly, “but it won’t mean much unless I give you a bit of background information. Without context, nothing I say will sound the least bit credible.”

“Fine. Start wherever you like.”

Lena leaned forward and placed her cup and saucer on the coffee table. “Are you familiar with the concept of an evil gene?”

Evangeline frowned. “I’ve read some research about the criminal brain. Is that what you mean?”

“No, not really. The criminal brain refers to the correlation between serious crime and brain abnormalities in the perpetrator. The cause of the anomalies can be any number of reasons—head trauma, chemical ingestion, birth defects. But the concept of the evil gene suggests that the propensity for violence—for evil, if you will—can be passed down genetically from family member to family member. Not only that, current studies indicate that behavior and life experiences can alter the biochemistry of certain genes and these changes can be encoded into our DNA and passed on to our children.”

“Are you saying that Paul Courtland’s killer was born with an evil gene? Is that where this conversation is going?” Evangeline asked with open skepticism.

“No, not at all. Just the opposite, in fact.”

“Then I’m afraid you’ve already lost me.”

“Just bear with me. You’ll soon understand.” Lena paused, as if to gather her thoughts. “The subject of my current book is a woman named Mary Alice Lemay. Have you ever heard of her?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“I’m not surprised. She’s been confined to a state psychiatric hospital for more than thirty years. Her name has long since faded from the public consciousness.”

“What did she do?”

“She killed her three small sons. Two were hanged, one was stabbed and drowned. The boys were five, three and eighteen months. When the authorities arrived at the house, they also found evidence that Mary Alice had recently given birth to her sixth child, although they never found the infant’s body.”

Evangeline suppressed a shudder. “You said her sixth child. What about the other two?”

“Both girls, ages six and eight at the time. They didn’t have so much as a scratch on them. In fact, there was some indication that the youngest daughter, Rebecca, may have helped with at least one of the slayings. But at six years old, she could hardly be held accountable for her actions, especially if she believed, as her mother apparently did, they were carrying out God’s will.”

“Is that what she claimed? It was God’s will that she murder her sons?”

“She said she killed her sons to save their souls from eternal damnation.”

“Did it work?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Her motive. Did the jury buy it?”

“She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a state psychiatric hospital rather than to death row, so yes, I suppose it worked.”

Evangeline knew it happened, mothers killing their own children, but it was something she would never be able to fathom. She certainly couldn’t lay claim to any mother-of-the-year awards, but she’d sooner take her own life than harm J.D.

“Mary Alice’s husband was a man named Charles Lemay,” Lena continued. “When he was just five years old, his father, Earl, was convicted of raping and murdering three young women in East Texas and burying their bodies on the family farm. He was sent to the Walls Unity in Huntsville and was executed some years later. Charles’s mother moved the family to Texarkana where she remarried and her three children took their stepfather’s last name.”

“I don’t blame them,” Evangeline murmured.

“So far as I’ve been able to determine—and I’ve been researching this case for nearly a year now—the family lived a fairly normal and middle-class life until the older boy, Carl, was arrested for the murder of a female classmate when he was seventeen. Her body was found buried in a vacant lot adjacent to the family’s backyard. The girl had been raped and beaten to death, just like his father’s victims.”

“The evil gene,” Evangeline murmured.

“Carl Lemay was also sent to Huntsville. He remained incarcerated for more than forty years before he was finally paroled as an old man.”

Lena bent forward and picked up her cup. But the coffee had cooled by this time, and she set it back down with a grimace.

“After the mother and stepfather died, Charles and his sister, Leona, moved to Louisiana. They both settled in New Orleans, but some years later, Charles got a job as a sales rep with a chemical company in Houma. Around that same time, he started using the name Lemay again. And this is when he met Mary Alice.”

“Did she know about his past?”

“Probably not at that time. But I think she must have found out about it later. I’m certain that was a factor in what she did to her sons.”

“So she married this Charles Lemay.”

Lena nodded. “Yes, against her family’s wishes, apparently. He was older. Very handsome and charming and by all accounts, it was love at first sight for Mary Alice. But right from the start, there were disturbing signs. Charles Lemay was cunning and manipulative, and Mary Alice’s family and friends were put off by his controlling nature. But she ignored their warnings and married him anyway.”

“They almost always do,” Evangeline said.

“Yes, I’ve known women like that, too,” Lena said. “What’s that old saying? They can’t see the forest for the trees. Mary Alice couldn’t see past her husband’s charm and good looks. Not at first anyway. He bought a place on the bayou in Lafourche Parish, and he and Mary Alice settled in. The house was out in the country, miles from the nearest neighbors, and since Charles’s job required extensive travel, Mary Alice was alone much of the time.”

“He isolated her,” Evangeline said.

“Exactly. And then the babies started coming. Before she was thirty, Mary Alice had five young children for which she was almost solely responsible. When the two girls reached school age, she homeschooled them at Charles’s insistence. You see, he not only isolated his wife, he also isolated the children. The only time any of them were allowed to socialize was at worship services. They attended a nondenominational charismatic church, and if you’ve never attended one of these services, the intensity can be a shock to your senses. The power of those sermons and the concepts of prophetic manifestations and demon chasers must have had a compelling impact on Mary Alice. On her children, as well, I would imagine.”

“By charismatic, you’re talking about snake-handling churches, right?” Evangeline felt both dread and impatience for what she suspected lay ahead.

“There are only a handful of small congregations that observe this practice,” Lena said. “But, yes. The church where Mary Alice and her children worshipped believed in taking up serpents.”

Lovely, Evangeline thought with a shiver. “Please go on,” she said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your train of thought.”

“No, that’s fine. You’re bound to have questions. Believe me, I know how all this sounds. But as I said, context is everything.” She paused, as if trying to remember where she left off. “One day Charles left on a business trip and never returned. He just simply vanished. Everyone assumed he’d walked out on his family. But when the police arrested Mary Alice for the murder of her children, she also confessed to killing her husband. She claimed she’d discovered that he was abusing their young daughters. She also feared that he may have been responsible for the disappearances of at least two young women from towns that were along his sales route.”

“Were her claims substantiated?”

“The records involving the children are sealed,” Lena said. “So I can’t speak to that. As for the disappearances…no bodies were ever found. But I suspect Mary Alice was right. However, given what she did to her own children, you can understand why the authorities were skeptical. I doubt her claims were ever properly investigated. What I do know is that Charles’s behavior fit the pattern of his father and brother, and I think Mary Alice was aware of that. Which is why she had to kill her children in order to save their souls.”

“That’s a hard sale,” Evangeline said. “Because what you’re saying is that she killed her sons so they wouldn’t grow up to be like their father and grandfather. That’s a huge assumption to make, especially where your children’s lives are at stake.”

“For Mary Alice it wasn’t an assumption, though. It was a matter of faith. Even so, her dilemma must have been heart-wrenching. Think about it.” She leaned forward, forearms on her knees as her gaze burned into Evangeline’s. “How far would you go to protect your son? Would you willingly sacrifice your own soul in order to procure his eternal salvation?”

“Now you’re making an assumption,” Evangeline said. “You’re assuming she told the truth about her motivation.”

The blue eyes darkened. “What is truth? Your truth? My truth? Mary Alice’s truth?”

“I’m not much on moral relativism,” Evangeline said. “It’s hard for me to get past the fact that she murdered her children in cold blood. That’s the only truth that matters to me.”

“You’re not alone.” Lena sat back against the sofa. Some of her energy seemed to have drained away. “Most people thought Mary Alice should have gone to the electric chair. Instead, she’s spent the past thirty-some years in a mental hospital. I don’t know which would have been the kinder fate.”

“What happened to the little girls?”

“They were separated and put in foster care. The older girl, Ruth, was adopted by a family in Baton Rouge. Her name was changed, of course, and from what I’ve been able to learn, she grew up in a stable, loving environment. Rebecca wasn’t so lucky. She’s been under psychiatric care since she was a teenager. Three years ago, her doctor committed her to Pinehurst Manor, in East Faliciana Parish.”

“I know where Pinehurst Manor is,” Evangeline said.

“Then you probably also know that up until a few years ago, it was a low- to medium-security facility. When Katrina hit, some of the patients in maximum-security units were evacuated and sent to places like Pinehurst. Mary Alice was one of those patients.”

“You’re saying she and her daughter ended up in the same mental hospital?”

“For a short while, yes.”

“Did they come into contact with one another?”

“Almost certainly they did. And you can imagine the impact such a meeting would have had on someone as fragile as Rebecca Lemay. She’d had no contact with her mother or sister for years, and it’s my belief that seeing Mary Alice unleashed a flood of suppressed memories—her father’s abuse and her complicity in at least one of her brother’s deaths. Those memories would have devastated her. Perhaps the only way she could justify what she’d done was by convincing herself that she, too, had been carrying out God’s will. And if she’d been recruited as one of His soldiers, then her mission wasn’t yet over. It would be her spiritual duty to finish what her mother had started.”

“Meaning?”

“The only way to destroy the evil embedded in the Lemay family DNA would be to destroy all the male progeny.”

“But her mother had already done that by killing the father and sons,” Evangeline pointed out.

“Not completely. A few weeks after Rebecca left Pinehurst, Carl Lemay was found murdered in an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Texarkana, where he’d relocated after being released from prison.”

Evangeline rubbed the sudden tingles at the back of her neck. “You think Rebecca was responsible?”

“Yes, I do. And I think she was responsible for two other murders, as well. Remember I told you that Charles Lemay’s sister, Leona, moved to New Orleans? She married a man named Robert Courtland and they had two sons, Paul and David.”

Evangeline stared at her in speechless shock.

Lena inclined her head slightly. “Now you see where all this has been leading. David and Paul Courtland are the direct descendants of Earl Lemay. They are the first cousins of the little boys who died more than thirty years ago at Mary Alice’s hand. Paul and David were, so far as I can determine, the last male members of the Lemay family.”

“If all that’s true—” which was a very big if in Evangeline’s book “—Rebecca Lemay’s mission would be over, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, except for one thing.”

“And that is?”

“Carl Lemay was stabbed to death in his bed,” Lena said. “But the use of snakes with Paul and David Courtland—”

“Wait a minute,” Evangeline said with a frown. “How did you know about the snakes? It wasn’t in the paper.”

Lena shrugged as if how she’d obtained the information was of no consequence. Evangeline remembered what Lapierre had said about the woman. She was well-connected in the NOPD.

“I think Rebecca is now working with an accomplice,” she said. “The Courtland brothers weren’t just killed. There was an element of torture involved. I think Rebecca Lemay has hooked up with someone who has his own calling.”

Evangeline thought of the blond woman who had supposedly been following Paul Courtland just before he died.

“Do you know what Rebecca looks like?”

“I have a picture of the girls before they were separated, but I have no idea what they look like now.” Lena bent forward and pulled a photograph from the pages of a book lying on the coffee table. She handed the picture to Evangeline.

The shot might have come from the pages of a Southern magazine, Evangeline thought. In the background, cypress trees dripped with Spanish moss, and in the foreground, two breathtaking little blond girls in white dresses clung to one another’s hands as they smiled for the camera.

“They look exactly the same,” Evangeline said. “How do you know which is which?”

“If you look closely, you’ll see the one on the right is a smidgen taller than the other one. I believe that’s Ruth.”

For the longest time, Evangeline couldn’t tear her gaze from those angelic faces. It was hard to imagine that one of them would grow up to be a cold-blooded killer, no matter her motivation.

“Do you have any idea of Rebecca Lemay’s whereabouts?”

“It’s possible she’s gone back to where she grew up in Lafourche Parish. The nearest town is Torrence. I’ve been in contact with the sheriff’s department down there. The old Lemay house has been abandoned for years, but a few days ago, a fisherman spotted someone in one of the upstairs windows. They actually thought it was Mary Alice, but of course, that’s impossible. I think they may have seen Rebecca.”

“Did anyone from the sheriff’s department check it out?”

“I haven’t been able to verify that. People in that area are still a little touchy about what happened. I doubt anyone’s all that anxious to go out there to that old house. Too many ghosts.”

When Evangeline handed her the photograph, Lena took a moment to carefully tuck it back into the book.

“I would very much like to speak with Rebecca Lemay,” she said. “I would go down there and check that sighting out for myself, but as Captain Lapierre probably explained, I don’t leave my house much these days. I’m afraid I wouldn’t get very far. That’s where you come in.”

“You want me to go down and check it out for you,” Evangeline said. “I can’t do that. Like I told you on the phone, I’m no longer working this case. I was sent here today to hear what you have to say and report back to Captain Lapierre. What she does with the information is out of my hands.”

Lena bent forward, her eyes very direct. “I have a proposition for you, then. It’ll need to be off the record, I’m afraid.”

“No way,” Evangeline said bluntly. “I don’t work like that.”

“Johnny was right,” she said with a wry smile. “You are a tough nut to crack.”

It was still weird to hear her talk about Johnny so casually. Even more weird to think that he might have been in this house, might have sat in the very chair that Evangeline now occupied. In the course of one day, her husband had begun to seem like a stranger to her.

Lena studied Evangeline’s face for a moment.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll lay all my cards on the table. If you want to tell your superiors what I’m proposing, that’s up to you.”

“And just what are you proposing?”

“I want you to find Rebecca Lemay for me. In return, I’ll do everything I can to help you find out what really happened to Johnny.”