*dropping unedited

Why couldn't anything be easy? Corey would get his story. There was something rotten going on in the town of Surette, and he intended to figure out what exactly it was, Jeff Jacobs and Alan Robichaux be damned. The people deserved to know! Well, more accurately, he needed material for the struggling paper. It wasn't as if the editor-in-chief was any help, allowing The Surette Gazette to focus on boring local fare like how many booths would be at the farmer's market craft fair, what the Women's Club was reading, which streets were being repaved, who'd been dumb enough to leave a car unlocked and been robbed. The six years he'd been here, Corey had been bored to death. He'd moved to Surette to assist an ailing aunt who'd died pretty quickly afterward, and though his job at the paper hadn't been anything too lucrative, it'd excited him enough to stick around (and it wasn't as if he'd had any better prospects). What he'd come to find out, though, was how bloody stubborn the population was, at least when it came to any matters of import. Sure, there were those residents who'd been volunteering their thoughts and comments about recent events, and yet they were never the kind of people whose thoughts he wanted; they were visitors or renters, transplants or any variety of people without roots to the community. As much as Corey hated to admit Jeff was right, he wasn't of Surette—he was ultimately an outsider, and it seemed almost all the people willing to speak with him were as well.

Under normal circumstances, Corey wouldn't have cared half as much as he did. The town was sleepy and usually easygoing. But what'd happened the past few weeks indicated something big, something dark was going on, and he was beginning to think that there was some kind of cover-up. Otherwise, why all the avoidance?

That little boy had gone missing. Poor kid. What'd it been—three weeks ago, now? The likelihood he was still alive was slim, and yet Corey's gut told him the boy hadn't been removed from the area. That it'd been someone or something in Surette that'd taken him. The man was unsure why he felt that way, but it probably had something to do with the fact everybody (or at least the higher-ups) was acting weird. Even George, his boss, had advised him to stop digging, told him to leave things up to law enforcement, and if that didn't go as far against the principles of their work as could be! Yeah, right. Like Corey was going to stop, now. George's firm "suggestion" had made him only more determined. If he could solve this unsolved mystery, unearth something bigger and more sinister at work, he'd take it to the big papers and news outlets! He'd get that journalistic clout he'd been seeking most of his life, ever since he fell in love with reporting for his high school newspaper. Journalism, dead? Ha. No way in hell. He'd bring it roaring back with this story . . . or, well, whatever the story was. He'd have to find it first, and that was proving to be problematic.

Today, though, he hoped to gain some traction. The St. James House—formerly the LeBlanc House—had finally been left alone, again. For the past several days, after that lamb had been found strung up behind the place, it'd been busy with activity, and Corey hadn't been sure what angle to take to approach it, anyhow. No one would let him near the whole dead lamb business. But once things had settled and he, in the meantime, had done a bit of research, he'd realized that the house itself had some kind of history, changing hands between the families that'd lost their kids, and, a really long time ago, originally belonging to the family that'd founded the town.

He'd start there, he told himself. Everybody liked talking about houses, especially ones with potential hauntings, and if he came in benign and distanced, just chatting about the structure and its history, maybe he could sneak his way into it and into some more nuanced conversations. That St. James woman was as tight-lipped as a scallop, but if he pulled out the "Corey Charm," which had worked more than once, Corey was fairly sure he could get that old woman to talk, especially because he was timing his ETA with happy hour. Surely he could convince her to share a glass of wine with him, and after that, conversation would flow.

That'd been Corey's plan, anyhow; what he hadn't expected upon his arrival, however, were two hysterical women.

The moment he'd approached the front steps of the intimidating columned façade, he'd known something was wrong. Someone yelled inside; someone else screamed. And when he'd pressed the bell in trepidation, the sound of shattering glass startled him enough to deter him from peeking in the windows on either side of the door. His ring was met almost immediately with success, as the crimson-paned slab of dark wood swung inward with the force of a small gale and an older woman stood looking rather flustered before him.

Her short dark hair, streaked white in a few places, hovered about her head like some static cloud, and her eyes were electrified to enhance the effect. Her attire consisted of high-waisted jeans and a black t-shirt; her feet were bare though (Corey noticed in his surprise) her toes were painted red to match her nails. Without a word, the woman pulled the man inside and slammed the door behind him.

Corey's eyes adjusted in the reddish light of the massive foyer. He'd been inside the St. James house nearly six years earlier, when he'd first arrived in Surette, and only then it'd been to interview someone staying there to attend his high school reunion, a prior local who'd moved away and become somewhat well-known in the tech industry out west. Corey had forgotten how overwhelming the place was, how high the ceiling vaulted, how grandly the staircase to the second floor ascended, how layered and complex the upper level appeared beyond its balcony and the depth of the shadows beneath it. Persian rugs layered one another across the hardwood floors; divans lined the windowed walls; a gleaming ruby chandelier light dressed the space in hellish illumination. A second woman—Corey didn't recognize her at first—sat on the floor, her garb indicative of her hired help status, one hand held against her cheek, her eyes and mouth round as quarters. When the door closed, that woman rose quickly albeit unsteadily and shook her head imploringly in his direction as if trying to tell him something, though Corey, in his shock, hadn't any idea what.

"Is . . . is everything all right?" he tried, shooting glances between the two women.

Glory St. James walked to a side table, where a glass of something most definitely alcoholic awaited her. She picked up the glass, saying, "Everything would be fine, if this bitch didn't keep trying to fuck everything up."

Corey's continued assessment of the situation gave him pause. Ms. St. James was clearly intoxicated. The hand gripping the stem of her glass shook in conjunction with her swaying. The woman on the floor (who was she? why was she so familiar?) continued to plead with her expressions, yet she stayed on the floor, one hand propping her up and the other falling from her cheek to reveal a purpling welt. Shards of glass—a pitcher, previously, perhaps?—lay beyond her, in a flower around a dark liquid stain on one of the rugs.

"I've tried to tell her," Glory went on, her back to the other two, "she's got a lot coming. Tried to tell her to get ready for hell to come up out of the goddamned ground itself."

"Please—please!" stammered the woman on the floor. "She says she knows something about my son! You have to—have to help me—"

"Your son, my sons, who cares? None of them belong to us." Glory snorted, turned about, a sneer gracing her face. "They belong to their fathers. And rightly so, the bastards."

Corey thrilled with nerves. The situation was volatile as heck, and it was just the sort of crack in the shell he needed. "You're Elena Flores?" he asked of the woman on the floor, knowing immediately who she was at the mention of her son. Rather than reach out a hand to help her up, he looked back to Glory, who wobbled on her feet and opened her mouth as if to snap something more. "Now . . . now calm down, ma'am. Let's just everybody take it easy. Why don't you have a seat, Ms. St. James?"

For a moment, it seemed Glory might actually listen, but when she saw the man pull out his cell, trying but failing to be discreet about it, she flung her glass at him.

Dodging the projectile (though he hadn't needed to; it'd been off by a few feet) Corey dropped his phone. "All right! All right!"

"Don't you pick that up!" Glory cried as the reporter reached for his device. "I know what you're trying to do, and it's not going to matter one bit, you hear me?"

Corey held out his hands as if fending off a wild animal. His eye contact with Elena revealed solidarity in one thing at least: they were both certain Glory St. James was insane. Neither was sure what the woman would do next, and yet after screaming at the reporter, Glory appeared to have spent her remaining energy. In a graceless display, she flopped back onto the divan behind her, one leg propped up high on the small pedestal table next to it and the other dragging along the floor. Even more unexpectedly, she broke into sobs so deep and dramatic that her captive audience grew even more uncomfortable than they already were.

For the moment, though, Glory was occupied, so Corey took the opportunity to approach Elena, who seemed to have forgotten she was on the floor. Crouching, the man spoke quietly to her. "What the hell is happening, here?"

"There's a man out back in the pool," Elena stated matter-of-factly. "He's dead. She says he drank too much and fell into the pool and she let him drown."

"What?!"

"We have to call somebody!" Elena hissed. "I've been trying but then she—she started talking about all these things, about my son!"

"Here, come on," Corey ordered, sliding his hands under Elena's armpits and helping her up. He had no intention of calling anybody, but he wasn't going to say that out loud. "What was she saying about your kid?"

Elena darted a glance at Glory, who'd flung an arm across her face and devolved into whimpering. With any luck, the woman would finally pass out. "She said my Eddie's alive!"

Corey raised his eyebrows.

"It sounds crazy, but she knows something, but she won't tell me. I've been trying to get her to, but she just says tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow! And she tried—tried to tell me her son out back, the dead man, that she did it since I was coming, to show me or something." Elena wrung her hands together. "Oh, I don't know! She's crazy, just crazy! But if she knows something about Eddie, I can't leave, you understand? I can't! What if she's taken him, hidden him? What if she's done something?"

"That woman?" Corey waved a hand at the pathetic groaning but otherwise sedate figure. "Wouldn't surprise me. She's had a pretty awful time."

Elena stepped back a little, her shoe crunching some glass into the carpet. "What do you mean?"

But Corey didn't answer. His attention had been drawn away from Elena, from Glory, even, to the side of the center staircase he could see from where he stood. They weren't floating stairs; they had a solid base, thick enough to hide a secret room inside, if the designer had had any inclination to do so, and because the walls of the foyer were too busy with windows and sconces and hanging plants to hold any more, the sides of the staircase served as gallery walls. Fitting the descending angle, myriad old photos and framed images were pegged into the beadboard above and around an elegant bench. One image in particular appeared almost to glow in the dim shadows extending from the first-floor rooms, and as Corey drew near it, he saw it was a painting, though it'd been so realistic he'd thought it first to be a photograph.

Two figures were centered in the eighteen-by-twenty-four frame, equal in height to one another: a little blonde girl in a white pinafore, smiling sweetly, her arms wrapped around the thick-furred neck of a huge, wolfish black dog with eyes painted so bright they gleamed. As Corey leaned a bit closer, he noted a cross on a gold chain hung around the little girl's throat, and at the bottom, also painted, was a thin banner reading "Marianna Surette 1800-1811."

The reporter chewed his tongue. He'd been in the house before, but he couldn't recall having seen this painting. Surely, though, he'd not stood in this particular spot. When he'd been invited in to conduct his interview, it'd been through a side door and into a sitting room looking out over the back patio. This image, though, it was striking, and the other photographs and paintings surrounding it captured his interest as well. Photographs of old families—the LeBlanc family? He'd heard of them . . . a man and wife and their two children, standing on the porch of this very house . . . And the St. Jameses! There was Glory, right there, with multiple small children and a man at her side; it was a candid photo outside a ramshackle building probably down by the bayou (Corey had done one of his "Stories" about that rundown string of shacks and trailers, now mostly abandoned save for a few very old folks who'd never wanted to speak with him, never even answered the door when he'd come around). There were numerous other paintings and photographs of people he couldn't place, though none so recent as those of the families he recognized, except for—

A short intake of breath behind him startled Corey, and he did an about-face to see Elena had followed him to the wall. She wasn't looking at him, though, or at the center image of the girl and wolf. He traced her gaze to a small framed, colored photograph of three people seated at an outdoor table, eating; they were two boys and a woman who, he realized on closer inspection, was her.

Elena muttered some kind of question that Corey couldn't answer, but before he could do or say anything helpful, the woman turned and ran from the house, not bothering to close the door behind her.

Utter confusion filled the reporter, but he loved the sensation. Something wild was going on, here, and this house—or at least these images—were absolutely some kind of clue to it all. Elena Flores? She didn't seem to know anything, so to hell with her. Glory, on the other hand . . . she'd definitely have some things to say, and in her vulnerable state, Corey was sure he could get some information out of her. If there really was, as Elena had said, a dead body in the pool, well, it wasn't going anywhere. No need to call law enforcement until he had his story. Why should he helpd them, anyway? It wasn't as if they'd been forthcoming!

Howling—from beyond the house. Corey twisted his head so sharply toward the open front door that he pulled a muscle. It'd sound like, like a . . . a wolf. But that was stupid. There were no wolves in Louisiana. It must've been a dog. Still, that certain drawn-out howl—he didn't like it. Best to keep the outside outside.

But before he'd taken more than a few steps across the foyer, the front door ever so slightly inched inward, and a long, canine muzzle sniffed its way into the house, followed by a massive front paw and a head aflame with sparking ruby eyes.

The man's innards dropped. He moved back toward the wall of pictures he'd just left, sure time hung suspended as the creature moved slowly forward, its sights clearly set on the terrified reporter.

Corey's stunted movements altered as he made a snap decision to turn and run, but a silvery streak cut through the space before him, filling his last vision of milky white with the dark black of his own blood.