mean—you can’t leave?”
His teeth clamped together. Then he seemed to make a deliberate effort to relax. “The priestess comes out here to reinforce an old grudge. Her ancestor cursed my family. We have to stay at Belle Vista.”
She tipped her head back, staring into his eyes. “You believe that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You said you felt the power—on the road and now in the graveyard.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“I feel it, too.” He grimaced. “It we put it in medical terms, we could say that what you experienced were acute episodes. What I’ve got is a low-level, persistent infection—that flares up if I stay away from Belle Vista for too long.”
“If you stay away overnight?” she guessed.
“Yes!”
“And . . . and . . . what happens here at night?”
She saw him swallow. “I have to go out into the bayou . . . and stay there until near dawn.”
“But isn’t that dangerous?”
“Yes. But I have no choice. So, I’ve learned to live with it.”
“Can you break the curse?” she asked in a shaky voice, amazed that she had bought into the reality of a voodoo curse. But she’d discovered it was the only way to have a coherent discussion about his problems.
“Maybe if I had someone at my side to help.” He swallowed. “Someone willing to stay here with me.”
She nodded silently, not sure what to say.
His eyes drilled into hers. She wanted to look away, but she held herself steady. Another question burned behind her lips. A question she was afraid to ask. Yet Andre had finally been honest with her. Now she had to face her own fears—about the dreams she’d had since she’d put on the robe. She’d tried to shove them to the back of her mind. Yet she knew she had to deal with what they meant.
“The woman your grandfather loved and lost—was her name Linette Sonnier?” she whispered.
###
Morgan watched a host of emotions chasing themselves across Andre’s face. “Where did you get that name?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
“Where could I have gotten it?” she asked carefully.
His jaw firmed. “You couldn’t have researched my family.”
“Well, that’s not how the name came to me,” she answered.
He opened his mouth, but she hurried on, forcing herself to grapple with one of the other questions that had been gnawing at her since the first afternoon when Andre had rescued her from the flood. “Why was that robe you gave me in a bag of clothing in your car?”
“I told you, it was going to a garage sale at the church.”
“You don’t get along with the town, why were you taking anything to a church sale?” she challenged
“It was either that—or burn the clothing. And I was taught from a young age never to throw out anything that someone could use. Just because some people in St. Germaine don’t like me is no reason to spite the rest of them.”
“Okay.” She would give him that much. But it still didn’t get to the crux of her question. “You didn’t have the robe . . .” she stopped then began again. “You didn’t have the robe in the car so I could put it on?”
Instead of answering, he made a frustrated gesture with his hand. “I asked you about Linette. What does that have to do with the bag of clothing? I didn’t even know what was in there until you were sitting there shivering like a drowned muskrat. Why are we going on about the robe?”
Lifting her gaze, she looked back toward the cemetery plot. It was no longer visible through the trees, but she knew it was still lurking in the shadows. “I had a couple of weird experiences today.”
“And? This is the damn strangest conversation I ever had,” he added in exasperation. “What—you’re just going to ignore every question I ask you?”
“I’m working up to an answer,” she murmured, scuffing her foot against the ground, watching with great interest as she scraped a line in the dirt. “This is hard. What I wanted to say was that . . . I . . . I had another weird experience when I put on the robe.” She swallowed.
“A bad experience?”
“No. I . . . I had a vision of Linette.”
His reaction seemed to be as strong as her own. “What?” he gasped out. “What are you talking about?”
“Andre, I’m a pretty down-to-earth person. I don’t know how to describe what happened exactly. But it was like I had a dream. About her.”
“While you were sitting in the car—right after I pulled you