“At this point, I’m just about willing to try anything.”

Philippe made a tsk-tsking sound and got up to refresh his coffee, topping off Josie’s cup as well, while Anne-Marie appeared to ponder what Josie was asking.

“You can’t just try, chérie. You must believe.”

“Believe in the ritual?”

“Believe that good can conquer evil. That love triumphs over all.”

Love…

Anne-Marie’s gaze narrowed on her. Then she appeared to come to some sort of understanding, while Josie felt like the other woman had just gazed straight down into the very chamber of her heart.

Anne-Marie nodded. “Yes, yes. This just might work.”


DREW PACED THE LENGTH of his room then back again. His suitcase was packed, as was his laptop.

He looked at his watch. Three hours had passed since he’d left Josie standing alone in the kitchen. Walking away from her had been, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the hardest thing he’d ever done. Harder than facing a battalion of heavily armed Iraqi soldiers on the border of Kuwait. More difficult than his divorce. Tougher than his demotion when his divorce had delivered a blow he hadn’t expected.

She wasn’t going to call.

Shit.

But he hadn’t been called “The Closer” for nothing. He’d be damned if he’d give in that easily.

Leaving his suitcase and briefcase sitting near the door, he went out into the hall, his intention to head over to the Josephine and do what he probably should have earlier. Kiss Josie until she remembered none of the bad and wanted nothing more than to enjoy more of the good.

His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He slowed his purposeful stride down the hall and fished it out of his pants.

“Hello?”

“Drew?”

Josie.

He stopped and closed his eyes.

“If you’re free, I’d like you to come over tonight. Say around ten?”

Ten. A good four hours away. He didn’t think he could survive it.

But he would have to.

“I’ll be there.”

17

FOLLOWING THEIR CONVERSATION in the kitchen, Anne-Marie insisted that the first order of business was to scour room 2B. No cleansing ritual could be expected to work while the blood of a dead woman still marred the place, she’d said.

So she and Josie cleaned it. Top to bottom. Placing the stained mattress in the back alley, despite Detective Chevalier’s instructions that neither guest room was to be touched since they’d been deemed crime scenes.

After they’d completed that somber task, Anne-Marie had gone back to her shop, promising to return shortly, while Philippe stayed in the kitchen to make dinner.

Josie, on the other hand, was in her rooms, once her grandmother’s rooms, on the fourth floor.

She stood in the middle of her bedroom, looking around with eyes other than her own. While the additional rooms had always belonged to her grandmother, this one had been hers. It had changed over the years. From a twin canopy bed with pink accents, to a queen-size wrought-iron bed not unlike those in the guest rooms. Except it had a canopy with white sheers draped around the top posts, lending it what was supposed to be a romantic effect, but now only looked ghostly. Especially with the breeze blowing in from the open French doors, disturbing the gauzy fabric so that it billowed out, resembling a phantom.

She’d never had a man up here before. Had never had cause to because all her liaisons had been fleeting, carried out in the guest rooms where her lovers had stayed.

She reminded herself that Drew fell solidly into the same category, even if he was no longer staying at the hotel. Only she knew that the connection to him that dwelled within her, that grew every time he touched her, would be with her till the grave.

Gathering fresh linens from a nearby closet, she stripped the bed and remade it, fluffing the pillows on top. Then she took the white candles on black wrought-iron stands that were placed throughout the room and repositioned them on the nightstands on either side of the bed, careful to tuck the canopy sheers on the back board so they wouldn’t accidentally catch fire.

Narcissus.

She thought she smelled the unique, indigenous fragrance on the night air. The unmistakable scent her grandmother always wore. She turned her head, trying to identify the source of the smell.

Then she did what she’d only done once, very briefly, in twelve months. She stepped out into the main drawing room and stood outside her grandmother’s private rooms.

She’d breached Josephine Villefranche’s sanctuary one other time since saying her final goodbyes a year ago. But she hadn’t stayed long. Hadn’t been able to. She’d only picked up the fan she used at the front desk that had been lying on her grandmother’s rocking chair and then had quickly left.

She sniffed. The scent was stronger here.

Odd that she shouldn’t have sensed it until now.

She gripped the doorknobs of the ornately carved double doors and slowly pushed them inward.

As impossible as it seemed, a gust of fresh air hit her head-on, blowing her black curls from around her face and infusing her with the smell of narcissus, as though an entity not of this world had just traveled through her. She stared unblinkingly at the familiar room, half expecting her grandmother to materialize in front of her, looking for her usual kiss on the cheek.

Of course, she didn’t appear. But Josie felt her presence everywhere. Smelled it. Sensed it.

She slowly stepped from one familiar object to another. From an old oval picture frame that held a shot of Granme with her two young daughters, the girls looking as different from each other as night and day. To the wooden rocking chair that still held Josephine’s favorite shawl. To the bed that Josie had left made as if her grandmother might want to use it some night.

The source of the narcissus came from the wrought-iron dressing table. She stepped to it, picked up a crystal spray bottle and squeezed the decanter so that a fine mist filled the air. Immediately she was enveloped in everything that was her grandmother.

“Remember, always, that you are only as beautiful as you feel,” she’d said to her while Josie had sat in the rocker watching her grandmother get ready for church one Sunday morning. “And smell.”

She sat down on the bed, the same bed that when she’d first arrived at the hotel, she’d spent sleeping in with her grandmother to help chase away the nightmares that abandonment had caused. She ran her hand over the meticulously tatted lace.

It seemed like a long time later when she finally got up and left the room, closing the doors after herself.

And it was only then that she realized she still held the bottle of perfume.


THREE HOURS LATER, Josie again stood alone in her room. Night had long since fallen. Anne-Marie was long gone. But the rituals Josie had helped her perform remained in her mind and likely always would.

She remembered a time long ago when her mother had dabbled in white magic, the voodoo. Lighting candles and sitting for long hours watching the flame grow lower. But while it was rumored her great grandmother had been a witch of sorts, her grandmother had never bought into it and had refused to allow Josie to be tempted down that route. She’d infused the Church in her instead, making sure she went to services every Sunday and that she prayed before going to bed every night when she was younger.

Of course, Josie had been surrounded by voodoo her entire life. Her best friend owned one shop out of the dozens that catered to interest in the occult. And Josie had been in that shop countless times. But she’d always looked upon it as something to make her smile. She’d never taken it seriously, dismissing the rituals as strange, the beliefs as unworthy.

But as she’d watched Anne-Marie bring herself to a oneness with the four elements and, using natural herbs and oils, cleanse the hotel, she saw there was nothing hokey or damaging about the ritual. In fact, the mere act of participating had brought her a sense of peace and awareness of her surroundings that she hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

When Anne-Marie had finished with the hotel, she’d commanded Josie to kneel over the bathtub in her private bathroom and went about pouring an aromatic wash over her hair and head several times before filling the tub and asking her to soak in it.

The final ritual, Anne-Marie had said, was one only Josie herself could perform. Setting up a table in the middle of the private sitting room, Anne-Marie had draped a white cloth over it then placed a single white candle in the middle.

Even now, wearing a loose-fitting, white gauzy dressing gown her friend had given her, Josie sat in front of the table, concentrating on the flame, the scent of sage and various oils teasing her senses, the sweetness of narcissus just beyond.

“Clear your mind of everything,” Anne-Marie had told her. “Focus only on the color white. And imagine yourself pushing that whiteness on everything around you, from the inside out, up to and including the hotel, until you reach the front curb.”

Her friend had smiled at her softly then, a serenity on her face that Josie couldn’t help absorbing. She didn’t have to say aloud that she had gotten it. She suspected that was as obvious on her face as it had been on her friend’s.

She didn’t hope that the rituals would work. She knew they would…


THE HOTEL WAS NOTABLY QUIET given the sound of the raucous jazz streaming from the bar across the street. Drew hesitated in front of the open door, looking up the lit street. The blind horn player had taken up his spot on the corner again, blowing a tune that made its way under Drew’s skin so that the trumpet was the only thing he heard outside his own heartbeat.