“And the battle was won, January 8, 1815!” Angela said, causing him to smile and nod. She was glad her spirit friend had died later in life. He had been, she was certain again, a good man.
“I’ve got to get back out to Chalmette Battlefield again one of these days—and the park named in honor of our Lafitte!” he said, nodding. “But not today. Today . . . I’m going to get some good gossip, I promise you, word on the street!”
“And thank you,” she told him.
He indicated the side street where he wanted her to stop. She did so and he made a face as he “exited” his ghostly form through the car door.
Smiling, she headed on the police station and greeted those with the force there that she had come to know through the years. Captain Orbach met her quickly and showed her to a small office where she could get on a computer herself.
Naturally, she wrote to her techs back at her own headquarters to give them what she knew before getting started herself. Then she plunged in, looking for area stores where the necessary machinery might be purchased along with credit card receipts. She also searched for those in the area who had training in phlebotomy in any way, who were in medicine and might have knowledge of using the machines and doing comparisons wherever she could. There were records she couldn’t reach easily, but a call to headquarters and the Director could get her just about anything she needed. The records she wanted to access were public, and she wouldn’t be moving into circles that might be construed as illegal in any way.
Because whoever was doing this had to have a certain skill—maybe not rocket science skill, but enough to know how to obtain large masses of blood in such a controlled manner.
She’d stumbled upon several people in a chat group who had drawn her attention, one talking about a meeting, about the group being from the area, and having special “bloody” fun because they knew all the whacky stories that might be among the legends of New Orleans.
She scratched out a few notes; compared her list of screen names, and delved into records for labs, urgent care centers, hospitals, and more. And when she did so, she discovered she just might have names for the “witches” practicing a strange trade in the streets of New Orleans. There were three names that aligned with knowledge of phlebotomy and the group that was ready to have a “bloody good time.” She’d discovered a man working at a lab who had started med school but never finished, getting an online certificate on the web instead. He was JuddGantry. There was a woman named Celia Osprey in the group; she was an LPN at a local urgent care center, and one more woman, Sheila Hapsburg, a nurse practitioner for a local doctor. And if Angela was right, the three with their slightly twisted screen names were planning on getting together that night. All she needed to do was figure out when and where.
But she stopped when she saw her dignified spirit friend Alain making his way through the station, looking for her, seeing her, and hurrying through the glass door to reach her. “I heard something, but we need to move!” he told her.
“What is it?”
“Please, get the car . . . I mean I could be wrong; it could be nothing. But I think that they’re meeting at the old cemetery the minute darkness falls. Please, we need to go!”
“Alain, they close the cemeteries at night. You can take ghost tours, but—”
“Angela, please, this isn’t a tourist cemetery! There’s an old potter’s field that’s just a stone’s throw from the Chalmette Battlefield. Please! I mean, I don’t know if I’d call out the troops, but there was a nurse getting off duty, and she was talking about a ride she was taking, that she had to get moving, she was meeting friends that night. And Angela, she was carrying a strange bag with her and—”
And Angela was up. She wished Jackson and Jaden had gotten back, but she was armed. And since she didn’t believe in real witches, she wasn’t going to get close enough to anyone to get a needle thrust in her arm to knock her out.
“Let’s go!” she told Alain.
In leaving, she told the captain she’d be back and where she was going, just to check out a strange intuition. Of course, as she drove—Alain’s spirit at her side—she called Jackson to tell him where she and Alain were headed.
“All right, we’ll meet you out there,” Jackson told her. “But this is something that Alain heard on the street—”
“That coincides with people in a chat room that makes it appear they’re all getting together just as a social thing,” Angela explained. “But these are people who know what they’re doing with the kind of medical machine that removes blood in the way that blood was removed from the poor creature drawn out of the Mississippi!”
“We’ll get there as quickly as we can. We were on Royal Street, looking for that group we saw playing the other night,” Jackson told her.
“Did you talk to anyone?” Angela asked him.
“They weren’t out on the street. We’re heading to the car.”
“See you at the cemetery,” Angela said, and they ended the call.
“Old potter’s field,” Alain said as they ended the car. Then he shrugged and looked over at her. “The St. Louis cemeteries . . . they didn’t come into being until 1789. People call it the oldestextantcemetery in New Orleans. But people died before then; there were burial grounds long before, and . . .”
“I know. They originally buried people at the St. Peter’s Street cemetery,” Angela told him. “And there are rumors that many people probably remain beneath the ground beneath homes, restaurants, bars—”
“Many not manymany!” Alain said, smiling at her, “but there have been circumstances in building homes, add-ons, pools . . . when remains have been discovered. The dead had to make way for the living. And way back then, St. Louis Cemetery was out of the main city, to keep the essence of death far from the main flow of human life. Way back, the French created a settlement here when the ground was unwelcoming, when flooding was frequent. And in my mind, New Orleans became an amazing city, through three flags, through trials andtribulations, wars, slavery, freedom—and to this day, a time when men and women of good heart and decency still try to create a world in which all are equal. So with that said, you still have . . .” He looked at her and shrugged, a frown on his face. “Humanity, those ill within their minds. In this case—witches!”
“And I know nothing of this cemetery,” Angela said, shaking her head. “I have been to Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District, St. Louis number one, number two, and number three—but I didn’t even know about this one.”
“It’s near Holt Cemetery which was established in 1879 for those . . . well, as a Potter’s Field. Dr. Joseph Holt and others were involved in the creation of Storyville; they were concerned with the diseases that were running rampant in the city and wanted to get control of . . .”
“Prostitution?” Angela suggested, amused, but also respectful of the fact that in Alain’s day, it was polite to be circumspect. “I love the city; I’ve studied lots of history,” she assured him.
“C’est vrai, it’s true. Right, of course,” Alain said, smiling at her. Her ghost was such a dignified older man in his eighteenth-century dress, his decorum in sitting so very straight. And yet he could smile with a sweet charm that told her again that in life, he must have been an amazing and very good man.
