Page 78 of Pretty Nightmare

“Let me guess. You don’t know him either.”

“I know the surname. But they’re all dead now.” The birth year on this one was in nineteen twenty-six.

“OK, then. This one is… oh, it’s an easy one.” Then she laughs. “Here, you do it.”

I take the stack and read the last one. “Ameci. Sidonia Ameci.”

“What kind of names are these?”

“Old World ones.”

“Whatever. They’re weird. Who are the passports for? Not Americans, obviously. They are not blue.”

I bop her on the head with one. “You’re a smart girl. But American passports weren’t always blue. Red was the color of the first booklet cover and they were green for a while too.” I open the first passport and find that it matches Mallory Machette. “Hmm.”

“What?”

“Mallory’s. But the year is off. I mean, obviously, even though this passport is green, it’s still modern. Issued in nineteen forty-nine. And if Mallory was born in eighteen-seventy-five then—” I shuffle through the papers that were stuffed in the plastic and come up with a death certificate for Mallory. “Yup. She died in nineteen eighteen.”

“Then they’re fake identities.”

“Jesus Christ, Maggie. You know way too much about this shit.”

“It’s your fault.” She’s right about that. “But I’m right. Aren’t I?”

I open the other two passports and find they match the other two birth certificates, and then find two death certificates for Mallory and Sidonia, but no Nikos. Which might be odd. “Hmm. Three random fake identities and a bundle of money that isn’t a whole lot, considering. I mean, what can you really do with forty thousand dollars? Not much.”

Maggie shrugs and swings the lantern. She’s not impressed with our booty. Paperwork is boring. And forty grand isn’t enough to impress her, either. Hell, we’re gonna give ten of it to the fucking cemetery guard to keep his trap shut when we leave.

I can’t say I disagree, but paperwork often leads to answers to questions you didn’t know you had. Except… “Why did my father hide them in this coffin?” I whisper. Mostly to myself.

“And where the hell is your brother?”

I don’t say anything about her swear word. I let it slip every now and then when we’re into something deep. And anyway, it’s a good question.

“Maybe he’s not dead?”

“He better be fuckin’ dead,” I say. “Because someone has to die. That’s how these stories go.”

It takes a good hour to fill the hole back in. And by the time we’re done, we’re filthy.

“No way is McKay not gonna say something when we pull into Old Home looking like a pair of midnight gravediggers.”

I turn left on Burgundy and then ease the truck up to a tall, wrought-iron gate. “Let me worry about that.”

“What’s this place?”

“You’ve been here before.”

“When?”

“Oh…” I think back a little. “You were probably four the last time we stopped by.”

“Hmm. I think I’d remember that. Four was only two years ago. And this place is… nice.” She leans forward in her seat and looks up at the tallness of the compact French Quarter mansion I grew up in. “Nothing like that cemetery. Why did your father bury your brother in that place, anyway? It’s”—she wrinkles her nose—“not right.”

She probably didn’t notice that Holt Cemetery was wrecked when we entered it because it was the middle of the night. But there was no way to miss the fact that the old resting place for local New Orleans indigents was in complete disarray when we left in the glow of a morning dawn.

“I guess we’d have to ask him to know for sure.” That’s the standard answer I made up back in my teens when I was still trying to piece together my life. The Boucher family mausoleum is located just west of Old Home, on a mostly untouched piece of wild land about halfway between the property and Pearl Springs.