LITMIR.BIZ

       SIX

      Inside my mind, instinct is at war with itself. As I stare down at the two glowing footprints, half of me wants to run, the other half to lock the door. I want photographs of the prints, but to get them I’ll have to act quickly. Once the chemical reaction that causes the blood hidden in the carpet to luminesce is complete, it can’t be repeated.

      The front door of the house bangs shut. Pearlie. I cross the bedroom and lock the door. Then I open my camera case, bring out my SLR, and fit a standard 35mm lens and cable release to it. Damn. I forgot to unload my tripod from the trunk of my car.

      Someone raps sharply on my bedroom door. A rush of déjà vu tells me that rhythm belongs to Pearlie.

      “Catherine Ferry?” calls a throaty voice as familiar to me as my mother’s. “You in there, girl?”

      “I’m here, Pearlie.”

      “What you doing home? Last time you came back was … I don’t know when. Why you didn’t call ahead?”

      I can’t waste time trying to explain the situation. “I’ll be out in a few minutes, okay?”

      Grabbing my car keys, I slide up the window, climb out, and run to my car. Tripod in hand, I climb back into the bedroom, close the curtains, and set up the tripod almost directly above the footprints. Pearlie is still knocking on the door. After mounting the camera and aiming it downward, I switch on the lights and shoot a reference photo of the floor. Then I close down the lens aperture by two f-stops, take a ruler from my dental case, and switch off the overhead light. The ruler has copper wire wrapped around the inch markings. The copper will fluoresce when sprayed with luminol. Laying the ruler alongside the glowing footprint, I spray both ruler and bloodstain with more of the chemical and wait.

      “What you doing in there?” Pearlie demands. “Did Natriece mess up something?”

      “I’m all right!” I snap. “Just give me a minute.”

      I hear the muted chatter of Pearlie interrogating the little girl.

      As the greenish-white glow begins to increase in intensity, I open the camera shutter with the cable release and look at my dive watch. To capture the faint glow of luminol in the dark, I need a sixty-second exposure. My hands are shaking badly, but the cable release will keep the camera from vibrating. This time the tremor isn’t from medication or alcohol withdrawal. It’s fear. The same sickening panic I felt at the LeGendre crime scene, and at the Nolan scene before that. If it weren’t for the child’s footprint, I’d assume the boot print was made with deer blood. Whitetail often wander onto the grounds of Malmaison, and my grandfather has been known to shoot a buck now and again, sometimes from the window of his study. But the child’s footprint is there …

      When my watch hits the sixty-second mark, I close the shutter. Then, to be sure I capture the prints, I open the lens aperture by one f-stop and repeat the procedure. By then Pearlie is squawking through the door.

       “Catherine DeSalle Ferry! You open this door!”

      The familiar ritual of crime scene photography is calming my nerves. Habits have great comforting power—even bad habits, as I discovered long ago.

      “Answer me, girl! I can’t read your mind like I used to. You’ve grown up too much and been gone too long.”

      I smile in spite of my fear. The year after my father died—the year I stopped speaking—only Pearlie was able to communicate with me. The stoic maid could read my emotions in a glance, from the curl of a lip to the angle of my downcast eyes.

      “I’m coming!” I call, going to the door.

      As soon as I turn the knob, Pearlie pushes open the door and stands with her hands on her hips. Over seventy years old, she is tall, thin, and tough as gristle, with chocolate brown skin and clear traces of Caucasian ancestry in her facial features. Her eyes still flash with intelligence and wit, and her bark—though intimidating to strangers—is considerably worse than her bite. Around my grandfather and my mother, Pearlie displays the quiet dignity of a nineteenth-century servant. She can vanish as silently as a ghost when certain whites enter a room, but around me she is much more animated, treating me as she might a daughter. She still wears a starched white uniform, which you don’t see much anymore, and a shiny, reddish brown wig to cover her grizzled white hair.

      I’ve missed her more than I realized. For her part, I see a mixture of pique and excitement in her eyes, as though she doesn’t know whether to hug me or spank me. Were it not for Natriece’s fear and the odd scene in the bedroom, Pearlie would undoubtedly crush me to her chest.

      “Answer me this minute!” she demands. “You ain’t been home since your grandmother’s funeral, and that’s been a year now.”

      “Fifteen months,” I correct, fighting a new wave of emotion that I can’t afford to face right now. Last June, my grandmother drowned on DeSalle Island. Part of the sandbar she was standing on simply slid into the Mississippi River. There was no warning. Four people saw it happen, yet no one could save her. No one even saw her surface after the bar collapsed. Catherine Poitiers Kirkland was an excellent swimmer in her youth—she taught me to swim—but at seventy-five, she’d been no match for the mighty current of the Mississippi.

      “Lord, Lord.” Pearlie sighs. “Well … why didn’t you call to say you was coming? I would have cooked for you.”

      “It was an impulse.”

      “Ain’t it always with you?” She gives me a knowing look, then pushes past me into the bedroom. “What’s going on in here? Natriece told me they’s a ghost in here.”

      I see the little girl standing just outside the door. “There is, in a way. Go look at the carpet by the foot of the bed.”

      Pearlie walks over to the tripod, bends at the waist, and examines the floor with the eagle eye of a woman who has spent decades eradicating the slightest specks of dirt from “her” house.

      “What’s making that rug look like that?”

      “Blood. Old bloodstains hidden in the carpet fibers. It’s reacting with a chemical that Natriece sprayed on it by accident.”

      “Blood?” Pearlie says skeptically. “I don’t see no blood. That looks like them Halloween teeth you used to wear when you was a child. Vampire teeth, like Count Dracula.”

      “It’s the same principle. But there’s blood there, you can count on that.”

      “Blood the only thing make that stuff glow?”

      “No,” I concede. “Some metals will do it. Household bleach can do it. Have you spilled Clorox in here? Or in the laundry room and then tracked it in here?”

      Pearlie purses her lips. “Can’t say I have. Can’t say I ain’t either. Could have done, I guess.”

      “I’ve

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