4

Early the next morning I was wakened by the smell of brewing coffee. Ashley was already up, so I jumped into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and ambled into my little kitchen to join her. I was ready to ease into casual conversation with her until I could segue into our relationship. The serious stuff.

But I didn’t have to. Ashley opened up the discussion as I sat next to her.

“So I’ve been thinking,” she began. “About the compatibility thing.”

I listened.

“Not just,” she went on, “about our different geographies. Me up there in chilly Wisconsin, and you down here in the South, living the life of a beach bum on Gilligan’s Island.”

I laughed.

“It’s more than that,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

I agreed. This was friendly direct examination, not aggressive cross-examination. So I asked a lawyerly question. “Tell me, what do you think is the biggest point of incompatibility?”

“Dirty lawyer’s trick,” she said with a fake complaint in her voice and a smirk. “Are you really going to make me spill it first?”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “From the beginning of our time together in Wisconsin, you knew where I was coming from. You knew about my unusual work. And you knew that I consider myself on a mission from God. Now, you’re in law enforcement. You deal with the aftermath of evil. Me? Whatever I am, I deal with the genesis of evil, the kind that comes from another dimension.”

“Kooky, that’s for sure,” she said. “Your so-called ability to detect demons. Based on . . . let’s see, what was it? . . . Oh yeah, catching their smell. You realize, don’t you, there are psychological explanations for that.”

It sounded pretty crazy the way she put it. “Yes,” I said. “The scent, that’s the way it started. At least at first. But maybe it’s changing.”

“You mean, now it’s different? You don’t have to smell them to see them?” More sarcasm in her voice.

I was thinking back to the incident the night before, on the beach. Seeing one of the monsters, but that time, minus the burning scent of rot and death.

“Look,” I said, “the technical details of my ability, that’s not important. What is important is about us. Maybe in one way, what you and I do in terms of stopping evildoers, we’re not that different. But I’ve had a soul shake-up. A complete spiritual realignment. And in that, we are different.”

“Different is . . . ,” she began, then let her voice trail off.

“Different is fine for a vacation,” I filled in, “but not for a lifetime.”

She blew on her cup of coffee to cool it down. “Nice closing argument.”

“Not a fun case to argue,” I said. “But then, I didn’t pick this case. It picked me.”

Ashley changed the subject and asked me about Heather. I was frank about the problems we were having. But I told her that I would never give up on my daughter.

Ashley took a sip of coffee. “She’ll come around.” She stood and stepped over to me, cup in hand, and planted a kiss on my forehead. As she stepped away, she said, exhaling, “Aw, crap. I don’t mind breakups with the bad boys. But it’s tough when it’s a good guy.”

An hour later, Ashley announced that she had booked an earlier flight out of Norfolk, just across the border in Virginia, departing late afternoon, and that she would have to leave shortly.

When she was behind the wheel of her rental car, window down, I leaned in to face her. I was trying to come up with something snappy or profound or tender to say. But it didn’t come. I was wordless.

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” Ashley said, breaking the silence. “It’s painted all over your face. This isn’t your fault. You don’t owe me a thing. And by the way, you’ve given me a lot.”

She turned on the ignition and added, “Besides, I’m sure this isn’t the last time we’ll be talking. You’ll be calling me up with some outrageous favor I’m supposed to do for you. Some police intelligence you need. So you can break another case. So you can call another nasty murder the work of the devil. And who knows? Maybe it will be.”

I asked, “Will you answer when I make that call?”

“We’ll see,” she said. Seconds later, I saw her taillights heading away from me, down the sandy road.

When Ashley left, Heather didn’t bother to ask me why. She hit me with her own theory. “I know what happened,” she said. “It’s all that ‘I’m crazy for Christ’ stuff you’re into and Ashley’s not. All that ‘The devil made the homicidal maniac do it’ stuff. And that is really too bad, Trevor. I liked Ashley a lot.”

I listened but didn’t go into debating mode.

For the rest of the morning I took Heather out for a boat ride, cruising around Ocracoke Island. I gave her some of the local lore about the island’s most famous figure, Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, the eighteenth-century pirate, who scuttled ships and looted and murdered around those waters until he was finally hunted down by the English navy and killed not far from my place on the island.

She seemed interested. We kept the conversation light and breezy and off the personal topics, eating sandwiches out of my cooler as I motored my forty-footer. Heather was still keeping things at arm’s length. I had concluded it was going to be a marathon rather than a fifty-yard dash between us.

But my mind turned to other matters when we got back to the cottage and I found a voice message waiting on my cell phone. The call was from a young man named Kevin Sanders. He said he was a law clerk calling for his boss, a New Orleans lawyer by the name of Morgan Canterelle.

But when I returned the call, I was greeted by a message on the other end. While the voice sounded like the Kevin Sanders I’d just listened to, the message on his answering service began with a surprisingly freaky intro: “Hello, and welcome to Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo.”