“Your cold case.”
He glanced away. “We discussed it.”
“Not that much.”
“If not that then what?”
“Your victim told me.”
“That’s—” His lips tightened; he still refused to look at me.
“Crazy. I know. But he did.”
“Why would he tell you?”
“Because he could. I saw him. Heard him.”
At last he met my gaze, his both curious and wary. “Here?”
I nodded.
“Why would he be here?”
“He is—was—attached to you.” At his obvious confusion, I continued. “Some ghosts attach to a person. Some to a place—like Stafford.”
“Why?”
“Unfinished business. Either the ghost’s or the person they follow.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Excessive grief or guilt over a death by the living can keep the spirit from moving on.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “You know an awful lot about ghosts.”
“Been seeing them all my life.” I still didn’t know as much about them as I should, but I did know more than most.
His expression closed. The air around him seemed to chill. I could tell he wanted to say Bullshit, but he didn’t.
“You said was.”
I lifted my brows.
“The hotel victim was attached to me.”
“Once you discovered how he was killed, he went on.”
“Where?”
“Wherever ghosts go.”
“You don’t know?”
“Once they go, they don’t come back and share.”
“Why would some guy I didn’t know follow me around?”
“Maybe the same reason they are.” I indicated the man and woman who materialized near Bobby every once in a while. I hadn’t seen them often since that first time at my father’s house, but I had seen them.
“There are more?”
“An older woman. African American. Graying Afro.”
“Hey!” the woman in question exclaimed.
“Sorry,” I said. It was gray. Always would be. “Beautiful hands. Very tall.”
“My name is—” the woman began.
“Geraldine Hervieux,” Bobby murmured.
“Oui.” Geraldine’s face softened. She set her hand on his shoulder. “He has never given up on finding me.”
“She disappeared,” he continued. “It was one of my last cases in missing persons before I transferred to homicide. Her daughter still comes in every month to make sure I keep searching.”
“You would anyway.”
“Yeah, I would.”
“I’m in the Honey Island Swamp,” Geraldine said.
“She’s in the Honey Island Swamp.”
Bobby closed his eyes. “That’s seventy thousand acres of land and a million alligators. Literally. I’ll never find her.”
The woman stroked his hair. “He doesn’t need to find me; he needs to let me go.”
“She wants you to let her go.”
His eyes opened. “I can’t let go what I don’t have.”
“He continually thinks about my case, reads the file, dreams about it. I could be at peace if he would be.”
I told him what she had said.
“If I just knew who killed her…”
“No one killed me. I went to gather wild iris for my daughter’s birthday. She loves them. A gator got me.”
“You didn’t tell anyone you were going there?” I asked.
She shook her head. “More fool me.”
“What?” Bobby asked.
“A gator got her while she was gathering wild iris for her daughter.”
“I’m supposed to tell her daughter that? I can’t prove it. And the poor woman would—” Bobby made an aggravated sound and stood, paced a few steps away, then came back. “This is ridiculous. You aren’t talking to Geraldine.”
“How would I know what she looks like if I wasn’t talking to her?”
“People like you have your ways. It’s easy enough to search the Times Picayune for my cases.”
He was right. I’d even done so.
“People like me,” I echoed. “Those liars, thieves, and charlatans? Why do you hate them so?”
He gave me a wary glance, then his shoulders dropped on a sigh. “Audrey sold jewelry and drugs. Some of her pals sold lies.”
“How can someone sell lies?”
“Fortune-tellers. Psychics. They have all sorts of methods to find out information about people. Once a fool believes they have a connection to the great beyond, he’d give anything, everything, for that connection. For one more second of a loved one’s presence. A single word. For anything that might make the pain—” His voice broke.
“Oh, Bobby,” I whispered. He shot me a glance that very clearly said drop it. I wasn’t sure I could.
He might have been duped and lied to by another, but I was who I was. While I’d spent my life trying not to be, I knew now I had little choice. I was a witch born, and a witch I would stay.
“Leave him be, cher,” Geraldine said. “You can’t make him see. He has to want to.”