Page 88 of Girl Between

“Collecting my belongings wouldn’t exactly be my first priority if I was running for my life. Was she ever questioned about any missing items?”

“Yeah. All right here in the report, though it’s not much help. Poor girl was so disoriented there’s quite a few holes and inconsistencies in her story. Only thing she made clear was that the Goode sisters abducted her and her friends, held them against their will while ranting about elemental sacrifice to appease the Gods.” George scrolled to another part of the report and read a line out loud from the victim statement report. “We begged them. We didn’t want to die, but they kept saying it over and over. It was time to cleanse. Our blood or the flood. Our blood or the flood.”

Dana looked at George, uneasiness surrounding her in the stillness of the bayou. She spoke, giving voice to what slumbered in the silence between them. “Katrina.”

George’s face hardened. “Thirteen days after Sloane Bridges wasfound, Hurricane Katrina decimated our city. If there was ever more evidence of what happened to the Harvest Girls, and the Goode sisters, it was washed away. After that, people ‘round here didn’t have the luxury to chase ghosts.”

“What about Abigale’s mother?”

“Alice? She was in Oregon when the girls were abducted. File says she left Louisiana when she was sixteen.”

“Sixteen? The same age as the Harvest Girls.”

“Also the same age she got her driver’s license,” George argued.

“Okay, but why Oregon? It’s about as far away from New Orleans as you can get without leaving the country.”

George shrugged. “Can ya blame her? I wouldn’t want to live out here if I didn’t have to.”

“I don’t know,” Dana replied. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

She couldn’t put her finger on it. She wasn’t sure if the Harvest Girls case had anything to do with the current murders, but she didn’t like the niggling feeling in the back of her mind. She couldn’t shake the notion that she was looking at different parts of the same equation. Right now, she couldn’t make them add up, but with the right clues, they would.

She just hadn’t found them yet.

“Maybe,” George replied. “Either way, this feels like a dead end. I don’t see anything to connect this case to our ongoing one.”

“I don’t see how we don’t connect them,” Dana argued. “All the victims are women, white, and met their demise in some sort of ritualistic, sacrificial way. They’re decades apart, but like Dr. Landry said, this might be a big city, but it operates like a small town. Someone knows something. We just need to knock on the right door.”

George didn’t look convinced. “Sometimes it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, but it’s a goose.”

“What?”

“I’m just saying, if you zoom out too far, you can’t see what’s right in front of you.”

“Which is?”

“The Harvest Girls case has been cold for twenty years. I’d ratherfocus on something that doesn’t come with two decades of urban legends. We have three fresh victims. I’m putting my manpower toward them.”

Dana shook her head. Was she really in the middle of the Louisiana bayou arguing the existence of witchcraft with a cop whose mother was a Voodoo priestess? If anyone should understand how practical magic was in this day and age it was George. “People flock to New Orleans because of its connection to the occult world. Ignore it and you ignore facts that could help you solve these murders.”

“I’m not ignoring anything,” George assured her. “I’m just focusing on the tangible facts. There aren’t any for the Harvest Girls. So, for now, they’ll have to stay ghosts.”

Dana sighed. “We should go back. I don’t want to be out here when the sun goes down.”

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the dark,” George teased.

“The dark? No. But alligators and swamp spiders are a different story.”

80

“What are you thinking?”George asked as Dana pensively watched him tie up the old airboat.

She sighed deeply. “Nothing you want to hear.”

He straightened, grinning at her. “Try me.”

“It’s more witchcraft theory.”