Page 24 of Gumbo, Ghosts, and Deadly Deception (A Midnight House Mystery #1)

"I have interesting news. Can you meet me at the studio? There's something you need to hear."

What I was hearing was Hollis going upstairs to Room Three to help Abigail.

“I’ll leave now.”

I drove to Maggie's studio in the Bywater. She was waiting for me with her laptop open and a grim expression on her face.

"Remember that audio file you sent yourself from Delia's phone?" she said.

I felt heat creep up my neck. "Of course."

"Did you tell Hollis about it?"

“Yes, he knows about it. I’m surprised he didn’t arrest me for tampering with evidence. Which he probably should. It was very impulsive on my part. He didn’t tell me much about it though."

"Well, you need to hear what I found." She pulled up an audio program on her laptop. "The recording was longer than you realized. There's stuff about ten minutes in."

She hit play. For a moment, there was only the hiss of dead air. Then, faintly, voices emerged from the background noise.

"...told you to stay away..."

"...all these years and now you want to destroy everything..."

I leaned closer to the laptop speakers, straining to make out the words. The voices were muffled, distorted, but I thought they were male.

"I can make out two different speakers," Maggie said. "But I can't tell who they are. The audio quality is too poor."

"Can you clean it up? Make it clearer?"

"I've been working on it all morning. Listen to this."

She played another section, this one processed through multiple filters. The voices were clearer now, though still not perfectly intelligible.

"...was supposed to disappear..."

"...forty years. Forty years I've kept this quiet..."

Now I wasn’t even sure if it was two men. “Is that second voice a woman or a man?”

"I’m not sure. Does that sound like anyone we know? Father Claude, maybe?”

"That doesn't make sense. If Father Claude was involved, why would Delia have recorded him? She would have been confronting her killer."

"Unless she didn't know she was being recorded. This could have been an accidental capture, background conversation picked up by the phone."

I sank into a chair, trying to process what I was hearing. "Play it again."

This time, I focused on the rhythm of the voices, the inflections. The first voice—the one that had said "told you to stay away"—was definitely older. “I guess it could be Claude, but I can’t say for sure. It’s too brief of a clip and there’s nothing noteworthy about the voice at all.”

The second voice was younger, more authoritative. Familiar in a way that made my skin crawl, though I couldn't place it.

"...but we had an understanding..."

"...too risky now. She knows too much..."

"...I’m not going to be a part of this..."

"Oh my God," I whispered. "Maggie, they're talking about killing her. This was recorded before she died."

"Or during. The timestamp shows this conversation happened around 8:30 PM. This was before the séance."

I felt sick. Strangers had been in my house while we'd been sitting in my parlor, holding hands and calling to spirits.

Murderers had been in my house. Obviously, I had known that, but this was a terrible reminder that they’d been wandering my hallways upstairs and I'd been completely oblivious.

"We have to take this to Hollis," I said.

"Agreed. But Harper..." Maggie hesitated. "There's something else. I ran voice analysis software on both speakers. The older voice has vocal patterns consistent with Claude's speech. I compared it to that interview he did on WDSU last year about religious extremism."

And here I’d gone and apologized to that man. He’d made me feel terrible and doubt my own instincts. What a jerk. But I suppose most killers would be considered jerks. "What about the other voice?"

"That's the problem. The software flagged it as familiar, but I can't match it to anyone in my database." She turned the laptop toward me. "But listen to this part one more time. It’s definitely a New Orleans native."

She played the clearest section again: "...forty years. Forty years we've kept this quiet..."

This time, I heard it. The slight New Orleans drawl, the particular way he pronounced "years." The voice definitely seemed familiar. Or maybe just an authority figure?

"It sounds like a politician or something."

"That's what I was thinking too. The cadence, the way he talks. Like a guy used to giving speeches."

We stared at each other across the table.

“But he’s also the one who says he isn’t going to do this. He sounds like he draws the line at murder, which I give him props for,” Maggie said.

“Well, who could have been in the house that night? I realize there were a lot of people in and out and someone definitely could have slipped upstairs at some point, but two men? I feel like they were supposed to be here, you know or we would have noticed them.”

Nothing could convince me that it was Pete from Houston by way of Pittsburgh originally.

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think someone got up the back stairs without us noticing. But who were your other male guests?”

“Just the dad from Houston and Arthur.” Then it hit me. “Is that Arthur’s voice? The first one?”

Maggie sat straight up. “It could be. Maybe that isn’t Claude at all. But Arthur.”

Goosebumps raced up my arms. “Arthur was in the garden this morning. Staring at the tree. He runs in paranormal circles. He had the means and opportunity.”

“He could have been the one who tied up Abigail.”

“And mugged me in the French Quarter.”

“We need to call Hollis.”