Almost as much as admitting she was the woman he loved, even if he had only admitted it to himself.
Later, when the older adults had gone to bed, Susan turned to him, her gaze sharp. “So tell me what on earth is going on, that I had to come here and help out.”
Sam had to battle back some of the resentment he’d felt against his sister, who’d been living her own life while he’d been helping their parents in Phantom Bayou. He knew her absence wasn’t neglect—her new job wasn’t flexible—but logic didn’t matter when he was bearing the weight alone. She hadn’t seen the exhaustion in their mother’s face, felt their father’s frustration and temper as they negotiated his recovery.
But that wasn’t what Susan needed to know, not right now. She needed to know the new threat to her parents.
“Remember the ghosts in the bayou?” he began.
Susan’s expression slid through disbelief, into annoyance, and finally settled into wary doubt.
He laid it out piece by piece—how their mother had always been drawn to the ghosts, how she’d turned away from it because of their father’s pleading, and how it had all come back since Erielle’s return. He explained the Benoit house, its history of haunting, and their mother’s determination to get her hands on the journal—her certainty that its contents could heal their father.
Susan’s brow furrowed, but she didn’t interrupt. Sam searched her face for flickers of memory—had she ever seen Millicent? Heard whispers during those childhood nights spent with Erielle? But her expression remained unreadable.
He pressed on, describing the journal, the red book, their mother’s insistence, and finally, the thing that still haunted him, and always would—the church.
He stopped short at what he himself had taken part in this morning, and what he saw happen to Erielle.
“So Mom’s here to…what?”
“Dad wanted to get her away from the bayou, away from the temptation of returning to magic, I guess you’d call it.”
“Witchcraft,” Susan murmured. “Our mother. Who would have guessed?”
Sam let out a dry chuckle. “It was sure the last thing I thought I’d be dealing with when I came home.”
Susan stood and walked over to the bar cart her grandparents that had sat under the window as long as Sam could remember. She poured each of them a tumbler of whiskey from the crystal decanter and carried one to her brother. He let the glass rest on his knee, not ready to numb his brain just yet.
“What else aren’t you telling me? You said the Benoit house was haunted, but you didn’t tell me what ended up happening.”
Right, because he’d been focusing on how all this affected their mother, not Erielle. Not him. He rubbed his thumb between his eyebrows, finding himself unable to look at her. She and Erielle had been friends, after all.
“So when Erielle came back, I was helping her out. Like, she was all by herself, didn’t have anyone.”
“Mom told me,” Susan murmured. “I’m sorry for her, but she did put a lot of people off.”
“She’s independent to a fault,” Sam said. “You remember how her parents were.”
Susan nodded reluctantly. “Right, but I’m saying she pushed people away. Me, for one.”
He remembered how heartbroken his sister had been, the summer after Erielle’s parents had come to get her, the summer he’d turned them in for sneaking off to the party. He’d felt guilty, even though he’d known it was the right call to protect the girls.
“She was probably mad at me, in trouble with her parents. I’m sure she missed you as much as you missed her.”
Susan made a doubtful hum. “Go on. You helped her.”
“She didn’t want me to help her. She was still mad at me for getting her sent home. But she couldn’t do all this on her own. The house had been empty a while, and it was in bad shape. And working out at Rumrunners, you know, I was worried she might not get home safe. So I hung out while she worked, then came by the house in the mornings to help.”
“Protective big brother mode,” Susan said.
“Ah, well.” He looked down at his hands folded in front of him. “Not the big brother part.”
Susan’s eyebrows rose and humor lit her amber eyes. “Mom may have mentioned that part too.”
“I wasn’t sure if she knew. But I’d catch Erielle sleeping in the back seat of her car, and…she finally told me she was hearing voices, seeing things move around, stuff like that. So I spent the night and…you know the legend of that house, right?”
“The woman who killed her kids?”
