Jack jerked awake, bolting against the cluttered mahogany desk, throwing his head back away from the black Underwood manual typewriter that had served as pillow for the last-what? hour? two? three? He looked around, blinking against the buttery light that filtered down through the canopy of live oak and through the sheer lace curtains at the window. He rubbed his hands over his lean face and cleared his throat, grimacing at the taste of stale beer coating his mouth. With his fingers he combed back his straight black hair, which was too thick and too long for south Louisiana this time of year.

The old ormolu clock on the bedroom mantel ticked loudly and relentlessly, drawing a narrow glare. Eleven-thirty. The respectable folk of Bayou Breaux had been up and industrious for hours. Jack had no memory of coming home. It might have been midnight. It might have been dawn when he had stumbled across the threshold of the old house the locals called L'Amour. He cast a speculative look at the heavy four-poster bed with its drape of baire carelessly stuffed behind the carved headboard. There might have been a woman dozing among the rumpled sheets. He had a vague memory of a woman… big blue eyes and an angel's face… fire and fragility…

There wasn't a woman in his bed, which was just as well. He was in no mood for morning-after rhetoric. His head felt as though someone had smashed it with a mallet.

The last thing he remembered was Leonce's leading him away from Frenchie's. He might have gone anywhere, done anything after that. Pain jabbed his temples like twin ice picks as he tried to remember. Funny, he thought, his mouth twisting at the irony, he drank to forget. Why couldn't he just leave it at that?

"Because you're perverse, Jack," he mumbled, his voice a smoky rumble, made more hoarse than usual by a night of loud singing in a room where ninety percent of the people were chain smokers.

He pushed himself up out of the creaking old desk chair, his body doing some creaking and groaning of its own after God knew how many hours in a sitting position. He stretched with all the grace of a big lean cat, scratched his flat bare belly, noted that the top button on his faded jeans was undone but left it that way.

The page in the typewriter caught his eye, and he pulled it out and studied it, frowning darkly at the words that must have seemed like gems at the time he had pounded them out.

She tries to scream as she runs, but her lungs are on fire and working like a bellows. Only pathetic yipping sounds issue from her throat, and they are a waste of precious energy. Tears blur her vision, and she tries to blink them back, to swipe them back with her hand, to swallow the knot of them clogging her throat as she runs on through the dense growth.

Moonlight barely filters down through the canopy of trees. The light is surreal, nightmarish. Branches lash at her, cutting her face, her arms. Her toes stub and catch on the roots of the oak and hackberry trees that grow along the soft, damp earth, and she stumbls headlong, twisting her head around to see how near death is behind her.

Too near. Too calm. Too deliberate. Her heart pounds hard enough to burst.

She scrambles backward, trying to get her legs under her. Her hands clutch at roots and dead leaves. Her fingers close on the thick, muscular body of a snake, and she screams as she tries to escape the triangular head and flashing fangs that strike at her. The stench of the swamp fills her head as the copper taste of fear coats her mouth. And death looms nearer. Relentless. Ruthless. Evil. Smiling…

Crap. Nothing but crap. With a sound of disgust Jack crumpled the page and hurled it in the general direction of the wastebasket-an old Chinese urn that may well have been worth a small fortune. He didn't know, didn't care. He had stumbled across it in the attic, buried under a decade's worth of discarded, moth-eaten clothing. Apparently it had been there some time, as it was a third full of the dead, decaying, and skeletal remains of mice that had fallen into it over the years and been unable to get out.

Jack owned antiques because the old decrepit house had come with them, not because he was culturally sophisticated or a conspicuous consumer or particularly appreciative of fine things. Material things had become irrelevant to him since Evie's death. His perspective of the world had shifted radically downhill. Another irony. For most of his thirty-five years he had fought tooth and nail to achieve a status where he could own "things." Now he was there and no longer gave a damn.

"Dieu," he whispered, shaking his head and wincing at the pain, "old Blackie must be sittin' in Hell laughin' at that."

Bon à rien, tu, 'tit souris. Good for nothin', pas de bétises!

The voice came to him out of the past, out of his childhood. A voice from beyond the grave. He flinched at the memory of that voice. A conditioned response, even after all this time. Often enough a slurred line from Blackie Boudreaux had been followed up with a back-hand across the mouth.

Jack pulled open the French doors and leaned against the frame, the smooth white paint cool against the bare skin of his shoulder. His eyes drifted shut as he breathed in the sweet green scent of boxwood, the fragrant perfume of magnolia and wisteria and a dozen other blooming plants. And beneath that heady incense lay the dark, insidious aroma of the bayou-a mixture of fertility and decay and fish. The scents, the caress of the hot breeze against his face, the chorus of birdsong instantly transported him back in time.

He saw himself at nine, small and skinny, barefoot and dirty-faced, running like a thief from the tar-paper shack that was home. Running from his father, running to escape into the swamp, his bare feet slapping on the worn dirt path.

In the swamp he could be anyone, do anything. There were no boundaries, no standards to fall short of. He could conquer an island, become king of the alligators, be a notorious criminal on the run. On the run for killing his father, which he would have done if he had been bigger and stronger…

"Shit," he muttered, stepping back into the bedroom.

He left the doors open and shuffled toward the bathroom some previous forward-thinking owner of L'Amour had converted from a dressing room back in the twenties. It still "boasted" the original white porcelain fixtures and tile. Not much of a boast, considering all were dingy with age, cracked, and chipped. Fortunately, Jack's only prerequisite was that they work.

With the flick of a switch the boom box sitting on the back of the old toilet came to life, belting out the bluesy, bouncy Zydeco sound of Zachary Richard-"Ma Petite Fille Est Gone." Despite the fact that it jarred his aching head, Jack automatically moved with the beat as he filled the sink with cold water. The music defied stillness with its relentless bass rhythm and hot accordion and guitar licks.

Gulping a big breath, he bent over at the waist and stuck his head in the basin, coming up a minute later cursing in French and shaking himself like a wet dog. He gave himself a long, critical look in the mirror, debating the merits of shaving as water dripped off the end of his aquiline nose. He looked tough and mean in his current state, a look he didn't let many people see. The gang down at Frenchie's knew Jack the Party Animal. Jack with the ready grin. Jack the lady's man. They didn't know this Jack except through his books, and it amazed them that the Jack Boudreaux who was touted by the publishing world as the "New Master of the Macabre" was their Jack.

He sniffed and tipped his head to one side, a wry half smile curving his mouth. "Pas du tout, mon ami," he murmured. "Pas du tout."

As he reached for his toothbrush, the music on the radio was cut short in midchorus.

"This just in," the deejay said, his usually jovial tone stretched taut and flat by the gravity of the news. "KJUN news has just learned of another apparent victim of the Bayou Strangler. This morning, at approximately seven o'clock, two fishermen in the Bayou Chene area in St. Martin Parish discovered the body of an unidentified young woman. Though authorities have yet to release a statement, reliable sources on the scene have confirmed the similarities between this death and three others that have occurred in south Louisiana in the past eighteen months. The body of the last victim, Sheryl Lynn Carmouche, of Loreauville, was discovered-"

Jack reached over and hit the tape button. Instantly the frantic fiddle music of Michael Doucet whined through the speakers, snapping the tension, drowning out the grim news. He'd had enough grimness to last him. He had a stock stored up, ready to be called upon and brought down on his head like a ton of bricks any- time he wanted. He didn't care to bring in more from outside sources.

Don't get involved. That was his motto. That and the traditional Cajun war cry-laissez le bon temps rouler. He didn't want to hear about dead girls from Loreauville. He couldn't give Sheryl Lynn Carmouche her life back. He could only live his own, and he intended to do just that, starting with a big shrimp po'boy and a bottle of something cold down at the Landing.

Sweat trickled between Laurel 's breasts as she knelt in the freshly turned earth. It beaded on her forehead, and one drop rolled down toward her nose. She reached up with a dirty gloved hand and wiped it away, leaving a smear of mud.

No one would have spotted her for a once-aggressive attorney-a fact that suited her just fine. She wanted to lose herself in mindless manual labor, thinking of nothing but simple physical tasks like turning soil and planting flowers. She suspected she would appear to have bathed in dirt by the time she finished her work in the courtyard. There were worse things to become immersed in.

She poked at the root of a new azalea bush with a small hand spade, mixing in the special compost Bud Landry at the nursery had sent home with her-his own secret blend of God-knew-what that would grow anything, "guar-un-teed."

She spent most of the morning sweeping up yesterday's carnage and supervising the hanging of a new gate at the back of the courtyard. Not pausing for more than a sip of the iced tea Mama Pearl brought out for her, she swept and raked and piled. She then hauled the mess, one load at a time, to the edge of the small open field that lay to the east of Aunt Caroline's property, where she piled all the debris of her first two days' work, and would burn it all before it could become a haven to snakes and rodents.

She made a mental note to call city hall and check to see if she would need a permit. No one in Bayou Breaux had ever been much on that kind of formality, but times changed. She hadn't lived here in a lot of years. For all she knew the place could have been taken over by yuppies on the run from suburban life. Or the Junior League might have decided environmentalism was in vogue-so long as it didn't interfere with their husbands' businesses. Laurel could well imagine her mother leading the crusade against common folk burning brush while Ross Leighton polluted the bayou with chemicals intended to keep his cane crop money-green and safe from insects.