She dropped the key through the mail slot and heard it ping on the tile entryway, then dashed back to her car and rounded the block to her own home. Two cop cars were still parked in front of Mrs. Pearson’s house, but officers were getting into one of the cars as she parked. The officers from the second car were nowhere in sight, so Emma assumed they were still inside.

She hurried to the front door and let herself in, determined to get in and out before the cops left. She practically ran up the stairs to the bedroom and pulled open her nightstand. A single folder inside contained all her important documents. She’d always meant to rent a safe-deposit box for the items, but had never gotten around to it. A quick check determined that her Social Security card, birth certificate, and passport were inside. She placed the folder on the nightstand and pulled out a velvet-covered ring box. Her mother’s wedding ring glittered inside. She slipped the box in her pocket and grabbed the folder.

Three blind mice. Three blind mice.

The whistling came from the doorway behind her.

Her breath caught in her throat and pain rocketed through her chest as if she’d been shot. It wasn’t possible. The police were right outside. He wouldn’t risk coming after her here. Not now.

The whistling stopped. “I knew you’d come home again.”

Emma whirled around and gasped.

Three blind mice.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Shaye slowed to a stop and studied the rudimentary drawing Sissy had made for her. The problem she’d run into was that swamp roads weren’t clearly marked. Instead, Sissy had indicated places to turn with landmarks like “tree split by lightning.” A decade ago, those directions might have been stellar, but years of Gulf weather had made some of them a challenge to spot. She’d already encountered two dead ends and was about to turn around again.

Traipsing around the swamp with a paper drawing was a huge departure from GPS and Google Maps. But even if Hamet roads were visible on a satellite rendering, her phone service had been fading in and out ever since she left the highway.

Her phone buzzed and she saw it was a message from Emma.

Returning to my house to get passport, social security card, and my mother’s wedding rings and to drop off house key to Patty. Police are still there.

Shaye frowned. She would have preferred if Emma had driven straight to the interstate and headed the opposite direction from her house, but if the police were still out front, then she would be all right. Ron wouldn’t be foolish enough to turn up at his own murder scene, not in broad daylight.

Be careful.

She typed the message and hit Send, then sighed when service dropped again and the message remained unsent.

She put her SUV in reverse and tried one more time to locate three cypress trees at an intersection that formed a triangle. This was the last road, and it was proving to be the most elusive. After another ten minutes of driving around, she was almost ready to give up when she spotted two trees and what was left of a third to her right. She wheeled her SUV down the road and stopped to inspect the trees. It could be the set Sissy was talking about.

What the hell. She guided the SUV onto the dirt path. Worst case, she’d be turning around again. The path was filled with big holes, forcing her to inch along. The alternative would have been bouncing in and out of them so hard that it might cause physical damage, to her and the SUV. The brush on the side of the path grew closer and more dense until she could hear it scratching the outside of the truck.

The trees grew together overhead, forming a canopy over the path, and the farther she drove, the less light streamed through until it seemed more like dusk than afternoon. The tree limbs got lower and lower until she could hear moss running across the top of her SUV. Her headlights came on and she lifted her foot from the accelerator, slowing down to a crawl. The path was overgrown, but not so much that it appeared untraveled. If Helen had left when Jonathon did, someone had continued to come here afterward, at least for some time. Maybe not often, but often enough to keep the path from becoming completely grown over.

None of that did anything to diminish the creepiness of it all. The dark, mostly overgrown path with a canopy of trees and hanging moss looked like something out of a horror movie. The path made a sharp right and she guided the SUV around the corner, then slammed on the brakes as a shack appeared right in front of her. The SUV lurched and stopped only inches from the front porch.

If the path had looked like something out of a horror movie, the shack held the starring role. It was constructed of wood and tin. The wood was gray and rotting, the entire structure sagging on the right side. The tin was rusted and Shaye could see holes in the sheets that made up the roof.

The overwhelming desire to put her SUV in reverse and get the hell out of there washed over Shaye like a tidal wave. Sissy had been born in the swamps and held some old beliefs about haunts and such. Shaye didn’t tend toward fanciful beliefs, but she couldn’t argue with Sissy on this one. The house felt wrong. Oppressive.

Nothing good had happened here.

Given its condition, no one was living there, so a look around wouldn’t hurt. If Helen was the last to live here, maybe there was a family photo left behind, something concrete she could show to Emma when she explained her mysterious husband’s past. She reached for her purse and pulled out her nine-millimeter. The house may be devoid of people, but that didn’t mean swamp creatures hadn’t taken up residence, and many of them could be deadly, especially if they felt their home was threatened.

She left her headlights on, hoping to cast some light into the dark shack, but still grabbed her flashlight out of the glove box. She carefully chose her first step onto the dilapidated front porch. One wrong selection, and she’d go straight through to the ground. It wasn’t the drop that concerned her, but the thought of rusty nails piercing her skin. There was a time in her life when she slathered on Neosporin like most women did body lotion. She had no desire to revisit that.

She paused in front of the windows to peer inside, but the grime on the glass prevented almost all of the glow from her headlights from entering the structure. In the dim light, it was difficult to make out anything inside except shadows. At least none of the shadows were moving. She continued to the door and found it contained no lock or even a doorknob. She pushed it open and stepped inside.

The front of the shack was one room that, based on the remnants of furniture, served as kitchen, living, and dining. The cooking area consisted of a single counter with rusted cook plate and broken dishes. Next to the counter, a lantern with a busted globe sat on top of an ice chest. No electricity. Not really surprising. A lot of the remote bayou houses lived without running water or electricity.

A tiny table was collapsed on the floor in front of the counter, its wooden legs rotted in two. A faded couch sat on the wall opposite the counter, its stuffing pulled out of the cushions and tucked into the corners in round bowls that looked out of place with the rest of the random chaos. Shaye hoped that whatever lived there had since moved on to nicer quarters.

The entire room couldn’t have been more than two hundred square feet. One door stood on the interior wall, probably leading to the bedrooms. Given the remote location, a bathroom was probably a stretch. She lifted her gun up in ready position and approached the door.