RABBI BEN-AMICHAI HADadvised selling the house, but Eve and Joe saw no harm in trying a less drastic measure. They would ask Ken to bore a hole through the bedroom wall. If that didn’t appease the shedim, they would sell, probably at a loss, but they would have no choice.

Joe said, only half joking, “We’d have to ask the rabbi if we’re obligated to tell the broker about the shedim.”

In the morning Joe would drive Eve to her parents’ home, where she would stay until Ken made the hole and the rabbi determined that the house was safe for Eve.

“I can take you now,” Joe said. “I don’t want you to suffer through one more night of voices and nightmares.”

Eve said, “Tomorrow is fine, Joe. Now that I know what’s going on, I’m not scared.”

Joe bought dinner from Cambridge Farms: sushi, Eve’s favorite saffron rice with cranberries, grilled steak. Eve, feeling better than she had in weeks, was ravenous. Later Joe murmured, “You and me forever, babe,” and she fell asleep in his arms.

Eve dreamed. She was in a long narrow room filled with Hebrew texts and men wrapped in prayer shawls. A shul. She saw a white-haired man with a long white beard sitting on a bench at a table piled with open texts. He was so familiar, who—

Rabbi Ben-Amichai.

A man approached the rabbi, his back to Eve. He shook the rabbi’s hand and sat across from him. The two talked. Eve heard the man say, “. . . at my wits’ end, Rabbi . . . need your help.” The rabbi raised his hands, palms up. The man leaned forward and continued. Eve couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she sensed the urgency in the hunch of his shoulders, saw the rabbi’s responding sigh. The rabbi said, “I cannot promise, but I will try.” The men shook hands again across the table. Then the man turned and Eve knew before she saw his face that it was Joe. She watched as Joe, crossing the room, greeted her father and brought him to the rabbi’s table.

The image shifted to the cemetery. Eve saw her parents and Joe’s, crying at her gravesite. She saw Joe and the brown-haired woman stealing glances, their hands touching. “. . . everyone knows she was crazy, Joe, don’t blame yourself.”Rabbi Ben-Amichai was standing to the side, his white head raised toward the sky, his faced etched with grief, tears streaming from his dark brown eyes as he beat his chest with a clenched fist.

Then the voices, the rabbi’s among them: Leave, leave, leave.Not a whisper, no, a cry.

Joe had fooled the rabbi. He had almost fooled Eve. “I don’t believe in thisshedim stuff, do you, babe? We’ll make the hole through the wall, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll sell.”

All to get her out of the house.

Eve woke with a start and blinked her eyes open. Her heart was beating so rapidly she was sure Joe heard. She gazed at Joe, lying on his back, asleep.

Lover or traitor?

And howwould she die? Would she take her own life, driven mad by the voices and dreams and despair? Or would Joe lose patience? Would he poison her? Drug her? Smother her with a pillow as he leaned in for a final kiss?

Shedimlied.

Shedimlied, Eve reminded herself. The rabbi had said so. Shedimlied. Shedimlied.

Were they urging her to leave, showing her a future they hoped she would avoid? Or were they laughing at her with malicious glee, trying to shatter her newfound faith in Joe?

How could Eve know what was truth and what was fabrication?

Lover or traitor?

Careful not to wake Joe, Eve slid off the bed. She tiptoed down the hall to the kitchen. She eased open a drawer.

She would never leave, never, unless she was taken out feet first, and then she wouldn’t go alone, oh no.

She loved Joe so much. She really did.

Eve lay on her back, the knife tucked under her thigh, sharp against her skin.

There it was—that stench of stale blood again.

DeFeo Montville stood and stared at the desecration of his family’s handsome temple tomb, set almost dead center in the peace and beauty of the cemetery—this “city of the dead” where some of the finest names to ever grace Louisiana found their rest. Even in a cemetery where the dead rested in style, the Montville vault was a thing of sheer grandeur. The façade was pillared and porticoed, a gloriously winged and weeping angel sat atop the vaulted roof, and a cast-iron gate opened to the small altar area that separated the rows of the family’s individual tombs.

Naturally, the gate was kept locked.

But that didn’t stop hooligans from their graffiti and vandalism.

He inhaled. Pig’s blood, he thought. And he knew how it had come to be there, or he was almost certain that he knew. Austin Cramer.

Cramer was the self-proclaimed god of a so-called voodoo-vampire cult, though what the man didn’t seem to know about the contemporary American practice of voodoo would surely fill enough volumes to cross the ocean. He was a dropout, but a dropout who had a way with women, motorcycles, and oration. He rode a Harley and wore black at all times; maintained a head full of sleek, pitch-black hair; and had the look. He wanted the world to think of him as a New Age Aleister Crowley—in his mansion in the Garden District, he had collected a harem of Cramerworshipping girls and, of course, a following of young men who wanted to be just like Cramer, or to have young women worshipping them—as they did Cramer. As far as DeFeo knew, the jerk and his friends were just into girls, unlike the real Crowley, who would sleep with just about anyone—or anything.

He called himself the Father of the Brotherhood, and he preached a lifestyle that wasn’t exactly Satanism, but something like it. Cramer had borrowed from Crowley and, DeFeo was fairly certain, from the religious view of demonology during the days of the witch burnings.

And, of course, because DeFeo’s ancestor, Antoine Montville, had been suspected of Satanism during his day (a complete lie!), Cramer—a man he could just tellhad been a nerdy-brat-turned-cult-master—liked to bring his acolytes to the cemetery, perform a sacrifice ritual, and cast blood over the tomb. They snuck in and carried out their ridiculous rites when he was working, which meant he was going to have to be working a case in the area if there was any hope of catching the little bastard and his crew. He had long ago gotten his license and hung up his shingle as a private investigator; it kept him friendly with the police. He liked the fellows in this district, but he knew, too, that they were busy with gangs, robberies, and other cases of violent crime. They’d do their best, but they couldn’t just hang around the cemetery watching for a vandal.

DeFeo shook his head, turned to the bucket of water and soap he’d brought, and started cleaning. Eventually, workers would have come in to do the chore; he wouldn’t wait for “eventually.” He finished cleaning the tomb and decided to head down to Frenchmen Street, hope a real jazz band was playing somewhere, and try to drink some of his aggravation down. There were some interesting things going on in the city, but for now, he’d take a night off, look forward to some enjoyment, and calm his simmering inner rage against a petty—idiot.

He parked on Esplanade and walked down Decatur until he reached his favorite little pub, a place called Your Favorite Pub on Frenchmen. Before he had even taken his seat on a stool at the bar, Joe, the owner, had a drink in front of him. “It’s a DeFeo special,” Joe told him, but he wasn’t jocular, he was grim.

“Thanks, Joe. Anyone singing tonight?”

Joe seemed surprised and perplexed by his question, but he answered.

“A lady named Regina Hansen; she’s got one of the best blues voices I’ve heard in my day.”