Read Chapter 30: All the Lost Girls

The body lay on the tarp like she was waiting for someone to sew her shut. Marie-Claire Broussard, one hundred and ninety-something years dead, looked younger than Elodie. The peat had done its work—skin the color of old leather, sure, but the face was all there. High cheekbones. A widow’s peak. The lace of her veil still caught the swamp light like morning mist.

Caleb knelt at the edge of the tarp, his knees sinking into the muck. He’d carried her up from the pirogue himself. He hadn’t let anyone help. His hands still smelled of her—sour and mineral, like a struck match held underwater.

Deputy Fontenot was throwing up behind a cypress. Sheriff LeBlanc just stood there, arms crossed, watching Caleb like he was the one who might bolt.

“You want to tell me again,” LeBlanc said, “how you found a corpse in a boat under a tree that wasn’t there yesterday.”

“I told you already.”

“Tell me again.”

Caleb looked at the sheriff. LeBlanc’s jaw was tight, but his eyes weren’t angry. They were scared. Good. Let him be scared.

“The ground opened,” Caleb said. “The tree came up. The boat was under it. She was in the boat.”

“And you just—pulled her out.”

“Someone had to.”

Elodie had her phone out again. She’d been shooting photos since the sheriff arrived, filling her camera roll with Marie-Claire’s face, the dress, the way the veil had tangled around her throat like a second strand of pearls. Now she lowered the phone and squatted down beside the body, close enough that her breath fogged the dead woman’s forehead.

“Check her ears,” Elodie said.

“What?”

“Her ears. The lobes.” She pointed. “See that notch on the left one?”

Caleb leaned in. Under the peat-dark skin, the lobe was split—a ragged tear that had healed long before death. A healed wound. A rupture that had never quite sealed right.

“The missing girls,” Elodie said. “Pictures are grainy. But a few of them, you can see it. Same notch. Same ear.”

“You’re saying this woman is one of the missing women.”

“I’m saying she might be several of them.”

LeBlanc made a sound like he’d been punched. “Don’t you start that voodoo bullshit with me, Broussard.”

“It’s not voodoo,” Elodie said. “It’s peat. The acid preserves tissue. Sometimes it tans the skin so thoroughly that later burials into the same bed—if the conditions are right—can merge. Adhere. I’m not saying this body is multiple women. I’m saying this body might contain traces of them. Layers. Like sediment.”

The sheriff stared at her. Caleb watched the word sediment land in his head and stick wrong.

“Where’s the ME?” LeBlanc asked.

“Twenty minutes out,” Fontenot called from behind the cypress, his voice thin.

But Caleb was already moving. The cypress that had come up—the one whose roots had clutched the pirogue like a fist—was still lying on its side, a forty-foot hulk of wood torn from the earth. The hole it left behind was a raw wound in the marsh, black water already seeping into it. And around the hole, visible in the cleft of the root ball, were bones.

Not one skeleton. Not two. A lattice of them, woven through the root system like rebar. Ribs curved around taproots. A femur angled through what had once been a knee joint. Skulls, three of them that he could count, tucked into the hollows where smaller roots had split.

“Sheriff,” Caleb said.

His voice was too calm. That was what LeBlanc took his cue from—not the word, but the flatness of it. The sheriff walked over and looked down into the root ball. He looked for a long time.

“Fontenot,” LeBlanc said. “Call Baton Rouge. Tell them we need a forensic anthropologist. Not the coroner. The whole team.”

Fontenot fumbled for his radio. LeBlanc turned back to Caleb, and this time his fear had an edge to it.

“How many do you think?” LeBlanc asked.

“I don’t know.” Caleb looked at the bones again. He started counting skulls. One, two, three, four. No—that was a hip. Five. Six. The roots had grown through them, around them, turning the dead into architecture. The tree had fed on them for two hundred years.

“Sixteen,” Elodie said. She was standing at the edge of the pit, her phone held out like a divining rod. “I counted the skulls in the photographs. Sixteen. But I think there’s more buried beneath the root ball itself. The tree was holding them up. When the ground split, it pulled them with it.”

“Sixteen women,” Caleb said.

“All born between 1784 and 1997,” Elodie said. “I can check the dates now. There were missing women in the parish records across those years. Every generation. One or two per.”

LeBlanc opened his mouth, closed it. He looked at Marie-Claire’s body on the tarp, then at the bones, then at the water seeping into the pit.

“We need to get them all out,” he said. “Before the water takes them again.”

The work was slow. The water was rising—that was the other thing. The swamp was flooding across the land like it had been waiting for permission. By the time the ME van arrived, the pit was half-full and they’d recovered eleven sets of remains. The other five were still in the root ball, which they’d have to cut apart with chainsaws to free.

Caleb was ankle-deep in black water, lifting a femur from the mud, when his phone buzzed. Elodie’s name. He wiped his hands on his pants and answered.

“Where are you?” she asked. Her voice was wrong. Too bright, too quick.

“Still at the tree. What’s happening?”

“I went back to the bunker. The one where they stored the peat samples.” He heard her breath catch. “Caleb. There’s a room I didn’t see. A hidden door behind the fertilizer shelves. It was locked but the lock was rusted.”

“What did you find?”

“Ava.”

The name hit him like a wave of cold water. Elodie’s sister. The one who’d gone missing four years ago. The one they’d all assumed was dead, swallowed up by the same swamp that took so many others.

“She’s alive,” Elodie said, and her voice cracked on the word. “She’s alive, Caleb. She’s cold but she’s breathing. There’s a heater running—an old kerosene heater, still going. And a dehumidifier. The room is dry. It’s been dry for years.”

Caleb didn’t remember running. He didn’t remember hanging up. He only remembered the dark of the tunnel tree, the ladder down into the bunker, the way Elodie’s flashlight shook as she led him into a room that smelled of kerosene and dust and something else—peat, sweet and acidic, like the inside of Marie-Claire’s boat.

Ava lay on a cot against the far wall. She was wrapped in blankets—old blankets, moth-eaten but clean. Her hair was gray. That was the first thing he noticed. She was twenty-nine, but her hair was gray, and her skin had the waxy paleness of someone who hadn’t seen sun in years. She was curled on her side, her knees drawn up.

She was breathing.

The medical examiner—a woman named Dr. Perrin—came down twenty minutes later. She knelt beside Ava, checked her pulse, her pupils, the temperature of her skin.

“She’s hypothermic, but not dangerously. She’s malnourished. No external wounds. No signs of trauma.” She looked at Ava’s face for a long moment. “She’s catatonic. Probably been like this for a long time. I’d guess years based on the muscle wasting.”

“Can she hear us?” Elodie asked. Her voice was small.

“Possibly.” Dr. Perrin touched Ava’s hand. “Sometimes they can. They just can’t respond.”

Elodie knelt beside her sister and took her hand. Ava’s fingers curled, almost imperceptibly, around Elodie’s. It might have been reflex. It might have been recognition.

Caleb watched. His cut had healed again—the one Marie-Claire had given him in the church pit. He could feel it beneath his shirt, the skin smooth, the flesh knit. He didn’t feel cold. He didn’t feel tired. He felt like the swamp had made an offer and he’d already accepted it.

By evening, the ME had finished the preliminary examination of the remains from the pit. Dr. Perrin pulled them aside—Caleb, Elodie, LeBlanc—and handed over a printout.

“All sixteen women—now seventeen, including the body from the boat—were exposed to the same preservation conditions. Peat acid. High tannin. Low oxygen.” She paused. “But here’s what I didn’t expect.”

“What?” LeBlanc asked.

“They were all drugged. I found trace compounds in the bone marrow of the older specimens, and in the soft tissue of the more recent ones. A sedative. Something plant-based—looks like a compound derived from datura, mixed with something else I can’t identify yet. Enough to keep someone unconscious for hours. Maybe days.”

“Drugged and buried alive,” Elodie said. Her voice was flat.

“No.” Dr. Perrin shook her head. “That’s the thing. The peat didn’t kill them. There are no wounds. No fractures. No signs of struggle. And the way the bodies are positioned, the way the older ones are wrapped—they were placed. Gently. Like someone was putting them to bed.”

Caleb stared at the printout. The names weren’t on it yet—just the dates, the estimated ages, the notations. 1784. 1812. 1836. 1871. 1898. The gaps were regular. Every twenty or thirty years. Like clockwork.

He thought of Marie-Claire’s voice in the swamp, thin and grateful. *Thank you for freeing her.*

He’d thought she meant herself.

“She was a keeper,” he said aloud.

Elodie looked at him. “What?”

“The entity. Marie-Claire. She wasn’t killing them.” He looked at the pit, at the water still rising over the bones. “She was keeping them. Preserving them. Drugging them and putting them in the peat, where the acid would hold them in stasis. Waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For a cure.” He said it slowly, working it out as he spoke. “She was drowned. Her body was preserved. But her soul was stuck. Trapped in the swamp. She couldn’t leave. She couldn’t die properly. So she took others—women like her, maybe women who were going to be killed anyway—and she kept them safe. Suspended. Hoping that one day someone would figure out how to undo what was done to her.”

“And then they’d all wake up,” Elodie whispered.

“And then they’d all wake up.”

Inside the bunker, Ava made a sound. A low, thin moan, like air escaping a puncture. Elodie was already moving.

Caleb didn’t follow. He stood at the edge of the pit, watching the water rise over the roots of the overturned cypress. The bones were gone now, bagged and tagged and loaded into the ME’s van. But the hole in the earth remained. The swamp was filling it slowly, patiently, drawing the land back into its mouth.

He thought of his father, who had known about the baby. He thought of his mother, who had torn a page from a ledger. He thought of the name Jean-Baptiste Broussard, written in ink that only showed under UV light.

He thought of the way his cut had sealed itself closed.

From the bunker, he heard Elodie’s voice, soft and breaking.

“Ava. Ava, wake up. It’s Elodie. It’s your sister. Please wake up.”

The swamp kept filling the pit. The water kept rising.

Caleb stayed where he was.