The Malveaux Curse Mysteries Boxset 1 Read online

  Dog Days of Voodoo - You, Me, and the Voodoo Queen - Oops! I Voodooed Again

  The Malveaux Curse Mysteries books 1, 2, 3

  G.A. Chase

  Bayou Moon Press, LLC

  Copyright © 2018 by G.A. Chase

  First Edition 2018

  Cover Art by Janet Holmes

  Editing by Red Adept

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

  Bayou Moon Press, LLC

  Contents

  Dog Days of Voodoo

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  You, Me, and the Voodoo Queen

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Oops! I Voodooed Again

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Book List

  About the Author

  Dog Days of Voodoo

  Dog Days of Voodoo Blurb

  Absolutely nothing stands between a woman and her beloved dog… not even the malevolent force of a voodoo curse.

  Kendell Summer, lead guitarist for Polly Urethane and the Strippers, has always been interested in the unexplained. So when she sets off on a paranormal research romp with Myles, a former classmate, to explore his skills in psychometry, she’s ready for a little adventure. But she gets more than she bargained for when her Lhasa apso, Cheesecake, is dognapped. Kendell will do whatever it takes to get her dog back.

  While rescuing the pup, Kendell and Myles learn that the touristy glitz of New Orleans’ voodoo shops hides a dark history few understand—a truth that some in the city plan to use for their own gain.

  Soon they uncover more than they ever wanted to know about New Orleans’ unsavory past and a curse that threatens to change everything. Only Kendell can prevent the evil they’ve uncovered from doing more damage, but she’ll need Myles’s support and psychometric abilities—and the vigilance of the ever-watchful Cheesecake.

  ***

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  1

  The World War II fighter plane crashed into the dark emerald-green water of the Gulf of Mexico, dislodging its overhead canopy. The heavy glass dome shifted and snapped back down, trapping the pilot’s arms in the narrow cockpit. Desperation set in fast as he yanked his body against the restraining harness. Water flowed over the instruments’ gauges like a menacing waterfall.

  “Move, goddammit!” His words echoed around the diminishing air pocket in the cockpit, but his arms remained frozen in place. His hands still gripped the joystick as if he could fly the plane in water as easily as in the sky.

  Frantic, he tried pulling his arms from under the displaced glass dome that had been designed to protect him but was now the bear trap that prevented his escape. It was no use. The metal lip that cut deep into his flesh had crushed the bones in both arms.

  “Fuck!” His training argued a pilot never gave up hope, but panic had a way of supplanting logic. What breaths he could take came with painful jabs to his chest. Either his ribs had been crushed or he was having a heart attack brought on by fear. He prayed for heart failure over drowning.

  As the icy water filled the small compartment, blood from the wounds on his arms sent black eddies into the water illuminated by the meaningless gauges. He turned from the scene of his body being consumed by the gulf waters and sought rescue from some unknown source beyond the sinking plane. All he saw was the angled wing of his fighter dip down as if preparing for a strafing run against some enemy of the deep. His harness held him firmly against the seat.

  There was no escape.

  Once filled with the ocean’s salt water, the craft dove sharply below the waves. His eyes were still protected by his goggles and were the last of his senses to function correctly. Having exhausted every option for escape, he closed his eyes, choosing the undistorted view of the murky depths as the final scene to his life. With no fight left in him, the warrior gave in to the inevitable. The blackness of the deep separated his consciousness from the hell around him.

  Myles Garrison woke in a cold panic. His hands grasped his arms, certain he’d be clutching the torn leather airman’s jacket. Instead, he felt the sting of a growing sunburn on his unprotected chest. “Swing the boat around.”

  He felt the powerful vibration of the inboard engine starting up against his back as he lay on the front fiberglass deck of the dive boat Sea Conch. The sensation brought him to full consciousness. A disgruntled voice rang down from the wheelhouse. “What now?”

  “I want to dive. Right over there.”

  The voice came across muffled as the captain turned away from Myles. “Please go talk to him. We’re less than an hour from the oil rig. There’s good diving out there, lots of sea life. I only agreed to stop so y’all could take a dip to cool off.”

  Vanesa, in her skimpy dive bikini, worked her way along the polished-chrome rail to the front of the boat. “You were asleep.”

  “No. I wasn’t. This is where I want to dive.” He knew his companions’ impression of him. They hadn’t even bothered to hide their irritation. He didn’t care. This was his expedition. He’d paid for the charter. And they’d dive where he wanted. “There’s a World War II airplane down there. I want to see it.”

  Water dripped off her long, bare legs as she stood over him with her arms crossed. “Trust me. You were asleep. I could hear you snoring.”

  “You were sitting on the back of the boat, and you heard me snoring all the way up here? I wasn’t asleep. I saw the crash.”

  She moved her hands from her elbows to her hips as she looked at the sky. “Charlie is going to have a fit. We’ve only enough da
ylight for one more good dive, and you want to waste it out here?”

  “I’m telling you I saw the plane. It’s down there.”

  Her tanned body, barely covered by the light-blue neoprene fabric, was more compelling than her argument. “Yeah? You mean like yesterday when you thought you were a pirate captain? We spent half the day poking around in those sandbars. All I saw was one crab.”

  “It was a pretty piraty-looking crab.” Myles turned to see Charlie leaning against the cabin.

  Vanesa was a hard person to impress. “Yeah, a regular reincarnation of Jean Laffite. But other than some random shells, he didn’t seem forthcoming about his buried treasure.”

  Myles struggled to his feet while trying not to slip on the smooth fiberglass. “I know you think I’m nuts. But you did agree to come out here with me. I promise if there’s nothing down there, we can spend all day tomorrow diving wherever you want.”

  Charlie scowled as he nodded. “I suppose we did agree to help you with this quest to prove your insanity. But whether we find something or not, the drinks are on you tonight.”

  Myles stared out at the featureless water, hoping he wasn’t once again wrong about his abilities. At least there would only be a couple of people laughing at him this time. Finding people who might be open-minded enough to join him on his adventures was becoming a challenge.

  * * *

  The early-autumn sun lit up Kendell Summer’s small kitchen. Her hand didn’t move from the coffee cup on her small dining table as she reread the article in the Southeastern Louisiana State alumni paper. She couldn’t have cared less about the picture of the restored airplane that had been used in place of the actual discovery or even the explanation of how it was found. She knew a bullshit story when she read one. If all treasure hunters had to do was study sonar readings and underwater charts, there’d be a lot more crap dredged up from the ocean’s depths. But the goofy, smiling face on the guy standing next to the attractive, serious couple rang a bell. She’d shared a class with him. He too had fallen for the shyster’s advertisement for a made-up college course.

  The class had been one of her dumber mistakes as a music student. How was she to know The Transfer of Human Energy into Inanimate Objects wasn’t sanctioned by the state college? She had reasoned that just because it wasn’t listed in the course catalogue didn’t mean it wasn’t a valid class. With all of the institutions of higher learning in New Orleans, nearly anything someone wanted to teach was validated by some organization. She should have known better. Nothing she believed in her soul ended up being true.

  The study of how intensely emotional events left a record in those things around the person matched up nicely with how she viewed her beloved guitar. Every sad moment as a pre-teen strumming out songs on the instrument had mellowed its sound like the yellowing of the varnish on the white-spruce wood top. Now in her twenties, she could play everything from classical music to David Bowie on the old guitar—and tap into emotional depths impossible to find in even the most expensive of instruments. Her parents had emphasized that love wasn’t a term to be used for things. But Cecile, Kendell’s guitar, understood her better than any person ever would. After a lifetime of being told physical objects didn’t carry emotions, she’d finally found a professor who believed they did. If only such fantasies had any basis in reality.

  Now this Myles doofus seemed to have broken the code of how to turn theory into reality.

  Kendell slapped the paper to the table and looked at her overweight Lhasa apso basking in the morning sun on her beloved ottoman. “Cheesecake, I’m going to call him.”

  She never lied to her dog. Telling her eleven-year companion of her plans was as good as chiseling them in stone.

  The dog looked up at her with sleepy brown eyes. The idea wasn’t the dumbest one Kendell had ever told her about.

  “I promise I won’t let my imagination carry me away. I just want to find out if this guy’s discovered something interesting. Don’t look so worried. I expect to be let down this time.”

  * * *

  Myles sat in the funky coffee shop lined with books. Frenchmen Street wasn’t one of his usual New Orleans hangouts. There were too many hipster types lounging around trying to look intellectual.

  He gave up trying to place the small, spunky girl behind the counter who greeted everyone with a smile. She’d said on the phone that her name was Kendell Summer. Apparently, they’d gone to college together. There was a cute girl-next-door quality to her interactions, but as she wasn’t six feet tall with blond hair that reached all the way to her butt, he couldn’t be expected to remember her.

  His lack of recognition wasn’t a complete surprise. He viewed his school years as a marathon, and college had been the last lap. Those students around him were not competitors as much as obstacles threatening to trip him up. Women particularly fit that description. Each night, he suffered the dilemma of whether to study or go drinking with his friends in the bars that lined Bourbon Street. Women and alcohol had waylaid more than one fellow student in his class. It took all of his time and energy to pass the courses on dead civilizations. Archeology was supposed to be about getting outside and playing in the dirt, not getting buried under books so boring they sucked the life out of him.

  She set two steaming mugs of coffee on the table and took off her apron. The café was trying to be too homey for his tastes. Paper cups held more and would let him take the drink and go if the conversation got boring. Actual mugs were a not-so-subtle way of keeping the customer in the shop.

  “Thanks for meeting me.” Her voice had a soft, calming tone that reminded him of a woman singing a lullaby.

  “No problem. I work in the Quarter as a bartender, so this is on my way.” He had to admire any woman brave enough to make the first move even if she wasn’t his type. He must have made quite the impression on her in college.

  Her short hair was as black as her coffee. “I have to confess I didn’t remember you when I first read the article in the alumni paper.”

  Now he was confused, which was not an unusual situation for him when it came to women. “Then why did you make contact?”

  “Do you remember that off-campus class on energy transfer?”

  Myles closed his eyes in horror. She was one of those whack jobs who believed in the supernatural. She probably belonged to some coven. Now that he thought about it, she did look a little like a sexy witch. “We all make mistakes.”

  She leaned forward over her coffee. “But you did it, didn’t you? You figured it out. How to read energy that had been left behind in an object. You really did it.” The steam rising to her face only reinforced his image of her as a witch.

  “You’ve got the wrong idea. I didn’t take that stupid class looking for answers. I make up stories, okay? Ever since I was a little kid, I’d pick up some rock and imagine it was thrown into my yard by an Indian chief hundreds of years ago. My parents said I had a hyperactive imagination. I had some time to kill, my junior year, and thought that class might be a good way to refine my debate skills. Any teacher willing to stand in front of a class and expound nonsense about physical objects being recording devices deserved whatever arguments he got. Seeing as how I understood where he was coming from, I thought sparring with him might be a useful exercise.”

  Kendell’s brown eyes looked so large and trusting he felt bad about laying into her like that. “Then what were you doing looking for that plane?”

  “Just because my parents thought I had an overactive imagination didn’t mean I had to listen to them. Conducting quiet private research is vastly different from standing in front of a bunch of students talking out your ass.” He put his coffee cup down as a waitress stopped by to refill it. “I’ve always been lucky at finding things—lost keys, wallets, you name it. When I go camping, I seem to run across all the garbage that’s left behind. I sometimes find junk that’s been sitting there in the dirt for a hundred years. But that’s all it is—luck.”

  “Finding that pl
ane didn’t sound like luck.”

  He settled back in the overstuffed lounge chair, wondering how much he should trust her. Even his friends thought his ideas were crazy. “That professor thought emotions were like sound waves. As they hit the atoms of an object, they could affect how they vibrated. Kind of like a tape player.”

  “I remember an argument you had with him about the saying if these walls could talk. It got pretty heated.”

  Myles took the small porcelain pitcher of cream and poured some in his coffee. “There’s a theory in physics that says it’s impossible for me to completely mix this milk into my coffee. If I could get down to the submolecular level, I could still reverse the flow and turn it back into two liquids. But it’s all theory. I couldn’t actually take this spoon and unmix what I’ve done. To hear the voices in the walls would be like unmixing my coffee. Plus, every person who ever visited the room would be affecting the molecular movement. It’d just be a jumble.”

  “You do a remarkably good job of explaining why what you did didn’t work. After all, you did find that airplane.”