Chapter 2

October 21, 1991

Barataria, Lousiana

I t was these legends that drove Luanne and Desmond Dyeus out of their home in Barataria, Louisiana, Luanne clutching their two-year-old baby girl, Evangeline, as she sprinted from the house.

Desmond following, finally catching up to Luanne and curling his arm around her shoulders before shifting their baby girl into his arms away from his sobbing wife. Giving him a grateful look, Luanne swiped her tears away with the back of her hand and stared over her left shoulder at their house. A lone hallway light shone through their front window, revealing curtains that were burnt to a crisp, shattered glass on the floor, and charring along the back wall of the living room.

Luanne slid in the driver’s side of their beat-up old Jeep, turning over the car engine and cranking up the air conditioning to combat the mid-autumn heat and humidity. Desmond dropped into the passenger seat and buckled his seatbelt, all one handed as he cradled their toddler to his chest. “She’s just a baby, Lu. It was an accident. It had to be.” His wife glanced at him before turning her attention back to the road. “She was upset, weren’t you sweet girl,” he cooed down at their daughter, who wriggled happily in his arms even as Luanne sped down Privateer Boulevard so quickly that the houses and trees around them blurred.

“I know, Des,” she choked out, toggling the right turn signal. “But we’re just… we’re just not equipped to handle this. I don’t think we can do this with a daughter who’s… who’s like this.”

“This isn’t right. For Christ’s sake, she’s our daughter , Lu. We can’t abandon her! I don’t care what you think she may or may not be, she’s still our child, no matter what.” Desmond lifted his gaze from his beautiful daughter to his wife, whose elegant face bore a wild expression and tear stains. “How can you think this is okay?”

“This is what a good parent would do!” Luanne clenched her hands so tightly around the wheel that her knuckles turned white. Her voice rose in the small car. “This is something we need to do for her safety. We can’t raise her like this; we’re not equipped for it. She’ll be better in the forest. Safer!”

Desmond took a moment to get himself under control before responding, drawing on every de-escalation course he had taken in his career as a therapist to try and talk down his wife. “Tell me again why we’re doing this. I’ve never even heard of this forest bullshit; it just seems like a good way for our baby girl to get eaten by an alligator rather than a way for her to be raised by somebody who can protect her.” Evangeline rested her small fists on his chest, her grey eyes suddenly serious in her chubby toddler face. “ We can protect her. Why would we ever leave her to anybody else?”

Luanne breathed in deeply, her response terse when it finally came. “It’s an old story that my mother used to tell me—” she started before falling silent. The forest seemed like an answer, the only answer, to Luanne. Over many generations, her Creole family had passed down stories of kids in the family, strange daughters who were unstable and problematic, whose instability had led to property damage and physical injury. So the stories went, these children vanished, never to be seen again. During one drunken episode, her mother confided to Luanne that she remembered a terse family drive through the night to a forest filled with shadows that seemingly had eyes and more movement than shadows usually did; Luanne’s grandmother left the car with an infant before returning to the car empty-handed, driving away as a baby's wails pierced the night behind them. The memory of that experience terrorized Luanne’s mother; the story haunted Luanne herself, often flavoring her own dreams throughout her life. She never expected to use that nightmarish knowledge, never once thought that it might come in useful.

One late night in February 1989, Luanne gave birth to a tiny baby girl. Over the next three months, she kept seeing bizarre things out of the corner of her vision, anomalies that resolved when she directed her attention to them, which she chalked up to the fatigue of having a newborn. After five months of this oddness, she woke to her daughter’s screams and the house rattling on its very foundation, lightning striking close enough that the windows shook. She shrugged it off as another oddity, rocked her daughter back to sleep, and sank into a deep sleep herself.

Three weeks later, Desmond awoke to their daughter’s laughing and babbling. He rushed over to her crib, ever the doting father. She kept pointing and nonsensically babbling to the darkest corner of the room, a corner filled with shadows that looked like a human figure. Unsettled, Desmond pulled a chair next to the crib, uncertain why except maybe to protect her from the shadows, an absurd thought if ever there was one, and dozed off, one arm resting on the rail.

After that, Luanne and Desmond experienced regular nightly abnormalities. Sometimes, it was the noise of something crashing as if it had fallen from a great height; other times, it was finding their six-month-old daughter, only in the very beginning stages of crawling, sleeping cozily between them in their bed when neither of them had moved her. Terrible storms that didn’t show on any radar and weren't reported on by any news station blew open their windows and doors after midnight. They would wake up in the morning to shattered glass on the floor or, worst-case scenario, an outside door knocked off its hinges and dented, resting on the other side of the hall from the frame in which it ordinarily sat.

The tall trees surrounding their house grew three times faster than any in the neighborhood, the long limbs reaching towards and crowding the structure. Desmond cut back the trees every week, but they grew back even more quickly than before. It was completely normal to find branches punched through their windows or vines curling in, around, and underneath their doors. Strangely enough, the trespassing flora and fauna only ever seemed to go towards Evangeline’s room.

Spontaneous fires occurred regularly in their house. They blamed it on their gas stove, an old radiator, anything that used electricity and wasn’t in particularly good shape. Although they weren’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, they invested in new appliances and, in a bout of paranoia, stocked every room in their three-bedroom home with a fire extinguisher. Small fires continued to break out, irregularly situated within the house but consistent. Luanne even called in the top electrician in the area to investigate their wiring. No dice.

It wasn’t until Evangeline’s first birthday that Luanne and Desmond began recognizing that the bizarre occurrences took place during their daughter’s emotional occurrences. They could directly tie her laughter, crying, screaming, or speech to specific incidents, although they never sought to hazard a guess whether her emotions caused the incident or whether the incident incited the emotion. Then one night in June 1990, they heard their small baby girl cackling from her spot in her high chair. On the heels of her laughter, their back door started shaking in its frame. Evangeline's voice rose into a screech and, seconds later, the door’s glass window erupted, a sharp crack of noise before shards of glass flew into the room just as a branch the width of Desmond himself came hurtling in towards their daughter. He leapt in front of it, desperately trying to get to his daughter, but the branch flicked him away into the wall. From his spot crumpled against the wall, he watched the limb stop just in front of the baby chair where his daughter was making grabby hands at it, babbling eloquently to the tree as only toddlers could do. He’d sustained three fractured ribs that night.

The incidents continued with ever-increasing intensity. By unspoken agreement, Desmond and Luanne settled into sleep rotations, where one of them would sleep and the other would watch their baby girl and put out any sudden fires before they could burn down the house.

Several times, Luanne brought up the forest as a way to solve their problems, but it always ended in arguments. Desmond was born and raised in New York and had never once heard of abandoning one’s child to the wilderness. He thought it was utterly absurd, even if their daughter was magical, mystical, or whatever designation Luanne felt the need to assign to the abilities. Luanne felt alone and terrified, completely incapable of caring for or raising a child with uncanny abilities that felt wrong. Abnormal. Unstable. Their arguments grew more and more frequent as Luanne pushed the issue after each incident. He finally threatened to divorce her and take away their daughter for good. She loved him deeply, though, so she promised that she wouldn’t take their daughter to the forest without his consent.

Until tonight. A week passed between incidents, but then, Evangeline started shrieking. In the far corner of the living room, a fire exploded into existence, working its way rapidly up the wall. A second blaze wove its way around the curtains. Both Desmond and Luanne grabbed fire extinguishers while their daughter continued to merrily scream, lightbulbs exploding and cracks splintering the walls.

After finally extinguishing the fire, Luanne turned to check on their daughter, who just stared at her, head tilted eerily to the side, normally grey eyes now the color of molten gold. At the sight, Luanne screamed and burst into tears, snatching her daughter—was this even her child? was it a demon?—and sprinting from the house, holding the infant that she refused to call hers in her arms so tightly that it almost certainly must have hurt Evangeline.

Desmond tried to calm Luanne as she raced to the Jeep, as they got in the car… but alas, she wasn’t listening to reason, seemed incapable of even hearing his words to her, as if she wasn’t even connected to this world anymore.

Now, as Luanne drove recklessly towards the nature preserve, the silence grew between them, slowly filling the car, the only interruptions Desmond’s continued attempts to sway his wife, his comforting murmurs to Evangeline, and the inconsistent chime of the turn signal. Their life was slowly falling apart, Luanne’s threatened abandonment of their infant daughter an albatross around his neck. His wife didn’t even seem to hear him, kept mumbling to herself in French. He couldn’t understand everything she said, but the word “ diable ” kept coming up, which seemed like a pretty damning indication of his wife’s mental state at the moment.

Luanne slammed on the brakes on the nonexistent shoulder, sliding them to a stop in the mud caused by the recent rains. Desmond glanced at her, bracing himself to fling the door open and sprint like hell away from the car with Evangeline in his arms. He would be damned if he let Luanne just fucking abandon their baby girl like this. It wasn’t going to happen. Although there weren’t any road lights in the area, the preserve visitor center wasn’t too far from here. He was pretty sure that, if he could get to the visitor center and break in, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office would send uniformed officers who could help him. Somehow.

Before he could even open the door, though, Luanne turned to him, her eyes shining and manic, tear tracks dried on her face. He opened his mouth—one last try to convince his wife not to do this, he supposed—but before he could say a word, she suddenly seized their daughter from his arms, shoved open the car door, and darted away.

He leapt from the car, running at full speed behind her, just behind her. “Luanne, stop it!” he shouted. “Fucking stop! You can’t do this!” He was gaining ground on her, but somehow, she seemed further away than ever. “Luanne!” he shouted again, his tone pleading. Not above begging to protect his baby girl. “Please don’t do this! We’re a team; we can protect her. We can’t abandon her!”

Ahead of him—must be fifty yards at least, how did she get so far away—Luanne took a sharp turn into the wetlands. He sprinted at a parallel, hoping to cut her off, but instead he sank his foot into a moldering log and went sprawling. From the ground, he shouted his wife’s name once more as he turned his foot sharply this way and that to extricate himself. What felt like hours later but was probably only seconds, he ripped his foot from the rotten log. He heard something tear and a burning pain in his calf but couldn’t care less, even as he felt something wet—probably blood—soaking his sock. Unsteadily, he shoved himself to his feet, limping towards the last place he had seen his wife. No sign of her; the wetlands and velvet night concealed her as surely as they did the alligators and snakes that lived here. He turned wildly, looking for any clue, and stopped abruptly.

In the humid mist of the night, a shadowy figure with six red embers glowing around the height where eyes would sit in a human face stood only feet away from him among the trees. He couldn’t make out what it was, but chills ran down Desmond’s spine as he stared in horror; this couldn’t be real. He mustered up the courage to call “hello,” but as quickly as the shadowy figure appeared, it vanished, leaving him alone and more scared for his family then ever.

He roamed the perimeter of the preserve for hours, calling for his daughter and wife. He searched for so long that the sun rose, the Preserve employees who staffed the Visitor Center arriving for their shift, only to find a distraught man covered in mud and blood, shouting desperately, weeping as if his heart was broken.

Two deputies with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department came around 9:00 am to take Desmond to the station. He was drenched in blood and rambling wildly, begging them to find his wife and daughter while the deputies marched him to their car. As they drove away, Desmond turned back for one last look. Nothing there but a group of women, seemingly part of the fog, and not a one of them his Luanne or their Evangeline.

Three days later, they found the body of a petite woman with strawberry-blonde hair dressed in tattered clothing and missing one shoe, not far from where the Preserve staff found Desmond that fateful morning. The Sheriff’s Department easily identified her as Luanne Devereaux-Dyeus.

Between the blood on his person, the outlandish claims Desmond made about a magical daughter, the intense fights with Luanne that Desmond admitted to, and his honesty about chasing his wife and baby daughter through the preserve, it was the easiest double homicide trial that the Parish had ever seen. They had Luanne’s body; the absence of the daughter’s body was clear evidence to the District Attorney and the jury that, in Luanne’s crazed run from her husband, their daughter had been lost to the forest and most likely became ’gator food.

Desmond’s last sight of Luanne was the photos displayed during the trial. Of his daughter… he never saw her again.