And Gabriel wasn’t afraid at all. Not of what Sara feared, which was death. Gabriel would embrace death, would welcome a return to the other world, but that was not his choice, not an option open to a sinner like himself, and he wasn’t stupid enough to wish for Hell. He had to stay on earth, mortal, alive, until he paid for his sins. It made him weary, exhausted from the strain of living day in, day out, with no goal, no meaningful friendships, no sense of purpose other than making it through, one step at a time. He was worn out, fucking tired, and he wanted it to either end or he wanted to find a future.

What he feared was that neither one would ever happen, and he was destined to stagnate, to fester indefinitely in his own personal hell.

The more Sara thought about it, the more she was convinced that John Thiroux was a psychopath, an attractive, charming killer, who may have murdered other women before Anne Donovan, and possibly after. In the twenty-four hours since she’d packed her bag and battened down in Gabriel’s apartment—determined to find something, anything, that smacked of an answer to any of her thousands of questions— she had tried to find information on John Thiroux before and after his murder trial and had drawn a complete blank.

Gabriel had dropped her off at the library for several hours while he went to track down where the pictures of her mother had been sent from. As Sara sat at the computer, stiff from immobility and cold from the overzealous air-conditioning, she suspected he wasn’t having any more luck than she was. John Thiroux appeared in the society pages of the New Orleans Bee for the first time in 1847, at a large party hosted by a congressman, then disappeared without a trace after early 1851, when she’d found record of his selling his property on Royal Street.

A search of Ellis Island and Port of Orleans records showed no evidence of his arrival in the United States, though she did discover that one Anne Donovan, age thirteen, had arrived in New Orleans in 1839 in the company of her mother, Mary Donovan, age thirty-four. Sara wasn’t sure if it was the same Mary Donovan, but she did find a death certificate for the same name, same age, a mere three years later. Which might explain how Anne Donovan had wound up a prostitute, if she had no family and no income at the age of sixteen.