Charlene Johnson died on October 19th. She was born on August 27th—at the time of her death she was approaching forty. She was adopted. Cause of death: undisclosed illness.

The included photograph of Charlene might as well have been a picture of Monica.

Christina Devereaux – March 17, 1980

8879 Rice Ferry Road

New Orleans, LA 24501

Christina Devereaux is still alive. She is a high school administrator in New Orleans. She was adopted.

The picture revealed the woman to be another Monica lookalike.

Troy leaned back in his seat and ground his teeth.

“I don’t understand it,” he said. “They look so much alike, it’s as though all of them were cloned.”

“My thoughts exactly, Doc,” Sullivan said.

“Cloned, or something like it, and Grace is the blueprint,” he said. “She’s the mother. She’s having these children, these girls, and at birth, she puts the babies up for adoption.”

“Meanwhile, she goes off and works various jobs,” Sullivan said. “Seems that she typically works as a live-in nanny, based on her employment history.”

“She has a talent for running a household,” Troy said. “My guess is she’s also using her herbal formulations on the families that employ her, testing and refining her recipes. If we could find out exactly whom she’s worked for over the years, I’ve no doubt we would find a history of deaths and accidents.”

“Right,” Sullivan said. “As for her daughters, she comes back to them when they’re around forty years old. Pays the lucky ladies a visit, and they die soon thereafter.”

“Why is forty the magic number?” Troy asked. “Because some folks think that’s over the hill?”

“There’s a lot of pressure on women as they get older, I guess,” Sullivan said. “Hell, my wife, when she turned forty a few years back, didn’t even want me to celebrate her birthday. She tells me, ‘Nicky, I’m officially an old lady now. Why would I want a party?’”

“Grace is draining these women, her daughters, of life, of their youth.” Troy thought about how Monica’s physical condition had deteriorated in the past several days: the graying hair, the wrinkles, the arthritis. “Meanwhile, she somehow reverses her own aging process, and starts looking younger and younger.”

“Okay,” Sullivan said cautiously. He cleared his throat. “That isn’t ah, quite scientific, Dr. Stephens.”

Troy went on: “Some of the entries in her journal go back to the eighteen hundreds. Eighteen eighty-three, from what I remember. I hadn’t sent them to you because they seemed unrelated.”

“If this woman was around giving birth in eighteen eighty-three, she would be well past a hundred and forty-some years old,” Sullivan said. “Even some of the cases I checked into, where these women were dying back in the nineteen sixties . . . how the hell could Grace be only fifty-nine?”

An image of Grace popped into Troy’s mind: the amazingly youthful figure . . . the elongated tongue.