I wouldn’t have climbed those stairs if the storm hadn’t come in sideways. The Moore house sits on a strip of high ground where the sugarcane ends and the cypress knees begin, five miles off Highway 87 and a lifetime from anywhere you’d want to be after dark. By the time I pulled into the dirt drive, rain had shaved the sky down to a single color—tin pan gray—and the ditch frogs were screaming like they’d seen the future. Lila Moore was waiting on the porch. Bare feet. Old Saints hoodie. A coffee mug she wasn’t drinking from. She watched my car lights crawl across the wet boards and didn’t wave. “You’re Harper?” she asked as I killed the engine. “Detective Harper,” I said. “Grant is fine.” She nodded like the name didn’t matter. “Come on in.” The place smelled like lemon oil, laundry powder, and rain that had learned how to sneak through a roof. Lila moved around the living room with that quiet, wired energy I see in people who’ve been holding their breath for weeks. She was thirty, give or take. Brown hair pulled tight. Eyes the color of river silt when the current’s fast. I’d read her file—local girl, steady job at Saint Inez General, the one in the family who paid the light bill. Her brother, Jason Moore, was three years into a seven-year stretch at Angola for dealing meth. Their

When Lila Moore climbs into the creaking attic of her family’s farmhouse in Saint Inez Parish, Louisiana, she’s only doing what her incarcerated brother, Jason, asked over a crackly prison call: “There’s a box up there. Get rid of it.” She finds the trunk—old, scuffed, and heavy as sin—wedged beneath warped rafters. Inside: rot, plastic wrap clouded green, and bones. Two sets—one adult, one impossibly small. Detective Grant Harper of the parish sheriff’s office has waded through every kind of backwoods horror, but this is different. The DNA doesn’t lie. The tiny bones belong to Jason. Jason swears he bought the corpse—part of a backroom hoodoo ritual he was told would break a curse that’s been dogging him since he fell into pills and crank. He says the body wasn’t pregnant when he brought it home. He says a lot of things. As Harper and a weary corrections officer dig into Jason’s past—his years of addiction, a vanished girlfriend, whispers of graveyard dirt and “service work” done by two traveling dealers—the investigation slips into that sliver of the South where faith turns, and superstition bites back. Because in Saint Inez Parish, folks know: when the dead don’t rest, the living end up paying.

The Corpse Beneath the Attic

The Corpse Beneath the Attic

The Box Beneath the Attic

Table of Contents

The Box Beneath the Attic

The Addict’s Tale

Corpse Bride, Southern Style

The Child That Shouldn’t Exist

Buried Truths

Blurb

The Box Beneath the Attic