Текст книги "Plantation Shudders"

Автор книги: Ellen Byron

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter Eighteen

Maggie figured that she had just enough time before dinner prep to drop off Xander’s art supplies and deliver the latest guest bombshell to Bo. But first, she applied some lipstick and just enough eye shadow to bring out the orange in her eyes that Bo had commented on. She then drove to the Pelican PD, where she found Artie Belloise working the front desk, as well as a large fried crab po’boy.

“Hey, Maggie. Anything to eat in there?” He eyed her bag hopefully. “I could use some sides with my sammy.”

“Sorry, just art stuff for Bo’s kid.”

“Oh.” Artie didn’t try hiding his disappointment. “I’ll get it to him.”

“Actually, I need to talk to Bo, so can you let him know I’m here?”

“He ain’t around right now.”

“Oh.” It was Maggie’s turn to be disappointed. “Well, let him know I came by and have some information.”

“Will do.” In pretty much any other jurisdiction in America, a law enforcement official would have found this message intriguing enough to pepper Maggie with questions. But Maggie could put money on Artie’s lack of interest in anything but his po’boy.

She got back in her car and headed toward Crozat. Her cell rang, and she put in her earbud to answer it. The caller was Tug.

“Hey, Dad. What’s up?”

“I’m at the hospital with your mother.”

“What?” Maggie, her heart racing, pulled over and parked near the Pelican town square. She was too distracted by Tug’s news to drive.

“Nothing to panic about. She’s been having night sweats and wasn’t feeling well this afternoon. We could tell she had a fever, so I brought her here. I didn’t want to take any chances.”

“No, of course not.”

“The doctors want to keep her at least overnight and run some tests in the morning. It’s probably nothing.”

Or, Maggie thought, it’s a very bad something. But she kept her attitude upbeat with Tug. “I’m sure you’re right, Dad. I want to see her, though. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“All right, sweetie.” Tug’s voice cracked the tiniest bit. “I love you, bebe.”

“I love you too, Daddy.”

They ended the call. Maggie sat in the Falcon for a moment and then got out. She needed air. She walked to the bandstand in the middle of the square, leaned against the opening, then slid down to the top step.

When Maggie was going through her brutal breakup with Chris and thought she’d never find love, she’d seen a therapist, who discouraged her from “catastrophic thinking.”

“Stop going to worst-possible outcome scenarios,” the therapist told her. “It’s a waste of time and energy because things rarely get that bad.”

Now, as an unsolved murder haunted her family’s home and livelihood and her mother faced a potential health crisis, Maggie was tempted to call the therapist and yell that she wanted her money back. Instead, she sat on the steps of the bandstand, overwhelmed with emotions—sadness, frustration, anger at herself for allowing her life to get messed up in such a big way. Then she dropped her face into her hands and began to cry.

“It’s okay. Everything’s gonna be all right.”

A hand rested gently on her shoulder. She lifted her puffy, wet face to see Bo. He sat down next to her on the bandstand steps, keeping his hand on her shoulder. “Thanks for the art supplies. Xander’ll love them.”

“How did you find me?”

“Uh, excuse me, it’s my job to track people down,” Bo said, faking indignation. “I saw your car and looked left.” Bo grinned and she couldn’t help grinning back through her tears. She wiped them away, smearing her carefully applied eye makeup. “What’s going on?” Bo asked.

Maggie looked at him. He only had a few years on her, yet he seemed so much wiser and more mature. “Bo . . . was there a moment when it hit you that you had to grow up and be an adult?”

“That’s an easy one for me. It was the moment Xander was born. But you need to stop beating yourself up about where you are and give yourself some credit. You’re working two jobs, helping your parents, getting your art going. You are an adult, Maggie.”

“I feel like I’ve regressed. Like I’m more of an adult-in-training these days.”

“Whatever you want to call it, it’s something to be proud of.”

Bo turned Maggie’s head toward him so she could see how sincerely he meant those words. And she saw something she’d never seen in the eyes of any man she’d ever been involved with: kindness.

Their faces were close enough to inhale each other’s warm breath. Then instinctively, both pulled away. “I got a message from Artie that you wanted to talk to me,” Bo said, making his voice brusque and businesslike.

“Yes, right.” She shook off the moment and filled him in on Debbie’s secret machinations to oust Jan and turn Cajun Cuties into a moneymaker.

“Interesting,” Bo said. “Gives us a new suspect. If Beverly Clabber found out what Debbie was up to, it’s a possible motive for murder. What if Clabber felt she needed to tell Jan that one of her Cuties was planning a coup d’état? It would have destroyed everything for Debbie.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m gonna go do a background check on this Debbie Stern. Rufus is off today, so he’s not around to stonewall me. I’ll let you know what I come up with.”

Maggie and Bo exchanged a little more information and perfunctory good-byes, each choosing to deny the heat between them.

“Hope your mom’s okay,” Bo said as he started toward his car.

“Thanks,” she responded. “I’m heading over to the hospital to check on her.”

She forced herself to concentrate on the road as she drove to Francis Xavier Medical Center, the closest hospital to Pelican. Rush hour was just beginning, and cars darted in and out of lanes without warning as they battled the growing clog. Maggie swore to herself that if she ever got a vanity license plate, it would read, “UZ SGNL.”

She parked and went into the hospital, where a receptionist directed her to Ninette’s room. Maggie gave the door a gentle knock.

“Mom?”

“Come on in, chère.”

Maggie walked into the typically antiseptic hospital room, where Ninette lay on a bed that had been raised for her comfort. Tug sat in a chair next to her, holding his wife’s hand. Maggie had never seen her mother look more pale or frail. She kissed her father and then sat on the edge of the bed.

“Mama.” She reached down and hugged Ninette, hiding her face so the tears slipping down her cheeks wouldn’t show.

“My sweet baby.” Ninette patted the bed, and Maggie crawled in next to her. “This is just like when you were little.”

“I know. I’d use any excuse to get into bed with you and Dad. A storm, a bad dream. Which is what this feels like right now.”

“Everyone is overreacting. This is just some little thing.”

Tug squeezed Ninette’s hand. “I’m sure it is, but we could do with some medical facts to back that up.” He awkwardly rose to his feet. “I’m stiff from all this sitting. I need to stretch my legs. I’m gonna take a lap around the floor. Be back in a few.”

He left, and the women rested in each other’s arms. “I know I’ve been going back and forth about whether or not I should have come home,” Maggie said. “But I’m beyond glad I’m here right now.”

“Me, too.” Ninette stroked her daughter’s hair.

“Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry.”

Ninette looked at her daughter. “For what?”

“For everything. For leaving. For being so conflicted about coming back. For being who I am—and never fitting in here.”

“You’ve always fit in, honey,” Ninette said. “You just never wanted to. I think you were afraid that would make you the same as everyone else here, and you wanted to be different. But you can be who you are and we’ll all still love you.”

Maggie pulled her mother closer. “You’re amazing. I love you so, so much.”

“I love you more.”

“Impossible.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Uh-huh.”

It was a game they’d played since Maggie was a toddler. Ninette usually let her win. Tonight, Maggie gave her mother the victory.

Tug returned to the room. “I need to get back to the house and tend to our guests. Why don’t you stay with Mom?”

“I think you should stay with her, Dad.” Maggie slid out of her mother’s arms and stood up. “I’ll take care of every else.”

“You sure?” Tug asked. He looked nervous. “There’s cooking involved.”

“I can handle it. I promise I won’t poison our guests.” Maggie gasped and put her hand over her mouth. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

Tug managed a half-smile. “Don’t worry about it. Just stick to that promise.”

*

After getting her dad’s assurances that he’d text her with updates about Ninette’s condition, Maggie raced home. She was one of those people who, raised by a great cook, preferred to compliment the chef rather than prepare anything herself. If there were health risks associated with microwave use, she was destined to be Patient Zero. But now she had to feed a houseful of people, none of whom was expecting a nuked Lean Cuisine.

She parked and ran into the shotgun, where she knew Gran’ had a few boxes of jambalaya rice. Maggie grabbed them and planned an ad hoc meal in her head as she rushed to the kitchen in the main house. She stopped in the doorway and gawked at the sight before her.

Gran’, a butcher’s apron over her taupe silk blouse and slacks, was tossing shrimp into a large sauté pan while Alice Ryker chopped celery. The girl’s brothers stood next to Gran’ holding measuring spoons and spices. “Two bay leaves and a teaspoon of thyme,” Gran’ ordered. The boy measured and tossed in the spices. “Well done. Now I need the celery.” Alice walked over and tossed celery into the pan; it sizzled as it hit butter melting in the pan.

Gran’ dumped a bowl of tomatoes into the concoction on the stove. “Hello, chère,” she called to Maggie.

“Uh . . . you cook?”

“Of course. Children, cover your ears.” The Ryker kids did so. “Back in the day, there was a saying: if you want to get a man, you need to be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, and a bad girl in the bedroom. Nowadays, I’d take a fist to anyone who said this, but it did motivate me to pick up a few recipes. Why don’t you throw together a salad and heat up some dinner rolls while I finish making my Shrimp Creole?”

“Can we uncover our ears?” Sam asked.

“Yes, my apologies, I forgot all about that.”

Maggie put together a salad, impressing herself when she jazzed it up with dried cranberries and chopped pecans. Ninette had left a bowl of dough to rise, and she pinched off balls to turn into rolls.

“Your mama’s going to be fine,” Gran’ told her as they worked. “I got a real strong sense of it.”

“I hope you’re right,” Maggie said. “I’m not getting a thing from my sense.” She pulled a tray of browned dinner rolls out of the oven, took a picture of them, and sent it to Ninette with the text, “#Success!” Anything to distract her mother from the unspoken fear that they all shared.

The meal that night was a group effort. The Rykers and Butlers served the appetizers that went with the drinks Kyle mixed at the bar. The Georgia boys provided music that was more suited to an electronic dance party than a sedate lodging like Crozat, but at least it was upbeat. Cuties Jan, Angela, and Suzy set the table and took charge of the dessert Lia brought over. The only guest not pitching in was Cutie Debbie, who seemed so believably semicatatonic that Maggie wouldn’t be surprised if Bo unearthed some acting lessons in the woman’s background.

Maggie looked around the table as everyone dined and chatted. The night felt more akin to a family gathering than a hostess tending to her guests. She had trouble believing that one of these lovely people might be a killer. It would be like finding out that the fun cousin who taught you how to make armpit farts was leading a double life as a violent criminal.

After dinner, she thanked everyone for their help and then shooed Gran’ off to bed, taking on cleanup duties herself. She was finding it therapeutic and would have added cleaning to her Crozat duties if she didn’t know how much the Shexnayders needed the job. She finished loading the dishwasher and turned it on. Her phone pinged and vibrated with a text, and she eagerly read the message from Tug: “Mom sleeping well. Fingers crossed.”

Her emotions vacillated from disappointment that the text wasn’t from Bo to relief that her dad seemed optimistic. She sent him heart and fingers-crossed emoticons and then pocketed her phone and headed toward the back door through what the family called the Event Wall Hall of Fame. Every event held at Crozat since its inception as a B and B was commemorated with a framed photo on this wall. Aside from decorating a dull area few guests ever saw, the pictures served as visual reminders of highlights from one successful event that the family could use for another. In this way, the wall served as a large scrapbook of party-planning ideas.

As she walked past them, Maggie realized that she’d missed dusting the tops of the frames. She went back to the kitchen, grabbed a rag, wet it, and returned to the hall. Cynic that she was, she wondered how many of the couples were divorced by now as she dusted a handful of wedding portraits. Her eye landed on one of the older photos, taken about ten years prior. The groom, smiling and elegant in a morning coat, looked familiar. She struggled to place him. Then it hit her, and the realization of who he was made her gasp.

The groom in the photo was Kyle Bruner.

Chapter Nineteen

Maggie stared at the picture. She knew Kyle had lost his wife in a car accident. Was she the beautiful bride standing next to him, or had he been married previously? Either way, why had he never mentioned that he’d stayed at Crozat before? That he’d been married there?

Kyle was keeping secrets. And in a place where a murder occurred, secrets could be dangerous.

Maggie knew this was something that she couldn’t withhold from Bo. But she had to talk to Lia first. She pulled her cell out of the back pocket of her jeans and texted her cousin to meet at the bandstand and then ran to the kitchen and extricated a reusable grocery bag from a pile stashed under the sink. She returned to the Event Hall of Fame, removed the photo from the wall, and stuck it in the bag. Then Maggie raced out of the house and hopped into the Falcon, whose top was down. As she drove, her heart thumped unpleasantly. She hated to think that Kyle wasn’t the sweet, considerate guy that he appeared to be. But every psychopath she’d read about or seen in movies seemed to present a perfectly amenable façade.

As soon as she reached Pelican’s historic business district, she parked and jumped out of the car. Lia was already waiting for her at the bandstand. Maggie grabbed the bag with the photo and ran to her cousin.

“Lia, I wish there was an easy way to say this, but there’s not,” Maggie said. She was out of breath from running, so her words came out in puffs. “Kyle lied to us. Well, technically, he didn’t tell us something, but it’s the same thing. Anyway, I found something at Crozat and I have to show it to you because I’m scared for you. Here.” With that, she pulled out the photo and handed to Lia. Lia gave the picture a cursory glance and handed it back to her.

“I know.”

“You know? What do you mean, you know?”

“I know about the photo. I know about the wedding at Crozat. I know why Kyle is really here.”

Maggie stared at her cousin, annoyed and confused. “Well if you know all this, do you mind sharing it with me?”

Lia shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Oh, come on, Lia—”

“I can’t because it’s not my place to tell his story. Come.”

Lia motioned for Maggie to follow her, and the two women walked through the park across the street to Fais Dough Dough. Lia led Maggie to the back room, where Kyle was alone, once again hunched over the computer as he processed an online order. Lia laid a hand on his shoulder, and he started.

“Maggie knows about your wedding and Crozat,” Lia said.

Kyle froze for a moment. The room was silent. Maggie felt her chest contract and realized that she’d been holding her breath. She released it slowly.

Kyle spoke. “It was only a matter of time until someone noticed that picture. We were just playing a waiting game.”

“I think you better tell her everything,” Lia said.

Kyle nodded, his lips pursed. He turned his back to the computer and faced Maggie. “Beverly Clabber killed my wife.”

“But . . . I thought she died in a car accident.”

“She did. And Beverly Clabber was behind the wheel of the car that broadsided Sara.”

“Oh my God. What happened?”

“Mrs. Clabber ran a stop sign. She claimed it was because the rental car she was driving had an acceleration problem. Not only that, but she sued the rental company, which didn’t want the publicity of a lawsuit and settled with her out of court. So she actually made money off my wife’s death.”

“That is unbelievably horrible. But why did you follow her to Crozat? Actually, how did you even know she was staying with us?”

Kyle smiled grimly. “I wish I could say that I used my expert abilities as a computer programmer to ferret out that information, but Beverly, like a lot of seniors, has a passing interest in social media with no idea how to use it properly. She posted on a couple of sites where she hadn’t activated any privacy settings. She and Hal were supposed to spend their honeymoon visiting several Louisiana plantation B and Bs. When I saw Crozat was one of them, I had to come here. I wanted to confront her where Sara and I got married, to make her see and feel what she took from me. I wanted to show her that wedding picture on your wall, and then I was going to show her this.”

Kyle took a wallet out of his pants pocket. Maggie noticed that his hands were shaking slightly. He extracted a square of paper and handed it to her. She stared at the blurry black-and-white image.

“It’s a sonogram,” Kyle said. “Sara was two months pregnant. When I got the strength to go through her purse after the accident, I found it. She was going to surprise me.”

“Kyle, I feel for your loss—really I do—but you’ve been lying to us.”

“Not lying,” Lia said, jumping to his defense. “Call it a sin of omission. When Beverly was murdered, Kyle told me everything and swore he had nothing to do with her death. I asked him not to go to the police. Knowing Ru, he would have been all over Kyle and done nothing to find the real murderer.”

Maggie shrugged. “I’m not surprised Rufus never put you and Beverly together,” she said to Kyle, “but I am surprised Bo Durand didn’t find the connection.”

“She was using her original given name and the surname of one of her husbands, so anything on the Internet about the accident would have listed her as Fran Walker. She hadn’t married Hal Clabber yet.”

“Man, that woman had more husbands than an old-time movie star.”

“I also went on this jag where I cleaned the Internet of everything about the accident,” Kyle continued. “I couldn’t stand it out there, where anyone could read about it. I didn’t want to just wipe it from my memory, I wanted to wipe it from everyone’s memory.”

Maggie grimaced and rubbed her forehead. She turned to her cousin. “Can I talk to you in private?”

Maggie and Lia walked into the Fais Dough Dough storefront, where Maggie confronted her cousin. “How could you not tell me any of this?”

“I had to protect Kyle.”

“Who you’ve known for what, a week? How do you know he’s even telling the truth and not some psychopath? Because let me tell you, his behavior is kind of psychopath-y.”

“I just know, Maggie. The way we all know when we clear our minds like Gran’ taught us, to give space for the answer and let our instincts take over.”

“I’m beginning to see that there’s a big difference between intuition and wishful thinking.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you or make things any harder on the family,” Lia said. She squeezed her hands together and held them in front of her as if begging Maggie to understand. “I didn’t know what else to do. I guess I just hoped that the police would find the real murderer, and no one would ever have to know anything about Kyle and his connection to Beverly Clabber. I was afraid if they heard about it, they’d stop looking for anyone else.”

Intellectually, Maggie understood Lia’s dilemma, but she still felt angry and betrayed by her. “Either Kyle goes to Bo and tells him everything, or I do,” she declared. “You may feel the need to protect Kyle, but I sure don’t. I feel terrible for his loss, but he is not my family, and I will not risk being accused of obstructing justice for him.”

Lia nodded. “I’d never expect you to do that. Now that you know his story, of course Kyle has to tell it to the police. God knows what Rufus will do when he finds out.”

“Yeah, well, your instincts were right about that,” Maggie said, softening a touch. “Rufus would have slapped the cuffs on him and thrown him in jail and said, ‘Case closed.’ He’ll probably do that now. But if you truly, truly believe he’s innocent, at least we have Bo to pursue other suspects behind Ru’s back.”

“Do you really think he’d do that for us?”

Lia looked so desperately hopeful that Maggie could only say yes and pray that she was right.

“Okay, then,” Lia said. “I’ll talk to Kyle.”

Lia turned out the store’s lights and the two women returned to the back room. Kyle was no longer at the computer. “Kyle?” Lia called. “Kyle?” But there was no answer.

Kyle was gone.