Nat picked up a large sack of crawfish and carried it into the back room to begin purging them. “Times have changed, Evangeline, and we’ve gotta keep up if we want the Funky Cat to be a success.”
“It only has six rooms!” Evangeline cried, rearranging bags of spices on the counter. “How much of a success can it be?”
Roxy felt awkward. She didn’t want to talk about how much more upscale the boutique hotel was now or how expensive the rooms had become since Evangeline’s time as owner; it would be rude and embarrassing.
“Well, the room rates are just a touch higher, so we need a new, more affluent demographic, that’s all. Now, shouldn’t we get started on the jalapeño cornbreads? Where have those ramekins gotten to?”
They were really going to town on the welcome meal for the influencers. It was to be a five-course affair.
“Do you think they’ll be able to eat all this lot?” Nat wondered out loud as she wandered back into the kitchen a few minutes later. She was carrying a pot of newly purged crawfish with a grin on her face. “For course one, we’ve got a chicken gumbo with Cajun spices.” Nat ladled up a spoonful of the gumbo and let it slowly pour back into the pan. “Followed by miniature crawfish and cheese pies, followed by Shrimp Creole. That’s shrimp cooked in tomatoes, peppers and hot sauce, with white rice, Roxy,” the young English woman said gravely.
Nat was a Funky Cat treasure. She helped Roxy with anything that was needed at the boutique hotel, from cooking to serving guests, from checking them in to cleaning their rooms. And her talents extended even further. Nat possessed a voice that was so smooth and creamy that Roxy had hired her on the spot to sing for guests.
Now, Nat’s black nail polish gleamed in the lights of the kitchen. Her excitement about the upcoming meal really was something. Getting the cynical, skeptical Nat to be joyous and upbeat about anything was a true feat. But then, what was coming was a bold, new experiment for the small hotel.
“Yum, and I’m preparing dessert—warm bread pudding with caramel and whiskey sauce,” Roxy said.
“Don’t forget the cheese course!” Evangeline cried out from where she was stirring a huge pot of broth.
“I’m not sure they will be able to eat it all, but I do know that thousands and thousands will be watching via their Instagram accounts, and we have to give a great impression, not only of the Funky Cat, but of New Orleans,” Roxy finished.
The city was the first place Roxy had ever felt truly at home. It was hard to explain, but New Orleans had gotten into her bones somehow. There was a heat about “N’awlins” as the locals called it, perhaps from the spices, perhaps from the carnivals and the magic and the spiritualism that lurked about the place, perhaps from the music that floated from basements and businesses at any time of the day or night. Whatever it was, the essence of it had found its way into Roxy’s very soul, lodged itself there, and wasn’t about to leave any time soon.
As she chopped onions and garlic for the Shrimp Creole, Roxy sighed happily to herself. Things were finally falling into place in her life, and she felt cozy and warm and safe. Just then, they heard the sound of the front door knocker being rapped. Hard.
Roxy frowned, her knife paused over an onion. She was expecting Sam, but he’d have simply walked in without knocking. Roxy wiped her hands down her apron and hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room and into the hallway. The influencers weren’t due for a good three hours. She hoped this wasn’t one of them arriving early. She wanted to be dressed in her best and have the food ready before they got even so much as a glimpse of the Funky Cat or its proprietor. A little flustered, she pulled open the door. Her heart sank.
A very tall, slim woman with huge sunglasses and long, black hair that cascaded in waves down her back stood on the doorstep. She wore chunky high heels on her feet, skinny jeans, and a leather jacket with a fur collar that looked very expensive indeed. Behind her, six Louis Vuitton suitcases and two holdalls were piled up in the courtyard. Without so much as a greeting, the woman walked assuredly past Roxy and into the Funky Cat lobby.
“Oh, hello,” Roxy said, stepping back to give the woman room to pass. Who was she? The woman had walked in like she owned the place, a demeanor that Roxy suspected was her visitor’s default setting. Then she remembered who the woman was!
“Good afternoon,” the visitor said, pushing her sunglasses on top of her head. “I am Ada Okafor.” The woman eyed Roxy. “But I expect you knew that. I’m early, I know. I’m always early. The early bird catches the worm. Snooze, you lose.” She flicked her wrist and poked one forefinger into the air.
Roxy recovered quickly. “Great to meet you. I’m Roxy Reinhardt, part-owner and manager of this hotel.” Roxy stuck out her hand, but Ada didn’t seem to notice so Roxy gestured down at her apron, embarrassed. “Yes, um, I’m afraid we aren’t quite, um, ready for the grand welcome we wanted to give you.” What was happening to her? All Roxy’s confidence and excitement had evaporated at the sight of this officious, elegant woman.
“It’s fine,” Ada said, though her mouth twitched. She didn’t look impressed. “I will go to my room and do some editing on the mag while you,” she looked Roxy up and down, “pull yourself together.” Ada Okafor ran a travel magazine for rich Nigerians who wanted to jet-set around the world like she did. She had a huge international following on Instagram in the luxury travel market.
Ada looked around. “But who will carry my bags?”
CHAPTER TWO
THREE MONTHS EARLIER, the Funky Cat Inn had been a guesthouse known as Evangeline’s. It was a large, grand house built in the French architecture style so common in New Orleans. But when Roxy arrived, the building had long since begun to crumble and fall into disrepair. It was covered in cobwebs. The balcony on the third floor was so rickety that no one dared step out on it. The once-vibrant pink façade had peeled and faded in patches until it was blush in one corner and almost white in another. Bookings were down, and one guest turned out to be a murderer. But then Evangeline retired, Sam infused an injection of cash, and Roxy had taken over. Now the place was transformed.
Roxy’s do-over had started with the exterior. No one was going to be staying with her if the place looked like a flamingo on its last leg. She had gotten busy with a stepladder and used up can after can of bright pink paint until the first floor dazzled. She stopped there because she wasn’t a fan of heights, and instead hired a professional who brought his ladder and took over. Now the outside of the building had been restored to its former brilliance. It stood out like a beacon among the black, white, yellow, and red buildings around it.
Roxy had bitten her lip as she watched the painter from the cobbled, narrow street below. Hiring someone had seemed an extravagance. To save money, she had done most of the work around the hotel herself with the help of Nat and Sam, but she knew she must recognize her limits. It would hardly help to save money on a painter if she fell off a ladder and broke her leg. But still, her poverty-stricken background and her thrifty ways made spending money on the renovations hard for her.
Sam had been a huge help. As well as being both an excellent handyman and the owner of a nearby laundry, he was also an awesome sax player, a car enthusiast, and apparently an all-round decent guy. Sam’s most important role at present, however, was that he was the main investor in the hotel, both buying the building from Evangeline and paying for its renovations. He had given Roxy a budget, and she had made sure to keep well within it.
The form of Sam’s relationship with Roxy had an unresolved quality around it, though. Roxy knew she had a crush on him, one that she was trying to quell. She suspected he was attracted to her too. Over the weeks and months of renovating the building together, they’d built a friendly, but platonic working relationship, their mutual attraction only slightly impinging upon it now and again. Neither had made a move on the other, either because they were too scared or too busy. Roxy wasn’t too sure which it might be, and now she felt it best to keep things as they were. It
didn’t do to mix business with pleasure in her book. She didn’t want to destroy a good thing. And now, as part-owner and manager of the Funky Cat, she most definitely had a good thing.
Where Sam got his money from was a second unresolved question that had caused Roxy some sleepless nights. The laundry business was doing great, sure, but the cash needed to buy the hotel? That was more than a laundry business owner could be expected to shell out. And he owned a Rolls Royce!
“Where does he get his money from?” Roxy had asked Nat one day.
Nat had shrugged. “He doesn’t say. We don’t ask.”
It was all a bit of a mystery.
Roxy’s life gave her no time to ponder the question, however. After the Funky Cat’s exterior was made over, she turned her attention to organizing the area out front in the courtyard. The hotel faced onto Elijah’s Bakery. The owner, Elijah was a great friend and a wonderful baker. Daily he provided the Funky Cat with fresh bread, delicious pastries, and, of course, beignets. Elijah also played the piano and rounded out the jazz trio that performed at the Funky Cat alongside Nat and Sam.
Elijah was a snappy dresser. When he wasn’t working, he was kitted out in bright shirts and gleaming, patent leather crocodile shoes. He loved a stripe pattern or an African print. But when it came to his business, his personal style didn’t translate. While Elijah might have been a master baker, he was not a master decorator. The façade of his building looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 1980s. It was entirely black and white and gray. Roxy, with some effort, had persuaded him to paint it, and he’d chosen a pale pink and mint-green color scheme. Now the two businesses that sat opposite each other were also a match for one another. The buildings were even color-coordinated.
“I can’t believe I didn’t do this years ago!” Elijah said to Roxy when they stood back and surveyed his storefront. A huge grin spread across his face, and he gave Roxy a high five. He bought new cast iron tables and chairs for the outside, and Sam had given him a special deal on linen tablecloths and napkins to finish off the bright, clean look. Now the bakery was doing better than ever with clientele drawn to it by its elegant, comfortable surroundings and the smell of fresh coffee and beignets that emanated from it.
Roxy and Elijah had become firm friends as they strived to build successful businesses while staying true to their values. They both believed in offering a great product at a great price with friendly service, hard work, and decency being their driving forces. They could often be found outside Elijah’s bakery nursing coffees, their heads together as they discussed the finer points of running a business.
Finally, there was just one thing left to do to the outside of the Funky Cat: they needed to add the finishing touches to the courtyard. First, Sam came along with a pressure washer and took out years of encrusted grime from between the cobbles. Then it was on to the decoration. Roxy had decided to incorporate as many plants as possible into the design of the new courtyard, and her friend Sage was just the right person to help her.
Sage was a spiritualist, New Orleans born and bred, with an ancestral line of African American spiritual women stretching back behind her into history. It was in her blood. She stood in the newly cleaned courtyard in her flowing robes, a deep emerald green this particular time, and put her hands out. “I’m letting the spirits come to me,” she said. “You need to place pots around. They should be filled with basil and white sage and rosemary and lavender. Here, here, here, and here,” she said to Roxy, pointing at four spots in the space in front of the hotel. “They will ward away evil spirits, and I will invite angels and other benevolent spiritual beings to bless and protect this space.”
Roxy wasn’t entirely sure she believed in all that, but she guessed it couldn’t hurt. Besides, it would make the entrance to the Funky Cat smell wonderful. She placed huge pots of herbs just as Sage had directed and hung baskets overflowing with brightly-colored blooms from the exterior walls. Finally, Sam hung a sign with the name of the hotel emblazoned across it under a rendering of a cat that looked rather like Nefertiti, Roxy’s long-haired white Persian. The cat on the sign was wearing a trilby hat at a jaunty angle and holding a saxophone.
The courtyard now looked so good that Roxy was satisfied that the standard of the outside of the hotel matched that of the inside. The interior of the building had come a long way in the time since Roxy had taken over and in the process of restoring it, she had uncovered yet another useful talent of Nat’s—restoring or repurposing worn neglected furniture and decorations.
“It’s called ‘upcycling,’ Rox, and you can do it with just about anything if you have the right eye and the tools,” Nat had said. “Beauty on the cheap.” The hotel had benefited from her passion enormously.
They’d transformed the dining room into a grand eating area and the lounge into a sumptuous, decadent sanctuary for relaxation and rest. They had furnished the rooms with a mixture of real antiques and upcycled items in a variety of dark woods, silver, and gold, with occasional touches of powdery blue. The bedrooms had had a similar treatment. But Roxy still worried that there wasn’t enough color, so she and Nat went through, adding splashes of flamingo pink and royal blue and gold—a cushion here, a toothbrush holder there, until there was a heightened vibrancy to each room.
“It’s so fantastic, Rox. You’re gonna be on TV soon, I just know it,” Nat said to her soon after they opened.
Word-of-mouth recommendations about the Funky Cat spread quickly. After her Grand Opening event, as news of Roxy’s relaunch of the hotel became known, business picked up. Roxy had seen a dramatic increase in bookings and the hotel was now at full capacity nearly every night.
“Oh, I don’t know about that, but it is pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Roxy had felt her confidence grow in leaps as the days passed. The Roxy of old—anxious, wallflower Roxy—seemed to have gone. An energetic, confident businesswoman had replaced her. Roxy was mostly fine with her transformation, but occasionally doubts emerged. She knew that despite her efforts and the professional demeanor she strived to project, there were times when she wasn’t quite as together as she appeared. Now though, it was showtime. Whatever the next few days had in store for her, Roxy had a responsibility to be calm, unflappable, and in charge. The game was most definitely on.
CHAPTER THREE
NAT RETURNED TO the kitchen red-faced and scowling. “What did that woman bring with her, the entire contents of Harrods? She told me she’d just been to England and had ‘stocked up on essentials.’ Essentials? She thinks all these Burberry trench coats and designer dresses are essentials? Really!” Whenever she was angry, Nat’s British accent became more pronounced, all clipped tones and short vowels. “And not only did I have to carry all those bags upstairs, but I also had to get a load of the clothes out, hang them up and check for damage and creases.”
Roxy was surprised Nat had played along with Ada’s requests. “Doesn’t sound like you, Nat.”
“I know.” Nat flopped on one of the stools they kept in the kitchen and pushed her short dark hair back from her face. “Normally I would have told her to jog on. I mean, I’m not her personal assistant, am I? But I knew I had to do it. Imagine, what if she had been secretly filming and I told her I wasn’t going to help? It wouldn’t make a good impression, would it now?”
“Right,” said Roxy biting her lip. She was already wondering if they had gotten themselves in too deep with this Instagram promotion. They’d had plenty of guests before, but those were nice normal ones. Perhaps naïvely, she’d thought the Instagram influencers would be the same. “Thanks for taking one for the team.”
Nat rolled her eyes and hopped off the stool. She began to drench the bread pudding Roxy had prepared earlier with caramel and whiskey sauce. “Well, the next few days are going to be fun, fun, fun, aren’t they?” she said, pulling a face and clapping her hands. “Just four more guests to go. Let’s hope they’re not all as demanding as Ada. We’ll not cope.”
To Roxy and Nat’s relief, Ada
didn’t make as much work for them that afternoon as they feared. She called down to reception for soda water but stayed quiet the remainder of the time. There was a lot of work to do in the kitchen, and Roxy, Nat, and Evangeline did not need distractions.
When everything was prepared and laid out for the evening meal, Roxy hurried to shower and change. Since transforming the hotel, she’d had part of a downstairs storage area turned into two rooms—a bedroom and a bathroom. These were now her private quarters. The room at the top of the house where she’d first stayed as a visitor had been transformed into a wonderful penthouse-style suite. That’s where they were going to put Lily Vashchenko, one of the other influencers. She had the most followers, but now Roxy wondered if she should have put Ada Okafor in there.
Roxy went into her room and slipped off her shoes. She padded in her socks over to the bed where her fluffy white princess of a cat Nefertiti was curled up, purring away. Roxy tickled her under her chin. “Hello, my love,” she said. “You look so cozy there.”
Nefertiti looked up at her, gave a little mewl in appreciation and closed her eyes in what appeared to be ecstasy as Roxy rubbed her cheek.
There was nothing Roxy loved more than curling up with a good book and Nefertiti on her lap. But there was little time for that these days, what with all the hotel work going on, and there was absolutely no time for it now! She took a lightning-fast shower and slipped into a crisp, pressed, white shirt, tight jeans, and silver pumps. She heard a knock on the front door and quickly looked in the mirror before smoothing her hair.
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