miss fortune mystery (ff) - jewel of the bayou

by amy jo belford

  No sooner had I gotten situated and grabbed the back of the chair with both hands – and “chair” doesn’t do justice to that massive piece of furniture; it had been situated back behind the pulpit for dignitaries to sit on, and it really was more of a throne – than Jack reappeared at the church door and gave me a shout.

  “Hey, you wanna give me a hand with this?”

  “Right now?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m busy!” I shouted back, and dragged the chair a few feet through the grass.

  “Ah, come on!” he yelled. “It looks like you have a job for two. Let’s get this lighting together, and then I’ll give you a hand.”

  “Ooof,” I said in my most ladylike way as I dropped the chair back down onto the grass. “Fine! I’m coming!”

  Not that I really minded, but I didn’t want him to get any ideas about whether or not I could pull my weight. So to speak.

  Either the lighting equipment was fiddly, or Jack was extremely meticulous, but it took a while to sort out the cables and to get everything working. It took almost as long, in fact, as it took Mrs. Langstrom to get her hair back into a state that she could live with. Jack and I were just finishing up when I saw Deacon Ryan approaching from wherever he had been, and we heard the three ladies coming back out the door.

  “No, it does not,” Gertie was saying. “If ‘natural’ is what you were going for, then you need to think long and hard about who you’re giving your money to.”

  “Gertie, the day I take fashion advice from you is the day…”

  “And if you think that damn necklace of yours is ‘natural’,” Ida Belle cut in, “then you’ve got a whole world of misunderstanding when it comes to what exactly ‘natural’ is.”

  “Ida Belle, I don’t know what you’re trying to imply…”

  “I’ll say it just as clearly as you want…”

  “But that necklace is a treasure. The natural beauty of my Mama’s bloodstone has always received compliments, and comments…”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Now you listen, Ida Belle! I think it’s just plain old jealousy. I think you’ve been jealous of that gorgeous, gorgeous necklace since the first day you saw me wear it, all those years ago, and I think…”

  She stopped herself in mid-comment, and turned to me.

  “Give it to me, Lindy,” she said. “It’s no use just talking about it. Let me show these two, up close and personal, what a gorgeous stone really looks like.

  “Of course, Mrs. Langstrom,” I said, and then I paused as I realized I didn’t have it in my hand. “Oh, shoot. I just had it...” I looked around. “It’s gone!”

  Chapter Seven

  Mrs. Langstrom’s shriek could have raised the dead. Honestly, I don’t think any of us would have been surprised to see an early resurrection from the graveyard down the road.

  “Gone! What do you mean, ‘gone’? What have you done with my beautiful stone!”

  “Now, just a minute,” I said. “Let me think!”

  “Think!” Mrs. Langstrom went on. “Think? If you’d been thinking, you never would have let it out of your sight!”

  She sucked in her breath, and looked around at each of us in turn.

  “What have you done with it?” she said. “What have you done with my stone?”

  “Calm down, Gladys,” Gertie said. “You know darn well that none of us wanted anything to do with that dratted necklace.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it’s a fake, anyway,” Ida Belle said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t necessarily go that far,” Gertie said, her brow furrowed in thought. “It’s hard to see why someone would make a fake that looked like that.”

  “Oh, so you’re not content to see me suffer the loss of my treasure. You have to insult me, too!” Mrs. Langstrom lifted the back of her hand to her forehead. “I’m feeling faint. I need to sit down.”

  “Sit down!” I cried out, and Mrs. Langstrom straightened up and looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “That’s it!” I went on. “The chair, that’s where I put the necklace. I was moving the chair over here, and I put the necklace on the seat while I was dragging it!”

  I looked at the confused faces around me.

  “It’s a really big chair,” I said.

  “I don’t care how big it is,” Mrs. Langstrom said. “Go get it!”

  The chair was still sitting in the shade of the oaks, a shade that was turning into a deeper, inky darkness as the sun began to sink lower in the sky. The last of the golden hour had already departed from that part of the yard.

  “Not just the necklace,” she went on. “Get the chair, too! If I don’t sit down soon, I just know that I’ll collapse where I stand.”

  “I’ll help,” Jack said, and the two of us went to fetch the treasure.

  Of course, as soon as we approached the chair, we could see that the necklace wasn’t there. Not on the seat, not draped over the arm. Nowhere. It was just the chair itself, at rest beneath the branches of the old oak trees.

  “Did you see where it went?” Jack whispered to me.

  “No, I do not, and if this is some kind of joke I’ll have your hide,” I hissed back. “I set it down right here. Where the heck did it go?”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Jack said, and he grabbed the chair and hauled it over to where Mrs. Langstrom was standing.

  “Here you go!” he said in a hearty voice. “Now, you just take a seat, and we’ll get this taken care of.”

  “Where’s my stone?” she said as she sank into the cushion on the seat.

  “It’s got to be around here somewhere,” Jack said.

  “I don’t understand,” Mrs. Langstrom said. “I thought that you left it on the chair, Lindy?”

  “I did!” I said. “At least, I think I did. I just can’t imagine where it must have gotten to.”

  “Well, it certainly didn’t walk off by itself!” she said. “Find it! Find it!”

  Ida Belle snorted at that, but even she joined in on the search. We kicked through the grass, looked under the cars, checked to see if the necklace had gotten tangled in the extension cords, but it wasn’t anywhere. The longer we looked, the more frantic Mrs. Langstrom got, until suddenly she was silent.

  That was more unnerving than anything else, and the search party gathered back around the chair where she was sitting like an elderly queen. A queen without her jewels, but still.

  “It’s been stolen,” she said quietly. “You’re not going to find it. Someone stole it.”

  “Not anyone who ever saw it,” Ida Belle said, but Mrs. Langstrom just shook her head.

  “It’s getting dark,” she continued, “and under the cover of darkness, it will disappear forever. My precious stone, gone forever! Someone knew how valuable it is, and they took it.” She gestured at the group. “For all I know, the whole kit and caboodle of you are in cahoots. All of you!”

  She may have meant all of us, but I was pretty sure she thought that I was at the heart of it all, and I wasn’t wrong about that. She turned, and jabbed her finger at me. “And as for you, Lindy… You’re fired!”

  I should have seen that one coming from a country mile away, but somehow it hadn’t occurred to me. I stood there, mouth agape, and felt the wheels in my mind spinning around, but nothing came out for what felt like ages.

  “Well, you can fire me all you want,” I finally said, “but that won’t keep me from trying to find that darned necklace.”

  But what if it never turned up? This was the last thing I needed. I’d probably have to stay in Sinful forever, looking for that necklace like a widow watching for a whaling ship, always searching, searching, searching… I shivered. It was like a curse.

  Jack came over and stood by my side. Maybe he’d seen me shiver, and maybe he just knew I needed the support, but he took my hand and looked me in the eye. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “If you need a job, you can stay on with me. You’re the best lighting assistant I ever
had.”

  I had to laugh at that, and I sniffed back any possible tears. After all, big girls don’t cry.

  “I knew it!” Mrs. Langstrom said. “Cahoots, all of you!”

  “Gladys, if you think any one of us made a play for that old thing, you’re crazier than I thought you were,” Gertie said, and Mrs. Langstrom began to sputter.

  “But!” Gertie went on, “there’s no sense in trying to make you see sense. Looks to me like it’s time to call in the Deputy.”

  “The old man? On the horse?” I said. “Robert E. Lee?”

  “Now who’s crazy?” Gertie said. “No, not the Sheriff. The Deputy. Carter LeBlanc.”

  I hadn’t been in Sinful long enough to know the ins and outs of who’s who in town, but I’ve spent enough time in enough small towns to know that knowing who’s who is an important part of getting along. If Gertie and Ida Belle though that the Deputy needed to be called in, then I was all for it.

  ###

  If I didn’t know Gertie and Ida Belle as well as I thought I was beginning to, I might have suspected that there was some ulterior motive to calling in Deputy LeBlanc. He was handsome, young – just about everything that Robert E. Lee was not. I like my boys more on the linebacker side of things, but I’m not going to lie. I felt a bit of a flutter when he arrived.

  Or maybe it was just my nerves. If that darn necklace didn’t turn up, there was no telling what Mrs. Langstrom might insist happen next. I could just see myself, hauled off to jail under suspicion of stealing that rock. At least I could probably count on Ida Belle and Gertie as visitors, if only to commiserate about the injustice of being locked up for the possible theft of something that, as Ida Belle would undoubtedly tell anyone who would listen, looked exactly like a big ol’ turd.

  Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

  At least Deputy LeBlanc seemed to be fair. He stood there in the twilight, jotting down statements in his notepad as he tried to get a description. He nodded his head as Mrs. Langstrom went on and on from her perch on the throne about her valuable family treasure, but eventually even her non-description had to come to an end.

  “Lindy, get me some water,” she demanded.

  “How’s that? I thought you fired her,” Jack said, and got a glare for a response.

  “Now, now,” Deacon Ryan said. “No need to fuss. Let me go fetch you a glass.”

  Deputy LeBlanc shot him a look, but he was already headed toward the church.

  “OK,” Deputy LeBlanc said, and he cleared his throat. “I think I see, Mrs. Langstrom. Or, actually, maybe I don’t. Just to make sure, I should probably get a description from someone else, too.”

  “Oh, I can help you with that,” Ida Belle said. “It looked like a big ol’ turd.”

  It hurts, sometimes, being so right all of the time.

  “I’ll need a better description than that,” Deputy LeBlanc said. “Are there any photos of it? I understand that it went missing while Mrs. Langstrom was, um, getting ready, but were there any shots taken before then that might show the necklace?”

  “No,” I said dejectedly. “We didn’t take any photos earlier. We were too busy moving the whole photo studio outside for that.”

  “And I don’t even want to ask about why it all had to be moved outside, do I,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Probably not.”

  As we were talking, Jack had been looking at his phone. Probably texting someone about the crazy things that happen in Sinful, I thought to myself. Or catching up on baseball scores. Or checking out the news of the world. Anything to take himself away from right here, right now – and I didn’t blame him one bit. I’d check out myself, if I could.

  Or, maybe, he was looking for a picture.

  “This is it, isn’t it,” he said, and I looked at him in wonder as he flipped his phone around. When exactly had he had the chance to snap a shot of Mrs. Langstrom and her necklace?

  “Give me that,” Mrs. Langstrom snapped, but Deputy LeBlanc held out his hand and Jack passed the phone to him.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, and he held the phone out at arm’s length and then close to his eye again, almost as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. I wasn’t sure if that was because he couldn’t quite believe that Jack would have a picture of the missing necklace after all, or if it was because he couldn’t quite believe the necklace itself.

  After all, it was quite a sight.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Langstrom said. “Where did you get that? I don’t recall you taking any pictures of me. Or of my necklace. Or is this the sort of thing that thieves do? Were you taking pictures so that you could scalp my necklace?”

  “Scalp?” I said.

  “I think you mean ‘fence.’ And, no, for the record, I did not take a picture of your necklace in order to fence your bloodstone.”

  “Ah-ha!” she said. “You know it was a bloodstone! How could you possibly know that, unless you had been doing your research, figuring out the best place to sell it? Figuring out the best price you could get for it, probably!”

  “I don’t think that it was a secret, Mrs. Langstrom,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that Gertie or Ida Belle said something about it earlier.”

  “I think we all know what Ida Belle has been saying about it,” Mrs. Langstrom said, “but that doesn’t change the facts.”

  Deputy LeBlanc took a deep breath, and turned to Jack.

  “How about we start over again,” he said. “So, how did you get this picture?”

  Before he could answer, however, the blast of a shotgun echoed through the twilight. I jumped, Mrs. Langstrom screamed, and Ida Belle and Gertie turned toward the noise just as a second blast exploded in the darkness.

  “What the heck?” Deputy LeBlanc said, and he snapped his notebook shut and peered into the night.

  “That’ll teach ‘em!” came faintly to us through the evening air.

  “Adele! That you?” Gertie shouted in response, nearly taking out my eardrum in the process. She grabbed her purse, and without another word she headed to her truck.

  “Hold it!” Deputy LeBlanc said. “What’s going on?”

  Ida Belle shook her head.

  “Honestly, Carter,” she said, “if you can’t keep up with what’s going on, how are you going to keep on top of things? I’d think you’d know darn well that Adele Monroe is convinced that the raccoons are trying to steal her lawnmower. I’m surprised she hasn’t called you about it, truth be told.”

  “Maybe she did, but that tale seemed farfetched, even for Sinful,” he said.

  “Farfetched or not,” Ida Belle said, “it sounds to me like Adele has just upped the ante.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you say that some raccoons are trying to steal a lawnmower?”

  “That’s exactly what I said, and you’d think that folks who have lived around these parts for their whole lives would be a little more open to the possibility,” she said. “The wildlife around here will give you fits. I’m not saying that Adele is on point all day, every day, but you know what? I will say that there’s an even chance that the raccoons are trying to do just exactly what she says they are.”

  She patted Deputy LeBlanc on his arm. “But don’t you worry. We’ll get it all straightened out.”

  The truck was roaring to life, and Ida Belle strode over and hopped in. She gave us a wave, and then Gertie peeled out and headed on down the road. Off to make sure that the lawnmower was still safe and sound.

  Deputy LeBlanc sighed, and opened his notebook again, and Jack looked at him quizzically.

  “Shouldn’t you go check that out?” he said.

  “Ida Belle’s right,” Deputy LeBlanc said, “Gertie’ll find out what’s going on, and it’s not like the sound of a shotgun is anything strange around these parts.”

  “And just how that is supposed to help me find out what’s going on around here, I’d like to know?” Mrs. Langstrom said. “If she and Ida Belle hadn’t run off in that cowardly
way just now, maybe we’d be getting to the bottom of this!”

  “Cowardly?” I said. “They ran off toward the gunshots!”

  “I think you’ll find,” she said, “that the line of fire isn’t exactly new to them.”

  Deputy LeBlanc sighed again. “To be fair, it’s not exactly new to most of the ladies in this town.”

  “There you are!” Mrs. Langstrom said, and I turned to see Deacon Ryan coming out of the shadows. He had a sickly smile on his face, and a thimble-like glass held between his thumb and index finger.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Langstrom, but this is the best I could find,” he said, holding out the tiny communion glass of water to her.

  “Couldn’t have looked too hard,” she grumbled, “considering how long you took.”

  He attempted to improve his smile, but he still seemed a little green around the gills to me.

  “Don’t worry about the shots you heard,” I said. “It’s just someone down the street trying to scare away the raccoons.”

  “Oh?” he said, but he didn’t look any more settled to me. Maybe it wasn’t the gunfire that had him upset. “I think I’ll go have another look for the necklace.”

  “Maybe you should stay close by,” Deputy LeBlanc said. “Don’t want you getting lost in the dark.”

  Deacon Ryan looked back toward the edge of the churchyard, but he didn’t try to leave.

  “So, Jack,” Deputy LeBlanc said, “why don’t you tell me a little bit more about how you came by this picture?”

  “I told you already!” Mrs. Langstrom jumped in. “He’s clearly been planning this for a long time, and he took the picture so that he could move the goods! That’s what they say, isn’t it? Move the goods?”