by Tina DeSalvo
“I want to clear the air.” She fisted her hands at her sides and faced him. “So you don’t misinterpret my bug repellent or my regular gait as an act of seduction.” She lifted her hand and ticked off her fingers as she spoke. “One, I don’t like you. Two, I’m not interested in you. Three, I definitely don’t want to have sex with you. Four, I don’t want to share my workspace or investigative time with you.” She slammed her fist onto her waist. “Comprends?”
“Yes, I understand, Boots.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I deserved some of that anger. But tonight, when you climb into bed and turn out the lights and think about us on this hard attic floor, you’re going to realize that you kissed me as much as I kissed you.”
She blew out a breath, turned toward the chest, and spoke in rapid-fire French again. She rambled on as she kneeled, her words slowing and her tone softening as she secured the chest. Work seemed to ease her temper and calm her; he watched her close the lid of the chest. She inhaled deeply, rubbed the top of the chest, and began to push it toward the wall. Beau looked away. He didn’t want to see her in those tight jeans anymore. He wanted the hell out of the stifling hot attic and back to his office. Back to normalcy.
“I’ve had enough of this today. Let’s get out of here,” he growled. She didn’t respond or move. Was she ignoring him? He waited a few beats, controlled tempered his tone and spoke more calmly. “Let’s go.”
“Uh, Beau. You’ll want to see this,” she said, speaking English. He turned to look, not sure if she was going to continue this cat and mouse thing they had going or if she had moved on to something else. “I don’t want to be accused of contaminating evidence by finding new old things in the attic.”
Beau walked over, grabbed the gloves off the floor and using them like a dishrag, picked up what she was pointing to. “It’s a wooden spool. So what?”
“It’s a fezzo, a bobbin,” she corrected, using a heavy French accent. “A childhood toy. Fezzos were used in races down the halls of the house by the plantation children or tied together to make doll legs or spun with a string and stick like a top. If a child could think of a way to play with it, they did.”
Beau held it up to the light. “I remember my brother, Jackson, had found some in an old tackle box one time.” He paused realizing she already knew that Jackson was his brother from the obituary she read. “We used them as corks for fishing.” He flipped it over. "There are two letters carved into the top. W and W. Or M and M.”
“What?” Jewell stood, removing a magnifying glass from her tool belt. She slid on her head lamp and turned it on. “May I?” Beau handed it to her. “These initials are M’s; see how there is a faint line beneath the open side of the letters, like it’s sitting on the line?” She pointed to the markings. “It looks like the initials were burned in.” She studied the rest of it, reading the manufacturer’s writing along the side. “I’ll have to date these serial numbers, but my guess is that it’s from 1910 to the 1940s. I'm familiar with the company stamped there,” she indicated the name on the side of the spool. “New Orleans Spool and Thread went out of business in 1946.”
“And the M’s? I guess one could stand for Martine. She was the daughter of Aguste, Ben’s great-grandfather.” He frowned, thinking of how she had researched him and his family. “You know that, of course.”
“I saw her name in my research.” She looked at him. “You don’t have to be so annoyed by it. It’s my job. If I know the ancestors when going through the family heirlooms, I can put the pieces and family history together.” She held up the spool.
Beau conceded that made sense. The research may have led her to family secrets that he didn’t want her to know about, though. He had to sort that one out. “Well, I’m guessing the M is for Martine,” he said. “I don’t know of any other person with the initial M who lived here. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t put MB, her full initials?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the child asked for her initial to be placed there twice. Not that I’m familiar with the thinking of children, but it seems to me they aren’t logical thinkers. I didn’t see any death records on Martine. Is she alive? We can ask her. She may know.”
“The family lost track of her over the years.” No. Beau didn’t like her digging too close to Martine one bit.
“Oh, that’s so sad. Have you considered hiring a private detective?”
“Several times.”
“How long ago did the family lose track of her? And what does that mean?”
“A long time ago,” he said answering the first question and choosing to believe the second question was rhetorical.
“You’re being so vague.”
“You’re being so nosy.”
She looked down her nose at him. “At least I’m not being rude.”
He laughed. She had him on that one. “Sorry.”
“What’s up with Martine that has you so defensive?”
“Did I ever tell you how much I liked that nightgown you wore when you raced into the kitchen?”
She looked down her nose at him again and stared at him. “Oh, you definitely are being defensive and evasive over Martine. Why is that?” He shrugged. “You know, if you won’t tell me, Elli or Tante Izzy will.”
“Crap.” She was right. At least if he told her about Martine, he could control what he wanted her to know. If she presented any other information to him, then he’d know she had another source. Hell, she probably knew about Martine already and was just pretending she didn’t. “Martine has been missing since she was three years old.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, sounding sincerely shocked. “How?”
“We don’t know. When the nanny went to wake her one morning, she was gone. That was it.”
“How awful. The family must’ve been devastated. Her father…”
“Never got over losing her. He hired private detectives until he died. He looked for her himself. She was never found.”
“Could she have wondered out at night, fallen into the bayou?” she asked, her voice soft.
“The family doesn’t believe so. The doors to the house were locked. And, even as young as she was, she knew how to swim.”
Her eyes were wide and they looked so sad, he nearly gathered her into his arms.
“Is she presumed dead, Beau?”
“No.” He stopped himself before he told her that the family would never give up hope until she was too old to still be alive. Jewell’s big, beautiful, mesmerizing, eyes almost had him saying more.
She nodded, then walked to the second cypress chest that looked just like the first one a few feet away and opened it. Her hand went to her throat. “Perhaps there were two little girls with the letter M in their names who lived here that weren’t family?” She lifted two rag dolls that were lying on top of the folded items in the chest.
“Too easy. Nope.” He shook his head.
“Well, then maybe Martine liked having two of everything to play with.”
Beau walked to the chest and looked inside. There were two matching tan dresses with the same tiny flowers stitched on each of the collars. “This doesn’t make sense.” Jewell lifted the dresses and held them up together. They were the same size.
“Maybe one is for Martine and one is for her twin sister, Mignon.”
He wasn’t all that surprised to hear her make the connection. ”I would’ve given that idea more than two seconds of consideration, Jewell, if I hadn’t seen all of the family documents associated with Martine and the Bienvenu family. She didn’t have a twin. In fact, there were never any twins in the family. Ever.”
Jewell lifted two more identical dresses from the chest. “What documents, Beau? There couldn’t have been many documents from that generation. Did you see a birth certificate or a midwife’s book proving that? Family letters announcing the birth of a daughter? Plantation records that indicated a single baby had been born here and certain purchases had to be made as a result? Or did you see it written in the family bible?�
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“No, none of those.” He ran his hand through his hair. She would know exactly what kind of evidence could be found to corroborate facts of birth. How much did she already know? How much should he tell her? “I’ve seen the legal and binding last will and testament of Martine’s father,” he offered, deciding she wouldn’t stop asking or looking until she had answers. “He sure as hell would’ve known if he had twin daughters.”
She nodded, appearing to be satisfied with his answer. Remaining silent, she gently placed the dresses back into the chest with the rag dolls and lifted her iPad to take photos of the items. “I’d like to look at that will.”
“I’m sure you would.” He shook his head. “Private family papers, Boots. It is none of your business.”
“Are you absolutely sure of that?” Was she planning to twist this story of the twins to eventually bring it around to claim that Mignon was the long-lost Martine? Was that her scam? Or did she believe there actually were twins? There hadn’t been enough time or opportunities for her to plant the double items in the chest.
“Yes, Boots, I’m sure.” He nodded once. “A couple of matching dresses, dolls, and fezzos do not point to Martine having a twin. Circumstantial at best. It can certainly be explained in other ways. Maybe she was a messy eater and needed extra clothes. Maybe she had a habit of misplacing her toys and to keep their princess happy, they always had a spare handy.” He folded his arms over his chest.
“In my research coming here I had a good idea of the family lineage but I saw nothing of the mistakes.” Jewell said, her voice low, even. “Were there illegitimate children? Maybe Martine had an illegitimate sister who was very close in age.”
Jewell never made eye contact with Beau; her attention was on the task of snapping a few more photos of the inside of the open chest. She then added a notation to the inventory in her iPad before taking out a single item and repeating the tedious process of photographing and cataloging it. When she was finished, she returned everything as she’d found it. The process took twenty minutes, before she closed the chest and shoved her magnifying glass into her tool belt.
“An illegitimate sibling isn’t a stretch, is it?” she asked, as if there hadn’t been a long pause in their conversation. She placed the wooden spool with the initials on it onto the floor and took a series of photos of it at various angles. When she finished, she turned off her head lamp. “That was a common occurrence in a closed plantation community. It’s not the same as what we’ve come to learn of the slave girl–plantation owner affairs in the generations before Martine, but men have been having affairs with the help throughout history.”
“So you’re saying Mignon is the illegitimate heir of Aguste Bienvenu?” He laughed a short laugh. “Come on, Professor, you can come up with a better story.”
“I’m not saying Mignon is the illegitimate heir.” She kept her voice even, but Beau heard the impatience in her tone. “I’m not saying she is the legitimate heir. I’m not saying she’s one of the M’s on the wooden spool or the little girl who wore one of those matching dresses. I’m certainly not saying she is actually Martine.” She hesitated, looking like she was gathering her thoughts before continuing. “What I am saying, Counselor, is that she might be one of those things. I will investigate this until I figure it out.” She paused. “Why—isn’t that what you want, too? Why do you prefer to just dismiss an old lady’s claims that she lived around here rather than see if there’s any legitimacy to them? Does she threaten you?”
“Hell, no. Not her. You. You threaten me.”
Jewell looked at him, her mouth open, but no response came.
“It’s lunchtime,” he said, not wanting to continue that conversation. He looked at the time on the phone. 11:00. So it was an early lunch. “Let’s take a break, get a sandwich…”
“Then come back to work,” she said, finishing his sentence. It wasn’t what he would’ve said, though. He would’ve said they should call it a day and go their separate ways.
An hour later, they had finished lunch, checked on the progress of the work being done in the barn and returned to the attic to catalog the items in the second chest. While Jewell worked, Beau sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, reading an old book taken from one of the chests. The book was a faded sable brown, the pages yellowed and brittle. The subject was outdated and entertaining as hell. “Uh-oh. I’m in violation.”
“What?” Jewell looked up from the small box of buttons she had on the floor in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s bad, Boots.” He sighed hugely. “According to the Ladies and Gentlemen’s Pocket Companion on Etiquette and Manners, I have made a huge faux pas.” He shook his head in exaggerated movements. “Here it is, in black and white…er, black and yellow.” He lifted his brows playfully. “Yellowed pages.” Then, he pointed to the book. ““It clearly states that—At family dinners where the common household bread is used, it should never be cut less than an inch and a half thick. There is nothing more plebeian than thin bread at dinner.” He looked at Jewell, eyes wide. “I’m plebeian.” His brows furrowed. “What does ‘plebeian’ mean?”
She smiled. “A commoner. From the Roman times, the lower, common class of people were referred to as the plebeian class.”
“Well, there it is.” He slapped his forehead. “I’ve served bread only an inch and a quarter thick, so I must be plebian.”
She laughed easily and it warmed him the like sun did when he sat on his back porch to watch the sunrise.
“Who knew?” She said, walking to where he was sitting. Her alluring, earthy fragrance slid over him as she sat next to him and looked at the book. He never seemed to be prepared for the sensual assault of her unique scent. He closed his eyes a moment to both allow himself to enjoy it and to fortify himself against it. Then, he shifted the book so they both could read it.
“I’ve seen this book before,” she said, her voice soft and light. “But I didn’t realize how personally revealing it could be.”
“Yes, indeed.” He flipped a few pages. “Revealing and full of useful advice. Read this.” He pointed to the sentence that he wanted her to read.
Jewell shifted closer to Beau to better see the passage. Her shoulder pressed against his, sending a slow heat through his body.
“‘The less your mind dwells upon lovers and matrimony,’ says Mrs. Farren in her address to young women, ‘the more agreeable and profitable will be your intercourse with gentlemen.’” She looked up at Beau. “Ha, ha. Very funny. You aren’t plebian. You’re mischievous.” She rolled her eyes. “Now what do you think this really means?”
He held up one hand in surrender. “I didn’t say I thought it meant anything.” He wagged his brows and smiled. “You have a dirty mind, Dr. Duet.”
She inhaled, looked up toward the ceiling and shook her head. “I’m sure there were a lot more interesting and historically significant passages you could’ve selected for me.” She tapped the book.
“Well, there was something in the book about how ladies’ minds are less occupied with important concerns, so they are better observers of propriety or impropriety.”
“Less important concerns, huh?”
“Hey, I didn’t write it.” He closed the book and placed it on his lap. “I think deciding on the luncheon menu and what dress to wear to the ball are very important concerns.”
Jewell punched him in the arm. “Chauvinist.”
“Hey, be careful. You aren’t being agreeable for your intercourse with gentlemen.”
She laughed, started to get up. “Well, at least I’m not with this gentleman.” He extended her hand to point to him and he grabbed it and tugged her back down. She landed on his lap. “Hey.”
“I’ve never said I was a gentleman.” He rubbed the silky strand of hair that had fallen around her face between his finger and thumb. Her mouth fell open, her lips softened, as if in invitation. Nothing else seemed to exist around him, except those lips and the sound of her breath sliding o
ver them. Plump, soft, wet. He slowly moved in, his eyes focusing only on her mouth as everything else around them seemed to disappear in a fuzzy cloud. He angled his head, moistened his lips…and was jolted from the magical haze by Jewell jumping back.
What the hell happened?
Then he heard her phone. It was playing the verse, Jambalaya, crawfish pie, filé gumbo, complete with fiddles, accordions and rubboard.
“That’s the ringtone for Tante Izzy,” she said, sounding both breathless and worried. She answered her phone.
“Hello.” She looked at him, her eyes wide. “It’s Tante Izzy. She says we’ve spent enough time in the plantation attic.”
“I agree.” He folded his arms over his chest.
Jewell rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, ma’am. Okay. We’ll meet you there.” She ended the call. “Beau, I think I was just extorted, and my Mimi is being held for ransom.” She smiled. “Tante Izzy said she has been patiently waiting for me to go to her house to clear out her old stuff. But she ‘isn’t patient no more.’ She’s taking Mimi to her house now, and if I want my Mimi, I have to get her there…but only after I do what she hired me to do.” She looked at Beau, humor in her eyes. “Should I call the FBI and report a kidnapping?”
“Hah. Forget the FBI. You’ll need the Marines, Air Force and Navy Seals.”
***
Jewell reached the parking area near the camper and walked toward her old beat-up truck. “Let’s take my car,” Beau said, pointing to a black, late model BMW that had the white fluffy clouds from the sky reflected on its shiny hood and doors.
“I’d prefer taking mine.” Jewell opened the driver’s door and climbed in. “You can take your car if you want,” she said, hoping he’d ride separately. She wanted to mull over the recent finds and see if she could make sense of it all. Having Beau around muddled her thinking. She had to be careful that she didn’t say something wrong that could jeopardize her job here. When he was around, she felt on edge and defensive. It was exhausting to always have to be on her “A” game around him.