Secrets, Lies, and Crawfish Pies

by Abby L. Vandiver

  “No.” Consuela raised an eyebrow. “I told you, it’s not me.”

  Auntie seemed to consider that answer. I stood holding the bundle of linen, too intrigued by this conversation to move.

  “Well, do you know who it was?”

  “Know who what?” Consuela asked.

  “Who did kill someone?”

  Consuela filled up her cheeks with air and blew it out as she flapped her arms and shook her head.

  “Okay,” Auntie said slowly. “But I was speaking of Room 207.” Auntie pointed a thumb back to the room we’d just left. “Do you remember the person that was there?”

  “Is he the one murdered?” she asked.

  “Perhaps...” Auntie started to elaborate, but that seemed to make Consuela unhappy. She took the bundle from me and started into the room. “I tell you I know nothing about it.”

  Auntie looked at me then followed Consuela into the room.

  “Did you notice any visitors coming to see him?” she said.

  “Yes,” Consuela said not stopping her work of stripping the bed. “I saw one person.”

  Auntie’s eyes lit up. “A black woman. Short. Old.”

  She was describing my Aunt Julep. I knew exactly what she was up to.

  “Auntie,” I said.

  She waved her hand at me, shooing me away, letting me know not to interfere. She wanted to get an answer to her question.

  Consuela held onto the pillow she’d just taken the case from and thought about it.

  “She was tanned, but I don’t think she was black.”

  Auntie looked at me and gave a nod as if it were the answer she was looking for. “Julep is light,” she said. “She could be mistaken for having tanned skin.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “What about her age? Did she look around my age?”

  Consuela was flapping the sheet over the bed. She stopped mid-flap and looked at Auntie Zanne as the sheet floated down. “No. Not old like you.”

  “Was she short or tall?”

  I guessed Auntie Zanne was going to continue asking Consuela questions until she got one that matched Aunt Julep’s description. My auntie was a terrible investigator.

  “I guess short,” Consuela said and hunched a shoulder.

  Auntie Zanne snapped her finger as if she just made the connection.

  “And what did you see her do?” Auntie Zanne asked.

  “Nothing,” she said and shrugged. “I just see her go into the room with the man.”

  “Did she stay long?”

  “Not the first time,” she said.

  “She came more than once?” Auntie asked.

  “I saw two times,” she said and nodded as if thinking. “Yes. It could have been more times.”

  “Would you recognize her if you saw her again?” Auntie asked.

  “We have a lot of people that come here,” she said. She grabbed the towels she’d brought in off of the chair and headed into the bathroom. She must have just left them on the counter because she came right back out. “But maybe.”

  That made me have a question. Nothing along the line of my auntie’s crazy interrogation, trying to make the answers fit who she’d determined was the murderer.

  “Consuela, may I ask you a question?” I asked.

  “Sure. Why not?” she said. She grabbed a feather duster off her cart and came back in and went over to the dresser. “I have nothing better to do than stand around and talk to people. People not even staying in hotel.” She fluttered the feathers over the dresser. “Ask me anything.”

  Her sarcasm wasn’t lost on me, but I went on with my questioning. “When is the last time you saw the man that was staying in that room?”

  She stopped dusting and thought about it. “I haven’t seen him in a few days.”

  “Two? Three? How many days?” I asked.

  “I think three days. Maybe four.”

  I nodded. If Auntie was right, which I was sure she wasn’t, that would fit with the time of death.

  Auntie glanced down at her watch. “I have to go,” she said to Consuela. “But if you think of anything, call this number.” She handed a small piece of paper to the maid and started toward the steps.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said and followed my aunt back to the parking lot.

  “Did you find out anything?” I asked. “With your little interrogation?”

  Consuela had gone into the room she’d been cleaning and shut the door, leaving us standing outside. She seemed quite pleased with shutting us out.

  “No. I didn’t,” she said. “Did you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You know, I made a big deal out of Pogue not knowing what to do...” Auntie’s voice trailed off.

  “And now you don’t know what to do?” I asked. “Now you see how hard it is to conduct a murder investigation.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  “I was going to say...You know what, let’s get out of here.” She pointed toward the parking lot. “My car is parked over there.”

  She looped her arm around mine and we started down the steps.

  “Auntie, don’t’ feel bad,” I said. “It is hard figuring out who a murderer is even when you have been trained as a homicide investigator.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a lot, I’m just saying, to figure out. So don’t let it bother you. You need evidence. Clues to lead you from Point A to B. Then to the murderer.”

  She didn’t say anything else and was quiet as we walked through the parking lot. We made it over to Auntie’s white Cadillac, the same make she used for the cars at the funeral home. She unlocked her door, then clicked the switch so I could open mine.

  “What’s hard is not having any cooperation,” she said. “It would be easier to do this if I had some help.” She looked at me. “That’s what I was going to say about Pogue. That he was going to need help.”

  “I plan on helping Pogue,” I said.

  “Did you give him the autopsy report?” she asked.

  “Yes, I did,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Auntie, I had to give it to him. He’s investigating the murder of the guy at your funeral home.”

  “I know. Didn’t I say ‘good?’ You do what you have to do,” she said. “And I’ll do what I have to do to get information.”

  “That worries me,” I said. “And then what are you going to do with the information once you’ve gotten it?” I asked.

  “I’ll let the sheriff know.” She put her head down. “After I’ve solved it.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “You’re solving it?”

  “You think I can’t?”

  “No. I don’t,” I said. “Evidently you think you can, giving Consuela your number, telling her to call you if she thought of anything.”

  “That’s what people say when they’re investigating a murder.”

  “Yeah, they do because they are able to know a lead when they see it, and they know how to follow it,” I said. “You didn’t get anything today with all your snooping and questioning. You just need to let Pogue do it. Give him any information you have or get.”

  “Heavens,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said. “You said you couldn’t trust Pogue.”

  “I never said I couldn’t trust him.” She glanced at me. “I said that he’d turn Josephine Gail in to save his mother.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. So, are you planning on handing over to Pogue all the incriminating information you find?” I asked. “I presume about his mother?”

  “No. I already told you I wasn’t giving him anything until I solved it.”

  �
�Found the evidence against his mother?”

  “Right.”

  “And how are you going to conduct this investigation? You’d need law enforcement to do things like run prints, match DNA, and follow leads. You can’t do it without them. Without their technology.”

  “I have Rhett.”

  I frowned. “Your French-speaking funeral boy?”

  She scrunched up her face. “What is a funeral boy?” She shook her head. “You better be nice to him.”

  “I’ll be nice,” I said. “I am nice. I was just saying who is he to help?”

  “He’s FBI. Used to be part of highly secret covert operations, he’s certified in spying and everything. And now he’s helping me look into this case.”

  “No, he’s not,” I said. “And I can’t believe that man was ever a spy or anything close.”

  “Yes, he is.” She sucked her tongue. “Well he used to be an FBI agent, and I probably shouldn’t have mentioned his top-secret missions. But he still has a lot of connections. He told me that if the man was murdered somewhere outside of Roble and brought to my funeral home, it might not even be in Pogue’s jurisdiction.”

  “Why would you want to do that to Pogue?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know he’s trying to solve this murder.”

  “He’s trying to make Josephine Gail out to be a murderer is what he’s doing.” She looked at me. “If only I could get him to drink some of my tea I could calm him down and talk to him about this. Right now he’s so gung ho about solving it that he’s not thinking straight.”

  I shook my head. I was thinking that I could say the same thing about her.

  Maybe she should drink some tea...

  “It’s his job, Auntie Zanne,” I said. “And he wants to do a good job.”

  “He’s jumping to conclusions.”

  “He is not. He is just gathering information.” She had a look of disbelief on her face.

  “And,” she said, “Rhett also told me that if I get him proof of someone else committing the murder, he’ll make sure it gets to the right person.”

  I froze. I felt like my breathing had been blocked and someone was holding me down.

  “What is wrong with you?” Auntie Zanne asked. “You look like you’re lost.”

  I turned and looked at her. I felt sick–this conversation with her was making my stomach turn.

  I was nervous that Rhett Remmiere, a man who followed my aunt around like a lovesick puppy, would kowtow to her and interfere in what Pogue was trying to do, especially now that he might be a suspect.

  I scrunched up my eyes and stared at her. I wasn’t sure if she was telling me the truth about her little fake-French friend. She did have a tendency to overdramatize and exaggerate. But I did know he’d do just about anything for her. And if she reported to him some information about Aunt Julep, I couldn’t be so sure, if he did have some kind of relationship with the FBI, that he wouldn’t pass it along to someone more important than a little ole County Sheriff like Pogue.

  In the end, I knew it wouldn’t amount to anything because Julep Folsom, my beloved aunt, hadn’t murdered anyone. But in the interim, trying to straighten out all the wrong information disseminated, it sure could cause one heck of a hullabaloo.

  Just the sort of thing my Auntie Zanne enjoyed being a part of.

  “So, tell me this,” I shifted in my seat and turned to face her, “if Aunt Julep killed him, why in the world would she bring him to your funeral home?”

  “To make me look bad.”

  “And run the risk of getting caught? Murder is a very serious crime.”

  “Don’t I know it, darlin’.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “And so does Aunt Julep.” I swallowed and held out my hands in an act of pleading. “She wouldn’t take the chance of being found out. She could have put that guy in a pine box and put him in a potter’s field somewhere and no one would have ever known.”

  “We don’t have those anymore.”

  “Or even cremated him. She has a furnace, you know.”

  “Probably doesn’t work.” She turned up her nose. “Nothing works over that at the Broke Down Grove Funeral Parlor.”

  “Garden Grove,” I said. “And she would have embalmed him properly.”

  She cut an eye at me. “He wasn’t embalmed properly?” she asked.

  “No. Not even close. Now doesn’t that tell you it wasn’t Aunt Julep?” I tried to reason with her. “She knows the Code of Ethical Conduct for the Care of the Decedent. Even if you think she could commit murder, you couldn’t think that she’d violate a code of ethics.”

  She sucked in a breath.

  “I can’t let Josephine Gail go through this,” she said, her voice wispy. “Have you seen her?” She turned and looked at me. I thought I might have even seen a tear in her eye. I didn’t ever remember seeing my auntie cry. “The last time she was like this, she was administered shock treatments.”

  “Electroshock therapy?” My brows knitted together.

  “It’ll kill her if that happens again.” She took her eyes off the road to look at me. “I’m investigating why my friend went into a deep depression just because she found a man in our funeral home.”

  “Is that the reason? Maybe it was something else.”

  “You’re a doctor, Romaine,” Auntie Zanne said. “People who suffer from depression don’t always know what’s bothering them. Sometimes they feel lost and alone for no reason.”

  “I know that.”

  “And it doesn’t matter what we say or what we do, they just can’t snap out of it.”

  “I know that, too, Auntie.”

  “But what we can do is be supportive. Be a friend.” She swallowed. “And I’ve always tried to be a friend to her. And this time, my way of being supportive is to see if perhaps my squatter is the reason she’s feeling so bad and why. And the only way I can do that, help try to make her feel better, in my opinion, is to find out what happened.”

  I turned and gazed out of the window. Now I was starting to feel bad. Giving my auntie such a hard time. I probably could have been more supportive of her breaking the law and snooping around.

  Wait...that didn’t sound right.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I hadn’t paid much attention to where we were going on the way back from the Grandview. I had stared out of the window for the better part of the trip, seemingly in my own world. Mostly because I didn’t want Auntie to have the chance to pull me into any more of her craziness, so I avoided any talking with her.

  But when I realized where she’d taken me, I wished I had taken notice and flung myself out of the car onto the asphalt road somewhere along the highway.

  “I just want to have a look around,” she said as she parked the car two houses down. “C’mon, Romaine. Get out of the car.”

  I didn’t move.

  I’d only been home a couple of days. Still, I should have gone to see my Aunt Julep by now. She was the only paternal relative, besides Pogue, that I was close to and had ever had any kind of relationship with. And now, here I was sitting in a parked car down from her place of business, and it appeared the reason was not to show familial love, but to sneak around on her property with her archrival, Suzanne Derbinay, to find out if my Aunt Julep committed murder or not.

  How would that make my Aunt Julep feel if she knew that?

  I hung my head in shame.

  “If you don’t c’mon,” she said, “someone will see us.”

  I didn’t know why she thought the speed of me agreeing to trespass would somehow keep us out of sight, but my legs just wouldn’t move any faster.

  “Why are we doing this?” I said, raising my voice as I got out of the car so she’d hear me.

  “You’re too loud,” she said. “You’ll call attention to us.” She turned to walk
into the driveway of the Folsom family business.

  The Garden Grove Funeral Home wasn’t as large as The Ball Funeral Home & Crematorium in name or reputation. It wasn’t as grand, nor did it do the same volume of business, but it was well maintained and welcoming. My Aunt Julep’s place catered to mostly black families, while Auntie Zanne’s only requirement was that the person was dead. Nothing else mattered.

  The front yard to Aunt Julep’s establishment was full of green grass and colorful annuals that were, as I remembered, changed out often. I hadn’t visited in a while, but it looked exactly the same.

  As I made my way to the driveway, I bent over, ducking below the windows on the front and side of the house so that I could try to go unnoticed. Auntie Zanne, however, marched with her head held high, that red hat flapping in the breeze, and her nose in the air like she had every right to be there.

  “Auntie Zanne,” I called after her. I was tiptoeing through the grass trying to avoid the sidewalk. I should have called her, “Auntie Zany,” because this was a crazy idea.

  And I was following right behind her.

  “Can you please not do this?” I asked as she rounded the funeral home and went into the backyard.

  “I’m not doing anything,” she said. “I told you I just–Hey! Look at this.” She beckoned me over. I bent over and ran past the remaining windows.

  “What is it?”

  She pointed to a shotgun laying on the steps. It was in the process of being broken down and cleaned. A white rag, cleaning oil, some swabs, and a box of ammunition were sitting near it.

  “So?” I said and hunched my shoulders. “It probably just means someone is cleaning it and they’ll be coming back soon.” I turned and looked from side to side. “So, we should get out of here.”

  “Looks like she’s trying to hide it back here,” Auntie Zanne said. “Could be evidence.”

  “Doesn’t look like Aunt Julep’s hiding anything. Looks like someone is cleaning it, like I said. And I can’t picture Aunt Julep being the one sitting out here doing it.”

  “Take a picture.”

  “What? No.”

  “Where’s your phone?” she asked and started patting me down. I pushed her hands away. “You can take a picture with your phone. There’s an app or something, just like you said you could use to record when you were doing the autopsy.”