by Jana DeLeon
Gertie’s eyes widened. “Oh, the Sinful Ladies Society is a secret society. I can’t tell you what we do at meetings.”
“Or you’d have to kill me?”
“Ha,” Gertie gave a nervous laugh. “Mostly, we knit.”
“Uh-huh.” Knitting, my foot. I had no idea what was really going on but I could tell Gertie was lying.
“Excuse me,” Sheriff Lee interrupted.
I looked over at the sheriff, a shriveled, white-haired man who couldn’t have been a day under ninety. “Yes?”
“The water’s rising in the bayou—tide’s coming in and all—and I’m afraid the bone will wash back into the water.”
I stared. “So pick it up.”
His eyes widened. “Oh, well, I don’t know about that. That’s disturbing a crime scene and my deputy needs to document everything.”
“The dog chewed on that bone for a good ten minutes. I don’t think moving it two feet is going to mess up your evidence.”
He stared at me for a while, then looked back at the bone. The bayou level had risen so that it just reached the edge of the bone. It had already submerged the sleeping hound dog in a couple of inches of water, and when I took a closer look, I realized he was blowing bubbles with his partially submerged mouth.
I elbowed Gertie and pointed to the dog. “We should probably wake him up, right? Before he drowns in his sleep.”
“Oh, that dog. Do you mind? I’m wearing support hose and you’re already barefoot.”
I sighed and stepped into the water to shake the dog. Saggy support hose were not something I was interested in seeing in this lifetime, much less today, when my absurdity meter was already on overload.
“Bones,” I yelled at the hound as I jostled his body. He let out a loud snore. Not even so much as an eyelid flickered.
“You may have to pick him up,” Gertie instructed. “He sleeps like the dead.”
“You think?” I gave him one final shake with no result, then straddled him and wrapped my hands underneath his body, hoping if I pulled him to an erect position, he’d wake up and help me out a bit. Just as I was about to lift, he woke up with a start and flipped over, crashing into my right leg and sending me sprawling into the bayou.
Instantly, the polyester suit soaked up a thousand pounds of water and began to itch like crazy. I struggled to rise, but then my legs sank in some sort of quicksand-like mud, and my entire body lowered six inches into the rapidly rising water. And that’s when my training kicked in.
In a split second, I shed the heavy suit top, exposing the lacy strip of fabric beneath. I placed the suit top in front of me, flat across the mud and heaved myself onto it with my knees. A short crawl across the suit top put me onto the grass of the backyard, and I collapsed on the lawn, my feet and legs so caked with mud they felt as if they’d been encased in cement. My eyes stung from the water and I clamped them shut, not wanting to think about how much bacteria was running through them.
I heard someone clear their throat and opened one eye. Bones was sitting next to me, clutching the bone in his mouth and looking quite satisfied all the way around. Directly behind him was a pair of blue jean-encased legs. I followed the legs up and found myself looking at the guy I’d seen in town with the monster truck.
“We sorta frown on skinny-dipping around here,” he said, “especially at crime scenes.”
I jumped up and glared. “This is a…lace-shirt-thingie. I’m hardly naked.”
He raised one eyebrow. “Your lace-shirt-thingie is white and thin, so you may as well be.”
I looked down and was momentarily horrified to see his assessment was absolutely correct. What in the world were clothes manufacturers thinking, making a top that wasn’t water resistant? Girly clothes sucked rocks.
Before I could retort, Gertie slapped her gigantic bag across my chest and glared at him. “Young man, your mother raised you with better manners, and you best just get on with your job or I'll tell her all about this.”
He smiled, a slow, sexy smile that you usually see in movies, but he never took his gaze off me. “I am doing my job. This is the second time today I've caught this woman breaking the law.”
“You're the deputy?”
I don't know why I was surprised. So far, he was the only person in town I'd seen well under the century mark. Given that the sheriff had arrived horseback, monster-truck guy might be the only person in town that could still function well enough to have a driver’s license.
“Carter LeBlanc,” he introduced himself. “Protecting the citizens of Sinful.”
I pointed to the bone. “You didn't protect that one.”
A tiny bit of smug slipped from his expression.
“I'm going to change clothes,” I said, “unless, of course, changing clothes in your own home is also a crime in Sinful.” I whirled around and started toward the house.
“Only on Wednesdays,” Gertie called behind me.
***
I used the water hose next to the back porch to wash the black, gooey mud off my legs and arms. The last thing I wanted to do was track it into the house and have to do something domestic, like mopping, on my first day here. It stuck like tar, and for a moment, I wondered if I was going to need a scraper to get it loose. After what seemed like a lifetime, my skin finally appeared, and I turned off the water and stalked into the house, letting the back door bang behind me.
A quick inspection of the rest of the house’s downstairs didn’t reveal a bedroom, so I assumed that meant they were all upstairs. Unless, of course, bedrooms were illegal in Sinful on Saturdays, which was always a possibility. I grabbed the hideous pink luggage and lugged it up the stairs, feeling like I’d been dropped into an alternate universe. I had no idea what I’d expected to find deep in bayou country, but this certainly wasn’t it.
I hadn’t even been in town one day, and I’d already ruined my shoes, committed two misdemeanor crimes, flashed the deputy, and stumbled upon a potential murder scene. For the first time since I’d left D.C., I was happy that Morrow had insisted on a no-contact rule with him until it was safe to bring me home. If he had any idea that my entrance into Sinful society had been anything other than under the radar, he’d probably fly down here and shoot me himself.
I left the luggage at the top of the stairs and did a quick reconnaissance of the upstairs rooms. The outside of the back of the house didn’t contain any structures or trees close enough to the house to make a second-floor window exit possible, but it seemed to have no lighting other than the light next to the back door. The front lawn appeared to be well-lit, and the porch roof provided easy access to the upstairs windows.
I weighed my escape options and finally decided a front-facing room gave me the most flexibility until I could buy some sturdy rope to rappel out of a back window. I knew if Morrow were here he’d be telling me that the likelihood of needing to escape in the middle of the night was slim, but then he’d probably also have told me that inheriting a dog that dug up part of a dead person on my first day in town wasn’t probable, either.
The master bedroom was on the front of the house, but staying in a dead woman’s room while pretending to be her niece didn’t seem right to me, so I selected the other room. It didn’t have a connecting bathroom, but then, the desert didn’t, either, so traveling to pee was the norm for me. And I had to admit, albeit rather grudgingly, that the other room was rather nice.
It had real wood paneling, hand-carved with ornate designs of inset squares. One wall contained a huge picture window complete with cushioned seat and built-in bookcase, filled with books, took up another entire wall. It was easy to see what Marge had used this room for. I didn’t even like to read, and this room had me ready to select a book and pile up in that window to catch the last of the evening sunlight.
Of course, given the town and the people I’d met so far, likely Marge had a wall full of Bibles or books on knitting. I took a step closer and studied the titles on a shelf, my eyes widening in surprise: The
Study of the Brain, Forensic Investigation Techniques, Eastern Religions, Field Dressing Manual, The Power of Women, A Study of Handguns through the Centuries.
I glanced at the other shelves, my eyes lingering only long enough to scan some of the titles, and then blinked in amazement. Not a single work of fiction that I could see, and none of the books were what I expected to find in an old spinster woman’s house.
I picked up a framed photo sitting at the back of the desk and took a closer look. It was a stocky woman wearing camo and holding a rifle beside an enormous deer. I assumed it was Marge. I put the picture back and shook my head. Apparently Marge and I had more in common than I’d expected. This entire day had been filled with surprises.
Unable to stand the itching from the polyester skirt any longer, I shed my wet garments and tossed one of the pink suitcases on the bed. I’d managed to convince them that librarian-beauty queens also had to mow lawns and take out the trash, so a couple pairs of jeans and several T-shirts were tucked in the corner of the suitcase. I tugged at the jeans that wanted to cling to my damp skin, then pulled on the shirt and reached for the tennis shoes and socks.
Two minutes later, I was beginning to feel almost normal.
A knock sounded on the back door, and a second later, I heard Gertie calling for me. I gathered the wet clothes from the floor and tossed them into the hallway bathroom on my way downstairs. They needed to dry before I could burn them.
Gertie was standing in the kitchen next to Deputy Charming and not looking the least bit pleased. “I tried to tell him to come back later,” she said as I entered the kitchen. “A few minutes is hardly enough time for a young lady to make herself presentable.”
“That's okay,” I said. “I'm not convinced he's worth getting presentable for.”
Gertie gave me an approving nod. Deputy Charming was not as amused.
“The personal assessments of criminals rarely interest me,” he said, “but I need to ask you a couple of questions before I leave.”
I could have argued over the criminal comment, but that would have only kept him in the kitchen longer. “Go ahead,” I said. This couldn’t possibly take very long as I didn’t have anything to tell.
“Did you notice anything odd today?” he asked.
I stared. “Are you kidding? Try everything I’ve seen since I stepped off the bus. You’re going to have to be a lot more specific than that.”
He sighed. “Since you arrived at the house.”
“That really doesn’t narrow it down much. But I’ll give it a shot and say no because everything I saw that looked odd is apparently business as usual here.”
“So you didn’t see anyone else along the bayou when you and Gertie went outside?”
Gertie frowned. “I already told you no one was there. I’m old, not blind.”
“No one was outside,” I confirmed.
“How can you be sure?” he continued to prod. “They may have been hiding.”
“Then we wouldn’t have seen them, now, would we? But the answer is still no.”
“You’re sure?” He looked a bit skeptical.
“Look—I have a sixth sense about these things. I can’t stand being watched. If someone was out there, I would have known.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Seems odd that a beauty queen wouldn’t like being watched.”
“That was a long time ago. I was in a different place in my life.” The understatement of the century.
“Guess that Miss Congeniality title went into the past along with the crown,” he said.
“You have no idea. Are we done here? I need a shower and to unpack.”
“I’m done for now, but I’ll need to know if you’re planning on leaving town.”
I threw my arms up in the air. “What in the world for? If you knew a single thing about forensics, you’d know that bone has been in the bayou for a while. The only way to get that smooth edging is by the constant flow of running water over time. I hardly sneaked out here years ago, killed a man, and put him in the bayou only to return years later and direct a two-hundred-year-old hound dog to dig up the bone and implicate me.”
Gertie stared at me, and I could see the wheels in her mind working. Crap. I’d gone too far with my assessment.
“That’s an awful lot of forensic knowledge for a librarian,” Deputy Charming said.
Likely, it wouldn’t be a good idea to share that I came about that particular bit of information when I’d stumbled on a mass grave in a river in the Congo and received a rudimentary education from a local scientist.
Librarian. You’re a librarian!
“You’ve probably heard of books,” I said. “They tend to collect in libraries. I read. You should try it sometime.” I looked over at Gertie. “Thank you for the welcome. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear a hot shower calling.”
I stalked out of the kitchen, not even bothering to take a look back. What the hell was wrong with that man? Was he really so incompetent that he couldn’t tell that bone was old? Good Lord, you could literally get away with murder in this town based on the ability of the local law enforcement. Not to mention the sheriff’s horse was hardly the optimum choice for a hot pursuit. It looked as old as he was.
Morrow had thought he was doing me a favor sending me to Louisiana, but instead, I was right back in hostile territory, but without the benefit of any training or experience in my environment. As soon as I finished that shower, it was time to break out my laptop and do some reading on Louisiana.
It was stranger than any foreign country I’d ever been in.
Chapter Four
It was a ten-minute struggle to cut off most of the length of the fake nails, but I wasn’t even going to bother trying typing with those daggers on my fingertips. Who knew acrylic was so hard? It was a fact I stored for future reference. The ability to construct weapons on my body parts might come in handy at some point.
By the time I closed the laptop at midnight, I was more confused than ever. The stories and supposed facts I’d read about Louisiana were wide and varied. The people who lived here couldn’t agree on anything—language, how to fish, how to cook—even their legal system wasn’t in line with the rest of the United States’.
Apparently, I was just going to have to wing it. The odds of Marge’s property becoming a second potential crime scene were unlikely, so I could probably fly below radar from here on out.
I turned off the television on the dresser that had been blaring a late-night marathon of some reality show and crawled into bed. I let out a sigh as my body collapsed on the cushy foam mattress. I’d barely closed my eyes when I popped back upright.
Croak.
What the hell? I reached for my weapon on the nightstand and then cussed when I realized I didn’t have a weapon. Sandy-Sue Morrow did not have a license for a handgun and therefore could not check one in airline baggage, much to Director Morrow’s delight.
Croak.
I dropped out of bed and crawled over to the window, then slid up the side of the wall and pulled the drapes to the side just enough for me to see outside. The front of the house looked clear, but I knew I wasn’t imaging the noise.
Croak.
I whirled around. The noise was coming from the backyard. Where the bayou was. I relaxed a bit and walked into the room across the hall. I peered out the window, but the light above the back door didn’t do much to illuminate the backyard.
Croak.
Jesus, it was getting louder!
I replayed the past four hours of Internet research in my mind. Frogs. That had to be it. How in the world did people sleep with all that racket?
Croak.
That did it. I’d seen a shed behind the house during my dog-crime-scene adventure. Surely it contained something that would kill one noisy frog.
The thick, hot, humid air hit me as soon as I stepped out the back door, and I paused for a moment. A wad of toilet paper in my ears would probably work nicely and wouldn’t make me sweat.
Croak.
Nope. I wasn’t about to live with that for weeks or months on end, and besides, if I couldn’t hear the frog, then I couldn’t hear intruders, either. Not an option for the supremely suspicious. I sighed and headed across the lawn to the shed, happy to discover it wasn’t locked. I opened the door and peered into the darkness, wishing I’d thought to look for a flashlight in the kitchen. A dim ray of moonlight crept inside, and I finally made out a set of tools hanging on the back wall of the shed. The middle one was a shovel.
Worked for me.
I crept across the backyard toward the bayou, scanning the gently flowing water for my prey.
Croak.
To the left—near the hedge.
As quietly as possible, I traversed the lawn, careful not to step into the bayou water and create a splash. A dark cloud passed over the moon, reducing visibility to almost nothing, and I paused for a moment, hoping the tiny bit of light returned soon. A couple of seconds later, the dim glow of moonlight slid over the water, and I located two humps about two feet from the bank. As the moonlight passed over them, I caught a flash of the white of the eyes before the shadows took over again.
I positioned myself directly in front of the humps and lifted the shovel above my head. But as I began my downward pummel, a hand reached out of the hedges and grabbed the shovel, stopping my swing. An arm hooked around my waist and yanked me a good five feet away from the water before releasing me.
“Coming back to bury the rest of the body?” a deep voice asked.
I let out a sigh. Deputy Charming.
And I was standing in the middle of a potential crime scene, at midnight, trying to regain possession of a shovel. Even with forensics on my side, this had to look a bit suspicious.
“Actually, I was going to kill that frog so I could get some sleep. Do you guys give them amplifiers or something?”
“That's no frog.”
“I may not be from here, but I think I know a frog croaking when I hear it.”
“Ah, it's a frog making all the noise, but that's not what you were about to hit.” He released his grip on the shovel, flipped on a flashlight and shined it on my target. It was two humps of eyes all right, connected to a mouthful of teeth and a long body and tail.