by Jana DeLeon
My laptop finally finished booting, and I double-clicked on the icon Harrison had set up to reroute my Internet connection to appear as if it were coming from Idaho. As long as we were careful, there was no reason we’d get caught. I figured if I kept telling myself that, I’d believe it, eventually.
Once the rerouting process completed, I signed into email and saw one message. I rolled my eyes when I saw the return email address. No chance it was spam. This was totally Harrison.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
Hello. Hope things are going well down on the farm. Have you settled into the summer season?
Things are heating up here in NE. I think we’re looking at a scorching summer. With any luck, it will begin to cool off early, maybe by the end of August.
Email me when you get a minute.
I felt my heart sink as I read the second paragraph. “Things are heating up” meant the situation was getting more critical, but did he mean with Ahmad’s organization or inside the CIA with the search for the mole?
I sighed. Either way, he’d made it clear that the soonest he expected positive movement was by the end of August. That left me treading water in Sinful the entire summer.
I clicked Reply and typed in a message.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
I’ve settled into summer season fine. I’m sorry to hear you’re expecting such a hot summer. I always hope for very mild as hot tends to stunt growth and activity, in general. But I guess it’s all out of our control.
Are you planning a vacation this year?
I hope to see you soon.
I reread the message to make sure he’d get what I was trying to say. The gist of it was that I had arrived safely, wanted to know if he’d be leaving for assignment soon, and hoped to get back to D.C. Soon. The safe arrival part seemed sadly understated given what I’d stepped in the middle of here in Sinful, but the less Harrison knew about it all, the better.
I clicked Send and stared out the window. I don’t know what I’d expected to hear in only a day’s time, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. I’d hoped this would be really short-term—like a couple of weeks—and everything would go back to normal. I could have feigned an emergency that sent me back home, and the real Sandy-Sue could hire someone to auction off the contents of the house when she returned from her European vacation. No one would have been the wiser.
Instead, it looked like I was stuck in Sinful, trying to stay out of a murder investigation while attempting to blend with the locals, most of whom were right in the middle of the murder investigation.
***
Sunlight streaming directly into my eyes awakened me the next morning. I groaned and climbed off the window seat that I’d fallen asleep on the night before. My laptop was on the floor where I’d left it to “rest” my eyes for a minute. They must have been really tired, because a quick check of my watch let me know I’d been asleep in that window seat for six hours.
My mind had probably gone numb from the complete lack of information that I’d found on the citizens of Sinful. I’d dug up exactly five names online—the mayor, the priest, the preacher, a local beauty queen, and someone who’d won a state fair ribbon for the largest squash. The mayor, the priest and the preacher had been listed on a website with information about Louisiana cities. That was all the listing contained aside from the population—253.
The beauty queen had a Facebook page where she apparently spent all day telling the world how much effort it took to be beautiful, what with four-hour hair treatments and eating only negative-fifty calories a day. I’d gotten heartburn just reading it. Facebook had to be the biggest playground for self-absorbed assholes that the world had ever seen.
I’d spent a moment praying she never heard about my arrival in Sinful as she might think we needed to hang out at salons or shop for shoes, and I had been relieved to find that she’d left for Hollywood the year before because she just knew she’d be famous. The fact that the Internet held no other mention of her answered my question about her Hollywood success.
Three hours of searching and all I had was information a description of how to tighten the muscles on the inside of my thighs and more makeup tips than Tammy Faye Bakker could have offered. I was really jonesing for my database of information at the CIA. There had to be more to this town than God, banana pudding, and dead things.
The only useful information I’d gleaned was on the alligator. Now, there was a worthy opponent. I’d seen one move in the water, and knew I’d be completely outclassed there, but I’d had no idea it could run that fast on land. And besides the underbelly, which it wasn’t likely to expose, the kill zone was a quarter-sized spot on the back of its head. I wasn’t one to shirk from a challenge, but I’d decided right then and there to keep my distance from water during my stay, which was going to prove a challenge since it was right outside my back door. At the very least, no more night excursions over frogs.
As soon as the stores opened, I was going to see if I could purchase a pair of noise-canceling headphones. It would eliminate my ability to hear intruders, but aside from the dead guy I’d found on my first day, Sinful didn’t appear a security threat. Besides, the headphones would solve the nightly problem with my friend the frog, who’d spent last night running through what I was convinced was an Italian opera. Paper towel wasn’t enough to cut the racket.
I threw on jeans and a T-shirt and headed downstairs to let Bones out for his morning business. At first, I’d been a bit concerned that my stay in Sinful included the care of something living. I couldn’t even keep cactus alive, but Bones was easy. He went outside three times a day, and every evening, he ate a can of soft food. Aside from that, he stayed curled up in the corner, snoring.
Thirty minutes later, I’d polished off coffee, scrambled eggs and toast when I heard someone pounding on my front door. Surely there wasn’t church on Monday morning, and I knew of only one person that would be rude enough to bang on my door just before seven a.m. Boy, was he going to get a huge piece of my mind.
I yanked open the front door and yelled, “What the hell do you want now?”
Then I realized that it wasn’t Deputy LeBlanc standing on the front porch. Instead, Gertie and Ida Belle stood facing me, eyebrows raised.
“I told you she wasn’t a morning person,” Gertie said to Ida Belle.
“Well, by God,” Ida Belle ranted, “you woke me up and I had to put on my dentures and race out of the house without so much as a cup of coffee. She can darn well let us in and give us something to drink so we can tell her why we’re here.” Ida Belle narrowed her eyes at me. “Or maybe they’ll be more bones found in the bayou.”
I wasn’t sure if Ida Belle was referring to me or Gertie, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Ida Belle could probably take Gertie in a fight, and I really didn’t want to have to kill anyone while I was here. I stepped back and waved them inside, figuring whatever had driven Ida Belle out of her house without coffee might be interesting enough to warrant brewing another pot.
Gertie deferred to Ida Belle, who filed in first and marched straight back to the kitchen. She was already pouring herself a cup of coffee by the time Gertie and I got there. She downed the first cup like a shot of whiskey, and I wondered if the inside of her mouth was cauterized. I looked over at Gertie, who gave me an imperceptible shake of her head, and figured it was best not to talk until Ida Belle was done.
She poured herself another cup, then filled one for Gertie and refilled mine and set another pot to brew. I wisely decided to stay out of her way.
“Time to talk turkey,” Ida Belle said finally and pointed to the kitchen table.
I grabbed my coffee and slid into a chair at the table. “I don’t think I can help you with cooking it or hunting it. I’m strictly a microwave-meal girl.”
They both stared at me for a moment; then Gertie’s face cleared in understanding and Ida Belle chuckled
.
“Not that kind of turkey,” Ida Belle said. “The what-the-hell-is-going-on-in-this-town kind of turkey.”
“Oh,” I said, still cautious. Killing something was often easier than talking. I wasn’t out of the woods by a long shot.
“That bone belonged to Harvey,” Gertie said.
I choked a bit on my coffee, the million reasons why Gertie sounded so certain of this fact running through my mind. “How exactly do you know that?”
“The DNA test came back early this morning. Myrtle Thibodeaux is Marie’s second cousin, and the night dispatch down at the sheriff’s department. She’s been watching Carter’s email, waiting for the results.”
“She hacked the deputy’s email?”
“Well, I don’t think it’s really considered hacking when you use your dog’s name for your password,” Gertie said.
Ida Belle nodded in agreement. “Besides, we can hardly be expected to run this town without information. Deputy LeBlanc is a bit too young to appreciate the order that the Sinful Ladies have managed for the past thirty years, so he’s not on board with keeping us in the loop yet.”
“One of your citizens killed her husband and dumped his body in the bayou,” I pointed out. “That doesn’t sound very orderly.”
“It was only a matter of time before someone killed Harvey—a jilted woman, the jilted woman’s husband, a business owner he’d ruined—Harvey had all enemies and no friends.”
“That part I get,” I said, “especially after Gertie called him a jackass in church.”
Ida Belle looked at Gertie. “You said ‘jackass’ in church?” Then she rolled her eyes upward as if looking through the ceiling and directly to Heaven for strength.
“Anyway,” I continued, “the disorderly part is not killing Harvey but the disposal of his body. With all the swamp surrounding this town and careful planning, a piece of him should never have washed into my backyard.”
Gertie nodded her approval and looked over at Ida Belle. “See. I told you she had a different way of looking at things.”
Ida Belle cocked her head to one side and studied me for a bit. “You’re sorta direct, aren’t you?”
I shrugged because I could be as vague as the next person if the situation merited it. “Maybe.”
“Ha.” Ida Belle let out a laugh. “I like shrewd. It takes smarts to be good at it.” She looked over at Gertie and nodded. “Good call.”
“We need your help,” Ida Belle said.
“It’s a little late to find a better spot to hide the body.”
“We know we can’t change the past,” Ida Belle said. “What we need is a plan to protect Marie.”
“Aside from hiring the best attorney possible, I don’t know what anyone can do at this point, especially me. Out of curiosity, has anyone asked Marie if she did it? You did say everyone hated him, so why assume it was her?”
“I asked her Saturday evening after I left here,” Gertie said, looking slightly ill.
“And?”
Gertie sighed. “She didn’t say anything. Her eyes got really big and she sorta squeaked and then ran off inside her house. She hasn’t answered the door or her phone since.”
“Okay,” I said. “Probably not the actions of an innocent person, but it’s not exactly hard evidence, either.”
Ida Belle nodded. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. As long as there’s no hard evidence, there’s a chance of beating this. Gertie told me about how you knew all that forensic stuff from reading so much at the library, so we figured we’d ask you to help us come up with something to detract suspicion from Marie.”
Good Lord. I stretched my mind to all the late-night reruns of Law & Order that I’d watched. Somewhere in there had to be an answer, because it wasn’t going to come from all those books I’d never read.
“I guess the most logical thing to do is to find another suspect.”
Ida Belle nodded. “That creates that unreasonable thing, right?”
“Reasonable doubt?” I asked.
“Yes!” Ida Belle looked pleased. “We need you to find us some reasonable doubt.”
“You want me to investigate people so that I can accuse them of murder? What about your secret knitting club? Surely you cooked up something after banana pudding and before evening service.”
Gertie shook her head. “Only Ida Belle and I know everything. We’re the only two surviving members left of the original five that founded the society. The original five made all the decisions, and it’s going to stay that way for now. But we can’t investigate the people in Sinful. We have too many preconceived notions about the people here. We need someone from the outside to make the connection, the same way a jury would.”
“No way. Even if I had the ability to do such a thing, doesn’t it sound rather dangerous to you—getting dirt on people so you can accuse them of murder?”
Ida Belle raised her eyebrows. “Funny, the last thing I would have pegged you for was a coward.”
My pulse immediately spiked, and I gripped the coffee mug so tightly the handle snapped and dumped the entire thing on the table. Gertie jumped up to grab a dishrag. Ida Belle just sat there, staring at me across a pool of spilled coffee...challenging me.
Don’t get involved.
Morrow’s voice echoed in my mind.
I started to shake my head.
The worst kind of person is a coward.
That voice from the grave ripped through me, completely overshadowing Morrow’s plea, and twenty years fell away in an instant.
“I’ll do it. But I’m going to need information. I’m not going in cold.”
Gertie tossed the dishrag on top of the spilled coffee and started clapping. Ida Belle broke out into a smile for the first time that morning.
“We can start with why the bone washed up in my yard. After all this time, why now, and where did it come from?”
“That’s the easy part,” Gertie said. “It was Edgar that dug it up, and when they flushed the water out of the freshwater pond a couple of weeks ago, it drifted down the bayou until Bones found it.”
Ida Belle nodded. “I agree.”
“If this Edgar dug it up, why the hell didn’t he turn it in?”
Gertie laughed. “Edgar was a hurricane that blew through here late last year. Flooded the whole area. Couldn’t even step off Marge’s back porch for over a week or we’d have been right in the bayou. Caught some good bass sitting right there in the wicker chair, though.”
Ida Belle nodded. “All sorts of things rose out of the ground during Edgar. Why, my mother’s coffin popped straight up out of the grave and cruised down Main Street. I always said you couldn’t keep Mother down.”
“And your mother always did love Francine’s pudding.”
I sighed. I was going to need a lot more coffee.
Chapter Seven
“The first thing we need is another suspect,” I said as I poured one more cup of coffee. "Someone that a jury would believe could have killed Harvey. Juries come with their own prejudices, so we should play to them. Pick a man that’s scary looking, slightly odd in behavior, and has more firearms than any one person should need.”
Unless they were CIA agents.
Gertie and Ida Belle looked at each other, then back at me.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“That describes pretty much every able-bodied man in Sinful,” Ida Belle said.
“Seriously?”
“Well,” Gertie said, “except for Carter. He’s got the firearms, but he’s kinda cute, in an aggravating sort of way.”
“The aggravating part, I’ve noticed,” I said. “You lost me on the cute.”
“Give it some time, honey,” Gertie said.
I was just about to tell her I didn’t have that much time when someone knocked on my front door.
“Are you expecting anyone?” Gertie asked.
“Who would I be expecting? You’re the only people here that I know except—”
&nb
sp; Ida Belle sucked in a breath as I stalked out of the kitchen and to the front door.
Deputy LeBlanc stood on my front porch, but rather than wearing his usual semi bored/amused expression, this time he looked angry.
“I need to speak to Gertie and Ida Belle. Are they here?”
I stepped back and waved one hand at the kitchen. This did not look good for the home team.
I hurried behind him as he stomped down the hall and into the kitchen. He stood there in the middle of the room, glaring down at them.
“Where is Marie?”
Their eyes widened.
“At home?” Gertie said.
“No. She’s not at home, or I wouldn’t be asking, and no one has seen her since Saturday. Tell me where you’re hiding her now, and I’ll let it all slide.”
“But—” Gertie started to reply, but Ida Belle put a hand across her mouth.
“You have got some nerve,” Ida Belle said, “marching in here and accusing us of such a thing. And even if Marie isn’t at home—even if we knew where she was—explain to me how that’s a crime.”
“You know darn good and well why it’s a crime.”
“Actually,” I said, “unless Marie is under arrest, it’s not a crime to know where she is and not tell you.”
He shot me a dirty look. “This is none of your business.”
And that pissed me all the way off.
“You’re threatening my guests in my house,” I said. “So unless you’re planning on arresting someone, I want you to get out.”