“Beignet? That’s a great name for a dog.”

“When he was a pup, he got into a bag of ’em.” Bo finished Gopher’s tummy rub and stood up. “So I hear you’re to blame for my marriage breaking up.”

Maggie stared at him. “I’m sorry—what?”

“The curse your family put on us, damning all of our relationships.”

There it was. The curse that turned the Durands and the Crozats into the Louisiana version of the Hatfields and McCoys.

The Crozats managed to reinvent themselves after the Civil War and, if not prosper, at least survive reasonably comfortably. The Durands, however, degenerated into low-rent victims who blamed hard luck on everyone but themselves. And they especially blamed it on the Crozats—because the swinish former fiancé of Magnolia Marie Crozat, the man she was rumored to have put a curse on in the mid-1800s, was none other than Henri Durand, the great-great-great-grandfather of Rufus. And Bo.

Bo smiled slightly. Was he making fun of the curse? Was he serious? Maggie didn’t know him well enough to tell.

“I’m sorry about your divorce,” she said, “but I really don’t think you can hold some nineteenth-century hocus pocus responsible for whatever happened.”

Gopher started barking again, this time with genuine anger. The target of his wrath, Rufus Durand, came around the corner of the house. It was a steamy day, the kind that made sweat pour off some people, and Ru was one of those people. He glared at Gopher, who barked even louder.

“Gopher, shush,” Maggie said, reaching to pet and calm him.

“I’m looking forward to the day when I find that mutt loose and can ship him off to the pound,” Ru said. “Hey, Coz, glad you made it okay. I’m guessing you met the Crozat clan by now. If they give you any trouble, just let me know.”

“So far they’ve been very helpful,” Bo said as he shook Ru’s hand. “Thanks again for working out my transfer. I owe you.”

“I’ll remember that. What’s the line from that movie, The Godfather? ‘Someday I may ask you to do me a favor.’ Or something like that.” Ru turned to Maggie. “Bo’s ex remarried and the guy got a job on one of the rigs, so they moved down this way with his son, Xander. I got Bo Buster’s job so he could be closer to his boy.”

“That was really nice of you,” she said with genuine sincerity.

“Family is number one, as I’m sure you Crozats know.” Rufus gave Bo a poke in the ribs. “So remember the family that brought you here . . . and the family that brought your marriage down in the first place.”

Rufus gestured for Bo to follow him back into the house. As soon as they left, Maggie groaned and threw herself on the grass next to Gopher. “Can you believe that idiot, Goph? If there was ever an excuse for a poisoning by arsenic—”

She bolted up from the ground, her memory jogged. She knew where she’d seen arsenic before. She sauntered slowly away from the main house, and then as soon as she was out of anyone’s eye line, broke into a run.

Maggie was out of breath by the time she reached the plantation store. She was about to go in when she realized that she didn’t have the key. “Dammit,” she said, giving the door a frustrated pound. She almost fell into the store when the door unexpectedly swung open. She checked the door handle and lock. It didn’t take a law enforcement expert to see scratches on the metal where someone had jimmied it open, something that wouldn’t be too hard to do on an old door that was half off its hinges.

She stepped into the room and studied all the shelves until she found what she was looking for. There were a few cleaning products left on a shelf once dedicated to them, all covered with dust. But there was also a clean, empty rectangle. Clean because someone had taken the product that had been sitting there untouched for eighty years—a box of rat poison with a skull-and-crossbones insignia and, in large letters, the words, “DANGER—ARSENIC.”

Chapter Eight

Maggie stared at the empty spot on the shelf. All of Crozat’s guests except for the Clabbers had accompanied her on the plantation tour. Any one of them—including the Ryker kids—could have easily slipped back into the old store and taken the poison. Then again, so could anyone who lived in Pelican—or who knew the area. It was like looking at one of those online maps that started in tight on a location and then widened out to Planet Earth.

A bead of sweat dripped from Maggie’s forehead into her eye, stinging it. The room’s air was so oppressive that it had actual weight, and she needed to escape. As she closed the door, Maggie checked to make sure no one had seen her and then headed into the woods. She kept walking until she came to an old tree stump, where she rested and contemplated her next move.

Maggie knew that she was bound by law to share this information with Bo. But he owed his job to Rufus, who could use the discovery against the Crozats. The store was on their property, and the Clabbers were incredibly annoying guests—Hal in action, Beverly by association. She could just see Ru trying to twist that into a motivation for murder, painting it as a crazy, last-ditch effort on the family’s part to get rid of an unwanted guest. On the other hand, there was something about Bo that read, “I’m my own man.” Maybe she should trust him and avoid the possibility of going to jail for withholding evidence. She’d seen enough television lawyers use this threat against suspects to assume it happened in real life.

Maggie groaned. She desperately needed to get advice from someone. Her parents would insist on following the proper procedure, as would Lia. Why was she surrounded by such decent people? Maggie got up from the stump and made her way out of the woods. She needed someone who was comfortable occasionally making a dodgy moral choice.

*

“Hmmm,” Gran’ said after Maggie finished filling her in a half hour later. The two sat in the shotgun’s living room, where a ceiling fan above them whirred at top speed, decapitating any hapless mosquito that wandered into its blades. “Hmmm,” Gran’ said again.

“What do I do, Gran’? Do I tell, don’t I tell? What do you think?”

“I think we need to clear out our minds and give space for the answer.”

Gran’ closed her eyes, as did Maggie. Both sat quietly as the fan’s hum provided a lulling white noise. While no Crozat or Doucet ever claimed to be clairvoyant, the family did boast well-developed intuition, a sort of sixth sense that they could tap into, given some intense focus.

After a moment, both women opened their eyes. Gran’ spoke first. “I believe we can trust Bo.”

“I got the same sense.”

“I believe he will share the information with Rufus because he has to. But I think he’s clever and fair and won’t be swayed by personal obligations. If he feels he owes Ru, he can pay off the debt with a case of cheap beer. But that does not mean he’ll do us any favors, especially since at the end of the day, Ru is still family and we are not.”

“Yes,” said Maggie. She hesitated. “My intuition is telling me that Beverly Clabber’s murderer isn’t some stranger who snuck in off the road.”

Gran’ nodded. “Mine is telling me the exact same thing. Someone at this plantation or in this town knew that woman well enough to want her dead.”

“Exactly. But who? And why? She seemed like a harmless old lady.”

“Well, you know, the thing about us ‘old ladies,’ dear, is that we’ve put in a lot of miles on this God-given ground, and there are sometimes events in our past that we hope time will render a distant memory at worst, or at best, erase completely. Unfortunately, there are times when that simply doesn’t happen.”

“We need to know more about Beverly Clabber. And you know what that means.”

“Indeed I do,” Gran’ said gleefully. She got up, walked over to a small rococo desk, and pulled her iPad out of a drawer. “An Internet search.”