“Hello.”
Maggie froze, heart in her mouth. The voice was male and she knew exactly who it belonged to. She hid the envelope in the back pocket of her shorts and pulled her shirt down to cover it. Then she slowly wiggled out from under the bed and found herself staring up at Bo Durand, who was standing in the inside doorway. Maggie wondered how he’d escaped Gran’s professed skill at sentry duty.
“Oh, hey,” she responded as casually as possible for a woman caught on the floor of a room where she’d just conducted an illegal search. “I’m glad you’re here, I was looking for you.”
“Really. I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted that you thought I could fit under there.”
“Well, I mean, I was going to look for you.”
“After you finished unlawfully entering this room?”
Maggie bounced up to her feet. “Look, Mr. Big Shreveport Detective, you don’t know anything about us or how this town works. Cal and Art are great guys and decent police officers, but in addition to the fact they’ve never actually searched a murder scene before, they, like all of Rufus’s hires, are good old boys who couldn’t be less interested in trying to think how a woman thinks and letting that steer their search. So I was actually trying to help you.”
“Which is why you entered this room without first requesting permission.”
“My grandma made me,” Maggie said a little sullenly as she resorted to her last defense. This elicited a burst of laughter from Bo. “It’s true.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that at all. I met your grandma.”
“I did find out something. Not here, but in the plantation store.”
Maggie filled Bo in on her memory of where she’d seen arsenic and the empty space where it no longer sat.
“Good lead.”
“Uh, you’re welcome,” Maggie said. She decided to dial back the sarcasm and be honest with Bo. “I know your cousin would love to see us fail with Crozat, but it’s not just our home and our business—which my family desperately needs to survive, by the way—it’s also a landmark, something for Pelican to be proud of. Between hurricanes and oil spills and a crappy economy, this state and this town have had such a rough time, and Crozat’s survival is a tiny triumph. When we make visitors happy, they go home and tell their friends, and then more visitors come, which is good for everyone. I’m not naïve enough to ask you to help us. All I’m asking, I guess, is that you not hurt us.”
Bo looked at her thoughtfully. As she waited for his response, Maggie’s mind drifted to wondering how she’d blend colors to create the rich, dark-chocolate hue of his eyes. Then, annoyed at herself, she forced her attention back to the moment at hand.
“Go out the way you came in,” Bo said. “I’ll pretend this didn’t happen. But if I ever catch you contaminating a crime scene again, I will instantly haul your ass to jail.”
Bo’s harsh words wiped out her dreamy reverie. She left without a word through the room’s French doors, glad that she hadn’t shared the envelope from the chest of drawers with him—or the gold-and-diamond ring that she’d found hidden under the bed between the mattress and the spring coils.
Chapter Nine
Later, back at the shotgun house, Maggie sat on her bed and pondered the brochures in her lap. After Bo booted her out of the Rose Room, she’d stepped onto the veranda and found Gran’ fast asleep. So much for standing guard, Maggie thought. She didn’t have the heart to wake her grandmother, so she returned home alone, put on a pair of gloves, and carefully opened the envelope she’d found in Beverly Clabber’s drawer.
Unfortunately, the only gloves available were Gran’s elbow-length black evening gloves, which were warm on a ninety-degrees-plus day. But the last thing Maggie needed was to be busted for tampering with evidence, so damp hands were a small price to pay if it meant she wouldn’t leave fingerprints on anything. Her plan was to make copies of both the envelope’s contents and the ring, and then replace everything once the Rose Room was reopened, trusting that the Shexnayders would uncover the items during one of their meticulous cleaning rounds and turn them over to the police.
The envelope contained two brochures. One was for McDonough Castle in Perthshire, Scotland, and the other was for a quasi castle—technically a “country home,” the brochure explained—in the Gloucestershire county of England. Both had been kitted out as luxury hotels. Nice life where you can afford these places, Maggie thought, a little envious. But “life” was the operative word, and both Clabbers’ lives had been snuffed out, one by nature, the other by design. There was the possibility that they’d visited the sumptuous establishments before coming to Doucet, but the brochures had a crisp sheen that spoke of being brand new rather than carted across an ocean and through Great Britain.
She put down the brochures and picked up the ring. Designed for a woman, the diamonds on its flat front spelled out an ornate monogram—a small b sandwiched between two large Ds. Except for the small b, the initials didn’t resemble Beverly Clabber’s. Were they from a previous marriage? Did the ring even belong to her? What if a previous guest had left it behind? Maggie could match the initials to archived reservations, but she assumed someone who’d forgotten a ring this valuable would have contacted Crozat the minute they realized that it was missing. Besides, Marie Shexnayder’s near-OCD level of maid service could be counted on to unearth anything forgotten by past visitors.
Given that she felt safe assuming that the ring and brochures belonged to Beverly, what did it all mean? Were they connected, or had the woman just found separate hiding places for things she valued? And why exactly were the brochures so important to her? Maggie could see keeping them in a safe place so they’d stay in pristine condition, but hiding them like they were blue chip stock certificates made no sense. Yet that’s exactly what Beverly Clabber had done.
Maggie closed her eyes, placed her hands on the brochures and ring, and cleared her mind, just the way Gran’ had taught her. After a few meditative breaths, her intuition kicked into high gear, sending the powerful feeling that the answer to why Beverly Clabber was murdered somehow lay in the three items resting under her hands. If she could figure out how the ring and brochures were tied to Beverly’s death, it would help lead the police to who did it.
She turned on the color printer that she’d treated herself to when she moved back home and carefully made copies of the brochures and ring. Then she hid the originals under a pile of papers she kept in the bottom drawer of the heirloom desk where generations of Doucets had sat paying plantation bills, keeping diaries, and penning the occasional lovesick note to a potential suitor or mate they were crushing on. She searched for a clean manila folder and couldn’t find one, so she stuck the copies of the brochures and the ring in an old folder labeled “Receipts.”
Maggie locked the drawer and tugged at it to make sure this was the rare Crozat lock that did its job. Satisfied, she hid the key under the liner in her underwear drawer—it had worked for Bev Clabber—and then pulled off Gran’s evening gloves. This took some effort, since her calloused painter paws were larger than Gran’s delicate hands. She finally peeled off the gloves and headed to the main house to help her father find accommodations for any guests who wanted to bolt after their police interviews.
She found Tug hunched over his computer in the B and B office. “How’s it going?” she asked.
Tug crinkled his forehead and pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying to relieve a headache. “Bad,” he said. “Pelican is sold out because of Fet Let. There are three conventions in New Orleans right now, so you can’t even find a place to stay on airbnb-dot-com. LSU starts this week, so the Baton Rouge area’s a no-go. I found a Motel 6 in Metairie and a few iffy choices everywhere else. Not sure I want to take responsibility for steering our guests toward the Chateau des Femmes Motel on Airline Highway. Especially since I think it’s partly a halfway house.”