“You’re right,” Jan said. She hesitated again, and then launched into her story. “A few years ago, Debbie went through a horrible experience that almost destroyed her. Before she joined the Cuties, she was one of the country’s top female entrepreneurs. She’d started her own headhunting company and expanded it all over the world. Then one of those venture capital types mounted a hostile takeover. The only way Debbie could keep the company away from him was to sell it. Stern Partners International was her life. She never married or had kids or even a pet. When SPI was gone, she had a total nervous breakdown. She wound up in a psychiatric facility and underwent ECT—electroconvulsive therapy.”
“Electroshock? God, that’s so old school.”
“It’s made a comeback. Her psychiatrist assured us that ECT has changed a lot over the last few decades, and it’s the most effective treatment available for severe depression. But it wiped out months of memory. Between that and the huge doses of antidepressants she’s on, Debbie’s a completely different woman now. I’ve been with her when we run into people from SPI, and they don’t even recognize her at first.” Jan shook her head sadly. “The Cuties have become her family, her whole world. We look after her. When she wanted to serve on the board, Suzy insisted that she be given the job of secretary, even though she was a gimme for treasurer. But Suzy was adamant about how it would be too stressful for Debbie and even offered to serve as treasurer herself. That’s how much we all care about Debbie and look after her.”
Maggie clucked a few appropriately sympathetic remarks, but Suzy’s alleged altruism set off an alarm bell, and she replaced Debbie as a potential suspect in Maggie’s mind. Maybe this Cutie had a personal agenda for steering Debbie away from managing the organization’s finances and taking on the task herself. State and federal prisons were peppered with white-collar criminals doing time for embezzlement, and Maggie wondered if Cutie Suzy had succumbed to the temptation of tampering with the Cajun Cuties’ books. If this was so, and Beverly Clabber had accidentally stumbled upon information that would have exposed Suzy, Beverly’s death might just be a deadly case of “follow the money.”
Chapter Twelve
Maggie slept on her theory about Suzy and in the morning decided that it would behoove her to do some digging into the woman’s past before sharing it with anyone. Besides, the Clabbers’ service loomed.
While the Clabbers’ lawyer provided Pelican PD with detailed instructions regarding Mrs. C’s postmortem journey, the couple’s will had no stipulations about what to do with Mr. C, who apparently considered himself immortal. The entire town was surprised to learn that Francine/Beverly owned an ornate tomb in the local cemetery where she was to be laid to rest. According to Vanessa Fleer, who was becoming a font of information, when Rufus cracked a joke about just tossing Hal into the tomb with Beverly/Francine, the late couple’s lawyer said, “Sounds like a plan.”
The day dawned gloriously. Sunny, but not too humid, made comfortable by a light breeze off the river. It was the perfect day for a fete—and a funeral. PPD officers Cal and Artie had finally shown up and were devouring plates of biscuits and gravy before embarking on their search for the missing box of arsenic. Unlike Bo, they had no problem accepting free food, and as much of it as they could ingest without exploding their stomachs. It never seemed to affect Cal’s long, skinny frame. But even though Artie was only in his late twenties, he had inherited his father’s build, and his gut was already expanding with what locals called a “Pelican pouch.” He’d also inherited Buster’s sandy tight curls that tended toward thinning, and Maggie noticed an embryonic bald spot on his crown.
The Crozats and Crozat guests slowly assembled on the veranda. Everyone had dressed as appropriately as they could, given that the guests hadn’t figured a funeral into their vacation plans. The hipster Butlers, of course, had plenty of black in their wardrobe. Shane even lent a couple of tees to Georgias Two and Three, who may have been half a head taller than the compact New Yorker but managed to squeeze themselves into apparel from a trendy Manhattan men’s store. The general mood was one of awkward solemnity. Since everyone had only known the Clabbers an unpleasant day or two, there was little genuine emotion, just a general feeling that respect was owed to the late couple.
“It’s so strange that Mrs. Clabber never told anyone she had a crypt here,” Cutie Jan mused.
“I know,” Shane said. “Not even Mr. C.”
“Some people are just way weird,” Georgia One said solemnly. He yawned and stretched. It was a little early in the day for a frat boy on summer break. “This is an awesome shirt. It really moves with you, ya know?”
“You can have it,” Shane said. “I’ve got a ton of black shirts.”
Georgia One’s face lit up. “Seriously? Thanks, man. You rock.”
The group caravanned over to Pelican’s Assumption of Mary Memorial Park, where both Clabbers would now spend eternity together in the missus’s tomb. And what a tomb it was. Like its neighbors, the tomb was raised off the ground due to South Louisiana’s high water table. But unlike the others, which were modest in decoration, Beverly/Francine’s boasted ornate carvings and was topped by two statues of angels holding hands as they gazed upward to what they assumed was a welcoming heaven. Their cherubic faces bothered Maggie, but she couldn’t figure out why.
“I always wondered whose tomb this was,” Tug said as the group awaited the arrival of Father Prit, who had kindly agreed to lead the funeral service even though he’d never laid eyes on the Clabbers. “There was no name, no information on it. It was just sitting here . . . waiting.”
“I wonder why Mrs. Clabber didn’t tell us she’d lived here,” Ninette said. “That’s usually the first thing that guests who’ve moved away do. ‘I grew up on Richard Street, near the elementary school.’ It’s odd that she never said anything.”
“Maybe she was waiting, for some reason,” Maggie theorized. “She wanted to find just the right time to share that, but she died before she could.”
Ninette shuddered, and Tug put a protective arm around her shoulder. “You got a chill?”
Ninette shook her head no. “Just the shudders.”
“Well, if you’re gonna get them anywhere, you’re gonna get ’em here,” Gran’ said, gazing around the cemetery with distaste. “That’s why I’m considering that thing where they float your head in space for a century or two after you kick the bucket.”
“Or,” Maggie teased her grandmother, “we could just have you stuffed, mounted, and put on display in the Cabildo down in New Orleans.”
“Oh, honey, that’s goin’ in my will.”
“Stop it, you two, you’re being ghoulish,” Ninette admonished them. “Good, Father Prit is here. Now we can get things moving. I want to get home; I have Crawfish Crozat to prepare.”
The group clustered around Father Prit as he led a brief service. “From I Corinthians 15:51 through 58,” he intoned in his thick Indian accent. “‘Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall all indeed rise again: but we shall not all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet: for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall rise again incorruptible. And we shall be changed.’”
As the priest continued with the reading, Maggie’s attention wandered back to the angels on the tomb. She gasped and then covered her mouth, but not before Gran’ jabbed a warning elbow in her ribs.
“Sorry,” Maggie whispered, “but I just got why those statues bother me so much. They have the same grins on their faces as Mrs. Clabber always had.”
Gran’ looked at the statues and also gasped. Ninette shot her mother-in-law a look. “Charlotte, please.”