“I have a great-uncle I’ve never met who lives in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley,” Lachlan said. “He’s a widower with a nice house, and he offered us a place to stay while we both job hunt. If you can bear our brood for one more night, we’ll start off on the drive in the morning.”

“We’ll pay,” Carrie added quickly. “We insist on it.”

As much as she wanted to, Maggie couldn’t bring herself to take the struggling family’s money. “Please, at this point, don’t worry about that.”

“Thank you so much. Oh, before I forget . . .” Carrie pulled something out of her pocket. It was Maggie’s missing gris-gris bag. “I found this by our car. It’s yours, isn’t it? It must have fallen off when you were rummaging through the dumpster.”

“Keep it,” Maggie told Carrie. “You need it more than I do now. In fact, I’ll ask my cousin to make you each one for prosperity.” Right then, it hit her that she hadn’t touched base with Lia yet. “I have to go. I’ll see you later.”

When Maggie got back to Crozat, she saw Lia’s car parked in front. She ran up the wide-planked stairs into the house, where she found Lia and Kyle in the front parlor with Tug, Ninette, Gran’, and the Cuties, including Jan. Maggie threw her arms around Lia and then took turns hugging Kyle and Jan. “It’s over,” Maggie said as she sank into a damask chair. “What a relief.”

“It wouldn’t be over if it wasn’t for you,” Kyle said.

“Amen to that,” Jan declared, thumping the arm of her chair with her fist for emphasis.

“Thanks, but I had plenty of help,” Maggie said.

Gran’ wagged a finger at her. “Darlin’, what did I tell you about learning to take a compliment? I believe this calls for champagne. Tug, please pop open a few of my personal bottles.”

Tug did as his mother told him and filled delicate flutes for all. They toasted to Maggie, who tried not to feel uncomfortable with the attention. As they were about to sip, Sam ran in yelling, “The copper’s here!” Sam was followed by Luke, Carrie, and Lachlan. Alice lagged behind, trying to pretend that she wasn’t interested in what Bo had to report. But she took a seat in front of her brothers and ignored their griping.

Bo walked in a moment after the Rykers. He was still in his official attire of crisp shirt, blazer, and jeans. But when Gran’ asked if he was on or off duty, Bo quickly responded “off” and took the flute of champagne that she offered him.

“So,” he said as he sipped his champagne. “How is everybody?”

His audience groused, and Maggie chucked him playfully on the shoulder. “Stop being a jerk and tell us what happened. Did they reveal anything?”

“Mack MacIlhoney went from congratulating Kyle and Jan on their releases to signing up Emily as his next client,” Bo said. “So he shut her down as quick as possible. But by the time Shane’s public defender showed up, he’d given us enough of a story to make a cable miniseries.”

“I think I figured out at least part of it,” Maggie said.

Bo grinned. “Go for it.”

“Beverly Clabber was obviously the original distant relative who inherited the peerage. Remember how they called each other milord and milady? They weren’t just being obnoxiously cutesy. They were actually, well . . . milord and milady. That’s what Beverly planned to reveal and throw in Gran’s face. Gran’ may be ‘Louisiana royalty,’ but that’s a joke compared to the real thing, at least in Beverly’s eyes. She would have finally one-upped Gran’. I’m guessing her plan was to make a big announcement and then start flashing the ring around. The initials stand for Beverly, Duchess of Dundess.’”

“Like I care about that sort of thing,” Gran’ huffed.

“You never got the chance to give Beverly that lack of satisfaction because Emily, Miss Next-in-Line-for-the-Title, got rid of her competition.”

“Wait, this means Beverly and Emily were related,” Lia said.

“Very distantly,” Bo said, taking over the story. “In the way that I once met a man whose last name was Rockafellow, and he was distantly related to the Rockefellers. ‘Rockafellow’ was their original name and an ancestor changed it at some point.”

“Did Emily and Beverly know each other before this all came up?” Ninette asked.

“According to Shane, no. Emily only found out about Beverly when she was contacted by the Dundess estate solicitors from Great Britain. That’s when—again, according to Shane, but we think he’s the money in this case—Emily came up with the scheme. She and Shane were both making squat at their start-ups and basically living off Emily’s trust fund, which was drying up. She manipulated her way into getting Beverly’s contact info from one of the solicitor’s assistants and then got in touch with Beverly using ‘family history’ as an excuse. When she found out the Clabbers were coming here, she booked a trip too. She convinced Beverly to keep their connection on the down low so it wouldn’t blow Beverly’s big moment of revealing her duchessdom, or whatever you call it, to Mrs. Crozat.”

“I told you, it’s Charlotte, not Mrs. Crozat,” Gran’ playfully chided Bo.

“Crawfish Crozat,” Maggie exclaimed. The others looked at her, confused. “Shane and Emily—they were the first ones to eat it at Fet Let. Everyone else was worried it might be poisoned, but they weren’t. Because they knew it wasn’t.”

“Exactly,” Bo nodded. “Emily found a time when the Clabbers weren’t in their room, snuck in, and filled Mrs. Clabber’s medicine capsules with the poison she stole from your plantation store. The Butlers had brought their own—Shane told us where they disposed of it, which gave us some solid hard evidence—but Emily thought that using yours would focus the investigation on the Crozats, which it did—”

“Yeah, thanks for that.”

“—very briefly,” Bo continued, ignoring Maggie’s sarcasm. “Emily also knew about the ring and brochures because Beverly had shown them to her. When the police didn’t bring them up, she figured they hadn’t found them, which they hadn’t due to Rufus letting CSI get away with a half-assed job.”

“And pretty much anyone paying attention—which Emily certainly was—could figure out that I was doing my own investigating,” Maggie added, “which led her right to my place when it came to searching for that stuff.”

“Shane admitted that he was the one who planted faulty fuses in the backup generator,” Bo shared. “They couldn’t time when Beverly Clabber would take her medication, but once the storm hit so fierce, it was a pretty safe bet that she’d need something to calm down, and Emily figured a total blackout would kick up the old woman’s anxiety level. As it turned out, the whole fuse thing was unnecessary. When Hal had his stroke, you all just assumed that the trauma of the event triggered a stroke in his wife.”

“The term ‘evil genius’ comes to mind,” Kyle said.

“That’s Emily for sure,” Bo agreed. “The DA’s office researched her background and she appears to have been troubled from early on. She was asked to leave several schools due to disruptive behavior. It escalated to the point of a violent confrontation with another student in middle school, at which point she was sent to a boarding school for girls with personality disorders.”

“Emily once told me that her parents said their lives got more complicated after she was born,” Maggie recalled. “I thought it was such a terrible thing for them to say. But now I guess I understand where they were coming from.”

Bo downed what was left in his champagne glass. “Her behavior seemed to improve after her time at the boarding school, but in retrospect, it seems that her psychosis didn’t disappear, it just went dormant. It was triggered again by the news that she had a shot at becoming royalty. She became fixated on the idea, to the point of it becoming an overwhelming obsession.”

“Much like Beverly,” Maggie said. “I guess it ran in the family.”

“Shane, on the other hand, was mostly in it for the freebies. Although he did say he was looking forward to literally lording it over his blue-collar relatives.”