Thoughts of Vivian erased what was left of Laurel 's smile. She had been in Bayou Breaux four days now without making a call to Beauvoir. That wouldn't be tolerated much longer. She had no desire to visit her childhood home or the people who resided there, but there was such a thing as family duty, and Vivian was bound to bring it down on Laurel 's head like a club if she didn't make the expected pilgrimage soon.

The idea hardly overjoyed her. The fact that she would have to deal with Vivian and Ross, if only to sit at the same table with them for dinner, had been enough to make her reconsider the wisdom of coming back. But the instinctive need for a place that was familiar had overridden her aversion to seeing her mother and stepfather.

The thought of going off someplace on her own, someplace where her anonymity would be absolute, had been too daunting. Go someplace where the only company she would have would be herself? That was company she didn't want to keep just now. She had longed for the reassurance of Caroline Chandler's formidable personality and unconditional love. She had felt a need to see Savannah. She had missed Mama Pearl's fussing and truculence. The occasional encounter with Vivian and Ross seemed small enough penance to pay for the privilege of coming home.

With considerable force of will she shut the door on the topic and focused on other things. Her hands packed the soil around the roots of the azalea bush. The scents of ripe compost and green growth filled her nostrils. Across the courtyard bees were buzzing lazily over a wild tangle of rambling roses and wisteria that clung to the brick wall. A Mozart quintet drifted from the boom box she had left on the gallery of the house.

The heat grew a little thicker. She sweated a little harder. Overhead wispy clouds writhed and curled their way across the blue sky, scudding northward on a balmy Gulf breeze. The quintet ended, and the news began, signaling the start of the lunch hour.

"Topping the news this hour: the discovery of another apparent victim-"

Laurel jerked her head around as the announcement was cut short. Savannah stood on the gallery, hands on her hips, a pair of square black Ray-Bans shading her eyes. She had pulled her wild hair up into a messy topknot that trailed tendrils along her neck and jawline, and had dressed with her usual flare in a periwinkle spandex miniskirt that hugged the curves of her hips and backside, and a loose white silk tank that managed to show more than it covered. A diamond the size of a pea hung just above the deep shadow of her cleavage, just below the necklace Daddy had given her years ago, and gold bangles rattled at her wrists as she shifted her weight impatiently from one spike heel to the other.

"Baby, what in the world do you think you're doing?"

Laurel pushed her bangs out of her eyes and flashed a smile. "Gardening! What's it look like?"

She abandoned her tools and straightened up, dusting the loose dirt off the knees of her baggy jeans before heading for the gallery. Mama Pearl would cluck at her like a fat old hen if she tracked it into the house.

"You've spent the entire last two days gardening," Savannah said, frowning. "You're going to wear yourself out. Didn't your doctor tell you to relax?"

"Gardening is relaxing, psychologically. I've needed to do something physical," she said, toeing off her canvas sneakers and stepping up beside her sister. In her heels Savannah towered over her. Laurel had always felt small and mousy in Savannah 's presence. Today she felt like a grubby urchin, and the feeling pleased her enormously.

Savannah sniffed and made a comical face of utter disgust. "Mercy, you smell like a hog pen at high noon! If you needed to do something physical, we could have gone shopping. Your wardrobe is begging for a trip to New Orleans."

"I have plenty of clothes."

"Then why don't you wear them?" Savannah asked archly.

Laurel glanced down at the shapeless cotton T-shirt and baggy jeans that camouflaged all details of her body. Most of what she had brought with her was designed for comfort rather than style.

"It wouldn't be very practical for me to do gardening in stiletto heels," she said dryly, eyeing her sister's outfit. "And if I had to bend over in that skirt, I'd probably get arrested for mooning the neighbors."

Savannah looked out across the courtyard to L'Amour, the once-elegant brick house that stood some distance behind Belle Rivière on the bank of the bayou. The corners of her lush mouth flicked upward in wry amusement. "Baby, you couldn't scandalize that neighbor if you tried."

"Who's living there? I didn't think anyone would ever buy it, considering the history of the place and the state it was in the last time I saw it."

L'Amour had been built in the mid-nineteenth century for a notorious paramour by her wealthy, married lover. By all accounts-and there were many versions of the tale-she died by his hand when he discovered she was also involved with a no-account Cajun trapper. Laurel had grown up hearing stories about the place's being haunted. No one had lived there in years.

"Jack Boudreaux," Savannah answered, her smile turning sexy at the thought of him. "Writer, rake, rascal, rogue. And when he gets to be old enough, I imagine he'll be a reprobate too. Come along, urchin," she said, turning for the house. "Go hose yourself down. I'm taking you out to lunch."

Jack Boudreaux. Laurel stood on the veranda, staring at L'Amour.

"Baby, you coming?"

Laurel snapped her head around, a blush creeping up her cheeks like a guilty schoolgirl's. Concern tugged at Savannah 's brows, and she pushed her sunglasses on top of her head.

"I think you've been out in the sun too long. You should have worn a hat."

"I'm fine." Laurel shook her head and dodged her sister's gaze. "I'll just take a nice cool shower before we go."

Cold shower indeed, she thought, shaken by her response to the mere mention of a man's name. Lord, it wasn't as though she had enjoyed their encounter. It had unnerved her, and in the end she'd made a fool of herself. Mortification should have been her reaction to the words "Jack Boudreaux."

She showered quickly and dressed in a pair of baggy blue checked shorts and a sleeveless blue cotton blouse. Barely ten minutes had passed by the time she trotted down the stairs and turned into the parlor, a room with soft pink walls and the kind of elegant details that put Belle Rivière on a par with the finest old homes in the South.

"… poor girl over in St. Martin Parish," Caroline was saying in a low voice.

She sat in her "throne," a beautifully carved Louis XVI man's armchair upholstered in rose damask. Home from her regular Saturday morning at the antiques shop, she had settled in place, kicking off her black-and-white spectator pumps on the burgundy Brussels carpet and propping her tiny feet on a gout stool some woman in the eighteenth century had doubtless gone blind needle pointing the cover for by lamplight. A tall, sweating glass of iced tea sat on a sterling coaster on a delicate, oval Sheraton table to her left.

"I turned the radio off before she could hear," Savannah said, her voice also pitched to the level of conspiracy. She sat sideways on the camelback sofa, leaning toward her aunt, her long bare legs crossed.

"Before I could hear what?" Laurel asked carefully.

The two women jerked around, their eyes wide with guilty surprise. Savannah 's expression changed to irritation in the blink of an eye.

"It should have taken you at least another twenty minutes to get ready," she said crossly. "It would have, if you'd bothered to put on makeup and do something with your hair."

"It's too hot to bother with makeup," Laurel said shortly, her temper rising. "And I don't give a damn about my hair," she said, though she automatically reached up a hand to tuck a few damp strands behind her ear. "What is it you didn't want me to hear?"

Aunt and sister exchanged a look that sent her ire up another ten points.

"Just something in the news, darlin'," Caroline said, shifting in her chair. She arranged the full skirt of her black-and-white dotted dress slowly, casually, as if there were nothing more pressing on her mind. "We didn't see the need to upset you with it, that's all."

Laurel crossed her arms and planted herself in front of the white marble fireplace. "I'm not so fragile that I need to be shielded from news reports," she said, tension quivering in her voice. "I don't need to be cosseted from the world. I'm not in such a precarious mental state that I'm liable to fly apart at the least little thing."

Even as she spoke the words, her mouth went dry at the taste of the lie. She had come here to be cosseted. Only just last night she had gone to pieces arguing with a no-account drunk about a no-account hound. Weak. She shivered, tensing her muscles against the word, the thought.

"Of course we don't think that, Laurel," Caroline said, rising with the grace and bearing of a queen. Her dark eyes were steady, her expression practical, straight-forward with not a hint of pity. "You came here to rest and relax. We simply thought those objectives would be more easily attained if you weren't dragged into the torrent of speculation about these murders."

"Murders?"

"Four now in the last eighteen months. Young women of… questionable reputation… found strangled out in the swamp in four different parishes-not Partout, thank God." She gave the information flatly and with as little detail as possible. Now that the cat was out of the bag, she saw no point in dancing around the issue with dainty euphemisms. Certainly her niece had dealt with cases as bad or worse in her tenure as a prosecuting attorney. But neither did she see the need to paint a lurid picture of torture and mutilation, as the newspapers had done. She only hoped the case wouldn't snag Laurel 's attention. Coming away from the situation in Scott County, she didn't need to become immersed in another potboiler case of sex and violence.

"All in Acadiana?" Laurel asked, narrowing the possibilities to the parishes that made up Louisiana 's French Triangle.

"Yes."

"Are there any suspects?" The question was as second-nature to her as inquiring after someone's health.

"No."

"Do they-"

"This doesn't concern you, Baby," Savannah said sharply. She rose from the sofa and came forward, her pique doing nothing to minimize the sway of her hips. "You're not a cop, and you're not a prosecutor, and these girls aren't even dying in this jurisdiction, so you can just tune it out. You hear?"