Louisiana Longshot (A Miss Fortune Mystery, Book 1) (3 page)

“Me?” I walked through a doorway behind Gertie and stopped short to look at the bright, sunny kitchen. The walls were painted off-white; the cabinets were oak and real hardwood, not the fake crap like I had in my apartment back in D.C. Miles of granite countertops covered the cabinets forming an L shape around the kitchen area.
   

 
“Yes, dear,” Gertie poured a cup of coffee and sat it on the countertop in front of me, then placed a wooden box of sugar and cream next to the coffee.
 

I ignored the sweetener, took a big sip of the coffee, and sighed with pleasure. Gertie made coffee that would strip paint off a bumper.
 

Gertie watched me for a moment, then poured herself a cup of coffee. “Marge was concerned that you wouldn’t live up to your potential as a woman. She thought you had some old-fashioned ideas.” Gertie looked at the unused sweetener, then back at me, and smiled. “Maybe she was wrong.”

Uh-oh.
I scrambled for an explanation. I hadn’t even been in Louisiana thirty minutes and already someone was onto me. If I couldn’t fool Mother Time, how was I supposed to fool anyone else? “My, uh, mother, had a different view of things than Aunt Marge.”

Gertie nodded in understanding. “And you did what good daughters do and went along with her. Of course, dear, I understand that completely. My mother had ideas of her own, too. I was a constant trial to her.”

“You? What in the world did you do?”

“I didn’t get married and give her grandchildren. Why that was a mortal sin to Mother. A woman who couldn’t find a man was to be pitied.”

“You don’t strike me as someone I should pity.”

Gertie’s eyes twinkled. “Smartest thing I ever did was not have a man. I’ve had seventy-two years of doing what I please.” She patted my hand. “You and I are going to get along just fine.”
 

I felt a shift somewhere in the universe, and smiled at Gertie. Maybe, just maybe, this wouldn’t be so bad after all. I was just about to ask for a second cup of coffee when a lump of blankets in the corner of the kitchen shifted and rose from the box they were in. I barely kept myself from reaching for the weapon that wasn’t there and instead pointed to the corner.

Gertie glanced at the box, then the clock. “Five p.m. on the dot. Time for Bones to get some exercise.” Gertie walked over to the corner and pulled the blankets off the box. Finally, a hound dog’s head emerged. He stared at me for a moment, and I wondered if he was a trained attack dog, but when he took the first shaky step out of the box, I realized the dog was old.

“I guess I know why they call him Bones,” I said, taking in his thin, bony frame.

“Oh, that’s not why,” Gertie said. “He was a magnificent piece of hound in his day, but Bones is getting up there.” She opened a door at the back of the kitchen and the dog strolled outside. Gertie motioned to me and we stepped out behind him.
 

Bones did the whole sniffing routine at the edge of the bushes, then leaned against the side of the back porch to prop himself up and hike a leg. The necessary business completed, he then headed toward the dirty stream that ran across the back of the lawn.
 

“Is that the same dirty water running through town?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s Sinful Bayou. Creates a bit of a problem with mosquitoes and snakes, but alligators rarely come into the lawns, so you probably won’t have to worry about that.”

Oh goody.
I might not have to kill anything my entire visit.
 

Bones waded at the edge of the bayou and stood there as if he were soaking his feet. His head was down, with his nose close to the surface, but he wasn’t drinking. Thank goodness. Lord only knew what was in that water besides my shoes.

Gertie frowned. “There he goes again. That dog.”

“What’s he doing?” I asked, just as Bones began to dig. “Is he going to be all right? He looks like he’s going to drop any minute.” The dog wobbled like a drunk, throwing water and dirt around him at a faster pace than I would have thought him capable of.
 

Gertie waved a hand in dismissal. “He does it all the time. Tracks mud everywhere.”

All of a sudden, he stopped and put his nose right up to the surface of the water, then completely submerged his head in the murky mess. A couple of seconds later, his head popped up with a large white object in his mouth. Looking extraordinarily pleased with himself, he trotted back to where we stood, dropped the object at our feet, and shook bayou water on us.

I put one hand up to shield my face and looked down as Bones dropped on his belly and began gnawing on one corner of the object. “Gertie? That’s a bone.”

Gertie lowered her hand and looked down at the hound. “Well, of course it is. We had to install cement footers around the entire cemetery because of that dog. How do you think he got his name?”

I narrowed my eyes at the object between Bones’ paws, making certain my initial thought was correct. “You sure those footers went around the entire cemetery?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“Because that bone is human.”
 

Chapter Three

Gertie stared at the bone, then back up at me, and for a moment, I was afraid the prunes were going to repeat on her. The color drained from her face and she whispered, “What do we do?”

“Did you kill him?”

Gertie’s eyes widened and she sucked in a breath. “Lord no! I…I don’t…I can’t…”

“Then we call the police. You have police here in Mayberry, right?”

“Of course. We have the sheriff and a deputy.”

“Then let’s head inside and dial them up.”

“What about the…you know? We can’t just let Bones keep gnawing on it. I mean, that’s someone’s family.”

I took a look at the hound, who was stretched out on the lawn, gnawing the bone in slow motion and about to nod off to sleep. “I don’t think he’s going to do much damage. He probably doesn’t even have any teeth left.”

Gertie didn’t look convinced, but she trailed after me as I headed back inside the house. I located the phone at one end of the kitchen counter and passed it over to Gertie, then proceeded to fix myself another cup of coffee. It was going to be a long evening.
 

Gertie took the phone, then bit her lower lip. “Maybe I should call Ida Belle.”

I paused before taking a sip of coffee and looked over the cup at Gertie. “Your sheriff’s name is Ida Belle?”

“Of course not. Robert E. Lee has been the sheriff here forever.”

I blinked. Surely she meant figuratively. “So why would you call this Ida Belle before you called the sheriff?”

“Ida Belle is the president of the Sinful Ladies Society.”

I waited a couple of seconds for more information, but apparently Gertie thought that one sentence had explained it all. “So, this Ida Belle will call the sheriff—measure the bone for a slipcover…or what?”

“Ida Belle will do whatever is necessary. The Sinful Ladies Society has been running Sinful since the sixties. I know the mayor likes to think he and the city council have a say, but everyone’s just humoring them.”

“Of course,” I said, even though I had absolutely no idea what was going on in this town. “Maybe call the sheriff first, then Ida Belle. Keep up the illusion for the men?”

Gertie nodded. “That’s a sound plan. Keeping men in line requires a delicate balance.”

She started pressing numbers on the phone, then paused. “I’m wondering…why did you ask me if I’d killed that person?”

“Because I needed to know whether to call the police or help you hide the body.”

Gertie’s face cleared in understanding and she smiled. “Of course.”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or afraid.
 

# # #

Apparently, Tuesday afternoons were a hotbed of criminal activity for Sinful, so we had to wait almost an hour before the sheriff showed up. He looked nothing like the pictures of Robert E. Lee from my history books, but he did ride up on a horse. Ida Belle, on the other hand, had shown up within minutes, her white hair wrapped around giant rollers and covered with a bright green scarf that clashed with her purple robe and pink slippers.
 

She’d asked to see the bone, which was still out back next to the now-sleeping hound dog, and after a brief look, exchanged a glance with Gertie that seemed to convey an entire conversation I wasn’t privy to.

“But—” Gertie began.

Ida Belle lifted a hand to cut her off. “Not now. I need to take these rollers out of my hair and get some blood flowing back to my head. Then I’ll be able to think clearly.”

“Of course,” Gertie said.

“Tonight,” Ida Belle said and spun around on her pink slippers and exited the lawn by a hedge on the side that she’d walked through earlier.

“What’s tonight?” I asked.

“Oh, er…nothing, really. We just meet sometimes—the society ladies, that is.”

I studied Gertie for a moment, intrigued by her sudden discomfort. She hadn’t seemed the least bit disturbed by the discovery of the bone, and her call to the sheriff had lacked any of the normal drama that would have been present in most people. But a mere glance from a five-foot-two ancient woman, with a slight limp and wearing a bathrobe had her unnerved.
 

“What exactly do you do at these meetings?”

Gertie’s eyes widened. “Oh, the Sinful Ladies Society is a secret society. I can’t tell you what we do at meetings.”

“Or you’d have to kill me?”

“Ha,” Gertie gave a nervous laugh. “Mostly, we knit.”

“Uh-huh.” Knitting, my foot. I had no idea what was really going on but I could tell Gertie was lying.

“Excuse me,” Sheriff Lee interrupted.

I looked over at the sheriff, a shriveled, white-haired man who couldn’t have been a day under ninety. “Yes?”

“The water’s rising in the bayou—tide’s coming in and all—and I’m afraid the bone will wash back into the water.”

I stared. “So pick it up.”

His eyes widened. “Oh, well, I don’t know about that. That’s disturbing a crime scene and my deputy needs to document everything.”

“The dog chewed on that bone for a good ten minutes. I don’t think moving it two feet is going to mess up your evidence.”

He stared at me for a while, then looked back at the bone. The bayou level had risen so that it just reached the edge of the bone. It had already submerged the sleeping hound dog in a couple of inches of water, and when I took a closer look, I realized he was blowing bubbles with his partially submerged mouth.
 

I elbowed Gertie and pointed to the dog. “We should probably wake him up, right? Before he drowns in his sleep.”

“Oh, that dog. Do you mind? I’m wearing support hose and you’re already barefoot.”

I sighed and stepped into the water to shake the dog. Saggy support hose were not something I was interested in seeing in this lifetime, much less today, when my absurdity meter was already on overload.
 

“Bones,” I yelled at the hound as I jostled his body. He let out a loud snore. Not even so much as an eyelid flickered.
 

“You may have to pick him up,” Gertie instructed. “He sleeps like the dead.”

“You think?” I gave him one final shake with no result, then straddled him and wrapped my hands underneath his body, hoping if I pulled him to an erect position, he’d wake up and help me out a bit. Just as I was about to lift, he woke up with a start and flipped over, crashing into my right leg and sending me sprawling into the bayou.
 

Instantly, the polyester suit soaked up a thousand pounds of water and began to itch like crazy. I struggled to rise, but then my legs sank in some sort of quicksand-like mud, and my entire body lowered six inches into the rapidly rising water. And that’s when my training kicked in.
 

In a split second, I shed the heavy suit top, exposing the lacy strip of fabric beneath. I placed the suit top in front of me, flat across the mud and heaved myself onto it with my knees. A short crawl across the suit top put me onto the grass of the backyard, and I collapsed on the lawn, my feet and legs so caked with mud they felt as if they’d been encased in cement. My eyes stung from the water and I clamped them shut, not wanting to think about how much bacteria was running through them.
 

I heard someone clear their throat and opened one eye. Bones was sitting next to me, clutching the bone in his mouth and looking quite satisfied all the way around. Directly behind him was a pair of blue jean-encased legs. I followed the legs up and found myself looking at the guy I’d seen in town with the monster truck.

“We sorta frown on skinny-dipping around here,” he said, “especially at crime scenes.”

I jumped up and glared. “This is a…lace-shirt-thingie. I’m hardly naked.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Your lace-shirt-thingie is white and thin, so you may as well be.”

I looked down and was momentarily horrified to see his assessment was absolutely correct. What in the world were clothes manufacturers thinking, making a top that wasn’t water resistant? Girly clothes sucked rocks.