There are times when every woman needs to sit on the porch and listen to Emmylou Harris. One of those times is when she realizes she’s overplayed her hand. I now find myself in such an awful moment. I haven’t spoken with my fiancé, Graf Milieu, for seven days. And not from lack of trying.

Graf warned me that my work as a private investigator troubles him. Not the work, but the fact that I often find myself in danger. My partner, Tinkie Bellcase Richmond, and I have had more than our fair share of close calls and injuries. I gave Graf my word I wouldn’t court danger—and I have kept it. Or tried to. Who would have thought an insurance claim would turn deadly?

But Graf won’t even give me a chance to explain. He’s in Hollywood, filming, and I’m in Mississippi, stewing in my own juices. My offer to fly to Los Angeles and explain how I’d nearly drowned in secret tunnels in Natchez with Tinkie has been rebuffed. He hung up on me when I phoned, and now he won’t take my calls. He’s furious.

The worst part is that I don’t blame him.

There are no simple decisions in life. When I took the Leverts’ insurance case, I made a choice I thought was reasonable and sound. Delaney Detective Agency would examine the evidence for a missing necklace and write a report. Simple enough. Each action that followed seemed based on a reasonable expectation of safety. In the end, though, both Tinkie and I placed ourselves in danger—the one thing Graf had asked me not to do.

I betrayed him. And now I’m here at Dahlia House, my ancestral home, surrounded by cotton fields and reflecting on the dozens of missed opportunities I had to avoid bodily harm. Why hadn’t I listened to my gut and walked away? No, I’d ignored each throb of my instincts and stayed on the case.

Hindsight has the clarity of perfect focus. No matter how I try to stop the wheels of my brain from retreading the past, I can’t. The sun heats my bare legs as I mope on the steps in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt advertising my Tennessee friend, Jack Daniel’s. Though I’m too depressed even to fix a drink. Emmylou sings the story of my life in the words of “Making Believe.” The CD shifts and Rosanne Cash takes over with “Blue Moon with Heartache.”

What would I give to be a diamond in Graf’s eyes again?

A lot.

The land of Dahlia House, lush with waist-high green cotton that’s forming into bolls, stretches as far as my eyes can see. The marvel of Mississippi in September is not lost on me. No matter how tragic my life, the land exists far beyond my momentary troubles. While the loam holds the hopes of the future, it is also saturated with the past. In my despair, I drift through scenes: Graf and I riding through the fields at sunset, my mother’s laughter, my father walking down the drive toward me, Aunt Loulane holding my hand in the backseat of a funeral car. So many images crowd the fertile soil. There were many happy times, too, and that is what I should focus on. Despair breeds depression. I force myself to see the present.

The weather has held all summer, and the cotton crop will be bumper. My valiant steeds, Reveler, Miss Scrapiron, and Lucifer, the black Andalusian that once belonged to Monica Levert, are grazing peacefully in the side pasture. My hope is to find a new home for Lucifer, but that will take some time. There was an initial period of tension between the two males—hot weather isn’t the best time to geld, but Lucifer is healing nicely. On this sunny Friday morning, peace reigns at Dahlia House. At least in the pasture, if not in my heart.

Not even Jitty, the resident family haint, has come around to disturb my pity party. She’s pissed off at me, too.

Only Sweetie Pie, my noble redtick hound, keeps me company. Rosanne Cash is working on her, too. Sweetie, with her long ears and wide eyes, looks sadder than the last first grader in a bathroom line.

We both exhale, a sound forlorn and weary. “Sweetie, I didn’t mean to get in danger. I tried hard not to. Graf won’t even let me explain.” I could rationalize to my hound, if not my future husband.

Sweetie gives a grumble and slumps over on her side. Even her ears look defeated. She’s not going to be a bit of help in getting me over the doldrums.

After rising, I walk across the porch. “Jitty!” She never appears when I summon her, but I’m desperate enough for a distraction from my self-flagellation that I’ll try. “Jitty! I need you.”

Jitty is the ghost of my great-great-grandmother’s nanny from the 1860s. Like my ancestor, Alice, Jitty was a young woman during the War Between the States. Working together, Alice and Jitty managed to keep Dahlia House and the surrounding land intact after the war, during a time of great hardship and deprivation. They were strong, determined women who didn’t let the worst circumstances break them down. They were not quitters, and I need to remember that.

It wasn’t until I returned to my hometown of Zinnia and Dahlia House, battered and bruised by my failed attempts to act on Broadway, that I knew Jitty haunted my family home. During my childhood, I’d never seen her. I think she came back from the Great Beyond just to keep an eye on me. But now, when I need her, she is playing coy.

“Jitty!”

Perhaps it was the fact that I was about to weep, or maybe it was Sweetie Pie’s soft slumbering howls, a sound as desolate as a train whistle at a Delta crossroads on a winter’s night. Whatever the reason, I finally heard Jitty. She’d responded to my call. She came around the corner of the house, arms akimbo, and I was stunned at her A-line skirt, twin sweater set, pearls, and Toni-permed hair. She appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties, though she was dressed like a spinster.

“Where is that Ned?” she demanded. “He was supposed to bring the convertible around to the front of the house. I’ve got a hot lead. I think I know the resolution for the case of
The Hidden Staircase
. I need the car and I need George and I need to strike while the iron is hot.”

“That’s three ‘I needs’ in a row. Who are we today, Nellie Narcissistic? Fashion tip, Jitty, you
need
to update. Your wardrobe is about sixty years behind the times.”

“Your problem, Sarah Booth, aside from the fact that you’re like a heat-seeking missile aimed at destroying any chance at love, is that you have no concept of history. You call yourself a private investigator, but you don’t know squat about the women who came before you.”

Somehow I knew she wasn’t talking about the Delaney women. She referred not to my ancestors, but to a literary heritage. Women sleuths. And I had her pegged. “Miss Nancy Drew!” I pointed my finger at her.

“At last,” Jitty said in a proper voice. “Now, stay out of the way. I’m on a case.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Are you deliberately mocking me?” Jitty was stern, but she wasn’t mean. “You know I’m sitting out here watching my life crumble because of my last case and you—”

“You’re out here moping and wallowing in guilt, listening to music about heartbreak and hopelessness. Nothing is quite as delicious as self-pity. And as an aside, you might want to turn the music down. You’ve got it cranked up so loud, folks at neighboring plantations can hear it. Let me just say if anyone with testicles wanted to come around Dahlia House, that music would shrivel up his vas deferens and send the little swimmers back upstream.”

“I’m guilty as charged with moping. Just let me remind you I wouldn’t
be
moping if it weren’t for a man. These songwriters know a thing or two about heartbreak. It’s nice to have company in a trip down Depression Drive. I can’t count on you, and my friends are busy. Tinkie is doing all she can to patch up things with Oscar. Cece is working on some big story for the Black and Orange Ball in New Orleans, and Millie is breaking in a new chef. I’m left with the brutal facts of bad romance and the songbirds.”

“They got a call-in line for bad romance stories? You could give them some grist for their song mill. You’re about the most accomplished gal I know for screwing up relationships.” Jitty’s tone was dismissive and sassy. Taking on the persona of a privileged, ahead-of-her-time girl detective had given her a bad case of attitude.

“What do you deduce from that?” My heart was only half in the debate. Normally I could give as good as I got from Jitty, but today, I was blue.

“That Graf is mad and he’s punishin’ you, and you’re curled up like you don’t have a backbone in your body. You need to put on your boots and go to Hollywood and kick his butt. He ought to at least give you a chance to explain. What he’s doin’ is just downright wrong.”

I straightened my shoulders. “Say what?” Jitty never took my side over a man’s. Especially not Graf’s. She adored him and had populated her imagination with the images of the gorgeous children he would “get” on me. Jitty was all about propagating the Delaney line.

“Look, he’s angry. Any fool could see why. This private investigation issue is somethin’ you two got to lay to rest. Once and for all. I hope he knows you as well as I do, or he’s gonna lose you. No matter how much you love him, you’re not gonna let him dictate your life. And he can’t go sulkin’ off each time you take a case and get in trouble. He needs to buck up or back off.”

I liked Jitty in her Nancy Drew mode. She was sassy, independent, and she wasn’t won over by viable sperm.

“Well, thanks.” I leaned against a porch column. “He is being unfair. In fact, he’s being uncharacteristically childish. He’s not willing to even listen to what I have to say.”

“So what are you going to do about it?” Jitty pulled out a notebook from the handbag hanging on her arm. She also whipped out a scarf and tied it around her curls—which had not moved an inch, even when the wind blew. She did look good as a blonde, but I wondered how she’d gotten her hair to coil like that.

“What do you recommend?” I asked.

“Call him again,” Jitty said. “Make it hurt.”

I had an idea. “This time I’m going to leave a message and tell him if he won’t talk to me, I’m not calling again. I’ll send the ring back FedEx.”

Jitty nodded. “Nice. That should get his attention.”

I gazed at the beautiful yellow diamond on my ring finger. The thought of taking it off, of shipping it back, of ending things with Graf made me sadder than I could say. But Jitty was right. I couldn’t wander around Dahlia House feeling guilty and sad because I worked a case. That was what I did for a living, and I still owed a mortgage and taxes on my ancestral home, plus the grand old place needed a lot of repairs. Delaney Detective Agency was how I made my way in the world.

It was something of a sore point with Graf that I wouldn’t take his money to fix my home or even to live on, but I had my reasons. Dahlia House was the Delaney home. I was the last Delaney. While I might live here—in the future—with my husband and children, it was my responsibility to keep the house in good order and to pass it down to future generations. My responsibility and no one else’s.

Tinkie didn’t understand why I couldn’t take money from Graf to renovate Dahlia House, but Cece, a working journalist, understood, and so did Millie, a businesswoman, and Tammy Odom, aka Madam Tomeeka, my childhood friend and Zinnia’s resident psychic. They got the concept that Dahlia House was a trust of blood and heritage. My heritage, my responsibility.

Tinkie came from a privileged life where men were
always
expected to pay the bills. I’d been raised differently. My folks had taught me to
always
assume responsibility for myself. No matter how much I loved Graf or how much he loved me, I needed a job. My self-respect was bound up in my ability to support myself and take care of the things I loved. To do otherwise would be a slap in the face to generations of Delaney women, and even Jitty understood that.

“Hey!” Jitty snapped her fingers in my face and I noticed the charm bracelet on her wrist. A
charm
bracelet. With little miniature items in silver—a tennis racket, an ice skate, a forty-five record, a Scottie dog, a cat, a horse, a bird, a magnifying glass. Holy cow! That should be in a museum. Next she’d be attending a sock hop in a poodle skirt.

“Hey!” She snapped her fingers again.

“What?”

“You drifted off. I thought you were gonna call Graf.”

“I thought you were going for a ride in the convertible with Ned and George. You know, hidden staircase mystery and all.”

“Call that man and get it straight. Then get off your duff and do something constructive. Those horses need ridin’, and your hound needs a run.”

BOOK: Bonefire of the Vanities

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