Midnight in Ruby Bayou (24 page)

“Either way, that's a lot of silver.”

“Hey, it should have been gold.”

“It should?”

“Sure.” Mel waved an empty fork. “What good is a legend about silver? Gold is the stuff of myths. You ever hear about a world-changing
silver
rush in History One-B?”

The empty fork swooped down, speared another of Faith's shrimp, and departed in the direction of Mel's plate, trailing a banner of linguini. Shrimp and accompanying pasta disappeared neatly.

“Be grateful it was silver,” Faith said. “If it was gold, one of the Montegeaus on the downward curve of prosperity would have hocked it by now.”

“They still might if they could find it.” Mel eyed the handful of shrimp remaining on Faith's plate and decided to keep her fork close to home. Friendship only stretched so far. Not to mention the waistband of maternity clothes.

“Do you mean that the Montegeaus lost their Blessing Chest?” Faith asked.

“ 'Fraid so. Someone came into the house and shot Jeff's grandfather, Rich. The thief either stole the Blessing Chest or killed the only one who knew where it was hidden, that being Richmond Montegeau. Whatever. It hasn't been seen since. Jeff's grandmother, Bess, went a little nuts after her husband was murdered, but not enough so she had to be locked in a closet or anything. A genteel nervous breakdown followed by a five-year slide into death. Antigua, who must have been about fourteen or fifteen at the time her father died—”

“This is Jeff's aunt, the one who phases in and out like a ‘Star Trek' character?” Faith cut in.

Mel nodded. “Tiga might have seen the murder. No one knows and Tiga never talks about it, or if she does, nobody can figure out what she's saying. But Tiga wasn't ever the same after Rich, her father, died. She kept it together enough to finish raising her brother—that's Daddy Montegeau now—while her mother was going nuts, but Tiga was a little weird even back then.”

Faith blinked, sorted through the conversation, and grabbed a thread. “I take it Tiga didn't improve with age?”

“Depends on your definition of improvement. For all I know, the ghosts think she's better than a pizza sundae. So when you come to Ruby Bayou, just treat her like a pet cat. If she wants to talk to you, listen and try not to look confused. If she doesn't see you and talks to dead Montegeaus instead, I'll give you a genealogy so you know who's answering. Or what.” Mel paused, “Is a ghost a what or a who?”

Faith gave up trying not to laugh out loud. “Ask them.”

“I'll leave that to Auntie Tiga. Where was I? No, no hints. I figure if I talk fast enough, you won't have to kill me for stealing all your shrimp. Let's see. The Blessing Chest,” she said triumphantly, looking away from the temptingly full plate across the table from her nearly empty one.

Biting her lip against a laugh, Faith forked a shrimp and its attendant linguine onto her friend's plate.

“You're a saint,” Mel said. “The calories don't count if someone gives them to you, right? God, why does everything that's bad for you taste so good?”

“Shrimp is good for you.”

“Minus the olive oil and pasta, sure.” She closed her eyes, savored every morsel of forbidden food, and whimpered. “No more. Even if I beg and drool like Boomer.”

“I'm almost afraid to ask. Who's Boomer?”

“He's a what. A big mixed hound that Jeff found hurt along the side of the road. We fixed him up and took him home. Our apartment in Hilton Head was too small once Boomer got well—that's how he got his name, booming around the apartment—so we gave him to Tiga and Daddy. What's a creaking southern mansion without a hound?”

“Blessing Chest,” Faith said firmly, feeling the conversation sliding away from her again.

“Oh. Right.” Mel took a drink of mineral water, pretended she was full, and went back to talking. “Every generation was supposed to add a special piece of ruby jewelry or a particularly fabulous loose ruby to the Blessing Chest. Kind of a tradition and a superstition at once. The generations that fed the chest rubies and other goodies got rich. The ones that took without giving back got poor.”

Faith suspected that Mel's wedding necklace would have ended up in the Blessing Chest in a previous generation.

“Of course, Daddy Montegeau never got a chance to add to the Blessing Chest, because it was stolen. He blames the loss of the family heirloom for his money problems.”

“What does Jeff think?”

“That his father is a lousy judge of real estate. So Jeff runs the Hilton Head jewelry store and Daddy keeps trying to make a killing in real estate and Tiga runs Ruby Bayou after her own wacky fashion. A good cook, though. She can do scattered, smothered, and covered with the best of them.”

“You lost me.”

“Scattered, smothered, and covered?”

“Yeah.”

“Potatoes scattered with onions, smothered with cheese, and covered with gravy,” Mel said longingly. “It's a style of southern breakfast. Heavy on sin and real light on fresh fruit.”

“Have another bite of shrimp.”

“If I close my eyes, the calories won't count, right?”

“Um,” was the kindest thing Faith could think of to say. As though she was feeding her niece, she tucked a shrimp between Mel's eager lips.

Mel chewed slowly, swallowed, sighed, and opened her eyes. “Next to Jeff, fresh shrimp is the best part of being in the South. How soon can you come to Ruby Bayou? The show ends tomorrow afternoon, doesn't it?”

“Yes, but I can't promise anything. Especially for Walker.”

“Then we'll let the man speak for himself.”

Mel stood up and walked over to the bar. Even six months pregnant—or perhaps because she was so gloriously pregnant—she moved with a feminine confidence that drew men's eyes.

She leaned dramatically on the bar next to Walker and fiddled with his jacket collar. “What's a good-looking guy like you doing in a bar like this?”

Walker's eyes crinkled at the edges. “Waiting to get lucky?”

“Consider yourself got.” She tugged at his collar.

“You sure? I don't want to get in the way of ladies' night out.”

“Positive. We're ready to move on from labor-room horror stories to the all-time great fights in the NHL.”

The smile spread from his eyes to his mouth. “Should I bring my own barstool?”

“If you limp hard enough, our server will get the point.”

“There you go.”

Sure enough, the server beat them back to the table. The fact that he managed to cram a chair between the other two without upsetting Faith's plate into her lap assured his tip.

Any reluctance Walker might have felt about intruding vanished when he saw Faith. At the beginning of dinner, she had been as pale as bone china. Now her color had returned and laughter danced in her silver-blue eyes. She was finishing the last of her shrimp and twirling pasta around her fork with obvious enjoyment.

Relieved, he settled into his chair. “You're good for her,” he said quietly to Mel.

“What do you mean?” Mel murmured.

“The mugging shook her more than she wanted to admit.”

“Mugging?” Mel's shocked voice carried easily to the FBI agents seated nearby.

“At lunch,” Walker said.

“Today?” Mel asked, horrified.

Faith shot him a
nice-going-champ
look.

“Oops,” he said. “Guess Faith didn't get around to telling you.”

“That does it. You're coming to Ruby Bayou tomorrow night, if not sooner.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Walker saw the agents look up sharply. The thought of Uncle's best-dressed agents crawling around Ruby Bayou at midnight made Walker grin like a gator.

“I never argue with a beautiful lady,” he drawled. “We'll be there.”

A
fter the expo awards were handed out, dozens of customers and designers prowled the aisles of the exhibit hall, taking stock and keeping score. At least ten uniformed, obviously armed men circulated among the lookers. After the brazen robbery yesterday, the management was taking no chances. It had hired off-duty policemen and to hell with being discreet about showing weapons.

Faith and Walker mingled with the crowds. Today she was wearing a sleek pants suit whose deep red echoed that of a prime Burmese ruby. Her killer heels had been replaced by simple, sinfully expensive black Italian shoes. They were even more comfortable than they were costly, which was all she cared about at the moment.

Walker was dressed in his same dark sport coat, a different pale blue shirt, no tie, and dark pants, all of which were calculated to be as close to invisible as clothes got. The less people looked at him, the more he could watch what was going on without being obvious about it.

His personal nomination for “Most Ridiculous” entry in the expo was a piece of jewelry that looked like a dropped fried egg. A very expensive egg, to be sure, with fancy yellow diamonds as the yolk and colorless diamonds as the white, but still your basic model hen's egg. Offhand he couldn't think of a woman who would want to wear a half million dollars worth of breakfast on the front of her business suit. However, he was just a country boy. He didn't know what moved women in Manhattan or Los Angeles.

“Stop snickering,” Faith said to him without moving her lips.

“Why? Whoever voted that pin Best in Show must have had a keen sense of the ridiculous.”

“This isn't a dog contest. The award is ‘Most Inspired Design,' not ‘Best in Show.' ” Leaning over the case, she read the judges' card that accompanied the award. “The pin is a ‘droll postpostmodern statement of the everyday trivia that lies at the heart of even the most glamorous life.' ”

“So's a pile of road apples.”

She bit her lower lip, hard, and tried not to laugh out loud. That would only encourage him. But it felt very good to remember the real indignation on his face when the Montegeau necklace was awarded an Honorable Mention “for our talented western jeweler, Ms. Faith Donovan.” He had all but growled at the balding professorial type who had handed Faith her framed certificate with such fine condescension.

“This particular design association,” she said mildly, “began on the East Coast. Their idea of important designs is firmly grounded in the academic.”

“No professor could afford that fried egg.”

A snicker escaped despite Faith's teeth leaving marks on her lower lip. “That's not the point. The winning design will be documented in every modern-jewelry design text for the next decade.”

“Documented, huh? Just like it was really important.”

“It is. If, after a year, the piece itself doesn't sell to a museum or a private collector, the gems will be removed and reused in other pieces.”

“I'll look forward to that part of it.”

“You're a bad dog,” she said under her breath.

“There you go. Want to scratch my belly?”

She squeezed his arm and made a soft, shushing sound. “From a designer's point of view, the interesting thing about the fried egg award is that the era of sandstone and stainless steel is pretty well gone.”

“Back up. You lost me.”

“The last decades of the twentieth century were full of jewelry designers who wanted their artistic vision to set the price of the piece, rather than the market value of the materials themselves. Like painters or sculptors. Oils and marble aren't valuable in themselves; the value is in the creation. So the jewelry designers used common stones and base metals in their pieces instead of gold, platinum, and precious stones.”

“A lot cheaper,” he agreed. “But the final price didn't reflect that?”

“Nope. It was a return to the Renaissance idea of jewelry, before we learned to facet, and therefore covet the beauty of, truly hard gems. Back then, the value of the jewelry was in the design, not solely in the worth of the gems. Then we learned faceting, and the role reversed. Gemstones became the heart of important jewelry, and design was secondary, at best. While the, um, ‘droll postpostmodern' piece isn't to my personal taste, at least it represents a fusion of materials and design as equal partners in determining the value of the finished piece of jewelry.”

Walker tilted his head slightly to the side, studied the glittery piece again, and nodded. “Okay. If you look at it that way, it's not bone-deep silly. But if you're looking at jewelry that way, you should have the card next to your work, not that guy's. All of your pieces are a fusion of gem value and intelligent, elegant design.”

“I take back what I said about you being a bad dog. You're a love. It's nice to be appreciated.” She smiled, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him on the cheek above the beard as though he was Archer.

But he wasn't her brother. Walker's heartbeat quickened. He could think of some other ways to appreciate her, but he doubted she wanted to hear about them and he damn well was certain he shouldn't be thinking about them.