Plantation Shudders (3 page)

Maggie kissed her grandmother good-night and then retrieved the oil paints and portable easel that she kept in her bedroom. With the help of a small flashlight, she made her way through the dark to woods at the east end of Crozat land, where a stream fed into Bayou Beurre. Green branches hung heavy
over the lush waterway, and an occasional cypress popped out of the water like an arboreal jack-in-the-box.

As she set up her supplies, Maggie’s eyes adjusted to the dark. The outside world fell away as she focused on her canvas. She had taken to painting at all different hours, capturing the way light and dark played with the lush Louisiana landscape. She particularly loved the plantation grounds at night, when clouds, stars, and the moon competed for space in the sky. The evening’s full moon provided the scene with highlights and shadows; Maggie filled in the rest with her imagination.

A long gray cloud wandered over the evening’s full moon, and she took a brief break to let her eyes readjust. She heard leaves crunch nearby. An animal, she assumed, probably a neighbor’s dog. There was another crunch. Then another. And Maggie realized that she wasn’t listening to an animal. She was hearing footsteps.

Maggie was no longer alone.

Maggie froze, heart pounding.
Should I scream?
she wondered.
No. Relax. It’s probably just a guest who can’t sleep.
She took a few deep breaths to calm herself.

“Hello, who’s there?” She called into the darkness. “It’s me, Maggie Crozat. Is everything okay?”

The footsteps stopped. Then they resumed at a quicker pace, fading as whoever it was took off in the opposite direction. Maggie packed up her supplies and hurried home. She checked out the main house and outbuildings to see if the late-night visitor might be one of Crozat’s guests, but all was still in both buildings. She scurried inside her house, double-locked the door, and rested her ear against it, listening for any sound that indicated movement outside. There was a rustle of leaves, and Maggie tensed. She peeked out the front window and noticed Spanish moss swaying from a slight breeze.
I must have heard the wind picking up the leaves
, she thought. She waited in silence, but there were no more footsteps.

Maggie sat on the couch and tried to calm herself down. The event spooked her. Why would anyone be wandering around Crozat in the middle of the night? And if they weren’t “up to no good,” as Gran’ would say, why was there no response when she called out? Maggie fussed over these questions and more as she readied for bed. She checked to make sure her window was secured, crawled under the bed covers, and fell asleep clutching the gris-gris bag Lia had given her for protection.

*

Maggie woke up a few hours later to find that the weather was growing dark and moody. There was no way the day would pass without a storm, at least a brief one. She decided not to mention what had happened the night before to anyone. She didn’t want to worry her parents or Gran’.

The guests slowly assembled on the veranda for the tour of Crozat, yawning at the early hour and limiting their small talk to perfunctory greetings. The only no-shows were the Clabbers. Maggie debated skipping her hostess duty of checking on them, but guilt propelled her down the hall to their room. She could hear the sound of tandem snoring through the door, so she left the couple to their beauty sleep, although in this case the only thing beautiful about it was that it freed her from their company for a few more hours.

Maggie led her guests through the main house, sharing its history as they went. She was so used to giving tours at both Crozat and Doucet that she could cheerfully impart information while thinking to herself, as she was doing at the moment:
How did I go from aspiring artist to plantation guide and maker of cheesy souvenirs?

She took everyone onto the front lawn for a panoramic view of the stately mansion. “Every side of the house has windows almost a full story high,” Maggie shared. “When all of them are open, they provide a cross breeze that I’m guessing saved at least a few of my ancestors from death by Louisiana mugginess.”

“I think I got a bad case of that myself,” Cutie Angela muttered. A stout woman bordering on obese, she wiped perspiration off her second chin before it dripped down to her third.

The group left Crozat’s manicured grounds and hiked through abandoned fields where the plantation’s slave quarters and sugar mill lay in ruins. The Crozats hoped to have the money to restore the plantation’s outbuildings someday, but given the cost of maintaining the buildings that still stood, someday seemed far off.

Maggie stopped in front of what appeared to be a miniature store. “This was the plantation store, which was built after the war. After the
Civil
War,” she added for Debbie’s benefit. “Postwar, a lot of former slaves returned to their plantations as tenant farmers, so some plantations set up stores where they could buy supplies more easily than going into town. As transportation improved, the stores disappeared. Crozat’s has been closed for eighty years.”

Maggie took a skeleton key and unlocked the store’s old door, which crookedly swung open. Everyone stepped into the space and gazed around the century-old time capsule with fascination. The interior was completely intact, down to a few old cans and other dust-covered items still on the shelves. A
turn-of-the-century cash register sat on the counter waiting for what could only be a ghostly transaction at this point. After months of showing off the shop to visitors, Maggie had reached the point where, if she wanted to, she could close her eyes, point to a shelf, and rattle off its faded occupants with 100 percent accuracy.

“Fantastic,” Jan said. The other Cuties echoed the sentiment, as did all the guests.

“Oh, Boo Bear, I love it,” Emily Butler gushed. “Don’t you?”

“Totally, Boo Bear.”

Maggie took a moment to enjoy their reactions. Guests’ enthusiasm made her efforts worthwhile, especially if they translated into glowing reviews on a travel website. “I always like to finish up my tour here. Now, anyone besides me ready for breakfast?”

The whole group answered in the affirmative, so Maggie brought them back to the main house. Since the Georgia boys were heading off on a fishing excursion and the Ryker family on a swamp tour, Ninette packed their breakfasts to go. The Butlers—who would now forever be known to the Crozats as the Boo Bears—asked for breakfast in bed.

“I didn’t know that was an option,” grumped Hal Clabber, whose crabbiness had returned. He and Bev had roused themselves and were seated between Kyle and Jan, who Maggie had learned was the Cajun Cuties’ board president. While the other guests helped themselves to reasonable portions, Hal heaped his plate with pecan pancakes, scrambled eggs, andouille sausage, cheese grits, fruit, and Lia’s delicate croissants, clearly determined to squeeze every last breakfast item out of
the complimentary buffet. Bev sported a slightly modified version of her husband’s plate.
The couple’s eating habits are eating away at our profits,
Maggie thought darkly.

“Everything is delicious,” Beverly said, smiling as always. Maggie wondered if she slept with that grin on her face.

“It’s predictable,” Hal declared. “I’m disappointed in the lack of creativity.”

Then stop stuffing your face with it
, Maggie wanted to scream. Instead she said, “We’ll work on that.”

As soon as the guests finished breakfast and left the table, Maggie cleared it. She was about to return to the shotgun when she heard a timid voice behind her.

“Excuse me.” Maggie turned to see Cutie Debbie. “We were wondering if you’d like to come into town with us. We want to support the local businesses and perhaps you could fill us in on some of Pelican’s history on the way.”

Maggie decided to embrace the opportunity to remove herself from the Clabbers’ beck and call. “That sounds like a great idea,” she told Debbie and followed her to the Cuties’ van, where the rest of the group greeted Maggie’s addition to their numbers with great joy. She climbed into the front passenger seat of the van, and they took off.

As Jan drove the women into the village, Maggie pointed out the occasional landmark—like an old schoolhouse that still possessed a working bell and a white-columned Jesuit monastery almost two hundred years old.

“You see that alley of trees that ends in an empty field?” she said to the women as she gestured out the window toward the river. “That’s where another plantation once stood.”

“Petite Chambord,” Jan said. “Once the largest in the area, lost to fire in 1871.”

Maggie looked at Jan in surprise. “Nice. I’m impressed.”

Jan shrugged and grinned. “What can I say? I gotta have something to put in my Cajun Cuties newsletters.”

The van made its way into Pelican and found an empty parking spot in front of Fais Dough Dough. Maggie jumped out and was dropping coins into the meter when she saw Rufus “Ru” Durand saunter toward her. Ru was the Pelican chief of police, a patronage job that few residents gave much thought to since crime in the town was so infrequent. Ru, who was the color and shape of unbaked bread dough, was oblivious to his lack of importance. But fortunately for Pelican, his arrogance and sense of superiority were kept in check by what many locals considered a genetic streak of laziness.

“Hey, Maggie.”

“Hey, Ru.”

Ru took the nightstick he was swinging like a Keystone cop and pointed it at the meter where Maggie was parked. “That got changed, ya know. Only half an hour.”

“Yes, I do know,” Maggie checked her phone. “It’s 8:54. I’ll be back at 9:24.”

“So will I,” Rufus said. “Ready to write you a ticket at 9:25.”

Maggie clenched her teeth and managed to refrain from a nasty comeback. She knew Ru was taunting her. Enmity between her family and the Durands went back more than one hundred fifty years. “Not to worry, Ru. I’ll be right on time.”

“If you say so.” Rufus turned to the Cuties. “Enjoy your all-too-brief visit to the bakery, ladies. And Maggie, tell Lia that I
think of free coffee and croissants more as a thank-you than a bribe. I’m just sayin’.”

Rufus winked at her and strolled off. Jan glared at his back. “In New Jersey, we have words for guys like him.”

Maggie laughed. “I bet they’re the same words we have in Louisiana. I’m sorry about that. Let’s just forget it ever happened and buy us some homemade treats!”

The Cuties happily followed her into the store. They shopped up a storm at both Bon Bon and Fais Dough Dough, grabbing many of Maggie’s souvenirs as well as Lia’s treats. While they loaded up their baskets, Maggie filled Lia in on the horror that was the Clabbers.

“What did you do when he said breakfast was ‘predictable’?”

“I responded politely and then spent the rest of breakfast fantasizing about putting my grapefruit knife in just the right position so that if someone ‘accidentally’ tripped Hal Clabber, he’d be impaled by it.”

Lia laughed. “Oh, it’s gonna be a long week. I think you could use some ice cream.”

“We all could. I’ll take a gallon of Brown Sugar. It’ll go great with Mom’s Bananas Foster tonight.”

Lia tried to press the ice cream on Maggie as a gift, but Maggie insisted on paying her cousin for it. Then she and the Cuties drove home as quickly as possible. Rain was certain to come by afternoon or evening, and she hoped the summer storm wouldn’t bring with it a power outage. The Crozats had a backup generator that kicked in pretty quickly, but there was always that transitional moment when guests panicked.

Maggie and Gran’ spent the afternoon helping Ninette prep for dinner and sharing notes about the week’s guests. All three agreed that the Clabbers were awful, the Ryker kids cute, the Butlers bland, the Cuties entertaining, and Georgias One through Three harmless.

“For my money, the most interesting guest in this lot is the handsome Mr. Bruner,” Gran’ said. “He’s quite refreshing for a Texan.”

“What does
that
mean?” Ninette asked as she put a pot of water up to boil.

“He doesn’t wear cowboy boots, which even the most sedentary of his fellow statesmen insist on tromping around in. And so many of the Texans who come here can’t stop bloviating about how great their state is. Remember that one man? Every time you put out a flower or a piece of fruit, he would say something like, ‘We have roses the size of your head in Texas.’ Or ‘I once grew a cucumber that was as big as a basketball player’s forearm.’ That was my favorite. I wanted to say, ‘Do you live in a state or a nuclear testing site?’”

The others couldn’t help but laugh at this. “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” Gran’ continued. “He’s got a story, that Kyle. Good looking, obviously successful—he had one of those high-end credit cards, didn’t he, Ninette?”

“That’s nobody’s business, Charlotte,” Ninette chastised.

“Well, he did, I saw it. But no wife, no family? And he didn’t set off my gaydar. Trust me, there’s a story.”

Maggie raised her eyebrows. “You know about ‘gaydar’?”

“I doff my cap to the Internet.”

Maggie excused herself from dinner prep to set the table. At five, the guests assembled for happy hour. Tug mixed Sazeracs, and Kyle once again helped serve.

“Oooh, milady would love a refill,” piped up Beverly Clabber, who was buzzing from the first round Maggie had delivered to her mere moments before. She gave her husband a flirtatious poke in the ribs. “What about you, milord?” Hal Clabber grunted what sounded like a yes.

“At the rate those two are inhaling food and beverage, we’ll be lucky if we break even on them,” Maggie muttered to her father as he mixed the couple’s second round. He put a finger to his lips, simultaneously shushing her and suppressing a smile.

Ninette stuck her head in from the kitchen. “Dinner’s ready.”

A loud clap of thunder startled everyone, and then the skies opened. Rain poured down outside and was hurled against the house by wind gusts. The lights flickered for a moment but then regained their power.

“Fantastic,” Cutie president Jan enthused. “Nothing like a Cajun Country summer storm.”

Fortunately, despite the initial noisy thunderclap, the storm wasn’t as close as it seemed, although Maggie could tell it was heading their way. As they dined, the guests filled each other in on their day’s activities. Hal Clabber never said a word, and welcome as his silence was, Maggie began to wonder if something might be wrong with him. Gran’ also seemed to notice the change in his behavior.

“Mr. Clabber, you’re awfully quiet tonight,” she said. The man responded with a grunt.

“Hal’s not feeling great,” Beverly explained. “The humidity here really gets to him.”

“Why don’t we have our liqueurs in the front parlor?” Gran’ suggested. “It’s a bit cooler there.”

“Thanks, but we need to get our boys to bed,” Carrie Ryker said. Her sons groaned and protested, while their sister snarked her refrain about how embarrassing her entire family was.

“And if it’s okay, we’re gonna take it to our room,” Shane Butler said. Emily entwined her fingers with her husband’s. The couple’s lust for each other was starting to annoy Maggie, who wouldn’t have admitted to her best friend that it had been more than a year since she’d even made out with someone.

The Rykers and Butlers took off, and the Crozats herded the rest of the guests into the front parlor. The storm was moving closer to Pelican, with less and less time between lightning strikes and thunder booms. Maggie could tell that some of the guests were feeling jittery. After about fifteen minutes of forced small talk, all conversation petered out. Maggie chose a soothing classical playlist from the bed and breakfast’s iPod, hoping it would distract everyone, but with the storm practically on top of Crozat, even she felt edgy.