Trouble in Mudbug (11 page)

“Double damn!” Helena paced the bedroom up one way and down the other. “I knew it. There’s no telling how long that worthless husband of mine has been pilfering from my safe.”

Maryse studied Helena, a bad feeling washing over her. Should ghosts really be this worried about things they couldn’t control? “What exactly was in that letter, Helena?”

Helena stopped pacing and looked at her for a moment, her expression wavering as if on the verge of saying something important. Finally, she shook her head and looked away. “Nothing to concern yourself with. At least not yet. If it becomes an issue, I’ll let you know.”

“You’ll let me know? I have news for you, Helena. All of this is an issue for me. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in breaking and entering, and furthermore—”

Before she could complete the sentence, a tiny red light in a small box on the backside of the bedroom door started to blink. Had that been there before? She didn’t remember seeing a blinking light when she’d entered the room. Surely she would have remembered.

“Uh, Helena,” Maryse said and pointed to the box. “What exactly is that red light?”

Helena whirled around to look at the light, then spun back around, a panicked look on her face. “It’s the alarm. Harold must have set it when he left. It’s on a delay, but we don’t have much time left before it goes off.”

Maryse tossed the stack of envelopes back into the safe, slammed the safe door and whirled the dial, then hung the picture on the wall as quickly as she could. She’d stepped one foot outside the bedroom door when the sirens went off. The shrill shriek of the alarm deafened her for a moment, and Maryse froze.

“Run!” Helena cried and ran down the staircase.

Maryse took the steps two at a time, passing Helena on the way, and almost fell as she hit the foyer floor. The scream of police sirens was far too close for comfort, and Maryse struggled to pick up the pace. Skidding on the polished wood, she dashed around the corner and onto the textured tile in the kitchen, where her shoes had a much better grip and she picked up some speed. She ran into the laundry room, shoving down the window where she’d entered the house. Then she rushed out the side door, locking it before she slammed it behind her.

She made for the huge hedge of bushes that separated Helena’s yard from her neighbor’s and ran as fast as she could to the dock. She jumped in the boat from shore, banging her knee against the metal bench, and stifled a yell. Limping over to the controls, she started the boat, threw it into reverse and shoved down the throttle.

The boat shot out from between the dock and the cattails, and she changed it to drive and forced the throttle all the way down again, causing the boat to leap out of the water and slam back down onto the bayou, jolting her so hard her teeth hurt. She looked back at Helena’s house and blew out a breath of relief when she didn’t see police or any curious neighbors observing her departure.

Her knee was throbbing now, and Maryse could feel a tiny trickle of blood down the front of her leg. Her aching head would probably never be the same. As soon as she rounded the bayou out of view of Helena’s house, she’d stop and assess the damage. She slowed a bit, so as not to look suspicious, and twisted on the bench to look back at Helena’s house. The police were just pulling into the driveway, and she breathed a sigh of relief that she’d be well out of their line of sight before they got out of their cars.

She turned back around and almost panicked when she realized she was headed directly toward an anchored boat.

She threw the throttle in reverse and the engine whined in protest. The boat jerked one direction, then another, and as every muscle in her body strained to hold her inside the bouncing vehicle, Maryse knew she was going to pay for this tomorrow.

Miraculously, the boat stopped just inches from the other vessel. Maryse sank down on the bench, trying to catch her breath.

“Quite a stop you made there,” a voice sounded from the other boat. “Do you do everything as fast as you drive a boat?”

That voice was too familiar and wasn’t one she wanted to hear. She raised her head a tiny bit and saw the smiling face of Luc LeJeune. Just what she needed—an opportunity for Luc to file a reckless endangerment charge against her with his uncle. This day just kept getting better.

“Hi, Luc.” She tried to force her voice to normal. “I was having a bit of engine trouble. I thought I might have a little trash collected down there. Figured I’d blow it out.”

Luc looked at her, still smiling, not believing a word of it. “Uh huh. Hey, what’s that noise around the bayou? It sounds like an alarm? Cop cars have been racing along the highway to get here.”

Maryse looked behind her even though she knew she couldn’t see around the bend of the bayou to Helena’s house. It bought her a moment, and in that moment, she was hoping to come up with a better answer than “I didn’t hear anything.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t hear anything.” So much for the moment.

Luc studied her, a curious expression on his face. “Really? That’s odd, because the sirens and everything are pretty loud. Of course, if you were working on your engine, you might not have heard it over the motor.” He gave her another smile that clearly said, “you’re full of shit and up to something and I know it.” “What happened to your knee?”

Maryse looked down at her leg, just realizing that she’d been massaging the top of her kneecap. A patch of red was seeping through her jeans, and given that it was growing in size, she probably couldn’t pass it off as an old stain.

“I banged it on the bench when I was working on the engine. I didn’t even notice it was bleeding. Must have a sharp edge somewhere. I’ll get the metal grinder after it tomorrow.”

“After the bench or you knee?” Luc asked, clearly amused.

Maryse sighed. “The bench. Look, I need to get going. I have a lot of things to do tonight.”

Luc waved one hand across the bayou, as if to say “What’s stopping you?”

“I’ll see you at the office tomorrow,” he said as she backed her boat away from his.

Managing a weak smile, she turned the boat and headed down the bayou toward the station. She was halfway there when she realized she’d locked Helena inside her own house, and she hadn’t gotten the promised information on Hank.

Damn it! Things were out of control, and she had to get a grip on them fast or she was going to end up costing herself everything. Breaking and entering? What had she been thinking? All that drama for a fractured kneecap and a reinjury to her throbbing head, and she still hadn’t gotten what she’d gone in for, which was information on Hank.

She’d hoped after the will reading that the situation with Helena would resolve itself and she could go back to her regular life, minus Helena Henry, of course. But it looked like things were far more dire than she’d initially thought, and her options were limited.

What she needed was professional advice, and the only two people she could think of to give it were her priest and Sabine. One of them had to know of a way to help Helena pass or cross or whatever it was that she needed to do.

And if anyone would know how to make that happen, it would probably be Sabine.

Luc watched as Maryse headed up the bayou in her boat, wondering what in the world was going on with that woman. He’d stepped right in the middle of something strange and for the life of him couldn’t figure out what.

He’d followed after she left the office, the GPS he’d installed on her boat made finding her among the hundreds of bayous an easy task. But when he’d initially arrived at the location the equipment had specified, he wondered if there had been a malfunction. Her boat was nowhere in sight, even though the tiny gray monitor clearly showed a blinking red light not fifty yards in front of him.

Then the alarm sirens had gone off, and seconds later, he’d spotted Maryse running along a group of dense hedges, away from the house with the sounding alarm. He glanced down at the bank and saw a tiny tip of her boat peeking out from the cattails, suddenly realizing why she’d shown on the equipment but not to the bare eye.

She’d made a leap into her boat from the bank that Indiana Jones would have been proud of, and it probably explained the injury to her knee, but it didn’t explain why a seemingly rational woman would break into a house in broad daylight. Before she could catch him spying, he’d hustled around the corner and anchored directly in her flight path.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and pressed in a number. His buddy and fellow agent answered almost immediately.

“LeJeune here. Brian, I need you to check on something for me.”

“Go ahead,” Brian said.

“There’s a house in downtown Mudbug along the bayou where an alarm just went off. The police responded, so I know the alarm system is linked to an outside provider. I need to know who owns that house.”

Luc heard tapping and knew Brian was working his magic on the computer. It took less than a minute to get the answer.

“The house belongs to a Helena Henry,” Brian said. “You want me to pursue anything further?”

“No,” Luc said. “That’s it for now. Thanks.” He flipped the phone shut and shoved it in his pocket.

Maryse had just broken into her dead mother-in-law’s house. He was certain. And even though it probably had nothing to do with his case, he couldn’t help wondering what the woman had gotten into. The information on Maryse from the DEQ research department didn’t allude to anything remotely dangerous or illegal. Truth be told, on paper she was probably the most boring human being he’d ever read about. In person, well, in person obviously things were a bit different.

Luc smiled. He couldn’t wait to find out why.

Fifteen minutes after she’d risked a criminal record, Maryse docked her boat and left the office before Luc could show up and start in with any more embarrassing questions. It was fast approaching supper time, and since she’d completely forgotten lunch, Maryse was on the verge of starving. She had thirty minutes to snag a clean pair of jeans and make the drive into Mudbug. Sabine would just be closing up shop for the day, so the two of them could grab some burgers, and Maryse could fill Sabine in on her ridiculous day.

She made the drive in twenty minutes flat, which was fast even for her. But then, being haunted tended to create a sense of urgency. As she parked her rental in front of one of the restored historical buildings along Main Street, she spotted Sabine through the plate-glass window of her shop, Read ’em and Reap. She was dressed to the hilt in her psychic getup—a floor-length, midnight-blue robe with stars and moons on it and a matching head wrap with a huge fake sapphire in the center. Her long earrings and dozens of bracelets glinted in the sunlight. With her jet black hair—dyed, of course—and black nails and lipstick, the picture was complete. And completely frightening.

Maryse smiled for a moment, unable to help herself. From the outside, two more different people had never been made than she and Sabine, and she was certain that more than a few Mudbug residents wondered how in the world they had ever become such close friends. But then people in Mudbug could sometimes be a little obtuse.

Those two poor little girls with no mothers.
Maryse could still remember overhearing her first-grade teacher saying that to the principal their first day of school. They were different from the other kids and knew it. And Sabine didn’t even have a father, just an aging aunt who had taken her in but couldn’t tell her much if anything about her parents.

Now they were both short two parents. Sabine’s parents from a car accident when Sabine was still a baby, and Maryse’s parents lost to cancer.

Maryse frowned and tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. She hated being pitied and had felt the difference in the attitudes of the teachers and other kids even then. As much as Maryse missed her parents, and Sabine wanted to know something about her own, neither of them wanted the pity of people who would never understand. Pity was for those who couldn’t do anything about it. She and Sabine had spent their lives trying to fill those gaps, and damn it, one day the holes their parents left were going to be filled.