When Daniel stomped off, he was so blindingly angry that he stomped in the wrong direction. Instead of heading for his car, he ended up by the ice cream truck, which was, in fact, an ice cream truck and not a tricked-out FBI surveillance vehicle. He’d been watching too many Die Hard movies with Aaron.
“Whatcha want, bud?” some old codger at the window asked him. He wore a Polly’s Pralines cap and a T-shirt advertising his ice cream, Sweet Scoops. He had little or no teeth. Too much of his own product, Daniel assumed.
He ordered a vanilla waffle cone. Yes, boring vanilla for a boring ex-doctor who’d made a boring effort to rescue his woman, who wasn’t his woman, at all. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Boring, boring, boring.
“Dontcha want sprinkles on that?”
“No, I don’t want sprinkles,” Daniel said, barely restraining himself from saying something rude. It wasn’t the old guy’s fault that Daniel was in a foul mood.
Fuming, he leaned against the wagon. He watched as Samantha exited the Comcast van and headed toward the building, unaware that he was still hanging around like a . . . boring . . . stalker. For once, he wasn’t ogling her ass as she walked in those high heels, not even thinking of Aaron’s theory of women and high heels. Well, hardly at all.
Instead, he watched as the landscaper moved closer to the building, and the jogger entered one of the side doors. All was quiet in the parking lot then with normal activity. People coming to and leaving doctor appointments. A few coming up to the ice cream truck.
Vacillating between extreme anger and extreme worry over Samantha, he stood there for fifteen minutes before he gave it up and tossed the remainder of his dripping cone in a waste bin and wiped his hand on a napkin, discarding that, too. He considered heading to the fishing camp, hiding out, till this whole fiasco with Samantha blew over. But, no, he needed to return to the plantation and see what he could do about fixing one of the slave cabins for Molly’s father.
Just then, he heard a popping noise. He wasn’t sure where it came from, but all hell was breaking loose in the parking lot. Brad and Sonny and cops with SWAT T-shirts, and the landscaper, were running toward the building, all with weapons visible. Daniel saw Luc following on the melee and yelled in a panic, “What’s up?”
“A gunshot from inside the building,” Luc said as he ran past.
So, Daniel ran, too. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God! I should have stopped her from getting involved in this debacle. I should have tied her down, if I had to. If she’s dead, I’m going to kill someone. Nick, and then the FBI agents who conned her into this mess. But she’s not dead. She can’t be dead. Why think the worst? Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!
Daniel made it inside just before the cops began pulling out the crime scene tape and barring people from entering or exiting the building. He swerved away from the elevators where a bunch of cops were filing in, and instead followed those going up the stairway. One of them with earbuds, reported to the others. “The kid’s been shot. Head wound. Non-fatal. The perp has the sting out in the parking garage.”
The kid . . . that would be Angus. And the sting . . . son of a bitch! Coltrane had Samantha. In the parking garage.
As he assimilated those words, Daniel swiveled on his heels and headed back down to the first floor and the door leading to the parking garage. He was at a full-out sprint through the connecting corridor, but was unprepared for the sound of gunfire that he heard ahead of him. He might have cried out in dismay. Too late! He was too late!
Some cops tried to hold him back, but he struggled against their restraining arms and hollered, “I’m a doctor. Let me through.”
He was unprepared for the sight that met his eyes. A cop with an apparent thigh wound was being helped upright by his fellow cops. Daniel started to go to the cop, but he was waved over to the other wounded, instead. The other wounded being Nick Coltrane, who lay on the stone floor of the garage, blood pouring from his face, his chest, and one thigh. Maybe even more places. Samantha was standing off to the side, sobbing with shock, her face pressed against John LeDeux’s flak vest, his arms around her heaving shoulders. She appeared unharmed.
Daniel dropped to his knees beside Nick, and someone handed him a pair of disposable gloves which he pulled on with expert speed. He checked for a pulse. None. Heartbeat. None. Then he pulled Coltrane’s eyelids back. Pupils constricted. With a weary exhale, he glanced at his wristwatch and declared, “T.O.D. Three twenty-seven.” He stood up, tossed his gloves aside, then looked toward Samantha, who was still plastered against LeDeux’s chest as he murmured some words of comfort to her. She hadn’t even noticed Daniel’s presence. Without a word, he left the building.
Once outside, he saw Angus being helped toward an ambulance. He appeared to be arguing with an EMT about getting into a wheelchair. A bunch of gauze bandages circled his scalp, but he was ambulatory. So, that was good. He waved at Angus, and the boy waved back. The cops were rushing Angus and the EMT’s to avoid the news vans that were already barreling into the parking lot. They would want to keep Angus’s . . . and Samantha’s names out of the press until the mob bosses were no longer a threat. And on the remote possibility that Coltrane might have associates involved with him, other than the Misty person.
Daniel was probably in shock as he drove back to Bayou Rose. Death was traumatizing, even when the victim was a bad guy. He was too upset to think beyond the moment. Driving his car. Watching the highway, that’s all he was capable of. He did think about what would happen next in terms of the FBI and the cops. With Coltrane’s death, the baby trafficking case was over as far as Angus and Lily Beth and Samantha having to be in hiding, although the feds would be working to arrest his overseas connections, those people facilitating the sale of the babies. But, more than that, there was still the Dixie Mob situation that required Angus to remain hidden, and by association, Samantha and Lily Beth would stay, too.
Well, Daniel couldn’t stay himself. He just couldn’t be around Samantha and pretend there was nothing between them. There wasn’t, apparently, from her end. Other than the one-night/one-week stand business. But he was a fool for love, as the old song went, and if he ever said that out loud, he was going to surgically remove his own tongue.
On the other hand, he had things to do at Bayou Rose.
When he got back to the plantation, Lily Beth and Tante Lulu were the only ones there. Emily, at least, was glad to see him. She oinked and oinked and oinked until he picked her up and gave her a kiss. No, not on her mouth, but on the top of her snout. And, really, it was only a sort of air kiss. Axel and Maddie barely gave him a glance, considering him of no importance. Clarence, on the other hand, greeted him with the usual, “Holy shit!” But then the bird let loose with a whole string of new words, “I’m a Ragin’ Cajun!”
Daniel glanced at Tante Lulu who shrugged. “I dint have nothin’ ta do whilst y’all were gone.”
He set Emily down with an admonition to stay put. Ignoring her woeful eyes, he left the room and went down the back stairs with Tante Lulu and Lily Beth.
“Don’t you want to know what happened?” he asked.
“We already know,” Lily Beth said. “Angus called us from the hospital.”
“Samantha is at the hospital, too. Jist ta be checked over,” Tante Lulu added.
“You should be relieved that there is no more threat from Dr. Coltrane,” Daniel said to Lilly Beth. “Now you can do whatever you want about the baby.”
Which caused Lily Beth to burst into tears and leave the kitchen.
“What did I do?” Daniel asked Tante Lulu.
“Nuthin’. The girl is jist confused, and her hormones is hummin’, givin’ her the blue moodies.”
“Did Angus say when they’d be back?”
“In an hour or two,” Tante Lulu answered. “Where’s all mah groceries, by the way. I knew I shoulda gone ta the store myself.”
“Just hold your horses. Aaron is bringing them.”
Daniel went into an anteroom where he grabbed a broom, dustpan, some rags, and cleaning products. “I have a little job to do,” he explained to Tante Lulu, whose eyebrows were raised with curiosity.
Which, of course, was like raising a Cheez Doodle before her pet gator, because Tante Lulu immediately followed after him as he went out the back door. “Whatcha gotta do?”
“I need to see if one of the slave cabins is liveable for a few days . . . or weeks.”
“Why? Ya gonna turn it inta a honeymoon cottage?”
“What? No! Geez, where do you get these ideas?”
Tante raised her eyes heavenward.
Great! She has connections to the Great Beyond! He tried to explain, “The father of one of the kids at the cancer center in Houma needs a place to stay. I volunteered one of these cabins. The guy has construction experience; so, he might be able to fix the electricity and plumbing, if there is any.”
Tante Lulu asked some questions and he found himself telling her about Molly and the lack of housing for men like Molly’s father, Edgar Gillotte, who had less than a pristine rap sheet.
“So, yer bringin’ ex-cons here now.”
“He’s not an ex-con. He’s just a guy who made some mistakes, minor mistakes, and needs a break. It’s as much for his kid, as for him.”
“Ah,” Tante Lulu said.
“What does ‘Ah’ mean?”
“Jist that life has a way of workin’ things out.”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Sometimes we doan know why things happen the way they do. Like you and Aaron buying this ol’ plantation. Ya thought it was ta open an animal rescue mission.”
“That was never my intention.”
Tante Lulu waved his contradiction away. “But God . . . and St. Jude . . . had other plans in mind fer you.”
“I swear, following your mind is like traveling down a Louisiana bayou. So many twists and turns, you get lost.”
“Huh?”
He should know better than to encourage her with questions, but he had to ask, “What do God and St. Jude have to do with me and Aaron buying this plantation?”
“It’s obvious, ain’t it? I kin see it all clear now. Yer supposed ta open a refuge fer sick kids and their families, lak Ronald McDonald House, ’cept yers will be Rose House, or sumpin’ lak that.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! You are way ahead of me here. All I’m doing is fixing up one cabin. One. And it’s only for a short period.”
“Uh-huh!” Tante Lulu said, not convinced.
Even she was a bit taken aback at their first sight of the interior of the first cabin. Dogs had run free rein here at one time, both inside the cottage and in the fenced yard, but that had been thirty or so years ago when the former owner was raising Redbone Coonhounds, according to Tante Lulu. Whatever feces or urine stains there might have been were all dried up now, but the whole place would need a good scrubbing and a bleach disinfecting. Even so, Tante Lulu declared it had possibilities. No wonder she was a fan of St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes.
In fact, Tante Lulu told him she was going to call her niece, who was at her Houma beauty shop today. She apparently had other salons or spas, as well, including one at the ranch where she lived with her husband Raoul Lanier, better known as Rusty. And another which did everything for a woman’s body except plastic surgery . . . waxing, massaging, exfoliating, manicuring, pedicuring, hairstyling, braiding, corn rows, eyebrow shaping. He knew all this because Tante Lulu told him so, in enough detail that his eyes started to roll back in his head.
She pulled a cell phone out of her apron pocket.
“Charmaine, honey, kin ya do me a favor?”
“Yes, I know yer allus willin’ ta help me. Kin ya go ta that used furniture store down the street from yer salon. See if they have enough stuff ta furnish a small cottage.” She turned to Daniel and asked, “How much ya willin’ ta spend?”
He waved a hand as if it didn’t matter but then he immediately amended, worrying that giving a woman like Tante Lulu an open checkbook would be like leaving an open door on an alligator farm, insanity, in other words. “Two thousand, maybe three.” Tante Lulu repeated the amount to Charmaine.
“I doan s’pose Rusty is in town and he could bring the stuff over in his pickup truck?”
“He is? Oh, good!”
Oh, crap! He never intended for Tante Lulu to impose on someone like that for his benefit. In fact, he never intended to involve her at all. But there was no stopping the living bulldozer. Several times, he tried to interrupt her call, but she just ignored him.
When her call was over, she told Daniel, “You’ll have stuff here by this evenin’.”
“Thank you,” he said, for more reasons than one. He hadn’t thought about his disastrous relationship with Samantha for, oh, fifteen minutes, with all the old lady’s chatter.
Lily Beth waddled up and helped as much as she could. And when Aaron returned, complaining about the amount of groceries he’d been forced to buy, Tante Lulu went back to the kitchen to start dinner, but not before she pulled a framed St. Jude picture from her handbag and hung it on the wall. To no one’s surprise, she also had a hammer and nails in the blasted bag.
Lily Beth went back to the house with her. And Aaron stayed to help Daniel pull out the rusted metal fence.
“I think there’s some white picket fencing stored in one of the sheds. Used to encircle these cottages at one time,” Aaron told him. “Of course, it hasn’t been white for a lot of years, but nothing a little paint won’t handle.”
“Let’s not go overboard. This is just for one guy, for a short time.”
“Uh-huh,” Aaron said, just as disbelieving as Tante Lulu had been.
“By the way, do you still have the key to Remy’s houseboat?” Until they bought this plantation, Aaron had been living on Remy LeDeux’s old houseboat while Daniel lived in the bayou fishing camp.
Aaron stopped what he was doing, stacking the dismantled wire fencing, to stare at him. “Trouble in paradise already?”
“Aaron,” he cautioned.
“Yeah, I have the key. It’s in my bedroom dresser. Why do you need to stay there?”
Daniel declined to answer.
“Ah, Dan,” his brother said. “I knew she would hurt you, but I didn’t expect it so soon.”
“It’s not her fault, and don’t you dare say anything to her. It’s my fault for assuming too much.”
“Uh-huh. So, this whole safe house business here still goes on?”
Daniel shrugged. “I expect so. The Dixie Mob arrests still haven’t taken place, as far as I know. And I’m not sure when the news will break on Nick Coltrane’s death and crimes, and whether Samantha and Angus’s names will come up. At the very least, they’ll want to avoid the news media, at first.”
Aaron continued to study him, the way only twins could, and did. Seeing more. “Why don’t you go back to your garconniére apartment, and I’ll stay in the houseboat?”
Daniel shook his head. “I’d rather not be here when they all come back.”
“Bok, bok! A little chicken-ish, dontcha think?”
“I’m not afraid to be around Samantha, but it could be a little awkward today with so many people around. Besides, Tante Lulu will probably still be there, and you know damn well she’ll be harping at me about thunderbolts.”
Just then, there was a crack of thunder in the distance. It was probably just a portend of a typical Louisiana summer storm to come.
But, holy crap! Maybe not.
They looked at each other and burst out laughing.
When the dust settled, she was alone . . . again . . .
Much to Samantha’s disappointment, Daniel wasn’t at the plantation when Samantha returned with Angus and John LeDeux around six o’clock. Two cops came, too, to provide continued security for them until all the danger was gone, but they became invisible almost immediately.
Tante Lulu explained that Daniel and Aaron had gone off somewhere and hadn’t said when they would return. Couldn’t Daniel have waited for her to come back first?
And Tante Lulu had also relayed some crazy story about Daniel renovating one of the slave cabins so the father of some kid with cancer could live there. Well, that part she could sort of understand, but Tante Lulu went on some rambling discourse about life and fate and things meant to be, and this was why Daniel and Aaron had bought this plantation in the first place, though they didn’t know it yet. All of this was accentuated by the arrival of that too-hot-to-believe cowboy husband of Charmaine’s, Rusty Lanier. Whoo-boy! He gave a new twist to Cajun and cowboy in one neat package. Rusty, without Daniel being there to direct him, just emptied his pickup truck of a load of furniture that supposedly Daniel, via Tante Lulu and Charmaine, had ordered that afternoon. He left it all on the cabin porch for Daniel to sort out tomorrow, or whenever.
Daniel had apparently been a busy bee while she’d been off at the hospital being checked over this afternoon, after the incident with Nick.
She didn’t like the way their meeting had ended earlier today, when he’d tried to convince her not to meet with Nick. For the first time, she began to wonder if he was still upset. She’d been thinking how happy Daniel would be to see her safe and Nick out of the picture, though none of them had wished Nick dead. How naïve of her!
Maybe he wasn’t as happy as she’d imagined.
But then, maybe she was overthinking everything.
They ate dinner . . . a sumptuous feast of shrimp étouffée that Tante Lulu had whipped up, along with fluffy rice, accompanied by fresh bread that Aaron had bought in the bakery of the Starr store where he’d shopped. He’d also picked up another fruit tart, much to Lily Beth’s delight, and Angus’s and Samantha’s, too, not having eaten since this morning. John also said it was wonderful, almost as good as Tante Lulu’s Peachy Praline Cobbler Cake, which had made the old lady beam.
Throughout the meal, Samantha and Angus regaled the others with a retelling of the day’s events. They were both still in a state of shock, or at the very least, on an adrenaline rush.
“I almost shit my pants when I walked into that office and saw Nick with a gun aimed at Samantha’s head,” Angus said with a laugh.
“Hush yer mouth, boy!” Tante Lulu said, flicking Angus with a dish towel. “That kind of language ain’t proper.”
“Ya shoulda said poop, instead of shit,” John advised with a grin, probably having been flicked many a time in his life by his beloved aunt. Everyone, even as far as New Orleans, had heard of Tee-John LeDeux, the baddest Cajun to ever cross a bayou. He must have given Tante Lulu every one of the gray hairs she hid . . . under her Farrah Fawcett wig, which was incidentally lopsided at the moment. In fact, John leaned up and adjusted it for her.
“Or mebbe ya shouldn’t say no bad words at all,” the old lady said with a harrumphing sound.
“Anyhow, I don’t even remember bein’ shot,” Angus went on. “It only hurt when I woke up.”
“Ah, yer mah hero,” Lily Beth drawled out, patting Angus on the shoulder. They were sitting side by side on one of the benches. It was a wonder the bench didn’t tip over like a seesaw with the disproportionate weight. Really, Samantha could swear the girl had gained five pounds just since yesterday.
“Weren’t ya scared?” Tante Lulu asked Samantha.
“Shaking in my high heels. Don’t forget to give them back to Charmaine, by the way. The funny thing is, when you’re in the middle of something dramatic like that, you don’t stop to think, ‘Boy, am I scared!’ You’re too caught up in the frenzy of your wildly beating heart, your light-headedness, and what’s happening around you. Almost like you’re hovering above the scene, and it’s happening to someone else.”
“I know what ya mean,” Tante Lulu said. “I felt lak that when I first heard that mah fiancée, Phillipe, had died in the war.” Everyone knew that long ago Tante Lulu had been engaged to Phillipe Prudhomme, a frogman, one of the original Navy SEALs, and that he’d died on Omaha Beach during World War II. “In fact, I felt lak that fer a long, long time. Fergit about that Walkin’ Dead show on the TV. I was lak a true, blue, walkin’, talkin’ zombie. Fer years! I drank too much, smoked lak a chimney, and slept with more sailors than a French Quarter pros-tee-toot.”
Whoa! TMI! I do not want to picture this old lady as a hooker.
“What made ya stop?” Lily Beth asked, in awe, hearing this story for the first time. Well, part of it was a first for Samantha, too.
“St. Jude, bless his heart. He come ta me right on Jackson Square before St. Louis Cathedral in Nawleans.” Tante Lulu sighed and swiped at her teary eyes. “But thass another story.”
John pulled his aunt down onto the bench beside him and kissed the top of her wig. “Now, doan be gettin’ the moody blues.”
“I won’t,” she said, “but sometimes it jist hits me, of a sudden, what I lost.” She turned to Samantha. “Yer situation is different. You’ll be feelin’ better by t’morrow.”
Samantha nodded. “Funny thing, though. Much as I had grown to detest Nick, and loathed the baby selling scheme of his, I never wished him dead. It saddens me.”
“Course it does.” Tante Lulu was back to her usual opinionated self. No longer weepy with memories. “It’s cause we allus hope that bad folks will see the light before they go ta their Maker, and be saved. Lak I was by St. Jude.”
Samantha wasn’t sure about that. Not about Tante Lulu and St. Jude. But about everyone hoping that everyone would “see the light.”
“It dint hafta end lak it did,” John said. “If Coltrane hadn’t shot at a cop and been aimin’ his gun at Samantha, he wouldn’t have been gunned down. ‘Suicide by cop’ probably hadn’t been his intention, but that’s how it worked out.”
“Did he die right away? Before he could see the light?” Tante Lulu asked, making the sign of the cross.
“I don’t know ’bout the light,” John said, with a wink at Samantha, “but Daniel pronounced him dead at the scene, almost immediately after he was shot.”
“Daniel was there?” Samantha tilted her head to the side. This was the first time she’d heard that. “In the parking garage?”
“Mais oui,” John answered. “Dint ya see him, chère?”
She shook her head, guessing that she’d been even more out of it than she’d recalled. But the idea that he’d been there, and left, gave her a foreboding of things not so right between them, more so than she’d thought.
John was telling Angus and Lily Beth what the situation would be from now on. “There will probably be a day or two before the paperwork is done for the Coltrane case. The accomplice, Misty Beauville, was arrested at a private airport outside the city, and she’ll be spillin’ the beans all night long, is mah guess. We doan think there’ll be other arrests, too difficult to investigate perps outside the country, and it looks lak Coltrane was using some Nigerian middle men ta sell his product . . . i.e., babies.”
Lily Beth groaned at that image. Her baby being shipped outside the country.
Once again, Angus hugged her in comfort.
And Samantha wondered if something might be developing between the two of them.
“Shouldn’t I go back home to see what damage might have been done at my house?”
John shook his head. “Not yet. The house is secure. Give it another day or two. Let the Fibbies give you the all-safe signal before you leave here.”
She nodded.
“The biggest concern now is Jimmy Guenot and his branch of the Dixie Mob,” John went on. “Until those arrests are made, y’all have gotta lay low. Not you so much, Samantha, but by association, yer still in danger. As evidenced by those lowlifes that visited you before you left Nawleans.”
“I keep tellin’ y’all. Lemme call Jimmy’s mama. If she knew what her boy was up to, she’d hogtie ’im and roast ’im over her bar-b-q.” Truly, Tante Lulu was enjoying all the excitement, you could tell by the gleam in her eyes and the way she practically bounced on her seat as she talked.
“Yer not callin’ anyone,” John told his aunt. “Everything is still hush-hush.”
“Right,” Tante Lulu agreed, zipping her lips, but grinning mischievously. The bayou grapevine would be singing as soon as the old lady got the go-ahead, or maybe even beforehand.
After more discussion about the day’s events, John said he was going to drive his aunt home, promising to pick up Tante Lulu’s car the next day.
“I gotta come back mah self t’morrow to help with the cabin,” she protested.
“Not tomorrow. You’re having lunch with Charmaine, Sylvie, Rachel, and Valerie. A planning session for yer birthday party, remember?” Rachel and Valerie were the wives of Remy and René LeDeux. Tante Lulu’s big pool party bash was planned for Saturday, only four days from now.
“Hmpfh! I doan see why I hafta plan mah own party? It should be a surprise.”
“How could it be a surprise when it was yer idea ta begin with?”
She was still arguing with her nephew while they walked off. But almost immediately, she came back and told Samantha, “Tell Daniel I’ll be puttin’ the finishin’ touches on his hope chest.”
Then she was off again.
Samantha had to smile as she explained to Lily Beth and Angus how Tante Lulu made hope chests for all the men in her family. Quilts, monogrammed pillowcases, doilies, and lots of St. Jude imprinted items, like place mats, napkins, and wind chimes.
Aaron and Lily Beth went to their room where they planned to watch a Big Bang Theory marathon. The double bed they’d put in the front parlor for Lily Beth to use, temporarily . . . the one with the rice frame . . . had been moved up to the guest bedroom, aka Aunt Mel’s room for when or if she ever came to visit, along with the rest of the matching bedroom furniture that had been delivered by some high school boys that day . . . an armoire and a dry sink. The boys had also brought two single bed frames that had been unreachable in the back of the storage unit, but for which Daniel and Samantha had already bought mattress sets.
Apparently, Daniel and Aaron had not only set up the guest bedroom, but they’d put together the two twin beds in the front parlor for Lily Beth and Angus to use. A lot of work for a temporary situation. Something more for which she had to thank Daniel. And Aaron, of course.
Samantha took care of all her animals, delighting in Clarence’s new vocabulary. Maybe she should have spent more time teaching him. But then, maybe his ability to be taught would make him more adoptable.
It was almost ten o’clock before Samantha heard a vehicle in the front driveway. She’d taken a shower and put on clean clothes . . . well, relatively clean, considering her dwindling supply . . . and was running a comb through her damp hair. She rushed downstairs, anxious to see Daniel. She heard a vehicle shut down, and voices raised in discussion, then another motor turning over and a vehicle departing. She figured it was probably Aaron, off for his nightly trips to no one knew where.
By the time she got to the front gallery and was going down the steps, though, all she could see by the exterior lights was Aaron. It was Daniel who had taken off.
“Where’s Daniel?” she asked Aaron.
“Um . . . he decided to sleep on Remy LeDeux’s houseboat tonight, to allow more room for you all here at Bayou Rose. It’s just temporary.” Aaron didn’t quite meet her eyes as he relayed this news.
The message being: temporary, as in, after I leave.
Maybe it was better that she was alone tonight. So much had happened in such a short time. She wasn’t thinking clearly.
Even so, the first thing she did when she got back in the house was hunt out a bottle of good Scotch whiskey. This was a night that warranted booze. Even Southern Belles, especially Scottish ones, appreciated the medicinal value on occasion of a good binge.