Chapter One

They called her the Bayou Queen. Once she stood, stately and beautiful, facing the bank of the river, welcoming all who came her way. Renowned for her elegant teas and grand balls, she played hostess to the best of people. But, the steamboats stopped coming to her landing. The railroad passed her by. Yet, she survived in style until the Great Depression reduced her to penury. Then, she grew shabby and took in whoever would pay her now modest price. The food she served was hearty but cheap. Traveling salesmen and bachelors frequently stayed in her domain as well as soldiers from two world wars on their way to the front. When that second war ended, the surge of automobiles all but ran her over. The interstate highway swung wide around her precincts, and motels gathered at their exits. Some people said she still had good bones like all fine ladies, but her charm dimmed considerably and finally shut down altogether.

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Dressed in jeans tucked into high-laced work boots, Julia Rossi approached the Bayou Queen with caution. She carried a hammer and a small sack of nails on her tool belt, though neither would do much good if she stumbled across a water moccasin hiding in the heavy brush surrounding the old hotel. The blackberry brambles and green briars impeding her progress made Julia regret wearing her royal blue company T-shirt instead of a long-sleeved shirt, hot as it might have been on this early May day in Louisiana. The thorns scratched her arms, drew blood, and attracted mosquitoes from the dense shade of nearby live oaks. Really, she should have cut her hair short years ago, but it was a vanity, thick, black and glossy as the tail of a show horse and endowed with natural red highlights sometimes revealed by the sun. Instead, she drew her locks up into a ponytail and shoved them through the loop in her work cap to keep the hair off her neck and out of the way. Despite that, sweat trickled down her back.

Finally, the faint path Julia followed ended at the plain, unassuming rear door of a shed-like addition to the once magnificent building. Her last owners had shown some respect to the aged beauty by hammering stout boards over the door before decamping to Florida and running out on their property taxes several years in arrears. All the ground floor windows she could see through the overgrowth were similarly barred to keep out the vandals, the vagrants, the drug users prone to taking advantage of abandoned buildings. Julia would never have known the Bayou Queen existed, set back from the road and screened by the live oaks and all the trash trees that had sprung up among them over the years if she hadn’t been lured by two of most talkative doyennes of Chapelle, Louisiana to share a pastry tray at Pommier’s Bakery one rainy afternoon while she and her uncles waited for their plasterwork to dry at Alleman Plantation.

She’d stopped in for a black coffee and ended up with au lait and a pecan pie tart on her plate after the being summoned to sit at the table occupied by the two overweight matrons, each with her white hair dyed an identical champagne blonde and tight, permed curls hair-sprayed into submission. Sisters obviously, they introduced themselves as Patricia Broussard and Pamela Vice, “Please call us Patty and Pammy.” Julia knew her Southern etiquette well enough to put a Miss in front of both names when she addressed them despite their overt friendliness. Within a few minutes, they’d managed to work in their status as the wife of a former three-time mayor before term limits were voted in, and the widow of a prominent bank president.

“We hear your company is doing such marvelous work out at Alleman. How wonderful Gaylord Getty can afford to restore the place to its former glory on his proceeds as an artist—though I don’t make much sense of his work which always seems so distorted to me, maybe even perverted, but I can’t really tell. I hear the gay in Gaylord describes him perfectly. Is that true?” Miss Pammy inquired with a raise of her plucked and penciled eyebrows.

“I really couldn’t say. Mr. Getty is staying in his New York loft while the renovation is ongoing. He relays his instructions through Marvin Holcomb, the caretaker.”

Miss Patty put her pudgy hands in the air and let the wrists go limp. “Well, we already know about Marv. He should not have been allowed to teach in the public schools.”

Julia pretended to miss the implication and did not take the barb baited with old gossip. “Mr. Holcomb has been very helpful. He has a good eye for design.”

“Don’t they all?” Pammy sank her dentures into a pillowy beignet adrift in powdered sugar. “How long will you be staying in Chapelle?”

Julia considered it part of her job to keep an ear out for new business possibilities. Well-connected women like these were a good source no matter how annoying. “Until the work is done, unless we get another contract in the area. You seem like ladies who would know people who might need restoration work done on their homes.”

“Oh, we know people,” both women agreed. “The only building that comes to mind right off the top of my head is the old Bayou Queen Hotel, but once my grandson, Remy, gets hold of it, that place is a gone pecan. He’s all about modern,” Miss Patty said. “His daddy let him go to architecture school in Chicago and now he has Yankee notions. However, he did come home to start his business. Remy is an eligible bachelor. About time he settled down with a good wife. I think you two would have a lot in common.”

Julia wondered if she’d qualify for bride-to-be if she’d worn her work clothes instead of a light blue summer dress, her hair loose around her shoulders, and the sandals on her feet showing off pearl polished toenails while she explored the town. Maybe, Remy was as gay as Marv, and his deluded grandmother refused to admit it.

“Our great-grandmama held her wedding reception at the Bayou Queen in the 1920’s. We have photographs. What a grand place it was: four stories tall, the highest building in town, and the first to have air-conditioning, a crystal chandelier in the lobby to beat all. The second story ballroom…just magnificent. Then, the Crash and the Depression,” Pammy said with a sigh as if she’d personally endured both. “The Queen hit the skids after that.”

Interest piqued, Julia asked where the hotel stood and received excellent if somewhat localized directions. On the way out of town by the bayou road—just past where the old fruit stand used to be on the right, but before the historical marker where a Confederate camp once existed, they told her. She insisted on paying for their pastry tray and met little resistance. On her way back to Alleman, she made note of a patch of gravel and the faint pathway on the bayou side just past the rundown fruit stand buried beneath wisteria vines.

Yesterday’s rain had ceased, leaving behind oppressive humidity. They set up drum fans in the plantation home to move the air, but plaster could not be rushed. The brown coat simply had to cure before adding the finishing layer. She’d left her uncles Sal and Sam in the motorhome running its A/C off the generator while they watched a ballgame and knocked back some cold brews. Now Julia, dressed appropriately for exploring, stood before the treasure trove called the Bayou Queen and pried off the boards that prevented her entry with a crowbar drawn from her tool belt. That job done, she pulled a high-powered flashlight from another loop and aimed it at the interior.

Nothing much to see but a very old-fashioned kitchen with rusty appliances dating back to the thirties. She moved quickly into the next room, traversing a large open space until she stood before a grand staircase. Overhead, an ornate plaster medallion of fruit and flowers still possessed a stout iron hook in its center that once supported the legendary chandelier. Julia rubbed some of the dust from the handrail to the second floor and shone her light upon it. Mahogany, certainly, in need of repair and polish, but the real deal. She turned her eyes to the bleak floor covered by green linoleum with a thick layer of dead insects, and used her bar to lift a loose corner. Marble lay beneath, the luxury flooring of the nineteenth century. Did she dare ascend the staircase? The steps seemed stout enough, but you never knew in old buildings. She weighed in at one-twenty-five and had a reputation for being light on her feet, compared to her uncles for sure. Gingerly, she tested a few of the treads, then raced to the second floor without mishap.

Three sets of large double doors marked the ballroom. One stood halfway open beckoning her to enter. She scuffed her boot across the layer of dust and fallen debris—parquet floors—and above them, the source of the chunks of plaster laying everywhere: a coffered ceiling, the equivalent of today’s dropped ceilings but much more attractive, consisting of squares and rosette medallions matching the pattern of the inlaid wood beneath her feet. A few of the medallions still held traces of gilding. She spotted four with hooks for chandeliers. Three large arched windows would have illuminated the space if they hadn’t been heavily shuttered and provided some cross ventilation on hot summer nights before modern cooling came into existence.

Closing her eyes, Julia imagined what the place must have resembled in its heyday. Her uncles said she had imagination, and she did. Dancing women swirled by, first in hoop skirts, then in bustled gowns, and finally in the loose styles of the 1920’s. Maybe injured soldiers billeted here for a while, sleeping in row upon row of cots. Perhaps, doughboys played poker and rolled dice across the parquet floors while waiting for transport to the distant railway station. She’d have to hit the library and do more research on the history of the Bayou Queen. Maybe it wasn’t too late to save her from destruction, if she could appeal to the city council to save what should be an historical landmark for Chapelle. Enough speculation. She had real work to do. Before leaving, Julia checked out two narrow staircases at either end of the hall leading to the third-floor guestrooms, but decided not to chance further exploration alone. She descended the main stairs and followed her tracks in the dust through the ancient kitchen and out the rear door.

Selecting the lowest board, she hammered it back into place. On to the next and the next. Julia Rossi would not leave the Queen vulnerable to those who preyed on old buildings, not even that modern-minded Remy Broussard.