Marisa Carroll - Hotel Marchand 09 (9 page)

“Pretty well, I think. I was just telling Sophie that you really need to be up in the attic to tell. And I’m not going up there today. It’s far too dark and dreary and I don’t have a key. I’ll get Alain to check it out tomorrow or the next day if you’re going to be here working. Is that all right?”

Sophie hoped her color wasn’t rising. “Yes, of course. He can stop by anytime. As a matter of fact, I need to talk to him. I can’t find the code to the alarm system anywhere in Maude’s things. I’m hoping, she gave him a copy to keep at the police station.”

“Why don’t you ask him now?” Luc straightened, resting his hands on the back of the seat. “I just saw him going into the Blue Moon with his mother and little girl. Would you two ladies care to join me there? Marjo can fill us in on the Acadian music festival the Indigo Development Committee’s hoping to hold here in October.”

“Here in the building?” Sophie asked, gazing around at the overcrowded space. It was the first she’d heard of a music festival.

“That would be great, of course,” Marjolaine said hastily. “But we never got around to getting Maude’s permission. The most we were hoping for was that she’d let us give tours of the building during the weekend of the festival. Our goal, in partnership with the historical society, is to eventually buy the opera house, restore it and use it as the staging area for zydeco and Cajun music festivals. Sort of a mini Grand Ole Opry.” She looked around, a frown pulling her strongly marked brows together. “Maude was our buffer. As long as Past Perfect was a going concern, we figured the owner wouldn’t sell the building out from under us…the town, I mean. Now we have no idea what will happen to it.”

“The lease is up at the end of the year.”

“We know. That’s why we need the festival to be a success. So we have funds on hand when we start negotiating with the owner. We’re having a planning meeting next week. We’d love for you to come.”

“I’ll try,” Sophie said. “But I don’t know if I can even reopen Past Perfect without a trustworthy manager. I have responsibilities to fulfill the bequests in Maude’s will. It might mean liquidating the business as soon as possible. There might not be enough money to keep up the lease for almost a year.”

Marjolaine’s lips thinned. “Then that’s something else we’ll have to consider.”

“I’m sorry.” Sophie felt miserable, but didn’t know what else she could do to help at the moment.

“We can’t do anything more about it this afternoon,” Marjo said. “I have to be going.” She turned to Luc. “Thanks for the dinner invitation, Luc, but my brother’s expecting me home. I’ll take a rain check, though.”

He smiled. “I’ll hold you to that.”

“See ya’ll later,” Marjo said and headed back out into the rain.

“Oh dear,” Sophie said. “I’m afraid she’s unhappy with me.”

“She’ll get over it. To tell you the truth, it’s a long shot that the town will be able to come up with the money for this white elephant anyway. It’ll cost an arm and a leg to restore it. And the upkeep’s going to be a bitch.”

“But it would be a real asset to the town. Think of the tourist dollars it would bring in. Indigo’s right on the Evangeline Trail. It could be a real draw.”

“Let’s discuss it over dinner. Maybe there’s some way to work it out. I know it’s a little early but Willis’s gumbo never lasts long.”

She hesitated then decided to accept his invitation. She’d probably be eating at the Blue Moon anyway and it would be pleasant to have company. “I’d like that. I skipped lunch, so an early dinner suits me just fine. If you give me a minute to call my mother and make sure everything’s all right back home, I’ll join you there.”

“E
STELLE
, come here.” Cecily poked her head inside the kitchen door of the diner. She’d told Alain she was going to the bathroom. Luckily the hallway that led to the restrooms also led to the kitchen so she could talk to Estelle and Willis without Alain seeing her.

Estelle turned away from the huge restaurant stove, where a big stainless-steel pot of gumbo steamed, and waved a distracted hand. “Not now, Cecily. I’m swamped with orders.”

Willis was working the grill. “How’s it going, Cecily?” He lifted his spatula in a salute, but didn’t lift his eyes from the row of burgers and crawfish cakes sizzling on the hot surface.

“Fine, Willis. And yourself?” You didn’t skip the pleasantries in Indigo, no matter what else was on your mind.

“I’ve had worse days.” He’d lost a lot of weight fighting his cancer, but he no longer had that pinched look to his face, and the grayness that underlay his dark skin had disappeared.

“Glad to hear it. Now, Estelle, we need to talk.” She spoke the words sharply. The diner was almost full. Someone could come walking down the hall at any moment, including her own son, the Chief of Police. It had been a half hour since she’d stolen the little teddy, marked with the double purple diamond on the price tag that was the code for Willis’s cancer med, but she was still shaking. She’d barely been able to swallow her dinner, she was so upset.

Estelle wiped her hands on the apron around her waist and turned away from the pot of gumbo. She crossed the big, steamy kitchen as Cecily eased inside the swinging door. “What is it, Cecily? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost come up out of the bayou.”

“I have Willis’s meds.” She looked over her shoulder at the door, expecting to see Alain bearing down on her. Imagine the headlines in the
Parish Gazette
if she should be arrested by her own son. It didn’t bear thinking of.

“You what?” Estelle’s eyes widened. “Did I hear you right?”

“You heard me.” Cecily fumbled in her bag and pulled out the little teddy. “Quick, get something to hide it in before someone else sees it.”

A big smile broke out on Estelle’s care-worn face as she studied the price tag with its distinctive marking. “Thank God. We were about ready to get in the car and drive to Canada ourselves to get some more. How did you get your hands on it? Did she give you the rest of them?”

“She didn’t give me anything,” Cecily hissed. “I stole it, may God forgive me.” She made the sign of the cross, then went on to explain as quickly as she could what had happened. While she talked, Estelle lifted a stainless-steel container down from a shelf.

“No one will look for it there. It’ll be safe until we close up for the night. So you couldn’t get any of the others?”

“No.” Cecily shook her head. It had all happened so quickly. She still couldn’t believe she’d had the nerve to take the teddy at all, but when it fell on the floor and bounced away from the others, she’d taken advantage of the situation and slipped it into her purse.

“The Lord will forgive you,” Estelle said, blinking away a tear. “And Willis and I do surely bless you.”

“Thanks. But we need more than a blessing. We need a miracle. We can’t keep going in there and snatching them piecemeal this way. We need to get them all at once. Oh, I wish she hadn’t seen them.”

“What if she puts them out for sale?” Estelle asked, her eyes widening. “I mean, she must have commented on the price.” She looked down at the little bear. “He’s cute and all…but…”

“I’m worried about that, too.” They ordered the drugs through a pharmacy in Nova Scotia close to her cousin’s home. All seventeen members of their group paid individually for the meds, most by credit card, and then gave her cousin’s home as the shipping address. Cecily’s cousin sewed the meds into the stuffed toys she loved to make and sent them across the border in monthly shipments. It had been Maude’s idea to have her put the prices of the drugs on the tags she attached to the animals along with an identifying code of squares and triangles. Never any names. When each of the members of the group came to collect their animal, she matched their invoices with the tags and their colored code. Cecily had never felt it was a foolproof system, but since Maude had been willing to be the one to accept the smuggled shipments, she’d never felt as if she could voice her misgivings.

And happily her cousin was a very meticulous woman. In over two years there hadn’t been a single mix-up, so maybe Maude’s system was a good one.

“I wish we’d known she was going back to Houston like she did,” Estelle said, breaking into her thoughts as she dropped the teddy bear into the metal canister and covered it with the bag of brown sugar. “Maybe we could have gotten in—”

“It’s too late now for that. She’s seen them. She’ll know they’re gone now even if we’re lucky enough to get in and out of the opera house without being caught. Sophie’s no fool. She’ll remember what happened today. I don’t want her to think I’m a shoplifter.” A horrible thought struck her. “Or that Dana stole it. She was with me when I took Willis’s bear but I made sure she didn’t see me put it in my purse. Lord, what have I done?”

“The right thing,” Estelle assured her.

“I don’t suppose we could wait until she puts them out on the shelf and then all go in and buy them back,” Cecily said hopefully.

Estelle’s lips drew into a straight line. “These drugs are so expensive already. But—”

Cecily waved her off. “I know. I know. It was just a thought.”

“If worse comes to worst we’ll tell her the truth,” Estelle said.

“I don’t want Alain to find out what we’re up to.” She had to consider the fact that he wanted to run for parish sheriff in the future, but Cecily had also noticed the way he’d looked at Sophie when she came into the Blue Moon with Luc Carter. Alain still cared for her. No one else might have noticed, but she was his mother and she knew. How could he ever have any kind of relationship with her if his own mother was convicted of stealing from her?

“Order up,” Marie called out. She was filling in for Estelle and Willis’s regular waitress for a couple of days while she recovered from an abscessed tooth. Whatever bad you could say about Marie Lesatz—and there was a lot, to Cecily’s way of thinking—she had a good heart. Always ready to help a friend even when she spent eight hours a night on her feet. She spied Cecily in the kitchen and turned her head to call over her shoulder. “Hey, Alain. I found your mom. She didn’t faint in the bathroom, so don’t worry. She’s in the kitchen with Estelle.”

Time had run out. Cecily looked at Estelle and then at Marie. “I’m going to talk to my mom. But are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Estelle sighed, then nodded. “If there’s any one of us that can figure out how to get in and out of Past Perfect without getting caught, it’s Marie.”

T
HE SUN
was shining for the first time in almost a week, so Alain left the SUV in his parking space behind the city building and headed out on foot. Indigo didn’t have much of a business district anymore. As in small towns all over the country, there were more empty storefronts than going concerns, but those that remained, the general store—really a combination grocery and convenience store—the hardware, the drugstore, an auto-parts store, the diner and a combination flower and gift shop, were well cared for and holding their own.

The air was unseasonably warm and a couple of elderly gentlemen were sitting on the benches beneath the war memorial, smoking and shooting the breeze. Bart Lafever and his brother-in-law sunning themselves in the square was as sure a sign of spring as the swallows returning to Capistrano. The drugstore windows were filled with red, white and pink Valentine cutouts and the hardware had a display of small appliances and red candy heart boxes to remind husbands and boyfriends that a toaster oven, too, was a gift of love. Estelle and Willis had a sandwich board out in front of the Blue Moon advertising a surf-and-turf special for the holiday with crème brûlée featured as dessert. Willis must be feeling better if he was firing up the blow torch for crème brûlée.

Alain hooked his thumbs in his utility belt and made a mental note to pick up a rose each for his mother and grandmother. Since he didn’t have a sweetheart to buy for, Valentine’s Day tended to slip his mind, or would, if Dana didn’t have the dining-room table littered with dozens of Dora the Explorer valentines for her classmates.

Another week had gone by and he still hadn’t connected with Casey Jo. He was beginning to hope she’d lost interest in the trip to Disney World. Dana still jumped up to answer the phone every time it rang, but she’d stopped pestering him about the trip. Maybe, this once, it would all blow over, but knowing his ex-wife as he did, he doubted it.

He touched a finger to the brim of his hat as he passed a pair of his grandmother’s cronies entering the drugstore. “Afternoon, Miss Lillian, Miss Sarah. Nice day, isn’t it?”

They returned the greeting, stopping to ask after Yvonne, and he promised to pass on their hellos. That exchange was followed by five minutes of discussion of the weather, and the fact that it was getting too warm, too early in the year. Meant a bad tornado season in their experience, which between them, Alain guessed, added up to about a hundred and sixty years or so. The conversation concluded with both elderly women holding to their faith in the Good Lord and keeping their TVs tuned to the Weather Channel to see them through.

The radio receiver on his shoulder crackled to life, giving him an excuse to move on down the street without seeming impolite for cutting the visit short. It was only a reminder from his dispatcher that he had a five-thirty meeting with the mayor to go over the department budget requests for the next quarter, and not an emergency call, but it served.

He continued on his way, skirting the square, swinging over a block on Jefferson, passing by Maude Picard’s house, wondering what Sophie planned to do with it. He cut back across the square, arrived at the opera house and tried the door. It was unlocked so he walked inside, buttoning his sunglasses into his shirt pocket as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. Sophie was nowhere in sight. The doors to the auditorium were standing open and he heard the foot-tapping sounds of zydeco coming from the stage.

She’d been busy the past few days, he noticed. Guy and two of his friends from the high-school football team had helped her sort through and move all the inventory in the auditorium so it would be accessible to the appraiser. His son had told him all about it as they’d shared a pizza the night before.

There was some cool stuff in there, Guy had continued, warming to the subject. Like an entire steamer trunk full of old clothes. Mostly women’s stuff, he said, but there was also a Civil War uniform jacket and sword. “I’ll bet it’s worth a lot of money,” his son had speculated. “But Sophie says it should be in a museum.” Alain agreed and was pleased Sophie felt the same way.

Since Guy had broached the subject, Alain let himself pose a question or two. “How was Sophie to work for?” he’d asked casually as he helped himself to another slice of pepperoni-laden pizza, figuring he’d take a handful of antacids before he went to bed to ward off the inevitable heartburn.

It had been hard work, Guy admitted. Most of that old furniture weighed a ton. But Sophie was easy to work for, and a generous employer. She’d brought a cooler of bottled water and sodas, and didn’t get all hyper when Willis and Estelle’s grandson, Antoine, dropped a couple of plates and broke them. “She said they weren’t all that valuable and she didn’t even dock his pay or anything.” Guy had a goofy smile on his face and an unfocused look in his eye as he talked about Sophie.

“That was nice of her.” Alain suspected his son had a little bit of a crush on her. Hell, he’d start to worry if he didn’t, a woman as good-looking and sexy as Sophie Clarkson.

His thoughts of the evening before had carried him into the middle of the auditorium, but Sophie wasn’t anywhere around. The music was coming from a boom box on the stage, one the size of a carry-on bag and easy to spot. The acoustics were good in the old building and the sound carried to where he was standing, even though the volume wasn’t tuned very high. Half a dozen books were lying on tables and the tops of dressers. He tilted his head to read the titles:
Throwaway Treasures. The Amateur Guide to Antebellum Antiques. American Furniture of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century. A Guide to Southern Antiquing
. The books were marked with dozens of strips of colored paper. Sophie was obviously doing her homework. For a moment he let himself hope that meant she was going to stay in Indigo. But only for a moment.
Get a grip,
he told himself. Sophie Clarkson was a successful fund-raiser with a life and career in Houston. She wasn’t a small-town girl. Never had been. Never would be.

“Oh dear, is that you, Alain?” Her words came floating down from somewhere above him. He zeroed in on the bow-fronted box to the left of the stage.

“I’m here to take a look at the patch on the roof. Marjolaine told me you knew I’d be stopping by.”

“I lost track of the time.” There was embarrassed laughter in her tone. She appeared in the box, leaning her arms on the gilded railing. “You caught me playing dress-up.”

Alain sucked in his breath. She was wearing something white and sheer, all lace and tiny tucks.
Ye gods, was it a corset?
Her shoulders were bare, and so were the rounded tops of her breasts. A huge straw hat bedecked with pale-pink roses and what appeared to be ostrich plumes framed her face and tied under her chin with a lacy bow. She’d twisted her hair up under the hat, or tried to, but her hair had always had a mind of its own, and here and there stray curls shimmered against her cheeks and neck in sunlight that was filled with dancing dust motes.

She lifted one hand to her throat. “This is awkward,” she said. “I’m up here and my clothes are down there.” She leaned a little forward to point to her jeans and sweater set draped over the back of one of the chairs in the row ahead of him.

“I’m a cop,” he said, hoping his voice didn’t crack with the strain of keeping himself from getting hard. “I noticed that first thing.”

Her cheeks were as pink as the roses that adorned the preposterous hat and she looked…? He didn’t know how to describe the way she looked. His brain had shut down. Her eyes widened in alarm and she leaned slightly forward to look over his shoulder to the open doorway. “There’s no one else with you, is there?”

“I’m alone,” he assured her. “Want me to bring your things up to you?”
And then lie down on the floor and make love with you?
That’s what he wanted to do so bad he could almost taste it.

She hesitated a moment, her color going a little deeper, as though she might have had the same wayward thought. “No.” She gave her head a little shake as she straightened. “I’ll come down.”

She disappeared behind the side wall of the box and a moment later materialized at the top of the staircase. She was indeed wearing a corset and a floor-length petticoat of pale ivory silk and yellowing lace that swirled around her legs when she walked. The corset followed the flare of her hips, narrowing to a point just above the juncture of her thighs. His heart started hammering in his chest and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out with a whoosh. There were too many layers of silk and lace to tell what she was wearing beneath the petticoats, but it couldn’t be much. Her jeans were lying underneath her sweater. It wasn’t because he was a cop that he’d noticed the wispy blue bra on top of the pile. And it definitely wasn’t a cop that reasoned if the bra was pale-blue and wispy, so were the panties that matched it.

She halted at the foot of the stairs a good two yards away from him. “I found these in a trunk yesterday. I…I couldn’t resist trying them on.” She touched the delicate ruffle of lace that lay against her breast with the tip of her finger. “They’re like something from a Victorian Victoria’s Secret, don’t you think?”

Alain shifted uncomfortably. At this rate he was going to need a cold shower when he got out of here.

“Then I heard something up in the balcony,” she said. “I thought a squirrel, or maybe a cat, or heaven help us, a skunk had gotten shut up in here and I went to look.”

He couldn’t stop staring at her, and she wasn’t so embarrassed she didn’t notice.

“Alain, your mouth’s hanging open.”

He got his jaw muscles back under control and closed his mouth. Her legs were long for her height and he remembered how she’d wrapped them around him when they had made love. She leaned forward to grab her sweater, and hurriedly pushed the bra out of sight. She whirled the sweater around her shoulders and the creamy swells of her breasts vanished from view. Alain felt like a kid who’d just discovered coal in his Christmas stocking.

“As I was saying, we found this entire steamer trunk of vintage clothes yesterday when Guy and his friends were helping me get ready for the appraiser.” She looked down, smoothing her hands over the layers of silk and lace. When she raised her face to his, her eyes shone with the excitement of a little girl playing dress-up. “I’ve always wondered what it would feel like wearing a corset. I couldn’t resist trying it on.”

“How does it feel?” he asked.

She laid her hand on her stomach. “The stays are bone, probably whalebone, and they poke something fierce. I can’t breathe and I can’t bend over.” She smiled. “And I didn’t even lace it tightly. The material’s too fragile, and well, frankly, I’m too fat.”

“You aren’t fat.” As far as he was concerned she was just right. He let his eyes travel over the utterly feminine curves of her body. The tips of her running shoes peeked out from under the embroidered hem of the petticoat, but he found even that anachronism sexy.

“Thank you,” she said. “But I’m fatter than the woman this corset was made for. At least in the waist…and other places.”

“I noticed that, too,” he said before he could stop himself.

“I noticed you noticed.” She fell silent, but when he didn’t take the hint and move, she said, “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll change now.”

“Oh. Sure.” He shoved the brim of his Stetson up then stopped himself from running his finger under his uniform collar. Either the temperature in the room had gone up twenty degrees, or his had. “I’ll wait for you on the stage.” They hadn’t made love in more than fifteen years. He hadn’t even kissed her, or held her, or touched her since the day Casey Jo had found them in this very spot, but his body remembered and the blood ran like lava through his veins.

“I’ll only be a moment.”

“Take your time.” He pivoted, got his legs moving, and took two steps, but she called him back.

“Alain?”

He almost groaned out loud. He turned his head. She was holding the sweater against her, the roses in her cheeks brighter than before. “Yeah?”

“I… There’s a knot.” She turned her back and looked at him over her shoulder, a Victorian temptress in lace and silk and a ridiculous hat that was about the sexiest get-up he’d ever seen. There was real distress in her eyes. “I…don’t want to break the lacing.”

He walked toward her on wooden legs. He could see her spine between the edges of the corset. He remembered, suddenly, the way she’d shivered under his hands when he touched her there, just above the swell of her buttocks. He felt himself grow hard thinking about the softness of her skin beneath his fingers. To clamp down on his thoughts and his libido, he stared at a tiny mole on her shoulder.

“How did you get it on?” he asked as he fumbled with the knot in the woven lacing. Too late he realized what her answer would be. Up close he could smell lavender, old and faded like the material, and beneath it her scent, warm and womanly, and overlying it all the mundane odor of moth balls. He forced himself to concentrate on the mothballs as he worked.

“I—” she straightened her shoulders a bit, as though she too might be steeling herself against the brush of his fingers “—I laced it up the front and turned it around, but I pulled the strings too tightly to undo it that way.”

He steeled himself against the effect of that mental image on certain excitable parts of his anatomy as he worked at the knot.

Once he loosened the lacing, she spun around so quickly he felt the swirl of silk against his pant leg. “The petticoats have hooks and eyes. I think I can manage them on my own.”

“We’re good to go, then,” he said. He took off once more for the stage, taking deep breaths, telling himself it had just been too long since he’d been that close to a half-naked woman.

But he was only fooling himself. It wasn’t just any half-naked woman back there. It was Sophie Clarkson. His first love, and he’d be telling a bald-faced lie if he said he didn’t want her back in his arms, in his bed and in his life.