The Miss Fortune Series: Nearly Departed (Kindle Worlds Novella) (4 page)

It took about an hour for the three
of us to give our statements to Deputy Breaux, who informed Gertie she may at
some point be interviewed by an ATF agent.

We then
stopped in at the after-funeral party at Francine’s. It almost seemed like a
real after-funeral get-together, except for the black balloons and streamers.
Ally was in the process of taking down the festive “RIP Gertie” banner when we
walked in, stopping all conversation.

“The f-u-n
has finally been taken out of my funeral,” Gertie said glumly, scanning the still-stunned
faces of the funeral attendees.

Ally
dropped the banner and ran over, hugging Gertie, tears in her eyes.

Ida Belle
grabbed a water glass and fork from a table and signaled the crowd to quiet. “I
want everyone to know the ATF may be on their way to town to do some
investigating into the exploding casket, so everyone at the funeral will
probably be questioned.”

“They think
one of us did it?” one of the Sinful Ladies asked.

“No, no,”
Ida Belle said, holding her hands to quiet the grumbling and cries of
protestation. “But maybe one of you saw something. Something that seems
unimportant, but can help crack the case.”

Oh no, the
ATF wasn’t going to hog all our intel. I sidled up next to Ida Belle and said
to the crowd, “So if anyone did see anything, you can let Ida Belle know, and
she’ll pass it along to the people in charge.” Ida Belle lifted an eyebrow at
me. “Isn’t that what Sheriff Lee said to tell everyone?” I asked her. “You
know, so the deputies don’t have to waste their time sifting through useless
info.”

Ida Belle grinned.
“Yes, that’s right, he did say that. I’m acting as the tip line. So, text me if
you remember seeing or hearing anything strange. And send me any photos or videos
you took on your phones before and after. Send them all to my number.”

Ida Belle
cast a glance at Lady Lamé. He pulled himself up from his chair and said, “While
the food’s being served, the Divas will serenade you with a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t.”

I flashed a
thumbs-up to Lady as he and the Divas began belting out Aretha Franklin’s
Respect
.
“That should take the edge off everyone,” I said to Ida Belle.

In the
mirror above the counter I saw the door opening behind us. I instinctively
placed my hand on the waistband of my jeans. Ida Belle did the same with her
capris. Ida Belle and I thought alike—we both hid our guns in the same place. Gertie
undid the latch on her enormous purse, where she was known to keep one or two
pistols, a hunting knife and a fun collection of handcuffs. We nodded a signal
to one another and whipped around to face the new arrival.

“Jo-Jo?”
Gertie said.

I could
feel my body relax. He had a creepy vibe, what with his unresolved crush on
Gertie, but he seemed harmless enough.

He shuffled
into Francine’s, his eyes widening at the sight of Gertie. “Miss Hebert, I… I
heard the news.”

He rushed
to Gertie and enveloped her in a hug. A full-on body hug, despite Gertie’s best
efforts to make it a shoulder-bump,
stay away from my boobs
hug. Gertie
patted him several times on his back. Universal signal for
hug’s over
.
But Jo-Jo wasn’t letting up. Ida Belle and I both grabbed Gertie’s shoulders
and pulled her out of the embrace.

“We have to
go,” Ida Belle said.

“Oh, I’m
sorry,” Jo-Jo said. “I’m just… I’m just so excited to see you… alive. I heard
you was dead.”

Jo-Jo
glanced at Ally. He smiled. “Hey, Ally, remember me?”

Ally
crossed her arms around her chest. “Yes, I do.”

“Well,
you’ve certainly blossomed. Say, I’m in town for a couple days—”

Ally cut
him off. “I see a spot next to Delphine and her mom. You go have a seat and
I’ll bring a plate over.”

“Oh. Okay.”
He looked at Gertie. “Can we sit and chat later?”

“Oh honey,
I would love to, but there’s some business I need to attend to with my friends
here. Maybe later.” She brushed at her hair, scratching her head.

Jo-Jo nodded,
and then ambled over to the table next to Cookie, squeezing around her
wheelchair and her daughter’s three-wheel scooter, and took a seat. He gazed up
at Gertie and waved.

“I have a
special table for the three of you,” Ally said. “Far away from Jo-Jo.”

Ida Belle
shook her head. “I don’t think we can stay.”

“But you
need to sit and have something to eat,” Ally said. “You’ve been through hell.”

Gertie
sniffed the air. “Maybe we’ll take a to-go box, Ally. We’re all smelling a bit
swampy. We need showers and some quiet time to settle our nerves.”

“Oh sure. I
don’t blame you. I’ll make up a box.”

But quiet
time wasn’t on our agenda. A potential killer was still out there. And we
needed to find him before he struck again.

* * * * *

Our first order of business, even
before washing the mud and swamp stench off our bodies, was to conduct a sweep
of Gertie’s house. If someone wanted her dead enough to plant a bomb under her
butt in a coffin, planting a bomb at her house wouldn’t be too far a stretch.
Carter had assured us he had already swept the house while we gave our
statements to Deputy Breaux. But we were trained professionals. And a
professional never took someone else’s word for it. Even if that someone else
was Carter.

To be on
the extra-safe side, we decided to first look at the feed from surveillance
cameras Gertie had stationed at entry points and hallways inside her house.

“Since when
did you have security cameras put in?” Ida Belle asked.

“Four weeks
ago. The day Beulah Sinclair threatened to steal my brownie recipe. I’ve been
hoping to catch her in the act.”

We transferred
the stored video feed of the past twenty-four hours onto Gertie’s laptop and
zoomed through it to detect anything out of the ordinary. Nothing jumped out
until 1:03 this morning.

“Slow it
down,” I said. I leaned in to take a closer look. “Oh, God.” In the hallway,
outside Gertie’s bedroom…

A figure
emerged.

A naked
figure.

“I got
hungry in the night,” Gertie said as she frantically pressed buttons on the
laptop, trying to speed through the footage.

“You’re
naked,” Ida Belle said, leaning in to the screen.

“It was hot
last night!”

Gertie
nervously pressed another button on the laptop. Probably not the one she had
intended. Her naked image not only froze on the screen, but zoomed in and enlarged
as well.

“Don’t
look!” she screamed.

“I told you
not to say, ‘don’t look.’” I said. “Now I can’t stop looking. Jeeze, Gertie. What
is that?”

Ida Belle
pointed to the screen. “It’s what your boobs will look like in forty-some
years.”

“If she’s
lucky,” Gertie said defensively. “I’ve been told by my masseuse, Annabelle,
that I have the boobs of a forty-seven-year-old.”

“Do you tip
her?”

“Of course
I do.”

“Enough
said.”

Gertie
turned the monitor away from us. “You two go check my backyard. I’ll finish
with the video scan.”

Ida Belle
and I sprung up from our chairs and fled into the backyard, where a thorough
check revealed nothing out of order. By the time Ida Belle and I came back
inside, Gertie had finished her security scan.

Our second
order of business involved hiding any weapons or evidence of past “activities”
Gertie may have taken part in. If the ATF did stick its nose in, they would
want to take a closer look at the victim, in this case, Gertie. We had to make
sure all they found was evidence of a meek, sometimes-confused white-haired old
lady and not an illegal-alcohol-manufacturing, weapons-hoarding,
criminal-investigation-hampering ex-spy.

“Marge has
a secret panel in her bedroom where she kept her weapons. Is there someplace
you can hide your weapons and other… stuff?” I asked, scanning her living room for
a suitable hiding place.

Without
saying a word, Gertie lifted an urn off the fireplace mantle, opened the lid,
stuck her hand inside and produced a remote control. She pointed it toward a
bookshelf next to the fireplace and clicked. The shelf, as well as the wall
behind it, pushed inward and slid to the side, revealing a small alcove under
the staircase.

I crawled
in on my knees. “Dear God, it’s your purse on steroids.”

The alcove overflowed
with weapons, boxes of files and costumes. I held up a red silk nightie with
black lace bodice.

Gertie
smiled. “Remember that one, Ida Belle?”

“Oh yeah, when
you helped get the goods on the mayor of Mudbug. April, nineteen-eighty-one.”

I put the
nightie down and held up a straitjacket.

“Eighty-six.
We helped spring one of the Sinful Ladies out of the psych ward. Ida Belle
pretended to be a psychiatric nurse and I was the mental patient.”

“Must not
have been much of a stretch,” I said under my breath.

“I heard
that.”

Apparently
not under my breath enough.

“Okay,
anything incriminating gets put in here. Anything that says you’re just a
typical little old lady gets spread around the house.” I noticed a collection
of grey and white wigs and old-lady getups on a shelf. “What do you need these
for?” I asked, holding up one of the grey wigs.

“Oh my
goodness,” Gertie said, taking it from me. I could see from her eyes the wig
was taking her back in time. Way back. “We used these to disguise ourselves as
seniors. Back when we were not much older than you.”

Ida Belle
nodded. “You’d be amazed at the types of things people say around old people.
Either they don’t notice us sitting there or they figure we can’t hear them or
we’re too senile to understand what they’re saying. Those disguises yielded
some of the best intel we every got.”

“Now we
don’t need them.” Gertie’s voice took on a wistful tone. She gazed at Ida Belle.
“When did that happen?”

Ida Belle
shrugged. “I didn’t notice.”

* * * * *

We gave ourselves an hour to shower
and change clothes before reconvening at Ida Belle’s dining-room table, now functioning
as command central.

Although
Gertie’s fake funeral had only lasted a half hour before we detected the bomb,
plenty of people at the funeral shot photos and videos before and during the
service. Since we had planted the idea of us sifting through information and
videos for the ATF to the people at the after-party, we had a treasure trove of
texts and videos to sort through. Ida Belle’s job was reading texts. Gertie was
responsible for examining photos and videos.

My job involved
sifting through the debris we collected behind the rec center. I may not have
been an explosives expert, but I’ve had to make my own bombs on numerous
occasions, so I was probably the closest to an expert Sinful had. And by
looking at a few pieces of the bomb itself, I could tell one thing…

“This is
homemade.”

Gertie’s
face blanched. If this bomb had been the work of an expert, there was a
likelihood of it coming from the man who had a contract out on me. But no pro
made this bomb.

“It was
meant for me,” Gertie said.

“Most
likely. And he didn’t do a great job of putting the bomb together.”

“How so? It
exploded, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, but
believe me, that explosion could have been much worse. And from what I saw, the
top of the casket wasn’t in that bad of shape, meaning the force of the blast
went down, not up. I would have positioned it so the force of the blast would
go upward, into the intended victim’s body. And, from what I observed at the
bayou, that explosion didn’t have a lot of power behind it. Whoever made this
didn’t read the instructions very well.”

Ida Belle
and Gertie got up from their chairs and crowded around me.

“Granted, I
don’t have much to work with, but I would bet whoever planted this bomb was
hasty and cheaped out. A professional hitman would take his time and go for
top-of-the-line materials. And I would also bet that whoever planted it was within
a hundred feet when he remotely set the timer to start the countdown.”

“Which
meant he would probably have been close enough to show up in the pictures and
videos many people were taking while standing in line,” Ida Belle said.

Gertie
waved her hand in the air like an excited student. “There’s a park bench right
outside the rec center.”

“Check all
the footage people sent to Ida Belle,” I told Gertie. “And wear your glasses.”

Gertie
pursed her lips and slapped her hands to her hips. “I can see just fine.”

“I’ll do
it,” Ida Belle said.

I wasn’t
taking any chances. “You both do it. One and a half sets of eyes are better.”