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Paula brought two mugs of coffee to the table, both with cream and sugar. When she sat down and stirred her coffee, Gabriella had the feeling there was more she was going to say.
“What is it?” she asked.
“A couple of months ago, your mom rented the Cypress Cottage to a man named Luke Buckley.”
“Yes, she mentioned that. She was glad of the extra income. He wasn’t any trouble, was he?”
“You mean complaining about stuff? I don’t think so. But I think she regretted having him on the property.”
“Why?”
“I think she was afraid of him.”
“Why?” she asked again.
“She said he was secretive. I tried to tell her that maybe he just wanted to keep to himself. He could have lost his job or his wife for all we knew. Who can say why a man moves into an isolated cottage in a new location?”
“Because he’s hiding from the law?” Gabriella asked, putting a different spin on the speculations.
“I don’t know, but I do know she kept going on about him. He was stony. Aloof. Abrupt. He was always in there working on the computer. And there were papers scattered all over the place. When she’d come in, he’d hide them.”
“Hide them?”
“Well, gather them up. And there was something about him that she just didn’t trust.”
“Did he have a lease?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she thought he was all right at the beginning. Or … you know … she was …”
Paula let the sentence trail off, and Gabriella was sure her mother’s friend was referring to her recent mental problems, although she wasn’t willing to come out and say it.
Gabriella glanced out the window toward the Cypress Cottage. “Should I be worried?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But you might want to watch out for him while you’re here. You know, keep the doors locked.”
“If he’s so much of a loner, I probably won’t run into him.”
“Maybe, but you’ll have to deal with him eventually. I mean, now he’s renting from you.”
Gabriella nodded, realizing that she’d inherited this property and would have to decide what to do with it.
“How long are you staying here?”
“Just a few days.”
“Your mom would want you to get back to your career.”
Gabriella made a soft sound. Her career. She’d made it the most important thing in her life. Until today.
If it wasn’t for her ambitions, she might have stayed home, but then what? Work as a short-order cook in Lafayette? That wasn’t why she’d gone to the Culinary Institute of America in New York state, then come back to Louisiana to look for a job in the best restaurants in New Orleans. Creating wonderful food gave her a satisfaction nothing else did. Or it had.
“I’d better get to the funeral home,” she murmured.
“Your mom didn’t want to be a burden to you, so she had everything spelled out—before …” Again Paula stopped.
“But I’m going over there anyway.” Gabriella stood and carried her coffee mug to the sink. “Thank you for being here.”
“Just tell me if you need anything.”
“Thanks. I will.”
BEING CAREFUL NOT TO STEP ON anything that would make a crunching noise, the man watching from the shadows of the trees saw Gabriella Boudreaux hurry back to her car. Probably going to the funeral home.
He waited another minute for the other woman to get into her vehicle. When they had both driven away, he made a satisfied sound.
With the two of them gone, he could finally have a smoke. He was starving for one. After quickly using his pocket lighter, he took a deep drag on the fag, grateful for the nicotine rush. He’d broken the habit out of necessity in prison. As soon as he’d gotten out, he’d started again.
While he smoked, he reviewed the day’s events. The old lady had darted upstairs, and he’d followed, knowing that if he pushed her down, the daughter would come running home.
He was an expert at digging into people’s backgrounds, and he knew that she was one of the children from the Solomon Clinic in Houma.
It had been set up to help infertile couples conceive children, but that was only a cover for something else. The guy who’d hired him had wanted to know what had happened there. Not the covert purpose, the unintended consequences.
The doctor had kept records of his activities, of course, but those had been destroyed in a fire long ago.
A few people in Houma had talked to him about the clinic. Which was how he’d gotten Marian Boudreaux’s name.
She’d been a good place to start, but his real objectives were the children, like Gabriella. She was the one he really wanted, out here in the country, where there was more privacy and little chance of her screams being heard.
Chapter Two
Gabriella was already wiped out by the time she met with Burt LeBlanc from the funeral home.
He’d gone to high school with her, although they hadn’t known each other well. She hadn’t been really close to anyone, except one girl named Julie Monroe. It was as if she and Julie were on the same wavelength, although she wasn’t sure what that meant exactly. They’d spent time together, until Julie had moved away in their sophomore year, leaving Gabriella feeling more alone than ever. Because she’d never been great at making friends, it had been easier to keep to herself than to try and work her way into any of the established groups.
Burt LeBlanc, who’d inherited the business from his dad, greeted her as if they’d been buddies.
She shook his hand, getting through the physical contact the same way she was getting through everything else.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said in the deep, reassuring voice that he must have cultivated.
“Yes—thanks.”
“Sit down. Make yourself comfortable.” He gestured toward one of the padded leather chairs across from his broad desk. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea?”
“No, thanks,” she answered as she lowered herself into one of the chairs.
“I read about your pastry chef career in that airline magazine.”
She blinked. “You did?”
“Yes. Very impressive. People in town were talking about it.”
Again, she was surprised that anybody in Lafayette would take notice of her.
After relaxing her with a little more small talk, Burt addressed the arrangements that her mom had spelled out—in an envelope full of instructions that she’d given him several years earlier.
“Your mom wished to be cremated, like your dad,” he said. “There’s a place waiting for her in the columbarium, next to him.”
The columbarium was a building with rows of little vaults along the walls. Putting Mom next to Dad made sense, particularly because it appeared that the space was already bought and paid for.
“All right.”
Burt consulted some papers on his desk. “And, of course, there’s to be no viewing and no funeral.”
Gabriella stared at him as she struggled to take that in. “What?”
He tapped one of the papers. “She didn’t tell you that she specified a memorial service—six weeks after her death?”
“No. Did she say why?”
“She wanted the shock of her death over, and …” He paused for a moment. “And she felt it would be less expensive. The lead time would give you a chance to prepare some of the food yourself if you wanted to. She thought you could make some of those pecan pies she loved.”
“Uh, yes.”
Lord, Mom had certainly gotten into micromanaging the event.
Gabriella left the funeral home feeling light-headed. She’d braced to deal with her mother’s friends. Now she had plenty of time to get ready for the service. And to plan what she wanted to say.
Her mother always had been detail oriented. She must have obsessed over all this before she started losing her grip. Or had she already felt her mental state deteriorating, and she’d hurried to write down these instructions while she could still think clearly?
Gabriella made a small sound as she realized the implications of Mom’s carefully considered list with its wealth of details. Her mother had been forced to deal with a daughter who didn’t always follow the parental script. In death, she had the upper hand—at last.
BY THE TIME GABRIELLA returned to the plantation house, it was after sunset. The gathering darkness contributed to her feeling of being utterly alone. Neither Mom nor Dad had brothers or sisters. Which meant no aunts and uncles or cousins. It had been a small family, and it would die with her because she wasn’t going to get married and have children.
Did that make her feel sad? Or relieved? She was too off balance to know.
Glad that she had left some lights on in the house, she hurried up the steps to the front door. But walking into the hall was like a sudden shock to her already frazzled nerves.
When she’d come through here with Paula, she’d been focused on her mom’s friend. This time she was alone, and when she stood looking up the steps, an inexplicable feeling of terror swept over her, making her reach out and brace her hand against the wall as she struggled to catch her breath—and scrambled to make sense of what she was feeling.
Her mother had fallen here. The impact of Mom’s death was hitting her again, which was why her temples were suddenly pounding. However, she knew deep down that her attack of nerves wasn’t just from the accident.
Paula had said her mom had climbed the steps and fallen. But why had she gone up? To get something? Or to run away from someone? Or both?
Gabriella couldn’t shove away the notion that another person had been here and something evil had happened in this hallway.
Her speculations immediately went to the tenant—Luke Buckley. Mom had been afraid of him. What if he’d come over here and attacked her?
But why?
Maybe he didn’t have the rent money. They’d gotten into an argument, and he’d killed her …
“Stop it,” she muttered to herself. “You’re just letting your speculations run wild because this is the worst day of your life.”
She clenched her fists, sure that Mom’s sudden death and her own feelings of guilt were making her jump at shadows.
What did she really believe? Nothing she could prove. Not without some evidence. If she went upstairs, would she find anything suspicious? Or was there something incriminating in Cypress Cottage?
She gritted her teeth as she imagined herself spying on Luke Buckley. What if one of Mom’s friends caught her doing it? People in Lafayette already thought she was a little off. Which was one of the reasons she’d known she didn’t want to stay in town once she had graduated from high school.
She’d fled her childhood reputation for being weird by going across the country to culinary school then moving to New Orleans, and she didn’t want it back.
But nobody was here to observe her now. Could she start with some kind of psychic impression of what had really happened in the hall—then back it up with evidence? She focused her attention on the stairs, trying to bring the past few hours into focus. Mom had been here. She’d fallen to her death, but had she been alone?
Gabriella put everything she had into trying to bring back the scene. Even as she focused on her mother in the hall—with someone, she silently wondered if she was sending herself on a fool’s errand. No matter how much you wanted to, you couldn’t see the past. Could you?
She’d never tried anything like that before, but she sensed that the scene was hovering almost within her grasp. Shadowy figures flickered at the edge of her vision. Her mom and a man?
She closed her eyes, straining to bring the vision into focus. Yes, she saw her mom, a look of fear on her face as she rushed up the stairs, trying to get away from the stalker. Gabriella saw him only from the back. Or was she making it all up?
Probably.
Struggling with frustration, she tried to see his image from a different angle. Maybe she could have done it, but a massive bolt of lightning struck nearby, so bright that she saw it through her closed eyelids.
It was followed by a clap of thunder that shook the house.
As the thunder rumbled, the lights flickered out, plunging Gabriella into inky, disorienting blackness.
She pressed her back against the wall, suddenly alarmed by the darkness, just like when she’d been little and Mom had insisted on turning out the lights at bedtime. At night, she’d always imagined ghosts from the past coming back to claim this house. Even the toys on her shelves took on sinister shapes, and the closet door had to be closed before she could even think about sleep.
In adulthood, she’d talked herself out of those juvenile fears. But in her fragile emotional state, the sum of her childhood terrors came rushing back to her as she stood in the darkened hallway.
“Stop being ridiculous,” she ordered herself. “The lights are just out. There’s no bogeyman lurking around the corner.”
But she couldn’t deny why she’d come here in the first place. Mom had called her in a panic, talking about a stalker, and there was a man living right on the plantation property who could be up to no good.
With her heart pounding, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. The moon was up, and a small amount of light came through the windows on either side of the door.
When she could see well enough, she crossed the hall and turned the lock on the door. Then she started for the kitchen to get the flashlight that Mom kept in the utility drawer.
Was there anything she could use for a weapon?
They’d never kept a gun in the house, but maybe she should have something with her, like a hammer.
SHE MADE IT TO THE KITCHEN as fast as she could in the dark and opened the utility drawer. The flashlight was there, but when she tried to click it on, the batteries were almost dead. Only a feeble light came from the bulb, and she clenched her fist on the shaft, then shut it off again. All it would do would tell someone where she was, not light her way.
Now what?
