Murder in the Bayou Boneyard Read online

  Murder in the Bayou Boneyard

  A CAJUN COUNTRY MYSTERY

  Ellen Byron

  Dedicated to the man who sees me more but talks to me less. I couldn’t do this without you.

  Acknowledgments

  A shout-out as always to my indefatigable agent, Doug Grad, and to the wonderful team at Crooked Lane Books, including Matt Martz, Ashley Di Dio, Chelsey Emmelhainz, Melissa Rechter, and Jenny Chen. I must give a special thank-you to my extraordinarily gifted cover artist, Stephen Gardner, for bringing my cover dreams to life. Eternal gratitude to my fellow chicks at chicksonthecase.com: Lisa Q. Mathews, Kellye Garrett, Mariella Krause, Vickie Fee, Cynthia Kuhn, Leslie Karst, Kathleen Valenti, and Becky Clark. Ladies, I am nothing without your priceless feedback.

  Nancy Cole Silverman, our weekly walks have been lifesavers. West Donas Walkers Lisa Libatique, Kelly Goode, Kathy Wood, and Nancy McIlvaney, same goes for our Power Walks! Super thanks to my Louisiana krewe: Jan Gilbert and Kevin McCaffrey, Charlotte Allen, Gaynell Bourgeois Moore, Laurie Smith Becker, Shawn Holahan, Madeline Hedgepeth Feldman, and Jonathan and Debra Jo Burnette. More thanks to Maria Cordero and Joe Coates for their input and advice regarding Louisiana real estate deals and trusts. And a shout-out to my Facebook support team, the Gator Gals, otherwise known as the Dirty (Rice) Dozen. Gals, thanks so much for sharing what you respond to in Halloween-themed mysteries.

  Bob and Mary Morrin, thank you for your generosity at the Malice Domestic Convention, and I hope you enjoy being in print.

  I’m blessed to belong to Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, specifically the chapters SinCLA and SoCalMWA. Without the Guppies, a SinC subgroup, I never would have gotten anywhere in the mystery world. A million fin flaps to all of you! Thanks to all the bloggers who let me blather, and friends who’ve supported me throughout this fabulous journey—I’m talking to you, June Stoddard, Laurie Graff, Nancy Adler, Denise and Stacy Smithers, Karen Fried, Von Rae Wood, Kim Rose, dearest cousin Marie Tenaglia Olasov, and everyone I forgot to name! And infinite thanks to my mom, my bros David and Tony, and especially my husband Jerry and daughter Eliza.

  Finally, you’ll see the executive producer of Great Weekend Getaways is named Richard Seideman. The producer is named after my late father, a fantastic writer in his own right. Dad was a classic Mad Man, the veteran of many well-known Madison Avenue ad agencies. He lived for the written word, and it’s no accident that all three of his children became writers.

  How I wish Dad had lived to see me published—and to help me with advertising and promoting my books! I think of him all the time, and while I’ll always miss him, he’ll live in my heart forever.

  The People of Bayou Boneyard

  The Family

  Magnolia Marie—“Maggie”—Crozat, our heroine

  Tug Crozat—her father

  Ninette Crozat—her mother

  Grand-mère—her grandmother on her dad’s side

  The Canadian Relatives

  Susannah Crozat MacDowell—Tug’s distant cousin

  Doug MacDowell—her husband

  Johnnie and Bonnie MacDowell—Doug’s twentysomething twins from a previous marriage

  Pelican PD Law Enforcement

  Bo Durand—detective and Maggie’s fiancé

  Rufus Durand—Pelican PD police chief

  Cal Vichet—officer

  Artie Belloise—officer

  Ville Blanc PD Law Enforcement

  Zeke Griffith—detective

  Rosalie Broussard—detective

  Friends, Frenemies, and Locals

  Lee Bertrand—service station owner and Gran’s fiancé

  Ione Savreau—friend and coworker

  Mo Heedles—multi-tier marketing skin care maven

  Vanessa Fleer MacIlhoney—frenemy turned friend … adjacent

  Quentin MacIlhoney—defense attorney, Vanessa’s fiancé

  Helene Brevelle—the town voodoo priestess

  Sandy Sechrest—Rufus Durand’s girlfriend

  Gavin Grody—tech entrepreneur CEO of Rent My Digs

  Walter Breem—elderly hermit caretaker of Dupois Plantation

  Xander Durand—Bo’s eight-year-old son

  Kaity Bertrand—teen Belle Vista employee; Lee Bertrand’s great-granddaughter

  Brianna Poche—high school student and helper at Crozat Plantation

  JJ—proprietor of Junie’s Oyster Bar and Dance Hall

  Robert “Bob” Morrin—local bank president

  Patria Heloise—local actress

  Crozat Plantation B and B Guests

  Emma Fine—stage manager

  Barrymore Tuttle—actor

  Lovie—parrot

  DruCilla—Lovie’s pet mom

  Assorted others

  Prologue

  “It’s a good thing we lay our departed to rest aboveground,” Gran whispered to Maggie. “Because if I sunk any further, I’d be standing on a coffin.”

  A cold rain dripped down on the small group of mourners huddled under their umbrellas in the derelict Louisiana graveyard. They listened politely as Father Prit led prayers for Etienne Dupois, an octogenarian who had died during a randy romp with a fellow resident at the Camellia Park Senior Village. No one at the grave site was related to Etienne, a man whose only goal seemed to have been throwing an endless party while the Dupois home crumbled and its famed gardens were reclaimed by vines, weeds, and snakes. Still, Etienne was a Dupois, and his ancestry meant something in tiny Pelican, Louisiana, which is why the feet of a small portion of the town’s citizenry—including Maggie, her parents, and her grand-mère—were sinking into the muddy ground of the Dupois family’s centuries-old resting place.

  As Father Prit continued the service in his thick Indian accent, Maggie snuck a few subtle glances at the cemetery’s ornate tombs and mausoleums. A century and a half earlier, the Dupois family had been the richest in Cajun Country, and their famed ostentation didn’t end with death. Every burial chamber in the graveyard featured ornate stone carvings or a life-size statue, some dignified, at least one not even close. The tomb next to the recently departed Etienne boasted the statue of a fan dancer, his great lost love. Not lost to death—bored with the country life, the fan dancer beat it weeks after tying the knot. Etienne, his heart broken, commissioned the tomb to memorialize the death of his one brief marriage, and segued into a life of mild debauchery.

  Maggie shivered, but not from the early-September cold snap. She found the Dupois family plot disturbing. With no family members left to maintain it, the once-grand cemetery was now falling apart, its demise hastened by vandalism on the part of local miscreant teens. Statues were missing limbs, stained-glass windows in the fanciest crypt were broken, and anything of value had been stolen. In the gardens beyond the cemetery, the most famous in the country a hundred and fifty years ago, stone bridges and paths were slowly disintegrating into piles of pebbles and dust. The stately but run-down Dupois mansion loomed over the entire property, a ghost of its former self. In its day, it had been the region’s grandest house, but no one had lived there since Etienne decamped to the senior village years earlier.

  “Place him in the region of peace and light,” Father Prit read, “And bid him be partaker with Thy Saints. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  “Amen,” the assemblage responded, and immediately began disbanding.

  “I’m not the only one who finds this place creepy, am I?” Ninette, Maggie’s mother, asked.

  “No!” everyone chorused.

  “We paid our respects,” Gran said. “Now let’s give Etienne the send-off he would have really wanted. A round, or two or three, of cocktails.” This earned an even more fervent “Amen” from Maggie.
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  A loud cracking sound caught everyone’s attention. “Is that thunder?” Maggie asked, looking at the glowering clouds crowding the late-afternoon sky.

  “No. It’s Lulu.”

  Tug, Maggie’s father, pointed at the cemetery. The fan dancer had fallen from the top of her tomb, knocking over Etienne’s statue and toppling both to the ground, where they were locked in a stone embrace.

  “Etienne got in death what he couldn’t get in life,” Gran said. “Eternity in the arms of his sweetheart.”

  “Let’s get out of here before the graveyard is swallowed up by some kind of paranormal sinkhole,” Maggie said.

  Her family, as eager to escape as she was, followed her to the Crozat bed-and-breakfast minivan. Tug hoisted himself into the driver’s seat. He turned on the gas and accelerated. Soon the cemetery was in the rearview mirror. “At least with Etienne gone,” Tug said as he drove, “we’ll never have to set foot in that cursed place again.”

  It would only take a few weeks to prove him wrong.

  Chapter 1

  “You hate Halloween?” There was disbelief laced with amusement in Bo Durand’s voice as he repeated what his fiancée Maggie had just confessed to him. “Who hates Halloween?”

  The couple was putting the finishing touches on Crozat Plantation’s brand-new spa, due to open in a few days. Once a lackluster 1920s-era garage, the building now also housed Bo and Maggie’s future home, a spacious apartment above the spa facilities. Damage from a massive flood that inundated Pelican almost doomed the project, but the Crozats refused to give up on their dream of offering guests to their ancestral home–turned–B and B a pampering option.

  Maggie focused on the fluffy white towel she was folding, embarrassed by her phobia. There wasn’t a holiday Pelican didn’t celebrate with massive gusto, but Halloween ranked at the top of the list, along with Christmas and Mardi Gras. Hating the holiday in a state that proudly billed itself as the most haunted in America was downright sacrilege. “I know it seems nuts, but I’ve always found it … I don’t know … a little sinister and malevolent. Well, at least since I was nine. Some older kids dared me to sneak into the Dubois cemetery on Halloween night. I didn’t want to look like a scaredy cat—”

  “An expression I haven’t heard since I was nine.”

  Maggie playfully swatted her handsome beau with a towel. “Anyway, I snuck in and was feeling all proud of myself when a rougarou jumped out from behind a tomb and roared at me,” she said, referencing the Cajun version of a werewolf. “I thought I was gonna be the first Pelican nine-year-old to die of a heart attack. I screamed and ran home. After that, I trick-or-treated for a couple more years, but only with my mom and dad. I was terrified a rougarou would jump out from behind a tree or a car. When I was eleven, I stopped going out on Halloween at all.”

  “You do know that the rougarou is a mythical creature? There’s no such thing, so it had to be some kid playing a trick on you.”

  “I’m not saying my fear is logical. It just left me with a bad feeling about Halloween.” Maggie added the towel she’d folded to the stack on a freshly painted shelf behind the reception area. “I never should have told you.”

  Bo put down the towel he was folding and took Maggie in his arms. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have teased you. I’m sad that you lost the fun of it. But I promise you will get it back when you come trick-or-treating with Xander and me this year.”

  Xander was Bo’s eight-year-old son from his first marriage, and Maggie adored him. She gave Bo a warm smile. “If anything could make me rediscover how much fun Halloween can be, it’s seeing it through Xander’s eyes.”

  Bo released Maggie and went to put his folded towel on another shelf. Maggie stopped him. “That’s where Mo’s skin care line will go,” she said, referring to friend who’d created her own line of products. Mo had also gotten an aesthetician’s license and would be providing facials at the Crozat spa when she wasn’t manning the reception area.

  “That’s my last towel,” Bo said.

  “Then we’re done for now.”

  Maggie stepped back to survey the reception area. The walls were painted a soothing sage green with light-yellow trim. A couch and two lounge chairs upholstered in a soft violet were adorned with throw pillows covered in a fabric featuring all three of the room’s signature Mardi Gras colors, but in muted shades. Across from the seating area, water gently cascaded over rocks in a fountain, providing the room with a soothing sound. A diffuser perfumed the air with the scent of camellia blossoms. Maggie breathed in the fragrance, loving it. “All we need is for our massage therapist to arrive, and we’re set for the first weekend of Pelican’s Spooky Past.”

  Bo squeezed Maggie’s hand. “Another epic brainstorm from my brilliant—and gorgeous—fiancée.”

  Maggie laughed. “You flatter me on both counts. I just hope my idea works.” A few months prior, she’d noticed that Crozat B and B’s bookings were down. She’d traced the decline to a new app called Rent My Digs. Additional research revealed that Gavin Grody, the app’s creator, was buying local housing and turning it into “owner” rentals. His venture was eating up a lot of affordable housing stock, as well as taking a toll on all the St. Pierre Parish hostelries. To combat this, Maggie joined forces with four other B and Bs to create a package she titled Pelican’s Spooky Past, scheduled to run every weekend in October. Much as she disliked all things Halloween, she knew a great marketing opportunity when she saw one.

  Each of the B and Bs was offering an event that capitalized on the Halloween traditions of the region—the emphasis being on the historical past, not the recent spate of murders that had bedeviled the small town. The Crozats chose the tamest themes possible for their events: food and crafts. Ninette planned on creating a meal featuring dishes that antebellum hosts might have served guests paying a condolence call during the Creole and Cajun cultures’ extended period of mourning. Maggie and Grand-mère had put together a workshop that would teach their visitors how to construct immortelles—cemetery arrangements made from dried flowers, beads, and ceramics that were meant to be an “immortal” memorial to the dead. Maggie was thrilled by the enthusiasm generated by the Spooky Past packages. Several of the weekends had already sold out.

  Bo checked the time on his cell phone. “I need to pick up Xander from school. We’re going shopping for a costume.”

  “Does he know what he wants to be?”

  “Either Aquaman, Captain America, the Hulk, a Transformer, an X-Man, a Guardian of the Galaxy … should I go on?”

  Maggie laughed and held up her hands. “No need, I get it.”

  She and Bo walked to the front of the Crozat manor house. With a march of tall, square columns encircling the home, Crozat was the River Road’s most iconic example of Greek Revival architecture. In keeping with the weekend packages’ theme, skeletons currently occupied the Adirondack chairs on Crozat’s wide veranda, and “cobwebs” hung over the Spanish moss dripping from the allée of centuries-old oak trees. Fake gravestones decorated the spacious front lawn, along with the remnants of a “witch” who had crashed into them. “Congrats on the decorations, by the way,” Bo said.

  “Ooh, wait until you hear this.”

  Maggie dashed up the plantation’s front steps and pressed the doorbell. A loud shriek rang out, followed by a bwaha-ha-ha evil laugh. “Awesome, huh?”

  “Uh-huh,” Bo said, a little hesitant. “But I’m guessing after about the fifth time, that awesome’s gonna turn into annoying.”

  Maggie grabbed a skeleton off an Adirondack chair and held it in front of her. “Just for that, the only kiss goodbye you’re gonna get is from Bertha Bones here.” She spoke in a breathy voice. “Hey, handsome, pucker up.”

  Bo shook his head, amused. “I’ll leave you girls to yourselves. Call you later.”

  He got into his SUV and headed down the long drive from the manor house to the River Road. The home’s front door opened, and Barrymore Tuttle poked his head out. Barrymore, a m
an of wide girth in his midsixties, was an insurance salesman–turned–actor in the mystery play Belle Vista Plantation Resort was offering as part of their Pelican’s Spooky Past package. Each of the participating B and Bs had agreed to house a member of the show’s cast and crew. When it came to pompous Barrymore, the Crozats had drawn the short straw.

  “I was hoping that doorbell ring meant your massage therapist had arrived,” the actor said in his carefully cultivated basso profundo theatre voice.

  “Not yet,” Maggie said, forcing a cheery tone. “She and her family will be here tomorrow.”

  “Hmm.” Barrymore frowned, then cracked his neck. “My instrument is sore from the acrobatics of rehearsal.”

  “I didn’t know you played an instrument.” Maggie, sick of hearing the affected actor refer to his body as his instrument, couldn’t resist baiting him.

  Barrymore gestured to himself with both hands. “This. My body. The vessel for my craft.”

  A groan came from behind him. “Oh, please.” Emma Fine, the production’s young stage manager, who was also being housed at Crozat, appeared next to Barrymore in the doorway. “If I had a dollar for every time you said instrument or vessel, I could afford not to work with you anymore. And you do know you have to pay for that massage, right?”

  “I assumed it was part of the services being offered to the performers,” Barrymore said, over-articulating each word as if performing a Shakespearean soliloquy.

  “It’s not,” Maggie said.

  “Then, if you need me, I’ll be running a warm bath.” With this, Barrymore took a bow and disappeared into the house.

  Maggie suppressed the urge to applaud his exit. “Thank you for that,” she said to Emma.

  She sat on the veranda swing and motioned for the stage manager to join her, which Emma did. “Twits like Barrymore give all actors a bad name,” Emma said as the two women rocked back and forth. “I want to scream every time he tells someone”—Emma launched into a perfect imitation—“‘With a name like Barrymore, how could I not be an actor?’ I love pointing out that up until a month ago, he was selling insurance at a used-car lot. And he’s a total mooch. I hate that.”