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  “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”

  Her guests looked out over the quagmire of her yard and nodded.

  “You know, I had a call just this morning from that nice black lady, Odette St. Julien. She told me how sorry she was about Jeff and how she remembered her own grief when her husband passed away. She went back to substitute teaching to get in the stream of things again. She wondered if I might be able to spare some time to nurse at the free clinic when I feel up to it.”

  Helene brushed the crumbs of her first cookie from her lips and started in on another.

  “I told her I would be in next week. And my daughter called to ask me if I would keep the house and equipment because she thought she might like to come back here to practice when she finishes her medical studies. Before, all she could say was how much she wanted to get away from Port Jefferson and her father’s reputation.”

  Suddenly, Helene laughed deeply, tripling her chin. “You know, I always thought she meant his medical reputation up until now. Everyone loved Jeff. Oh, it will be good to have Ellen home and peace in the house. Now Bobby will feel free to live his own life with his friend, Randy. They want a place in New Orleans. Jeff never would advance them the money for it, but I’ll soon have plenty to give away.”

  Sheriff Duval had been studying the black coffee in his cup. He looked up and directly at Suzanne while the widow rambled on cheerfully about her plans for the future. Could a professional nurse inject a sleeping man with poison without waking him, she had to wonder? She mouthed the word “murder” at the lawman. He shook his head slightly in a motion telling her to keep quiet and held the coffee cup to his lips.

  The two laborers denied an early break queued up to the porch for coffee while the rest of the crew went back to work. The dragline operator leaned against a post and remarked, “Man, dat stuff ain’t never gonna quit comin’ out dat hole.”

  She glanced at the tarp. Her neat row of artifacts had jumbled into a heap of heavily tarnished silver objects, far more than there should have been.

  “Excuse me,” she said, distracted from her suspicions about Mrs. Sonnier. As she left the porch, Sheriff Duval came right behind her. He spoke to in a low voice as they crossed the lawn together.

  “I know what you’re thinking, missy. Well, let me tell you what you don’t know. This ain’t the first time Jeff Sonnier tried to take his life. Right after Virginia Lee passed on, he swallowed some pills. Left those same kind of letters on the nightstand. Helene saved him. She worked real fast, made him throw up all that junk. Guess she figured things would be better between them with Ginny out of the way. Don’t figure it was.”

  A merry laugh emitted by the widow reached across the yard. Helene pushed another cookie on George and took one herself.

  “Still, not saving a man’s life ain’t the same as killing him neither. This time he used a needle. Much quicker, they tell me, and no pain. That’s the way they’re putting killers to death now ’stead of frying ’em. And the letters had to be new. They mention the stuff in the cistern, had the same thing in his will.”

  Suzanne only half listened as she knelt in the mud, but that last comment caught her attention. She rummaged in the pile, handling pieces more carelessly than she should have, allowing the metal to shift and collide as she searched for the copy to match with the original on top of the heap. There it lay neatly placed in her original row, the candlestick with the cement core. The core had fallen out, and its side been dented by the backhoe. However, its surface luster remained only slightly dimmed and spotted compared to its twin, the tarnished, blackened original with the heft of the real thing. She arranged items, two by two, copy with original: two teapots, two sugar scoops, two punchbowls.

  “Sheriff Duval, some of this silver was in the cistern the first time Jefferson Sonnier tried to commit suicide, the silver he bought from Magnolia Hill through Randy Royal so Virginia Lee wouldn’t know he’d purchased it.”

  “Still don’t prove nothing, Nancy Drew.” The sheriff spat into a puddle. “But now you got me wondering forever.”

  Suzanne came to a piece she could not match, so blackened she could barely make out the design elements. American Empire, yes, it looked like American Empire. A set of small candlesticks in the same state of preservation had an eighteenth century style about them.

  “George!” she called.

  He crossed to her in a few of his long strides. She watched Helene Sonnier who sat pouring more coffee for herself, enjoying the ruination of her husband’s ancestral property as she hummed a little tune. George remarked in a whisper that Jeff’s death seemed to have unhinged the woman.

  “I think she became unhinged long before this.”

  Sheriff Duval gave Suzanne a warning glance.

  “George, did your mother have any older pieces, pre-Victorian?” she asked.

  “None that I know of. Why?”

  The dragline came down on something in the hole with a thunk. Its bucket scraped across the surface of the obstacle like a fingernail over a chalkboard. Suzanne winced again. The operator pulled back the bucket and dug into the pit once more. This try, he clawed out a metal box. While the hose man cleaned off the latest find, he scooped out three more mounds of mud yielding nothing.

  “Dat’s all dey is folks. You want us to fill in dat hole wit’ da bricks or jus’ cover it over?”

  “Fill it in and bring me a chisel and a hammer if you got one,” Duval ordered.

  A single strong blow took the rust-rotted lock off the strong box. It contained coins, mostly silver dating before 1860, and here and there, a bright bit of gold shining like new.

  “George, this doesn’t belong to Magnolia Hill. Or this, or this.” Suzanne held up the oldest pieces exhumed from the well. “What we have here is someone’s Civil War cache.”

  Sheriff Duval was happy to correct her. “No, Miss Suzanne, what you have there, according to the will, belongs to George.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Suzanne’s story

  George and Suzanne sat enjoying the balmy evening in late May on the verandah. The bayou whispered by at the foot of the hill, and the magnolias looked more dark and mysterious than ever on this nearly moonless night. Tree frogs and cicadas sang for them, though George assured her the torment of mosquitoes would soon make the lower gallery uninhabitable for the summer. Screens would ruin the lines of the house and be historically inaccurate, she commented absently. George just nodded in the light of the citronella candle.

  Suzanne took a sip of cool wine, burrowed into the cushions of the wicker settee, and rested comfortably against his shoulder. Her paper was complete, her degree in the mail. The local print shop would start a run of the condensed and less scholarly version of the history of Magnolia Hill and its contents to be used as a tourists’ guide very shortly. The original St. Julien silver, burnished by Birdie and lovingly restored by Randy Royal, sat safely locked in the sideboard again. All of the original pieces had lain in the cistern just under the replicas and above the forgotten cache of Civil War era coinage and plate never reclaimed by whoever had hidden it from the invading Yankees and failed to retrieve it.

  The treasure belonged to George by right of Jefferson Sonnier’s will. He owned the contents of the cistern. Doc’s family hadn’t objected. They wanted the whole tragedy to go away and cease being the major topic of gossip in Port Jefferson. The sale of the old coins had gone a long way toward reducing the debt on Magnolia Hill, and the best of the silver added to the glory and interest of its collection. Suzanne made a mental note to increase the insurance coverage and have a security system installed.

  Poor man, poor man, she thought, not entirely free of guilt over Doc Sonny’s death, though his letters to George, Bobby Sonnier, his wife and daughter attempted to absolve nearly everyone of blame. Using Randy Royal, the doctor had purchased each piece of silver as Virginia Lee put it on the market. Once, he had bought the little gilt mantel clock from her at an inflated price and returned it to h
er for a dollar. George’s mother refused further help because it would have turned their magnificent love affair into an act of prostitution, quote Virginia Lee, southern gentlewoman. She devised her own plan, and he supported her in it, even to buying her silver through a go-between and later stealing the replicas for her sake. The tyranny of love, Jefferson Sonnier called it, and he could not live without his lovely tyrant. What a pair they were, Jefferson Sonnier and Virginia Lee St. Julien.

  Suzanne told George her idea about Helene Sonnier as a possible murderess. He showed her his letter from the doctor. She thought it looked a little yellow and too creased to have been written recently. George said it seemed normal to him and besides, it mentioned that the contents of the cistern belonged to him. Ah, but the letter did not say anything about the theft of the fakes, she countered.

  “I knew about the theft. He didn’t have to tell me,” George retorted, still defending the man.

  The will had been altered to include the clause about the cistern on the day of Doc’s death. Jeff had gone into Opelousas to see his lawyer, taking Bobby along as a witness. Father and son spent some time together. Bobby claimed his father had been especially loving and kind that day, even including Randy Royal in their luncheon. That stopped Suzanne from saying any more, but she could still envision Helene Sonnier’s small, flesh-buried eyes watching the man die.

  “You know Mrs. Sonnier who supposedly wouldn’t condone divorce because of her religious convictions thinks her husband is burning in Hell right now because of his suicide,” Suzanne said, giving in to George.

  “My mother adored this house and would never have given it up to marry Jefferson and become the wife of a small town doctor, even if Helene had agreed to let him go. No, an affair with a man more elegant than my father suited her perfectly. She had the home she venerated, romance with Doc Sonny until the day she died, revenge against my womanizing father, and me to mop up after her. Wherever she and Doc are now, I am certain they are together.”

  George took a deep breath. Suzanne sighed and held him closer. She could just make out the shapes of the two white hens the one-eyed rooster had seduced and brought back to nest under the magnolias. The cock urged his ladies and a brood of motley chicks under the branches to roost for the night. The small flock was supposed to be shut up in the old stable with Puffy every evening, but somehow, the rooster always found a way to escape and take his family with him. Woe to the raccoon or weasel who tried to steal his chicks because Old One-Eye would be on them in a flash, spurring and pecking their startled faces.

  As for Puffy, George had given him to Suzanne as a birthday gift, purchased for twice his worth in a grand romantic gesture, and to hell with worrying about money for a change. Alcide Porrier figured with all his rentals lately, and now the sale of the horse, he had enough money to put a down payment on a used pickup truck to haul his vegetables. The practical and disloyal steed had trotted back to his nice, dry barn as soon as the flood water rose over his fetlocks, leaving her and George plenty of time to get to know one another. The white horse would make up for deserting them by pulling their wedding carriage.

  “What do you think Cherie and Paul are doing right now?” Suzanne asked, trying to divert the man she loved from all of the sadness in his life.

  “Probably they’re beating each other with whips in a motel in Doylestown.”

  She laughed. A lawyer from the firm of Ronald Angers had arrived to post bail for Paul Alvin Smith, Jr. Bail was denied pending a hearing and the receipt of DNA testing results, which the New Orleans attorney shouted was illegally taken evidence. Duval had cocked a cold parish sheriff’s eye at him and said the evidence had been obtained from the sheets at the Wonderland Motel, and no attorney in his right mind would want to let a possible serial killer go running around loose, now would he? In the back of the courtroom, George whispered, “Take that, city boy,” to her.

  Cherie stayed at Magnolia Hill during the ordeal following her kidnapping. Suzanne no longer minded. Mrs. Angers had lost all interest in George. Cherie simply wanted her great big animal set free. They heard her say so every day during her daily phone call to the jail.

  In a pathetic confession, Paul revealed his “joke.” He’d had no intention of hurting Suzanne, he claimed. Paul swore he was about to tell his ex-girlfriend that she did not deserve him when George knocked down the door of the motel cottage where he had once taken Cherry Fontaine during their dating years. The only place to hide out on the old Baton Rouge Road was the Wonderland Motel, as the Patout boys should have known. Cherie swore Paul treated her like a perfect gentleman, and she had gone along with the farce to tease Suzanne.

  In private, the divorcee pleaded with Suzanne to drop any charges against the man of her dreams. She also asked if Paul made good money. Suzanne said he did, but he’d prudently stashed it in an IRA and other long-term investments. Paul enjoyed talking about his portfolio. She suggested Cherie ask him about his stocks during one of her jail visits. He had a lovely two-carat diamond engagement ring available, too, she added. Cherie’s face lit with joy.

  Cherie’s lawyer added his pressure to the plea. Mr. Angers, it seemed, wished to keep this post-marital scandal to a minimum. The one about Cherie doing an entire professional basketball team provided sufficient embarrassment. Her former husband most generously provided plane fare for the ex-Mrs. Angers when Paul was extradited to Pennsylvania to answer questions about the serial killings as a “person of interest.” The DNA test and another gruesome murder committed while they held Paul vindicated him in the end.

  Paul was no killer. Suzanne should have known. However, he did give valuable information during questioning. Another computer analyst, John Sydney Turner, had given Paul some very poor advice on dealing with wayward women. John Turner, as it happened, specialized in kinky pornographic programs as a sideline. He’d performed the murders, storing the details on jump drives as common and unobtrusive as a recipe file. That evidence set up John Sydney Turner for thirteen life terms in prison and a probable death sentence. The police freed Paul and thanked him for his testimony in a nice little deal. Now, he lived with Cherie in an antique-filled townhouse in Bryn Mawr. Suzanne heard through friends that the place had an interesting attic, full of strange equipment, but she did not inquire further.

  “And what about Randy Royal and Bobby Sonnier?” she asked George.

  “Content in their bougainvillaea-draped courtyard in the French Quarter, I guess.”

  They were. Dr. Sonnier blamed his failings as a father for his son’s sexual preferences and left enough inheritance to Bobby for him and Randy to fulfill their dream of an antiques shop in New Orleans without Helene’s help. Royal’s of Royal Street, they called it. The sale of the Roadhouse brought them a nice profit, too, because of its meticulous restoration, not its recipes. The food improved immensely under the new management, and the historic tavern drew the tourist trade to Port Jefferson. Bobby and Randy often took the boy and his mother there for dinner when they came as a couple to visit Randy’s son.

  Helene Sonnier ate frequently at the Roadhouse. With her hair now a champagne blonde, she also went dancing at Joe’s Lounge with one of Billy Patout’s uncles, and the pounds came off. Evelyn Patout called her the Merry Widow, but the Lounge regulars said she was giving her dead husband the finger. Considering what happened the last time they’d gone there, Suzanne and George stayed away from the place.

  George unbent enough to invite Bobby and Randy to their wedding. Helene would come as well, though she still gave Suzanne the chills. The whole town was invited in fact. Though Suzanne hated making their wedding a media event, the Hill needed the publicity if it was ever to be completely out of debt. She worked on the research to reproduce an antebellum ceremony. The historical society ladies along with George’s great-aunts agreed to pitch in on making the dresses that would later to be used by the house guides. Birdie and Odette St. Julien organized the Ladies Guild of the Pilgrim Baptist Church to make the food, and her p
arents were enthusiastically footing the bill for the material and groceries. Her mother wanted the whole affair recorded to show her friends back home, and her dad was delighted that a big wedding in Port Jefferson cost a whole lot less than one held on the Main Line near Philly.

  She had major problems with George and Linc. George absolutely refused to wear a Confederate uniform. She gave in on that one because of his size it would have to be custom-made. The very idea irritated Linc, who pointed out that a black best man was not exactly historically accurate either. She suggested they bend history a little. Both men could wear frock coats. Linc and George exchanged looks over that idea and burst out laughing. They said they would provide their own costumes.

  Suzanne tried to divine what George plotted behind those glasses with their heavy dark frames, behind those bland gray eyes. As usual, she ended up kissing her perfect man and found out nothing about his plans. She wondered if the Devil’s Horseman would be showing up at her wedding. Whatever happened, George would supply the romance.

  A word about the author...

  Once a librarian, now a writer of romance, Lynn Shurr grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country. She attended a state college and earned a B.A. in English Literature. Her first job out of school really was working as a cashier in a burger joint. Moving from one humble job to another, she traveled to North Carolina, then Germany, then California, where she buckled down and studied for an M.A. in Librarianship.

  New degree in hand, she found her first reference job in the Heart of Cajun Country, Lafayette, Louisiana. For her, the old saying, “Once you’ve tasted bayou water, you will always stay here” came true. She raised three children not far from the Bayou Teche and lives there still with her astronomer husband.

  When not writing, Lynn likes to paint, cheer for the New Orleans Saints and LSU Tigers, and take long road trips nearly anywhere. Her love of the bayou country, its history and customs, often shows in the background for her books.