Before Miranda died, had it really mattered to any of them that Didi was only Amande’s half-aunt, or that Miranda’s sons had been her stepuncles and not her uncles? And Steve, who had only known as much about these people as his dead wife had told him—he must be dizzied by the effort of keeping everything straight. The law was now making those distinctions very important, financially.
Joe had given her a priceless description of Steve, doing a doubletake at Tebo’s casual revelation that Steve’s wife Justine had left behind an abandoned child. Then she remembered the impact of that information in terms of cold, hard cash. Amande’s very existence was going to cost Steve money when Miranda’s estate was settled. So was Didi’s.
As Faye neared the mouth of the bayou, she cut back on the throttle, hoping that quieting the engine would help her concentrate. Who had Steve known about? He’d known about Miranda, surely, and about her usufruct on the houseboat and stock. How else would he have known where to bring Justine’s will? And how else would he have known that he’d have a stake in the boat and stock when she died?
Hebert. He’d known about Hebert, because he’d said that Justine had told him Hebert was a wonderful brother. This must sting for Tebo, since his dead stepsister seemed never to have mentioned his name to her husband. Justine seemed to have been a person who didn’t just cut ties with a loved one. She amputated that loved one from her life. Thanks to Justine’s habit of severing ties, Steve had known about Miranda and Hebert, and that was all.
Faye cut the motor and let the boat float in the motionless spot where the bayou opened its mouth into Barataria Bay. She knew why Hebert was dead.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The computer asked Amande, again, whether she was still there. Amande responded in the affirmative. Her body was trapped at this desk, but there was nothing to keep her eyes from wandering to the calm blue water outside her window.
Her hand moved toward the basket on her desk. She reached in and fingered the artifacts she’d spent her childhood collecting. Smooth, sharp-edged, chipped stone. Chunks of old pottery shaped by the fingers of long-dead men and women. Why did she love these things so? Her hand went to the empty space at the back of the drawer where the old Spanish coins had rested in their box. They were gone, like her grandmother, like her dream of meeting her mother. Like everything, soon enough.
She pulled the brass sextant out of its drawer and rested it on the palm of her hand, wondering why it didn’t tell her which direction she should take. Oddly enough, it was pointing at the door when the knock came.
There were precious few people to whom Amande would have opened that door. Faye and Joe, surely. Manny, probably. Didi and Tebo, yes, but only because they were kin.
Dane Sechrist, with his well-scrubbed face and shy grin, was on that short list of people whom Amande instinctively trusted. She opened the door.
***
It wasn’t easy, holding onto her cell phone with one hand and hanging onto a child who had suddenly decided he needed to go swimming with the other. Sometimes, Faye missed regular old phones, with receivers that could be pinched between shoulder and ear, leaving both hands free.
Benoit was being obtuse.
She tried explaining her conclusions again. “What do you mean, you don’t follow me? Don’t try to disentangle all those family ties and all the inheritance laws. They’re too confusing, and they’ve kept us distracted from a motive for murder that’s not all that complicated. Greed.”
“We’ve suspected that all along. The trouble is that all these people are greedy.”
“Forget ‘all these people.’ Just concentrate on what Steve knew when he came to town. He knew that Justine’s stepmother Miranda had the lifetime use of most of his wife’s estate. He knew he’d be waiting to collect his inheritance until Miranda died but, when she did, he’d be set for life with monthly income and, if he played his cards right, a free place to live. He knew he was going to have to share that income and home with the other heirs, but it was still a sweet deal. Now tell me this. Who did he think those other heirs were?”
Benoit sat silent for a second. “He knew about Justine’s ‘wonderful brother’ Hebert. It doesn’t sound like Justine explained that he wasn’t her brother by blood. He would have thought that Hebert was another heir, and the only one, because he didn’t know about Amande, Didi, or Tebo. Are you saying that he came to town to kill Miranda, so that he’d inherit the boat and oil stock, but believing that Hebert also had a claim on it?”
Good. He’d understood her first major point. Onward.
“I am,” she said. “But he couldn’t kill just Miranda, unless he wanted the goods to be divided between him and Hebert. Hebert needed to go, as far as Steve was concerned. I think it’s significant that Hebert went first, before Miranda, to keep his heirs from showing up and wanting a cut.”
“I’m not sure that makes a difference. If Hebert had left heirs, they’d have been entitled to his claim on Miranda’s stuff, anyway.”
“I know, but that concept is a little sophisticated for Steve, don’t you think?” Faye could see that getting this lawman to stop focusing on the letter of the law was going to be tough. “That’s what I keep telling you. We’ve been thinking about this all wrong, worrying about the fussy details of inheritance. It’s isn’t important what the law says, or what the truth is. The important thing is what someone of Steve’s limited intelligence believed at the time of the murders. I believe he thought that taking out Hebert left him as the lone person holding a claim on Miranda’s stuff after she died…I mean, after he killed her.”
“So you think he killed Hebert by mistake?”
Now Faye felt like she was getting somewhere. “Yes.”
“Then why’d he go ahead and kill Miranda, after he found out that he was going to have to share the houseboat and stock with Didi and Amande? Was he going to kill them, too?”
“Maybe. But by then he’d seen Didi. Steve is dumb and dangerous, the kind of person who puts other people into just two groups: opportunities and obstacles. A pretty woman who owns a big chunk of the property he’d like to control would be a fairly irresistible opportunity for someone like Steve. Romancing her, promising her money and a place to live and security…wouldn’t that be a good way to control Didi? Even better, this pretty woman is the only likely candidate to get custody of the girl who owns the rest of her mother’s estate. Together, Steve and Didi could live on easy street, partially funded by a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“You think her judgment is that poor.”
Faye thought he must be kidding, but she indulged him by answering the question. If she hadn’t had unlimited minutes on her cell phone, she would have skipped the answer and just laughed at him.
“She cheats more openly than any married woman I’ve ever seen. She thinks that teaching a child to hold her liquor is one of the responsibilities of motherhood. According to the gossip that’s rampaging through Plaquemines Parish. Didi is so unburdened by guilt that she was willing to pretend her husband was killed when the oil rig exploded, so she could weasel herself into some undeserved widow’s compensation. Yes, I think her judgment is poor enough to allow her to take up with a man like Steve.”
“I take it that you don’t like Didi.”
Even when she was holding a wriggling child with one hand and trying not to drop her phone overboard with the other, Benoit’s understated style could make her laugh…
…until he turned around and made her stop laughing, just by making a logical point. “Steve and Didi have a problem though. Their plan only works until Amande is eighteen. Then she’ll control her own property and her own money.”
Why did Benoit have to point that out? Deep down, she knew that Amande was worth more dead than alive to Steve and that this would be even more true when she came of age, but she couldn’t think about that now. Amande w
as vulnerable to Steve in yet another way, and she needed to make Benoit understand that.
“Follow me just a little further, Detective. Consider Amande’s island. When Steve came to town, he probably knew about it, but he thought it was worthless compared to the houseboat and stock. Suddenly, it has become a very popular place. We have a treasure hunter, Dane Sechrist, sniffing around those waters, and Manny has told us that Steve was hanging out with Dane even before he showed up on Miranda’s doorstep. Right?”
“So Manny says.”
“We know from my cousin Bobby that Dane is interested enough in the island to drive to New Orleans and study old maps of it. We also know that somebody who is too sloppy to be Dane, somebody who is probably Steve, has been storing diving gear on the island. That island has become the center of the universe for some people, and I think it’s obvious why. Whether there’s treasure out there or not, people think there is, and treasure has been the motive for many a killing. Who owns that island?”
“Justine’s heirs—Steve and Amande. That’s all, I think. Not Didi, because she wasn’t related to Justine’s father.”
“Yes!” Faye said again. “Now tell me…how can Steve get control of the island?”
“It’s even easier than controlling the houseboat, because Didi has no ownership in her own right. He can control the island by controlling Amande’s guardian—Didi—or he can get himself named Amande’s guardian.”
“Or he can get her to marry him.” The very thought made Faye want to wash her brain with soap.
“Or he could kill her. That’s all very complicated, Faye.”
“Sure it is. Life is complicated.”
“Let me uncomplicate it for you.” There was pity in his voice. “Here’s what I think, and you’re not going to like it. Didi and Amande have no other known living relatives, correct? Other than Tebo and Amande’s missing father?”
“Correct.”
“In the absence of some guy with DNA that proves he’s Amande’s father, who would have the best chance of inheriting Justine’s stuff if Didi and Amande died? I’d say that Justine’s widower would have the best shot, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve told me that you think Steve is capable of committing murder twice, in such an out-front and straightforward way that it’s sheer luck we haven’t found witnesses or evidence yet who can help us nail him. He’s been lucky. What’s to keep him from believing he can get away with doing it twice more?”
Faye couldn’t think of an answer she liked, so she said, “I need to go back to the marina and get that girl. I can be there in ten minutes.”
“Was Steve around when you left?”
“No. I’d have noticed that stupid-looking boat.”
“That’s not to say he’s not there now. I’m on my way, and I won’t be alone. Call me when you get close to the marina.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Dane stayed a shy step further from the door than most people would have.
“Hey, there,” he said to Amande.
If Amande had been more experienced with romance, she would have been amused at this grown man, tentative in the presence of a sixteen-year-old girl. She would also have been able to see that he liked her and that he didn’t know what to do about it, because she was sixteen. “I have something to show you,” he said, holding out a bag.
Still feeling awkward and tongue-tied, she took too long to speak and he blundered on. “Some artifacts, I mean. I’ve got some things that I know you’ll want to see. Do you—” He looked around him and noticed two deck chairs and a low table nearby. “Do you want to sit out here and look at them?”
Amande, feeling that refusing to let him in her house would say she thought he was some kind of a criminal, said, “Oh, the sun’s kinda brutal out here. Do you want to come in?”
She let Dane in and, knowing that Detective Benoit would be proud of her, she locked the door behind him. Amande had never entertained a guest of her own, not in the role of hostess, but she didn’t want him to know that. She played it cool. “Would you like something to drink? Maybe a beer?”
“It’s a little early for me. I just had lunch. Some water would be fine.”
So much for her effort to be sophisticated. Now he thought she was as big a lush as the rest of her family. Amande wanted to drop through the boat’s deck and never look at Dane again. She hurriedly stuck two glasses under the tap and filled them with water, then she dumped the rest of the barbecue chips into a bowl. How sophisticated.
Dane didn’t even look up when she put his glass of water in front of him. He had reached into the bag and pulled out three broken pieces of pottery and a smaller bag.
“Look,” he said, holding out the pottery and finally meeting her eyes. “I found these yesterday, and I’ve been all over the Internet, trying to date them. I think they’re pieces of an olive jar, very old. This is probably a piece of the rim. And here…see? This piece is curved like the neck of a jar.”
She picked up the curved piece and ran a finger over it. “They look like they came from the same jar. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could put all the pieces together? How old do you think it is?”
“Maybe from the sixteen hundreds.”
“Where’d you get these?”
“From the bottom of Barataria Bay, right where the pirates used to sail.”
Amande held another potsherd up to the light and sighed. She was too distracted to notice the intent gaze that said Dane had never met a woman who cared about such things, except for the much older and very married Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth.
“Do you think there’s a shipwreck down there?” she asked.
“Yes. Of course there is. There’s lots of shipwrecks down there that nobody will ever find. But have I found one of them? Yeah, I’d like to think so.”
He opened the small bag and pulled out two boxes. “I didn’t find all of these, but I thought you’d like to see them. Especially since yours got stolen.” He handed her the first box.
Nestled on cushioning material at the bottom of one shallow box were two silver coins and a gold one. He gestured toward them and said, “I found those. But I bought the others.”
The second box held two silver coins. Even if she hadn’t recognized the box, Amande would have known them. She’d looked at them under magnification countless times. She’d held them in her hand until her fingertips knew their shape and texture. She knew them by their weight, to the very last gram.
She grabbed her coins, one in each hand, and rose to her feet. “Of course, you didn’t find these. I found them.” She started backing toward the door, reaching behind her to unlock it. “If you took my coins, you probably killed my grandmother. Why did you bring them back here? Did you think I was so young and stupid that I couldn’t figure it out?”
“Wait!”
Oh, God, now he was coming after her.
“No, I didn’t take your coins, and nobody could ever think you were stupid.”
How far was it to the door?
She took a step backwards, then another. “Those coins were in my drawer when I left that morning with Faye and her family. When I got home, my grandmother was dead and my coins were gone. If you have the coins, then probability says that you killed her. It’s simple statistics.”
“I bought the coins, honestly. Steve told me they came from his island, the one he wants to sell me as soon as—”
“As soon as he figures out a way to steal my part from me. You bought these coins from Steve? Are you nuts? You’re ignoring the obvious.”
It was Dane’s turn to look awkward and clueless.
“He stole my coins, you idiot. He killed my grandmother and stole my coins. I bet you even told him I had them, didn’t you? Steve probably stole them because he knew you were looking for s
tuff from the sixteen hundreds and would buy them from him. And because he knew that telling you he found them on the island would make you want to buy it even more. Geez. How stupid can you be?”
Amande reached the door and fumbled behind her, only to feel the doorknob vibrate as someone on the other side turned a key in the lock. The door opened and she fell into Steve’s arms.
Dane’s eyes locked on Steve and, for a moment, Amande could see that he had forgotten her. “You stole her coins? When? Did you sneak over here while I was talking to Miranda about buying Amande’s share of the island?” Dane said. “That was idiotic. I asked her if she knew where the coins came from, for God’s sake. And you knew I was planning to ask her that. Surely, you knew she would suspect me…or maybe you knew she’d never get a chance to suspect me, since you were already planning to kill her when you came over here.”
“You didn’t need to be dealing with the old lady. I told you I could get control of the whole island, if you gave me time.”
“I’ve got no time to waste, not with the oil coming.”
Amande knew that she should probably let them forget she was there while she came up with an escape plan, but she had listened long enough to the two of them discussing ways to cheat her.
“You were trying to get Grandmère to sell you my island? And then you stole my coins? When is somebody in this goddamn world going to recognize that something…anything…belongs to me?”
Amande dropped into a squat and leaned hard to the left, hoping to use her body weight to throw Steve off-balance. It was worth a try, because she was sturdily built and no shorter than he was, but he still had a hundred pounds on her. He yanked the girl to her feet, and she could feel new bruises on her rib cage. She wasn’t surprised when Steve pulled a knife from a hidden scabbard in his pants. She had felt the shape of it digging into her back when he first grabbed her.
The point of the knife was poking into her throat, just below the jaw. Dane’s freckled face bore a sheen of perspiration. “What good is this going to do you, Steve? All you need to do is get control of the island for me, so I can solidify my claim on the wreck. When I find it, I’ll buy the island from you at twice what it’s worth. Tell you what. If you let the girl go, I’ll raise my offer to three times the island’s appraised value.”
Plunder Page 24
