Marisa Carroll - Hotel Marchand 09

by Her Summer Lover

  Charlotte,

  I know I’ll probably never be able to make it up to you and your family—my family—for what I did to you and the Hotel Marchand back in New Orleans, but somehow I’m going to try. That’s why it’s important to me to keep in touch with you.

  I think our grandmother Celeste meant to punish me by sending me out here to Cajun country, but even she’s got to be happy with the way things are going. Her old Creole cottage, La Petite Maison, is now a beautiful B and B with paying guests. I never thought of myself as a small-town innkeeper, but I have to admit, the village of Indigo is growing on me. You’d love the little opera house the locals are hoping to restore, and you can’t beat the turtle soup and gumbo. There are some real characters in the town, but I have to admit, their friendliness is still something I’m not used to. The only one who looks at me with suspicion is Alain Boudreaux, the chief of police, but since he knows my past, I can hardly blame him. Let me know how you and your sisters are doing, and give my love to Aunt Anne. One day I’ll make you proud to have me in the family.

  Luc

  Dear Reader,

  Marian and I live nearly a thousand miles north of Indigo, Louisiana, but the town itself is very familiar to us. It is filled with hardworking men and women to whom family and country mean a great deal. Neighbors look out for each other and rejoice in the good times and comfort each other during the bad ones.

  But even the residents of an idyllic small town like Indigo have to face the realities of life in the twenty-first century—including the high cost of health care and prescription drugs.

  That’s why chief of police Alain Boudreaux’s mother and grandmother decide, with the help of a few friends, to begin smuggling their medications across the border from Canada. It saves everyone a bundle of money and isn’t really too illegal. The plan works fine until Sophie Clarkson, Alain’s first love, arrives back in town to settle her godmother’s estate and stumbles onto the scheme.

  Then all heck breaks loose.

  Won’t you please join us in Indigo and…laissez les bons temps rouler!

  Carol and Marian

  MARISA CARROLL

  Her Summer Lover

  Marisa Carroll is the pen name of authors Carol Wagner and Marian Franz. The team has been writing bestselling books for nearly twenty-five years. During that time they have published over forty titles, most for the Harlequin Superromance line, and are the recipients of several industry awards, including a Lifetime Achievement award from Romantic Times BOOKclub and a RITA® Award nomination from Romance Writers of America. The sisters live near each other in rural northwestern Ohio surrounded by children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and old and dear friends.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  PROLOGUE

  Indigo, Louisiana, January, 1900

  AMELIE VALOIS stood in the cold, misting rain of the late-January afternoon and looked at the beautiful little opera house her Alexandre had built for her so many years before. She lifted the heavy silk veil that had shielded her from the curious eyes peering from behind lace curtains across the square. What did it matter if strangers saw her tears? She cried for him, for herself, for the loneliness of the years she’d spent without him.

  Alexandre Valois, her husband, her lover. Dead of a nameless fever in a Yankee prison camp, nearly forty years in his grave. He would be an old man now, as she was an old woman, no longer the dashing young Creole gentleman who had swept her off her feet and married her, against the wishes of his wealthy family, and her own, oh, so long ago.

  She lifted her long wool skirts and accepted the hand of the rail-thin black man who stood waiting patiently at the carriage door. “Merci, Titus,” she said.

  “You’re welcome, Miss Amelie.” As a boy Titus Jefferson had been a slave on her in-laws’ indigo plantation. Now he owned a livery stable on property that he had once labored on. Not all the changes time wrought were bad ones, she reminded herself.

  She tilted her head to look at the building, designed for her husband by the famous New Orleans architect, James Gallier, Jr. The whimsical copper weathervane still graced the pinnacle of the cupola on the roof; the brickwork was in good repair; the cypress pillars that supported the wrought-iron balcony freshly whitewashed. The glass panes of the huge carriage lamp that hung above the carved double doors were polished, gleaming fitfully in the gray afternoon light. “It looks good, Titus.”

  “Yes, ma’am. The Lesatzes, they take good care of it. Bring in some money for the town, too. Had two revival meetings here last year with a preacher man out of Baton Rouge. So many people came that every spare room for three miles ’round was rented out. And they’re talking about a Vaudeville troop coming all the way down from Chicago come spring.”

  “Vaudeville?” She looked up into his dark, leathery face with a wry smile. “Oh, dear. Well, at least there will be music.”

  “Just like the old days when you used to sing here, Miss Amelie. I remember all us field hands listening outside when the windows was open. You sure did have a nice voice, Miss Amelie. Like an angel singin’. I sure would like to hear you sing again.”

  “I’m afraid my singing days are past, Titus. But thank you for remembering.”

  “Do you want to go inside now?”

  She laid her arm on his and stepped heavily from the carriage. Even the short walk to the three shallow steps that spanned the width of the pillared entry exhausted her. The opera house was a small building, not much larger than St. Timothy of the Bayou Catholic Church, across the grassy town square, where generations of her family had been baptized and married and, in the fullness of time, buried in the cemetery behind the church.

  Alexandre was there, waiting for her.

  Titus opened the heavy carved door and she stepped into the lobby. It needed paint, she could see that even in the watery light. And the scars from Yankee boots on the wide plank floors had never been repaired. The Lesatzes were good managers, but she couldn’t provide them with the resources Alexandre and his family had enjoyed before the War of Northern Aggression, as she still thought of the conflict that had torn apart the country of her birth.

  Once more Titus preceded her as she entered the auditorium with its faded velvet seats, removed and hidden during the war, on either side of a central aisle leading to the stage. She was glad she had been able to hang on to the opera house through the lean years. She looked up at the two small gilded boxes on either side of the stage, reached by narrow balconies connected to matching staircases situated to the right and left of the doors.

  “My maman will not sit with hoi polloi,” Alexandre had laughed when Amelie, her practical Acadian soul shocked at the expense, had protested the extravagance of their construction. And he had been right. The few times Josephine Valois had deigned to attend one of her daughter-in-law’s performances, for friends and family, never the public, she had indeed sat in the small gilt chairs that graced the boxes, in regal and solitary splendor.

  It hadn’t mattered to Amelie, then. Not Josephine’s coldness, not her own family’s disappointment that she had married away from their close-knit Acadian commun
ity. Nothing else had mattered when she had Alexandre. Even the ache of no babies of her own was kept at bay when he was at her side.

  But then war had come. The invading Yankees had turned the opera house into a hospital, commandeering the plantation house for their headquarters, displacing the womenfolk to La Petite Maison, a cypress cottage on the Bayou Teche. Amelie had not minded returning to the simpler life she’d known as a girl, but the shock and humiliation had nearly killed Josephine Valois.

  The war was almost over when word came that Alexandre was dead, and with that devastating news, for Amelie, everything changed. Her in-laws resented her, blamed her for Alexandre’s death because she had given him no sons, no reason to stay out of the conflict. Her own parents were broken by the loss of their farm in the aftermath of the war. Her brothers had died in the fighting; her sister, also left widowed, had three young children to raise alone. When, at the urging of distant cousins, they all decided to move to Acadie—Nova Scotia, as it was called in the newly formed country of Canada—Amelie went, too.

  Later, after they had lost the plantation, Josephine and Henri Valois and their surviving son and daughter had followed. The years passed, her family prospered once more. Amelie took comfort in her nieces and nephews and returned to Indigo from time to time when she could bear to be parted from her love no longer. Lately the longing had been even stronger, urging her to undertake a winter journey her relatives and her doctor all cautioned against.

  Her breathing was still labored and shallow. She didn’t attempt to mount the stage. Instead she handed the pale-cream camellia that she had kept sheltered near her heart to Titus. “Will you put this on the stage for me, old friend?”

  “Of course, Miss Amelie. My, this is a pretty one. Just like the ones Mr. Alexandre always gave you to wear in your hair before you sang.”

  “Yes, Titus.” She watched him walk forward to place her token to a lost love on the stage. In her mind she could hear all the wonderful music that had been performed in this building in those happier times: Beethoven and Bach and Mozart, traditional Acadian ballads, classic French opera, the village children singing Christmas carols, even, daringly, Negro spirituals. She and Alexandre had loved them all.

  As she still loved him. “Let’s go, Titus,” she said, warmed and strengthened by her memories. “I want to visit my husband’s grave before darkness falls.”

  “Yes, Miss Amelie, we’ll do just that. I expect Mr. Alexandre, he’ll be right glad to see you again.” Once more he offered his arm, leading her out of her opera house for the last time.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Indigo, Louisiana, present day

  “HURRY, CECILY,” Yvonne Valois cautioned her daughter in the Cajun French that was her first language. “We don’t have all day for this.” From her seat at the late Maude Picard’s kitchen table, she could see the comings and goings of the three other women who moved around the century-old shotgun-style house.

  “Mother, lower your voice—you’re in a house of death,” Cecily Boudreaux admonished without much hope of being attended to. She pulled out yet another drawer stuffed full of gadgets and gizmos and odd bits and pieces of mismatched silver. Her mother had spent seventy-five years ordering people around in that tone of voice. She wasn’t going to stop today just because her grandson, Indigo’s Chief of Police, had found her old friend slumped over dead in her living room.

  “Why not speak as I wish? Maude’s beyond caring and Marie’s as lazy as she can hold together. She’ll be all day if I don’t get her attention.”

  “Shh, she’ll hear you and it will take the rest of the afternoon to coax her out of her pout.”

  Yvonne firmed her lips but said no more as Marie Lesatz chose that moment to enter the room. She was a small-boned woman with short dark hair and dark eyes, several years past her fiftieth birthday.

  “Will this do?” The tall, black woman following Marie moved forward unhurriedly. At sixty-five Estelle Jefferson was a decade older than Cecily and Marie. She and her husband Willis owned the Blue Moon Diner, and served the best mix of Cajun and Creole favorites for miles around. She held up a navy-blue flowered dress. “I always liked Maude in this dress.”

  “It’s the only halfway decent thing in her closet.” Marie’s tone was acid as she dropped onto the ladder-back chair beside Yvonne.

  Yvonne switched to English now that she and Cecily were no longer alone. Marie’s Cajun was limited and Estelle spoke no French at all. “I always thought she looked better in her gray silk.”

  “If you’re not satisfied with the dress I picked out, you go look for the gray silk. I’m not rooting through a dead woman’s closet anymore. Especially that one.” Marie gestured over her shoulder toward Maude’s bedroom. “It’s stuffed full of clothes. Maude never threw anything away, you know that.”

  You certainly ought to know about stuffed closets, Cecily thought with a spurt of annoyance. Marie owned more clothes than any other woman in Indigo, and kept buying them every chance she got whether she could afford them or not.

  Marie caught her eye, obviously reading her thoughts, and pushed up her chin in defiance. Marie had been Cecily’s childhood friend, but Marie was also her son’s ex-mother-in-law, and that’s where the problem lay. Indigo was too small a town for Cecily and Marie to be at each other’s throats. Cecily swallowed her pique. “The navy will do just fine,” she said.

  “I even went through her underwear drawer, God forgive me.” Marie made the sign of the cross. “Nothing there is fit for a vendre de maison. And no, I didn’t come across any keys,” she added before Cecily could ask.

  “There’s far too much stuff here for a garage sale,” Yvonne decreed. Sophie Clarkson will have to call in an auctioneer. Anyway, we’re not responsible for selling off Maude’s possessions. That’s for Sophie to decide. She’s the heir. But Maude did let things go these last few years. What a mess.” All four women looked around as though they could see through walls into the other small, overcrowded rooms, stuffed with antiques, knickknacks and fatras, just plain junk.

  Maude Picard, owner of Past Perfect antique shop, had been their friend and the de facto leader of their group. Smuggling ring, Cecily corrected herself with a wince. Her mother and the others weren’t just the Lagniappe Ladies, who met a couple of times a month to play cards or go out to dinner—a kind of homegrown version of the Red Hat Ladies whose name meant “a little something extra.” The Lagniappe Ladies were criminals, plain and simple. And their latest shipment of illegal prescription drugs from Canada was locked up somewhere in Maude’s shop.

  “I’ve never seen so much junk in my life,” Estelle agreed as she laid the blue dress over the back of a chair. “I’m going back for shoes and her under things. It’s not right she should meet the Almighty not wearing her underwear. And then I need to get on home. Willis wasn’t feeling too well when I left. He took a pain pill but I want him off his feet and he won’t do that if I’m not there to hound him.” Willis Jefferson had been diagnosed with lung cancer two years earlier. He was taking an experimental anti-cancer drug that was prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain—and his next dose was sitting beyond reach in the opera house along with all the rest of their shipment.

  “You go ahead and leave any time you want,” Yvonne said. “What about her jewelry, Marie? What did you pick?”

  “I found these on top of her dresser.” She dropped a pearl necklace and matching earrings into Yvonne’s outstretched hand. “I’m not going through her jewelry box and then have that snooty goddaughter of hers show up from Houston and accuse us all of swiping something.” She folded her arms across her chest. Marie had gone from frowning to pouting, just as Cecily had predicted. “And I think she’d be happier in her housecoat and slippers,” she muttered under her breath.

  Yvonne gave Marie a hard look. “We’re not laying her to rest in her robe and slippers like swamp trash. The pearls will do fine.”

  Before the conversation could deteriorate further, Cecily sp
ied a wooden cheese box on top of Maude’s old round-shouldered Frigidaire and lifted it gingerly down. Two sets of keys glinted back at her. She held her breath. Were they the ones they’d been searching for? “Mama, look.” She held them up. “Do you suppose?”

  “They don’t look like deadbolt keys to me,” Marie said before Yvonne could respond, squinting to bring the keys into focus. “They look more like lockbox keys, or some such.”

  “I’m afraid she’s right. You’d better leave them where they are. Maude may have left instructions about them for Sophie, although I doubt it, as forgetful as she’s been the last few months.” Yvonne rose heavily from the chair. She looked every day of her age this morning. Maude Picard had been her friend for many years. Although her health had been failing slowly, her sudden death had come as a shock to all of them, but especially to Yvonne.

  “Alain found her slumped in the chair by the door,” Cecily mused. “She was obviously leaving to open the shop when she felt the stroke coming on.”

  “Then her keys to both the house and the store were most likely in her purse and are still there,” Yvonne suggested.

  “Alain took her purse,” Marie said. She was on the Indigo emergency squad and had responded to the 911 call. It was Marie who had informed the other Lagniappe Ladies of the sad event. “He’ll keep everything at the jail until Sophie arrives, I bet. We’ll have to think of some other way to get into Past Perfect.”