Mischief in Mudbug

by Jana DeLeon

  Beau looked back up at her. “In miles—who knows? Three continents, eleven countries, God knows how many cities, and a couple of islands that aren’t even on the maps.”

  “Wow. You weren’t kidding. I’ve never even been out of Louisiana.”

  Beau stared. “Wow. You’re kidding.”

  Sabine held up two fingers. “Scout’s honor. Unless you count the Gulf of Mexico for an offshore fishing trip.”

  Beau laughed. “Not exactly a world tour.”

  “No big deal, I guess. And the way things have been lately, there’s plenty of excitement in Mudbug.”

  Beau’s expression sobered. “A personal tour of the Australian outback is exciting. What’s been going on in Mudbug lately is criminal, and that’s just dangerous.” He looked up and down the front of the shop building, then twisted the front door handle. “You sure you don’t want me to take a look around? Everything looks okay, but…”

  Sabine shook her head. “I’ll be fine, but I appreciate the offer and the walk. Besides, you have a bit of a drive back to New Orleans.”

  Beau stared at her for a moment, as if he was contemplating saying something, or God forbid, doing something, but finally he nodded. “All right then. Goodnight, Sabine.” He headed back down the sidewalk to his truck and Sabine let herself into the shop and made sure the new lock was turned all the way. She peeked out between the blinds and saw Beau sitting in his truck, looking at her shop. He waited a couple of seconds more before starting his truck and pulling away.

  Sabine sighed. The triple threat—sexy, intelligent, and kind. Beau Villeneuve was the kind of distraction she just didn’t need, but damned if she didn’t want him anyway.

  It was almost lunchtime, and Beau paced the microfiche room in the New Orleans library for at least the tenth time, holding his cell phone but not wanting to make the call. He’d verified everything he could and then spoken with the family’s attorney. He was almost positive that he’d found Sabine LeVeche’s family. After recognizing the man from Raissa’s drawing in the Vietnam war criminal files, he’d dreaded the outcome. On the upside, the war criminal was an identical twin and hadn’t been seen since the war. With any luck, the remaining brother was Sabine’s grandfather, but Beau still didn’t feel right about any of it.

  The family’s attorney had been short and dismissive when he’d first contacted the man the day before. Not that Beau blamed him. Based on his research, the family was quite wealthy and probably always had their share of nuts trying to get a piece of their money. Beau expected he’d have to contact the man again, but first thing that morning the attorney called asking for a photo of Sabine and the particulars of her upbringing. Less than an hour later, he’d called again, the incredulity in his voice apparent, stating that the family would like to meet Sabine at her earliest convenience.

  No request for DNA testing, birth records, or any of the other hoops Beau had expected them to ask Sabine to jump through. Which bothered him even more. They knew something they weren’t telling. No wealthy family accepted a long-lost granddaughter without some proof. It had to be something about Sabine’s father. Aside from his driver’s license, which didn’t reflect his real name, no other form of ID was ever found in his car or in the apartment the couple was renting in New Orleans.

  Supposedly, he was the oldest son of one of the wealthiest families in the parish. Yet he lived like a pauper with no past? People who abandoned their inheritance without looking back were running from the people who controlled the money. But why? What had those people done that was so horrible that an eighteen-year-old left the comfort of his family’s estate and took a job working on the docks for minimum wage with a wife and infant daughter to support?

  It couldn’t possibly be anything good.

  Shit. He’d been putting off the call to Sabine for hours. He couldn’t put it off forever. Now that the family was aware of her existence, there was nothing to stop them from contacting her directly if they felt he wasn’t moving fast enough for them. He started to press her number into the cell phone, then changed his mind. He scrolled through his call list and found the number he was looking for. He pressed the Talk button and waited for the woman to answer.

  “Raissa? This is Beau Villeneuve. I need to talk to you about the research you hired me for. Can you meet me this afternoon?”

  Thirty minutes later, Beau slid into a booth in a bar across the street from Raissa’s shop. He gave the psychic a nod. “I really appreciate you meeting me.” He gave Raissa the basics of his search and explained his current dilemma of how to approach meeting the family.

  Raissa listened intently and when he was finished said, “I’m glad you called. I can see why you’re not comfortable with this.”

  “I’m sorry to put you in the middle, but I didn’t know who else to talk to. I mean, I’ve met Maryse, but she and Sabine seemed a little close for Maryse to be objective and, well…”

  “And you didn’t want to panic Maryse given the recent events in her own life.” Raissa smiled. “Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Villeneuve. You’re a detective—former FBI. You’d be remiss if you didn’t check the background of everyone Sabine is close to.”

  Beau nodded. “Please call me Beau. And you’re right, of course.”

  “Well, Beau, I further deduce that once you started reading up on Maryse you were probably far too interested to stop at the surface level. She’s had an amazing past month.”

  “Amazing is one way of putting it—so is frightening, overwhelming, and beyond statistically fortunate.”

  “It’s certainly no secret that Maryse is lucky to be alive. The things that happened to her were fantastic but some of them could have been prevented. That entire situation still vexes me. I should have been more on top of it from the beginning. I knew something wasn’t right—beyond the obvious. I could feel it in my bones.”

  Beau studied Raissa for a moment. “In your bones? No visions, no ghostly warnings?”

  “The phenomenon doesn’t work that way. It’s usually very obscure, unplanned, and certainly not scheduled. To make matters worse, the dead are often confused and even when trying to help they can give mixed signals or the wrong information entirely. It’s not an exact science.”

  “Some would argue that it’s not a science at all.”

  Raissa inclined her head and studied him. “Some would also argue that the Holocaust didn’t happen and that we never landed on the moon.”

  “Touché.”

  “Regardless of its fantastic nature, I still feel I should have picked up on something before things got that out of control for Maryse.”

  “How? Who would have thought those kind of things were going on in such a quiet little place? Who would ever have believed that such hideous secrets were hidden in a small town? Easier to hide in a crowded city where everyone isn’t constantly in your business.”

  Raissa nodded. “There is some truth to that, of course. And people often migrate to large cities to ‘disappear,’ but in a small town, if you’ve very good, you can disappear in plain sight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the small town I grew up in, there was a drunk. He was upper forties to early fifties and everyone called him Walker because he was usually so drunk he couldn’t even find his car keys, much less operate his car, so he walked everywhere he went. His house was at the end of an otherwise tidy little street of bungalows. But Walker’s house was rundown—the roof sagging on one end, paint peeling from every square inch of wood. He didn’t do much—picked up odd construction jobs from time to time, when he was sober enough. Then he usually went on a bender after that. Left town for a couple of days and came back snookered as ever.”

  Beau shrugged. “Okay, so almost every town has a drunk like Walker. Nothing special about that.”

  Raissa smiled. “No one in the town thought so either, until the day he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “His mail started piling up and people began to realize
that no one had seen him for a while, although no one could put their finger on exactly when. A group of people went to his house and knocked on the doors and windows, but he never answered. His car was in the driveway, so he wasn’t off on a bender. Finally, they called the fire department and had them break down the door, afraid he was dead.”

  “But he wasn’t?”

  “Not even close. The house inside was neat as a pin, although a layer of dust had settled over everything. There was no sign of Walker anywhere, and even more interesting, there was no sign of a bottle. The house was completely empty of booze. In fact, he didn’t even own a shot glass, a bottle opener, or a corkscrew. When they went to leave, one of the men tripped over the kitchen rug and discovered a door in the floor beneath it. You’ll never guess what they found in that makeshift basement.”

  Beau leaned toward Raissa, fascinated. “Bodies?”

  Raissa laughed. “Nothing so evil. No, they found a printing press. Walker had been counterfeiting money. It took a while for the local police to sort it all out, but finally the truth emerged. No one knew exactly how long Walker had been manufacturing money, but a couple of people remembered when the ‘benders’ began.”

  “And they weren’t benders?”

  “Not at all. Walker waited until he had a good bit of the fake money ready, then took a trip to Las Vegas to launder it through the casinos. The police finally tracked down banking records where he’d transferred large sums of money from a bank in Las Vegas to the Cayman Islands. By the time Walker had disappeared, those transfers amounted to over three million dollars.”

  “Holy shit! What a story.”

  Raissa nodded. “All anyone in town saw was a drunk, and they didn’t look any further.”

  “Hiding in plain sight,” Beau said, his mind whirling. “It’s brilliant.”

  “And simple. If Walker had been a recluse who rarely spoke and didn’t get out among town, people would have gone poking around.”

  “Instead, he invented a personality that was loud enough for people to stop looking any further. They took it at face value and left it at that.”

  “Which is exactly what happened in Mudbug,” Raissa pointed out. “And if I had to guess, might be what’s happening with your search for Sabine’s family.”

  Beau stared at Raissa for a couple of seconds. “You ‘guess’?” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “Exactly how does that psychic thing work? I’m not saying I buy into it, but I’m not so hardheaded as to think I have all the answers, either.”

  Raissa studied him for a moment, then smiled. “You’re attracted to Sabine, and you’re worried about this less-than-normal way of life she has.”

  Beau sat back and put on his game face. “I didn’t say anything like that.”

  “You didn’t have to. And before you think the spirits are telling your secrets, I’ll let you in on one aspect of my ability—a lot of it is simply the talent of reading people extraordinarily well, then putting everything together in one neat little package. Logic, deduction, an innate flair for understanding the psychology of human behavior. Not all is paranormal, Beau. A lot of what I do is no different than your FBI profilers would accomplish with the same information. It’s just that sometimes, I have a little advantage.”

  “Okay, so maybe I find her interesting, and yeah, she’s definitely not hard on the eyes…something you failed to mention, I might add.”

  “I wasn’t aware that was part of your job-considering criteria.”

  “It’s not. It shouldn’t be. Oh, hell, I didn’t ask to be attracted to her and don’t want to be, if the truth’s told. But it’s too late to undo what’s been done and that includes finding her family.”

  Raissa, who’d obviously been enjoying his flustering, sobered when he mentioned Sabine’s family. “You’re afraid they’re hiding something.”

  “Barely legal teens don’t usually run away from millions in inheritance to live in squalor.”

  Raissa sighed. “And people who have millions to leave in inheritance should have been able to find a missing teenager with relative ease—especially as he was less than a hundred miles from his hometown.”

  Beau nodded. “There’s something else. It’s Sabine. She’s hiding something.”

  Raissa waved a hand in dismissal. “We’re all hiding something.”

  “You know what it is, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know some of Sabine’s secrets. Do I know the particular one you’ve picked up on? I have no idea.”

  “And if these secrets are relevant to the case?”

  “Then I would have already told you what I knew. I’m not a fool. I’d break a confidence if I thought Sabine was at risk from the things I knew.”

  Beau clenched his jaw, then released. He didn’t like it but knew he wasn’t going to get anything out of Raissa. “Okay. You know what’s at stake. Knowing Sabine, how do you think I ought to proceed?”

  “There’s no going back now. Everything’s already been set in motion.”

  “I know. That’s the problem.”

  Raissa lifted her wine glass and swirled the red liquid around inside. She gazed at it as if in a trance, or looking for some magical sign. Hell, for all Beau knew, she might have been doing just that. Finally she frowned, sat the glass down, then looked him straight in the eyes. “Then I guess, unwanted attraction or no, you’re going to have to keep an eye on Sabine for a while. You and Maryse are the only people they wouldn’t question being part of the family reunion process, and you’re much better equipped to handle what is likely to come than Maryse.”

  Beau narrowed his eyes at Raissa. “Exactly what did you see in that wine glass?”

  “Nothing in particular. It’s just that it suddenly struck me how much the color resembled recently spilled blood.”

  Beau walked from the pub to the parking lot, still uneasy from his conversation with Raissa. Everything the woman had said made sense, yet he was still hesitating over doing the one thing he knew had to be done. He passed the parking lot and kept walking, circling once around the block, his mind whirling with all the possibilities, most of them not good.

  Finally, unable to come up with a good reason to delay any further, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and pressed in Sabine’s number. Maybe she wouldn’t answer. Maybe she’d be watching a movie or painting her toenails and this entire conversation could wait until he was ready. Like maybe 2056.

  But she answered on the second ring.

  “Sabine,” he said, “it’s Beau.”

  “Hi, Beau,” she said. “How are you today?”

  “Er, fine. I’m fine. Um, Sabine, I have some news for you.”

  “Oh.” Her previously pleasant voice took on a somewhat fearful tone. “What is it?”

  “I think I’ve found your family,” he pressed forward before he could change his mind.

  He heard the sharp intake of breath and waited for her response.

  “Oh my God,” she said finally. “So fast? I mean, I’m glad, but I can’t believe it. I guess I never really thought you’d find anything…after all these years, you know?”

  “I understand. Sometimes you just need a fresh eye and a stroke of luck,” he said, mentally cursing the television special on war criminals.

  “I guess so. So what now? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Do I write to them, call them? I know I can’t show up on someone’s doorstep and expect them to be happy about it.”

  “That’s all been taken care of for you,” Beau explained. “The family is quite wealthy, and I was certain they’d want all contact made through their attorney. I’ve spoken to him already and provided him with the information I had. He’s spoken to the family and apprised them of the situation.”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “They want to meet you. If you’d like, I can set up the meeting and go with you if that would make you more comfortable. I know this is very scary, and awkward, so please let me know how I can best help you.”

  “Yes
…I, um, yes, that would be fine. I mean, set up the meeting and let me know what they say.”

  Beau felt his jaw clench involuntarily. “All right then. I’ll call you as soon as I know something.” He flipped the phone shut and shoved it in his pocket, trying to convince himself that everything had already been set in motion before his phone call. That call hadn’t changed anything.

  At least that’s what he was going to keep telling himself.

  Chapter Eight

  Beau looked over to the passenger’s seat and studied Sabine. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

  Sabine stared at the enormous iron gate and swallowed. Somewhere on the other side of the ten-foot stone fence was an estate, just forty-five minutes from Mudbug, where her family lived. Living, breathing relatives. Her dad’s people. It all seemed like a blur. Twenty-odd years of searching with absolutely no results and now she had an entire family…grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, maybe even a dog. It was more than overwhelming. It was like waking up into a whole new existence.

  She realized she hadn’t answered and looked over at Beau. “I think so. I don’t know. Maybe not?” She covered her face with both hands. “I’m sorry. You must wish you were anywhere but here with me.”

  Beau gently pulled her hands down and placed his hand on top of hers. “There’s nowhere else I need to be. That’s all that matters.”

  Sabine looked up at him. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you doing this. I should have waited until Maryse could come.”

  “But that would have been another two days, right?”

  Sabine nodded. “Yes. She would have cancelled her plans, but the man she is speaking with is a scientist and could have information leading to the break she’s been looking for in her own research. He’s only going to be in the country a couple more days, and going to Houston was the only opportunity Maryse had to talk to him.”

  Beau didn’t look completely convinced that the reason was good enough to dump her best friend on the eve of discovering her long-lost family, but Sabine couldn’t help that. What she couldn’t say was that Maryse’s research had led her to a medication that could possibly eliminate the side effects of radiation treatment.