Page 49 of The Shop on Royal Street
“Wow. Well, that’s a smoking gun. I’m sure Uncle Bernie is already digging into it.”
“He is, as a matter of fact. I was thinking about asking Mimi if she knew anything about it. She was Jeanne’s best friend and about to move in with her, so I’m thinking they must have been close.”
Beau looked at me for a long moment before turning back to the road. “Why is it so important to you that you find out what happened to her?”
“Curiosity, I guess. She was murdered in my house. And I get the sense that there’s something... restless there. I’d hate to think that she wasn’t at peace because her murderer was never identified. Not that I can ask her, but if I were in her position, I’d haunt the heck out of the house where my body was found before I could rest in peace.”
“That’s not always the reason why restless spirits remain earthbound.”
“How would you know?”
After an almost imperceptible pause, he responded with a shrug. “I talk to a lot of people on my podcast who’ve had ghost encounters—some of them actually believable. And there seem to be as many reasons for a haunting as there are ghosts.”
I sighed and leaned back in my seat, watching the blur of the passing landscape. “Sometimes I wish I could be like Melanie and just ask them.”
“No, you don’t.” Beau’s phone rang again, and while he was on the call I closed my book, all pretense of reading gone, and thought instead of Jeanne, and all the reasons she might have for lingering in the place where she’d been murdered.
“Nola?”
I jerked my head in Beau’s direction, realizing he’d been talking to me while I was daydreaming about ghosts. “I’m sorry—what?”
“I was saying that I saw you at the Spotted Cat last week. I was wondering why you didn’t say hello.”
His question caught me by surprise, and since I didn’t know the answer, either, the various attempts to respond got jumbled in my throat and all that emerged was “Righto.”
“What?”
I wondered if Beau could hear my panicky breathing as my mind went into overdrive. “That’s just a thing we historic preservationists say. It sort of means ‘Yep’ and ‘Sorry’ at the same time. In other words, I’m sorry, but I didn’t see you, or I would have said hi and asked to be introduced to your friend.”
“That’s too bad.” He leaned forward to flip on the stereo, and for the remainder of the drive we listened to his playlist of classic jazz, nearly identical to my own, which didn’t completely surprise me, since the one thing we’d had in common back in Charleston was our love of the same music. We drove without speaking until we were past thewelcome to st. francisvillesign. I was just about to relax when Beau lowered the volume on the stereo and said, “If you didn’t see me, how would you know I was with a friend?”
The GPS piped in, saying we’d reached our destination. “Oh, look. We’re here!” I grabbed my lunch bag and backpack and slid out of the truck, feeling like a kid being dropped off at school. Looking somewhere past his head, I said, “I’ll text you when I’m done.” I slammed the door shut.
I began to walk away, hearing behind me the mechanical whoosh of an automatic window being lowered.
“Nola?”
I turned to see Beau with his elbow resting casually on the window frame, his face oddly serious. “I figured it’s not just your hair that’s different.” He paused, as if waiting for me to respond. “It’s your shirt. It matches the color of your eyes.”
Our gazes met, the silence drowned out by the whirring of cicadas in a nearby loblolly pine and by a passing eighteen-wheeler. “Thank you,” I said. And before he could say anything else, I headed out into an overgrown field, with no direction in mind except away.
CHAPTER 16
I sat on the curb with my baseball cap—which I had hidden in my backpack so Jolene wouldn’t see it—pulled low over my forehead, and I was nearly drowning in a puddle of my own sweat and reeking of insect repellent. I thought it might be close to three thirty in the afternoon, but I lacked the strength to look at my phone for confirmation. I had even had to swallow my pride and ask Siri to send Beau the message that I was done and ready to be picked up because I didn’t have the energy to lift the phone. I had seen Melanie resort to verbal texting, since she was a complete failure at texting with her thumbs, and I had laughed at her and called her a boomer. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.
At the honk of a car horn, I looked up and saw Beau’s truck. He got out and took my backpack and helped me stand, none of which I asked for or needed, as I could have stood on my own if I’d had an extra fifteen minutes or so.
“Thank you,” I said through dry lips as he opened the passenger door and helped me inside. I stopped him with my hand when he reached for the seat belt. “I think I can manage the buckle,” I said, although it took me three tries to lift my arm to reach it, and then another two to manage clicking it shut.
After he’d seated himself behind the wheel, he leaned over and turned all the AC vents in my direction and turned the fan on high. I pulled off my soaking hat and eagerly stuck my face in the powerful airflow like a dog with its head out a car window.
When I finally leaned my head against the headrest, he lowered the fan speed. “I hope you had a successful day, because you look like something the cat dragged in. Backwards. In the rain.”
I glowered at him. “Are you taking lessons from Jolene now?”
He grinned and handed me a tall foam cup with a lid and straw. “The nearest Smoothie King is in Baton Rouge, so I got you the next best thing. Sweet tea from the Magnolia Cafe right here in St. Francisville. Great place for lunch, by the way, if you need to come back. Don’t tell Jolene, but I was still hungry after I ate my packed lunch, so I ordered a French dip po’boy and it was pretty amazing. Lots of vegan options, too.”
He winked but I didn’t have time to laugh because I was sucking down the sweet tea like a honeybee stranded in the desert.
