Bo stepped outside to confer with Artie, who showed Jan, Suzy, and Angela back into the room. The women sat as a unit on the parlor’s high-backed couch. Their faces were streaked with tears. Maggie studied them for any signs that they might be faking their grief but saw none. As they all sat in silence waiting for Bo to return, she used the quiet to connect with her sixth sense and see if it told a different story. It didn’t. Maggie felt in her bones that the women were truly distraught.
Bo came back in the room and positioned himself in a chair opposite the Cuties. “Tell me everything you know about Debbie Stern,” Bo began.
Angela and Suzy let Jan do the talking. Jan filled him in on Debbie’s business triumph, loss, and subsequent breakdown.
“Thank you. Did you know she had created a business plan to oust Jan from the Cajun Cutie presidency, take over the organization, and turn it into a profit-making venture?”
All three mouths dropped open at the same time as if choreographed. Maggie scanned each face carefully and saw no signs of artifice. She would put money on the fact that Jan, Angela, and Suzy were genuinely stunned.
“Impossible,” Angela declared. “Debbie never would have done that.”
“I’m afraid that we have proof,” Bo said.
“I was Debbie’s best friend,” Jan said. “She wouldn’t have done that to me. Whatever you have is fake.”
“I’m afraid it’s not.”
Maggie noticed that Jan had started shivering. “But-but-but-but—” she stammered as she searched for a way to rebut Bo’s statement.
“We have proof,” Bo repeated, his tone kind but adamant.
“I swear to God, if Debbie wasn’t already dead, I’d kill her,” Suzy spat out.
Bo was about to caution her when Cal Vichet opened the door and stuck his head in.
“Sir, we need you,” he told Bo.
“I’m requesting that you not to speak to each other while I’m gone.” With that, Bo followed Cal out the door.
*
The next few minutes felt interminable as Maggie waited with the Cuties. Brought together by a common love and now devastated by a betrayal, each woman seemed to be in her own world. Maggie could tell they were trying to process Debbie’s duplicity and felt for them, but she was relieved when Bo returned. Cal was right behind him, holding something in a plastic bag. Bo motioned toward Cal, who showed the bag to the women. Maggie saw that it contained a purple ombré scarf.
“Do any of you recognize this?” he asked them.
“It’s mine,” Jan said. “I’ve been looking for it. It went missing a couple of days ago. Where did you find it?”
“Stuffed under a bush near the victim,” Bo said. “Ms. Slansky and DiPietro, you’re free to go right now, but know that I may call you in again for questioning.” He faced Jan. “Ms. Robbins, I’m going to need you to come to the station with me.”
The three women exchanged terrified glances.
“Am—am I being arrested?” Jan asked. Maggie noticed that her shivering had intensified and felt terrible for the woman.
“No, ma’am,” Bo said. “At least not until we get back DNA results on this scarf and see if they’re a match for Debbie Stern.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
As Bo and Cal Vichet led Jan out to Bo’s car for further questioning at the police station, they were followed by Angela and Suzy, who was issuing a stream of profanity that brought a flush to Cal’s weather-beaten face. “I haven’t heard language like that since my unit was bombed in Iraq,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.
Gaynell left after making Maggie swear to let her know if she needed any help. Maggie, who’d promised to contact Quentin MacIlhoney on Jan’s behalf, called the lawyer, but his assistant said he was unavailable due to the fact he was shooting an episode of For Crime’s Sake, a local show that pitted an ex-DA against a defense attorney as they argued about a Louisiana murder cold case. Maggie stressed the urgency of the situation and extracted a promise of a return call as soon as taping finished. Then she made the rounds of Crozat’s guests—at least the ones that weren’t in police custody or murdered.
Shane Butler whispered to her that he’d given Emily a sleeping pill to help her get through the trauma of discovering Debbie. The Georgia boys were celebrating the capture of the “Crozat Killer,” as they dubbed Jan, by heading back to LSU for a party that they found via social media. The Rykers told Maggie not to worry about them for dinner but didn’t share their plans. She blamed herself for their sudden reticence and deeply regretted her crack about treasure hunting.
Maggie went to the front parlor, where she found her father ending a phone call. He looked grim. “That was the New York Times.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Any chance they wanted Mom’s recipe for Crawfish Crozat?”
Tug shook his head. “Nope. Apparently you can get away with one old geezer being offed at a B and B, but when a successful Manhattan businesswoman is ‘murdered by her best friend,’ that’s news. In print and online. I’ve hung up on a couple of Internet bottom feeders this morning.”
“How did they find out so fast?”
“I think we can thank the Georgia boys’ social media accounts for that.”
Maggie groaned and then massaged her temples as she contemplated how to do damage control. “There is a bright side. Print media is dying. And you know how voracious the Internet is. Stories have a short shelf life. Since the police think they caught Debbie’s killer, this should blow over pretty quickly.” Of course, as she well knew, it would pop up whenever anyone did an Internet search for “Crozat Plantation.” But she chose not to burden her father with this ugly reality.
“The question is, will Crozat still be standing when it does blow over?” Tug asked. “We’ve already had four cancellations for Labor Day weekend. We’re always full then. This is bad, Maggie.” Maggie gave Tug a comforting hug. Her father held on to her for a minute and then pulled away. “Please, honey, let’s keep this a secret between you and me. Your mom certainly doesn’t need to know.”
“Of course, Dad.”
Tug went back to work, and Maggie walked out onto the veranda to think. She stared out at the grassy levee that separated Crozat from the mercurial Mississippi. The river, like a hungry python, had swallowed plantations whole over the centuries. Yet it always spared Crozat, and she couldn’t stand the thought that her family home, having survived many a natural disaster, might be brought down by a human one.
She glanced back at the parlor, where her father was hunched over his computer keyboard. Was it her imagination, or had his copper hair dulled? Were there more lines on his face and darker shadows under his eyes? She scrunched her eyes to fight off tears. There wasn’t a day in her life when Tug and Ninette hadn’t offered love and support in a crisis, no matter how trivial. When mean girls in Maggie’s fifth-grade class anointed themselves “the Fashion Police” and made fun of her quirky outfit choices, Tug made sure that the school principal ended the group’s sartorial reign of terror. When Maggie threw a childish tantrum at seventeen because she got a bad haircut, Ninette made her feel better by showing how the cut could be fixed by simply flipping her part to the left.
As she watched her dad deal with the fallout brought on by the Crozat Killer—whoever he or she was—Maggie realized she’d reached that moment in a child’s relationship with their parents where the balance shifts. Instead of getting support, it was time to give it. She was going to make things better for her mom and dad.
She just had to figure out how.
Maggie walked toward the shotgun and passed the area where PPD CSI was still dissecting the crime scene, although with much less attention to detail now that the potentially incriminating scarf had been discovered. As soon as she got home, she sat on the couch with her tablet and typed in a search for “Crozat Plantation B and B.” Page one was nothing but links to e-bites about the murders, as were pages two through five. It wasn’t until page six that customer reviews from a travel website appeared—glowing reviews now usurped by the notoriety of recent events. Maggie mulled over something an old roommate, Kristie, once told her. Kristie had been an entry-level executive at a large public relations firm and, as low girl on the corporate totem pole, often found herself assigned the most heinous clients. “But,” she said to Maggie one day as she was in the middle of turning a starlet’s drug habit into a story of rehab redemption, “I always stick to the basic rule of PR: if you don’t like what people are saying about your client, change the conversation.” Maggie wished she could call on Kristie to help her out with Crozat, but Kristie’s success at changing conversations had led her to an executive vice president position at her firm’s LA office, and the last time Maggie had seen her was on television as she led an Oscar-nominated client down the red carpet prior to the Academy Awards.