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Chapter One
I spotted the lifeless figure as soon as I rounded the corner.
“Over here!” I called to whomever could hear me above the roar of the ship’s engines.
I rushed toward him, crouching to get a closer look.
Oh no. No!
A memory flashed of Jane and I dancing to his music in my bridal suite as I attempted to shake off my nerves hours before my wedding.
Music that was now forever silenced.
My heartbeat pounded in my ears as I stared into his dark, unblinking eyes, frozen in a state of fright. The only movement I detected came from the whiskers cloaking his face, ruffled by the brisk sea air.
I collapsed onto the ship’s deck. My foot kicked a small object. It clanked and rolled a few inches from me. As the full moon emerged from behind the clouds, its glow reflected off the item, a piece of silvery metal lying on the ground beside his limp hirsute hand.
It was a bullet casing. Etched on the side in an old-fashioned scroll font was one word: ROUGAROU.
48 Hours Earlier
“Isn’t this nice?” my sister Jane asked as we walked past Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter.
Jane and I were back in New Orleans following a quick jaunt to Baton Rouge for the Louisiana Book Festival. We had one last night in the Big Easy before our residential cruise ship—the Thalassophile of the Seas—set sail again. Next stop: Port-au-Prince.
“Isn’t what nice? Do you mean the city?” I juggled a garment bag containing a formal ballgown in one hand with a pastry and a large chicory latte in the other.
“That, but also, isn’t it nice to be off the ship?” Jane had her own dress slung over her shoulder like a sack of flour.
“Are you already tired of a life at sea?”
“Not at all. It’s just a nice change of pace to be on terra firma for a few days. And of course, no murder.”
I laughed. “I watched the news last night. New Orleans isn’t exactly what I’d call murder free.”
“Sure, but we aren’t in the middle of those cases trying to solve them. Promise me, Char. No more murder investigations.”
I crooked my head to look at her. “You’ve got something on your face.”
Jane brushed her fingers across her mouth. “Powdered sugar is the glitter of the dessert world. One tiny bag of beignets has enough powdered sugar at the bottom to cover the surface of the earth, with enough left over to coat the moon as well.”
If she were being honest with herself, the bag of deep-fried donuts from Café Du Monde in the center of the French Market was far from tiny, and three full-sized beignets weren’t exactly what I’d call a light snack, especially at nine in the morning.
The bottom of the bag held more superfluous sugar than I’d used in a decade; I’d give her that. As a matter of fact, I had a box of powdered sugar on my pantry shelf left over from the great panic buying of Y2K.
“Don’t change the subject.” Jane wagged her index finger and then held up her pinkie. “Promise me.”
How binding was a pinkie promise? “I’d rather not.”
“Charlotte.” She jabbed her pinkie at me.
“Fine. I promise.” I linked my right little finger with hers.
After all, I’d never seen an episode of Judge Judy where the defendant was held to a pinkie promise.
“Char—”
“I said I promise.”
“Not that. I just wanted to check in with you. You just passed a major milestone, and we didn’t even talk about it.”
“Milestone?”
“Charlotte.” She looked down her nose at me.
My attempt at obtuse hadn’t fooled my sister. She knew me too well.
She meant my husband Gabe’s death, of course. The one-year anniversary. It wasn’t that I hadn’t remembered. I hadn’t known what to do with it.
How did one commemorate such a significant, yet complicated, loss?
Kyrie Dawn had put together a makeshift memorial service in the Azure Lounge. She claimed it was important for Quinton to honor his father’s memory, despite the fact he was only a toddler. I’d come down with a convenient migraine that day, but Jane had gone in my place and reported back to me.
The program had started with a short slideshow of photos set to their song, “Saving All My Love” by Whitney Houston—because, of course it was—but Kyrie Dawn only had the ones taken since she’d met Gabe, and I’d declined to submit any.
Between ten and fifteen people had shown to pay their respects. They’d known Gabe from the many sailings he and Kyrie Dawn had made in their love nest at sea. Most of those people hadn’t even known he had a wife until he died.
Of course, I’d only learned about the existence of Gabe’s longtime mistress and their son the same day two uniformed officers had shown up on my doorstep to tell me his car had hit a pole following a fatal heart attack.
So, yeah, it was complicated.
Despite the shock of his death, the revelations that he’d been keeping all sorts of things from me, and the added bonus of humiliation over his betrayal, I’d waded through the year of firsts like the stalwart I always tried to be. I’d braced myself against each wave. Thanksgiving had been spent consoling our nephew Andy following the death of his fiancée on their wedding cruise. On Christmas morning, Jane and I had assisted in serving more than eight hundred of Seattle’s less fortunate with an organization called Cozy Connections. On Gabe’s birthday, Jane had booked us a full day at the spa. Our anniversary required a bit more alcohol and chocolate, but I’d been prepared.
There was something different about crossing that threshold into year two that I couldn’t quite reconcile.
“Have you thought about therapy?” Jane asked.
“I talked to someone.”
“I mean ongoing.”
“I have you for that.”
“Char, I can’t be responsible for your mental—”
“Of course, I don’t expect you to be. I’m fine, Jane. Really. Good, even. Now, here’s the plan. We do brunch at Brennan’s, dinner at Commander’s Palace, and finish off with drinks and jazz someplace.”
“We can put a pin in that conversation, but you need to talk about it, preferably to a professional.”
I gave a noncommittal murmur. If I started honestly dealing with my feelings about the situation, there was a good chance I’d drown under them.
Jane sighed and shook her head. “So, your plan is to roll ourselves back up the gangplank tomorrow because we’ll have eaten our way across this entire city?”
I smiled at her, relieved she wasn’t pressing the issue further. “Exactly.”
We turned into Pirate Alley at Royal Street. Navigating the cobblestone in my heeled boots proved challenging. The cast iron lampposts that bordered each side of the path were unlit, and although the sun was attempting to peek through the clouds, the alley itself was appropriately shaded for its reputation as a haunted playground for the wandering spirits of pirates, novelists, priests, and prisoners.
Rumored to have once been the stomping grounds for pirate Jean Lafitte and his cohorts from the marshy islands of Barataria Bay, Pirate Alley was now a prominent stop on any New Orleans ghost tour.
“I read in the guidebook that the ghost of William Faulkner is purported to haunt this alley.” Jane shivered for dramatic effect. “That’s almost scarier than running into the ghost of a pirate.”
“Your disdain for him is as legendary as it is inexplicable.” I nodded at a cream-colored building with baby blue doors ahead of us. “Speak of the devil.” A small blue-and-gold sign hung above the doorway. FAULKNER HOUSE BOOKS. “Wanna peek inside?”
Jane brushed powdered sugar from her navy-blue sweater. “Not if it’s only Faulkner.”
“I believe they have rare and collectible books as well. Perhaps we’ll see the ghost of old Billy-boy writing at his desk, and you can tell him why you despise his work so much.”
“I’m always down for that.”
As we entered the store, a young woman greeted us from the counter in the back, which was lighter and brighter than I’d expected for a seller of antiquated books. Usually, those shops smelled like mildew and soot and were dimly lit by incandescent bulbs dating back to the time of Edison flickering their archaic filament’s grand finale. This place had fresh paint, polished chandeliers, and gorgeous woodwork.
It was narrow, but meticulously organized shelves reached all the way to the tall ceiling.
I deeply inhaled the scent of my first love: books. “Do you miss it?”
“Do I miss what?” Jane shoved the beignet-less bag into her purse. She caught me staring at her, and she grimaced with embarrassment. “You never know when a spare cup of powdered sugar might come in handy.”
“You mean like pocket sand, but instead it’s purse sugar?”
She gave a bewildered smile. “What? What does that even mean?”
“You know, like in those old martial arts movies, where they’d keep a handful of sand in their pocket in case they needed to throw it in the eyes of their adversaries for a quick getaway.”
“Not a bad idea. I can think of a couple times recently when that would have come in handy. Now what were you asking? Do I miss what?”
“Do you miss the library? The book world? The creak of a hardcover upon its inaugural opening?” I added that last part because I knew it would bug her to no end.
Her horrified expression was comical. “What kind of monster cracks the spine of a book?”
I was that kind of monster. “Tell me again why you can’t stand Faulkner.”
Jane glanced at the woman behind the counter. “Shh. You can’t disparage Faulkner in front of Faulknerites. They’re rabid in their devotion to him, although I can’t imagine why.”
A man in a tan trench coat and a fedora entered the shop, his head down. He hustled back to the clerk. “Bon matin, Angelique. How are you today?”
“Fine as always. I was wondering if I’d see you today. The month is coming to an end and I’ve only seen you twice.”
“I’ve been fully engrossed in a project, and this is the first I’ve poked my head out of my office in days.”
“Sounds fascinating. How can I help?”
“I’m looking for folklore stories about the Rougarou.”
I jerked my thumb toward the counter. “She’s otherwise occupied. You’re fine. Tell me where this abject hatred of one of America’s most significant writers of all time originated.”
“I had a professor at UDub who was obsessed with Faulkner, and I was obsessed with the professor, so I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn’t get it. I thought I must have accidentally picked up the works of some other guy named William Faulkner. But no, it was him, and it was nothing special. I just think he’s overrated. Have you read Spotted Horses? There’s literally no arc to the story. It’s just a bunch of guys at a horse auction. Nothing happens.”
“The Sound and the Fury is an important novel. You have to admit that.”
“I do not. Reading that book reminded me of what happens when parents feed ice cream to their preschoolers before coming to story time at the library. A blathering of nonsense with zero pauses to take breaths, along with a meandering plot.” She wandered over to one of the mahogany shelves and ran her finger across the broken spines of several classics. “This is a tragedy.”
“They’re just well-loved, that’s all. The way books are supposed to be.”
She snorted her derision. “Blasphemy.”
“By the way, what was that professor’s name? You’ve never mentioned him. I wonder if I ever had him.”
She sighed the smiling sigh of a schoolgirl’s crush as she turned away from the bookshelf. “Emmett Guidr—oh my good gawd!” Her gaze widened.
I whipped my head around to see what she was gaping at.
“It’s him!”
“Who? Faulkner’s ghost?” I scanned the bookstore but saw no apparitions.
Jane knocked over a display of books, causing both the clerk and the man at the counter to look at her with alarm.
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered.
A flash of recognition crossed the man’s face.
Jane swayed. She placed one trembling hand on the display table for support.
“I can’t believe after all these years, it’s really him.”
End of Excerpt
