Trouble in Mudbug (Ghost-in-Law, #1)(77)
Sabine shook her head. “I’m nowhere near needing a specialist now or in the future. I’ve asked Raissa about this. She thinks I’m going to be fine.”
“She thinks?” Maryse squeezed Sabine’s hand. “That’s just not good enough, Sabine. Please, please promise me that as soon as this is over, you’ll let me take you to New Orleans and see that doctor I know. For me.”
The tears that had been hanging on the rim of Sabine’s eyelids finally spilled over, and she nodded. “Okay. I promise.” She leaned over and clutched Maryse in a hug. “If you promise to be around to take me, I’ll promise to go.”
Maryse sniffled and tried in vain to hold back her own tears. “That sounds fair.”
“Who died?” Helena’s voice cut into their moment. “Oh wait, that would be me.” The ghost grinned.
Maryse frowned at Helena and instructed Sabine to drive. “We don’t want Harold catching us parked on the side of the road or we’re busted.”
Sabine edged off the shoulder and onto the highway, then made a quick U-turn and stomped on the accelerator. Maryse waited until they were out of sight of the trail, then turned in her seat to face Helena. “Well, are you going to fill me in?”
“Hank was there,” Helena said, and frowned.
“And?”
“And what? The moron was there with his even more moronic father.”
Maryse counted to five. “What did they say, Helena?”
Helena sighed. “Harold yelled at Hank for being so useless that I didn’t leave him the land. Hank said it wasn’t his fault and he didn’t know anything about my will before the reading, which is true.”
Maryse stared at Helena, but the ghost wouldn’t meet her gaze. “What are you not telling me?”
Helena looked at Maryse, her sadness evident in her expression. “Harold said Hank wouldn’t have to worry because it looked like he’d scared you into giving up the land.”
“So it was Harold who tried to kill me.” Maryse slumped back in her seat, not sure whether to be happy the mystery was solved or alarmed that Harold still walked the streets. God forbid he caught on to the fake land transfer before the week was up.
“I guess it must have been Harold,” Helena said finally, “but I still can’t believe it. Luc said those explosives were rigged by a professional. Harold was military, but I married the man, and I can tell you for certain, no one would ever let him work with explosives. Hell, he couldn’t even grill chicken without burning himself, and the television remote—forget it.”
“But according to Mildred, Harold was always bragging at Johnny’s about his special forces tour,” Maryse argued.
Helena shook her head. “I never went to Johnny’s so I can’t say, but if Mildred says so, then I guess it’s so. All I know is Harold used to tell me after he came home from a bender that it was amazing how the world ‘evened things out’ over time.”
Maryse stared at Helena. “What the heck is that supposed to mean?”
Helena shrugged. “I don’t know, but I always took it as some remark about his military service.”
“What’s going on?” Sabine asked.
Maryse felt instantly guilty. “I’m sorry, Sabine. I keep forgetting you can’t hear her.” She filled in the blanks of her conversation with Helena.
“I don’t like it,” Sabine said when she finished.
“Maybe Harold had help from someone else. After all, if he’s in cahoots with the oil companies, couldn’t he find someone to pay for that kind of service—especially with the amount of money on the line?”
“It’s possible,” Sabine said, “but somehow it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Maybe it isn’t Harold at all.”
Maryse yanked her cell phone from her pocket and pressed in the speed dial for her attorney. “But what else is there?”
Thirty minutes later, a new stun gun in hand, Maryse took one look at Mildred’s hotel, knowing she should probably go inside. As Sabine had pointed out before, they couldn’t be certain Harold was the one gunning for Maryse, and it was much smarter for her to lie as low as possible until they were certain no one else had a hidden agenda. But the very thought of closing herself up in that tiny room, or even worse, sitting in Mildred’s office and enduring the older woman’s scrutiny, made her feel claustrophobic. And what difference did it really make in the big scheme of things? She could be inside in an interior room, hidden in a closet, and covered in Kevlar with a stun gun pointed at the door, and a bomb would still kill her.
“Maryse Robicheaux,” Mildred’s voice broke into her thoughts. “Get your skinny butt into this hotel.” Mildred stood in the doorway of the hotel, hands on her hips and a disapproving look on her face. “Why don’t you just stand in the middle of the street wearing a target on your back next time?”
As Maryse stepped onto the sidewalk, she heard the zing of something small and fast passing right by her head, then a crack of glass. She took the remaining two steps to the plate-glass window on the front of the hotel and looked eye level at a tiny hole that had pierced clean through the glass. A hole the size of a bullet.
Maryse jumped back from the window in horror as a second shot hit the brick building just above her head. In the split second she was trying to decide which way to run, someone slammed into her, half-shoving, half-carrying her into the entrance of the hotel. They landed on the hardwood floor of the hotel foyer, and Maryse struggled with the weight of the person on top of her, pummeling the attacker as much as she could given the restraint. She screamed for Mildred to call the police, when the weight lifted and she was yanked to her feet.