Trouble in Mudbug (Ghost-in-Law, #1)(9)

She cautiously moved into the water, hoping she wasn’t stepping on anything dangerous. As it took her weight, her foot sank into the mud up to her calf. She tugged on the foot to remove it from the vacuum created by the mud hole and took another step with the same result.

By the time she got to the bank, one shoe was missing—lost forever to a bayou sinkhole—and the other was so full of the stinky, gooey muck that it felt like her leg weighed a hundred pounds. She flopped onto the bank and groaned when she felt the jolt through her head.

“Ouch,” she said, and gently rubbed her forehead. There was definitely a knot, but a quick body inspection didn’t reveal anything bleeding profusely. Just minors cuts and what would probably develop into some lovely bruises over the next couple of days. She looked over at her truck and sighed. The water was over the hood now and pouring into the cab. Definitely a total loss. Her insurance rates were going to go through the roof.

What in the world had happened? She’d just had her truck in for its scheduled maintenance a couple of weeks before. If there had been a problem with her brakes, the dealership would have let her know. Hell, if there had been a problem with the brakes, the dealership would have been delighted to charge her more money.

She tugged her cell phone from her wet jeans pocket, but it was just as she’d feared—totally fried. Looking back at the road, she considered her options. It was probably five miles or more back to her cabin, which put her around two miles from the office. Maybe Sabine could give her a ride into New Orleans. She pushed herself up from the ground, swaying for a moment as the blood rushed to her aching head.

Unbelievable. She’d totaled her car and had a raging headache, and she hadn’t even had the pleasure of being drunk to accomplish it. Disgusted, she shot one final look at her sunken truck and stepped onto the road with one muddy tennis shoe and one muddy bare foot. The gravel immediately dug into the sensitive skin on her bare foot, and she grimaced. All this and then a will reading—probably complete with a ghost.

The day just kept getting better.


Luc pushed his Jeep faster down the gravel road to the office. He had planned on arriving early, hoping Maryse might make a stop in before her appointment in New Orleans, but a faulty alarm clock put him thirty minutes later than he had hoped. He tried to tell himself that his desire to catch Maryse at the office was part of the case, just doing his job, but the truth was the woman intrigued him.

How in the world had such an intelligent, attractive woman allowed herself to get hooked up with the likes of Hank Henry? It simply boggled the mind.

As he approached a large curve in the road, sunlight glinted off something ahead of him, and he squinted, trying to make out where it was coming from. As he neared the turn, it was all too clear. Maryse’s truck was buried in the bayou just off the curve, the sun bouncing off her side window.

He slammed on his brakes and threw his Jeep in park before it had even come to a complete stop. Panicked, he jumped out and rushed to the edge of the water, trying to make out whether a person was inside the truck, but he couldn’t see a thing. He was just about to wade in when he saw a trail of flattened marsh grass followed by muddy footprints.

Thank God. Maryse had definitely made it out of the truck. His tension eased a bit now that he knew she was alive, but then his thoughts immediately turned to injury. The truck was totaled, and any number of things could have happened to Maryse during the wreck or wading through the bayou afterward.

The office was a couple of miles away, and since he hadn’t passed her on his way from town, he had to assume she’d started walking in that direction. He rushed back to his Jeep, threw it in drive, and tore down the road to the office, scanning the sides of the road as he went, just in case she’d stopped to rest, or worse, collapsed.

He’d gone about half a mile when he rounded a corner and saw her walking on the road ahead of him. She turned around to look, and the relief on her face was apparent, even from a distance.

“I thought I’d scared you away yesterday,” she said, as he pulled up beside her.

Luc shook his head. “I love a challenge. I thought I’d head in to the office early—practice putting the seat down on the toilet.”

“Well, three cheers for work ethic,” she said. “I was beginning to think I’d be walking the rest of the day.”

He stepped out of the Jeep and gently gripped her arm with one hand, checking her up and down. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

“I’ll be okay,” she said. “I banged my head on the steering wheel, so I have an enormous headache, and walking on a gravel road with a bare foot wasn’t exactly fun. But I don’t think there’s anything serious.”

He reached up to her face and moved her bangs to the side. She definitely had a goose egg, and from the size of it, he didn’t doubt the severity of her headache. It was going to take more than Tylenol to fix this one.

“What happened?” he asked.

Maryse shrugged. “I don’t really know. The brakes just failed, and I couldn’t make the turn.”

Luc felt his heart beat a little faster. “Have you had the truck serviced lately?”

“Yeah, that’s the weird thing. I just had it in for a sixty-thousand-mile service. They checked everything.” She paused for a moment. “Or at least they said they did.”

Luc nodded, trying to keep his facial expression normal, but his senses were on high alert. This accident sounded fishy. “We need to get you to the hospital,” he said. “Someone should take a look at that knot. Just to be safe.”