“My mother is going to love this,” I said.
The ride to Whiskey Bayou took more than an hour because of the weather. The drizzle was heavy, and the clouds were gray and angry. It wasn’t supposed to get below freezing, but if it did the city would be shut down for days and the chances of finding Vince would be nil. The South didn’t do well with any kind of winter weather, and for Mother Nature to have extended it into March was just downright cruel.
But the time we got to Whiskey Bayou, we were all ready to claw our way out and save our sanity. Scarlet had fallen asleep again, and her snores were shaking the van along with Black Sabbath. The cabbie had been right. Sometimes it did sound like she was part of the band.
“Oh, now,” Suzanne said. “Isn’t this the most darling town. Cute as a damned button.”
“I tried to get you to come down here when we were in college, but you wouldn’t do it,” Rosemarie said.
“You weren’t exactly selling it to me,” Suzanne said. “And I don’t remember you hurrying home every weekend. You usually bunked with me.”
“You had better booze and a hot tub,” Rosemarie said.
We heard a thunk and the snoring stopped, so we all peeked into the back to make sure Scarlet was okay. She’d slipped off her seat onto the floor and Rosemarie was helping her back up.
“I feel better,” she said. “Nothing like a good afternoon nap. I always get sleepy after lunchtime.”
“Or after your midmorning whiskey and cake,” I whispered under my breath, but Suzanne heard me and chuckled.
“Bad Boys” started playing from somewhere in my bag, and I dug around, finding it on the very bottom while everyone else started singing along. I hesitated on whether to answer Nick’s call with everyone in the van, but I figured there was some unwritten marriage rule about ignoring your spouse’s calls. Especially when that spouse was a cop. The reality was in any given situation, it might be his last call.
“Hey,” I said, plugging my ear with my finger so I could hear better. “Are you in a tunnel? I can hardly hear you.”
“Are people singing?” he asked.
“You don’t want to know,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I caught a homicide,” he said. “I’m on my way to the scene. Just wanted to let you know I don’t know how late I’ll be.”
“Wow, that’s a nice welcome back to work, huh?”
“You’re telling me,” he said. “You feeling better?”
“In a matter of speaking,” I said. “I’m on my way to Mom’s. She thinks Vince ran off with another woman, and she’s freaking out a little.”
“That doesn’t sound like Vince,” Nick said.
“I’m guessing Mom thought that too until she found Angelica’s phone number in his pants pocket and hotel receipts.”
“Yikes,” Nick said. “Have fun with that. I’ll see you when I see you.”
“Ask him,” Rosemarie hissed.
“What?” I asked, confused. “Ask what?”
“About redecorating the house,” she said.
“Who are you with?” Nick asked. “It sounds like you’re at a party.”
“I guess you could call it that,” I said. “By the way, it’s a shame you didn’t stick around this morning to say hi to Scarlet. She’s going to stay with us for a while.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then he said, “There’s a lesson to be learned in there somewhere.”
“You think?” I asked. “Scarlet wanted cake for breakfast, so we drove into the city and stopped at Krazy Cakes. And it turns out Rosemarie’s new wedding planning business is right next door.”
“It sounds like you’ve had a busy morning,” he said.
“You have no idea.” I looked in the back seat and Rosemarie was still singing “Bad Boys” in her operatic soprano. “I was in the Audi, so when Mom’s call came in Suzanne volunteered her van so we could all go console my mother. We’re bringing her booze and cake.”
“So let me get this straight,” Nick said. “You, Scarlet, the cake lady, and Rosemarie are all in a cake van to go visit your mother?”
“That about sums it up.”
“She’s going to love that,” he said.
Suzanne was motioning for me to ask him about decorating the house, and I finally found the courage.
“Can I ask a favor?”
“After the morning you’ve had, you can ask for anything,” he said. “But do it quick because I’m almost at the crime scene.”
My palms were sweaty and I rubbed them on my leggings. Nick was a man. Which meant he didn’t like change, despite his assurance that I could ask for anything.
“I was wondering…”
“Yeah?”
“I was wondering if maybe it’d be okay to do some redecorating in the house,” I said in a rush. “You know, so it feels more like it’s mine too.”
Nick was silent for a few seconds. “Babe, the house is yours as much as it is mine. Do what you like. As long as I have a soft bed and the refrigerator doesn’t move, I’m good with it. With the way my job is, it’s not like I get to spend a lot of time there anyway. I’ve got to go. There are bodies in the yard, and the media is going nuts.”
“Fun,” I said. “Be safe.” And I hung up.
“What’d he say?” Rosemarie asked.
“He said the house was mine to do as I wanted.” Or at least that was close enough to what he said in my mind.
“I love a good house renovation,” Suzanne said. “I watch the shit out of Chip and Joanna. I can shiplap like nobody’s business.”
Suzanne kept oohing and ahhing over the cuteness of the town, and I tried to look at Whiskey Bayou through her eyes. I guessed the Welcome to Whiskey Bayou, The First Drink’s on Us sign and the cobblestoned roads were charming, and the railroad graveyard had a certain artistic sense to it that threw you back to a simpler time.
We didn’t have much of a downtown—a few specialty boutiques that came and went with the times and the Good Luck Café, which hadn’t gone anywhere in seventy-five years. Technically, the Walker Whiskey Distillery was in the dead center of town, which is what put Whiskey Bayou on the map, so to say, before prohibition. In a weird turn of events, Scarlet gave me the distillery as a wedding gift. I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do with it, but I’d had a couple of people ask to rent it out for their weddings, so Nick was looking into insurance and all the other adult things that came with owning property.
In normal towns, there would’ve been a courthouse in the middle of the town square, but since the distillery occupied that spot the courthouse faced directly across from it. The Methodist church was on another side of the square and then the fire station and police department rounded it out on the last side of the square.
My mother lived a block past the fire station on an old residential street that dead-ended into the bayou. The houses were all on double lots, so you weren’t too close to neighbors. My mom had grown up in the house, and the same families tended to stay in houses for generations and expand however they could. Whiskey Bayou was landlocked, and real estate wasn’t easy to come by.