donated to several charities that Eden knew of and spent hours every week trying to entice Eden to move in with her and Mary. She would buy them a three-story house in the Garden District, large enough that they could all have private suites.
“I can afford it,” she’d told Eden only last month. “You know I hit the adoption jackpot, and now that my mother and father are both gone, their money’s just sitting there, waiting to be spent.”
“But not on us,” Eden had countered. “Take a Mediterranean cruise, Lisa. Meet men. Flirt, dance, do something that doesn’t involve soil, fertilizer and root rot.”
“I love my garden, and I don’t know how to flirt.” She’d started to take Eden’s hand, but stopped herself as she invariably did. “I inherited a lot of money, Eden, more than Mary knows about or could ever finagle out of me.”
“Invest it then—and I don’t mean in a bigger house.”
“You don’t want to move, do you?”
“Not really. I like my place.”
“It’s very nice, but it’s so small. You can’t spread out or grow bushes or even many herbs. I know you’re used to tiny spaces because of where you lived in San Francisco…”
Which had nothing to do with anything as far as Eden was concerned. Amused, she’d replied, “I grew up in suburbia, Lisa, not the backwoods. My parents left their hippie groove before I finished grade school. My mother actually went back to college and got her degree in philosophy.”
“And now she’s a professor at LSU,” Lisa supplied.
“Was.” Eden had propped her chin in her hands and tried to figure out how many different kinds of flowers were in the vase on Lisa’s kitchen table. “She accepted a position at Florida State last fall, remember?”
“She moved away?”
For a moment, Lisa had appeared confused. That quality of losing her bearings had puzzled Eden ever since they’d met ten years ago. Mary called them day trips. Eden wondered if there might not be more to it than that.
She was thinking about Lisa as she unlocked the wrought-iron gate at street level and climbed the outer stairs to her apartment. Her sister had actually located their biological father. The why of it aside, Eden gave her credit for persistence. By all accounts, including that of their natural mother, the man had died years ago.
“It feels like a thousand degrees,” Mary complained. She’d removed her jacket and now wore only a faux-leather halter top with her tight pants and spiky heels. “Lisa could be in trouble up to her big green eyeballs, and—” Her own eyes widened. “Why on earth are your windows closed?”
“Because Amorin would jump out onto the porch. Then she’d dig up the courtyard garden or get hit by a car, and I don’t want either of those things happening to my cat, that’s why my windows are closed. The ceiling fans are on. But talk to me about Lisa, Mary. What did the police want from her?”
The question had a surly edge, Eden realized. Her experience with the New Orleans force as a whole hadn’t been good. With one member in particular, it had proved disastrous.
But that was a memory for another time—maybe twenty years from now.
It took three shoves, a kick and two thumps with her fist to open her apartment door. Thunder rumbled on the river, and for a moment after she touched the light switch, Eden thought the power was going to fail.
“Just what we need in Hemingway Central,” Mary muttered at her elbow. “A candlelight vigil.” At a look from Eden, she kicked off her shoes. “Yeah, I know, cut the chit-chat. What can I say? There’s background stuff, I suppose, but we both know whatever went down in that plantation graveyard, Lisa didn’t hit Burgoyne on the head and take off.”
Eden tried a second light. It flickered but stayed on. “Is she a suspect?”
Mary fussed with her hair. “She’s a person of interest at this point because, like I said, she’s the last person the cops know of who saw the guy alive. But that’s today, Eden. What happens if they can’t find anyone to pin his death on? It’ll come back to Lisa—or it could. Okay, we’d be talking circumstantial evidence, but Lisa says she didn’t think much of the guy the first time she met him, and I don’t get the impression she was any more enamored after the second meeting. She doesn’t have an alibi for the time of the murder, either, and I can’t give her one because I was out with friends.”
Eden struggled to digest everything as she turned on her temperamental air conditioner. “She met this man twice?”
“That’s what she says. I didn’t hear about either meeting until the cops showed up tonight. Anyway, my point is this. You know a few cops, right?”
“Don’t start,” Eden warned.
Mary tapped impatient fingernails on the tabletop. “Forget the past, will you? You do know some cops. You could get information.”
Eden could be stubborn, too. “Mary, the only cops I knew have either quit or been reassigned.”
“What about that prosecution lawyer you dated last year?”
“You want me to ask him to spy for us?”
“If necessary, yes. Look, I don’t think you’re clueing in here. This little scenario has the potential to go very bad, very fast.”
Circumstantial evidence…
Eden rubbed her temples. It was still hot in here. She really needed a new air conditioner. “Back up a little,” she suggested. “Did Lisa go to this plantation with—what was his name?”
“Burgoyne, Maxwell. She says no. They had dinner near Chalmette, or started to. He said something that ticked her off—which couldn’t have been easy since she’s virtually untickable—and she left. He followed her out. They got into their respective cars and drove away. Lisa went home. Maxwell went to the auction preview. Less than an hour later, someone slammed him on the head, and it was lights out for Mr. B.”
Unimpressed, Eden kicked her sister’s feet off the chair where she’d propped them. “Maxwell Burgoyne was a person, Mary, and he was murdered. You could try for a little compassion.”
“Why? Because he was our father?”
“Oh, no.” Eden swung around to face her. “No way was some stranger my father. You want to talk science and procreation, fine, but my dad, my real dad, had a ponytail until I was thirteen, which he cut off so I wouldn’t get bugged because he and my mother were going to chaperon my first spring dance.”
Because that same real dad had also died of cancer five years ago and Eden still cried when she thought about him, she halted her tirade there and forced her mind back to Lisa.
“Do the police have a murder weapon?” she asked after a pause.
Mary started to put her feet up again, caught Eden’s expression and shrugged. “I get the impression no. I think the sticking point is that several people in the restaurant where they ate heard Maxwell laughing—and not in a nice way, if you know what I mean. That’s why Lisa got upset and took off. You know how lame she is at hiding her feelings.”
“What did Maxwell do, professionally?”
“Businessman, big time.”
Eden leaned on the kitchen counter and stroked her white cat. “Powerful people tend to cultivate enemies,” she mused.
Mary snorted. “What was that you said about compassion? Oh hell, I hear a cell. Is it mine or yours?”
“Must be yours. My ring tone doesn’t sound like bad disco.”
“It’s Beethoven.” Mary dug the phone out of her shoulder bag. “What is it? I’m busy.”
If she hadn’t seen it happen, Eden wouldn’t have believed it was possible.