Free Bayou Nights by Julie Mulhern Page A

than lovely. She couldn’t be seen like this. “Absolutely not.”
    “Then I’m spending the night at your house.”
    He was mad, crazy as a loon. Now she was sure of it. “Why?”
    “We just went over that. Zombie. Possessed mob. God knows what will be next.”
    “I mean, why do you care? This”—her free hand rose to the chain around her neck—“entails far more than tracking my father.”
    He stared down at her. “You need someone to help you.”
    That was either sweet or patronizing. Tired, in pain, and a mess, she was inclined to go with patronizing. Her shoulders tensed.
    “I’m not leaving you alone.” His face looked like hewn stone.
    “Are you helping me because of the treasure?”
    “No!” His voice was too loud. It rose above the sounds of carriages rumbling over cobbles, over the drunken humming of three men— Congo Love Song ? Perhaps. They were so drunk it was hard to tell. “No,” he repeated at a lower pitch.
    Mr. Mattias I-cannot-tell-a-lie Drake was a liar after all. He might not care about acquiring the wealth but the search for it—the puzzle—fascinated him.
    She primmed her lips and lifted a disbelieving brow.
    “I’m not leaving you alone.” He looked down at her ankle, which throbbed its displeasure with her perambulation, then hailed a hack and loaded her into it.
    Sitting next to her, he seemed too close, claimed too much space. It was like sitting next to a boulder, a warm boulder that smelled of bay rum cologne. She scooched away. “We need a plan.” She scooched even farther. “For tomorrow.”
    “A plan?”
    She nodded. “You heard Major Haywood. He was surprised Daddy won. Dominique Youx lost that card game on purpose.”
    “There’s no way to be certain of that.”
    She suppressed a bitter-as-chicory laugh. “Oh, I’m certain. Daddy never wins.”
    “Then why does he play?”
    “He can’t help himself. It’s like a sickness.” A sickness that had broken her mother’s heart, ruined their family, and cost Warwick his life. “Believe me, he never wins.” She stared at her hands that held the remnants of her skirts together. “You’d think dying would make it better, but no.”
    “How did he die?”
    “He was shot over a gambling debt.” The tone of her voice forbade further questions.
    “What happened?” Of course he’d ignore the warning signs in her voice.
    “He used collateral he didn’t own.”
    “Oh?”
    “I inherited it from my mother’s mother.” The words came too fast, like water rushing over a spillway. Why was she telling him so much? She never talked about this.
    “He lost something that belonged to you?”
    She didn’t trust her voice. She nodded then turned her head toward the window, hiding the tears that filled her eyes.
    “Obviously you didn’t give it to him.”
    How could she? She shook her head.
    “And then he was murdered?”
    “Shot.”
    “And you feel guilty.”
    Of course she did. Anyone would. But losing the house on Royal would have left her homeless.
    The granite of his expression softened to limestone. “If your father hadn’t lost everything, you wouldn’t be a milliner.”
    Probably not.
    “You’d be married to someone with a last name like Gautreaux or Durand or Dubois.”
    She didn’t argue.
    “You wouldn’t be you.”
    “ Fifolet down there.” The driver’s panicked voice carried through the open window. The hack rolled to a halt. “It’s right in front of your stop.”
    Christine leaned back against the seat and sighed deeply. “We can’t go to my house.”
    Drake leaned his head out the open window. “What is a fifolet ?”
    Why had Zeke sent a man with no knowledge of New Orleans to help her? What he didn’t know could get him killed.
    “Legend has it when a pirate buried his treasure, he murdered a member of his crew and threw the body into the ground with the treasure chest. It bound the dead man’s spirit to the treasure. The spirit becomes a fifolet .”
    “So it knows where