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Intrigued, I asked, “Terrified of what?”

“That she might have been wrong. Patricia can’t abide being wrong.”

I wasn’t sure she had been wrong a day in her life.

“I’m worried about Dylan,” I said softly. “None of this is fair to him.”

“He can handle what comes his way.” The rocking stopped. “But can you?”

I glanced at him.

He held my gaze. “Are you strong enough to let him hurt without feeling guilty about being part of what caused the pain? Because if a storm is brewing, he needs to know you’ll be there for him and not run away, thinking you’re saving him from even more agony.”

His words hurt, cutting to my soul.

Because I’d run before.

During our second attempt at getting married, I’d left Dylan standing at the altar and had literally run out of the chapel.

I bit my thumbnail. I didn’t want to lose him. I just didn’t want to be why he had broken ties with his mama.

Mr. Dunwoody’s rocking started up again. “The choices to be made now are yours, Carly Bell.”

My chest ached. “I know.”

We sat in silence for a stretch, and I began to wonder where Delia was. It had to be past eight at this point. It was much easier to think about her rather than the mucky mess my life was in.

When I heard a car coming down the street, I craned my neck. It wasn’t Delia, however. It was my aunt Eulalie. She swerved into her driveway, bumping over a curb and nearly taking out a holly bush in the process.

Driving was not her forte.

Eulalie parked, saw us and waved, and made her way over through the connecting gate between the yards. “Hidy-ho!”

We waved.

She carefully tiptoed through the grass so her heels wouldn’t stick into the ground, and nearly tripped when Louella lunged at her, her teeth aiming straight at Eulalie’s ankle.

“Yeee!”
Eulalie screamed, wobbling backward.

I dashed down the steps, grabbed Louella’s leash, and pulled her backward. “Down!” Louella didn’t listen to a word I said, intent on taking a chunk out of Eulalie. “Go on around,” I told my aunt. “I’ve got her.”

Eyes wide, Eulalie skirted around the dog and climbed the steps as fast as she could. Once she was on the porch, she pressed a hand to her chest and exclaimed, “What in tarnation!”

“Carly adopted a devil dog,” Mr. Dunwoody said, handing her his flask.

Aunt Eulalie unscrewed the top of the flask and tipped her head back. Giving her head a shake, she said, “Hooey! That stuff’s like to kill you.” Then she took another swallow and handed him back the flask. “Thank you kindly.”

I adjusted Louella’s leash, giving it a shorter range of motion. “She’s . . . special. You’re not looking to adopt a special kind of dog, are you?”

“Oh hell no.” She sat in the rocker I just vacated, adjusting her voluminous skirt and taking off a floral neckerchief. “I’ve done had it up to here with
special
. I’ve just come from the hospital to see Wendell Butterbaugh and he’s
specialing
all over the place. He was set to come home today, but he’s convinced the doctors that he’s dying, and they’re running every test known to man.”

Mr. Dunwoody laughed his tee-hee-hee.

She frowned at him.

“You volunteered, Eulalie,” he reminded her.

“I thought the heart attack would knock the weak constitution straight out of him, but all it’s done is made it worse. Lord-a-mercy. You don’t see Johnny Braxton acting like that, making a fuss over every little thing.”

Everything made sense now as to why Eulalie had volunteered to watch over Mr. Butterbaugh. She thought he’d be her Johnny. Johnny Braxton had a heart condition I’d diagnosed, but he hadn’t yet visited a doctor about it because he was a stubborn ass.

The Odd Ducks had an odd pact to always do everything as a trio. If one bought an inn, they all bought inns. It had been this way all their lives until Marjie bucked the tradition and started dating Johnny, while the other Ducks didn’t even have boyfriends. Aunt Hazel had since started dating mailman Earl Pendergrass, but Eulalie was still on the hunt and clearly feeling left out of her family dynamic.

“Johnny has his own issues,” I said.

“Am I on a cruise right now?” she asked. “No, I am not. I’m stuck here with a hypochondriac and I was almost attacked by a devil dog. I rest my case.”

Mr. Dunwoody started to laugh until she glared at him. He picked up his glass and took a long swallow, nearly draining the amber liquid.

“You have Mr. Dunwoody and me,” I said. “Plus, you know how Marjie gets motion sick. She’s probably having a terrible time.”

“You think?” she asked hopefully.

“Definitely.” She didn’t need to know I’d given Marjie a potion for seasickness before she left.

“That does make me feel better.” Standing up, she dusted herself off. “I best get going. I promised Wendell I’d bring him some slippers and an electric blanket. He’s chilly.” She rolled her eyes.

As we watched her sashay back to her place, another car came down the street, and I leaned forward to see if it was Delia.

It wasn’t.

“You expectin’ someone?” Mr. Dunwoody asked.

“Delia. We’re headed off to deliver Jenny Jane Booth to Opelika. And then we’re going to Auburn to meet up with Avery Bryan. I’m starting to think Haywood must be down there with her, too. I haven’t seen him since the fire.” I glanced Mr. Dunwoody’s way. “I’m pretty sure he’s her daddy.”

His eyes went round. “Well, if that don’t beat the band, I don’t know what does.”

Louella gave up her stoic stance and plopped to the ground, stretching out. “Her mama is Twilabeth Morgan. Do you know her? She and Haywood were married for a minute back in the late eighties.”

“Twilabeth? Sure thing. Prettiest little thing you ever did see, all big green eyes and curly blond hair. Smart as a whip. I always wondered where she’d gotten off to. She left town right after the divorce. I worried a fair bit about her over the years, hoping she was all right.”

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

He tapped his head. “She was fragile, up here. Went through a period of deep depression just before she met Haywood, as I recall. Tried to kill herself more than once. She took a leave of absence from her job as a secretary at the courthouse and ended up quitting altogether to enter an inpatient psychiatric program.”

How terrible. “What pain she must have been in.”

“She seemed better when she met Haywood, and it was a shock when they divorced. Most around here feared she’d fall back into a depression. Then she moved and no one ever knew what became of her.” He picked up his glass. “Is she living in Auburn, too?”

“I don’t know. All I know is she once owned the house Avery is living in.”

“You let me know what you find out, y’hear?”

“I will.” I glanced down the street again. No sign of Delia. “Do you know what Patricia might have to do with Twilabeth? She has strong feelings toward her, but won’t admit to any of them.”

“Patricia? Can’t say I do. They didn’t run in the same circles. Twilabeth was down to earth, and Patricia has always had her nose in the air. Twilabeth worked nine to five, and Patricia was busy with her committees and party planning. This was when Dylan was little, so she was busy with him, too.” He shook his head. “Are you sure about the energy?”

“Positive.”

There was definitely bad blood between them, and I hoped beyond hope that Avery Bryan would be able to tell me what it was.

Chapter Twenty-one

T
he reason why Delia had been late was a failure on our part to plan ahead how we were going to get Jenny Jane down to Opelika.

In a closed space like the car, her ghostly presence was entirely too close, which Delia had learned rather quickly this morning when she set off to drive to my house without the use of her right arm. Delia had struggled for half an hour to find a proper distance for Jenny Jane to follow that wouldn’t have Delia experiencing the symptoms of a stroke.

That distance was twelve feet, which explained why she was floating behind the car and not in it with us as we drove down I-65.

It would have been easy enough to just give her the address and tell her we’d meet her there, but as she couldn’t read, she couldn’t decipher street signs, and Opelika was so far away from Jenny Jane’s comfort zone it might as well have been Paris. She didn’t seem to mind flying behind us—in fact she had a big smile on her face.

It was an almost four-hour drive to Moriah Booth Priddy’s house including pit stops, and we were still a half an hour out. Elvis sang on the radio, and I was growing sleepy in the warm sunshine. If I couldn’t hibernate on All Souls’ Day, being on a road trip was the next best thing.

Delia glanced over at me said, “I think I found out what Idella Deboe Kirby is being blackmailed about.”

Suddenly wide awake, I turned to her. “What?”

“I started thinking about how you mentioned Idella’s letter had been postmarked from New Orleans and how Haywood’s had been postmarked from Auburn. The towns seemed like clues to me. If Hay was being blackmailed because of his daughter, and his daughter lived in Auburn . . . So I started looking into what kind of history Idella might have in New Orleans.”

I hadn’t even thought of the postmarks being clues. I wondered where the other letters had been postmarked from. Would the mayor’s be from Montgomery, because that’s where the casino was? Would Hyacinth’s be from Hitching Post, because that’s where she did the majority of her drinking? Patricia’s was too big a question mark to even hazard a guess.

“It took a while and a subscription to one of those genealogical Web sites, but I found that the name Deboe had been changed from de Bode sometime in the mid-twenties. When I plugged de Bode and New Orleans into a search engine, there were thousands of hits featuring the same subject.”

“You’re killing me. What?”

She grinned. “Susannah and Simon de Bode ran a high-class brothel in New Orleans’s red light district during the late eighteen hundreds and into the late teens, when the area was eventually shut down. They made a fortune.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. A
whorehouse
? Idella Deboe Kirby, one of the most elegant and high society women I’d ever met, had hailed from brothel keepers?

“Hardly blackmail worthy,” Delia was saying, “especially because brothels were legal back then, but I’m sure she’s terrified her sterling reputation will be sullied if it leaks out that all the expensive things she buys are a result of something so lurid. She gets bent out of shape if too much cleavage is showing.”

She did. Don’t get her started on tube tops and miniskirts, either. “That
is
quite the family secret, as Doc Gabriel alluded to.”

“Idella would sell her soul not to let that information get out. Personally, I think it’s terribly fascinating, and if it were my family’s history, I’d be using it as a conversation starter.”

“Right, because the whole magic thing isn’t interesting enough.”

She smiled. “Oh come on. The red light district in New Orleans? Think of the stories.”

I laughed, amused by her reaction and glanced out the window. We’d already talked about how Avery Bryan couldn’t be ruled out as a suspect in her father’s death because she might inherit the house. But what about the blackmail? Who was behind that? Was it the same person? Or were we looking at two different cases altogether?

“Dylan’s hoping to get a look at the financial documents of all the Harpies,” I said. “The blackmail is deeply personal. These are not secrets just anyone would know.”

“I agree. The blackmailer is someone who knows all of them well.”

“Doug Ramelle is convinced it was Haywood. Is it possible it was?” Hyacinth thought it was a ridiculous notion, but maybe Haywood had been good at keeping the truth from her.

“Anything is possible,” Delia said. “Where was Doug when Haywood was killed? He’s awfully quick to place the blame on someone who’s not around anymore to defend himself.”

“He was standing with my parents when it all happened.”

“You saw him there?”

“I saw him right before . . .”

“Right before? Or
when
?”