Resurrection in Mudbug

Copyright 2013 by Jana DeLeon

Published by Jana DeLeon

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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Chapter One

Maryse Robicheaux LeJeune polished off a truly excellent cinnamon roll and lifted her coffee to wash it down. She had just filled her mouth with the hot liquid when Helena Henry walked through the wall of the Mudbug Café and sat in the booth across from her. Before her mind could even process what she saw, her body reacted and she spit the coffee across the table, where it passed right through the smiling ghost.

“Are you all right?” the waitress asked.

Maryse nodded, attempting to look normal. “It just went down wrong.”

“Looks to me,” Helena said, “like it came
out
wrong.”

Maryse waited until the waitress walked away and glanced around the café to ensure that no one was within hearing distance. Then she leaned across the table.

“This is not possible,” she whispered. “You ascended a year ago. I saw you. We
all
saw you.”

“I know what you saw. I was the one doing the ascending.”

Maryse’s mind raced with possibilities that might explain the ghost in front of her, but all of them were horrible.

“Is someone going to die?” Maryse asked.

“How should I know?”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you weren’t at home. I stopped there first hoping to get a glance of the sexy Luc in some state of undress, but you were both already gone. So given the morning hour and knowing your lack of domestic abilities, I came here.”

Maryse clenched her hands and willed herself not to jump across the table and attempt to strangle the ghost, who was deliberately misunderstanding her. “Why are you back on
earth
, Helena? Why aren’t you in heaven?”

Helena shrugged. “It was boring, okay? And I might have done some things to make it more interesting.”

Maryse sucked in a breath. “What things?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Really? Because it sounds like that’s
exactly
the point.”

Helena rolled her eyes. “Is it my fault that God doesn’t have near the sense of humor you’d expect? I mean, he
did
put testicles on the outside.”

Maryse closed her eyes and started counting. Maybe if she counted long enough, she’d open her eyes and Helena would be gone. Maybe if she wished it hard enough, this entire episode could be classified as a temporary mental break that she’d learn to live with.

Please God, don’t do this to me.

“If you’re asking God for help,” Helena broke into her prayer, “I don’t think he’s going to comply if it means taking me back.”

Then something Helena said clicked with Maryse and she opened her eyes, a trickle of fear running through her. “How do you know where I live? We built that house after you left.”

Helena brightened. “Sometimes God let me watch you guys—you know, how parents plop their kids down in front of a movie to keep them out of their hair? Same concept.”

Maryse sighed. If God couldn’t handle Helena, she had no idea what he expected mere mortals to do. “I don’t want you back, Helena, nor the trouble you bring with you. Everything has finally settled down here in Mudbug. People are happy and there hasn’t been a single attempted murder since you left.”

Helena took on her indignant pout. “I did not murder anyone.”

“No, but everything seemed to center around you.”

Helena threw her hands up in the air. “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it. I’m here and I have no choice in the matter.”

Maryse downed the last of her coffee, wishing it were a shot of whiskey.

The peaceful existence she’d enjoyed for the last year was officially over.

Chapter Two

Jadyn St. James pressed the accelerator harder on her Jeep, causing her to bounce a good inch off the seat on the bumpy dirt road.  It was her first official day as game warden and only her second day ever in the tiny town of Mudbug, Louisiana, but apparently, she had a crisis to handle before she’d even unpacked her bags. At least, that’s how the sheriff’s dispatcher referred to the situation when she’d made a frantic call to Jadyn for help earlier. 

Jadyn attempted to find out exactly what she was driving into, but the distressed woman said she had to call the hospital and get a copter down there. Gripping the steering wheel with one hand, Jadyn looked at the rough map of the swamp that her cousin Maryse had drawn her the night before, and hoped she was headed in the right direction.

Tiny dirt roads snaked off in as many directions as the channels and inlets off the main bayou. One wrong turn and whatever crisis called for a helicopter might be over before she ever found the location. She took a hard right turn at a cypress tree split by lightning and hoped that she didn’t have to deal with a fatality her first day on the job. 

She’d only ever dealt with one fatality, and that one wasn’t work-related. In the back of her mind, she’d always known that death would be part of the job someday, but she hadn’t planned on facing her demons so quickly.

The dirt trail curved to the left and she rounded the corner, then slammed on her brakes, sliding to a halt right behind a truck with the sheriff department’s logo on the side. A collection of people lined the bank of the bayou, all of them shouting in panic. Still unsure what she was facing, Jadyn grabbed her pistol from the glove compartment and hurried to the bank to see what was up. 

It only took a glance to know this situation was way outside of her skill set.

The channel she’d been following ended in what could charitably be called a large pond. In the middle of the pond, half of a shrimp boat peeked up out of the murky water, but that wasn’t the cause for alarm. 

Around the shrimp boat bobbed floating plastic bags. From her spot on the bank, Jadyn couldn’t see what was in the bags, but it must be something worth risking your life for. All around the edge of the pond, men jumped into the alligator-infested water, trying to grab a floating bag before one of the prehistoric monsters grabbed them. 

Certain that Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries had no protocol for this, Jadyn did the only thing she could think of and rushed up to the edge of the bank and yelled at the men closest to her to exit the water. She might as well have been yelling into a vacuum. The men didn’t even acknowledge she was there, much less climb out. Instead, two men who’d grabbed the same bag started a fistfight. 

She yelled, a tug-of-war ensued, and the bag split in two, sending money scattering into the air. She grabbed at one of the bills as it fluttered near her and almost passed out—a hundred-dollar bill! What in God’s name was going on in this town?

She pulled out her pistol, prepared to take control, when a man’s voice sounded behind her.

“Sweetheart, I need you to step back from the pond. I’ve got enough to deal with. I don’t need you getting hurt trying to save your boyfriend or something equally as stupid.”

Sweetheart? 

She spun around to face the source of the voice and was momentarily silenced. The man before her was quite possibly the hottest guy she’d ever seen short of a movie screen. Even in jeans and T-shirt, she could see the size and flex of his muscles. His dark wavy hair was weeks past needing a cut, but somehow he made it look sexy instead of unkempt. He wore polarized sunglasses, so she couldn’t see his eyes, but something deep inside of her hoped they were green.

He called you sweetheart.

She frowned as she crashed back to reality. “I’m not your sweetheart. I’m the game warden. As this is the game preserve, this is
my
business, not yours, so I’m going to go ahead and ask
you
to step back from the water.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

She felt her back tighten. “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

He sighed. “Then you take one side of the bank and I’ll take the other. Those gators are napping right now, but if we don’t get these fools out of the water before lunchtime, it’s not going to be pretty.”

It wasn’t that she thought his idea lacked merit. It was that she had no idea why he thought he could bark orders at her like she was some lackey.

“And why should I listen to you?”

“Because I’m right and I’m the sheriff—Sheriff Colt Bertrand. I’m the one who called you for help. Well, not you specifically, because if I’d known…anyway, take the side to the left and do something—hell, flash them if you have to, but get them out of the damned water!”

He stalked off down the right side of the bank and she stared at him for a moment, before whirling around and heading the other direction. That was some condescending attitude. Clearly, the emergency in front of her rated her attention now, but as soon as this mess was handled, she would have a word with the sexist sheriff.

She walked up to the edge of the pond and yelled at some of the men to get out, even shouting her credentials, but they all pretended not to hear. Then she fired her weapon in the air, which got them to pause for a second, but as soon as she told them to get out of the water, they went right back to fighting and ignoring her. 

Another man came running down the bank and she leveled her gun at him, threatening to shoot if he didn’t stop. He ran right past her and bailed into the pond as if she were invisible. One glance at the back of the pond and her pulse spiked. The alligators were starting to stir. All of the thrashing about had gotten their attention and alerted them that an easy meal may be close by.

A rush of panic ran through her. If a significant portion of the Mudbug population were maimed or killed on her first day of work, it probably wouldn’t reflect well on her. Even if they were all idiots who’d asked for it.

They weren’t going to listen to reason. That much was obvious. And clearly, she wasn’t about to resort to a flashing debacle, as suggested by the no-account Sheriff Bertrand, so she took the only other reasonable option and started shooting.

An introverted personality and a significant lack of trust for people in general had left her a lot of free time, and she’d spent much of it at the gun range. Not a single shot out of her first ten went awry. Every single floating bag she targeted popped, then rapidly sank beneath the slowly swirling water. She never stopped once to consider what Sheriff Bertrand would say. Quite frankly, she didn’t care.

The men howled in horror and the fighting got more violent for the remaining bags, as she took out everything that wasn’t already in someone’s hand. The gators, who’d been contemplating an early snack, held their positions, either experience or some built-in defense letting them know that the sound of gunshots meant the possibility of a bad ending. 

When she sank the last of the bags, she stuck her nine millimeter in her waistband and watched as the men started wading out of the water, not willing to risk diving into the murky depths after the money.

“Nice shooting,” Sheriff Bertrand’s voice sounded beside her.

She looked over to see him grinning, thumbs hooked over his jeans pockets. 

“Are you going to arrest me now?” she asked.

“Why? You didn’t shoot any residents.”

“If they didn’t get out of that pond, I was going to start.”

The grin widened.

She stared at him and shook her head. How could someone appear so cocky and so relaxed at the same time? She’d expected him to be pissed at her choice; instead, he appeared amused. And that made her even madder.

“You could have helped,” she pointed out.

“Why waste my own bullets? You had it under control, and I have a touch of a hangover from my day off. I figured it was okay to sit back and watch the show.”

“I’m so glad I could provide you with some entertainment.”

“You stupid bitch!” A man’s voice sounded behind her.

She turned in time to see one of the swimmers running toward her, fist already cocked. Twenty years of martial arts training kicked in and she ducked before the hand could connect with her jaw, fully expecting the “moron” to tag Sheriff Bertrand.