LITMIR.BIZ

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you hear?” She surreptitiously dropped a warm biscuit in the vicinity of Milo’s tan-and-gray nose. “You get old, nobody pays you no mind. This is the problem. My problem. Her problem. I try to keep my family in line, nobody pays me mind. She disappears, nobody pays her no mind.”

      Riva was still obsessing over the disappearance of Margaret Lyon, the revered matriarch of the Lyons of New Orleans. Every morning since the story had broken in the Times-Picayune a month ago, Riva couldn’t wait to read the latest details. The Lyons seemed to hold some kind of special fascination for her, as if they were royalty.

      The Lyons themselves certainly seemed to think so, Nicki thought. But it annoyed her that her own grandmother should have such skewed thinking. Didn’t she remember it was the Lyons and their TV station that had smeared the Bechet name, ruined her career?

      Riva may have forgotten, but Nicki definitely had not.

      “Perhaps you should stay in town with James and Cheryl while we do the electrical work, Maman,” Nicki said, instead of what she was thinking.

      “You’re wanting, I think, to run me off my farm.” Riva didn’t look up from the newspaper. “See here, now, those Lyon scoundrels file junk in the court. They try to steal her TV station. Lord-a-mercy, is a great lot of peril in growing old.”

      Junk in the court. Nicki supposed her grandmother meant an injunction of some kind. When it suited her, Riva could be so Cajun she was almost unintelligible to the rest of the world. Riva was sharp, had always run the Bechet family like a benign dictator. Papa Linc Bechet had been no match for her. Even Riva’s two surviving children, Nicki’s aunt Simone and uncle James, couldn’t get her to budge once she’d made up her mind. They kept trying to persuade her to move into town, sell the old farm or, better yet, let them run it.

      That was usually when Riva lapsed into dialect and stared at them as if she’d never heard a word of proper English in her life.

      The same way she’d been acting for the past six months whenever Nicki tried to have a reasonable conversation with her grandmother about Cachette en Bayou Farm. Riva didn’t want to fix up the farmhouse, which was crumbling around the edges. She didn’t want to sell. She just wanted things to be the way they’d always been. At least that was what Nicki concluded. Maman would not discuss it, so it was virtually impossible to know with any certainty what the eighty-four-year-old woman’s motives were.

      “We need to talk about the house, Maman. It’s not going to be habitable for the next week. You should—”

      A football landed in the huge pottery bowl of cheese grits. Gasps and giggles and groans broke out, along with howls of outrage aimed at the skinny twelve-year-old future pro quarterback, who should have been in school in the city.

      “Why you not in school?” Beau demanded.

      “They probably don’t want him around, either,” Tony said.

      “Now you leave my Jimmy boy alone.” Riva waved off the comments. “Come here, Jimbo. Give an old lady a thrill.”

      The sheepish adolescent gave her a hug. Nicki supposed her youngest cousin was currently in residence at the farm because his mother was having another of her famous migraines. Nicki suspected what incapacitated her uncle James’s society wife had more to do with bourbon than migraines, but she certainly wasn’t about to say so. Nor would anyone else in the family.

      Then again, the Bechet family was enough to produce a headache, that much she could vouch for.

      “Maman—” Nicki made another attempt “—if you stay with James for the next week, you can help out until Cheryl gets back on her feet, Jimmy wouldn’t miss any school and—”

      “You must find Mrs. Lyon.”

      Nicki tried not to grind her molars. “Maman, the Lyons do not need my help finding anyone.”

      “Oh, but yes. I am thinking they do.”

      “Besides which, I am not remotely interested in helping the Lyon family.” The volunteer work Nicki did was dear to her heart. She did searches for people, usually on behalf of adopted children looking for their birth parents. She did it because she knew from personal experience what it felt like to be abandoned.

      She did not do it for millionaire families whose toughest decisions centered around whose life to ruin next.

      Riva folded the newspaper neatly and clasped her hands on top of it. “Good. This is decided.”

      “No, it’s not decided!”

      Nicki realized from the silence following her words that she must have raised her voice. Raising one’s voice to Maman Riva was not recommended. Nicki strove to sound reasonable.

      “Maman, I have work to do. Renovation work here at the farm—”

      Riva shook her head. “Not necessary.”

      “It is unless you want the place to fall in on top of you.”

      Riva looked around, seemed to consider that possibility. “The boys have their cabin. Simone, she and John are settled. James and Cheryl, they have a big fancy house.” Riva shrugged. “You, you might find a nice man yourself if you had noplace to go. Me, I am old. If it falls on my head, I go on to heaven. Better than this mean old world, where old women disappear and not a body cares.” She reached over, patted Nicki’s hand and smiled the smile no one could resist. “You help find Margaret Lyon, that’s a good girl.”

      “They haven’t asked for my help.”

      “So you go to them.”

      Nicki stared at her grandmother. Riva seemed to have forgotten just who had caused all the upheaval in the Bechet family two years earlier. Nicki would be just as happy if this morning’s headline reported that the entire Lyon family had been sentenced straight to hell with no chance for parole. But she couldn’t say that to her grandmother.

      “I have too many search projects already. I—”

      “You do good jobs for people,” Riva interrupted, still smiling. “You will do a good job for the Lyons.”

      Nicki heard the rattle and chug of the pickup truck belonging to the couple helping with renovations. She stood. “This discussion is over. I have work to do.”

      Riva stood and began collecting empty plates. “You call the Lyons. Make your grandmother happy.”

      Nicki was accustomed to the fact her grandmother never played fair. Well, let her think she’d won. Nicki had real work to do.

      SCOTT LYON LEANED against the wall closest to the conference-room door, one foot propped on an empty chair, his arms crossed tightly over his chest.

      He ought to resign from the station.

      Hell, he ought to resign from the family.

      The morning editorial meetings at WDIX-TV were wearing him down. These days the time was rarely spent assigning stories and scheduling tapings, as it should be. Instead, the meetings disintegrated into bickering as everyone jockeyed for control. He should be used to it by now; it had been this way in the Lyon family all his life. He’d been weaned on his father’s bellyaching that he’d been robbed of his inheritance, a victim of greed and unfairness. Now, thanks to Aunt Margaret’s disappearance and the injunction filed by Scott’s three older brothers—Jason, Raymond and Alain—the ugliness simmering beneath the surface for as long as Scott could remember had exploded to the surface.

      Jason, the sales manager at the station, had obviously made it to the conference room first this morning. He occupied the chair at the head of the table, a seat usually reserved for the news director. But the news director wasn’t family. To hear Jason and Alain tell it, even family wasn’t family these days.

      “We don’t need to be covering that,” Jason said now about a press conference for a beleaguered city official whose career was drowning in scandal.

      The city official was a buddy of Alain, the oldest

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