LITMIR.BIZ

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heard the gunshot. Who is he?”

      Nicki drew a deep breath and opened her eyes. The water was still smooth and green. Elephant ears still swayed in the barest of breezes, and clumps of bulrush still provided nesting areas for black-crowned night heron and red-tailed hawks. A smattering of low-lying fog clung to the opposite shore. You could count on the bayou, from moment to moment, from year to year. The only change from seconds earlier was a snowy egret that had dropped silently onto a cypress log lodged against the opposite bank. The bird was graceful and still, unlike anything in Nicki’s life.

      “I’m coming back as an egret in my next life,” she said.

      Toni chuckled. “Not me. I’m going to be a gator. Snap at anything that makes me see red. Course, I guess you’ve got that covered this go round.”

      A wry grin touched Nicki’s lips. “Smart mouth.”

      “Yeah, but I’ve got my bad points, too.”

      The egret took to the air, again without a sound.

      “He’s a Lyon,” Nicki said. “Scott Lyon.”

      “A Lyon? Oh, the big shots in the news. Some old lady ran off with the family fortune or something. Right?”

      Nicki had a moment of envy for the obliviousness that could still be one’s companion at eighteen. The world remained narrowed to one’s immediate concerns—a boy who looked good in his jeans, a weekend gig for the band you believed was your heart and soul, the certainty that you’d always be a size six no matter how many cheeseburgers you ate.

      “Something like that.”

      “You gonna find her?”

      “No.”

      “His brains you were blowing out, then?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Why? He looks cute enough from here.”

      Nicki restrained herself from looking. She didn’t have to. She could will Scott Lyon into her mind’s eye with a minimum of effort. He had changed since that day two years ago. His hair was short now, clipped so close to his head you couldn’t grab a handful. And it was mostly silver, even though he had to be about her age, which was thirty-four. He wore a tiny gold hoop in his left ear, the perfect size to hug his earlobe and no more. Strong bones formed his face, giving him a chiseled jaw and a square chin, high cheekbones and the nose from a statue by Michelangelo. His taut face was tanned to perfect gold, his eyes a smoky gray.

      Those eyes had haunted her for two years.

      She had been inclined to trust them two years ago when he’d burst into her chambers. Nicki usually trusted her instincts about people, and her instincts had told her Scott Lyon had no hidden agenda. He said he’d come to help her and he meant just that.

      Silly her.

      “I don’t like the Lyons,” she said.

      “Because they run the TV station that started all that stuff after Uncle David died of a drug overdose?”

      So maybe teenagers weren’t completely oblivious. Nicki felt the strongest urge to stalk away. But she did that a lot. So this time she stayed put.

      “That’s right.”

      “Dad said it was all true.”

      Nicki opened her mouth to say that Toni’s father was a straitlaced coldhearted son of a you-know-what, but she caught herself. Uncle James might indeed be a little chilly where emotions were concerned, but he was still Toni’s father. Besides, Nicki was well aware that some of her younger cousins considered her to be a straitlaced coldhearted you-know-what herself. They didn’t understand.

      Maybe she didn’t understand Uncle James.

      “True or not,” she said, “I wasn’t crazy about having it pointed out to everybody in the city that my father was a drug addict who raised his daughter as a street performer.”

      She flinched just saying it out loud. Giving voice to the words was her way of declaring that the truth had no power over her. Maybe someday, if she said it enough, it might be true.

      “It’s not like anybody was going to blame you because Uncle David was, you know, sick. And a lousy father.”

      Nicki glanced at Toni. Her young cousin was a Reynard, from the top of her mane of wild red hair to the tips of the toes she had shoved into a pair of size-ten snakeskin boots dyed red and purple. She also had the kind of husky throbbing singing voice that could give a saint a hard-on, a body the far side of Marilyn Monroe and an outspokenness saved from insensitivity only because she was always on target.

      Nicki would have given the dimple in her chin to be more like Toni. But she knew full well that wasn’t going to happen. She was what she was.

      “You’re a singer,” she said to Toni. “Dysfunctional’s trendy in the entertainment world right now. It doesn’t play as well for family-court judges.”

      “Not good for people to get the idea their family-court judges are human, huh?”

      Nicki felt her anger rising all over again. What was she thinking, trying to have a conversation about the darkest demons of her life with an eighteen-year-old? “Go to hell.”

      Toni chuckled. She didn’t have a temper, either. Some women had it all, Nicki thought. The rest of them got the leftovers. “Yeah, probably. But not right away, if it’s all the same to you.”

      “I’ll buy your ticket myself if you leave today and get off my back.”

      Then they were both laughing. Nicki could almost forget that her Maman Riva, the closest thing she’d ever had to a responsible parent in her entire life, was consorting with Scott Lyon. The same Scott Lyon who had pointed a television camera at her face while one of his colleagues asked questions about the secrets she hid in the darkest corner of her soul. She could almost forget that he had found her hideaway, the place she’d gone to lick her wounds when the world found out that Judge Nicolette Bechet was not perfect.

      She could almost forget that traitorous moment today when she’d felt a thrill at the sight of him.

      “Come on,” Toni said when their laughter subsided. “I’ve got to take Mom to her shrink today. If you come with me, I won’t be tempted to draw mustaches on all the photographs on the covers of Psychology Today in the waiting room.”

      “I’ve got work to do,” Nicki protested. “If I don’t—”

      Toni stood. “Looks like he’s going to be here awhile.”

      Nicki glanced toward the house. The lemonade pitcher was out. His chair was edged close to Riva’s, their foreheads almost touching as they talked. He did, indeed, look as if he was settling in.

      “She’s probably convinced him to wait you out.”

      Nicki didn’t relish a battle of wills with her grandmother.

      “My truck’s at the cabin,” Toni said. “We won’t even have to go up to the house.”

      “Deal. I’ll help you with the mustaches.”

      

      THEY WERE GONE all day. The look of shock on Aunt Cheryl’s face when she saw Nicki’s overalls and ball cap made the decision worthwhile. And at dusk, when Toni pulled into Cachette en Bayou’s back driveway and parked near the cabin, Nicki took satisfaction in knowing she’d managed to outmaneuver the Lyon family once again.

      Dinner had already begun on the back terrace. Nicki heard the talk and saw the flicker of candlelight when she tramped through the overgrown path from the cabin, along the swamp’s edge, toward the house. Thank goodness that at Cachette en Bayou there was no need to dress for dinner. As she approached the shadowy terrace, she pulled off her ball cap and ran her fingers through her hair. She could smell the étouffée and her mouth began to water. Her cousin T-John must have rolled in this afternoon. T-John,

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