Arsenic and Old Cake by Jacklyn Brady Read Free Book Online

stronger.

Five
    I got home a little after ten and spent the next three hours doing laundry and packing for the weekend. It wasn’t as easy to put together a wardrobe as I’d expected. I wanted to look good without appearing overly concerned about my appearance, but in the three years since Philippe and I separated, my wardrobe had suffered a slow, steady decline that matched exactly the deterioration of my social life.
    Or at least that had been the case until I moved to New Orleans last year. I’d been meaning to update the contents of my closet since, but had been too busy to do anything about it. While I considered and rejected a stream of T-shirts and tops that had been in style a few years ago, I toyed with the idea of calling Sullivan to let him know about my weekend plans. I even got as far as punching in his number a few times, but I always talked myself out of hitting send.
    It wasn’t that I wanted to hide the truth or that I felt guilty about my decision. Somebody had to help Old Dog Leg, and I’d been elected. And Sullivan was levelheaded and understanding about most things. But I had a few doubts about how he’d react to my plan for the weekend with Gabriel, and after the conversation I’d had earlier with Miss Frankie I wasn’t in the mood to defend my decision. I finally decided that it would be easier to let Sullivan know what I’d been up to after it was all over, and climbed into bed a little before 2 a.m. When my alarm went off five hours later, I dragged myself out of bed, wolfed down two cups of coffee and an Asiago cheese bagel with cream cheese while I waited for Gabriel to pick me up.
    The Love Nest turned out to be a sprawling old house that stretched out over a couple of lots on the West Bank. The central part of the house, which looked as if it had been built early in the twentieth century, was flanked by a couple of more recent additions. By recent, I meant sometime in the middle of the twentieth century.
    The freshly painted white clapboards and dark green shutters tried to make the building look cheerful, but its location in the heart of a depressed neighborhood gave it a downtrodden quality. It sat back from the street behind a patchy lawn, in the center of which stood two palm trees so bent by the wind that their trunks formed an off-kilter heart.
    Traffic was light for a Friday, so we got across the bridge faster than either of us had anticipated. It was half past noon when Gabriel parked at the curb. Check-in wasn’t until one, so we sat there for a few minutes watching the neighborhood stroll by. Or maybe stroll is the wrong word. The neighborhood surged past us, bounced past us, danced past us, with everyone moving to the beat of the music that seemed to be playing everywhere.
    A handful of musicians sat on one corner blowing the desultory notes of a jazz number on trumpets and a saxophone while only a couple of buildings away a driving hip-hop beat poured from the doors of a tattoo parlor. Two old men sat on the crumbling stoop of a barbershop, smoking cigarettes and watching the neighborhood through narrowed eyes. A few feet away several young women lounged against the side of a building, sharing a can of Coke as they kept an eye on toddlers playing on the sidewalk.
    Gabriel slid down on his tailbone and visibly relaxed. I felt my nerves winding tighter by the minute. I hadn’t given much thought to the area of town we’d be staying in, but now I wondered if we should have spent more time planning. “Maybe Dog Leg should have asked somebody else,” I said, breaking the silence. “You and I aren’t exactly going to blend in here.”
    Gabriel grinned and rolled his head to look at me. “Why? Because we’re white?”
    I grinned back. “Speak for yourself, gringo. Do you think they’ll believe that you and I picked this particular bed-and-breakfast for our honeymoon? I don’t want to make them suspicious right off the bat.”
    “You’re letting your nerves show,”