A long gray cloud wandered over the evening’s full moon, and she took a brief break to let her eyes readjust. She heard leaves crunch nearby. An animal, she assumed, probably a neighbor’s dog. There was another crunch. Then another. And Maggie realized that she wasn’t listening to an animal. She was hearing footsteps.
Maggie was no longer alone.
Chapter Three
Maggie froze, heart pounding. Should I scream? she wondered. No. Relax. It’s probably just a guest who can’t sleep. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself.
“Hello, who’s there?” She called into the darkness. “It’s me, Maggie Crozat. Is everything okay?”
The footsteps stopped. Then they resumed at a quicker pace, fading as whoever it was took off in the opposite direction. Maggie packed up her supplies and hurried home. She checked out the main house and outbuildings to see if the late-night visitor might be one of Crozat’s guests, but all was still in both buildings. She scurried inside her house, double-locked the door, and rested her ear against it, listening for any sound that indicated movement outside. There was a rustle of leaves, and Maggie tensed. She peeked out the front window and noticed Spanish moss swaying from a slight breeze. I must have heard the wind picking up the leaves, she thought. She waited in silence, but there were no more footsteps.
Maggie sat on the couch and tried to calm herself down. The event spooked her. Why would anyone be wandering around Crozat in the middle of the night? And if they weren’t “up to no good,” as Gran’ would say, why was there no response when she called out? Maggie fussed over these questions and more as she readied for bed. She checked to make sure her window was secured, crawled under the bed covers, and fell asleep clutching the gris-gris bag Lia had given her for protection.
*
Maggie woke up a few hours later to find that the weather was growing dark and moody. There was no way the day would pass without a storm, at least a brief one. She decided not to mention what had happened the night before to anyone. She didn’t want to worry her parents or Gran’.
The guests slowly assembled on the veranda for the tour of Crozat, yawning at the early hour and limiting their small talk to perfunctory greetings. The only no-shows were the Clabbers. Maggie debated skipping her hostess duty of checking on them, but guilt propelled her down the hall to their room. She could hear the sound of tandem snoring through the door, so she left the couple to their beauty sleep, although in this case the only thing beautiful about it was that it freed her from their company for a few more hours.
Maggie led her guests through the main house, sharing its history as they went. She was so used to giving tours at both Crozat and Doucet that she could cheerfully impart information while thinking to herself, as she was doing at the moment: How did I go from aspiring artist to plantation guide and maker of cheesy souvenirs?
She took everyone onto the front lawn for a panoramic view of the stately mansion. “Every side of the house has windows almost a full story high,” Maggie shared. “When all of them are open, they provide a cross breeze that I’m guessing saved at least a few of my ancestors from death by Louisiana mugginess.”
“I think I got a bad case of that myself,” Cutie Angela muttered. A stout woman bordering on obese, she wiped perspiration off her second chin before it dripped down to her third.
The group left Crozat’s manicured grounds and hiked through abandoned fields where the plantation’s slave quarters and sugar mill lay in ruins. The Crozats hoped to have the money to restore the plantation’s outbuildings someday, but given the cost of maintaining the buildings that still stood, someday seemed far off.
Maggie stopped in front of what appeared to be a miniature store. “This was the plantation store, which was built after the war. After the Civil War,” she added for Debbie’s benefit. “Postwar, a lot of former slaves returned to their plantations as tenant farmers, so some plantations set up stores where they could buy supplies more easily than going into town. As transportation improved, the stores disappeared. Crozat’s has been closed for eighty years.”
Maggie took a skeleton key and unlocked the store’s old door, which crookedly swung open. Everyone stepped into the space and gazed around the century-old time capsule with fascination. The interior was completely intact, down to a few old cans and other dust-covered items still on the shelves. A turn-of-the-century cash register sat on the counter waiting for what could only be a ghostly transaction at this point. After months of showing off the shop to visitors, Maggie had reached the point where, if she wanted to, she could close her eyes, point to a shelf, and rattle off its faded occupants with 100 percent accuracy.
“Fantastic,” Jan said. The other Cuties echoed the sentiment, as did all the guests.
“Oh, Boo Bear, I love it,” Emily Butler gushed. “Don’t you?”
“Totally, Boo Bear.”
Maggie took a moment to enjoy their reactions. Guests’ enthusiasm made her efforts worthwhile, especially if they translated into glowing reviews on a travel website. “I always like to finish up my tour here. Now, anyone besides me ready for breakfast?”
The whole group answered in the affirmative, so Maggie brought them back to the main house. Since the Georgia boys were heading off on a fishing excursion and the Ryker family on a swamp tour, Ninette packed their breakfasts to go. The Butlers—who would now forever be known to the Crozats as the Boo Bears—asked for breakfast in bed.
“I didn’t know that was an option,” grumped Hal Clabber, whose crabbiness had returned. He and Bev had roused themselves and were seated between Kyle and Jan, who Maggie had learned was the Cajun Cuties’ board president. While the other guests helped themselves to reasonable portions, Hal heaped his plate with pecan pancakes, scrambled eggs, andouille sausage, cheese grits, fruit, and Lia’s delicate croissants, clearly determined to squeeze every last breakfast item out of the complimentary buffet. Bev sported a slightly modified version of her husband’s plate. The couple’s eating habits are eating away at our profits, Maggie thought darkly.
“Everything is delicious,” Beverly said, smiling as always. Maggie wondered if she slept with that grin on her face.
“It’s predictable,” Hal declared. “I’m disappointed in the lack of creativity.”
Then stop stuffing your face with it, Maggie wanted to scream. Instead she said, “We’ll work on that.”
As soon as the guests finished breakfast and left the table, Maggie cleared it. She was about to return to the shotgun when she heard a timid voice behind her.
“Excuse me.” Maggie turned to see Cutie Debbie. “We were wondering if you’d like to come into town with us. We want to support the local businesses and perhaps you could fill us in on some of Pelican’s history on the way.”
Maggie decided to embrace the opportunity to remove herself from the Clabbers’ beck and call. “That sounds like a great idea,” she told Debbie and followed her to the Cuties’ van, where the rest of the group greeted Maggie’s addition to their numbers with great joy. She climbed into the front passenger seat of the van, and they took off.
As Jan drove the women into the village, Maggie pointed out the occasional landmark—like an old schoolhouse that still possessed a working bell and a white-columned Jesuit monastery almost two hundred years old.
“You see that alley of trees that ends in an empty field?” she said to the women as she gestured out the window toward the river. “That’s where another plantation once stood.”