Chapter 2
Two
“What happened?” I asked, already scanning Allison for blood, broken bones, or evidence she’d been attacked by an angry ghost.
“My laptop won’t connect to your WiFi and I have chapters I have to send to my editor within the hour or she is going to think I have abandoned the manuscript entirely.
I cannot have that conversation again, Harper, I simply cannot.
” Allison pressed a hand to her chest like she might actually faint.
I had braced myself for so much worse. A fellow guest falling out a window. A poisoning of the welcome chocolates. The ice for the mint juleps being melted. That’s what happens when your bed and breakfast is known as Murder House. You expect the worst.
“That’s an easy fix. I’ll take care of it for you right now. The house router resets if you unplug it and plug it back in. It lives in the hall closet under the stairs. Very high tech operation I’m running here. Feel free to reset it yourself if it goes out again and I’m not around.”
“Would you mind showing me exactly how to do it? Technology and I have a complicated relationship.”
I led Allison to the closet, unplugged the router, counted to ten out loud like I was playing hide and seek, and plugged it back in.
“You’re a lifesaver,” Allison said, already typing furiously on her phone while we waited for the little blinking lights to stabilize.
“So you’re on a deadline for the new book?” I had no idea how that sort of thing worked. It seemed like such a cliche that writers were always frazzled and on a deadline but there must be some truth to it.
“Yes. It’s due in September and I’ve barely started. I have twelve months of writing to fit into five.”
“That sounds unfortunate.” I shut the closet door. “What’s the book about?”
“It’s set in New Orleans. A fictionalized Garden District family, several generations, several scandals. Evelyn has been extremely helpful with research.”
I wasn’t sure if that was sarcasm or amusement. Allison’s expression was hard to read.
“Evelyn seems like she would be a stickler for accuracy.”
“Not in this case.”
Definitely amusement. The sort of I-have-a-secret look on Allison’s face gave it away.
“That sounds interesting.”
“It’s all a nightmare,” Allison said cheerfully, and went back to her phone. “I should have been a true crime writer. So much more straightforward.”
“But bloodier,” I commented. “I should know.”
“Why is that?”
“I co-host a true crime podcast with my best friend, Murder Maggie.” It was a morbid nickname but not the worst the internet had called Maggie, unfortunately. Everyone had an opinion.
The nickname had stuck and Maggie didn’t mind it.
I would hate it, but fortunately for me, even though Homicide Harper was an obvious pairing to Murder Maggie, no one seemed to have thought of it. Yet.
“You do? Fascinating! I’ll have to pick your brain. I’ve been noodling with the idea of writing a time travel novel. I could have the contemporary female protagonist be a true crime podcast host. Then she gets sucked back into a series of serial murders from the Victorian era.”
“I would read that book all day long,” I told her, truthfully.
“I need to flesh this out,” Allison said, rushing upstairs, her phone held up in front of her. “Siri, make a note. True crime podcast, set in San Francisco. Victorian era. No, right after the great fire when chaos overtook the city. A perfect setting for a predator.”
I nodded, approving of the idea. My guests this weekend were proving to be more entertaining than I had originally assumed. “Why do I feel like Taylor and Allison would make a great couple?” I asked Teddy, who was sprawled dramatically across the kitchen floor in a patch of afternoon sun.
He rolled onto his back in response, which I chose to interpret as agreement, and possibly a request for a belly rub, which I obliged.
What was setting out the Happy Hour hors d'oeuvres compared to quality time with my favorite skunk?
Reginald popped his head into the kitchen. “What’s this I hear about mint juleps? Taylor has brought out his own Bourbon batch. If you have the fixings I can play bartender. Always fancied myself a bit of a liquid architect as well.”
I would have sworn on Aunt Odette’s grave that Teddy rolled his eyes at the expression ‘liquid architect.’
“To the parlor, then,” I said, with a practiced smile.
Tomorrow night, there would be champagne flutes and the soft glow of candlelight beneath the magnolias at Belle Rêve Manor. One of the most powerful women in the Garden District would be toasted.
I would wear a dress that would make the blue “bread baking” dress I had on look like a casual rag—even though I normally wore jeans and T-shirts—and accept my legacy membership into the Society.
But tonight we were what sounded like the start of a joke. Four guests, an innkeeper, and a skunk walked into a parlor…
Vivienne took a picture of me the second I rounded the corner.
“Nice dress,” she said, lowering her camera.
After a friendly and uneventful evening, the next morning arrived with roughly four hundred percent more humidity than I had any interest in dealing with.
It was time to face facts—I had to ice my coffee.
Which had me in mourning for my hot java, but there was too much to do to grieve for long.
Sucking on my iced coffee through a straw in a steel tumbler, I spent the better part of the day running the B&B equivalent of a military operation.
Beignets, coffee, and orange juice out for breakfast, fresh towels, extra ice in the parlor cooler, and a covert dusting of the first floor, all while keeping half an ear tuned to the comings and goings of my guests.
Reginald spent most of the morning on the front porch with a folding easel and a sketchbook, apparently rendering the exterior of Midnight House in painstaking architectural detail, muttering to himself about window proportions. I peered over his shoulder at one point.
“Wow, that’s fantastic,” I said, enjoying the vision of Midnight House sketched out in charcoal. He was talented.
Reginald jumped. “Good Lord, Harper. You scared me half to death.”
I hadn’t exactly been quiet in my approach. I wondered if Reginald was a little bit hard of hearing. Either that or he had been so focused he hadn’t registered the floorboards creaking when I had walked. “My apologies. I just thought the sketch was lovely.”
He grunted, so I watered the ferns in the planters as Taylor arrived back at Midnight House, smelling faintly of bourbon and looking pleased with himself. I couldn’t even fathom drinking bourbon at noon but Taylor clearly loved the drink.
“Out testing your own or checking out the competition?” I asked.
“Both. It’s a calling,” he told me as he tottered up the porch steps. “Sort of like the priesthood.”
“Not quite the same,” Reginald said, not looking up from his sketch, his pencil moving rapidly.
Oh, so he heard that but not me? Interesting.
Taylor was undeterred. “It just whispers in your ear one day that you’re meant to distill spirits. Greatest day of my life.”
“I felt that way when I first picked up a camera at three years old,” Vivienne said, wandering onto the porch to take photos of my ferns and the rivulets of water running down the slanted floorboards.
Nothing in Midnight House was plumb.
Arguably, not even me.
“I bet you feel that way about this house,” Reginald commented.
Did I? There were days I would agree with that. Other days when the air conditioning refused to work or when my booking software showed nothing but empty rooms I wasn’t so sure.
“You can definitely say that this career found me, not the other way around,” I agreed, heading back into the house.
Allison had stayed largely cloistered in Room Two all day once we resolved her WiFi issues. She emerged now to request a glass of wine and to ask if I had a printer.
“No, sorry, I don’t.” I’m not sure I had ever printed anything in my entire life.
I had once heard that was a generational divide.
Allison certainly seemed horrified. “Well, where do I print something?”
“The library, I guess?” I honestly had no idea.
“You really should have a business center,” she chided. “I bet your competition does.”
I couldn’t argue with that because I had no idea who my competition was. I had been too busy trying to stay afloat to investigate other B&Bs in the area, though now I was suddenly curious.
I texted Maggie.
You love research and you love me. Do your thing and see how many B&Bs are in the Marigny and the Bywater and if they suck or not. Do they have business centers? Oh, and are haunted.
They’re all haunted. Or claim to be. But sure, on it. Though no one has a business center, I can guarantee it. Why the sudden interest?
If being a B&B owner is my calling I should be serious about it.
I wasn’t convinced it was my calling but I should at least listen for the whisper.
By six that evening, all the guests had assembled downstairs, gussied up and gala-ready, and even I had managed to snag enough time to put on makeup with my own gown. I herded them out to the rented shuttle van idling at the curb.
It was an unglamorous white seven-passenger number that I’d rented because I’d learned my lesson the hard way about trying to book ride shares in New Orleans.
Sometimes they showed up. Sometimes they didn’t.
Sometimes they showed up smelling like shrimp.
Other times they showed up smelling like Snoop Dogg had smoked seven blunts in the backseat.
There was just no telling.
A van ensured all my guests departed and arrived at the gala at the same time so no one could claim they had gotten unfair treatment.
Ask me how I knew that could happen.
I was still mentally processing the haranguing I’d received from a Loyola Mom who threatened me to within an inch of my life if she was late to her daughter’s graduation ceremony.
The whole experience had been made worse by the fact that I had just inherited the inn and had no idea what I was doing.