Chapter Seven
I’ve let that fade away for the most part, but apparently the First Baptist Church of Piedmont, Mississippi, hadn’t forgotten because they’d booked early this year, and I’m a sucker.
I’m heaving a mighty sigh of relief as their van bumps off down the gravel-and-shell road when August suddenly appears at my side.
“Have to say, until this trip, I never realized that innkeepers should be considered for sainthood, but watching you deal with that crowd? You should probably start polishing the halo now.”
I laugh, closing the front door with one hand and pushing my sweaty hair back from my forehead with the other.
It doesn’t seem to matter that I grew up in this very building—every summer, the heat catches me by surprise.
I keep telling myself it’s not any worse than usual this year, but each morning, the air feels heavier than the last.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” I tell him. “We had a bachelorette weekend three years ago that turned my hair completely white. This?” I point to my head. “Very expensive dye job.”
Now it’s his turn to laugh, his eyes crinkling. He’s wearing a white T-shirt this morning, setting off the deeper tan he’s acquired since he got to St. Medard’s Bay, and my stomach gives a pleasant little swoop.
“Well,” he says, putting both hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels, “I’m sure you want to face-plant into the nearest margarita after all that, but I was wondering if now might be a good time for that interview. And we can multitask and grab lunch while we do it.”
Between visiting my mom, the shock of learning Edie’s background, and the general chaos of the church group, I’d never gotten around to talking to August like I’d promised, and even though I know there are a million other things I should be doing, I find myself nodding.
“Yeah, sure, let me just tell Edie I’ll be out for a little bit. ”
I find her in the office, once again on the NOAA website, studying the two-week forecast. Now that I know about her family, her anxiety over storms makes complete sense. “Anything to report?” I ask, and she frowns, the bright blues of the map reflected in her glasses.
“There’s a system I’m keeping an eye on out in the Caribbean. Not loving the look of it. Did you know that the water temps are already higher than they were this time last year? Not loving that, either.”
I look over her shoulder at the map. I’ve been lucky—in the few years since I’ve taken over the inn, the worst weather we’ve had was a couple of severe thunderstorms. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t prep for a hurricane every year.
Both Mom and Dad instilled in me early on that a good innkeeper is always prepared.
So before June 1—the official start of hurricane season—I make sure the generators have plenty of fuel and are still in good condition, check the storm windows, and load up on bottled water that I store in the office.
It’s silly, but it always makes me feel like I’m doing some kind of protection ritual, gathering my talismans or something.
The Witches of St. Medard’s Bay, I find myself thinking, and almost smile.
Instead, I reach out and pat Edie’s back. “Well, forewarned is forearmed, right?”
She only grunts, and I give her shoulder a squeeze before letting her know I’ll be off the property for a little while but will have my phone with me.
I don’t tell her I’m going with August, or that he’s interviewing me for Lo’s book. In fact, we haven’t talked about Lo at all since that morning on the porch when Edie told me she was sure Lo had killed Landon Fitzroy.
It had taken me aback, the certainty of it.
It had surprised me even more to realize that I didn’t believe her.
It’s not that I thought Edie was lying to me. I’d seen the look in her eyes. She absolutely believed that Lo was a murderer.
But I … didn’t.
The night after I’d confronted Edie, I’d finally gone back to Mom’s box of clippings, staying up way too late reading every piece, poring over every word.
It didn’t do much good.
Some were fawning tabloid puff pieces about what a babe Lo was, basically, and some were poison-pen “burn the witch”–style takedowns, but there wasn’t much in terms of actual truth in them.
In fact, I realized as I went through all of it that it was mostly old tabloids or magazines, hardly any newspapers, and nothing about the trial itself.
She had more pieces about the Fitzroys than I’d realized, too, including a Southern Living article about Landon’s wife, Alison, from years after he died. I studied her pale oval face, her soft brown hair, and thought how different she was from Lo, almost like the negative of a photograph.
But nothing in that whole box felt like a smoking gun, like a clear sign of Yep, she did that shit.
Still, Edie has her own reasons for distrusting Lo, and I can’t blame her for those. And her insistence that Lo needs the spotlight to be on her is making me wonder why Lo has suddenly chosen to publish this book now.
August is waiting by the back door that leads to the beach when I come out of the office, and I’m glad I paid a bit more attention when I got dressed this morning, pulling out a coral tank top and long white skirt, pairing it with my favorite pair of sandals.
I slip those sandals off as we step onto the porch, nodding down the beach.
“There’s actually a place we can walk to,” I tell him, and he slides off his own boat shoes, following my lead.
It’s still punishingly hot, but the breeze keeps us cool as we walk the quarter mile or so down the sand toward Shrimpy’s.
It’s only a few steps above The Line in terms of classiness, but it’s got great boiled shrimp and fried grouper, and you can walk right up to one of the tables on the deck from the beach, something that seems to delight August.
“Oh, this is the dream for a kid from a landlocked state,” he says as we take a seat near the railing, as close to the ocean as we can get.
We both order beers, and then he takes his phone out of his pocket, pulling up something on the screen before laying it on the table between us.
“So I’ll record this via an app, and I’ll send you a copy tonight.
If there’s anything you realize you’ve said that you don’t want put in the book, let me know and it’s gone. ”
I raise my eyebrows as the waiter drops off our sweating bottles of Corona. “What if I say something really juicy? Something that would make this book a guaranteed bestseller? Would you delete that?”
“Oh, fuck no, ethics thrown out the window immediately,” he replies, and I laugh.
“No worries on that front,” I say before taking a sip of my beer. “I honestly don’t think I know anything that could be all that useful, but I’ll give it a shot.”
August folds his arms on the table, muscles in his forearms bunching, and leans in. “Can you tell me why Frieda Mason is now going by Edie Vargas?”
I almost choke on my next sip of beer, the bottle wobbling clumsily on the picnic table as I set it down just a little too hard. “Oh. Um. Wow.”
His hand shoots out, hovering over the phone. “Want me to start over?”
I shake my head. “No. No, I just … how did you know about Edie?”
“Lo told me,” he says matter-of-factly. “But she also said you didn’t know, until she mentioned it. About Edie, how she grew up here with Lo and your mom.”
“I didn’t, but Edie had her reasons for not sharing that with me, and I’m fine with it.”
Mostly true.
“Anyway,” I continue, trying to regain my composure, “I don’t really see what any of that has to do with Lo or the book. I mean, they were friends when they were kids, so I guess there’s history—”
“Frieda—or Edie, as you know her—was one of the prosecution’s star witnesses in Lo’s trial,” August says, pushing his sunglasses on top of his head and squinting slightly in the glare off the water.
“She was, in fact, the only person who confirmed seeing Lo and Landon together in the hours before Marie hit. She said she had gone by the bungalow, looking for Lo, and instead saw her and Landon, and it was clear they’d been fighting.
She also said that in the weeks prior, she’d heard Lo remark that she’d kill Landon before she’d let him …
‘throw me away like a fucking gum wrapper,’ I think the phrasing was. ”
I trace a water ring on the table, trying not to show how shaken I am by this news.
But August picks up on it anyway, and he presses a button on his phone’s screen and sits back in his chair.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “You thought we’d just be talking about the inn or the town’s history, and I throw something like this at you. ”
“It’s fine,” I say, even though it definitely isn’t, and based on his probing expression, I suspect that he also isn’t sorry.
That he very much intended to put me on the spot.
Why didn’t Edie tell me this part? Or, for that matter, why didn’t Lo?
She acted so nonchalant about Edie, like whatever beef there was between them was just silly girlhood stuff, back from when they were kids, not from the trial.
Edie had been one of Lo’s closest friends. What would it have felt like, seeing her up on the witness stand, telling everyone that you were a murderer?
Obviously, August wouldn’t have an answer for that question, but I ask him another one I hope he can shed some light on.
“Why now?” I ask, then clarify, “For the book, I mean. Why is she suddenly wanting to rehash all of this?”
August turns his head, looking out at the ocean. I watch the reflection of waves crashing against the sand in his aviator sunglasses as he says, “There’s no telling.”