Page 40 of Beau

“She stirred up trouble everywhere she went,” he said. “They were afraid she’d learn too much from her voodoo queen grandmother and turn everyone into toads or mushrooms.”

“Do you believe in all that voodoo stuff?” Aurelie asked.

“I keep an open mind,” Beau said. “I’ve heard of strange things happening in Bayou Miste. Things that can’t be explained away by science.”

Aurelie’s eyebrows twisted. “Like what?”

“My cousin Alexandra swears that Lucy gave her a potion bag that made her dog turn into a man.”

Aurelie eyebrows rose on her forehead. “She seriously believed that?”

Beau raised the hand. “She swears by it—and so does her friend Calliope. I can’t vouch for it. I was deployed to Iraq at the time that happened.”

Aurelie gave him a skeptical look. “I don’t know whether to be intrigued or a little leery of meeting the rest of your cousins in Bayou Miste.”

Beau laughed. “They’re harmless. A little kookie, but harmless.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Well, you’ve met Ben.”

“Yes,” Aurelie said. “He’s pretty normal from what I’ve seen.”

“He says that Lucy tried to put a love spell on him once. He also said he would’ve believed it worked, except he’s always been in love with her, even before she said she cast her love spell.”

Aurelie laughed. “I think I’m going to go with intrigued. Your cousins sound interesting. I look forward to meeting the rest of them.”

“I always liked coming over to Bayou Miste to visit,” Beau said. “We had grand adventures. I remember one time, as young teens, we snuck into Charlie Hughes’s watermelon patch. I almost got an ass full of buckshot for the effort.”

Aurelie chuckled. “I can picture a younger version of you sneaking into a watermelon patch.”

Beau cocked one eyebrow and glanced her way. “Oh, you can, can you?”

“I can imagine your hair being a little bit lighter blond and maybe your shoulders weren’t quite as broad. But I can imagine that smirky grin on your face. So, did Charlie Hughes tell your cousins’ mother what you all had been up to?”

“Sadly, yes,” he said. “It’s a small town. You can’t get away with much. Secrets can be hard to keep.”

“Were you all punished?” she asked.

Beau nodded. “She could’ve had us all go pick our own switch for an old-fashioned spanking. Instead, she had us go back to Charlie Hughes’s farm and help pull weeds in the watermelon patch. We had to spend the entire day pulling weeds while our friends went swimming.”

“That had to hurt,” Aurelie said with a grin.

“It did,” Beau said. “But Charlie Hughes worked alongside us. He didn’t say much, but he did tell us enough about raising watermelons, how to plant them and how to tell when they were ripe. Because you see, the watermelon we tried to steal was green. At the end of the day, he had each of us pick a ripe watermelon. He sent us home with the melon.”

Aurelie smiled. “What a nice thing for him to do.”

“After the watermelon patch incident, whenever I visited, we all went over to Charlie Hughes’s and helped him weed his watermelon patch. Sometimes, it was the corn patch or the cantaloupes. Then we’d sit with him on the porch at the back of his house and eat the fruits of our labors. He told us stories of when he was a teenager and got caught stealing watermelon from his neighbor’s watermelon patch. Only his neighbor wasn’t nearly as nice. He’d vowed to handle it differently if it ever happened to him. So, in a way, he was kind of glad to have the opportunity to do it right.”

“I kind of love that story.” Aurelie stared out the window as they drove into Bayou Miste. “I think I’m going to like this town.”

“It is a pretty great place to live,” he said. “Bayou Mambaloa is very much like it. In towns like this, people look out for each other, for the most part.”

He pulled into the parking lot at Thibodeaux's Marina.

“Does your cousin Benjamin work here?” Aurelie asked.

“On Sundays, he likes to work with Joe Thibodeaux, the man who owns the marina,” Beau said. “If he’s not here, we’ll swing by his house.”

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