Page 1 of Gumbo, Ghosts, and Deadly Deception
ONE
My morning had started with chicory coffee, a busted air conditioner, and a skunk in the linen closet.
Which made it a regular old Tuesday at Midnight House, the bed and breakfast I had recently inherited from my great aunt.
The air conditioning in the house and the grandfather clock in the foyer had both rebelliously decided to go on the fritz immediately after my great-aunt Odette’s death, a fact that had raised a few eyebrows among family and friends. While the air conditioning came and went at will, the grandfather clock had been telling the wrong time for six months. It was perpetually 2:13 according to the timepiece, which was approximately the time when Odette had passed. That was unconfirmed though because I was way too chicken to actually check her death certificate.
It was one thing to tell stories about eighteenth century duels gone wrong and Victorian ladies dying of a broken heart, but it was another thing altogether to think Odette was hanging around scrutinizing how I ran the B&B.
Which would not be, according to her, The Way Things Were Done. But were more along the lines of The Way Things Had to Be Done For Me To Make Any Sort of Profit.
I was halfway through my second cup of coffee when I heard the thump-thump-thump of a struggle behind the laundry room door. I set down my ghost-shaped mug and opened the door to find my skunk, Teddy, burrowing into a freshly folded stack of bath towels on the shelf. He looked up with the wide-eyed innocence of someone who absolutely knew he wasn’t supposed to be in there.
“Teddy,” I said, striving to be stern even though—let’s face it—he was adorable. “Explain yourself.”
He chirped, leapt free of the towels, and waddled out with the same self-assurance he’d had the day he broke into the mini-fridge in the communal parlor and stole a hunk of Gruyere meant for the afternoon charcuterie board.
Teddy was a skunk among skunks. A skunk savant, really, who had the instincts of a detective and the attitude of a jazz trumpeter in the French Quarter at midnight—cool, sharp, and just a little unpredictable. He was also descented and recently had become the star of our social media campaign to bring more attention and hopefully guests to the B&B.
“Don’t give me that look,” I muttered, grabbing the disheveled towels and tossing them into a laundry basket to be rewashed. The guests were generally charmed by Teddy but that probably didn’t extend to drying off with towels he had rolled around in. I shoved the basket to the side, determined to return to my coffee when a faint, sweet aroma made me pause mid-step.
Gardenias.
But it was October, and the gardenia bush in the courtyard had long since finished blooming.
The B&B had been in my family, the Bergerons, for four generations, and I had grown up running through its Victorian hallways, though I had never expected to inherit it. Aunt Odette had always emphatically stated that, and I quote, no Millennial who made a living from her cell phone could ever appreciate Maison de Minuit. Which grossly misstated my career, but I got tired of explaining how podcast advertising worked and left her to her opinions. My family had always assumed she was planning to bequeath the house and its wonky plumbing (seriously, why did every toilet require a ritualistic triple flush?) to the historical society.
But nope. She’d left it to me six months earlier and I had traded my cramped Magazine Street apartment for fifteen rooms of creaking Victorian splendor. The first thing I had done was shift from the French name of Maison de Minuit to the more tourist-friendly Midnight House. Then I had stopped using terms like "historically atmospheric" and "spiritually enriched" and leaned in hard to the haunted house angle.
We’ve. Got. Ghosts.
That was our new official slogan used on everything.
I had grown up listening to Odette's stories about the house.Tales of Confederate soldiers who checked in but never checked out, of jazz musicians whose melodies still drifted through the walls on humid nights, and of a young woman who'd vanished during Mardi Gras 1984, leaving behind only a room full of gardenias and a half-finished letter.
Those stories may or may not be accurate but they were our dangling carrot for the paranormal curious.
The gardenia scent grew stronger as I pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. If I smelled out of season flowers, skeptic or not, I was going to make a video about it and post it. I pulled my phone out to record but Teddy ran over to the back door and perched on his haunches, his black and white fur gleaming in the morning light. He chittered softly, then turned his attention back to something only he could see.
"What is it, boy?" I knelt beside him, following his gaze toward the courtyard. If it was rats I was calling an exterminator. I don’t do rodents. The banana trees swayed in the October breeze, their broad leaves casting dancing shadows across the brick pathways. Everything looked business as usual, with no sign of critters or anything out of the ordinary, except for the small pile of gardenias scattered near the base of the old crepe myrtle tree.
My stomach did a little flip that I refused to acknowledge. I'd lived in New Orleans my entire life, had grown up surrounded by voodoo shops and ghost tours and people who claimed to commune with the dead. I was willing to acknowledge that the city held mysteries I couldn't explain, but practical enough to look for logical explanations first.
All while profiting off the paranormal.
Fresh gardenias in October were a little weird. But New Orleans in general was a little weird.
"Probably just fell off somebody's funeral arrangement and blew over here," I told Teddy, who gave me a look that clearly said he wasn't buying it. "Or maybe Mrs. Patterson from next door was doing some late-night gardening."
The skunk's expression remained skeptical.
The old brass bell over the front door jangled and I turned away from the window, casting a longing glance at my now-cold coffee. I wasn’t a total Millennial. I had no use for iced coffee. Give me piping hot java all day long.
My phone screen read 7:15 AM, which meant whoever was at the door was either very early or very lost. Check-in wasn't until 3 PM, and most tourists didn't venture into the Marigny before double digits on the clock. The Big Easy led to big hangovers.
"Coming!" I called, straightening my vintage Saints T-shirt and running my fingers through my dark curls. Teddy trotted alongside me as I hurried back through the dining room, past the parlor with its velvet furniture and mysterious cold spots, and into the foyer where the grandfather clock continued its cheerful rebellion.
A willowy woman stood silhouetted in the foyer’s stained-glass light. She wore a flowing purple dress and enough chunky crystal jewelry to either summon the spirits or open up a boutique. With her silver hair and her combat boots I could easily picture her reading tarot cards in Jackson Square for thirty bucks a pop. Or heck, maybe it was more now. I tended to avoid the Quarter and its throng of tourists these days. But I had walked by enough readings in my lifetime to know the drill.
