Read Online miss fortune mystery (ff) - bloodshed in the bayou by Leslie Langtry - Free Book Online Page B

covers on the bed and pulled up a chair so I could face her.
    “There’s something I should’ve told you and your sister a long time ago.” She said as she looked me straight in the eyes.
    “Um, alright. What is it?”
    “Your father didn’t really leave us.” Her eyes grew wide and she reached for my hand.
    I took it. “Yes he did. He went away and never came back.” Well, until now. “He never got in touch with us. I call that leaving.”
    Dammit. Mom had lost it. She’d lost all touch with reality. It finally happened. The doctors had said it would. That she’d think things far in the past had happened only yesterday.
    Clearly Hugo’s return was too much for her. Damn that stupid man! Even in death he was screwing up our lives. I wondered if Gertie had c4 in her handbag so I could blow up the casket at the funeral tomorrow.
    Then Sadie Ancelet did something I’d never seen her do. She cried. Tears poured down her face and she broke into heavy sobs. I got up and held my mother while she wept. All those years she never once shed a tear over that bastard. Now she couldn’t hold it back. Her sobs turned into keening wails and after a moment or two one of the doctors came running in. I watched in silence as he checked her vital signs.
    “I was afraid of this.” He said. “She’s been extremely emotional these last few days and now her blood pressure has sky rocketed.”
    I stood aside as he gave her a sedative. Then I held her hand until she finally drifted off to sleep. And I vowed that once Hugo Ancelet was in the ground I would never, ever think of him again.
     
     
     
     
    Fortune answered the door at Gertie’s house. She handed me a bottle of beer.
    “You look like you need this.” She said with a wink.
    I drained half the bottle before stepping over the threshold. Ida Belle and Gertie were waiting for me in the living room. I finished the rest of the bottle and asked for another before I finally sat down on the couch opposite them.
    The whole story poured out of me. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even feel like crying. I just needed to get it out. Every bit of what I’d been worrying about, how my mom had lost it during my visit and how much I loathed my father came gushing out of me. When I finished, there was absolute silence.
    The women looked at each other.
    “I need to tell you what was in the file.” Ida Belle said solemnly. She reached behind her and pulled out a packet of three letters, wrapped in blue ribbon. “And about these.”
    From where I was sitting, I could see that the letters were made out to my mother, with Hugo Ancelet written as the return address.
    “So he wrote her three times.” I said as I took a second beer from Fortune. “Big deal. Three letters doesn’t even come close to making up for almost thirty years of abandonment and breaking my mom’s heart.”
    “I know.” Ida Belle said as she set the letters on the couch next to me. “But I think you deserve to know the whole story.” Fortune and Gertie nodded. So they knew already. Weirdly, I was okay with that.
    I sighed. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”
    “Your father didn’t leave voluntarily. He went to prison.” Ida Belle let that sink in a minute.
    “That’s where he’s been all this time?” I felt the heat rising in my neck. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? How long have you known?” Anger, disappointment, confusion, all ping ponged around in my brain which was now, threatening to explode.
    Gertie shook her head. “We didn’t know that part. Not until we got the folder from Big and Little. Your mother told us when you were little that he had to leave. She’d never said anything more.”
    “Mom just told me at the nursing home that there was more to the story. Why didn’t she tell us when we were old enough? And how come everyone in town didn’t know? You’d think it would be in the papers that he’d been arrested and tried?”
    If Sinful residents knew about Dad, most would’ve kept