Marisa Carroll - Hotel Marchand 09 Read Online Free PDF

start the coffee as soon as Father Joe finishes the prayer service.”
    “Bon.”
    Just then Estelle Jefferson and Helen Simone, the sixth and newest member of the Lagniappe Ladies, came through the back door of the kitchen, both laden with casserole dishes in padded baskets. “Sorry we’re late,” Estelle said.
    “How’s Willis doing today?” Marjolaine asked.
    “Fair to middlin’,” Estelle responded.
    “He’ll feel better when the weather breaks.” Marjolaine set the plate and glass she’d carried into the kitchen with her in the big double sink and exited the room, leaving the Lagniappe Ladies alone.
    Estelle and Helen placed their casseroles in the oven alongside the others and turned to Yvonne. “Are we ready?” she asked.
    Yvonne nodded, pulling her rosary out of her pocket. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go say au revoir to Maude, and then we’ll figure out how we’re going to sweet-talk Sophie Clarkson into letting us inside the opera house without my grandson finding out what we’re up to.”
    Marie didn’t budge from where she was standing. “I say after the funeral we just walk up to her and ask for the key to get our stuff out of the shop. I mean, it’s not like we’re smuggling heroin or something like that. We paid for it. We have receipts and everything.”
    “But we still smuggled it into the country,” Helen pointed out, biting her lip. “It’s against the law to bring prescription drugs over the border and you know it.” Helen was a timid woman and their activities had never set well with her. “Especially one like Willis’s that’s banned in the States.”
    “Banned is right,” Cecily hissed. “Why do you think we’ve been doing it like this for the past two years?”
    “I was never so frightened in my life as when I got that letter from the government people saying they’d confiscated Willis’s pills and we could be arrested if we tried ordering them from Canada again,” Estelle murmured.
    Cecily lowered her voice to a whisper, but even then it vibrated with emotion. “We have to get our shipment out of the opera house and that’s all there is to it. It’s not just the six of us. There’s another dozen people waiting for their medications, remember.” She wasn’t ashamed of what they were doing, but she was worried about what might happen to all of them, and to Alain, if they were caught. “But we’ve got to be smart about this. We can’t just walk up to Sophie Clarkson and ask straight out for the shipment unless—”
    “Unless what?” Marie demanded.
    Cecily gave up; she couldn’t let Willis and the others down. “Unless we absolutely have to.”

CHAPTER THREE
    S OPHIE SMOTHERED a yawn behind her hand. The music playing on the funeral home’s PA system, a mixture of Cajun ballads and folk tunes instead of the somber classical or religious orchestrations she’d expected, wasn’t loud enough or lively enough to keep her awake. It was almost midnight but there were about twenty people scattered throughout the viewing and refreshment rooms, eating, drinking, talking and even laughing softly now and then. Someone, it seemed, was always at her side, everyone friendly and solicitous, trying hard to include her in their conversations. But her connection to Indigo had been tenuous at best the last several years and she found herself only truly engaged when someone was speaking of Maude.
    Sophie had eaten her fill of Blue Moon Diner gumbo and Yvonne Valois’s sweet potato pie when the buffet was set out an hour ago, and had drunk what seemed like a gallon of coffee, but the intake of sugar and caffeine hadn’t helped. She was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open. And at the moment she felt like kicking herself for not accepting Marjolaine’s invitation to go upstairs and take a short nap. How would she ever make it through the entire night and half the next day without falling asleep on her feet?
    “You know there’s no rule that says you have