[Bayou Gavotte 00.0] Back to Bite You Read Online Free Page A

face uplifted to the rain. She was blissfully alive, while Arthur was dead.
    By her connivance.
    Or not.
    “Thanks for the offer.” Gerry got into the truck and turned the key. He closed his eyes and gathered his thoughts.
    Realistically, there was no better place to get to know Mirabel Lane than right here. She’d given him the perfect excuse.
    Or an invitation any red-blooded man would find it impossible to resist.
    Except that she wasn’t flirting for another month, probably because she didn’t want people to think she was a gold digger. It made no sense at all.
She
made no sense.
    He had to talk to the lawyer and the club manager. He needed a clear picture of how Grandpa Arthur’s heart attack had come about. Maybe what he learned would make it plain that Mirabel hadn’t done anything wrong.
    And if it didn’t . . . He would return with his passion for justice fully aroused, and his libido definitely not.
    “I may just take you up on that,” he said and drove away.
    * * *
    “Isn’t she a lovely girl?” Gerry’s old friend Stan, a lawyer who could be pretty hard-nosed at times, gazed dreamily at nothing, or more likely at some vision of Mirabel inside his head. Fat lot of use he was turning out to be.
    Gerry strove for a tone somewhere between irritable and indifferent. “She seems nice enough. Grandpa did her no favor when he left her that house. It’s falling to bits.”
    “You’re damn lucky she came along when she did, given the terms of the old will,” Stan said.
    “What terms?”
    “Arthur bequeathed the house to your aunts, but he left the contents to you and Hellebore University. All his Mardi Gras keepsakes were to go to the university museum, and the rest was yours. He stipulated that you personally had to go through the house and dispose of the contents before the old ladies were allowed to cross the threshold, much less take possession. Otherwise, you were stuck with the house, too.”
    “Jeez.” Gerry rubbed his face with his hands. “I know he didn’t trust them, but that was going way overboard. They didn’t know about that stipulation, did they?”
    “Nope. It would have been hell dealing with them. As it is, Mirabel got the whole thing—lock, stock, and barrel.”
    “That’s pretty weird, seeing how obsessive he was about the collection.” Grandpa had spent all his spare time organizing and cataloguing it during Gerry’s childhood.
    “He trusted Mirabel,” Stan said. “She helped him go through most of his possessions. He donated a bunch of stuff to the university just before he died. She’ll make sure everything else gets there before she sells the place and goes back to New Orleans.” He heaved a lovelorn sigh. “I don’t blame old Arthur for going overboard for her, and if your aunts sent you to tell me she seduced him into giving her the house, they’re wrong. For one thing, I doubt if he was up to it, and for another, she was shocked to find out he’d left her the place. She cried when I told her.”
    Because she’d expected to get the club instead?
    “She was broken up when he died,” Stan said. “One moment they were having a good time at the club, and the next he was lying dead in the alley.”
    “In the
alley
?”
    “They’d just left the club to walk home when he collapsed. She called 911 on her cell, but it was too late.”
    The alley, dark and usually deserted. “No one else was there when he had the attack?”
    “Why would anyone else be in an alley? They only went that way because it was quicker.” Stan pursed his lips and shook his head. “Mirabel worried that old Arthur was overdoing it. She wanted to call a cab, but he insisted on walking, so she made him takethe shortest route. They’d walked home fine other nights, but I guess all that activity became too much for him.”
    Either that . . . or she tripped him, he fell, and had the heart attack.
    Don’t be ridiculous
. That was no surefire way of killing anybody, even a