Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) by Mary Anna Evans

only known the girl for three days. Turning to Miranda, he asked, “Will you be all right if I leave? Or would you like me to stick around, in case that creep ignores the deputies and comes back?”
Tebo butted in before Miranda could answer. “I hope he does come back. I’ve got two fists and a knife with his name on ‘em. Nobody talks to my mother that way.”
To the best of Joe’s knowledge, Tebo hardly talked to his mother much at all. Also, Joe considered the sentence “I’ve got two fists and a knife with his name on ‘em,” to be in exceedingly poor taste when said in the company of a woman whose son had been knifed to death the day before. It was even worse when that woman was your mother.
Joe dealt Tebo the blow that blustering losers enjoyed least of all. He ignored him.
“Ma’am? Will you be okay if I leave? I’ll just be up the hill in our cabin. If you holler, I’ll hear you.”
Miranda was as experienced in dealing with blustering losers as Joe was. She managed to insult her son with her reply, merely by leaving him out of it. “I’ll be fine, but it’s a comfort to know you’re close by.”
In other words, having Tebo close by was no comfort at all.
With that statement, she picked up a banana off the dining room table and walked out of the room without taking their leave. Joe could see the half-made dolls that hung from the ceiling of her bedroom on their swaying strings. They disturbed him in a way he couldn’t describe. In his mind, he knew they were only woven straw, but their motion had a gallows swing that gave him an electric shock of revulsion.
As he gathered his family to leave, he could see Miranda bustling around her tiny bedchamber. She spread a fresh silk cloth on her altar and plunked the banana atop it. Squinting at the arrangement for a minute, she picked the banana up and pulled the peel back, so that a third of the fruit poked out invitingly. Then she poured a couple of fingers of rum in a glass and carefully set it down beside the banana. After lighting an array of votive candles and arranging them just so, she’d pulled a cell phone out of her pocket and dialed it.
Her crow’s voice carried to where Joe was standing. As he turned to leave, he heard her rasp, “Bernie, I got a question for a lawyer. You ain’t much of a lawyer, but you’re what I got.”
Amande had settled herself at the table between Didi and Tebo. She was with family, and that’s where a girl should be when she got the kind of news Amande would be hearing tonight. Nevertheless, Joe didn’t feel good about leaving her.

Episode 2 of “The Podcast I Never Intend to Broadcast,” Part 2
    by Amande Marie Landreneau
My mother is dead. It’s taken me a while to get my brain around that one, since she was never really alive to me when she was alive.
I didn’t know her, no more than I knew my dead Uncle Hebert. At least I remember seeing Uncle Hebert, even if I’ll only ever remember him as a corpse floating in the water. My mother is…a ghost. I don’t mean that she’s a ghost because she’s dead. She’s always been a ghost to me, a being who was real but who just wasn’t there.
Even the pictures I have of her are ghostly. She ran away from me and Grandmère when she was only seventeen, not enough older than I am now to even count. We don’t have any pictures of her that were taken after that. Somehow, I don’t think that Steve was the kind of lover who took pictures and saved them like treasures.
The woman who died of breast cancer at age thirty-three couldn’t possibly have looked like the pictures Grandmère gave me, not anymore. I have photos of her with braces on her teeth and acne, and I think they’re interesting, but when I look at them, I don’t think, “Mother.” Now, I guess I’ll never say “Mother” at all. Sally the Social Worker wants to know how I feel about that.
I have no idea. So I think I’ll change the subject and tell one of Grandmère’s stories. We podcasters can