place?”
Jonah’s moroseness lifted at that question. “They give tours?”
“If you ask real nice, sure.”
“Oh, well, then I guess I won’t be invited in for a tour. I met one of the Bryson sisters today.”
Jimmy’s grin widened and the belly bounce began as he chuckled so hard his ruddy complexion beamed scarlet. “I’m guessing it wasn’t sweet Lorene.”
“No…it was the other sister. Alice.”
“Oo-wee! She’s a firecracker, for sure.”
“You can say that again,” Jonah replied, grabbing a crispy fried crawfish tail off his sandwich. He popped the spicy tidbit in his mouth and chewed. “What’s her story, anyway? I mean, I know she’s single and she works at the Bayou Buzz and all that. But…is there something else I need to know?”
Jimmy leaned close. “That, my friend, would require about three hours of my valuable time.”
Jonah ate another crawfish. “I got nowhere to go. Talk to me.”
Jimmy’s eyes shifted as he put his beefy elbows on the mahogany counter. “Alice, she has trust issues with men.”
“You don’t say.”
Jimmy nodded. “Right after the storm when things were so bad around here, she fell for a contractor who was passing through. He took on work—remodeling and such—and he also took off with some of our hard-earned money in the process. Never finished the work.” He shook his head. “And the worst of it—Alice believed in him, thought he’d come to help us. But he was just a greedy man who’d come to take advantage of us. He took advantage of Alice’s good graces, too. He had her up to the altar, ready to marry him, probably just so he could get his hands on her inheritance. But she got wind of his shenanigans and questioned him minutes before the wedding. He denied all of it, then he blamed her for not believing in him. He left, just like that. On to the next town, I reckon. Left that pretty little bride heartbroken and humiliated. She’s not over that yet. Might not ever be over it.”
Jonah pushed the rest of his sandwich away. Alice had said as much. She’d said they’d all been taken advantage of. That some of them had been hurt.
And she was the one who’d been hurt the most, from the way she’d acted today. And no wonder. A jilted bride. Jilted by a man who’d offered her hope while he swindled everyone in town. Just as Jonah had offered her hope today with all his big plans.
“It’s worse than I thought,” he said, staring into his cold coffee. “She must think I’m like that. But I’m not. Not at all. I could never leave my bride at the altar.” Especially if she sparkled with life the way Alice did, part fire and part flowers.
Jimmy patted his meaty hand on the counter, his words full of sympathy. “Yep. A woman scorned. It ain’t good, that’s for sure.”
Jonah paid Jimmy and bid him good-night. Then he walked out and stared down the long main street of Bayou Rosette. And he wondered what was going through Alice Bryson’s mind right now.
Was she thinking about him? Or was she thinking up ways to stop him before he ever got started, just to prove a point about some idiot who’d done her wrong? And why did he care, anyway? He’d get the job done. He’d build his community. He wanted to do this. Had to do it, for more reasons than he could explain or even justify to himself. But he’d never factored in that the woman who’d inadvertently caused him to come down here on this crazy whim might also turn out to be the very one who’d put a crimp in his plans. Maybe he should just go back to Shreveport.
You’re not a quitter, he told himself. You’ve dealt with much worse than a jilted blonde with an ax to grind. And he’d always done things on his own terms, even though Aunt Nancy had urged him to turn to God for guidance.
But Jonah didn’t need God’s help on this. He just needed Alice Bryson to play nice and let him do his job. And he hoped while he was here he could find the truth at last. He wasn’t concerned so much about Alice. He’d get around her and build his new community, one way or another. But he was concerned about those questions he’d had all his life. What if he didn’t like the answers?
Maybe that was why he was so worried he hadn’t been able to finish eating the best crawfish po’boy he’d ever tasted.
Alice Bryson was just one person. One very forceful person. He’d worked for months on clearing the way for approval so he could get the whole town in on this renovation. He’d make them believe he could do this. He had to. Because he needed to do this. He’d come on this quest, this journey, to fulfill his creative need to build things, but the main reason he was here was to fill that empty place deep inside his soul.
He didn’t exactly want to call it a “God moment,” as some of his friends back home might say, but it sure had seemed that way when he’d stumbled across Alice’s intriguing story. He had to help Bayou Rosette. Because he was pretty sure he came from the Mayeaux family and that this was the place where his biological mother had been born and raised, right across the bayou from Rosette House.
And somehow, while he was here he had to find out why that same mother had abandoned him and never looked back.
Chapter Three
“I don’t understand why you were so rude to the man.”
Shoving her floral tote bag and her purse into her yellow vintage Volkswagen, Alice closed her eyes and counted to ten to drown out her sister’s voice. How could she explain to Lorene that Jonah Sheridan reminded her of all she’d lost? She’d placed her heart in a stranger’s hand once before and look where that had gotten her. Jilted and tossed aside, left embarrassed and bitter.
“Alice, are you listening to me?”
Alice turned at the door of her car. “I hear you loud and clear, Lorene, and I’ve tried to tell you how I feel. The man has this lofty plan. It just sounds too good to be true to me. And I wasn’t rude. I just didn’t get all giddy when he went on and on about building a new community across from us.”
“Not right across,” Lorene reminded her. “I think a park would be wonderful across the bridge. “I could take the baby for walks over there.”
Alice shook her head. “I knew better than to tell you anything. You can’t go spreading that around. Everything he told me was off the record.”
“I understand,” Lorene said, holding the water hose out to send a spray over her geraniums and mums. “I won’t say a word. But I’m sure the whole town is speculating about what he wants to do, since I’ve had phone calls all day about it.”
“And that’s just it,” Alice replied, getting in the tiny convertible. “It’s all speculation and I’m tired of speculators and curiosity seekers and people thinking they can just come in and take over and make things better again. They can’t make it better and we both know that.”
Lorene dropped her hose and came to stand by the car. “Alice, you need to work on your negative attitude. You’ve got to look at the bright side. Our house was spared. We’re okay. And everybody in this town did what they could to help each other. What’s wrong with someone else coming to help, too? We need some new ideas around here, or we’ll keep on suffering.
