Sophie Clarkson loved visiting her godmother in Louisiana's bayou country, and her most cherished memory is the enchanted summer she fell in love with Alain Boudreaux. Those hot days and steamy nights are nowhere in evidence when she returns for her godmother's funeral, yet the magic of Alain is definitely still alive.Alain, who is now chief of police and a divorced father of two, had once convinced Sophie there could be no future for a big-city girl and a Cajun boy. But as Sophie starts to fall in love all over again with both Alain and the little town of Indigo, she realizes this is her chance to prove just how wrong he was all those years ago.

Indigo, Louisiana, present day "Hurry, Cecily," Yvonne Valois cautioned her daughter in the Cajun French that was her first language. "We don't have all day for this." From her seat at the late Maude Picard's kitchen table, she could see the comings and goings of the three other women who moved around the century-old shotgun-style house. "Mother, lower your voice--you're in a house of death," Cecily Boudreaux admonished without much hope of being attended to. She pulled out yet another drawer stuffed full of gadgets and gizmos and odd bits and pieces of mismatched silver. Her mother had spent seventy-five years ordering people around in that tone of voice. She wasn't going to stop today just because her grandson, Indigo's Chief of Police, had found her old friend slumped over dead in her living room. "Why not speak as I wish? Maude's beyond caring and Marie's as lazy as she can hold together. She'll be all day if I don't get her attention." "Shh, she'll hear you and itwilltake the rest of the afternoon to coax her out of her pout." Yvonne firmed her lips but said no more as Marie Lesatz chose that moment to enter the room. She was a small-boned woman with short dark hair and dark eyes, several years past her fiftieth birthday. "Will this do?" The tall, black woman following Marie moved forward unhurriedly. At sixty-five Estelle Jefferson was a decade older than Cecily and Marie. She and her husband Willis owned the Blue Moon Diner, and served the best mix of Cajun and Creole favorites for miles around. She held up a navy-blue flowered dress. "I always liked Maude in this dress." "It's the only halfway decent thing in her closet." Marie's tone was acid as she dropped onto the ladderback chair beside Yvonne. Yvonne switched to English now that she and Cecily were no longer alone. Marie's Cajun was limited and Estelle spoke no French at all. "I always thought she looked better in her gray silk." "If you're not satisfied with the dress I picked out, you go look for the gray silk. I'm not rooting through a dead woman's closet anymore. Especially that one." Marie gestured over her shoulder toward Maude's bedroom. "It's stuffed full of clothes. Maude never threw anything away, you know that."You certainly ought to know about stuffed closets, Cecily thought with a spurt of annoyance. Marie owned more clothes than any other woman in Indigo, and kept buying them every chance she got whether she could afford them or not. Marie caught her eye, obviously reading her thoughts, and pushed up her chin in defiance. Marie hadbeen Cecily's childhood friend, but Marie was also her son's ex-mother-in-law, and that's where the problem lay. Indigo was too small a town for Cecily and Marie to be at each other's throats. Cecily swallowed her pique. "The navy will do just fine," she said. "I even went through her underwear drawer, God forgive me." Marie made the sign of the cross. "Nothing there is fit for avendre de maison. And no, I didn't come across any keys," she added before Cecily could ask. "There's far too much stuff here for a garage sale," Yvonne decreed. Sophie Clarkson will have to call in an auctioneer. Anyway, we're not responsible for selling off Maude's possessions. That's for Sophie to decide. She's the heir. But Maude did let things go these last few years. What a mess." All four women looked around as though they could see through walls into the other small, overcrowded rooms, stuffed with antiques, knickknacks andfatras,just plain junk. Maude Picard, owner of Past Perfect antique shop, had been their friend and the de facto leader of their group.Smuggling ring, Cecily corrected herself with a wince. Her mother and the others weren't just the Lagniappe Ladies, who met a couple of times a month to play cards or go out to dinner--a kind of homegrown version of the Red Hat Ladies whose name meant "a