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Chapter One

I WOULD HAVE been out the door free and clear five minutes earlier if it weren’t for the Easter lilies.

The lilies reigned, bouquet style, from a giant gold vase atop the fireplace mantel in my bff’s aunt Claudette’s living room. My bff, Camille Caron, stood near the fireplace fiddling with something in a bag, and as I waited for her to stop fiddling, the lilies drew me over with their perky yellow petals and frisky fresh fragrance.

I fingered a silky lily petal and eyed the slew of jetsam surrounding the reigning bouquet. Cookie boxes, nail polish jars, beer bottles, cigarette packs, electronic gizmos, and various other odds and ends crowded together like royal subjects worshipping the majesty of the lilies. Or guards protecting them.

Leaning in for a closer look, I saw each item was labeled with someone’s name, all printed in the same blocky handwriting.

“What’s with all the mishmash on your aunt’s mantel?” I asked Camille.

“Lent offerings,” Camille said, like it was obvious.

“Mignon?” I said, reading one of the names aloud and reaching for a pile of stubby, brown, gummy sticks bundled and trussed with twine like a miniature stock of firewood. “Mignon is doing Lent?”

Camille turned to a sheet of labels sitting on the coffee table, peeled off a sticker, slapped it on the side of a tub of peanut butter, and added the tub to the mantle.

“Bien sûr, Mignon aussi.” Camille drew closer to the mirror hanging over the mantel and peered over a bottle of perfume and a box of cookies. She smoothed her short blonde hair and pinched the fins up on the collar of her blouse. “To tante Claudette, Mignon is family. Everyone who’s family does Lent and gives up something.”

My eyes trailed over to Claudette’s white little poodle sprawled on a floor pillow in the corner, his tiny white paws clutching a tan stick so it stood upright, just tall enough for his tiny white teeth to gnaw on the top end.

“Umm. I think maybe Mignon didn’t get the Lent memo.”

Camille looked over at the dog. “Voyons, Lora. That stick is chicken flavor.” She tapped the mini bundle of sticks in my hand. “These are beef.”

I put the sticks back and pointed to the peanut butter with Camille’s name plastered over the brand logo. “And you’re giving up peanut butter? You don’t even like peanut butter.”

She shrugged.

“Not that I’m Catholic,” I said, “but I thought the point of Lent was to give up something hard. Like a habit you wish you could change or something you love, to show sacrifice or something.” I picked up one of the beer bottles. “Like this guy.” I read the name off the handwritten label. “Bruno. What? A cousin of yours? He’s giving up beer. That’s got to be hard.”

“Bruno’s a pro athlete. He’s in training. Bruno never drinks beer when he’s in training.”

I moved on to one of the cigarette packages. “Okay. Well, what about Solonge here? She’s giving up smoking. That’s a major addiction. That’s definitely hard.”

“Solonge never had a cigarette in her life. She has asthma.”

I looked down the procession of mantle offerings, noticing the mirror above registered far less of my petite reflection than it had of Camille’s taller one. Barely my forehead and the crown of my amber mass of hair showed. Nothing lower, from my blue eyes to my long knit sweater to my tan leggings. Not even when I tried spying between the cookies and cosmetics and got waylaid when I spotted a mini bag of corn chips behind a comic book and wondered if snitching something from someone’s stash was a Lent no-no.

“Are you telling me none of these contributions on the mantel are real?” I asked. “What’s the point then?”

“Oui, oui, they’re all real to tante Claudette,” Camille assured me. “Every year she makes the whole family do Lent. It’s very important. She wants everyone to put a symbol here to show we are giving up something. We want to make her happy, so we go along. And we only put things we’re willing to go without. Except the kids. It’s the kids who put the cookies and nail polish. Sometimes they cheat. It’s hard to go without cookies and nail polish for six weeks.”

“You mean their sacrifices are really things they like?”

“Sure. They’re kids. They’re afraid of tante Claudette. They think she’s got magic powers, like maybe she can talk to God or the Holy Ghost. They heard English kids call Saint-Esprit the Holy Ghost and now they think the Holy Ghost is something scary.”

Well, yeah. Totally understandable. Tack on the word “ghost” to anything and it sounds scary. Even to me at the tender age of thirty-one years old. I’m still scared of ghosts. And truth be told I agreed with the kids about Claudette, too. I’d gotten to know her a while back when she and her sister, Camille’s mom, had a falling out. I liked Claudette. And her little poodle Mignon, who I’d bonded with during a short time he’d bunked at my house. Like everyone in Camille’s family I’d met since I’d moved from New York to Montréal over two years ago and Camille and I had become friends, Claudette was kind and welcoming to me. And she even let me visit Mignon on my own now and then. But Claudette had also read my tea leaves and scared the bejeebees out of me with her predictions, some of which had come true. Magic powers may be pushing it, but if she could see more than meets the average eye in a bunch of soggy tea leaves, probably indulging her Lent plan was wise. Especially since she also had a reserved pew at the local church, so the talking to God thing wasn’t far fetched, either.

Camille motioned through the living room doorway to my shoulder bag where I’d left it on a bench in Claudette’s entry hall. “Et puis, what did you bring?”

“Excuse me?” I said. When Camille told me we’d be stopping by her aunt’s house on the way to dinner, she’d said nothing about Lent, let alone me participating. Camille had a family big enough to mount its own travelling Cirque du Soleil. She was always stopping by this place or that, dropping things off, picking things up, checking on things when someone was out of town. That’s how things worked in her clan. I didn’t think to question another stop-by.

Camille reached for the sheet of sticker labels and held it up to me. Few labels remained so it was easy to spot my name somewhere in the middle.

Tiny shivers set my neck atingle.

“I don’t have anything for the mantel,” I mouthed like Claudette might overhear and race into the room crossing herself or something. Totally irrational I knew, unless she’d cloned herself. Claudette’s house was a bungalow with a basement room where she was currently presiding over a church group meeting about Easter. Even through the closed basement door, I could hear the murmur of voices still clucking away led by Claudette.

Which got me thinking something else. “She won’t really notice will she?” I asked Camille. “I mean, didn’t Lent start weeks ago? Isn’t it almost over? Easter’s barely a week away. Isn’t it a little late to add offerings to the mantel?”

“Mais non. It’s not late for me. Claudette knows Laurent and me were in Québec City on a case. She expects we followed Lent there. Adding to the mantel is just a formality for Laurent and me.”

Laurent was Camille’s brother and owned and ran Investigations C&C, a PI agency, along with Camille. Making them both my co-bosses, since I was currently in training to become a PI and working as their assistant while I earned my stripes. For the few weeks they’d been away, most of that assisting had me hunkered down at the office doing boring phone reconnaissance and computer checks. And helping the receptionist Arielle, aka Claudette’s daughter, make tie-breaking decisions between items in her online shopping carts. Extracurricular shopping clearly not being Arielle’s Lent offering.

“But late for you?” Camille went on to say with the hint of a smile. “Peut-être. Tante Claudette knows you stayed au bureau with Arielle.”

“That’s so not fair,” I said. “I didn’t even know I was supposed to participate. I’m not even Catholic. Claudette knows that.”

“You think that matters? Family. That’s what matters and you’re practically family.” She swung her arm towards Mignon. “You think le petit là had a christening?”

I cut my eyes to the dog. It wouldn’t surprise me actually. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find a doggy-sized, frou-frou christening gown tucked into a box in one of Claudette’s closets.

But gown or not, she really did treat Mignon like family, and I was flattered to be in his company. Flattered and the hint of another feeling. Something I hadn’t felt in quite a while, since my parents had passed away and I’d been left with little family of my own. I was feeling an edge of family-style guilt at the thought of disappointing Claudette.

“Well, I’ve got nothing,” I said, scanning the mantel, looking for inspiration. An idea hit and I went to fetch my purse. “Here.” I pulled out a half-eaten slab of chocolate. “I’ve got this. Will this work?”

Camille looked at the chocolate like it was on fire. A mix of shock and fear radiating from her eyes like lighthouse beams shooting out to sea in the dead of night.

She snatched the bar from me. “T’es folle? You can’t give up chocolate!”

I snatched the bar back. “Sure I can. It’s only for a few days.” I folded the extra wrapper bits under and used the label with my name on it to seal the ends shut. I placed it among the other jetsam, leaning it against one of the beer bottles so my name was clearly visible. “There. Now let’s get out of here and go to dinner like we were supposed to before you ambushed me with this side trip to Lent land.” I headed for the front door to put on my shoes. “Next thing I know you’ll be telling me I have to fast on Good Friday, too.”

Camille shot me her “but of course” Frenchwoman look. The one that made it seem not only obvious but ridiculous for me to even consider not fasting. I was beginning to think if we didn’t leave Claudette’s house soon, by the end of the week I really would be Catholic.

I WAS OUT Claudette’s front door and on her porch before Camille even had her jacket on, my exodus stopped short when I ran into Laurent on his way up the porch steps. His eyes almost black against the backdrop of dimming blue, spring evening sky, his dark hair disheveled, wisps fluttering with the breeze and drifting to his chin. He had on dark jeans and a slice of white shirt hit me eye level, peeking out from his grey tailored overcoat.

He stood a moment on the top step then leaned in to kiss my cheeks hello, his usual scruff thickened and leaving lingering warmth on my skin as our greeting ended and café haze from his hair and clothes migrated onto mine.

I groped for the porch railing as we separated. The last time I’d seen Laurent was before he left on the Québec City case. He’d stopped by my house and given me a tiny doll that had shown up during a previous investigation. In an odd turn of events, the doll tied into my mom’s past as a teenager. Laurent hadn’t said exactly why he’d given me the doll and he didn’t need to. We both knew how much connections to my mom meant to me. One of the reasons I lived here stemmed from a desire for connection. Even though I was raised in New York, my mom had been from Canada and I wanted to get in touch with those Canadian roots and my mom’s life before me. The doll definitely qualified as part of the latter. The doll had been handmade in a likeness of my mom. Probably by my mom’s own hands. So giving me the doll was a sweet and big gesture. Maybe too big.

The police expected the doll to be handed in as evidence in the investigation, but instead Laurent had given it to me, claiming it as “misplaced.” I knew not one cop on the force would buy that. Laurent had a sterling reputation for integrity and exacting expertise. So two dayls later, as much as I hated to part with it, I turned the doll in claiming it as “found” and pleading mea culpa for its temporary AWOL status. Laurent had gone to Québec City about the same time, and we hadn’t spoken about it since. I knew by now he had to know what I’d done, and I was feeling a bit sheepish about it. And apparently a little off-balance at suddenly running into him, which I covered brilliantly with total avoidance of the subject.

“You here about Lent?” I asked him.

He nodded. One hand trailed towards his coat pocket, stopping midway and smoothing fabric.

I smiled. “Nice move. But you’re training me to be a PI, remember? I saw you reach for your pocket. Your offering for the mantel collection in there?”

He gave me a non-committal shrug, his eyes barely meeting mine.

Laurent had a way of making himself unreadable. A skill he’d acquired back in his cop days and trotted out whenever it suited him. Since I had a skill of reading people that I’d acquired in my old job as a social worker, him trotting out his skill and thwarting mine rarely suited me.

“Ah, c’mon,” I said. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

This got a smile out of him. A smile that faded quickly at the sound of a bellowing voice behind us.

“Elle est là, Camille!”

I turned to the owner of the bellowing voice. Claudette, wearing a flowered housedress, socks midway up her calves, fluffy blue slippers, and a wide smile outlined in smudged red lipstick. The only stitch of makeup on her otherwise scrubbed face framed by silver hair escaping a bun.

“Elle est là avec Laurent,” Claudette yelled some more, this time into the house.

Camille poked her head out of the doorway and rolled her eyes at me, adding in a raised eyebrow and a head shake. Bff sign language I cobbled together like a cryptogram, deciphering her message to mean something in the neighborhood of “I’m cooked now and have only myself to blame.”

“Et voilà,” Camille whispered to me as I got ushered back into the house by Claudette. “Don’t say I didn’t try to save you.”

Save me? Save me from what?

A tiny flock of older women encircled me, and it occurred to me maybe “save me from whom?” was a better question.

Beyond the cluster of heads surrounding me, I spotted Claudette hauling Laurent in, closing the door, and cornering him behind it, her finger wagging in his face. By the look in her eye and the pace of her finger wag, it looked like maybe I wasn’t the only one who needed saving.

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Copyright © 2021 Katy Leen

It’s almost Easter. Time for bunnies, bonnets, and bonbons. Not bedlam. Unless you’re Lora Weaver, that is.

With the scent of spring in the air and the promise of a long weekend looming, Lora is looking forward to a few days relaxing with her beau Adam, taking long walks and short naps snuggled together in the warm glow of Easter chocolate wrappers.

Until Lora spots a bouquet of Easter lilies at the home of bff Camille Caron’s aunt and soon finds herself donning a bunny suit and slinging more than Easter eggs.

Whiskers deep in a mêlée of sparring seniors, Lora must keep herself from falling into a rabbit hole she can’t escape. All while grappling with the clamorous Caron clan, mama-to-be Tina, and Lora’s enigma of a boss, Laurent, who may be hiding more secrets than a Kinder egg.