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

talk to you much, then, did she? Not if she forgot to tell you about a sister, a brother, and a daughter. Anyway, you missed Hebert by about twenty-four hours. He’s dead.”
Steve just looked at Tebo as if he’d never seen anybody that he wanted to pound so bad.
Suddenly, Miranda stirred. If Joe hadn’t been between her and Steve, he believed she would have gone for the intruder’s throat. As it was, he was forced to take the woman by both shoulders to keep her a safe distance from Steve. Joe hated manhandling women, but he did it when necessary. Like now.
“You’ll get this boat when you’re man enough to throw me overboard.”
Joe knew that Miranda was accustomed to being feared by people who believed in her voodoo-practicing mystique. Her hand went to her apron pocket and didn’t come out. Perhaps she had a protective talisman like Dauphine’s in there, but Joe thought this was just as likely to be an offensive move as a defensive one. People who believed that Miranda could curse them would cower at the possibility that her hand would come out of that pocket full of hexing powder or graveyard dirt. Nonbelievers couldn’t care less what a woman half their size did with her hands.
Steve did stop short of throwing her overboard, but Joe doubted he was motivated by fear of a curse. He’d credit the arrival of two sheriff’s deputies for the fact that Miranda remained safe and dry.

Chapter Nine
The responding deputies had handed Steve Daigle over to the detective investigating Hebert’s murder as soon as he arrived. The detective then released Daigle so quickly that Joe figured he’d said nothing to the man beyond, “What were you doing yesterday while a man was being knifed? You were busy not killing anybody? Cool! You’re free to go!”
The detective and deputies hung around for a few minutes to say nice things to Joe about the way he’d defused the situation.
“Thanks to you, Sir, nobody got hurt here today.”
This had felt real good, until Joe realized that Steve was now walking around free, perfectly capable of showing up again and causing trouble for Amande and her family. Just thinking about Steve coming within fifty feet of Amande gave Joe the creeps. The scumbag seemed like the kind of guy who’d really get into pretty sixteen-year-old girls.
Joe was beginning to think that he should have egged Steve on. If he could’ve gotten the man to throw a punch, maybe the deputies would have charged Steve with assault and hauled him off in handcuffs. As long as Steve was punching Joe and not Miranda, it would’ve worked out fine.
But no. Joe’d just had to have a Gandhi moment. In this case, it was possible that peaceful resistance hadn’t been the best way to go.
The good part of all this, though, was that Faye was proud of him. As soon as the deputies were gone, Joe’s irrepressible wife had appeared in the dining room of the houseboat, where Joe sat with Miranda and her older children. His fierce little woman now stood framed in the doorway with Michael balanced on one hip and Amande at her side, and she looked just as confident and strong as she did when she was squatting in an excavation and doing the work she loved.
He wasn’t at all surprised to see her. It must have been hard for her to stand aside during the crisis, and he was more than a little grateful that she’d let him handle this incident alone. Maybe she was mellowing in her old age. Hmm…bad choice of words. Any wise thirty-two-year-old man with a forty-one-year-old wife would do well to erase the word “old” from his vocabulary, and Joe thought he was pretty wise. Wise enough, anyway.
The sight of Amande troubled him. Just because she’d never known her mother didn’t mean that the news of Justine’s death was going to be easy for her. He wondered if he and Faye should stay, so that they could be there for Amande when she heard the news.
He decided it would be strange for them to intrude on that moment, being as how they’d