“But how are you going to get him to notice you in the first place?” Ida Belle asked. “We don’t know for sure that it’s the same guy scamming all the women, and even if it is, we don’t know how he’s choosing them.”
“He must live here,” I said, “or be very familiar with the area. Enough to know the people. I mean, think about it, he’s picked the perfect victims—lonely women with available cash. How could he do that if he didn’t have insider knowledge?”
“Which makes it worse, not better,” Ida Belle said. “Everyone in Sinful knows Gertie is a confirmed bachelorette, not to mention the fact that she has a decent retirement, but she’s not rolling in it.”
She had a point. Gertie already had a Facebook account. Assuming that whoever was catfishing Sinful women had prior knowledge of his victims, then chances were he already knew all about Gertie’s lifestyle and her pocketbook.
“I can fix the money thing,” Gertie said.
Ida Belle snorted. “If you know how to make money materialize, I wish you’d have let me know before now.”
“I don’t have to actually have the money,” Gertie said. “He just has to think I have it. For instance, what if I put out a rumor that my great-aunt died and left me a fortune?”
“If you had a great-aunt who was still alive,” Ida Belle said, “she’d be rich because of that alone, and in that Ripley’s Believe It or Not thing.”
“That could work,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“Seriously,” I said. “Louisiana is full of distant relatives and people with cash buried in their backyards, right? No one has questioned me being here and inheriting my supposed great-aunt’s stuff. Why would they question Gertie if she said she had money coming?”
“They wouldn’t,” Ida Belle said. “The money is not the real problem. It’s the part where Gertie all of a sudden decides to start man-hunting.”
“I could pull it off,” Gertie said. “I could do that whole thing where my spinster aunt’s death made me look at my own life and rethink my choices. And one of those choices is men. So now I want to have a great romance before I die.”
I sighed. It wasn’t voluntary, but I may as well have screamed. Gertie and Ida Belle both went silent, staring at me with those concerned looks I’d seen so much lately. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to derail the festivities.”
“You can’t keep holding everything in,” Gertie said. “It’s not healthy.”
“She cried at a coffee commercial,” Ida Belle said. “It’s not all in.”
“Oh, honey!” Gertie reached over and squeezed my hand. “It’s going to be okay. You’ll see. And something to take your mind off things is just what you need.”
“I know you’re right,” I said. “It just doesn’t feel like it at the moment.”
That’s what I said, but I wasn’t sure if the words were to convince Ida Belle and Gertie that I would be fine or to convince myself.
*
I popped another cookie in my mouth and watched as Ida Belle stalked to the stairs and yelled up at Gertie for the fifth time in the past thirty minutes.
“If you don’t hurry up,” Ida Belle said, “all of us and the catfish are going to be dead and it’s going to be a moot point.”
“Hold your horses!” Gertie yelled back. “It takes time to look this sexy.”
“Unless that time is the time-machine sort, you’re wasting it.”
I grinned. We’d been parked in Gertie’s house for two hours now, first creating the perfect backdrops for her new Facebook profile picture and then settings for some casual shots that she wanted to post different days. The last hour, Ida Belle and I had been mooning around the kitchen while Gertie was upstairs, rendering herself into catfish bait. I couldn’t wait to see what she came up with because I already knew it wouldn’t be normal or even remotely age-appropriate.
Ida Belle stalked back into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. “If she comes down in lingerie, I’m leaving. There are limits to what you should ask a best friend to help with.”
I was just about to pop another cookie in my mouth, but I paused. Lingerie was something that hadn’t crossed my mind, and now I was silently cursing Ida Belle for putting the image there.
“I thought she was supposed to look lonely, not desperate,” I said, praying that if nightwear was involved, it was fuzzy pj’s with cats on them.
Ida Belle sighed. “I’m convinced she has a funhouse mirror up there—you know, the kind where you see something completely different than everyone else unless they’re standing behind you.”