He gave her a grateful look. “Thank you, all of you, for looking out for me. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
“Get to the hotel,” Carter said, “and try to get some rest. I’ll come by tomorrow to bring you up to date on everything.”
“Thank you,” Nolan said again and headed to the kitchen for the garage.
Deputy Breaux went outside and hopped in his truck, ready to follow Nolan to the hotel. We trailed outside onto the porch and Carter locked the front door.
“Do you want to come down to the sheriff’s department?” he asked.
Ida Belle looked over at me, eyebrows raised.
“I told Carter we had some information for him,” I said.
Ida Belle nodded. “If it’s all the same, I’d prefer to do it at Gertie’s house. She’s laid up with a bad ankle, but she was there for part of it, too.”
“Okay,” Carter said. “I’ll follow you over there.”
We jumped in the Jeep and Ida Belle called Gertie to inform her that things had happened and we were on our way to her house, Carter in tow. I could hear her excited voice asking Ida Belle what had happened, but Ida Belle said we only wanted to tell it once and would be there in less than a minute.
The drizzle that had been coming down turned into giant sheets of rain by the time we pulled into Gertie’s driveway. Her power was off as well, but I could see light behind the living room blinds. We ran to the door and let ourselves in, Carter only steps behind us. Gertie was still in her recliner, but she’d retrieved two gas lamps and had them sitting on the end table and coffee table in the living room. They illuminated the room fairly well.
“I’m going to grab some towels,” Ida Belle said and headed into the guest bedroom, using her phone as a flashlight. She returned with three towels and we all did our best to dry ourselves.
“It’s really coming down out there,” I said. “No surprise that the power is gone.”
“Yes, yes,” Gertie said, “it’s raining cats and dogs, but what happened?”
Ida Belle looked over at me and I knew she was waiting on me to take the lead, especially as she still didn’t know exactly what I was doing at Peaches’s house in the first place and didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
“Ida Belle and I were here at Gertie’s tonight,” I said, “making sure her ankle was wrapped well and that she had everything she needed downstairs.”
“What happened to your ankle?” Carter asked.
Gertie waved a hand in dismissal. “I fell off the back deck. It’s just a sprain.”
I held in a smile. She didn’t say whose back deck she’d fallen from, nor did she add that it was on the second story, but then we couldn’t exactly hand out that information, either.
“Anyway,” I continued, “Ida Belle and I left and I had a book on guns that I was going to lend her so she followed me to my house. We chatted for a bit and noticed the weather getting bad. I offered to take her home and store her bike in my garage, so we took off in my Jeep, trying to beat the storm. When we passed by Brandon Dugas’s house, we saw someone walking through the living room with a flashlight. The shape was too big to be Peaches, so we assumed it was Brandon.”
Carter’s eyes narrowed. “You saw Brandon Dugas with a flashlight?”
“Unless there was another larger person in their house,” I said, “there’s no other explanation. The power wasn’t out yet so it looked strange. I stopped the Jeep and we saw the light go down the hallway to the kitchen. We sat there a couple of minutes, wondering what could be going on when Ida Belle saw a light moving in the master bedroom of Nolan’s house.”
Ida Belle nodded. “Fortune hauled butt around the block. I tried to call Nolan, but he didn’t answer. When we got there, we ran for the front door and Fortune started yelling and pounding while I called you.”
Gertie’s hand flew up over her mouth. “Oh my God. Is Nolan all right?”
“He’s fine,” Ida Belle said. “I think we startled him more than anything, but it startled us as well.”
Carter, who’d been silently taking all this in, frowned. “Back up to the part about Brandon. Do you actually think it was him in Nolan’s bedroom?”
Gertie, Ida Belle, and I looked at one another, and I could tell none of us were thrilled about the things we were about to say. But we also knew we had no choice.
“The Brandon part of things is what I didn’t want to say in front of Nolan,” I said. “We’ve discovered some things about Brandon that don’t add up.”
“I think you better explain,” Carter said.
We took turns telling what we had seen until Carter knew everything about Brandon that we did, except I left out the part about putting a tracker on Brandon’s truck. It was bad enough I went into Nolan’s master bedroom, and quite frankly, I was surprised he hadn’t complained about that yet. But I was certain the tracker thing would send him right into the stratosphere.
Carter blew out a breath. “Why didn’t you tell me this information before now?”