Carmela lay in bed in a half-dream state, trying in vain to figure out what was going on. Flag twirlers in spangled uniforms and shiny white boots pranced in front of a green and yellow float. Then the float ground to a halt, and a giant phone was handed down to her.

What? Oh, oh. Phone, she finally decided.

Carmela fumbled for the pale blue princess phone she’d ripped from the wall in the butler’s pantry the day she’d vacated Shamus’s home.

“Hello,” she croaked.

“Carmela.” The voice was a deep, languid drawl.

Carmela uttered a sharp intake of breath. It was the rat himself: Shamus.

“What?” she mumbled. Lifting her head, she peered at the oversized dial on her vintage clock radio. It read a big five-fifteen. She hadn’t slept more than six hours. No wonder she felt tired and crabby.

“Are you insane?” Carmela groaned into the phone at Shamus, already knowing the answer. “Because it’s so early the birds aren’t awake. It’s so early the morning shift of bartenders down on Bourbon Street hasn’t come on yet.”

“Carmela, I need to talk to you.” Shamus’s voice was soft yet insistent.

Carmela grimaced. She hated that soft, wheedling tone. It drove her crazy and got to her practically every time.

She closed her eyes, tried not to conjure up a mental picture of him. It didn’t work. In her mind’s eye she could still see Shamus. Tall, six feet two, and the proud possessor of a lazy smile that tended to be devastating when he decided to turn it up a notch or two. Shamus had a sinewy body, strong hands, flashing brown eyes. And a soft accent. His mother hailed from Baton Rouge, and he carried her soft-spoken ways.

“What about?” Carmela asked. She pretty much knew what Shamus was going to say, but she didn’t feel like making it easy for him. She swung her legs out of bed, hit the sisal rug, scrubbed the bottoms of her feet back and forth across the bristles, as though the rug were a loofah, and she could magically rub some energy into herself. Positive energy that would fortify her against Shamus.

“You heard what happened to Jimmy Earl Clayton?” Shamus asked her.

“You know something, Shamus?” she told him. “I was there. I was standing in front of the French Market when the entire Pluvius parade ground to a halt and the police had to lift the poor man down from his sea serpent float.” Carmela didn’t know why she was suddenly so defensive, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. When they were living together, she’d always thought they brought out the best in each other. Now that they were apart, Shamus most definitely brought out the worst in her.

“You’re not going to believe this, Carmela,” Shamus roared back, “but the police questioned me last night. Me!” She could hear both anger and anxiety in his voice.

“In fact, they held me at the police station until almost two in the morning!”

“I’ve got news for you, Shamus, they came and talked to me, too,” Carmela fired back.

“What?” said Shamus, genuinely stunned. “When?”

“Last night,” she told him. “Around ten, ten-thirty. They came to my apartment. The exceedingly small apartment I was forced to move into after you unceremoniously dumped me. The one I retreated to after your lovely sister ousted me from our former home.”

“Carmela, we’ve been over this,” Shamus said plaintively. “I didn’t dump you; I love you. You’re my wife.”

“Let’s see now,” she said. “Would that be your have-and-to-hold-till-death-do-us-part wife? Or your I’ll-get-back-to-you-when-I’m-good-and-ready wife?”

Oh man, she thought, there’s that insidious, wheedling tone again.

“Carmela,” repeated Shamus. “What did they want with you?”

“They wanted to know if I’d seen you last night. I told them I hadn’t seen your sorry ass since you stuffed your argyle socks into your banjo case and boogied on out the door.”

“Guitar. You know darn well I play guitar.”

“Sweetheart, I don’t care if you switched to a cello and joined the Boston Symphony. The police wanted to know if you were acquainted with Jimmy Earl Clayton.”

“What did you tell them?” asked Shamus.

“I told them everybody and his brother from here to Shreveport was well acquainted with Jimmy Earl Clayton. The man was your basic Southern boy mover and shaker. Rated several column inches per week in the business section as well as a few mentions in our somewhat questionable society pages. And I use that term loosely, society being what it is today.”

“That’s it?”

“Of course that’s it, Shamus. I even gave you the benefit of the doubt. I assumed you had absolutely nothing to do with this.”

“You assumed right, darlin’.”

“So what was it that prompted the police to come knocking on my door then?” asked Carmela, more than a little peeved.

“Nothing. I was taking pictures of the Pluvius floats, for Christ sake. I suppose I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that sort of thing.”

“And you just happened to snap a few photos of the sea serpent float,” said Carmela.

“Yes.”

“That’s it?”

“Of course, that’s it,” said Shamus. He paused. “Well, I might of had words with Jimmy Earl.”

“Words,” Carmela repeated.

“Yes, words,” Shamus said crossly.

“What exactly did you say to Jimmy Earl?” asked Carmela.

“What does it matter what I said?” Shamus answered in a huff. “It was nothing. Just because something happened to Jimmy Earl Clayton later on, doesn’t mean it had anything to do with me. I’m truly sorry the man is dead, but I can assure you, I had nothing to do with it.”

A tiny pinprick of heat slowly ignited behind Carmela’s eyes. It spread into her forehead and set her nerves to jangling. Carmela knew what was happening. She was getting one of her Shamus headaches. They swept over her whenever he acted this way. Belligerent, aggressive, manipulative. In other words, your typical Southern male.

“I have to go, Shamus,” she told him. “Nice talkin’ to you. Bye-bye.” Carmela slapped the phone back in its cradle, flopped back into bed. She lay on her back, staring up at the lazily spinning ceiling fan.

Just when you think you’re safe, she thought to herself. Just when you think your heart won’t hurt again. What was it the tin man said when Dorothy was about to leave Oz and fly back home to Kansas? “Now I know I’ve really got a heart because I can feel it breaking.”

Carmela pulled the covers over her head. Did she want to be married to this clod, or should she go ahead and get that divorce? Which was it going to be? Door number one or door number two?

Carmela lay there trying to release the tension from her body. If she could just relax and clear her head. Maybe catch a couple more hours of sleep . . .

Nope. No way, nohow. Try as she might, counting sheep, counting her chickens before they were hatched, counting on her own resourcefulness, she couldn’t fall back to sleep. That vision of Jimmy Earl Clayton being dropped from the float and laid out on the pavement seemed burned in her memory. It played over and over in her head like a bad news bulletin on CNN.

She shook her head in disgust. Preposterous. Shamus may be a louse, he might even turn out to be a sneaky two-timing bum, but no way is he a killer.

Carmela pulled herself out of bed, crept to the little kitchen, brewed a pot of nice, strong, chicory coffee. Scrounging one of yesterday’s beignets, she went out to sit in the courtyard. Wisely, Boo remained tucked in her cozy little dog bed, the L.L.Bean version that had cost way more than Carmela’s down comforter.

The sun, just beginning to peep over the crumbling brick wall that separated her little slice of the world from the rest of the French Quarter, felt warm on her shoulders. The steady drip-drip of the fountain was somehow reassuring.

Sipping her coffee, Carmela tried to banish thoughts of Shamus from her mind.

Begone, she commanded, as she let her eyes take in the beauty of the courtyard garden. The wrought-iron benches, the lush thickets of bougainvillea, the old magnolia tree dripping with lacy fronds of Spanish moss. Against the brick wall, tender green shoots of cannus peeped up through the dirt, and tendrils of tuberose curled on gnarled pine trellises that had been cut and woven by hand more than a hundred years ago.

There was a powerful amount of history here in the French Quarter, Carmela told herself as she took a fortifying sip of hot coffee. Which would make it a logical place to begin one’s life anew.