www.millsandboon.co.uk

      Dedicated to my father, Walter Orloff,

       who taught me about jazz

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      I’d like to, first and foremost, thank my father, Walter Orloff, who provided advice, ideas and historical background about jazz and the blues. As far as I am concerned, he is the world’s greatest jazz expert, and his extensive—some would say exhaustive—record and book collection helped greatly, as did our e-mails and conversations. I’d especially like to thank him for reluctantly giving up several of his Django Reinhardt albums.

      I must, as always, acknowledge my wonderful agent, Jay Poynor, who remains my greatest supporter. We talk daily, and it truly helps to know he is in my corner at all times. “Darlin’, you’re my Luv.”

      Thank you to Margaret Marbury, the best editor I could imagine. When I decided to take the tone of this novel in a different direction, she was not only supportive but excited. Thank you. I look forward to our collaboration for many years to come.

      What would I do without Writer’s Cramp? Pam, Gina and Jon. Thank you for giving me discipline as a writer—and wine. Let’s not forget the wine.

      Thanks to my friends Pam, Nancy, Cleo and Kathy for being such totally cool women. In the immortal words of Miss Bella: “You rock.”

      I acknowledge the late Viktor Frankl for giving my life philosophical meaning.

      Thanks to my mother.

       Whenever I felt like procrastinating on finishing this book, I called her, which was daily. And she happily obliged. But then would tell me to get back to work.

      Finally, to Alexa, Nicholas and Isabella. You can’t possibly imagine what inspiration you are. To J.D., for everything. Always.

      “All I know is when I sing the blues,

       the notes are like tiny shards… proclaiming how my heart is broke in a million pieces.”

      —Irene “Honey” Walker

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      Chapter 27

      Chapter 28

      Chapter 29

      Chapter 30

      Chapter 31

      Chapter 32

      Chapter 33

      Chapter 34

      Chapter 35

      Chapter 36

      Chapter 37

      Chapter 38

      Chapter 39

      Chapter 40

      Chapter 41

      Chapter 42

      Chapter 43

      chapter

       1

      I live in a house with a dead prostitute.

      More precisely, I live in a house with her spirit. At least that’s what my grandmother, Nan, thinks.

      New Orleans is filled with spirits. We’re so used to them, we don’t give them a thought. Mist-filled cemeteries are tourist attractions, and houses on St. Charles have ghosts. Halloween is more important than Christmas—at least to the drag queens. Voodoo priestesses still practice their art, and superstition is interwoven through our lives as much as the bayou and crawfish.

      Our house in New Orleans used to be a brothel and has been in my family since 1890. My grandmother ran the brothel briefly, until Sadie Jones was murdered over sixty years ago. A customer with an obsession for the redheaded whore with the alabaster skin and green eyes stabbed her in an upstairs bedroom. He’d been wordless, with the vacant-eyed look of a man possessed, and my grandmother has never forgiven herself for not turning him away. Another customer, a senator with a handlebar mustache, who enjoyed the brothel every Friday night, shot the murderer dead with a pistol and a single bullet as the man ran outside. My grandmother cradled Sadie’s head in her lap as the young woman took her last breath. After that, Nan closed the brothel, married my grandfather, who’d been her most faithful customer, and set about becoming one of the more colorful characters in New Orleans, a city known for colorful characters.

      When I was eighteen, I came to live with my grandmother in this house with twenty bedrooms. I soon found out that the spirit of Sadie had opinions on the opposite sex. According to Nan, if she felt you were making a big mistake with a man, she would slam the door of the bedroom in which she’d been murdered. If she approved, the house was at peace.

      Considering my track record over the last ten years, there’s been a whole lot of door-slamming in New Orleans.

      chapter

       2

      “O h my God, why’d she have to die!” Dominique wailed like a Greek woman throwing herself on the casket of a loved one. “Why? Tell me why?”

      “Here’s a tissue,” I said, calmly passing her one as we sat up against huge pillows, side by side on her bed. We were watching Steel Magnolias for the third time in two days, huddled beneath Dominique’s pink Laura Ashley quilt, with a bowl of popcorn swimming in a tidal pool of melted butter and a pitcher of Sex on the Beach on the nightstand—Dominique likes any drink with sex or genitals in the name.

      “I don’t understand how you can just sit there, stone-faced like that, Georgia Ray Miller. It’s unnatural,” she sniffled at me.

      “Dominique, you know Shelby dies in the end. You’ve known this since the first time we watched this video together in high school, and through every single solitary fucking time we’ve watched it since then.