Saturday Afternoon

By the time Detective Maeve Boudreaux realized she was in love, she was standing knee-deep in brackish water behind St. Odile’s Funeral Home, staring at a half-collapsed mausoleum while mosquitoes treated her like a buffet.
It was not the moment she would have predicted.
Maeve had spent her whole life in Bayou Techette, a town small enough that crimes were rare and gossip was not. She knew every road by heart, every last name by reputation. People still called her Miss Maeve sometimes, the way they did when they couldn’t reconcile the woman with the badge and the girl who used to steal pecans from old Mr. Guidry’s tree. She liked it that way. Predictable. Contained.
Love, on the other hand, felt like something that happened elsewhere. To other people. Preferably in cities with streetlights that worked and restaurants that stayed open past nine.
So she wasn’t looking for it when the anonymous tip came in about bones turning up behind the funeral home.
The mausoleum belonged to the Delacroix family, whose money had run out sometime in the Reagan administration. The structure leaned like it was tired of holding secrets. Maeve was halfway through cataloging water damage when she heard someone clear their throat behind her.
“Detective,” a man said, voice calm and unhurried. “You’re standing on a nutria hole. One wrong step and you’ll disappear like a bad memory.”
Maeve turned, hand already hovering near her sidearm, and found herself facing Jonah LeBlanc, the town’s unofficial caretaker of forgotten things. He was the groundskeeper for St. Odile’s, though grounds philosopher might have been more accurate. He wore rubber boots and a Saints cap so faded it had turned the color of old moss. His smile was small but precise, like he chose it carefully.
“You always sneak up on people like that?” she asked.
“Only the ones who look like they’re about to fall into the afterlife.”
She stepped back onto firmer ground. “Thanks.”
He nodded, then pointed toward the mausoleum. “You’re not gonna find what you’re looking for in there.”
“And you know that how?”
“Because if there were bones in there, the ground would be settling differently.” He crouched, pressed his palm to the earth like he was listening to it. “They’re over by the cypress line. Someone tried to move them. Didn’t get far.”
Maeve stared at him. “You got a badge hidden under that hat?”
“No ma’am. Just eyes. And time.”
She should have dismissed him. Instead, she followed.
The case turned out to be old—very old. Remains from a decades-forgotten burial scandal, no foul play, just greed and shortcuts. The town sighed in relief. Maeve wrote her report. Life returned to its familiar rhythms.
Except Jonah kept turning up.
At the gas station at dawn, drinking chicory coffee like it was a sacrament. At the library, returning books about river erosion and French colonial cemeteries. Once, at a town council meeting, where he spoke softly about flood mitigation and everyone leaned in like the bayou itself had decided to talk.
They started having dinner on Sundays—not dates, not at first. Just food eaten on the tailgate of her truck while the sun went down and the cicadas cranked themselves awake. He told her stories about the dead that weren’t sad, just human. She told him stories about crimes so small they barely counted, about loneliness disguised as routine.
One night, during a sudden summer storm, she found him sitting inside the mausoleum with a lantern, patching a crack in the stone.
“You fixing it for the dead?” she asked.
“For the living,” he said. “People like knowing something’s still standing.”
She sat beside him, rain hammering the roof, and felt something shift—quietly, but permanently.
Love, it turned out, didn’t arrive with fireworks or certainty. It came in mosquito bites and muddy boots, in shared silence and odd wisdom. It came in the last place Maeve would have thought to look: among the forgotten, the overlooked, the things that endured simply because someone cared enough to stay.
Years later, when people asked how she met her husband, Maeve would smile and say, “On a case.”
She never bothered to mention the mausoleum. Some things were better left standing quietly, holding their secrets.

Never know when you might find the one you are meant to spend your life with!!