Death Comes to Suburbia (Book 2 Molly Masters Mysteries)

by Leslie O'Kane

  The women’s casual attitude about golf gave me an idea for a cartoon. A man, sitting on the ground with a bent golf club in one hand, rubs a huge bump on his head and glares at a woman. The woman says to him, “I know you’re supposed to yell ‘Fore,’ but that’s when your ball goes forward. This time my club went backward, so, naturally, I yelled ‘Aft!’”

  Sergeant Tommy would no doubt call the cartoon sexist.

  The next hole had a lake to the left of the fairway, which my ball just missed. After hitting our second shots, we scanned the water, and Sabrina pointed to someone’s lost ball that looked to be well beyond reach.

  “What do you think?” Sabrina asked, lighting another cigarette. “Too far?”

  “Link hands, girls,” Emma said by way of reply. “We shall give it a try. With the flourish of a fencer unsheathing a sword, Emma extended the longest ball retriever I’d ever seen. We linked hands in a human chain to support her as she leaned out over the water. Moments later, we cheered as she pulled up the dripping ball.

  “This is why we always try to fill our foursome,” Kimberly told me. “We can lean farther out with four than three.” She patted her hips and added. “Good ballast.”

  Minutes later, we’d finished up the hole, but to my surprise, Emma drove us right past the next tee. “We are skipping this hole,” she explained. “Trees and traps everywhere.” We came upon their husbands near the green. “Driving through, gentlemen,” she called to them with a wave. Apparently the men were used to this hole-skipping, for they showed no reaction. She said to me, “They are so anal when it comes to golf. ‘Do not touch your ball. Do not talk while I am hitting.’ You would think it was brain surgery, for all the fuddy-duddy reverence they attach to it.”

  I smiled at the word fuddy-duddy, which sounded amusing in the midst of Emma’s careful, accented diction. “I heard your husbands were involved in quite an altercation recently.” She stopped the cart. “Who told you that?”

  “The guy at the counter.”

  “It was Preston’s fault. We had no recourse.”

  “We?”

  She pursed her lips. The other cart pulled up behind ours. All three women headed to the next tee at once. “This hole’s got a really wide tee-box,” Kimberly called back to me. “We all go off together.”

  My stomach was in knots as I wondered who “we” was. Had Emma been part of this fight that all but required police intervention? My best course of action to learn more was simply to continue to befriend Emma.

  Again, teeing off simultaneously was a new one, but I was willing to try, though I had visions of a midair ball collision or, worse, getting hit in the head by Sabrina’s club. The four of us teed up in a line, then Kimberly called out, “Okay, ladies. On the count of three. One. Two. Three.”

  We all swung, and, to my delight, I hit my second-best drive of the day, my ball outdistancing the others by at least thirty yards.

  “Nice shot, Molly!” Emma cried. “Let’s play best ball on this hole.” The others immediately gave their approval, and Emma turned toward me. “Do you object?”

  “Not at all,” I said, though this was yet another golfing first.

  The three unused balls were scooped up, and Emma was elected to hit the second shot on my ball, She hit it well, but a little to the left of the green, where it rolled into a sand trap.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t my turn next. It once took me ten strokes to get out of a trap on a par three. When we neared the green, Sabrina hopped down into the trap.

  “Need my water bottle?” Kimberly called to her.

  Sabrina shook her head. “I brought mine. She poured water on the sand near our ball. My eyes widened and I had to look away momentarily to keep from laughing. If the marshal were to see the club’s pristine sand being treated like this, he’d charge us with destruction of private property. Sabrina formed a sand mound, then picked the ball up and set it on her hand-crafted sand tee. One swing later, the ball was resting a few feet from the cup, and Kimberly confidently and briskly knocked it in. We exchanged a round of high-fives.

  By playing only the one ball, we had caught up with the group ahead, which was just starting to tee off. Emma “you-hooed” at them, and they waited as she drove up and asked if we could play through. They complied, though they shot us less-than-charitable glances, and we headed down to the women’s tee. Their husbands must have also played through, because this was a different foursome.

  All of us but Kimberly hit good drives, so she picked hers up.

  “So, Emma,” I said as we drove through the fairway, “how long have you lived in Carlton?”

  “Five years,” she replied.

  “Did you know Preston Saunders very well?”

  “Yes.” She gave me a look that implied, “the stories I could tell,” but she said no more. She got out of the cart, grabbed an iron, and hit with new-found power, as if she’d visualized that the little white ball was Preston’s head.

  To establish camaraderie, I immediately said when she returned to the cart, “I didn’t care for Preston.”

  “You knew him?” she asked, sounding quite surprised.

  Not wanting to reveal my cards till I’d seen hers, I answered casually, “His daughter babysits for my children.”

  Her expression suddenly grew fierce. “As far as I am concerned, that man—”

  She stopped abruptly as Sabrina’s and Kimberly’s cart neared. “Here comes Sabrina. I try not to speak about the lawsuit when she is near.”

  “Lawsuit?” I repeated, but Emma’s flawless smile had returned as she waved at the others. My mind raced. A lawsuit brought by her against Preston, maybe? Or vice versa? Either way, how could Sabrina be involved?

  “Did you see how far I just hit?” Emma asked the others, pointing down the fairway. “That little speck of white next to the green is Anthony.”

  While our playing partners complimented her, I repeated, “Anthony?”

  “Yes. I sometimes name my balls, but only when they behave. My husband, Chase, on the other hand, says, ‘What a piece of crap’ every time he hits a bad shot. So last Christmas I got him a box of balls with the words Piece of Crap imprinted on them.”

  Though the other two women had to have heard this anecdote before, we all laughed. We shared a short cart ride to my ball, but when I asked, “What lawsuit?” Emma told me in a calm, sincere voice that we would have to “discuss this some other time.” Soon the four of us had finished out the hole.

  “That’s enough golf for me,” Kimberly announced.

  This was very unexpected, as we were only on the eighth hole of our eighteen-hole course.

  “Me too,” Sabrina echoed, “Enough of this golf cart. I’m hitting the dessert cart.”

  “How about you?” Emma asked me.

  Chatting over cheesecake would be my best bet for getting the women to talk about their husbands. “I could go for some dessert now.”

  “Good. We’ll give ourselves holes-in-one from here on,” Emma said. “I suppose one day I should at least look at the back nine.”

  Though having someone drive by is always distracting, Emma gave the occasional disgruntled golfer a wave, and they smiled and returned the gesture. I asked her how old her son was and learned he was just ten months younger than Nathan. At my suggestion that we get the boys together to play sometime, she surprised me by inviting Nathan and me for lunch at her house on Thursday.

  I accepted, but silently worried whether or not I would even be here two days from now. If Jim had his way, the kids and I would be in Florida by then. Our original agreement gave the police until Friday night to solve the murder, provided I stayed out of it.

  My only violation—at least the only one Jim knew about—was this afternoon of golf. That was just a minor breach. I may have ruffled a few feathers where Preston’s former partners were concerned, but none of them had tried to kill me. Not even once.

  To appease Jim, my best course of action was to demonstrate I intended to live up
to our agreement by making plane reservations for Saturday morning. Then, just in case Jim disagreed about how severe this breach of mine had been, I would schedule as many appointments as possible between now and then to make it appear I was too busy to get into any trouble.

  Yet another reason for me to go ahead and schedule a visit to Dr. Chase Groves. And if Emma and I never got another opportunity to discuss the lawsuit she’d mentioned, I might be able to get Chase to talk about it.

  Having settled on a plan, I excused myself, found a corner near the clubhouse restrooms, and dialed Chase Groves’s office. All the while a couple of waitresses nearby were grousing about their children. Just as Chase’s receptionist answered the phone, a blond waitress said in a half shout, “You think that’s bad? Wait till your son gets to be mine’s age!” I had to cover my free ear. Chase happened to have had a cancellation, so I managed to set an appointment for tomorrow morning. Not wanting to keep the others waiting, I made a mental note to get plane reservations for Saturday as soon as I got home.

  I joined the others at our table, a square butcher-block top surrounded by four tall wing-backed chairs in gingham floral prints. The tables were staggered in such a way that the overall effect was more one of sitting in a conversation nook in a living room than being seated in an enormous restaurant.

  Our waitress was the strawberry blonde who’d been complaining about her, son. She looked to be a few years older than me. She would have been pretty had her frown lines not been quite so chasm-like. She brought the others the drinks they had already ordered. She quickly set each glass on the table, sloshing out some of Sabrina’s margarita in the process, then turned on a heel without acknowledging me.

  “Excuse me,” I called after her. I had to rotate completely around in my seat, then kneel so that I could peer at her over the top of the wing-back. This was probably not the most dignified manner in which to get someone’s attention. At least my chair didn’t topple over backward. “I’d like an iced tea, please.”

  She turned and glared at me. “I’ll get it for you just as soon as I’m done with my other tables.”

  My companions were smiling at me as I settled back into my over-sized chair. “It must be me. This is the second surly waitress I’ve had this week.”

  “Oh, it’s not you, it’s me she doesn’t like,” Sabrina said, clicking her tongue.

  “Oh? Do you two have a history?”

  Sabrina nodded. “There’s a regular flood under our bridge. She’s my brother’s jilted girlfriend.”

  “Your brother dumped her? And she has a grudge against you?”

  “We were all just kids,” she said with a slight shrug. “Lindsay, our waitress, and I were seniors in high school, back in Ohio. My brother was just sixteen at the time.” She paused.

  Emma and Kimberly were only half listening to her. They must have already heard Sabrina Mueller’s story.

  Leaning back in her chair, she flicked her wrist in a mannerism that reminded me of Stephanie. That, I finally realized, was why I had taken such an immediate dislike to her; the two women had such similar body language. “Now that I think about it,” she continued, “my friendship with her, with Lindsay, was just the typical rebellious teenager-type thing. She was not exactly wild, but she was certainly from the wrong side of…well, you know what I mean.”

  I nodded, gritting my teeth. I wondered if Sabrina would even want to be having this conversation if she’d realized how much lower a tax bracket she was speaking down to at that very moment.

  “She used to come over to my house after school.” Sabrina leaned closer to me and whispered, “We smoked dope together.”

  By now, Emma and Kimberly, who were sitting next to each other, began their own separate conversation. I, too, was beginning to lose interest in Sabrina’s tale, but hoped it would soon be winding to a close.

  “Then my brother started hanging around with us, too,” she went on. “It never occurred to me that he might actually be attracted to someone like her. I mean, it was one thing to be friends with her, but quite another to …” She shuddered, letting her voice trail off. “To make a long story short,” she continued, “she got pregnant and refused to get an abortion. As you can imagine, it would have ruined Preston’s life if he’d had to marry her at sixteen. And, after all, it was her fault. She was old enough to have known better than to let herself get pregnant.”

  My jaw had dropped at the name. “Preston? Your brother’s name is Preston?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That’s right. Preston Saunders.” She gave a sad sigh. “I suppose you heard his name on the news, if not from our husbands. He was killed last week.”

  Chapter 13

  Deja Vu All Over Again

  It felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room. My mind raced. Sabrina was watching me in silence, an expression of perplexed concern on her face.

  For a moment, I had a terrible thought: What if Cherokee Taylor was Preston’s illegitimate son? Tiffany might’ve unknowingly fallen for her half brother.

  But simple arithmetic put that theory to rest. Preston had been thirty-seven when he died. If he got a girl pregnant when he was sixteen, his child had to be twenty or twenty-one. Cherokee was eighteen.

  At least this new information cleared up a question that my interrupted conversation with Emma had given me: Emma simply hadn’t wanted to deride Preston in front of his sister.

  “Actually,” I said, trying to summon some semblance of normal behavior, “I’m friends with…I know Stephanie Saunders. I went to school with her.” That would be the very same Stephanie Saunders who’d failed to mention that one of the three names on the list of Preston’s bettors was his brother-in-law!

  “Oh?” Sabrina said, raising her very plucked eyebrows in surprise.

  Emma and Kimberly’s private conversation beside us came to an abrupt halt. They both turned to face us. Emma asked, “You attended Carlton High?”

  “Yes, I did.” I couldn’t resist adding as a private joke, “Seems like it was just last week. Time sure flies.” I returned my attention to Sabrina. “So Stephanie is your sister-in-law.”

  She grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”

  “The two of you don’t get along?”

  “A major understatement. When Hank’s business brought him here, in the same town with that woman…” She focused on the ceiling for several seconds, as if searching for strong enough words. “Well, I almost left him rather than make the move.”

  “Knowing Stephanie, I can understand that.”

  Emma and Kimberly were still paying strict attention to us, so I asked, “Do either of you know her, too?”

  “Oh, honey,” Kimberly said with a snort, “it’s impossible to belong to the Carlton Country Club and not know Stephanie Saunders. She doesn’t play golf; she just plays Queen Bee.”

  At that point, Lindsay, the apple of a very young Preston’s eye, returned with my iced tea. No one spoke as she set my glass down.

  Sensitized by my new knowledge, I noticed every painful detail about her appearance. The cheap dye-job of her strawberry-blond hair. The short black dress uniform with puffy quarter-sleeves. The white apron, stained with what looked like a thumb-sized smear of chocolate sauce. Black fishnet stockings. Maybe management had thought the uniform would appeal to its wealthy clientele. And apparently they were right, because the place was doing a good business. Yet here was a forty-year-old woman dressed up like a French maid, taking dessert orders from Sabrina Saunders Mueller, whose family had apparently disowned her and her illegitimate child.

  If Lindsay knew we’d been talking about her, she didn’t let on. Emma and Kimberly both ordered cheesecake, then excused themselves to use the rest room. My appetite was gone. I ordered a chocolate parfait, figuring if anything could restore my appetite, that would do the trick.

  The moment Lindsay walked away with our order, I asked Sabrina, “Does Stephanie know about Preston’s child?”

  She paused, then gave a little shru
g. “I would assume so.” Her vision drifted in the direction of the bathrooms, as if she were anxious for her friends to return. She frowned. “Now that Preston’s gone, Stephanie will want to cut off all of my contact with the baby.”

  Confused, I furrowed my brow, then realized Sabrina had changed gears and was now talking about Michael Saunders, Stephanie’s baby.

  Sabrina took a halting breath. Almost in tears, she muttered, more to herself than to me, “Hank and I have always wanted to be parents, but I can’t have children. Yet that bitch Stephanie gets pregnant. There’s no justice.”

  This subject brought back painful memories. Ten years ago, Jim and I had been heartbroken when I had a miscarriage of my first pregnancy. We’d already told the world our wonderful news and had begun decorating the nursery. Long afterwards, I felt hollowed out, as if I’d lost my uterus and my heart along with that baby. The miscarriage happened to coincide with Lauren’s wedding and caused us to cancel what would have been my first return visit to Carlton in seven years. It felt like punishment for my sin against Lauren when she and I were eighteen.

  But Sabrina was not someone I was comfortable sharing my feelings with, so I merely murmured words of condolence. She assured me that she had learned to accept her childlessness, though these words contradicted her previous ones. As she spoke, she periodically pushed on her hair, and suddenly I recalled having seen that hair someplace prior to today.

  “I remember seeing you now at the funeral.” At the funeral service, I’d noticed an auburn-colored hairdo in the front row, but hadn’t seen the face that went with it. Now that I thought about it, I didn’t recall having seen Hank. “I must have seen your husband there, too, and had forgotten.”

  She whipped out a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and selected one, her hands trembling slightly. “No, Hank wasn’t in town that day.”

  He missed his wife’s brother’s funeral? That was rather heartless. Which reminded me: Emma Groves hadn’t been there, either, though I now recalled having seen Chase there.

  In an unexpected demonstration of prompt service, Lindsay returned with our desserts. Sabrina, I noted, didn’t even look up the entire time Lindsay was at our table. I took a spoonful of my parfait, trying to shrug off a touch of guilt at the thought of how intensely my children would have relished this dessert that I could take or leave.