Blue Blood: A Debutante Dropout Mystery

by McBride, Susan

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to everyone who has ever felt like an outsider.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Blue Blood

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Praise for Blue Blood

  Books by Susan McBride

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  As always, I’m indebted to my mother, Pat McBride, for her support through thick and thin, and to my dad, Jim McBride, for cheering each small success.

  Having an agent like Victoria Sanders and an editor like Sarah Durand is akin to winning the lottery! My thanks to both for seeing something special in this book.

  My sincere appreciation to the wonderful Alice Peck, whose brilliant insights made the story shine.

  I am lucky to have the hardest working Web Diva in the biz, Janell Schiffbauer, who designed SusanMcBride.com and has kept it running like a well-oiled wheel for the past few years.

  And, finally, much love to my amazing family and friends for their faith in me and for making every day of my life such a blast! You all rock.

  Epigraph

  “It’s not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree.

  It’s what you do with your life that counts.”

  —Millard Fuller, Founder, Habitat for Humanity

  Blue Blood

  Prologue

  Unlucky.

  That’s what she was.

  Molly O’Brien pulled her T-shirt down over her head, not bothering to tuck the hem into her jeans. She squinted at her watch, barely illuminated by the faint stream of light flowing in from the hall, and she groaned when she realized it was well past midnight. God, how she wished she’d weaseled out of helping Bud Hartman close the place! He was creepy enough in broad daylight. If that didn’t bite, now she also owed the babysitter overtime.

  She grabbed her purse from its hook, slammed her locker and turned around.

  Bud stood in the doorway, watching.

  “Christ,” she breathed, her heartbeat thumping overloudly. How long had he been there? She swallowed and willed herself to sound far calmer than she felt. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

  His lips curved like a Halloween pumpkin. “You girls are too damned jumpy.”

  “Hard not to be with you sneaking around.”

  “Hell, it’s my joint. I can do what I want. Or who I want.”

  His eyes gleamed from the shadows, and a chill shot up her spine. She tightened her hand on her purse.

  “Well, I’m taking off, okay? The money from the register’s in the bank bag on your desk. I’ve gotta get home to pay the babysitter. I’m already an hour late.”

  But he didn’t move. His body filled the doorway, blocking her path.

  Molly’s only alternative was to squeeze past him. He put an arm across the threshold, but she bit her lip and ducked beneath. She kept going up the hallway, into the kitchen and toward the rear exit, which loomed dead ahead.

  “What’s your hurry, O’Brien?” he growled from behind her and caught her shoulder, jerking her back. He spun her around and forced her against the stainless-steel countertop. The cold metal jabbed hard into her spine, and she grimaced.

  “Hey, cut it out!”

  “Then stop playin’ so hard to get.”

  She felt the hot hiss of his breath on her face as his body pinned hers beneath him. He was six-two to her five-six, and he outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. He had her trapped, and he knew it.

  “You’re hurting me, Bud.”

  But he didn’t seem to care.

  His brown eyes bore into hers and the stretch of his brow beneath the slicked-back hair glistened with sweat. “What’s the problem, huh?” He smelled of beer and testosterone, and bile rose in her throat. “You were nice to me once.”

  “Temporary insanity,” she said.

  He grinned.

  Her mouth dry, Molly wet her lips and tried again. “I’ve got a six-year-old boy, remember? I’m a mother, not one of your bimbos. I can’t screw around with my life, not anymore.”

  For a moment, he hesitated, and his hold on her loosened the slightest bit. A bubble of hope swelled in her chest.

  And burst.

  His head came down fast and hard, his mouth smothering hers. His tongue rammed past her teeth, choking her.

  You disgusting piece of. . . .

  With her free hand, she reached behind her, frantically looking for something, anything, to get her out of this. Her fingertips ran into a wooden block and then upward into slender handles.

  She slipped a knife from its slot and blindly swung it as Bud came up for air.

  He howled and released her.

  Molly dropped the knife and sprinted to the exit door.

  Flinging herself into her Ford pickup, she took off in a squeal of tires, never glancing back.

  Chapter 1

  Music played in the background, a soft tinkling of piano keys that filtered into the yellow-walled dining room at the Palm, a swanky restaurant with white linen tablecloths, pricey lobster and steak, and an even more expensive clientele that Mother had selected for what she’d told me was a “girls’ night out.”

  Ha.

  I could swear the tune that teased my ears was “Mack the Knife,” a fitting soundtrack for the murderous thoughts running through my head, though I could hardly hear the notes over the careful rise of her voice.

  “Did I tell you, Andrea, that Trey has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Southern Methodist?” Cissy drawled above the hum of surrounding conversation, laying a smile so thick on Haskell E. Maxwell III that he blushed and nearly fogged up his Coke-bottle lenses.

  “Hmmm,” I turned away from Mr. Maxwell entirely to plant a glare on my mother that could’ve set her fashionably styled blond hair on fire. “Come to think of it, I don’t believe you told me anything at all about Trey.”

  She fluttered her eyes, playing innocent. Badly. “Oh, didn’t I? Just an oversight, darling, I swear.”

  I swore as well. At her, under my breath.

  Her “oversight” had started with a lie about dinner this evening—“Oh, it’ll be fun, Andrea, just us girls at the Palm, what do you say?”—never letting on for a moment that—surprise!—our reservation would include a ménage à Trey, as it were. A blind date for moi. My prospective match, not surprisingly, was the son of a bosom buddy of Mother’s. He was nearly forty, rather gawky (I’m being kind), and never married, which might be a chronic problem for him if what I’d seen so far was any indication.

  “He’s a musician, you know.”

  “Oh?” I arched an eyebrow at Trey, studying the long face, drooping hair, and geeky specs with black rims. Did he secretly wield a Fender Stratocaster for a rock band when he wasn’t off philosophizing? For a moment, he almost seemed interesting.

  Until Mother an
swered, just a tad too brightly, “He happens to be a brilliant pipe organist.”

  My eyebrow fell, along with any spark of intrigue that had flared at the idea of Haskell III as a closet Rolling Stone.

  “It’s a difficult instrument, Andrea, sweetie, one that requires years of study. Trey is nothing if not dedicated, and that’s such a rare quality in men of your generation.” She put the hard sell on me, like a Mary Kay cosmetics lady just a lipstick shy of a pink Cadillac. “Did I tell you he played the most breathtaking rendition of ‘Ave Maria’ at Highland Park Presby last Christmas?”

  Cissy clasped a beautifully manicured hand to her silk-covered heart at the memory, drawing my eye to the triple strand of pearls at her throat so that I found myself wondering how tightly I’d have to pull them to cut off her oxygen.

  “Please, Mrs. Kendricks, you’re embarrassing me,” Trey feebly protested, and I wondered how a man who’d grown up on a Texas cattle ranch the size of Rhode Island could be so meek and pale. Someone obviously hadn’t eaten his Wheaties.

  “A doctor of philosophy who plays the pipe organ. How . . . unusual.” I glanced at the bespectacled buttoned-down fellow across the table without a drop of my mother’s enthusiasm, all the while thinking that a Ph.D. in basket weaving might have been handier. But, then again, Trey had a trust fund that could pay off the federal deficit, so employment probably wasn’t his biggest concern.

  “And he’s a member of Mensa, if that isn’t enough.”

  “Oh, it’s enough already,” I murmured and felt the pointed toe of a Prada pump poke me in the shin.

  Cissy Blevins Kendricks strikes again.

  How like her to fix me up with a guy who thought he was smarter than everyone else, played the organ (which doesn’t sound like a good thing any way you put it), and who could quote Plato ad nauseam.

  Perfect.

  He fit right in with all the others she tried to foist on me when I least expected it. Last month it was an investment banker who wore a black eye patch but “had an impeccable nose for IPOs” and collected Lladro figurines. The month before, it was the heir to an ostrich farm whose long neck, receding hairline, beaked schnozz, and supersized Adam’s apple lent him a striking resemblance to his feathered beasts. Though I was the one who’d wanted to bury my head in the sand.

  I wished my mother could just let me be. It’s not as if I were an old maid or anything, at least from my perspective. I was still on the sunny side of thirty and not desperate enough to settle for money instead of love. For Mother, good bloodlines superseded matters of the heart. Any son of Ross Perot would do, even if that meant her grandchildren would have Dumbo ears and a squeaky drawl that made nails on a chalkboard sound pleasant in comparison.

  Trying to change her mind was a hopeless cause. Sort of like investing in Enron while they were making packing material out of financial reports.

  Part of me wondered why I hadn’t stayed in Chicago instead of coming home again, though I’d felt so guilty for leaving Mother alone and going off to art school after Daddy died that I’d nearly succumbed way back then and remained in Dallas to attend SMU. Cissy had her diamond-studded arrow badge ready to pin on me, expecting I’d go through sorority rush and pledge Pi Phi, as she did. But my father had always insisted I follow my dreams, and so I’d undermined all of Mother’s plans and forged ahead with my own, as much for myself as for Daddy.

  Still, it hadn’t taken Mother long after my art school graduation to lure me back where I belonged. Though I’d certainly adored Chicago, with its mix of sophistication and Midwest sturdiness, I’d missed Texas more, down to the scuffed toes of my Tony Lama boots. Must’ve been my DNA. Having both Blevins and Kendricks in my family tree made for some pretty deep roots. Though, sometimes, like now, I had grave concerns about what I’d gotten myself into.

  I picked at my hearts of palm salad as Cissy made small talk with Trey, asking about his family’s recent trip to their mock chateau in Telluride, though I knew she’d already gotten a blow-by-blow from Trey’s mother, Millicent Maxwell (after whom Bar Bush supposedly named the book-writing presidential pooch).

  And I pondered how the hell I was going to make it through several more courses without screaming and tearing my hair out at the roots. So I gazed at the crowd of faces on the yellow wall above, depictions of the Palm’s famous patrons, scowling when I spotted my mother’s image.

  “Trey, darling,” Mother purred, “why don’t you tell Andrea about the time you played the pipe organ for the pope?”

  I wasn’t fast enough to escape to the ladies’ room.

  “All right.” He cleared his throat and opened his mouth so I could see the hunk of chive stuck between his front teeth. “It was four years ago, no, five, excuse me, when I made a pilgrimage to Turkey to find the answer to my quest for the meaning of life,” Mr. Maxwell Number Three started up, Mother egging him on with gentle coos and keeping me in line with nudges under the table until I was sure my shin was black and blue.

  “. . . it was in Istanbul when I ran into a priest with one leg who’d lost his church organist to a tragic rug-weaving accident . . .”

  I didn’t even pretend to listen. Instead, I scoured the Palm’s extensive wine list, wishing I’d ordered something stronger than Perrier with lemon.

  Wondering how I’d ever fallen for another of Mother’s schemes.

  Thinking that, if they didn’t bring me a plain old hamburger as I’d requested instead of the filet mignon my mother had indicated to the waiter behind her hand, I’d order every damned dessert on the menu and rot out the teeth she’d spent so much money to straighten and whiten when I was growing up.

  Though Mother owed me a lot more than chocolate mousse.

  And she would pay for it.

  Dearly.

  The phone rang, shattering my dreams, which had something to do with a purple-haired woman and a handsome televangelist saying, “Praise the Lord” a lot and trying to pry money from my hands in order to save starving children in Nepal.

  It rang again, and I peeled open an eye just wide enough to read the glowing arms of my alarm clock.

  Five-thirty.

  I groaned and rolled over, thinking this was just part of the nightmare that had started with the set-up at the Palm and had ended with a headache requiring Excedrin P.M. and watching late, late night TV until I’d fallen asleep. Which accounted for the dream about the televangelist and his wigged sidekick.

  Maybe it was Cissy, calling to spoil the start of the day since she’d managed to do such a bang-up job ruining the previous evening by forcing me to endure the company of a philosophical Mensa pipe organist during one of the longest dinners of my life. Besides, she was the only one I knew who’d dial me up before the sun had risen. Tormenting her only child was more fundamental to her than sleep.

  When the phone rang twice more, I fumbled for the receiver before my voice mail could pick up. “Okay, okay, I’m up already,” I groaned.

  “Andrea?”

  The voice that said my name wasn’t my mother’s smooth drawl. It seemed familiar somehow, though I couldn’t quite place it, not at the crack of dawn when my normally sharp senses were still snoozing.

  “Andrea Kendricks?”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, God, it’s me, Molly O’Brien.”

  “Molly?”

  “You’ve got to help me, Andy, please.”

  Fear shook her every word, and I was suddenly wide-awake. Last time I’d seen Molly, we’d shared a place at Columbia College in Chicago, before she’d dropped out and run off to Paris with a Hemingway wannabe sporting a long black ponytail and a nose ring.

  “I’m in trouble, real trouble. They came to my apartment this morning and got me out of bed and I had to leave David with my landlady . . .”

  “Hey, slow down.” She was talking so fast I could hardly understand what she was saying. I sat up, reached for the lamp, and switched it on. Blinking at the flood of brightness, I felt around for my glasses and knocked a pa
perback off the night table.

  “Take a deep breath and start over,” I told her.

  “I’m at the police station,” she blurted out.

  At that point, I was the one who needed to take a deep breath. “Which one?”

  “Far North Dallas,” she cried like someone whose house was on fire. “They said Bud’s dead and that I killed him.”

  The terror in her voice shot through me faster than a cup of caffeine.

  I didn’t stop to ask who Bud was. I kicked off the covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed, telling her as confidently as I could, “Just hold on. I’ll be right there.”

  Then I hung up and called Mother.

  Chapter 2

  I had met Molly as a freshman in high school.

  She had been on scholarship at Hockaday, and I was there because my mother had been a Hockaday girl and couldn’t imagine I’d go anywhere else, least of all—God forbid—to public school. Molly had been quiet, pretty with her dark hair, fair skin, and more shape than any teenager deserved, but a loner because of her lack of social standing. I, on the other hand, had enough good background to go around, what with being half Blevins and half Kendricks, two of Dallas’s oldest families, if anything about Dallas can truly be called “old.” But I was no more popular than she.

  Gawky and flat where others were graceful and curved, I made up for my lack of poise and T&A with an overflow of creativity. To my mother’s chagrin, I didn’t try out for field hockey, golf, or tennis. Instead, I experimented with brushstrokes and ink strokes, like a modern-day Mary Cassatt. I volunteered to paint murals over graffiti-covered walls in the city, and gleefully slaved over graphics and layout for the yearbook and school paper. While I was so-so with watercolors and oils, I was daVinci with freehand drawings. I once overheard a teacher tell another that I was “a patchwork purse in a sea of Guccis,” which may have been devastating to my self-esteem had I not taken it as a compliment.

  Molly and I sat next to each other in art class, which bonded us more permanently than Elmer’s craft glue. She wanted to be a fashion designer and whipped up the wildest pint-sized outfits that she’d display on Barbie dolls, hoping to work her way up to real people. Before she’d entered Hockaday, she’d lived with a foster family on the outskirts of the Park Cities. I was the only child of Cissy and Stanley Kendricks of Beverly Drive in Highland Park. She taught me what it was like to grow up with nothing, and I showed her what it meant to be raised from the pages of the Neiman Marcus catalog. We both envied the other somehow, which sealed our friendship tighter than spit or blood.