Dedication
This book is dedicated to mothers and daughters everywhere.
And to the memory of my grandma, Helen Meisel,
who just wanted a hand to hold.
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club
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
Epilogue
About the Author
Praise for Susan McBride
Books by Susan McBride
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
Again, thanks to Robin Waldron, M.D., for answering my crazy questions; also to pharmacist Ethel Neal for confirming that my method of murder was not too farfetched for fiction.
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: working with Sarah Durand is an absolute joy. I’m also extremely fortunate to have found my way to Andrea Cirillo and Maggie Kelly this past year. Here’s to many fun and fruitful days ahead!
To the rest of my friends and family who keep me smiling even when things get nuts. If not for you, I would have to be medicated. (I’m kidding. Sort of.)
Epigraph
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
—George Eliot
The Lone Star
LONELY HEARTS
Club
Chapter 1
Getting old was murder.
Make no mistake about it.
Sarah Lee Sewell tugged on the loose skin of her cheeks and frowned at the mirror, wondering if it wasn’t time she got a little nip and tuck. Every woman her age in Dallas—and not a few of the men—had been doing it for years. But, as long as Eldon had been alive, Sarah Lee hadn’t put too much stock in her faded appearance.
“I love you for what’s inside, honey pie, not for the gift-wrapping”—his blue eyes had twinkled as they’d looked her up and down—“though I’ve got no complaints about that, either.”
The smile that formed on her lips at the memory fast died, and she sighed at her tired reflection.
“Oh, Eldon,” she said, to no one but herself. “How I miss you.”
She missed his wit.
Missed his scent, of tweed and pipe tobacco.
Missed having a hand to hold. That, most of all.
After five decades of marriage, two years seemed a long time to go without the touch of a man. Maybe some women could stand it, but Sarah Lee couldn’t. It was a slow death in itself, like being starved or suffocated. Even cats needed to be stroked now and then.
Sarah Lee was only human.
Which was why she’d gone and done what she had, something she never in her wildest dreams imagined she’d do and still wasn’t too all-fired sure about.
She’d started dating.
She hadn’t told any of her friends what she was up to and wasn’t certain she’d stick it out, but she’d promised herself she’d give it a decent shot before she chucked the idea as pure insanity.
She’d been out to dinner twice already with several different gentlemen, the conversation pleasant if not a little awkward. They had asked if they might call on her again, and Sarah Lee hadn’t objected. Though getting used to being courted at this point in her life gave her butterflies as big as B-2 bombers.
She fumbled with a silver tube of lipstick, swiping her thin mouth one last time with a well-used crimson. Then she pinched her cheeks and nodded, knowing she’d done the best she could with what she had.
Which is when her legs began to tremble.
Dear God, why on earth was she doing this?
Because you’re lonely, a tiny voice reminded her. Because Eldon’s been gone for years, and you don’t like to be alone.
It wasn’t even sex. She merely wanted to be held in the snug circle of a man’s arms. Was that such a terrible thing?
She sighed and steadied herself against the marble counter.
Before her recent outings, the last real “date” she’d been on was back in high school, and her suitor had been a sixteen-year-old Highland Park football star named Eldon Sewell. Sarah Lee had been top of her class at Ursuline Academy, smart enough to know a catch when she’d hooked him. At eighteen, they’d married, living in off-campus housing in Fort Worth as they’d worked their way through TCU, building a foundation that had lasted “till death do us part.” They’d still be together if that damned cancer hadn’t chewed Eldon’s life away from the inside out.
She’d never been with anyone before him, nor since. Not in the biblical sense. Which made her something of a freak in these fast and loose times, didn’t it? She was an eight-track tape in a digital era, and the way her friends kept dying off, pretty soon they’d all be extinct.
You’re morbid, Sarah Lee, she thought and laughed at herself.
But death scared her far less than the dating game she’d been playing.
She patted her hair, styled in the same teased and sprayed coif she’d worn for too many years, and she figured it was time for a change. She was a different person than she’d been: more self-assured and assertive.
Maybe she’d try that fellow at the Plaza Park Salon about whom her terribly chic friend Cissy Kendricks had been raving lately. She’d get his name when she saw Cissy Wednesday at bridge, because it wouldn’t be appropriate to inquire at the church service for Bebe Kent the next morning.
Ah, poor Bebe.
With bent fingers, she reached for her brush.
The doorbell chimed.
Startled, the brush dropped from her hand, clattering into the bowl of the sink, and she turned toward the hallway, her heart zigzagging in her chest, it beat so loudly.
Who could that be? she wondered, because she’d arranged to meet her date at the restaurant, as she’d done with the two before him. A neutral spot, because she didn’t want strangers in her home, not at night when she was by herself, despite the relative security of her surroundings.
Probably just a neighbor, or one of the staff come to sweet-talk her into submission. You’d think for all she’d paid to live in this highbrow retirement home, Housekeeping could come more than twice a week, her toilets would flush properly, and they could keep the damned squirrels out of her attic. No matter if it was the director herself, panting like a puppy dog and begging to please, Sarah Lee wasn’t letting her in. They could discuss her complaints at her convenience or she surely would drag in her lawyer.
Oh, dear, she realized, smoothing the hem of her dress. She had to leave in fifteen minutes flat if she wanted to be on time for the dinner reservation.
She took a deep breath and shut off the bathroom light as she stepped into the hallway.
The bell chimed again.
“Coming,” she trilled and hurried toward the noise, passing the photographs of herself and Eldon hanging on the walls, not seeing them, too curious about the visitor who waited for her on the other side of the door. She seriously hoped it wasn’t her date, to whom she’d stated quite plainly that she preferred to drive herself; but some men of her generation found the idea an affront to their chivalry.
Pulse skippi
ng, she put an eye to the peephole and squinted.
Hmmm.
This put her in a pickle.
She unlocked the door and pulled it wide. “Well, goodness, I wasn’t expecting to see you.” She stared at the visitor who stood on her welcome mat, unsure of how to handle things except to put on a polite face and mind her manners. “Oh, dear, I can only spare a minute or two.” She forced a smile and stepped back, making way. “But, please, won’t you come in?”
It was the last question Sarah Lee Sewell would ever ask.
Chapter 2
I only had one funeral dress.
My closet wasn’t exactly equipped for death.
If I’d been the proper Dallas debutante my mother had reared me to be, I would’ve owned uncountable black outfits, enough styles to accommodate any social occasion, from cocktail parties to gallery openings to saying sayonara to the dearly departed.
But I wasn’t a debutante, much less a proper one.
I’d never debuted at all, much to Mother’s everlasting chagrin. She’d blamed it on my grief over my father’s death when I was eighteen, a sudden stroke of temporary insanity, while I regarded my refusal to “come out” (and I’m talking socially) as finally coming to my senses. Defying Cissy Blevins Kendricks over something so important to her—and so meaningless to me—felt like the unveiling of the real Andy Kendricks. I’d been born-again, only not in any religious sense. It had more to do with my desire to be a regular human being, regardless of how desperately Cissy wanted me to follow in her Ferragamo-heeled footsteps.
I would no more be a society maven—like her—than a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist. It just wasn’t in the cards, no matter how she tried to stack the deck. I cherished my independence after growing up alongside far too many Step-ford children who seemed perfectly willing to follow the rules, such as they were, so as not to be disenfranchised by their wealthy parents. Any acts of rebellion on their part were carefully exorcised in the bars and on the beaches of Cabo on spring break.
Thank God my father had encouraged my free spirit. Unfortunately, it had taken his death to release it completely. I’d spent the better part of the last decade channeling his strength in order to beat back my mother’s attempts to corrupt me with invitations to the city’s most exclusive grand openings and galas, or the latest from Escada or Fendi.
So far, I’d done a passable job resisting.
Despite Cissy’s best efforts, she’d failed to turn me into a fashion plate, though my brain was still wired to recognize a Pucci when I saw one. I’d been a deb-in-training from the moment I’d left the womb, and those lessons were ones I couldn’t shake from my system, not unless I developed amnesia or had a lobotomy (and I wasn’t planning to do either).
Regardless of Cissy’s influence, these days I was more about comfort than couture. I’m sure the salesladies at Chanel in Highland Park Village would shudder and shoo me out the door were I to walk in wearing my uniform of paint-spattered jeans and faded SAVE THE RAINFOREST T-shirt. While my perfectly put-together pearl-wearing mother had them salivating like Pavlov’s dogs the moment she set off the door chime. I didn’t doubt they had the digits on her Platinum MasterCard memorized. They had her number, regardless.
There was little chance of my winding up beside Cissy on the Park Cities Press’s annual “bestdressed” list. My tastes didn’t go much beyond bargain hunting at vintage and resale shops, when I did shop at all.
A fashionista, I was not. I was an artist and web designer, doing lots of pro bono work, primarily for underfunded charities. Most days I lived in sweatpants and wrinkled button-downs left behind by Brian Malone, my current squeeze who happened to be an attorney. Though dating a man with a steady job and clean-cut appearance wasn’t my norm, Malone made my heart skip in a way that no free-spirited poet-cum-bartender had before him. And he never complained about the sorry state of my wardrobe, which scored huge points in his favor.
Particularly because he had good cause to complain, I decided, clearheadedly taking in the contents of my small walk-in closet, which more closely resembled donations to the Goodwill bin than the racks at Saks. Full of well-worn jeans, cotton T-shirts, and sneakers, everything—or most of it—made of natural fibers, none branded with a high-class label.
There were times, despite myself, when I wanted to call my Fairy Clothes-Mother to wave her magic wand and fix me up.
Then I’d come to my senses.
I hesitated but briefly before I plucked out a hanger with the only suitable funereal garment I possessed. The curved arms held a lightweight black knit that had served me well since the first time I’d worn it, at my graduation from art school in Chicago. I’d barely had cause to don it since.
I expected my mother to wince when she saw it, but she wouldn’t dare criticize, not at the memorial service of a dear friend and certainly not inside the walls of Highland Park Presbyterian where God could hear her. Besides, she was profoundly brokenhearted. As good as she was at maintaining an air of decorum, no matter how rough a situation, the loss of her old chum had her seriously choked up.
“I can’t believe she’s gone, Andrea.” Her ever-charming drawl had bordered on a broken-up wail when she’d phoned with the news the previous day. “Bebe was only seventy-three, and she was healthy as a horse except for the usual things . . . a touch of high blood pressure, seasonal allergies, certainly nothing fatal. I can hardly think of a day when she was sick. Good heavens, she got her flu shots every year like clockwork, and I’ve never seen anyone take so much vitamin C. It’s a wonder she wasn’t orange.”
Cissy had recently turned sixty, so Bebe had but a slim decade on her. No wonder she was so shaken, and her audible grief had me so tonguetied I hadn’t known what to say beyond the pathetic and inept, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“I just don’t understand. She did yoga and water aerobics three days a week and used her treadmill during Oprah. She finished the Susan Komen Walk in June in a hundred-degree heat and didn’t stop once. No,” my mother had protested, and I’d imagined the perfect oval of her face crumpled with desolation. “It doesn’t make sense.”
But people died all the time, right? Dropped dead for no apparent reason other than a heart that stopped ticking. And once you crossed seventy, you were fair game, I supposed. Heck, every time you stepped off the curb, you were taking your chances.
“You’ll go with me to her service, won’t you, sweetie? I don’t think I could bear to do this alone.”
Alone?
Unless the fire code prevented it, she’d be surrounded by four or five hundred of her and Bebe’s closest comrades.
“What about Sandy?” I piped up timidly, because Sandy Beck had been with my family for ages and still lived in the house on Beverly Drive, taking care of Mother and the mansion with the efficiency of Martha Stewart and the demeanor of Gandhi. She was, beyond all else, a calming force, and that’s what Cissy needed most.
Until I remembered that Sandy didn’t “do” funerals, neither did she read the obits in the Dallas Morning News. Unlike most of us, Sandy Beck didn’t like to dwell on negatives.
Damn her.
I wish I’d adopted the “no-funerals” policy myself right after Daddy died. Could be that I didn’t appreciate the closure offered by the tradition and ceremony, but sad hymns and eulogies twisted my guts like a pretzel. I wondered if there was such a thing as funeral phobia. If so, I had it in spades.
“Andrea, please, won’t you go?”
Mother’s honey-smooth drawl could sound so tragic when it suited her. If SMU had offered a course in Emotional Blackmail, my mother would’ve aced it. (Heck, she could teach it.)
Despite how thoroughly I wanted to decline this particular invitation, my heart wasn’t nearly black enough to refuse Mother’s plea. Before I could stop the words from flowing off my tongue, I’d told her, “All right. You can count on me.”
Well, she didn’t ask for my shoulder to lean on very often. Okay, almost never.
“Poor, poor Bebe,” she’d said and sighed the most doleful sigh. “I’ll miss her terribly. She was the best bridge partner I ever had.”
Beatrice “Bebe” Kent wasn’t anyone I’d known well, beyond polite “hellos” every so often when I was growing up on Beverly Drive in “the bubble” of Highland Park. She’d been a high-ranking member of Cissy’s expansive circle of blue blood friends who’d never met a fundraiser or civic organization they didn’t like. Her obit in the Dallas Morning News merited nearly half a page and read like a “what’s what” of A-list clubs and philanthropies: past president of the Junior League of Dallas; board member of the Dallas Art Museum; chairwoman of the Crystal Charity Ball; life member of the Brook Hollow Golf Club, Dallas Country Club, the Dallas Woman’s Club, the Dallas Garden Club, the Park Cities Historical Society, and on and on, ad infinitum. She’d been the trés wealthy widow of Homer Kent, a much-adored oil magnate after whom a rather large wing of Presbyterian Hospital had been named. But, most importantly, Bebe had been a graduate of Southern Methodist University and an active alumna of Pi Beta Phi.
My mother’s sorority.
In Cissy’s eyes, Bebe was a shining example of Texas womanhood, of living one’s life right. Or, rather, properly.
Part of me wondered if one of the reasons Mother had asked me to accompany her to Bebe’s memorial had less to do with needing my support than Bebe’s legacy serving as an example that it wasn’t too late for me to change my tune and embrace my trust fund with open arms.
I had no such delusions.
Seeing the hordes of Bebe’s nearest and dearest fill the pews, all garbed in the latest somber hues from New York or Paris, would only serve to remind me that Mother’s world wasn’t one I wished to inhabit, not in this lifetime. She had a galaxy of upper crust chums always flitting around her, like stars bright with bling surrounding the sun.
The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club: A Debutante Dropout Mystery Page 1