Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  “Don’t see any keys,” I said. “Where did you have them last?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be looking for them,” Mama huffed.

  Was something else wrong? I chewed my lip and replayed the morning in my head. Mama ate a good breakfast. Her buttercup yellow pant suit appeared neat and tidy as did her mop of white curls. Her triple strands of pearls were securely clasped around her neck. So, her appetite and grooming were fine, but her behavior was off. Probably not a medical emergency.

  I breathed easier. “What’s wrong, Mama?”

  “What’s right, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  There was just enough vinegar in her voice to make me think I’d missed something big. Like maybe a luncheon date with her. Or broken a promise. But I hadn’t done those things. I pulled out a chair and invited her to sit down. “Tell me what’s on your mind, Mama.”

  “The price of gas keeps rising.” Mama sat and enumerated points on her fingers. “World peace is a myth. Social Security isn’t social or secure. And Joe Sampson had no business dying on me.”

  She’d run out of fingers, but I got the message. Guilt smacked me dead between the eyes. I had forgotten something. The anniversary of daddy’s aneurism. Usually we took a trip to the cemetery on August 21. I gulped. “Oh, Mama, I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you say something yesterday?”

  “I didn’t want to make a big deal of it.” Mama’s voice quivered. “It’s been three years, Cleo. I should be able to go by myself.”

  I reached over the kitchen table and covered her hands with mine. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll drive you to your meeting, then we’ll swing by Fairhope on the way home.”

  Mama sat up soldier straight. “That will eat up your whole morning.”

  “No problem. We mailed all the quarterly tax payment vouchers to our Sampson Accounting clients last week. I can’t think of anything at work that won’t keep until this afternoon.”

  Half an hour later, I was sitting in the hall at Trinity Episcopal while Mama attended her Ladies Outreach Committee meeting. I’d brought a magazine to read, but there was something else about Mama this morning that worried me. Something more than our delayed cemetery visit. I wished I knew what it was. Even though I’m good at puzzles, I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong. Knowing Mama, I wouldn’t have long to wait. I dug my magazine out of my purse and flipped through the glossy pages.

  In a little while, the gentle murmur of conversation from the meeting room rose to an angry buzz. Mama’s sharp voice sliced through the fray. “Mark my words. If you don’t change your ways, Erica, someone will change them for you.”

  My heart stutter-stepped at the heat in her voice. This was not good. How should I handle it? Mama would not appreciate me trying to straighten this out. My intervention would be the equivalent of waving a red flag in front of a penned bull. I hesitated, hoping that the women resolved their difference of opinion on their own.

  “You threatening me, Dee?” Erica’s nasty tone ruffled the hair on the back of my neck and spurred me into defense of my mother.

  I stashed the magazine in my shoulder bag and hurried down the pine-scented corridor, the soles of my loafers smacking against the hard tile. After years of insulting each other, would the hostility between Mama and her arch nemesis turn physical?

  I entered the back of the meeting room in time to see Mama stride up to Erica’s podium. Ten seniors sat transfixed by the live drama. I had a very bad feeling about this. As emotional as Mama was today, her patience wouldn’t last for long. And Erica seemed to be spoiling for a fight. That wasn’t going to happen on my watch. I hurried forward, edging past the U-shaped log jam of tables and chairs. My eyes watered at the thick cloud of sweet perfume.

  Mama planted her hands on her hips. “I’m saying what nobody else has the guts to say. You are despicable. That outreach activity was supposed to bring joy and laughter to those dying children. You crushed their hopes. Worse, you gave them false hope. They were crying, Erica. You caused those dying children to suffer more.”

  Except for the red stain on Erica Hodges’ rigid cheeks, I couldn’t tell she was upset. Next to Mama’s sunny yellow suit and old-fashioned pearls, Erica’s sleek jewel-toned slacks suit, gold-threaded scarf, and apricot colored hair looked fresh, contemporary, and on-point.

  Looks could be deceiving.

  “Errors happen, Dee,” Erica said.

  Mama huffed out a great breath. “This one could have been avoided. Francine was doing a good job with scheduling before you horned in and messed it all up.”

  Across the room, Francine gasped at the mention of her name. She slid down in her seat, covered her face, and ducked her white-haired head.

  Erica surveyed the room, staring down the other matrons, before turning back to Mama. Her back arched, and her thin nose came up. “You think you could have done better?”

  “I know so. All that hard work the committee put in. You wasted it. You hurt those kids. Those circus tickets were nonrefundable. You threw away money we worked hard to raise.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Erica barked out a sharp laugh. “We’ll find more needy kids to show our civic merit. The hospital has a never ending supply.”

  A collective gasp flashed through the room. My stride faltered as distaste soured in my stomach. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A glance at Mama’s flame-red face and I knew Mount Delilah was about to erupt. I hurried forward.

  “That does it. I demand your resignation as chair of the Ladies Outreach Committee!” Mama shouted.

  “You’re out of order, Delilah Sampson,” Erica shrilled. “Sit down and shut up.”

  Mama’s mouth worked a few times with no sound emerging. She clutched her heart. I stepped up and planted my hand on her shoulder. “Mama?”

  She glared at Erica. “You can’t talk to me that way.”

  “Think again.” Erica smacked her open palm on the podium. “This is my meeting, my committee, my church, my town. I can talk to you any way I want.”

  Mama turned to face her friends. “Say something.”

  Brittle silence ensued. Not a single eyelash fluttered on the downturned gazes. Disbelief flashed through me. These women were Mama’s friends. Her best friends, but they were all intimidated by this big fish in our tiny pond. Poor Mama. We needed to get out of here before both of us did something we’d regret.

  I tapped Mama’s shoulder again. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have a family situation and have to leave. Please come with me now.”

  Mama nodded to me and inhaled shakily. She narrowed her eyes at Erica. “This isn’t over.”

  ~*~

  The events of the day returned in a rush as I locked my car. I ticked them off on my fingers.

  One, there had been a vehicular accident at the church. Two, Erica Hodges was dead. Three, Mama had a history of run-ins with Erica Hodges. Four, on Monday I listened to Mama and Erica Hodges exchange insults in public. Five, Mama’s whereabouts today were a mystery and her over-the-top behavior even more of a mystery.

  I don’t know what made me look at her Oldsmobile. Honestly, I don’t know why I looked at all. But I did. And then I wished I’d gone straight inside the house and minded my own business.

  The motion-detector light on the corner of the house had activated when I pulled into the driveway. The parking pad was now brightly illuminated.

  I touched the jagged safety glass of Mama’s shattered headlight cover. A suffocating sensation tightened my throat at the large indentation in her not-so-shiny bumper. The hood of her car mounded in the middle, pushed back from the leading edge. This car had hit something.

  Or someone.

  Dread charged through my veins, taking my breath away. Fear clawed at my heart, dragging me down to a place where I didn’t want to go. Dazed and bewildered, I staggered over to my Volvo for support. The hood warmed my cold fingers.

  This was very, very bad.

  Unthinkable.

  The pi
eces of the puzzle resolved in my head. With each connected piece, the picture became clearer. Mama and Erica. Rivals and combatants. Mama alive. Erica dead. Mama’s car damaged. Erica dead.

  Even to a rank amateur like me, the evidence pointed to a devastating conclusion. I shook my head in disbelief. This was Mama I was talking about. She was stubborn, opinionated, and bossy, and those were her finer qualities.

  Stars twinkled in the night sky overhead. Crickets chirped in the darkness. A light went on in my next-door neighbor’s kitchen. A diesel pickup truck rumbled past on Main Street. And I stood beside my mother’s damaged car in my driveway.

  Ordinary things. Trivial things

  But my life wasn’t ordinary or trivial any longer.

  A cold-blooded killer lived under my roof.

  ~*~

  Want to know what happens next? Click here to buy On the Nickel.

  About the Author

  Formerly a contract scientist for the U.S. Army and a freelance reporter, Southern author Maggie Toussaint has sixteen published books. She enjoys blending genres and solving problems, which comes in handy writing cozy mysteries, romantic suspense novels, and dystopian fiction. Her latest book releases are Bubba Done It (Five Star Publishing/Cengage, May 2015) and G-3 (writing as Rigel Carson, Muddle House Publishing, February 2016). Doggone It, a paranormal cozy, will release October 2016 from Five Star Publishing/Cengage.

  Maggie won a Silver Falchion Award for Best Mystery (Dime If I Know), a National Readers’ Choice Award for Best Romantic Suspense (House of Lies) and an EPIC award for Best Romantic Suspense (Hot Water). Her short story “High Noon at Dollar Central” was featured in the Killer Nashville Anthology: Cold-Blooded. She’s on the board for Southeast Mystery Writers of America and LowCountry Sisters In Crime. Maggie lives in coastal Georgia, where secrets, heritage, and ancient oaks cast long shadows.

  Connect with Maggie at the following sites:

  Email: maggie@maggietoussaint.com

  Website: http://www.maggietoussaint.com

  Blog: http://www.mudpiesandmagnolias.blogspot.com

  Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MaggieToussaintAuthor

  Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/MaggieToussaint

  Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MaggieToussaint

  Sign up for Maggie’s newsletter at: http://maggietoussaint.com/links/

  Books by Maggie Toussaint

  Cleopatra Jones Mystery Series

  In for a Penny

  On the Nickel

  Dime If I Know

  Dreamwalker Mystery Series

  Gone and Done It

  Bubba Done It

  Doggone It (coming Oct. 2016)

  Single Title Mysteries

  Death, Island Style

  Murder in the Buff

  Mossy Bog Romantic Suspense Series

  Muddy Waters

  Hot Water

  Rough Waters

  Single Title Romantic Suspense

  House of Lies

  No Second Chance

  Seeing Red

  The Guardian of Earth series

  G-1 (writing as Rigel Carson)

  G-2 (writing as Rigel Carson)

  G-3 (writing as Rigel Carson)

  Short Stories and Novellas

  “High Noon at Dollar Central”

  “Really, Truly Dead”

  Cookbook

  KP Authors Cook Their Books

  The Hydrogen Murder

  A Periodic Table Mystery, Book One

  By Camille Minichino

  On her 55th birthday, physicist Gloria Lamerino makes a U-turn: she cleans out her Berkeley, California condo and her physics lab, signs for a retirement bonus, and flies east to her hometown of Revere, just outside Boston. Back in the city she left thirty years ago, Gloria moves into an apartment above her friends’ funeral home and drives their hand-me-down Cadillacs.

  When she signs on with the local police as a consultant in science-related crimes, she thinks the most exciting thing about the job will be testifying as an expert witness. But Gloria finds a challenge she doesn’t expect: the murder of Eric Bensen, a physicist she knew in California. Gloria uncovers fraudulent scientific data, solves Eric’s murder, and engages in her first physical combat, all in the same week. She also has her first date in decades.

  PROLOGUE

  At two o’clock on Tuesday morning, Eric Bensen got into his aging cream-colored Volvo and drove to the laboratory complex. He needed one more look at the data, with no one else around, before he settled on his course of action.

  City traffic does sleep, he thought, as he wound through deserted streets a few miles from Boston, a light October rain bouncing off his headlights. Eric parked in front of the three-story physics building and let himself in through the back door.

  Even in the middle of the night, the corridors were noisy with the whining of generators and the hum of long fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Patterns of tiny red, yellow and green dots from filaments and stand-by lamps reminded Eric of miniature traffic lights spread at random over the racks of electronics visible through small windows in the heavy metal doors that lined the hallway.

  Eric walked past dark offices, supply closets, and workshops smelling of acids and graphite. He headed down a ramp and entered the basement room that held his gas gun—sixty feet of pistons, valves, and gases encased in metal piping, the heart of his hydrogen research. He flicked on the overhead lights, sat at his computer and picked up the printout from Monday’s runs.

  Resting the thick sheaf of data on his lap, Eric weighed his choices. He could kill one or two lines in the software program and the annoying result would disappear. Or he could acknowledge the error he and his team had made, retract their journal article, and be responsible for setting ten scientists, including his mentor, back to square one.

  Eric took a deep breath and ran his fingers through the small amount of dark brown hair he had left. With a wrinkled brow and heavy glasses, he looked much older than his thirty-one years.

  Eric was within two months of getting his doctorate and moving on to a real job with a good salary and some free time to put his personal life in order. The ticking of the generic clock on the wall above his desk seemed to grow louder as he thought of his wife’s constant nagging about starting a family.

  He swiveled around, rotating from side to side in his patched gray vinyl chair. Clockwise, instant recognition in the field of hydrogen research and financial security for life. Counterclockwise, embarrassment and disappointment for him and his colleagues.

  Eric heard the ramp door open and saw a figure approaching.

  “I thought you’d be here,” said a familiar voice.

  “Well, there’s work to do,” Eric said.

  “You’re not going to do this to me.”

  “What ... ?”

  Eric stopped short and watched, as if in a trance, as the figure moved toward him. His eyes formed a question that he didn’t bother to ask. He looked at the gun pointed directly at him and turned away, the slowness of his motion at odds with the intense speed of his thoughts. His fingers brushed the keyboard just before the first shot rang out.

  Eric fell to the floor. The sounds of two more shots echoed in his brain.

  His chair rocked for a few moments without him, then slowed to a full stop.

  ONE

  I blame my mother for all my character flaws. My inability at fifty-five years of age to decide whether to relax to an old Perry Como album or ride my exercise bike to operatic drinking songs, can be traced to my first twenty years with Josephine Lamerino.

  “You don’t like yellow,” Josephine would tell me. “You don’t want that blouse. It’ll only hang in the closet. And forget skating lessons, Gloria. You’re not athletic.” No need for decision-making with Josephine around to do it for you.

  Now with an evening free, a rarity since I’d come back to my hometown just north of Boston four months ago, I was like an electron searching for an orbit. I couldn’t focus on
what I wanted to do. I looked around my newly furnished living room, lined with neat rows of science books, biographies, and an occasional classic. I caught my reflection in the large framed print of a cable car on the highest street in San Francisco, a farewell present from the friends I’d left in California, and straightened up to my full five feet three inches.

  Maybe there’ll be a murder tonight, I thought, something to give me a focus. A strange thought, but thanks to old friends looking out for my mental health, I’d been asked to help the Revere Police Department on science-related cases. Working on my first and only contract thus far, I’d testified as an expert witness in a murder trial involving a chemist as defendant.

  I’d felt a thrill to match my best research day when I was able to give homicide detectives the break they needed—I decoded a formula for liquid tungsten that eventually led to proof of industrial espionage as the motive for a murder. I considered myself an official amateur detective, if there were such a thing.

  Not exactly what I had in mind when I took early retirement. I’d cleaned out my Berkeley condo and my physics lab, signed for my bonus, and flown east. My only plan had been to return to the place I’d fled thirty years before and see what it felt like.

  I made a private resolution to give it a year, then make a new decision. For someone who had a hard time choosing between “Hot Diggety-Dog” and the opening chorus from La Traviata, I’d set a lofty goal for myself.

  When my phone rang, I was on my way across new blue and white speckled linoleum to the refrigerator, another habit learned from Josephine. When bored or in doubt, have a snack. I was relieved to hear Rose’s voice. I didn’t really want someone murdered just to make my evening interesting.