“What was it?” Wanda Jean asked.
“He said he was in love with you and he just took the pantyhose because he had never tried control tops before,” Melinda Sue said.
“So you were upset that he wanted to put them on?” Wanda Jean asked. “You killed my husband because he wanted to put on your control top pantyhose?”
“Oh, no,” Melinda Sue said. “I didn’t kill him because of that. I killed him because when I asked him why he would pick you over me, he said it was because you dress so much nicer than I do.”
A slow smile began to spread over Wanda Jean’s face, a radiance that filled her eyes with shining joy. “Hilton didn’t cheat on me,” she said breathlessly. “He turned you down.”
“Well, yes,” Melinda Sue said, “but I’ve been turned down before. I killed him because he clearly was not in his right mind and I couldn’t have him influencing the judges with that kind of talk.”
“What judges, Melinda Sue?” Clara asked.
“The judges,” she said, turning toward Clara. “They’re always against me and it just never made any sense. And then I realized it just had to be a conspiracy. Like the Communists. It’s the only explanation. I did everything perfectly and I still didn’t get the tiaras that were rightfully mine.”
“You killed Hilton because you thought he was working against you with the pageant judges?” Clara asked.
“I couldn’t risk it,” Melinda Sue said. “You see . . ..” She faltered and then seemed to gather up her courage. “You see, I’m running out of time.”
“You sure as hell are,” Mae Ella said, shaking her head.
“And Hilton just stood there?” Wanda Jean asked.
“I told him I needed to use the ladies’ room,” Melinda Sue said. “I went in your kitchen and found the knife. I held it behind me and walked right up to Hilton and just aimed for his name tag. He tried to catch my hand, but he grabbed my charm bracelet. And then he just kinda fell back on your shag carpet. I am sorry about the rug.”
“Melinda Sue,” Clara said, “you need to come down to the Sheriff’s Office with us now and tell Lester about all this.”
“You mean about the conspiracy?” Melinda Sue said hopefully. “Do you think Lester can help me stop them?”
“Yes, I do,” Clara said. “Come on now. We’ll put a stop to all this conspiracy nonsense right now.”
“That’s so Christian of you, Clara,” Melinda Sue said, coming down the steps. “Just let me fix my hair before we go. Would you help me, Sugar?”
Sugar looked at Clara, who nodded. “Of course, I will,” Sugar said. “We’ll make you look real pretty, Melinda Sue.”
Melinda Sue turned a radiant smile on her. “Thank you, Sugar,” she said. “I do always like to look my best for the judges.”
As she and Sugar walked away, Mae Ella said, “I think there’s just one judge she’s gonna have to be worried about this time.”
Chapter 22
Melinda Sue Fairchild related the tale of Hilton Milton’s death with animation and pitch perfect elocution to Sheriff Lester Harper. For his part, Lester listened to her story with what appeared to be rapt attention and complete sympathy. When she began to detail the long crimes of the “conspiracy” that had so long deprived her of her dreams, Lester nodded as if the scales were falling away from his eyes and everything had become perfectly clear.
“This is awful, Melinda Sue,” he said in a tone meant to convey both comfort and outrage. “We need to get you someplace safe while we prove what these people have done to you. It won’t be as nice as what you’re used to, but it’ll just be for a little while. You may have to go into hiding, but I know a nice place in Big Spring where these awful people will never find you.”
Across the room, Wanda Jean leaned toward Clara and whispered, “What’s in Big Spring?”
“The State mental hospital,” Mae Ella supplied in a helpful but far from hushed tone.
Lester shot her a warning glance and she waved an apologetic hand in his direction before he turned his full attention back to Melinda Sue, who had taken ahold of his hand and was now gushing her gratitude.
“Oh, thank you, Lester,” she said breathlessly. I should have come and talked to you a long time ago.”
Lester patted her hand and said, “There, there now. We’ll take care of this whole mess. Now you just go with my deputy and let me make some phone calls.”
After Melinda Sue and Hank Howard left the office, Lester had the good manners to apologize to Wanda Jean, and stood there like a man taking a tongue-lashing from Clara about the state of the carpet, promising to take up the matter of reimbursement with the Commissioner’s Court.
In general, Lester looked like a man who had been freed of a terrible burden — an unsolved murder and a gaggle of unhappy women — until Clara said, “And we have a few other things to tell you.”
As she began to talk, Lester’s face turned an ashen gray. He looked like he’d just taken a bullet to the chest. He sank back in his chair and tried to absorb all the “additional facts” Clara and the women had uncovered over the last week. For just a fleeting instant he’d thought his troubles were over, and now it was painfully clear that his fishing was going to be interrupted for days.
It was a week, in fact, before Lester Harper was able to retreat to the safety of the riverbank. During that time, the real truth about the hardware store was fully revealed, including Hank Howard’s falsified report in exchange for a bribe from the insurance company. To save his own hide, Hank made a deal with the District Attorney and gave up the name of the arsonist.
Hank’s desk yielded up a full set of notes explaining the real nature of the fire, and the evidence that led him straight to Leroy Taylor, who set the fire. The destruction was in retribution for John Powell’s refusal to do business with him after Leroy wrote one hot check too many to pay for merchandise.
Leroy broke into the hardware store and poured kerosene in concentric circles around the building, igniting the liquid with one of his cigarettes on the way out the door. It was difficult to tell what made Lester Harper more apoplectic; the fact that Hank covered up the arson or that he let an arsonist and notorious wife beater go scot-free.
Lester used his fury to hide the fact that he was bitterly disappointed in his young protégé and his distress over the fact that now, without a deputy, he would be called upon to enforce the law more and fish less.
No sooner was Leroy Taylor in handcuffs than the Study Club officers appeared on Lura Belle’s front porch with an offer to help her file for a divorce. The poor woman stood there with a black eye and a split lip and said, “But I don’t have any money.”
“You let us worry about that,” Clara said. “Just tell us you want to get away from that son of a bitch.”
“I want to get away from that son of a bitch,” Lura Belle whispered obediently but fervently.
Predictably, however, it was Maybelline Trinkle who threw the biggest fit over the outcome of the investigation. Oh, she was glad Hilton’s killer had been identified, but she was not pleased to lose the ever attentive Hank Howard. And then there was the fact that her sister and the women actually thought she might have killed Blake.
In the middle of the tirade she threw in front of the Study Club officers, Maybelline declared, “I am telling you it was the pot Blake smoked that killed him. That damn stuff was making him sick and he just wouldn’t listen to me. Just kept lighting up like some damn-pinko-commie-hippie flower child . . ..”
Wilma stopped Maybelline in mid-description. “Do you still have the pot?” she asked.
Maybelline frowned. “I guess so,” she said. “Blake kept it in his extra tool box under the socket wrenches. Help yourself. I don’t smoke that crap. You can have it.”
Wilma took a day off and drove a sample of the pot to San Antonio to be analyzed by an old Army buddy who now worked in a research laboratory. The weed came back positive for an insecticide called Paraquat, which, when ingested in large quantities, can tr
igger a heart attack. In short order, Sheriff Harper was shutting down Blake’s supplier before the contaminated weed killed anyone else.
When Wilma delivered the news to the Study Club officers, Clara said, “Huh, I guess there’s something to be said for Mike Thornton’s organic gardening after all.”
“So that’s it?” Sugar asked. “We’re done? Things can get back to normal?”
“Well,” Clara said, “we figured out who killed Hilton, caught an arsonist, uncovered insurance fraud, got a woman away from her abusive husband, shut down a poison pot grower, and the county paid for Wanda Jean’s carpet. I’d say our work is done for now.”
Wanda Jean was so grateful to the women for solving Hilton’s murder and clearing her name she invited them all to dinner that night. The ladies were welcomed at the front door by a smiling hostess and a heavenly aroma of cooking food.
“My Lord, Wanda Jean,” Sugar said, “what are you fixing us for supper? It smells wonderful.”
“I made a big ole pot of spaghetti and homemade sauce and baked the bread myself,” Wanda Jean said. “It’s not very I-talian, but there’s chocolate cake for dessert.”
“Chocolate is a food group,” Sugar observed. “It goes with everything.”
The group made a point of studiously ignoring the pink spot on the carpet as they followed Wanda Jean into the dining room where she’d set the table with her best china, silver, and crystal.
The meal, which started out slow, became livelier with each bite. Every story seemed to be funnier than the last, and then a mellow, feel-good air seized them all.
“I just love you all so much,” Sugar said, dreamily twirling spaghetti on her fork until she was staring at an entwined lump the size of a golf ball. “The Study Club just gives me a reason to live.”
“That’s how I feel about doing nails,” Flowers said, buttering her sixth slice of bread. “Some days I just feel like that Emory board grinds away the problems of the world.”
Sugar leaned into Flowers and said, “I didn’t know you felt like that, Flowers. You’re just a beautiful person inside. Don’t you think Flowers is a beautiful person, Clara?”
“I do, I do,” Clara agreed, but then she frowned and squinted across the table at Mae Ella, who was holding her dinner fork six inches from her face and staring at it with rapt fascination. “Sister,” Clara snapped, “what in the hell are you doing.”
“Have you ever really looked at a fork?” Mae Ella asked, her gaze never leaving the utensil in her hand. “I mean really looked at one? Can you just imagine some cave man looking at a stick and thinking, if it had four pointy ends, and not just one, maybe my food wouldn’t fall off?”
“I never thought about it like that,” Clara said, frowning as if she were trying to concentrate on the concept of the four pointy ends. “You always were the deep thinker in the family.”
Across the table, Wilma, who had chosen not to have the sauce because “tomatoes bother my stomach” scrutinized her friends, and then said to Wanda Jean, “Honey, whose recipe did you use to make the spaghetti sauce?”
Wanda Jean giggled. “You don’t need a recipe, silly. You just make it until it’s right and then you add the special secret ingredient.”
“What ingredient?” Wilma asked.
“I can’t tell you that!” Wanda Jean said in a scandalized whisper. “If I told you, then it wouldn’t be secret anymore. It would still be special. But it wouldn’t be secret.”
Wilma smothered a smile and said with mock gravity, “You have my word of honor, Wanda Jean. I won’t tell a soul.”
Wanda Jean glanced around furtively, but the other four women were now all staring at Mae Ella’s fork. “Okay,” Wanda Jean said, “but you didn’t hear this.”
“I’m not hearing a thing you’re saying,” Wilma assured her.
“The secret ingredient is Mike Thornton’s oregano,” Wanda Jean said. “I don’t think anybody in the world grows better oregano than Mike.”
“I think you just might be right,” Wilma said, covering her mouth with her napkin to hide her laughter.
“Mike’s oregano just makes me so happy,” Wanda Jean purred.
Regaining her composure, Wilma said, “Did you make a big chocolate cake, honey?”
“Oh, yes!” Wanda Jean gushed. “Three layers.”
At just that moment, Sugar turned back to them and said, “Do you have any more spaghetti, Wanda Jean?”
“Not cooked,” Wanda Jean said, rising unsteadily to her feet. “But I can boil some up right now. But don’t you want to save room for the cake?”
“I just don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Sugar said. “I’m just starving to death.”
“Me, too!” Clara chimed in. “I could eat a horse.”
“Okay,” Wanda Jean said. “I’ll make some more spaghetti. You can always take the rest home. I’ve got lots and lots of Tupperware. I just love my Tupperware.”
Unable to hold back one minute longer, Wilma burst out laughing. The other women peered at her with amiable, bleary confusion. “What’s so funny?” Flowers asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Wilma said, wiping her eyes. “It’s just good to see you all so high . . . on life.”
In good time, the chocolate cake disappeared with the spaghetti, and the ladies finished the evening listening to Hilton’s Judy Garland records in honor of the man who died so ignominiously on the shag carpet with that Old Hickory carving knife sticking out of his chest.
As the good-byes were being said, amid happy hugs and a few tears, Wanda Jean herself summed up what they were all feeling. “Even if I did lose Hilton and my shag carpet, I still have the Study Club.”
Keep reading for a sneak peek of...
YOU CAN’T PUT A CORPSE IN A PARADE
A Study Club Cozy Murder Mystery
BOOK TWO
Chapter 1
The Race Meet Committee scheduled the parade for 10 o’clock Saturday morning year after year for the same reason. “It won’t be as hot then.” And year after year, parade participants sweltered in line waiting for the fire trucks to pull out on Main Street, sirens blaring, announcing the beginning of the first of the two long, festive weekends. The annual event featured horse racing, class reunions, goat sales, and dancing under the stars at the open air pavilion at the fairgrounds.
For the past three evenings the Study Club officers, and the members appointed to serve as slave labor on the float committee, had worked to transform a flatbed trailer into a proper parade float. The parade theme for 1968 was Into the Future with Agriculture, a motif the Club officers studiously ignored in favor of their usual twisted and draped red, white, and blue crepe paper garland strategically held in place with equally patriotic rosettes.
Sugar Watson, proprietress of Sugar’s Style and Spray, had the best penmanship in the Club with a Marks-a-Lot. While the others had twisted crepe paper, she had labored over the hand-lettered signs, signature Camel hanging loosely in her lips. Now her poster board placards were held firmly in place with masking tape and proclaimed to all passersby, “The Study Club - Better Citizenship Through Education.”
The Club officers were riding the float, which was being pulled by Slim Watson because he had the best looking truck of all the husbands. The fateful moment occurred about halfway through the parade, just in front of City Pharmacy. That’s when the fire truck backfired causing Buttons Jones’ horse to rear and pitch.
Buttons, who had not drawn a sober breath since the Hoover administration, was thrown skyward, somersaulting back over the welcome banner that stretched across Main Street. This caused Bill Simmons to slam on the brakes of the Simmons & Insall Mortuary hearse, a sedate presence in the otherwise gala parade.
When he hit those brakes, the momentum of the forced stop sent the casket in the back of the hearse flying out the doors and straight at Slim’s truck. It struck the front grill and hit the pavement hard, the lid flying open and spilling a very dead man out onto the street.
From
atop the Study Club float, Secretary Mae Ella Gormley announced loudly, “My God, Bill, you can’t put a corpse in a parade.”
Bill, who had bolted out of the hearse to inspect the damage to the casket, his most expensive model, looked up at her and said, “Mae Ella, I didn’t put a corpse in the parade. I don’t know who that is.”
“I know who it is,” Buttons Jones said, rising inebriated but unscathed from the street. “That’s Cooter Benson.”
“Who in the hell is Cooter Benson?” Mae Ella asked.
“He’s my brother,” a voice said from the depths of the crowd. Brother Bob, the Baptist preacher, walked out beside the casket and stared down at the dead man. “And it would appear his sins have finally caught up with him.”
About the Author
JULIETTE HARPER is the pen name used by the writing team of Patricia Pauletti and Rana K. Williamson. You Can’t Get Blood Out of Shag Carpet is the first installment of Harper’s debut cozy Study Club Mysteries, an hilariously funny look at the often absurd eccentricities of small town life. The second book, to be released in coming months, is called You Can’t Put a Corpse in a Parade.
The droll series, set in the 1960s, is a lighthearted spinoff of Harper’s Lockwood Legacy a nine-book chronicle of the lives of three sisters who inherit a ranch in Central Texas following their father’s suicide. Three of the novels are currently available: Langston’s Daughters, Baxter’s Draw, and Alice’s Portrait. The fourth book, Mandy’s Father, will appear in Summer 2015.
And don’t miss Harper’s first foray into the world of the supernatural, Descendants of the Rose, Book 1 in the Selby Jensen Paranormal Mystery series. The second Selby Jensen book, Lost in Room 636 is also scheduled for a Summer 2015 release.
Pauletti, an Easterner of Italian descent, is an accomplished musician with an eye for art and design. Williamson, a Texan, worked as a journalist and university history instructor before becoming a full-time freelance writer in 2002.
You Can't Get Blood Out of Shag Carpet: A Study Club Cozy Murder Mystery (The Study Club Mysteries Book 1) Page 16