Chapter Three

I called the police while Hazel continued to laugh so hard tears poured down her face. It took Flossie threatening to slap her silly before the poor woman managed to get control of herself.

“Sorry, sorry, I’ve had to put up with this sharp-tongued woman for the past two weeks. She kept telling me that tonight was going to be a disaster . . . and then the dessert burned . . . and I had to take it out to the garbage . . . and . . . now . . . this,” Hazel explained between gasping breaths. “She was right, wasn’t she? Tonight is a disaster. I bet she died just to make sure she would be right. She would always go to any length to ensure her rightness. I can’t tell you how much I hated that.” The doorbell rang again. Hazel glanced over at where Rebecca was still on the floor dead. The soles of the former actress’s high heels were really the only thing visible from where the three of us were standing. A short laugh seemed to explode out of Hazel’s mouth. “Sorry. I can’t seem to help myself. Seeing her there reminds me of the Wicked Witch of the East at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. Smashed by a house. Ding-dong.” She fought back more giggles and more tears. “Gracious, it isn’t funny. I know it isn’t. It’s just that I worked myself half to death these past several days trying to make Rebecca happy and then, the moment before the guests arrive and before Rebecca’s friend from that television show comes to set up, that terrible woman drops dead. And my casserole dish is smashed too. It was a wedding gift from my sister.”

“You didn’t do this?” Flossie asked, pointing to the shattered remains of what I supposed to be the murder weapon.

“What? Buy that dish?” Hazel shook her head. “No. I just told you it had been a wedding gift from my sister. I’ve had it forever. It’s hard to find quality ones that are large enough nowadays. I don’t know how I’ll replace it.”

“Flossie isn’t asking about the casserole dish,” I said gently. “But now that you mentioned it, you didn’t happen to, well . . . break it over Rebecca’s head, did you?”

“Heavens, no. I’d been working so hard to please someone who is unpleasable. My membership to the society is still provisional. I wouldn’t do anything to mess that up.”

She answered so quickly and so emphatically that I immediately believed her.

“I could have asked for a provisional membership?” Flossie slapped her leg. But then she looked over at Rebecca. “I suppose that’s not important right now.”

“Oh, but it is important,” Hazel said. “I’ve been trying to get into this book club for twenty years.”

“Twenty years! I’ll be dead and long forgotten before the society gets around to sending out my acceptance letter,” Flossie cried.

“The Arete Society has always been an exclusive book club,” Hazel said, as if we didn’t already know that. “My mother and my father’s mother were both members, and still it’s taken me forever to get in.”

The doorbell rang again.

“Do you want me to get that?” I asked. I wondered if I should make everyone stay outside. Should I tell the other members what had happened, or would it be better to let the police handle all that?

What would Hazel’s son Jace—an ex-NYPD police detective—do?

Jace! I should have called him first. Rebecca had died in his mother’s house. He needed to know.

I started to pull out my phone to call him when the doorbell rang yet again. This time whoever was pushing the button decided to push it over and over and over. Ding. Dong. Ding. Dong. Ding. Dong.

“The wicked witch is dead,” Hazel whispered, and then burst out in hysterical laughter again.

“I’ll just go,” I said.

Flossie nodded.

The half-dozen ladies at the door didn’t give me the chance to decide whether to let them in. As soon as I opened the door, they poured into the foyer. Behind them a smartly dressed woman with perfect makeup and an oversized microphone rushed into the room. Clearly this was Joyce Fellows. She started directing a pair of men with small handheld cameras to where she’d like them to set up. “Who decorated this living room? The setup is dreadful,” she said more to herself than to anyone crowding the room. “We’re going to have to rearrange.”

“It’s starting to rain out there, Tru,” my boss, Mrs. Farnsworth, said accusingly, as if the rain were somehow my fault. I knew I should have opened that front door right away.

“Where is Hazel? Rebecca hasn’t driven her crazy with her little demands, has she?” asked Delanie Messervey, a good friend of the library. She peeled off a stylish tan swing coat and handed it to me. The other ladies followed her example and started piling their coats in my arms too. “Whatever has happened in here? Hazel’s living room is a mess!”

All the ladies seemed to be talking at once. I didn’t know who to answer first.

From the other room, I could still hear Hazel’s wild laughter.

“Sounds like the party is in the kitchen,” Delanie said, heading off in that direction.

“No!” I ran to the swinging door and blocked it with my body and the ladies’ coats. “No! The police will be here soon.”

“The police!” everyone seemed to cry at the same time.

“Ms. Becket, what has happened?” Mrs. Farnsworth said. She glared at me the same way she had when I accidentally jammed the copy machine so badly that it’d taken three technicians to fix it.

“Rebecca is dead,” I blurted, because Mrs. Farnsworth’s glares always made me exceedingly nervous, and I had trouble thinking whenever I was nervous, which was why I had jammed the copying machine so completely all those years ago. Mrs. Farnsworth had been standing beside me watching me at the time.

“Are you sure?” Delanie cocked her head toward the door I was still blocking. “Sounds to me they are having a party in there.”

“I assure you they aren’t.”

“They?” Count on Mrs. Farnsworth to pick up on that. “Who is in there?”

“Hazel and Flossie,” I answered, but the ladies had all started talking over each other again. I doubted anyone had heard me.

“I can’t believe it!” cried Annabelle Smidt Possey, the mayor’s wife.

“Has someone contacted the authorities?” asked Gretchen Clark, Cypress’s new town manager. “I need to inform Mayor Possey.”

“I’m texting him now,” said Annabelle.

“How did this happen?” Delanie asked. She then added, “Dear, you should put those coats in Hazel’s guest room. It’s down that hall, the first door on the left.”

“Rebecca?” Marigold Brantley sobbed. Fat tears sprang to her eyes. “Rebecca!”

She tried to run into the kitchen, but Delanie—bless her—held Marigold back, hugging onto the thick-armed woman with all her might.

Everyone stopped talking. Marigold and her husband, Sherwood, used to own the town’s feed and seed store. They were retired now, and their store had been sold to my best friend, Tori, who had turned it into a coffee shop.

Marigold gulped back several sobs before whispering, “Rebecca is . . . was my best friend.”

She was? I suppose Rebecca must have had friends. I didn’t know the woman very well. Perhaps she wasn’t always this awful to everyone.

“What happened?” Mrs. Farnsworth asked again, her voice softer, more compassionate.

“She—” I started to say. But Marigold looked so crushed. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her that her best friend might have been murdered. Besides, I wasn’t sure I should be saying anything until the police arrived.

“It was probably an accident,” I mumbled.

“Probably?” Marigold cried, her voice growing shriller and shriller. “Probably?!”

That was when I noticed that the cameramen who had been setting up now had their cameras rolling and pointing directly at me. I must have looked quite ridiculous standing there with all those coats piled up in my arms.

“Do you think what happened to former soap opera star Rebecca White could be murder?” Joyce Fellows asked, her voice trembling with excitement. She thrust her microphone in my direction. “And who are you?”

I opened and closed my mouth, not sure what to say. I certainly didn’t want to be on camera discussing this.

“Ladies,” a deep masculine voice boomed. “I’ll need everyone to take a seat in the living room.” We all turned as one to watch as the lanky police chief, Jack Fisher, sauntered into the room, his thumbs hooked into the loops of his belt. Two officers followed him into the house along with Krystal Capps, the blue-haired coroner, who winked at me.

“Thank goodness,” I breathed. I couldn’t remember ever being happy to see the police chief before. But tonight, the sight of his scowling face looked better than finding a new release sitting on a bookstore’s sale rack.

Especially after all the cameras swiveled to film him.

Fisher paused when he spotted Joyce Fellows and her camera crew. His grim expression grew even tauter.

“Get the press out of here, now!” he barked, and pushed Joyce’s microphone out of his face.

“We’re not the press,” Joyce insisted. “We’re filming a segment on the book club for my television show, Ideal Life, and—”

“I don’t care if you’re filming Santa Claus, you’re not doing it here at my crime scene,” Fisher snapped back. “Get them out of here,” he ordered one of his officers. The officer herded the cameramen and the protesting Joyce back outside.

“I have every right to be here!” we could hear Joyce shouting. “This is my story. I’ll not have someone else steal it from me. Haven’t you heard of freedom of the press?”

The second officer directed the rest of us to follow him into the living room. I tried to sneak around him to deposit the coats in Hazel’s guest room, but the police officer stopped me. Very well. He could handle where to put them. I dropped the ladies’ coats into his arms.

“Why did Hazel move her furniture around like this?” Marigold wondered as she sniffled and dabbed a tissue to her teary eyes. “Her living room used to be so cozy.” She’d pushed the heavy armchair that I’d carried all over the room back to where Hazel had originally put it. “The placement of these chairs makes my head hurt. Doesn’t it make your head hurt?” she asked the police chief.

“I . . . um . . .” He looked around as if seeing the room for the first time. “It’s a room. And we, by gum, have work to do.”

His gaze passed over me and stopped at Gretchen, the town manager. “Tell me what’s going on here.”

“I don’t know. We all showed up at about the same time. We had to ring and ring and ring the doorbell before Ms. Becket let us in.”

“Becket,” it sounded like the police chief murmured under his breath. Or perhaps he’d whispered a curse word. His gaze narrowed as he turned toward me. “You’re Becket’s daughter,” he said.

Before my rise to local fame, that was how most people knew me. I was my eccentric father’s daughter.

“I am,” I confirmed, even though he knew perfectly well who I was.

His gaze narrowed even more. I wondered if I was now just a blur to him with his eyes mostly closed like that. “It’s interesting that you’d be here.”

“I called dispatch.” Another thing I suspected he already knew.

“Then I’ll be wanting to talk to you. Where’s the woman’s body?”

“In the kitchen.” I started to lead the way, but he stopped me.

“Go sit down,” he said. “Havers, stand watch over these fine ladies. Please, everyone, stay in here until someone takes your statement. Capps and Pitts, follow me.”

The three of them went through the swinging door into the kitchen. A few minutes later Flossie emerged. Someone had cleaned the tuna casserole off her wheels, I was glad to see.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to her after she’d reached my side.

She glanced around and smiled at the ladies in the room. “The police chief is taking the matter most seriously. He’s called in backup from the state law enforcement department. Your friend Detective Ellerbe volunteered to take the case, Tru.”

“He’s as capable as they come,” I said approvingly.

“That he is,” the mayor’s wife said.

“His mama is a Brantley,” Marigold said before blowing her nose. “And Sherwood’s cousin. She will make sure her boy finds out what happened to Rebecca.”

“I don’t understand why the police chief is calling in backup. Wasn’t it an accident?” Delanie asked. “Wasn’t that what you said, Tru? Wasn’t Rebecca’s death an accident?”

“I . . . um . . .” What could I say? “It might have been.” Not likely. It looked as if someone had hit the poor woman over the head with the now smashed casserole dish, but I sincerely hoped I had misread the clues and that Rebecca’s death had been a bizarre accident.

My phone pinged.

Another murder in Cypress? my best friend, Tori, had texted.

How did you hear? I texted back.

It’s true??? You have to be kidding me, came her immediate reply.

Wish I was. Who told you?

Everyone is talking about Rebecca’s death at the coffee shop.

 . . .

I didn’t know what to say to that. I mean, I wasn’t surprised that Tori already knew. Gossiping ranked higher than fishing or boating as a hobby in our lakeside town. Men and women alike, everyone seemed to get involved when there was a story to be told. And with smartphones and texting, the flow of information only moved that much faster through town.

“Flossie just told me that you found the body?” My friend Delanie shook her head slowly as she sat down on the sofa next to me. She put her arm around my shoulder. “You have to have the worst luck when it comes to these things, Tru.” Delanie, who had married into one of the founding families of Cypress, was naturally a longtime member of the Arete Society. “And Hazel was the only other person in the house? I would have never guessed she had it in her to do it.”

“She seemed so quiet, reserved,” Gwynne Hansy, the high school football coach’s wife, said with an excited quiver. High school football was a big deal in Cypress. A successful season meant college scholarships for the boys on the team, which meant a path to a better way of life for many of them. And because of that, the coach and his wife were treated like royalty.

She pulled out her phone and busily tapped away on its screen.

When had Gwynne arrived? She hadn’t come in with the original set of women who had pushed their way past me when I’d opened the front door. At least, I didn’t think she had.

“It’s always the quiet ones,” Annabelle said.

“She didn’t—” I started to say, but stopped myself. I looked around at the elite women of Cypress crowding around Flossie and me. These women were all dressed in their Sunday finery. Delanie was a strong supporter of the library and a full-time philanthropist. Beside her was her closest friend and my boss, Mrs. Farnsworth. Like always, Mrs. Farnsworth was dressed in an ultraconservative dress with a starched white collar. As much as I wanted to tell these ladies that Hazel wasn’t guilty of the crime, I couldn’t. Hazel had been in the kitchen. Rebecca had been killed in the kitchen.

One plus one always equaled two.

Didn’t it?

This was going to crush Jace.

I pulled out my phone and texted him. Something’s happened at your mom’s house. You need to get here.

He texted back almost immediately. I’m already on my way. Are you okay?

I’m fine.

How’s my mom?

I stared at the screen for what felt like forever, unsure what to tell him. I finally typed, She’s talking with the police chief right now. Detective Ellerbe is on his way.

I’m five minutes out.

“Tell him to call a lawyer,” Flossie whispered to me.

“Tell him she’s going to need a good criminal lawyer from Columbia,” Delanie said, shaking her head.

Everyone seemed to be staring at me again. It made my skin prickle.

“I’m sure Hazel will be able to explain what happened. And I’m sure Rebecca’s death was a horrible accident,” I said.

“Where is Emma?” Mrs. Farnsworth asked, looking around.

“Emma has a stomach bug and decided to stay home,” Flossie said.

“I bet that went over well with Rebecca,” Annabelle said with a frown. She then leaned forward and whispered, “Rebecca called me this morning. I was attending the bridge club’s annual breakfast and couldn’t take the call. But she later sent a text saying that we needed to discuss the club’s membership.”

“What did she want to discuss?” I asked. I remembered Rebecca grumbling about Emma’s lack of participation, but she seemed happy to let Emma continue her membership as long as she brought her icebox cake.

“I was under the impression that she was planning on kicking Emma out of the club,” Annabelle said with a shrug. She sat back on the sofa and smiled. “Didn’t she call anyone else?”

The ladies all looked at each other while shaking their heads.

“Maybe she wanted to tell Emma to tone it down when it came to talking about her travel agency so much,” Marigold finally offered. She looked around as if expecting someone to contradict her. When no one did, she continued, “The woman would go on and on about needing to build her clientele and what she had to offer. Don’t get me wrong. We all tend to talk about our personal lives a bit before we begin our book discussions, but that’s not what the book club is about. Besides, it’s not as if any of us are looking to jet off to exotic places every weekend. I mean, who does that?” She glanced over at Flossie. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Flossie said, even though her shoulders had tensed. “I don’t travel nearly as much as I did when my Truman was alive. I haven’t been out of the state in over a year.”

“Few of us have,” Mrs. Farnsworth said with a frown.

“Did Emma ever argue with—” I started to ask.

But Mrs. Farnsworth didn’t let me finish. “You have to understand that Emma isn’t from around here. Her personality is different from ours. We have to make concessions when it comes to outsiders.”

The other ladies all jumped in to agree with her.

“Bless them, they don’t know any better. They haven’t been raised with proper Southern manners,” Annabelle said. “They never attended cotillion. None of them seem to realize when they’re being rude, the poor dears.”

“I’m not sure that’s how regional differences work,” I said.

“If she was so ignorant, how in blazes did Emma get invited into the society?” Flossie demanded.

“Now, now.” Delanie rushed over to our friend’s side. “It’s not that we don’t want you as a member, Flossie. It’s just that you have been so busy with your travels, even if not recently, and your writing takes up a large portion of your time, and we didn’t want you to feel like you would have to choose between us and one of your other pursuits. We only have ten members; it would hurt the society if one member regularly missed meetings.”

“I don’t—” Flossie shook her head.

“This isn’t the time to talk about membership decisions,” Mrs. Farnsworth said firmly. “Considering the reason we now have an opening—perhaps two openings—such a discussion would be unseemly, don’t you agree?”

Flossie clearly didn’t like it, but surprisingly she let the matter drop. And yet I could tell by the way her brows kept popping up and down that she hadn’t stopped thinking about it.

As if by mutual agreement, the ladies shifted the discussion to what Rebecca’s death would mean for the book club. Flossie and I listened quietly while they argued about whether the next several meetings should be canceled. A few of the members lamented that I wasn’t going to be able to give my presentation. They’d been looking forward to it all month.

Marigold, I noticed, also stayed silent. She stared at her lap as tears rolled down her round cheeks. She appeared to be the only member who was truly going to miss Rebecca.