Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

Did You Declare the Corpse? (39 page)

BOOK: Did You Declare the Corpse?

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With Wilma claiming all of Grover’s attention, I decided to make a run to the bathroom before the meeting resumed. After refreshments, we still had to reconvene to decide how to invest our money that month. I had no clue what the investment procedure would be, but given the way some of those women liked to discuss every penny they spent, I guessed it could take a while.

I trotted down the hall admiring the sheen our new custodian was getting on the beige tile floors of the community center and thinking about the shipment of summer bedding plants that we’d just received at the store. I hoped we hadn’t ordered too many and that ours would be bigger and more unusual than those at the superstore. Maybe we ought to concentrate on selling in quantity to landscapers and not try to compete when the superstore could set prices below what we could afford to match.

That’s as far as I had gotten when I pushed open the ladies’ room door. It wouldn’t budge.

I shoved again. “Willena?” She didn’t answer.

I knocked. Still no answer.

“Willena?” I put my shoulder against the door and put all my weight behind it.

I felt something slide, then the door opened far enough for me to stick my head in.

Forever after, I would wish I hadn’t.

Willena lay crumpled on the floor. One hand clutched her throat. The other was out as if she had been opening the door when she collapsed. And her ruffled white blouse and the taupe tiles around her were drenched in blood.

Who Left That Body in the Rain?

But Why Shoot the Magistrate?

John Prebble,
The Highland Clearances
(Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd, 1978), p. 106.

Who Let That Killer in the House?

BOOK: Did You Declare the Corpse?

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