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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

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BOOK: Guess Who's Coming to Die?
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Augusta Wainwright
—queen of Hopemore society, primary stockholder in Wainwright Textile Mills
 
Other Important Characters
Charlie Muggins
—police chief, Hopemore, Georgia
Isaac James
—assistant police chief, Hopemore, Georgia
Slade Rutherford
—editor of the weekly
Hopemore Statesman
Grover Henderson
—stockbroker adviser to the club
Clarinda Williams
—MacLaren’s housekeeper
Dexter Baxter
—custodian of the Hopemore Community Center
Linette Shields
—Wilma’s housekeeper
Hetty Burns
—Willena’s housekeeper
1
If my husband, Joe Riddley, tells you, “MacLaren can’t get out of my sight without stumbling over a body,” remind him that this one time, it was all his fault.
Outside my office at Yarbrough Feed, Seed, and Nursery, our little town of Hopemore, Georgia, was enjoying a gorgeous day in May with the sun not too hot, a frisky breeze, and puffy white clouds floating like great dollops of Cool Whip overhead. Early perennials and bedding plants were in full bloom. All the trees had new leaves. Even the pines looked fresh.
Inside at my desk, I was grumpy as all get-out. I had gotten back from a two-week bus tour of Scotland that hadn’t turned out to be as restful as I had hoped. I had badly injured one hand, a couple of bodies had shown up, and I had nearly made a third.
1
Coming back to a pile of bills, invoices, and catalogs didn’t do a thing to improve my mood.
With my good hand I picked up a fancy envelope perched on top. Creamy and small, the size for personal notes, it was far and away the best-looking thing on my desk.
Judge MacLaren Yarbrough
was handwritten in a fat, round script I didn’t recognize.
As I reached for my letter opener, I glanced across the office. Joe Riddley was watching me from his desk with the expression he reserves for those occasions when he knows I will love a present. When he saw me looking his way, he opened a new seed catalog and began to peruse it with the same fervor financiers bring to the
Wall Street Journal
.
We have known each other for sixty years and been married for more than forty, and we share an office at the back of our store. He does the ordering and manages our big nursery out at the edge of town. I handle the store and the financial end of things. Generally, we work real amicably together. If he gets tired of me, he settles his red YARBROUGH cap on his head and goes down to the nursery and drives the forklift. If I get tired of him, I grab my pocketbook and run over to Myrtle’s Restaurant for a slice of chocolate pie with three-inch meringue and sugar beads on top. It works for us.
Joe Riddley has been known to occasionally arrange for wonderful surprises, so I slit open the envelope with a tremor of anticipation. “What’s this?” I asked in an innocent voice.
“A welcome-home present from Cindy and Gusta.” If I didn’t read it soon, he was going to grab it and read it for me.
Even if I was disappointed it wasn’t from him, my heart beat faster. Augusta Wainwright was the richest woman in town, and Cindy — wife of our younger son, Walker — had recently inherited her grandmother’s entire estate. Since her grandmother was the last of the Weinkoffs of the Weinkoff hotel chain, Cindy and Walker finally had enough money to keep their family in the style to which they had already grown accustomed. Joe Riddley and I no longer lay awake at night wondering how they would ever meet their enormous mortgage, car payments, credit card debt, and private school bills.
Had Gusta and Cindy decided to send us around the world?
My bags weren’t even unpacked. I could leave tomorrow.
Full of hope, I tugged out a creamy note card and read two sentences:
You are invited to become a member of the Magnolia Ladies’ Investment Club. We meet at seven thirty p.m. on the second Monday of every month in the Wainwright Room of the Hopemore Community Center.
There was no signature or phone number for an RSVP. The aristocracy presumes that people who receive an invitation to join them won’t turn it down.
Before we get on with this story, I need to correct any misapprehension you may have that “small town” equals “small bank accounts.” A number of our nation’s wealthiest families live in the small towns where their ancestors started businesses that became international corporations. These families have already found what the rest of the populace is looking for: lifelong friends, good neighbors, and space to build lovely, gracious homes away from crowds, traffic, and hassles. Our own little Hope County — located in that wedge of Georgia that lies between I-20 and I-16—has birthed Wainwright Textile Mills, Kenan Cotton Factors, DuBose Trucking Lines, and Middle Georgia Kaolin.
The Magnolia Ladies’ Investment Club was organized in the 1950s to provide a place for the women of the Wainwright, DuBose, Kenan, and Jensen families to get together, consume a lot of liquor in private, and talk about whatever very wealthy women discuss when not constrained by the presence of plebeians. They originally dabbled in the stock market only to give their meetings a semblance of purpose. After Gusta was widowed and assumed control of her own money, however, she also took control of the investment club. They added other members and became serious about investment strategies. At some point they drew up a charter and bylaws that limited membership to “Hopemore’s ten most influential women.”
For which read, “richest and most socially prominent.”
They had lost two members in the past six months. Edith Burkett had been murdered the previous fall
2
, and Pooh DuBose had died in her sleep while I was away. Cindy had taken Edie’s place, but there wasn’t a single reason I could think of why I ought to take Pooh’s. Like most other women in town who did not belong, I generally referred to the group as “the Moneyed Women’s Investment Club.”
I looked across the office and saw Joe Riddley waiting for me to jump up and down with joy. I gave him a sour look instead. “Okay, it was logical that Cindy got invited once news of her inheritance got around. But how on earth did I get nominated? And why? Except for Gusta, most of the current members are a lot closer to Cindy’s age than mine. I scarcely know them.”
He scratched one cheek and pretended to think that over. “You know most of them. There’s Gusta and Meriwether—”
Augusta Wainwright was the widow of the last Wainwright of Wainwright Textile Mills and had been the self-styled queen of Hopemore society since she’d learned to toddle. And yes, I knew Gusta and her granddaughter, Meriwether DuBose, real well. Meriwether was married to attorney Jed DuBose and mother of little Zachary DuBose. She was also starting her own business, Pots of Luck, which was a catalog company specializing in pots of all sizes and shapes, and doing real well. Meriwether had her daddy’s business sense.
“And the Kenan girls . . .” Joe Riddley wasn’t being chauvinistic. Everybody called the cousins “the Kenan girls,” although Willena was forty and Wilma fifty. I think that was in deference to their state of being what my mama used to call “ladies-in-waiting.” Until two perfect husbands appeared, they occupied themselves running—some said ruining — Hopemore’s social and civic clubs.
“I don’t really know the Kenans.” I was beginning to feel balky about this. I picked up my letter opener and amused myself by stabbing little holes in the thick invitation instead of in Joe Riddley’s hide.
“They’ve gone to our church for five generations, Little Bit.” He was getting exasperated, too. “And Willena’s real savvy where money is concerned. You might just learn something. And you and Nancy Jensen have served on a lot of church committees together.” Nancy Jensen was married to Horace, owner and CEO of Middle Georgia Kaolin.
“We don’t socialize with the Kenans or the Jensens,” I pointed out. The old coot seemed to have the membership list memorized. I gave him a quick glace to see if he had written the names down to prod his memory, but his eyes were peering at me with that earnest expression he gets when he’s trying to convince me do so something he thinks is for my own good.
“It’s not a social club. You might learn something from these women. Take MayBelle Brandison, for example.”
“You take her. I don’t want her. She’s a snake.” MayBelle could outtalk and outdeal anybody in three counties when it came to real estate, but that didn’t earn her a place on my favorite-people list. I hadn’t liked her even back when she was a poor, pushy girl in my son Ridd’s class. As far as I was concerned, money had not improved her a whit.
“It would be a chance for you to get to know that Ford woman better — the lawyer.”
For the first time, he had my attention. Rachel Ford was the director of our Poverty Law Center and a mystery to me. Striking rather than pretty, she was a tall, rangy woman with olive skin and naturally curly black hair cut to fall above her shoulders from a center part. Her long, intense face was marked by brows like straight dark slashes above eyes that were an unusual shade of blue-gray. I’d deliberately sat by her at a couple of functions to try to get acquainted, but while she would talk about her work, the only personal information I had gleaned was that she was half Jewish and half Catholic, “which is why both my hands move when I talk.” Between her Jewish and Italian ancestors, I wondered who had bequeathed her those eyes. She seemed uninterested in the two important Southern questions: “Who are your people?” and “Where do they come from?” As far as I knew, Meriwether DuBose was the only friend she’d made since she had come down from New York to take the Poverty Law Center job.
“She can’t earn much,” I pointed out. “How did she get in the club?”
“Maybe she inherited money, like most of them.”
“I don’t think so. Money has a way of showing up in clothes, cars, houses, or something. Her clothes are nothing special, and Meriwether says she is doing most of the work herself on that old house she bought, a little at a time.”
“She drives a BMW.”
“A very old one.”
“Maybe she banks it all. Or gets alimony, like Sadie Lowe. She’s in the club, too.”
“Take that grin off your face. Sadie Lowe is one more reason for me not to join.”
All you need to know about Sadie Lowe Harnett at this point is that she was thirty-seven years old, a former model and soap opera actress, with several millions from a New York divorce settlement tucked away in her sizable bra—and that men’s faces invariably went goofy when she came into a room or conversation.
“You are being asked to fill Pooh’s slot.” He picked up his catalog and turned a page like seeds were all he had on his mind. He added casually, “It was one of her last requests.”
Pooh DuBose had been my old and valued friend as well as the widow of the founder of DuBose Trucking Lines. I would miss her terribly. But I also hoped that once she had arrived in heaven, she had met up with her memory. It had predeceased her by a couple of years.
“If Pooh expressed any
recent
opinions about my taking her place,” I pointed out, “she had no idea what she was talking about.”
“It’s an honor, Little Bit.” Exasperation oozed from each syllable. He knows me well enough to read between my lines.
“Sure it’s an honor. Cindy made that clear when she was invited. But you and I both know each one of those women — with the probable exception of Rachel Ford — has more money than we’ll ever see. I don’t play in their league, or even want to. Besides, I have enough to do without taking on a new organization.”
I not only work full-time, belong to a slew of business organizations, and serve on too many church and civic committees, but I am also a county magistrate. Many magistrates in small Georgia counties combine judicial duties with a full-time job. As if to illustrate my point, a deputy stuck his head in our office door. “Judge, do you have time to come down to the sheriff’s detention center and hold a bond hearing for me? And I’d like this search warrant signed.”
I repressed a sigh and tried not to look at the work piled on my desk. “What you got?”
“A young man who has been robbing Mexicans while they are at work. We caught him red-handed, rifling one of their houses. My hunch is that if we search his garage before he gets back to it, we’ll find stuff he hasn’t disposed of yet.”
Joe Riddley chuckled. “Sounds like somebody had better explain to him that
‘Mi casa es su casa
’ is not to be taken quite so literally.”
 
Every deputy at the detention center wanted to know about my vacation, so it was nearly an hour later before I got back to the office.
“Joe Riddley has run over to the bank,” Evelyn Pratt, our store manager, informed me.
Evelyn had been creating a new window display of bedding annuals in a bright blue wheelbarrow. When she was busy or bothered, she ran her hands through her wiry red hair, which changed colors depending on which brand of dye she’d bought at the drugstore. Right now it was carrot orange and stood on end from her exertions.
BOOK: Guess Who's Coming to Die?
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