Who Left That Body in the Rain? Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Praise for Who Left That Body in the Rain?

  “Who Left That Body in the Rain? charms, mystifies, and delights. As Southern as Sunday fried chicken and sweet tea. Patricia Sprinkle’s Hopemore is as captivating—and as filled with big hearts and big heartaches—as Jan Karon’s Mitford. Come for one visit and you’ll always return.”

  —Carolyn Hart

  “Ms. Sprinkle has created an heirloom quilt. Each piece of patchwork is unique and with its own history, yet they are deftly stitched together with threads of family love and loyalty, simmering passion, deception and wickedness, but always with optimism embued with down-home Southern traditions. A novel to be savored while sitting on a creaky swing on the front porch, a pitcher of lemonade nearby, a dog slumbering in the sunlight.”—Joan Hess

  “Authentic and convincing. This series is a winner.”

  —Tamar Myers

  Praise for the previous mysteries of Patricia Sprinkle

  “Light touches of humor and the charming interplay between MacLaren and her magistrate husband make this a fun read for mystery fans.”—Library Journal

  “Sparkling . . . witty . . . a real treat and as refreshing as a mint julep, a true Southern pleasure.”—Romantic Times

  “Sparkles with verve, charm, wit, and insight. I loved it.”

  —Carolyn Hart

  “Engaging . . . compelling . . . a delightful thriller.”

  —Peachtree Magazine

  “The sort of light entertainment we could use more of in the hot summer days to come.”—The Denver Post

  “[Sprinkle] just keeps getting better.”

  —The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)

  Thoroughly Southern Mysteries

  WHO INVITED THE DEAD MAN?

  WHO LEFT THAT BODY IN THE RAIN?

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,

  London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  First Printing, December 2002

  Copyright © Patricia Sprinkle, 2002

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15728-2

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  THANKS TO . . .

  Judge Mildred Ann Palmer, Magistrate, Burke County, Georgia, who inspired the series, hosted me while I did research, and helped with details about MacLaren’s role as a magistrate. Because of Judge Palmer, MacLaren lives.

  Curtis St. Germaine, Chief Magistrate of Burke County, and deputy clerks Cynthia Lewis and Nicole Hammock, for their patience with my many questions about details relating to their work.

  Our cousins, Mary and Dan McKenzie, who answered numerous questions about owning a motor company in a small Southern town. I assure them and our mutual relatives that neither the motor company nor the characters in this book are based on Dan, Mary, or McKenzie Motors.

  Joe Sklandis, who filled me in on the automobile business from a salesman’s point of view, and Chris Potts, who explained how to detail a car.

  Composer Betty Carr Pulkingham, who suggested appropriate hymns for the imaginary St. Philip Episcopal carillon in Hopemore.

  Lucia Ravelo, who polished up my Spanish.

  Ellen Edwards, my editor, who greatly improved the manuscript, and Nancy Yost, my agent, who cheered and encouraged me.

  Most of all, Bob, who, as always, provided support, a sounding board, and, this time, the ferret.

  Where the book is accurate, these folks deserve the credit. The errors are my own.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  MacLaren Yarbrough: amateur sleuth, Georgia magistrate, co-owner of Yarbrough Feed, Seed and Nursery

  Joe Riddley Yarbrough: MacLaren’s husband, a former magistrate, co-owner of Yarbrough Feed, Seed and Nursery

  Clarinda Williams: Yarbroughs’ long-time cook

  Ridd: Yarbroughs’ older son, high school math teacher and small farmer

  Martha: Ridd’s wife, emergency room supervisor

  Cricket (4) and Bethany (16): their children

  Walker: Yarbroughs’ younger son, insurance salesman

  Cindy: Walker’s largely ornamental wife

  Jessica (11) and Tad (9): their children

  Fergus “Skye” MacDonald: owner of MacDonald Motors in Hopemore and friend of the Yarbroughs for thirty years

  Gwen Ellen MacDonald: his wife and friend of the Yarbroughs since she was a child

  Laura MacDonald: their daughter, vice president of MacDonald Motors

  Skellton (Skell) MacDonald: their son, would-be playboy and unwilling manager of the family used car business, Sky’s the Limit

  Jimmy Bratson: assistant manager at Sky’s the Limit Used Cars

  Ben Bradshaw: service-department manager at MacDonald Motors

  Nicole Shandy: receptionist at MacDonald Motors, claims she is Skye’s secretary

  Hubert Spence: Yarbroughs’ nearest neighbor

  Maynard Spence: Hubert’s son, curator of Hope County Historical Museum

  Selena Jones: his fiancée, later his wife

  Marilee Muller: a plain little girl from Hopemore who grew up to be a television celebrity

  Humberto Garcia: newcomer to Hopemore who opens the town’s first Mexican restaurant

  Emerita Garcia: Humberto’s wife, co-owner of their restaurant and cook

  Rosa Garcia: their daughter, who teaches the Yarbroughs’ grandda
ughter Jessica

  Charlie Muggins: Hopemore police chief

  Isaac James: assistant police chief

  1

  Only one of us committed murder that particular Friday, but a lot of folks were out of sorts. Maybe it was the weather. February in Middle Georgia is generally mild, but as we drove home that noon for dinner, heavy gray clouds hovered overhead and the air was uneasy and restless.

  Clarinda was banging dishes around, fixing to have a conniption. She’s been keeping house for us for over forty years. I know her moods.

  I set my pocketbook on the counter. “Who put ants between your sheets?”

  She jerked her head toward Maynard Spence, our nearest neighbor. He sat at our kitchen table with his long gold ponytail gleaming in the light and a fool’s grin on his face. “Hey, Mac.” He hoisted a mug. “Where’s Joe Riddley?”

  “Talking to his dogs in the pen. What are you doing here?” I bent to pat my beagle, Lulu, reassuring her I’d returned home yet again in one piece. “Don’t you have things to do?” Maynard was getting married the next morning.

  “Clarinda and I were checking on a few last things for the rehearsal dinner tonight.” He hauled his tall frame erect. “But it is time I got moving. I’ve got to collect my tux and Selena, then we have to drive all the way to Milledgeville to visit her great-grandmother. She’s too frail to come to the wedding, so Selena’s promised we’ll get all dressed up and take pictures with her.”

  Clarinda rested both hands on her stout hips. “Miss MacLaren, did that boy just say he’s gonna see his little bride in her dress before the ceremony?”

  “It won’t be the first time,” Maynard said, further rocking her boat. “I helped design the dress.”

  “I’ll bet she’s gonna be real fashionable,” Clarinda muttered to Lulu, “for eighteen fifty.” Maynard had a master’s degree in art history from NYU and was curator of our Hope County Historical Museum. He did sometimes tend to prefer the past to the present.

  He laughed and gave me a quick hug. “See you tomorrow. Don’t forget, I want you to sit on the pew with Daddy. You’re the closest thing to family I’ve got.”

  “We’ll be there,” I promised.

  “See you tonight, Clarinda. Sure hope you’re speaking to me by then.” He went out the door at a fast lope, stopping on the porch to greet Joe Riddley.

  Before I could ask Clarinda again what was bothering her, my husband ambled in with Joe, his scarlet macaw, on his cap. We had inherited Joe the previous October from a man who died in our dining room.* Joe slept in the barn, where we kept camping gear, the fishing boat, and lawn and garden equipment, and Joe Riddley carried him back and forth to the office every day. His favorite perch was on Joe Riddley’s red-billed cap with “Yarbrough’s” stitched in white letters across the front to advertise our store, Yarbrough’s Feed, Seed and Nursery.

  Joe Riddley knuckled Joe gently so he’d fly to the curtain rod above the sink, and hung his cap on its hook by the kitchen door. “Hey, Clarinda,” he said mildly. “Have a good mornin’?”

  Clarinda grunted. “Not so’s you’d notice.” She continued to bustle about the kitchen huffing and puffing and making a lot of clatter without doing much else as far as I could see. Our whole dinner seemed to consist of one pot.

  Joe leaned down and turned himself almost upside down, peering at her. Then he called “Sic ’em. Sic ’em.” When she ignored him, he righted himself and turned to preen a feather on his back. That parrot was a lot of trouble, but even I had to admit his scarlet breast and rainbow back and tail made a gorgeous display against our gray wall.

  Lulu danced around protesting that parrots didn’t belong in the house. Joe taunted her with more squawks, safe since she couldn’t fly. Clarinda banged flatware on the table, her chocolate-brown face pinched and martyred.

  “Hush!” I yelled. “All of you, hush. What is the matter with you, Clarinda?”

  Clarinda heaved a sigh that nearly dropped her sizeable bosoms to her kneecaps. “You aren’t gonna believe what Maynard has gone and done. Here he is getting married, you know—”

  Joe Riddley gave a snort of impatience. “Of course we know. Have we talked about a blessed thing since Christmas except that precious wedding?” He was still recovering from getting shot in the head back in August.* By now he could talk plain unless he was tired, remember most things, and walk unaided, but his sweetness and light tanks weren’t always full.

  “Hush,” I told him. “I want to hear what Maynard’s done.”

  Maynard had lived down the road from us all his life, a pallid gawky child who whined a lot, emphasized words in a strange way as he spoke, and loved history and art in a small town that preferred golf and football. To tell the truth, I hadn’t been real fond of him back then. I’d felt more charitable when he’d given up a good New York museum job the year before and hurried home when his widowed daddy had a heart attack. I’d been impressed with the way he nursed Hubert back to health. And I’d grown really fond of him while he was helping me do a spot of detecting right before Joe Riddley got shot. I’d even introduced him to his bride-to-be, Selena. And I had to admit that the pale boy who left home several years before had come home a downright handsome fellow. I didn’t even mind his earring anymore.

  Nobody had expected Maynard to stay in Hopemore once Hubert was on his feet. But here he was, a year later, still taking some of the load off Hubert at Spence’s Appliance Store and spending the rest of his time revitalizing our once moribund Hope County Historical Museum. Last fall he’d supervised a crew in renovating a Victorian house in town where he and Selena would live. Currently he was fixing to open an antique store in one of Hopemore’s three antebellum mansions up on Oglethorpe Street, near the courthouse square. It appeared to me if anybody deserved praise it was Maynard.

  Also, Clarinda loved him like he was her own, and if you don’t believe that, you’ve never witnessed the relationship that can grow up between a lonely little boy and his neighbors’ cook.

  Joe Riddley looked up and said to Joe, “Hey, bird, maybe he’s decided not to go through with it. I couldn’t blame him. A man never knows what he’s getting in for, tying himself down for life. The woman might turn into somebody he hardly knows. Take Little Bit, here—”

  I gave him a light swat. “You already took me, forty-three years ago, for better or worse. You got the better and I got the worse.”

  “Sic ’em, sic ’em,” Joe advised again.

  Clarinda glared up at the parrot, her own feathers equally ruffled. “Don’t you poop in my clean sink, bird.”

  “So what has Maynard done?” I was tired of waiting to find out.

  She rested her fists on her wide hips again. “Gone and spent money on a new sports car. I told him and told him his Saturn would do fine until they put something by, but he wouldn’t listen. Says Mr. Skye gave him a real good deal, and it’s a honey of a car. I’d like to honey him. It’s pride; that’s what it is. Nothin’ but pride, and he’s gonna marry that sweet child with a load of debt on him.” She thumped bowls down on the countertop in a way that made me nervous for my crockery.

  “He’s twenty-seven,” I reminded her, “and he inherited a good bit of money from his uncle in Atlanta. He knows whether he can afford a new car or not.”

  She ladled something into the bowls and huffed several times, making it clear that working for somebody as unreasonable as me was the greatest imposition in the world.

  At the sink, Joe Riddley soaped his hands for a second time and rinsed them good. “Maynard’s smart. Valedictorian of his class in high school and got a big scholarship to NYU.”

  “How can he remember that when he can’t remember he already soaped his hands?” I asked Clarinda, but she didn’t crack a smile.

  Joe Riddley reached for a towel, dripping water all over the floor. “Ought to make good money on that antique store, too, and Selena’s a nurse. They’ll pay off that loan. Stop your worrying. What did he get?”

  Clarin
da took a skillet of cornbread from the oven and banged it down on a trivet in the middle of the table. I sighed. We’d probably have a new dent. Our table has been in the family for three generations, and is what dealers like to call “distressed.”

  Clarinda pursed her lips to show she’d rather certain words didn’t have to pass through them. “Blue BMW convertible, or so he says. ’Co’rse, I haven’t seen it. He didn’t want to dust it up, coming down your road. Said he’s leaving it in town until after the ceremony.”

  “The way you talk,” I told her, “folks would think we were hicks living in the middle of nowhere.” Instead, we were college-educated, reasonably prosperous store owners living at the end of a good gravel road. We’re half a mile from the highway and less than a mile from Hopemore, county seat of Hope County, located in that strip of Georgia between I-20 and I-16. Joe Riddley’s great-grandfather built our house right after the War (if you have to ask which war, you weren’t born in Georgia), and none of his descendants has ever felt a need to lay asphalt—although I sometimes think we could have paved it in gold and saved money, with all the gravel we’ve put down.

  However, since the road does get a tad dusty in dry spells, and that particular month had been dry, I decided not to fuss. What was bothering Clarinda most was not Maynard’s new car, but Maynard’s departure from next door to his own house in town, and his upcoming switch of allegiance from her to Selena. That’s why I offered her a little comfort. “His Saturn might not make it all the way to Disney World. It’s getting pretty old, and it’s been giving him trouble.” I went to wash my own hands, sending a warning glare up to Joe about messing in my hair while I was under him. “What if they broke down between here and there?”