Who Killed the Queen of Clubs? Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  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

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgements

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for Patricia Sprinkle

  When Will the Dead Lady Sing?

  “Patricia Sprinkle takes the reader on a trip to the ‘real’ South, the South of family traditions, community customs, churchgoing, and crafty, down-home politics. Reading it is like spending an afternoon in the porch swing on Aunt Dixie’s veranda. . . . A delightful book.”

  —JoAnna Carl, author of The Chocolate Frog Frame-Up

  Who Let That Killer in the House?

  “Sprinkle’s third Thoroughly Southern Mystery is thoroughly absorbing.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  Who Left That Body in the Rain?

  “Forming a triumvirate with Anne George and Margaret Maron, Sprinkle adds her powerful voice to the literature of mysteries featuring Southern women. . . . Highly recommended.”

  —Mystery Time

  “Authentic and convincing.”

  —Tamar Myers

  “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

  “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 imbued 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

  Who Invited the Dead Man?

  “A wonderfully portrayed Southern setting . . . MacLaren seems right at home in her tiny town.”

  —Library Journal

  “Touches of poignancy mixed with Southern charm and old secrets make Who Invited the Dead Man? a diverting read.”

  —Romantic Times

  And her other novels . . .

  “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?

  WHO LET THAT KILLER IN THE HOUSE?

  WHEN WILL THE DEAD LADY SING?

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, March 2005

  Copyright © Patricia Sprinkle, 2005

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  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.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09907-0

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  MacLaren Yarbrough: Georgia magistrate, co-owner of Yarbrough Feed, Seed & Nursery

  Joe Riddley Yarbrough: MacLaren’s husband, co-owner of Yarbrough Feed, Seed & Nursery

  Ridd and Martha Yarbrough: MacLaren’s older son and his wife Cricket (4) and Bethany (17): their children

  Walker and Cindy Yarbrough: MacLaren’s younger son and his wife Tad (10) and Jessica (12): their children

  Clarinda Williams: MacLaren’s cook and housekeeper

  Hollis Stanton, Tyrone Noland, Smitty Smith: teenagers in town

  Bailey “Buster” Gibbons: Hope County sheriff

  Isaac James: assistant police chief

  Alexandra James: Isaac’s cousin, director of the Hope County Library Natasha (4): her daughter

  Edith Whelan Burkett: clubwoman, bridge champion, now library assistant

  Genna and Adney Harrison: Edith’s stepdaughter and her husband

  Olive Harrison: Adney’s sister, also a librarian

  Donna Linse: children’s librarian

  Shep Faxon: local attorney

  Valerie Allen: young adult who lives with Edith<
br />
  Frank Sparks: biker, friend of Valerie’s

  Henry Joyner: Edie’s pecan grove foreman

  Daisy Joyner: Henry’s mother

  1

  The second Friday morning in November, I wasn’t thinking about murder. Two weeks to Thanksgiving with Christmas pounding along right behind, I was helping our clerks make our store festive with chrysanthemums, straw bales, and pumpkins. When the phone rang, I stumbled over a bale of straw answering the danged thing. “Yarbrough Feed, Seed and Nursery. MacLaren Yarbrough speaking.”

  “This is Alexandra James. Would you happen to have a spare hour to come by my office? I really need to talk to you.” The syllables that rolled over the line were large, round, and perfectly enunciated. You could tell she didn’t grow up in Georgia.

  I cringed like a kid invited to the principal’s office. I knew Alex as the first cousin of my friend Isaac James, Hopemore’s assistant police chief, and as the mother of Natasha, my grandson Cricket’s favorite preschool chum. But Alex was also the director of the Hope County Library, and she’d never called me before. “I thought I returned all my books.”

  We’d recently moved into a new house, though, and I kept forgetting where I put things. Were a couple more library books stuck on a bottom shelf somewhere? Was there a limit to how many times you could return books late in a three-month period before they took away your card?

  Alex laughed. “I don’t do overdue books. That’s handled by the front desk. This is something else, if you can spare me about an hour.”

  Spare hours were scarce on the ground right then. Joe Riddley and I were spending most of our waking hours trying to sell hundreds of pumpkins, chrysanthemums, and a parking lot full of pine straw before a superstore opened at the edge of town on Thanksgiving Friday. In addition, as a Hope County magistrate, I was busier than a monkey picking fleas. You don’t have to be a lawyer to be a magistrate in rural Georgia, so except for the chief magistrate in each county, a lot of us fit magisterial duties around the edges of regular jobs. With the holidays approaching, we’d had more bad checks passed in the last week than in the whole month of July, and a sad number of couples had revved up their holiday spirit by pounding on each other.

  Still, I’d never been invited to meet with a library director in her office before, and I was tired of shifting bales of straw and pumpkins. “Would right now suit you?”

  “Great. I’ll put on a pot of tea.”

  Hope County is located in that wedge of Middle Georgia between I-20 and I-16, where November is a lovely month. Our fall is subtler than the flaming ones farther north, but equally lovely and a whole lot warmer. The sun blessed my shoulders as I walked the four blocks. Only dogwoods were rusty red as yet. Sweet gums were turning gold from the top down, and Bradford pears were making up their individual minds—some were red, others still green. Birds sang for joy at being back home for the winter, and the sky looked like it had been washed, hung out, and blown dry by sweet breezes. We’d had a long spell of chilly rain, so the air had that fresh, happy smell it always gets rising up from wet ground to meet the sun.

  At the library, I admired fat pumpkins lining the library steps and smiled at a scarecrow reading in the new children’s wing. Donna Linse, the children’s librarian, was on the look-out for me. She came to take my elbow and steer me toward the back. “Miss James is expecting you.”

  As we passed the checkout desk, I waved to Olive Harrison and Edith Burkett, thinking how odd it seemed to see Edie there. Edie was one of Hopemore’s few claims to fame. She had competed in bridge tournaments all over the world and was expected to come in at least third in the U.S. Women’s Bridge Championship in May. In addition, for years she had been one of Hopemore’s leading clubwomen. There wasn’t a club in the state worth belonging to that Edie hadn’t held office in. She’d even won a Georgia Woman of the Year award for her work with literacy. The previous April, however, her husband—who owned our local drugstore—had closed his pharmacy one night, gone into the back room, and taken an overdose of his own pills. Within three weeks, Edie had gone to work full-time at the library.

  She still served as president of the local literacy council and headed up a bridge club that was hosting a big regional championship tournament in January, but she had resigned as chair of the library board when she started work. As I pattered after Donna, I wondered how it felt to move from board to staff and how well Edie fit in with the other librarians. Of course, Edie and Olive Harrison had been friends and played bridge together before Edie went to work, and they were practically family, since Edie’s stepdaughter, Genna, had married Olive’s brother, Adney.

  Donna tapped on the director’s door, peeped in, and announced, “The judge is here.”

  It wasn’t me Donna was in awe of, it was her boss. Alex stood five foot ten in her stocking feet, taller in the spike heels she preferred. She piled satiny black curls in elaborate styles on top of her head, poured her caramel curves into exotic clothes, and sported nails that were more like talons. Some people might be misled by her glamour into underestimating her intelligence, but her coworkers weren’t among them. Alex had her master’s in library science. I just hoped she didn’t spend spare moments reading the classifieds, looking for a better-paying job.

  I stepped through Alex’s office door and saw Natasha smiling from at least two dozen frames. How had the child had time in her four and a half years to do anything but pose?

  Across the room, Alex towered over a credenza, pouring boiling water from an electric kettle into a china teapot. An enameled tray held a matching china sugar bowl, creamer, four cups with saucers, a plate full of cookies, orange napkins, and silver spoons.

  “Welcome, Judge.” She turned with a smile, setting pumpkin earrings swinging. Colorful cornucopias were knitted into her black cotton sweater, and it looked real good with a long black skirt and boots. “Thanks for coming.”

  “You sure do this in style.” I could admire the china cups and saucers, but had to repress a shudder at the tea. I hadn’t drunk tea from a pot since a memorable incident nine months before, when a pot-brewed cup nearly ended my life.1

  “I don’t tolerate mugs, tepid water, or tea bags in my office. Tea is a ritual I take seriously.” Alex put the lid on the pot and covered it with a yellow cozy to let it steep. “I’m real glad you could come. Won’t you sit down?” She gestured toward one of two visitor’s chairs, and I saw that even her long nails were painted orange with little gold pumpkins on them.

  She had lived in the South long enough to know not to rush into a conversation, so while we waited for the tea, we talked about our dogs. Alex’s Poe Boy was the son of my beagle, Lulu. Finally Alex shifted and settled back in a way that made me think we were getting down to business. I figured she had some legal question and didn’t want to pay a lawyer when she could get the same information free from a judge. She surprised me.

  “I called you because you’ve known Edie longer than I have, and I need your opinion. Olive claims Edie is worrying about something, and it’s beginning to interfere with her work. She forgets to run books over the magnet, which scares the pants off patrons when they start out the door and the alarm sounds. At least twice she has sent somebody to the wrong section, when she knows this library as well as anybody. And yesterday she shelved three books somebody donated to the library book sale. I want to get this straightened out so she can get her mind back where it belongs.” Alex tolerated nothing that interfered with the library running smoothly.

  “I’m not her priest or her doctor,” I protested. “Edie doesn’t call to tell me her problems.”

  Alex reached for her phone. “But you do know her, right?”

  “Sure. We’ve served on a lot of boards and committees together, and when Wick was alive, we saw them pretty often at the country club and various events.”

  “Then let me call her in and ask her to tell us both what’s bothering her. Afterwards, I want you to tell me what you think. Isaac says you have a good head
for solving mysteries.”

  While she turned her attention to the phone, I wondered uneasily what, exactly, Isaac had meant. The last time I’d gotten involved with a mystery, I’d nearly got myself and Clarinda, my housekeeper, killed.2 He hadn’t been particularly complimentary at the time. Was it likely he’d tell Alex I was good at solving mysteries so she’d involve me in another one?

  2

  Edie Burkett was neither plain nor pretty, but had what my mama described as “a pleasant face.” Her short brown hair, dusted with gray, fell from a side part to turn under above her collar except for what she called “that one bullheaded curl” that always flipped up at the back. We were about the same height, but she was still slender while I—well, Joe Riddley kindly calls me voluptuous.

  “I hate women skinny enough to look good in long denim jumpers,” I greeted her, “but if that cardigan ever goes missing from your closet, you’ll know where to look for it.” It was navy, with a snow-dusted village knit into it all around the bottom.

  She smiled. “I’ll stop by Shep Faxon’s office after work and leave it to you in my will.”

  I tremble to remember how we all laughed at that.

  Alex got up and went to pour tea. Edie held up a hand. “None for me, thanks. I can’t stay long.” She bent to remove a stack of files from the other visitor’s chair. “What are these?”

  Alex screwed up her mouth in disgust. “That grant proposal. You would not believe how much piddly information those folks want in it.”

  “I told you I’d do it over the weekend.” Edie put the files on the floor, settled herself in the chair, and crossed her ankles. “What did you want to see me about?”