What Are You Wearing to Die? Read online

  Praise for Patricia Sprinkle

  Guess Who’s Coming to Die?

  “The writing is captivating, as are the characters.”

  —Gumshoe

  Did You Declare the Corpse?

  “Patricia Sprinkle gives her Thoroughly Southern Mystery a charming Scottish accent this time, but everything else is delightfully the same…the warm, gentle sense of humor [and] the impeccable classic plotting.”

  —Nancy Pickard

  “A leisurely read [that] will have you curled up in an easy chair for the evening.”

  —Rendezvous

  “[A] primer in how to write a compelling story. Additionally, Jan Karon fans who like mysteries will love Mac!”

  —Meritorious Mysteries

  Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?

  “Time to sit on the veranda with a nice glass of lemonade and enjoy this down-home mystery full of charming characters and sparkling Southern witticisms.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  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 Chocoholic mysteries

  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?

  “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.”

  —Carolyn Hart, author of the Henry O and

  Death on Demand mysteries

  “Authentic and convincing.”

  —Tamar Myers, author of Hell Hath No Curry

  “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, author of The Goodbye Body

  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.”

  —Romantic Times

  And her other novels…

  “Totally absorbing…the fast-paced plot will keep readers turning the pages.”

  —Midwest Book Review

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

  —Library Journal

  “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

  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?

  WHO KILLED THE QUEEN OF CLUBS?

  DID YOU DECLARE THE CORPSE?

  GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DIE?

  WHAT ARE YOU WEARING TO DIE?

  A THOROUGHLY SOUTHERN MYSTERY

  Patricia Sprinkle

  AN OBSIDIAN MYSTERY

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  ISBN: 1-4295-9629-5

  Copyright © Patricia Sprinkle, 2008

  All rights reserved

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  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.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  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.

  Contents

  Primary Characters

  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

  Many Thanks

  PRIMARY CHARACTERS

  MacLaren Yarbrough—Hope County magistrate and co-owner, Yarbrough Feed, Seed, and Nursery

  Joe Riddley Yarbrough—her husband, co-owner of Yarbrough Feed, Seed, and Nursery

  Ridd and Martha Yarbrough—their older son and his wife

  Cricket Yarbrough—Ridd and Martha’s son (five years old)

  Bailey “Buster” Gibbons—sheriff of Hope County and Joe Riddley’s best friend

  Hubert Spence—the Yarbroughs’ former neighbor and old friend

  Maynard and Selena Spence—Hubert’s son and
his wife

  Augusta Wainwright—dowager aristocrat who shares house with Hubert

  Otis and Lottie Raeburn—couple who care for Hubert and Gusta

  Evelyn Finch—manager of Yarbrough Feed, Seed, and Nursery

  Trevor Knight—local taxidermist

  Starr and Bradley Knight—Trevor’s daughter and four-year-old grandson

  Wylie Quarles—Trevor’s assistant, Starr’s former boyfriend

  Robin, Natalie, and Anna Emily Parker—Trevor’s assistant and her daughters (five and three years old, respectively)

  Dan and Kaye Poynter—taxidermists from Virginia

  Grady Handley—soldier seeking his wife

  Billy Baxter—the Parker girls’ “Uncle Billy”

  1

  For months, Joe Riddley had been threatening to shackle me to my desk to keep me from “meddling in murder.” I never believed he’d do it.

  In fact, when he came into our office that Thursday afternoon in mid-September and set an icy Coca-Cola and a Hershey bar beside my computer keyboard, I was almost ready to nominate him for a sainthood merit badge. What held up his nomination was a look on his face that meant he was up to something. When you’ve been married nearly forty-five years, you learn to read signs like that.

  I hadn’t learned to read them well enough.

  “Is this a bribe or an apology?” I put one hand over the candy bar so he couldn’t take it back.

  “Give me space!” That wasn’t Joe Riddley. It was Bo, the big scarlet macaw whose rainbow tail feathers streamed down Joe Riddley’s back. We had inherited Bo from a man who died in our house a couple of years before,1and my husband often took the bird to work, claiming Bo got lonely at home. I didn’t complain. I often took Lulu, my three-legged beagle, to work with me for the very same reason. She was lying beside my desk at the moment, worrying a fat knot of red and brown cloth that she preferred to store-bought toys.

  I held the candy bar ready to open as soon as I got Joe Riddley’s explanation.

  “Neither. I figured those might keep you sending out invoices until quitting time. If you don’t want them—”

  “I want them, all right. They are probably the only incentives in the world that would keep me working on a day like this.” If Joe Riddley wasn’t ready to confess, I could wait.

  I unwrapped the candy and looked wistfully out our office window. Georgia in mid-September is still hot, but already the air was getting that golden tinge that heralds autumn. While the trees were weeks from changing yet, the breeze rippling the leaves on the triple poplar beyond our parking lot had a lighthearted look, no longer encumbered by the weight of summer humidity. “I envy you, getting to work outside.”

  “Remind me of that on a rainy day next January, or in July when the thermometer nears a hundred.”

  Joe Riddley and I co-own Yarbrough Feed, Seed, and Nursery in Hopemore, the seat of Hope County, which is located in that wedge of Georgia between I-20 and I-16. He runs the landscaping part of our business and manages the nursery on the outskirts of town, which sells shrubs and trees to homeowners, developers, and landscaping firms. I keep the books and oversee the store in town, which deals in animal feed, seeds, bedding plants, potting soil, pesticides, fertilizers, and garden equipment.

  He peered over my shoulder at the spreadsheet on my computer screen. “We still got money in the bank?”

  “Not to worry,” Bo advised. I have never known if that bird knows what it’s saying or merely gets it right sometimes.

  I spoke through a mouthful of chocolate. “Some. The nursery is going to show a nice profit when we collect from those new developments up near I-20, but the store’s been losing money since last November. The only thing that’s held steady is large-animal feed, and once developers turn pastures into subdivisions, that will go down the drain. We need to consider what we’re going to do pretty soon.”

  In case you are wondering, it wasn’t my poor management that had the store running behind; it was what some folks call progress. Back when the federal highway that runs through town was a main drag, it brought right many tourists our way each year. Once I-20 took the traffic, tourism slowed to a trickle, and some folks predicted that Hopemore would shrivel up and die. Of course, the primary business in the county at the time was agriculture, which was great for Yarbrough’s.

  Like Joe Riddley often says, however, “Land is like gold. They aren’t making any more of it.” In the past few years, our part of the state had been seeing what the chamber of commerce called “revitalization” and other folks called “the second Yankee invasion”: young seniors who wanted to enjoy early retirement free of snow and ice and who were willing to pay ridiculous prices for houses in cookie-cutter subdivisions sprawling over former fields and pastures. Our population used to be a steady thirteen thousand in the Hopemore greater metropolitan area. The next census would show a considerable jump.

  Furthermore, while newcomers might be willing to fill our pastures and fields with new neighborhoods in their search for warmth and recreation, they wanted to shop in familiar places. The entire South had broken out in a rash of national chain restaurants, stores, and motels. Hopemore had recently added a Waffle House, and the previous fall a big superstore had opened at the edge of town, to the delight of newcomers—who didn’t seem to realize that the small-town charm they had moved south for was headed for extinction. Local merchants were closing their doors at an alarming rate.

  Joe Riddley and I were holding on so far, but the superstore had both a garden center and a pet department, so they sold almost everything our store carried, and at lower prices. I couldn’t blame people for wanting to save money, but it irked me when somebody bought a plant at the other place and came to us for free advice on where to plant it and how to keep it alive. The superstore’s garden center staff knew diddly-squat about horticulture. And while I appreciated my husband’s determination not to let employees go until we absolutely had to, we couldn’t run the store as a charity indefinitely.

  Joe Riddley rattled his keys in his pocket. “You been to the bathroom lately?”

  That might seem like a personal question, but when you co-own a business, questions aren’t always what they appear. The day before, a small boy had flushed his sister’s plastic coin purse down our toilet. I’d had a plumber in there half the morning trying to fish it out.

  “Five minutes ago. It’s working fine.”

  “That’s good.”

  He shifted from one foot to the other, unusually restless.

  “Sic ’em, boy!” Bo urged.

  I reached again for my Coke. “For a nickel, I’d pack up and go down to Ridd and Martha’s for a swim. I’ve been thinking of that pool all afternoon.”

  A year before, Joe Riddley and I had moved from the old Yarbrough homeplace and turned it over to our older son, Ridd, and his wife, Martha—as Joe Riddley’s parents had turned it over to us when we had two boys to raise. Our grandson, Cricket, would be the fifth Joe Riddley Yarbrough to grow up in that place. The thing I missed most was the swimming pool. During warm weather, I went down several times a week to swim.

  As I took another swig of Coke, Joe Riddley dropped a coin.

  “Is that my nickel?” I was so busy drinking I scarcely noticed him crawling around my desk—until he grabbed my ankle. I smacked him. “Stop that! What if somebody takes a notion to mosey back to look at rakes and hoes?” The top half of our office door was a clear pane of glass, so we were visible to anybody who came to the rear of the store.

  “Back off! Give me space!” Bo demanded, trying to take a nip out of my hand.

  Something cold circled my shin. I heard a snap. “Hey!” I peered down at my husband’s broad back. “What are you doing?” Anklets weren’t my style, and this one was heavy.

  “What I should have done years ago.” I heard another click. “There’s been a body found out on the bypass, and I don’t want you haring over there to get involved.”

  I tried to lift my foot, but it mo
ved only a few inches. It was securely fastened to one leg of the oak rolltop that had outlasted three generations of Yarbroughs. I could no more lift that desk than I could lift the courthouse down the street.

  Playing along, I tugged at the cuffs—succeeding only in bruising my ankle and snagging my panty hose. “You can’t do this. What if I need to leave the office?”

  “You’ve already been to the bathroom.”

  He climbed to his feet with remarkable agility for a man of sixty-six. That’s one benefit of lifting heavy plants and working outdoors his entire life. Then the old hypocrite bent down and kissed the top of my head.

  “Let me out of here!” I still thought he was joking. “I’m not going over to the bypass. But what if I have to go down to the sheriff’s detention center for a hearing?”

  In addition to working at the store, two years ago I became one of three magistrates in Hope County. I hold court each week to hear cases of county ordinance violations, hold traffic court down in the south end of the county a couple of times a month, and may be called by a deputy at any time, day or night, to go down to the detention center (the fancy name for our jail) to hold a bond hearing after an arrest.

  Joe Riddley brushed his palms together to get rid of grit that accumulated on our old pine floors no matter how often we swept. “I told them you wouldn’t be available for the rest of the afternoon. Judge Stebley is covering for you.”