You Can't Get Blood Out of Shag Carpet: A Study Club Cozy Murder Mystery (The Study Club Mysteries Book 1) (21 page)
Authors: Juliette Harper
“I never thought about it like that,” Clara said, frowning as if she were trying to concentrate on the concept of the four pointy ends. “You always were the deep thinker in the family.”
Across the table, Wilma, who had chosen not to have the sauce because “tomatoes bother my stomach” scrutinized her friends, and then said to Wanda Jean, “Honey, whose recipe did you use to make the spaghetti sauce?”
Wanda Jean giggled. “You don’t need a recipe, silly. You just make it until it’s right and then you add the special secret ingredient.”
“What ingredient?” Wilma asked.
“I can’t tell you that!” Wanda Jean said in a scandalized whisper. “If I told you, then it wouldn’t be secret anymore. It would still be special. But it wouldn’t be secret.”
Wilma smothered a smile and said with mock gravity, “You have my word of honor, Wanda Jean. I won’t tell a soul.”
Wanda Jean glanced around furtively, but the other four women were now all staring at Mae Ella’s fork. “Okay,” Wanda Jean said, “but you didn’t hear this.”
“I’m not hearing a thing you’re saying,” Wilma assured her.
“The secret ingredient is Mike Thornton’s oregano,” Wanda Jean said. “I don’t think anybody in the world grows better oregano than Mike.”
“I think you just might be right,” Wilma said, covering her mouth with her napkin to hide her laughter.
“Mike’s oregano just makes me so happy,” Wanda Jean purred.
Regaining her composure, Wilma said, “Did you make a
big
chocolate cake, honey?”
“Oh, yes!” Wanda Jean gushed. “Three layers.”
At just that moment, Sugar turned back to them and said, “Do you have any more spaghetti, Wanda Jean?”
“Not cooked,” Wanda Jean said, rising unsteadily to her feet. “But I can boil some up right now. But don’t you want to save room for the cake?”
“I just don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Sugar said. “I’m just starving to death.”
“Me, too!” Clara chimed in. “I could eat a horse.”
“Okay,” Wanda Jean said. “I’ll make some more spaghetti. You can always take the rest home. I’ve got lots and lots of Tupperware. I just love my Tupperware.”
Unable to hold back one minute longer, Wilma burst out laughing. The other women peered at her with amiable, bleary confusion. “What’s so funny?” Flowers asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Wilma said, wiping her eyes. “It’s just good to see you all so high . . . on life.”
In good time, the chocolate cake disappeared with the spaghetti, and the ladies finished the evening listening to Hilton’s Judy Garland records in honor of the man who died so ignominiously on the shag carpet with that Old Hickory carving knife sticking out of his chest.
As the good-byes were being said, amid happy hugs and a few tears, Wanda Jean herself summed up what they were all feeling. “Even if I did lose Hilton and my shag carpet, I still have the Study Club.”
Keep reading for a sneak peek of...
Y
OU
C
AN’T
P
UT A
C
ORPSE IN A
P
ARADE
A Study Club Cozy Murder Mystery
B
OOK
T
WO
Chapter 1
The Race Meet Committee scheduled the parade for 10 o’clock Saturday morning year after year for the same reason. “It won’t be as hot then.” And year after year, parade participants sweltered in line waiting for the fire trucks to pull out on Main Street, sirens blaring, announcing the beginning of the first of the two long, festive weekends. The annual event featured horse racing, class reunions, goat sales, and dancing under the stars at the open air pavilion at the fairgrounds.
For the past three evenings the Study Club officers, and the members appointed to serve as slave labor on the float committee, had worked to transform a flatbed trailer into a proper parade float. The parade theme for 1968 was Into the Future with Agriculture, a motif the Club officers studiously ignored in favor of their usual twisted and draped red, white, and blue crepe paper garland strategically held in place with equally patriotic rosettes.
Sugar Watson, proprietress of Sugar’s Style and Spray, had the best penmanship in the Club with a Marks-a-Lot. While the others had twisted crepe paper, she had labored over the hand-lettered signs, signature Camel hanging loosely in her lips. Now her poster board placards were held firmly in place with masking tape and proclaimed to all passersby, “The Study Club - Better Citizenship Through Education.”
The Club officers were riding the float, which was being pulled by Slim Watson because he had the best looking truck of all the husbands. The fateful moment occurred about halfway through the parade, just in front of City Pharmacy. That’s when the fire truck backfired causing Buttons Jones’ horse to rear and pitch.
Buttons, who had not drawn a sober breath since the Hoover administration, was thrown skyward, somersaulting back over the welcome banner that stretched across Main Street. This caused Bill Simmons to slam on the brakes of the Simmons & Insall Mortuary hearse, a sedate presence in the otherwise gala parade.
When he hit those brakes, the momentum of the forced stop sent the casket in the back of the hearse flying out the doors and straight at Slim’s truck. It struck the front grill and hit the pavement hard, the lid flying open and spilling a very dead man out onto the street.
From atop the Study Club float, Secretary Mae Ella Gormley announced loudly, “My God, Bill, you can’t put a corpse in a parade.”
Bill, who had bolted out of the hearse to inspect the damage to the casket, his most expensive model, looked up at her and said, “Mae Ella, I didn’t put a corpse in the parade. I don’t know who that is.”
“I know who it is,” Buttons Jones said, rising inebriated but unscathed from the street. “That’s Cooter Benson.”
“Who in the hell is Cooter Benson?” Mae Ella asked.
“He’s my brother,” a voice said from the depths of the crowd. Brother Bob, the Baptist preacher, walked out beside the casket and stared down at the dead man. “And it would appear his sins have finally caught up with him.”
About the Author
J
ULIETTE
H
ARPER
is the pen name used by the writing team of Patricia Pauletti and Rana K. Williamson.
You Can’t Get Blood Out of Shag Carpet
is the first installment of Harper’s debut cozy Study Club Mysteries, an hilariously funny look at the often absurd eccentricities of small town life. The second book, to be released in coming months, is called
You Can’t Put a Corpse in a Parade
.
The droll series, set in the 1960s, is a lighthearted spinoff of Harper’s Lockwood Legacy a nine-book chronicle of the lives of three sisters who inherit a ranch in Central Texas following their father’s suicide. Three of the novels are currently available:
Langston’s Daughters
,
Baxter’s Draw
, and
Alice’s Portrait
. The fourth book,
Mandy’s Father
, will appear in Summer 2015.
And don’t miss Harper’s first foray into the world of the supernatural,
Descendants of the Rose
, Book 1 in the Selby Jensen Paranormal Mystery series. The second Selby Jensen book,
Lost in Room 636
is also scheduled for a Summer 2015 release.
Pauletti, an Easterner of Italian descent, is an accomplished musician with an eye for art and design. Williamson, a Texan, worked as a journalist and university history instructor before becoming a full-time freelance writer in 2002.
Looking for the latest updates regarding the Study Club Mystery novels? Want to know more about author Juliette Harper?
Visit Juliette Harper’s home on the web at
http://www.julietteharper.com
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