“It was no trouble,” I lied.
“Wonder where Bea is,” Dottie said.
Hank snorted.“Speak of the Devil.”
Bea came through the garden gate like a whirling dervish, her coral caftan catching the early evening light.She carried a large beach tote that matched her caftan, and I could hear it clanking before she made it to the sunroom.She pulled out a bottle of wine.
“Let me get you a corkscrew,” I said.
“It’s screw-top,” she corrected.“No one has time for that cork stuff anymore.I brought Moscato if anyone wants a glass.I’ve got two more bottles in my bag.Mabel, why don’t you stick these in your wine fridge so they stay cold.”
I took the two extra bottles from her and mentally shook my head.Apparently it was going to be one ofthosekinds of book club meetings.
I brought an ice bucket out for the open bottle just in time to hear her say, “I ran into Patsy Hindman at the post office this afternoon.She told me she saw Lorraine Crowder sneaking out of Mitch Berber’s back door at the crack of dawn.”
“Lorraine Crowder has been dead for two years,” Dottie said.
“That’s what I told her,” Bea said.“Patsy sat in the pew in front of me at Lorraine’s funeral.”
“And?”Deidre asked.
“Patsy is an idiot,” Bea said with a snort.“She said it could have been Lorraine’s ghost.I told her that Lorraine couldn’t stand Mitch when she was alive, so there was no way she’d be bumping uglies with him in the afterlife.”
Dottie snickered.
“I wouldn’t put Patsy Hindman on a witness stand to identify her own husband,” Hank said.“Her glasses are two inches thick.”
Walt cleared his throat.“If we’re done gossiping, we should focus on the book.”
“We can do both,” Bea said, pouring herself another glass of wine.
Walt cleared his throat.“The book.”
This month’s selection wasThe Bellwood Murders, about a family of four found dead in their home in the mountains of rural Virginia.Father, mother, two teenage children.For more than twenty years the official story had been murder-suicide.Then a cold case team reopened it and proved the killer was a neighbor who’d nursed a grudge over a property line until it curdled into something unspeakable.
“The forensics should have caught it,” Dottie said, taking a bite of cucumber sandwich.
“Agreed,” Deidre said.“A botched case from the beginning.Pure incompetence from just about everyone involved.”
“The residue pattern was inconsistent with a self-inflicted wound,” Dottie continued, ignoring her.“The angle was wrong.I could have told them that standing in the doorway.Any first-year pathology student with half a brain and a measuring tape would have flagged it.”
“So why didn’t they?”I asked.
“Because a murder-suicide is tidy.Answers every question in one neat package.Victim and perpetrator, case closed.Nobody has to do the harder work of finding someone who doesn’t want to be found.”
“I saw it from the bench more often than I’d like to admit,” Hank said, reaching for a peach.“A DA builds a theory and everything that contradicts it goes in a drawer that never opens again.”
“What bothered me,” Deidre said, flipping to a page she’d flagged with a yellow tab, “was the children.The author treats them as though they didn’t exist outside of being victims.We learn everything about the parents.Their finances, their marriage, their social standing.But those two teenagers are barely mentioned as human beings.”
“Of course they’re not,” Bea said.“Nobody ever pays attention to the children.Adults assume kids are furniture.They have their affairs and their screaming matches and their sordid little arrangements right in front of them, and then act shocked when the child turns out to know everything.”
She picked up her glass again.“I knew a family in Charleston.Very old money.The husband had been carrying on with the neighbor’s wife for years, and every person in their social circle knew.Every last one.”
“I think I know this story,” Dottie said.
“You don’t.This one was before your time.”Bea smiled.“The twelve-year-old daughter walked up to her mother at a garden party and said, ‘Daddy kisses Mrs.Jennings the same way he kisses you.’In front of forty people and a bartender.”
“Lord have mercy,” Deidre whispered.
