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By Root 868 0

and building custom-made yard fountains. According to Dove, who, much to her dismay, was getting semiweekly updates, Aunt Garnet and Uncle W.W. were having difficulty getting used to being around each other all day. It sounded like the pressure had finally gotten to both of them and Aunt Garnet decided to take a powder. Except for her only child, Jake, in Pine Bluff, whose wife, Neba Jean, had absolutely forbid Garnet to ever cross the threshold of their mahogany-paneled three-story split-level house again, poor Aunt Garnet had nowhere else to flee. Her only other close relative was her granddaughter and Jake and Neba Jean’s only child, my cousin Rita. Last we all heard, Rita was traveling the rodeo circuit in an old Winnebago with her bull-riding husband, Myron “Skeeter” Gluck.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“You know, we’re so busy with this remodeling and what with the house all torn up, I was thinking—”

“Not a chance, Dove,” I interrupted. “Gabe and I are still newlyweds. And I’ve got the storytelling festival this weekend and now there’s this murder that Gabe has to worry about . . . and since when are you all remodeling?”

“I’ve been considering it,” she said defensively. “Now’s as good a time as any to start. What murder?”

We temporarily shelved the subject of Aunt Garnet while I told Dove about Nora Cooper and my morning’s gruesome discovery.

“Her mama made the best apple pan dowdy,” Dove said, tsking under her breath. “This would’ve tore her heart to pieces.”

“I guess I should go visit Nick. We only see each other occasionally now, but we were good friends in college.”

“Take some banana bread,” Dove advised. “Or a fruit pie.”

“Okay, I’ll drop by the bakery.”

Her pointed silence admonished me. Dove didn’t approve of anything bought in a bakery, especially if you were taking it as a token of sympathy. “Your generation,” she was always harping at me. “Y’all are too lazy to pick your own teeth.”

I ignored the disapproving vibes floating over the phone lines and asked what Daddy and Uncle Arnie thought about Garnet’s visit.

“When they heard about it they lit out of here like two fresh-branded calves. Haven’t seen ’em since. And now that we’re back on that subject—”

“Gotta go,” I said. “I need to buy that pie. Call you later.” I hung up while she was still sputtering, knowing I’d pay big time for that little bit of bravado. In our family there were two sets of rules—the Ten Commandments and Dove’s Rules of Order. I had just broken one of the biggies—cutting her off when she was in the middle of cajoling you to do something. When she didn’t call me right back, I knew I was really going to get it, that she was plotting big time. That meant I’d never see it coming.

After a quick shower and change into clean Wranglers, a plain white T-shirt, and my old brown Ropers, I grabbed up Levi’s and a pale yellow polo shirt for Gabe. I pointed the pickup toward Blind Harry’s Bookstore and Coffeehouse in downtown San Celina. My best friend, Elvia Aragon, manager and head honcha of the bookstore, would most likely be there, even though Sunday was technically her day off. She’d kill me if I didn’t tell her about my morning’s activities before she heard it on the news. Grimacing at my poor choice of mental words, I maneuvered for a precious parking space in our already congested downtown shopping area. The influx of people moving into San Celina County and shopping downtown had been great for the merchants, but heck on the local residents, who were accustomed to finding a parking space on the first try. I pumped my last quarter into the meter, attempting to be a model, law-abiding citizen now that I was the police chief’s wife.

Blind Harry’s Bookstore resided a block away in part of a two-story brick row building that once held the offices of San Celina Trust and Savings, an institution that bit the dust during the 1929 stock crash. Until six years ago, it had been a bookstore called simply San Celina Books and Stationery. Then Cameron McGarry, a mysterious Scottish man who owned casinos in Reno, a cattle ranch in Wyoming,