Murder at the Book Group Read Free Page A

met.
    â€œLooks like hers would be hard to forget.”
    â€œI guess.” She waved a dismissive hand, setting off those dissonant bracelets. “I just finished an Agatha Christie. I keep reading them over and over.” Pulling a book out of her bookcase she offered it to me. “This one’s a Miss Marple. The Mirror Crack’d . Want to borrow it?”
    Okay, Linda was off limits. I wondered why. “Oh, no thanks. I have a copy.” Carlene reshelved the paperback.
    â€œHazel, the real reason I wanted to talk to you, aside from getting away from Helen, was to share my big news. I booked a trip to Costa Rica for December. Georgia and I are going to stay with a friend of hers.”
    â€œOh, Carlene, that’s great. You’ll love it. So will Georgia.” Georgia Dmytryk was Carlene’s lifelong friend and the executive director of the Richmond Women’s Resource Center.
    â€œI know you went there a while back. Maybe you can give us suggestions. Do you have time for coffee this week? Our treat. Maybe early one morning before Georgia goes to the center?” I wasn’t hot on early-morning activities, but I was hot on free coffee, so I agreed to meet Carlene and Georgia at Panera at Stony Point on Wednesday morning.
    Then my eye was drawn to a couple of photographs on the shelf over her laptop. How had I missed them in this monkish room? I pointed to one and said, “I don’t think I’ve seen these before.” Neither picture included Evan, but I didn’t comment on my observation.
    A smiling foursome posed next to a Christmas tree. Kat dominated the group with her abundance of everything: hair, makeup, cleavage, jewelry. Her twenty-something daughter, Stephie, took her mother’s flamboyant fashion statements several steps further with her riotous assortment of piercings and tattoos. Dean Berenger, Kat’s father and Carlene’s stepfather, wore a crewneck sweater and sported a buzz cut.
    Carlene’s elegant style was apparent even with her tacky Christmas sweater and jeans. Her eyes stared impassively into, maybe through, the camera. I never tire of her mesmerizing eyes, which happen to be the same color and shade as mine, “money green.” My thoughts digressed along a path from green eyes to husbands, recalling one of my exes declaring an exact match when he held a dollar bill up to my eyes. While he was puzzled that they weren’t hazel, suiting my name, they failed to mesmerize him.
    Besides our eyes, Carlene and I shared a number of physical attributes. We both stood at five feet four inches without shoes. We’d remained slim, but the pounds were creeping up in that insidious way that pounds crept. Our hair color belonged to the red family, hers a vibrant auburn and mine an autumn chestnut. No doubt her salon tab far exceeded mine.
    â€œThat was taken last Christmas,” Carlene explained, but didn’t elaborate.
    â€œAnd what about this one?” I pointed to an eight-by-eleven image in a brushed metal frame. “This has to be your mother.” Despite the beehive and thick black eyeliner, the woman could only be Carlene’s mother, so striking was the resemblance.
    â€œIt is.”
    â€œFather?” I asked, pointing at the handsome, smiling man holding a pipe, who didn’t look remotely like Dean Berenger. Carlene nodded.
    A perhaps ten-year-old Carlene towered over an unhappy-looking boy. “I guess that’s your brother.”
    â€œYes, that’s Hal. I hate to cut this short, Hazel, but I’ve got to get the food ready. They’ll be winding down their stories soon and will want to eat.” True to my prediction, a loud and intense childbirth discussion was in full swing downstairs.
    The rebuff didn’t surprise me as Carlene didn’t allow many personal questions. In no time the inevitable “it’s none of your business” messages would start, nonverbal but clear all