Rogues & Rascals in Goose Pimple Junction (Goose Pimple Junction Mysteries Book 4) Read Free

Southern woman didn’t make catty remarks or act rude in public, no matter what she may be thinking. Her smile held.
    “Well, I imagine so. Let’s have a look-see.” The store was full of round racks of clothing, and Miss Penny walked through the tight aisles, her hands adjusting the clothing she passed. She stopped at a rack of dresses against the far wall. Finding the size on several of them, she pulled out two dresses.
    Penny turned and said, “We’ll take the size eight back there too, just in case.” She winked at Caledonia and turned to lead the way to the fitting room. Sticking her tongue out, ever so quickly, at the woman’s back erased Caledonia’s smile.
    The dressing room door closed. As soon as she had her dress off, she heard Miss Penny, a woman two years older than her and a constant burr in her butt since high school, say in false sincerity, “You just let me know if you need a bigger size now, you hear?”
    Caledonia took a deep breath and said, “How lovely.”
    She was delighted with the size six. The knee-length dress did wonderful things for her figure. She thought it showed off her size 34C bust with just the right amount to look sexy but not slutty, and it showed off her toned calves. She turned and checked the view from the back in the three-way mirror. “And it clings to my behind and shows off my greatest ass-et,” she said under her breath, giggling at the pun.
    “Uh-oh,” came the sing-songy voice of Miss Penny on the other side of the door. “I hear laughter. Surely it isn’t that bad. Should I get you one of our body shapers? They’re tummy and thigh trimming, you know. Some people say it really helps hide those unwanted extra pounds that so many older women have. Or do you want me to see if I have a size ten?” Her voice went to an annoyingly high pitch at the end of the sentence in her attempt to be not-so-innocently helpful.
    Caledonia clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle what she wanted to say. She could hear her mother’s voice admonishing her to “be kind, considerate and, above all, always a lady.”
    So instead of what she was thinking, she said, “Why, no, precious, this one will do just fine.” She opened the dressing room door, and with a smile, deposited the size eight dress into Miss Piggy . . . Um . . . Penny’s hands. “I won’t be needing that one,” she scrunched her nose as punctuation, “sugar.”
    Because she didn’t want to give Bad Penny any more business than she absolutely had to, and she certainly didn’t want the woman knowing all her business, she walked around the corner to The Panty Waist, a lingerie store, where she bought a lacy pair of red panties and matching strapless bra. She’d have to pull the big guns out, so to speak, she thought with another giggle.
    On her way home, she called her husband, Philetus Swift Culpepper IV. “Hey, darlin’. I have a surprise for you,” she cooed into the cell phone. “You will be home at the normal time tonight, won’t you?” She listened and then said, “Great,” making it a three-syllable word. “I’ll see you soon, sugar.”
    She hung up as she walked past Slick & Junebug’s Diner, looking in the window at the busy restaurant. Her smile faltered when she spotted her husband with . . . the little Dutch Boy? No, it was that insipid shyster woman lawyer who reminded her of the little Dutch Boy. Caledonia remembered her mother’s advice to never show anger in public, so she kept walking, smile firmly in place, confident that her husband would never be romantically involved with the likes of that woman. But why hadn’t he mentioned who he was with?

    Caledonia was ready and waiting when Philetus came through the front door four hours later. She’d spent all afternoon getting dressed, starting with a long bath—”showers are for men,” her mother used to say—followed by lotion, powder, and perfume. She rolled her hair in big fat curlers to give it volume, and she applied just the