Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery Read Free Page A

quoting somebody—probably Genna. “Forget it, okay?”
    She rose, but before she could leave, Olive stepped into the office after the slightest of knocks. As a judge, I had no business convicting Olive of eavesdropping without evidence, but she convicted herself when she joined our conversation right away with no apology. “What about that girl who lives with you?”
    Edie gave her the impatient look she gave persons who attended board meetings uninvited and spoke out of turn. “Valerie is good about locking up. She also has a car.”
    Edie had been a lot more willing to consider Genna than Valerie, but she was irritated enough with Olive right then to reject anything she suggested. Olive must have understood that, for her pale, plain face flushed, and she said, in the same drab, uninflected voice that never held the children’s attention when she took over story hour for Donna, “I was just trying to help.”
    Poor Olive was less like an olive than anything I could imagine. A woman named Olive ought to be sophisticated and interesting, with sleek dark hair worn in a knot at the nape of her neck, slim little black dresses that cost a fortune, and a face you could put on a magazine cover. This Olive had a square jaw and eyes like unpolished pewter, and she invariably wore a black skirt, a light gray sweater with long sleeves and a V-neck, a single gold chain, and small gold balls in her ears. For winter she added black blazers. For summer she substituted short-sleeved gray cotton sweaters with scoop necks. For dress-up she wore gray silk blouses. For golfing she changed the skirt for black pants and the V-neck for a gray polo shirt or sweatshirt.
    She even drove a gray car, a Nissan SUV exactly like her brother’s, suitable for rough-track adventures, although I doubted Olive ever took hers anywhere more adventurous than the Bi-Lo. Cindy said Adney bought her the car soon after he bought his own. Apparently they were the only two left of their family, and very close. She had certainly moved to Hopemore not long after Adney and Genna.
    Joe Riddley claimed Olive had a secret desire to be a nun. I suspected she had drawers full of red bikini underwear and a closet full of slinky negligees. However, I was unlikely to ever know. Olive never invited anybody to her apartment except Adney, Genna, and Edie. She didn’t seem to have any other friends. It wasn’t just that she was a newcomer. She made it clear she preferred books to people. She also apparently preferred solitary rounds on the golf course to foursomes, if the gossip was right down at Phyllis’s Beauty Parlor.
    “She’s real good at golf,” I’d heard one woman say, “but when people ask her to play with them, she says she prefers to play alone. Can you imagine?”
    “She plays bridge like that, too,” said another. “Makes it clear it’s cards she likes, not the company.”
    “Poor honey, can’t you do something about her hair?” a third asked Phyllis. “I mean, that short straight look doesn’t do a thing for her, thin as she is, and that color of red—Well, all I can say is, if you and she are trying to match Genna’s color, one of you is color-blind.”
    Phyllis frowned over the head of a permanent she was rolling. “They don’t use the same color at all. And I give people what they ask for. You know that.” Her critic was a woman well past fifty who kept her own hair an improbable shade of yellow, too long for her age, and teased to look like Texas. “Olive favors a French waif look, and she brings her color with her.”
    As soon as Phyllis stepped into the dryer room to check on another customer, the last woman snorted. “French waif, my foot. That chopped-off crop makes Olive look like she’s trying out for the fire scene in Joan of Arc. ”
    “With her head already ablaze,” said the first. They all laughed. They didn’t so much dislike Olive as resent that she wouldn’t let them get to know her.
    All that went through my head in