Free A Tough Nut to Kill (Nut House Mystery Series) by Elizabeth Lee

down in the middle of the table.
    My trouble was whiskey made me sleepy, which I was thinking might be a good thing. I was staying the night in my old room, not willing to go back to the Nut House by myself, at least not in the dark. I started to get up, telling myself how tired I was and how I’d probably need a lot of strength for the morning, when another sharp ring of the doorbell sounded from the front hall.
    Bethany, sitting across the table from me, tapping furiously at her computer, dropped her head lower and ignored the bell.
    Justin wrote on sheet after sheet of a pad of paper as he shoveled food into his mouth, took small sips of the Garrison Brothers, and went on as if the doorbell didn’t exist.
    I’d logged on to the computer Hunter’d brought from my apartment with high hopes that all my files would be there. But there was nothing. I’d figured: two computers, backup hard copies, backup disks—that would handle any problem. What did I have to worry about?
    Now I knew and felt more than bad. A totally blank screen. Not a single icon.
    And I couldn’t tell anybody. I looked around at the worried faces of my family and knew I had to keep this new disaster to myself.
    I didn’t want to register the sound of a bell ringing either. Not at eleven thirty at night. Maybe some reporter. We’d been getting phone calls all evening from newspapers as far away as Dallas. So we were going to be famous all over Texas. Us and the Alamo, I thought.
    Perfectly rotten day and evening . . . and future.
    And about to get worse.
    Miss Amelia, who’d gone to answer the door, came back with her face a mass of warning smiles, leading the couple behind her, preceded by an ill wind of overpowering perfume and shaving lotion.
    Chastity Conway burst into the kitchen with her hands in the air, shaking them like a sinner in church. Her bright red hair was electrified, a mass of charged fuses. The red cowgirl boots she wore tap, tap, tapped across the tile floor. At the table she bent forward and threw her arms around Mama, grabbing her from behind, pulling my surprised mother back into a generous pair of bosoms and hugging her. Mama’s eyes got huge. She held herself still until the hold on her head was loosened.
    “Lord! Lord! Lord!” Chastity wrung her hands together. “Me and Harry know it’s late, but we couldn’t stay away. Not when our good neighbors are in trouble like you people are. Nope, couldn’t just sit there in that big house of ours and think about all of you over here. Miserable. Saw your lights and figured we’d come on over and tell you . . .”
    She smiled a wide, bright smile at each of us around the table. Red lips. Red cheeks. Red, dangling earrings. She jingled and she swished—her stiff cowgirl skirt brushing behind our chairs. Chastity was colorful and loud and smelled good.
    “Well, if there’s anything me and Harry can do . . .”
    She reached a hand with long red nails around and pulled Harry up to stand at the table beside her. He’d been hanging back in the middle of the room, thumbs stuck in the wide leather belt he wore with a buckle on it the size of Houston. He nodded to each of us around the table. “Evening,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “Sorry to come over so late, but it’s like Chastity says. Just couldn’t sit there and not be neighborly enough to offer a hand. Whatever y’all need.”
    Something about Harry’s “y’all” always made my scalp itch. Harry and Chastity had come to Riverville only seven years before from someplace in the Midwest. They bought the neglected ranch next to ours, tore down the old ranch house, and built something that looked like a manor house: big stones and blocks of granite. People in town forgave them their otherness, though, when they got the pecan groves going again. My daddy was the one who got them into the Pecan Co-op and introduced them around. That made all Blanchards friends with the Conways—like it or not.
    “This is