Free Thoroughly 10 - What Are You Wearing to Die? by Patricia Sprinkle Page A

the wagon, anyway, after so many years of staying clean? Where had she been going, dressed like that?
    Knowing that thoughts, like the sky, are apt to be darkest in the hour before dawn, I forced myself to stop thinking and belatedly kept my promise to the deputy. I prayed that Buster and his deputies would find whoever did that dreadful deed. I prayed for Trevor, and for Bradley. Remembering a police sergeant I’d once met who said she always prayed for the safety of her city when she was in charge of the homicide squad for the night—and that the city had never had a murder on her watch—I prayed for the safety of everybody in Hope County. And I prayed the prayer I often had—which had sometimes gotten me into trouble in my marriage: “If there’s something I ought to be doing, show me what it is.”
    Instead of a blinding revelation, all I could think of was Starr’s clothes. Why on earth had she been dressed so somberly when she died? Who might know?
    I couldn’t ask Trevor, but Evelyn might remember who Starr’s friends had been. I fell asleep in the middle of telling myself that Joe Riddley couldn’t accuse me of meddling if I was simply asking about the victim’s clothes.

6
    The news about how Starr died spread like flies. Hopemore was terrified. By Saturday morning, foot traffic in town was nil. I heard from the few customers who came by that parents weren’t letting their children go to friends’ houses and were setting up parent patrols at soccer and football games. Young mothers gave up jogging or riding bikes with infants in three-wheeled rickshaws. Few women played golf or tennis that weekend. Deputies reported that law enforcement phone lines were clogged with calls from people who heard noises outside their homes or noticed somebody acting strange.
    As you might imagine, Joe Riddley kept a close eye on me. Autumn Saturdays are busy down at the nursery, with homeowners coming by for plants to put in over the weekend. Usually he works there while I pay bills and catch up on paperwork. That morning he stuck around the office reading seed catalogs with the same passion I bring to a good mystery. I was impatient for him to leave, so I could call Evelyn in to talk to her about Starr’s friends.
    Lulu dozed at my feet. Bo stalked along the top of the curtain rod, darting looks to see if I was watching. “You poop on that curtain, you are dead meat,” I warned.
    “I love you. I truly do,” he replied.
    I was fantasizing about an appropriate revenge for Joe Riddley’s Thursday prank when Hubert Spence came in, beaming like he had won the Georgia lottery. Behind him, Evelyn was clutching fistfuls of hair and shaking her head to signify “I tried to keep him from bothering you, but I couldn’t.”
    I motioned her back to work. Nobody can stop Hubert.
    He bounced into the office with his hand outstretched, and the way he pumped Joe Riddley’s, you’d have thought they hadn’t seen each other for years instead of at Rotary a few days before. “Hey, ole buddy. How ya doin’?” Without waiting for a reply, he turned to me. “And how you doin,’ Judge? Is that a new outfit?”
    “Relatively.” I had treated myself to a celery green pantsuit at the end-of-summer sales. It was possible Hubert hadn’t seen it.
    “You’re looking good. Real good.”
    He looked pretty good himself. Not as handsome as Joe Riddley, of course, who inherited high cheekbones, straight dark hair, and an olive complexion with a tinge of red under the skin from his Cherokee grandmother. Still, Hubert was more than passably good-looking. Before Gusta had agreed to let him live in the same house with her, she had insisted that he bathe regularly, a habit he’d given up after his wife died. Once he got cleaned up, he started paying attention to what he wore and how he cut his hair. He had squired a congressman’s sister around the year before, and that past month I had heard a couple of widows talking like Hubert was worth