Free Peaches And Screams (A Savannah Reid Mystery) by G. A. McKevett Page B

saying. “If his wife won’t sign the papers before the wedding day, I just don’t know what I’m gonna do! That dad-gummed Lucille is just holdin’ things up to be spiteful, you know. She don’t want him, but she don’t want me to have him. We never did get along, not even back in high school. She was jealous when I was chosen homecoming princess instead of her, and she never got over it. Now she’s just . . .”
    “And then Atlanta beat her little sister in the Miss McGill pageant. She didn’t like that either.”
    “Oh, I don’t even want to hear about Atlanta,” Marietta said, waving a hand in front of her face as though shooing away flies. “My own sister won’t even come to my wedding. It’s not like Nashville is that far away.”
    “But she’s got a lot going on there with her big singin’ career. She actually got a job doing backup for somebody who used to play with somebody famous,” Vidalia said, an ugly smirk on her face that looked a lot like jealousy to Savannah.
    “Yeah, now that she’s a hotshot country singer, she doesn’t have time to come home and help her sister arrange a nice wedding. I tell you, I’m just plumb wore out with it all.”
    Savannah turned back to her dishes and ignored the rest. She had to; it was either tune her out or beat Marietta soundly about the head and ears with a frying pan.
    “You know,” Savannah said, elbowing Alma, “there are two kinds of people in this world . . .”
    “Yeah?”
    She nodded toward the two at the table. “There are those who are willing to work . . . and those who are perfectly willing to let them.”
    Alma snickered, then shrugged. “I don’t care, if it gives me a chance to be with you. I miss you really bad, Van.”
    “I miss you, too, honey bunny. You should come to visit me sometime in California, stay for a few weeks and see the sights.”
    “I’d love to, but I need to be here, you know, for Gran.”
    “I know. Maybe you both can come out together. We’ll take her to Disneyland and she can raise hell with Mickey.”
    Alma chuckled, then lowered her voice. “Yeah, but somebody around here would have to learn how to cook and clean, or we’d come back to a starved bunch and a filthy house.”
    “I was wondering,” Savannah whispered, “if they’re here all the time. I mean, I thought Vi and Butch lived over the garage and Marietta had a place in back of her hair salon.”
    “They do. They just hang out here for food and babysitting.”
    As Savannah applied steel wool and elbow grease to the crusted skillet, she made a silent vow to give her sisters a stern talking-to.
    Granny Reid might have more than her share of life wisdom and old-fashioned horse sense, but, like most truly kind and loving people, Gran had a blind spot when it came to those closest to her heart. And that weakness left her vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
    Such behavior wasn’t to be tolerated, and Savannah was prepared to do anything, short of shedding massive amounts of familial blood, to put an end to it.
    The screen door opened and slammed closed. Savannah turned to see yet another of her sisters, Cordele. Dressed in a white shirt, buttoned tightly under her chin, a shapeless navy skirt, and black loafers, Cordele looked twenty-seven, going on seventy-seven. Her dark curls were slicked back with copious amounts of gel and held snugly with a black barrette—her only adornment.
    “You missed supper,” Marietta told her with a smirk that conveyed little, if any, sympathy.
    “I grabbed an apple and some yogurt at school.” Cordele set a mountain of textbooks on the table. “That’s enough . . . for me.”
    Since she was easily twenty pounds lighter than any of her sisters in the kitchen, the dig couldn’t even be considered “thinly veiled.”
    Cordele didn’t bother with such subtleties as tact. She was, very simply, a superior human being—at least in her own opinion—so what was the point in trying to hide the fact?
    When