Free Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery by Patricia Sprinkle Page A

“Don’t sass your mama or I’ll paddle you, even if you are on the board here.” He was up for president the following term, which we thought was real good for somebody four years away from forty.
    Of course, Walker and Cindy are country club to the bone. They and their children practically live there. Joe Riddley and I don’t golf, don’t play tennis, and—up until we moved into town—did all our swimming in our own pool. We joined the club when Ridd went to high school, so he could play golf. We’ve kept our membership because we enjoy the folks we run into there and Hopemore doesn’t have a whole lot of places to entertain. Lately we’d started eating there every Friday because the new chef set out a weekly seafood buffet and a table full of desserts.
    Walker motioned the waiter to bring me a glass of tea. “Coffee,” I said firmly. “Hot.”
    As Walker resumed his seat, he asked Adney, “You think I can in good conscience accept the presidency of this club, considering how much money it loses each month on my folks?”
    “What are you talking about?” I demanded. “We never eat as many meals in a given month as we have to pay for, under that new rule you all made.”
    “I don’t know,” Adney said solemnly. “You may not come as often as some folks, but I’ve been watching Joe Riddley here put away seafood, and from what Walker says about the number of desserts you work your way through—”
    “You all be nice,” Genna begged.
    “I’m not paying them any attention,” I assured her. Joe Riddley swore that God got so busy making Genna beautiful, he forgot to give her a funny bone.
    She was beautiful. So beautiful that folks seldom remembered that her tousled red curls used to be a dishwater-blond ponytail, or that she’d headed to college with thin lips and a flat chest. Somewhere in the past fifteen years she’d learned to play up her big brown eyes and flawless skin and had acquired a set of full red lips and an impressive bosom. At thirty-three or so, she was a stunner. But she had never been an intellectual, and nowadays she seemed to have nothing weightier on her mind than pleasing Adney and finding the best places to eat lunch with friends. I frankly couldn’t see what Adney saw in her.
    On my way to fill my plate, though, I recalled that he was ten years older than she, and what had brought them together was discovering that her daddy’s pharmacy was on his regular call list. Walker had said Adney had been taking care of Olive since they were kids. Maybe he just liked taking care of women.
    I’d barely settled in my chair again before Joe Riddley asked, too low for the others to hear, “So why were you so late?” He was eating the last pile on his plate, something involving crab, cream sauce, and noodles. He is very systematic about the way he approaches those buffets, filling a plate with one category of seafood at a time and eating all of one dish before he tackles the next. That was the end of his crab. With luck, I could stall him until he was ready to go for shrimp.
    “Oh, you know, traffic court goes on and on.” I applied butter to my roll as carefully as if I were going to be graded on the project.
    Joe Riddley was a magistrate for thirty years before he retired and I took his place, so he has presided over his share of traffic courts. He actually enjoyed it, keeping a private tally of the number of trees that jumped in front of people, invisible speed limit signs, and red lights that looked green.
    Right that minute, he was looking at me the same way he used to look at people who insisted the radar had been wrong. “Court didn’t run late.” He swabbed up the last bit of cream sauce with a bite of roll. “I called down there around five, and they said you’d left soon after four.” He pushed back his chair and growled, “I’m going for shrimp. Cindy, you and Genna better help Little Bit here concoct a good story while I’m gone, or I’m gonna start looking for