Free The Glass Is Always Greener by Tamar Myers

I didn’t mention Rob, because I knew he was on all of our minds anyway, and because we all loved him, and most of all, it would have been a betrayal to even breathe his name in that context.
    “Okay, so we have the suspects,” Mama said. She’d been taking careful but microscopic notes on the back of the Christmas card. “Now we need a motive.”
    “What about humiliation?” Wynnell said.
    “Rob’s Aunt Jerry was just telling it like she saw it,” I said. It was amazing, but here I was feeling protective of a dead woman’s reputation, and I’d only known her for a few minutes. Strictly speaking, make that a few seconds.
    “Then the motive has to be greed,” C.J. said. “Everybody wanted more than their share, and they felt—Mozella, Abby, close your ears—stiffed.”
    “And I feel annoyed. C.J., first of all, I heard that. Second, how does one close their ears? And third, why didn’t Wynnell have to close her ears?”
    “Wynnell is hip, Abby. I didn’t want to offend you and your mother with the S word, that’s all.”
    “The S word?” Mama said.
    “She means stiffed ,” I said.
    Wynnell and C.J. sound absolutely wicked when they laugh in unison, especially when the laughter is directed at me . “You sound like a couple of fourth-graders,” I said.
    “And I, for one, am not at all offended,” Mama said. “I think stiff is a lovely word. You know, I’ve been searching for years, and just last month now I finally found a man who does it right.”
    I clamped my hands over my ears. If only I could close them; if only we humans came equipped with “earlids.”
    “Mama,” I moaned. “Why must you mortify me like this?”
    “Oh Abby, you’re such a prude. A well-starched crinoline is something of which to be proud. I used to do it myself, but frankly it’s a messy job that I’d just rather not be doing at my age. So when I discovered that new full-service laundry up there on East Bay—”
    Of course covered ears are only symbolic; they don’t stop one from being able to hear. “Is that all , Mama? Stiff crinolines?”
    “Why Abby, dear, whatever else could I possibly mean?”
    I presented her with a blank face, one honed by my years as her teenage daughter. “Beats me, Mama.”
    “Oh, by the way, dear, I decided not to report my car stolen if you’ll do my crinolines for the next three months. I figure that with the money I’ll save I can have a nice little visit with your cousin down in Savannah. Do we have a deal, or should I beat Chanti to the punch?”
    “Mama, you wouldn’t! Would you?”
    “Beats me, Abby.”
    “She’s got you, Abby,” Wynnell said. “She does your blank face even better than you do.”
    C.J. sighed. “I wish that I had me a mama—especially a young-looking one like you, Mozella. Granny Ledbetter has so many wrinkles that you never know which one’s going to open when she talks—bless her heart.”
    “Bless her heart,” we echoed in unison.
    I clapped my hands. “Okay ladies, time’s a-wasting, so here’s the deal. Jerry Ovumkoph was murdered so that someone could take possession of a ring she was wearing.”
    “Diamond?” Mama asked.
    “An emerald—practically the size of an egg. She wanted to give it to me, but I refused to take it.”
    Mama clucked like the hen that might have laid such an egg. “Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth—not to speak ill of the dead.” She opened one of the two pill cases and flung its contents over her shoulder.
    “Hey! What was that?” The beefy man in the wife-beater T-shirt was out of his banquette and looming over our table.
    “It was salt,” Mama said calmly.
    “It was to ward off bad luck,” Wynnell said.
    “Back in Shelby we once had a horse with no mouth,” C.J. said, apropos of nothing. “We had to feed it through—”
    “ What’d you say?” Big and Beefy demanded.
    “Don’t mind her,” I said. “She claims to be part Nubian—goat, that is—and may even have the horns to