Free Murder on the Lunatic Fringe (Jubilant Falls Series Book 4) by Debra Gaskill

black thoroughbred. She appeared considerably younger; her hair was still platinum blonde and her waist was thin and trim—whether that was fact or the painter’s doing, I couldn’t tell. She cupped her riding helmet under one arm and held the reins with the other hand. Her jacket was royal blue and her light tan jodhpurs slipped into the tops of black knee-high riding boots. In the background, a large barn sat at the end of a long line of oak trees.
    Her third husband had the portrait painted at the beginning of their short-lived marriage. It hung in the foyer of their palatial Fort Worth home and when they split up, it had been the one item he had gladly given her. Everything else had been bitterly debated, but in the end she’d walked away with half his oil money and all of his Porsche. It was parked next to my Taurus in the employee parking lot with the vanity license plate ‘WAS HIS.’
    “So, let’s get started. I have a bunch of people I’d like to include in this little focus group.” Earlene ruffled through the papers on her desk. “Oh wait—here’s the list.”
    “Before we get started, I want you to know that I have some fundamental problems with letting a focus group dictate our coverage,” I began.
    “Oh, no—don’t you worry about that, darlin’! I just want to get the pulse of the community, hear what people are thinking. These are folks who have come by my office and introduced themselves to me and I thought they’d make a good sounding board. The first name is… let’s see… Reverend Eric Mustanen.”
    “He’s pastor at the Lutheran Church,” I said, nodding. “He comes to the newsroom every year during the week before Ash Wednesday with his annual listing for mid-week soup suppers and Easter services and again at Christmas. He seems like a reasonable guy.”
    “Angus Buchanan?”
    “Hmm. He might be a problem.”
    Redheaded and beefy, Angus Buchanan was the local car dealer and reminded me more of a polled Hereford bull than someone who spent thousands upon thousands of dollars in advertising with us each year.
    I had to remind him periodically that he might have the right to determine what goes in his ads, but he couldn’t influence my newsgathering. He snorted like a Hereford bull, too, when he stomped out of my office.
    “But he spends so much money with us!”
    “That’s the ad department. That’s not the news department!”
    “He did say something about a story that ran last year that he wasn’t happy about.”
    “One of his mechanics was caught selling meth. He was selling it from his apartment, not out of the dealership. We never identified him as one of Angus’s employees, but he took offense that the story ended up on the front page.”
    Earlene cringed. “Oh. That is unfortunate.”
    “Earlene, the last thing I’m going to do is to temper my news coverage to suit our advertisers. This guy was caught with a meth lab in his living room, for god sake! It’s not my fault he decided to sell to an undercover cop! We only reported it. Am I supposed to know the name of every Buchanan Motors employee?”
    “Well, that is true,” she said slowly. “Here’s a couple more names: Naomi Callum and Hedwig Ansgar.”
    “They are both presidents of the area’s two garden clubs,” I said. Retired teacher Naomi Callum was the leader of the upstart Plummer County Peonies, which had been founded in the 1950s.
    Hedwig Ansgar, another retired teacher, presided over the older, more sedate and prestigious Garden Club of Jubilant Falls, which had been founded during the town’s golden age in the 1890s. Hedwig was nearly as big and beefy as Angus Buchanan, but better dressed. I privately referred to her as The Dowager Empress.
    While anyone with an interest in getting dirt beneath their fingernails could join the Peonies, those who wished to join the Garden Club had to be nominated by a current member, vetted by the membership committee and approved by a two-thirds majority.