Do Unto Others

Something niggled at my mind, something in all this that didn’t fit. I thought of Matt Blalock and simmering hatred. I thought of Ruth Wills, an accusation of poisoning that didn’t stand up. I thought of Hally Schneider, who had been right about a secret connection between Beta and Eula Mae, yet still seemed awfully nervous for an innocent bystander. I thought of Bob Don, who seemed to want to help me and fought violently with Beta less than a week before her death. I thought of the Hufnagels, and how their church wasn’t good enough for Beta’s ambitions. And I thought of my mother, her presence on Beta’s list still unexplained. Billy Ray thought he had his woman now, but I wasn’t convinced. I went over to the local-authors shelf. Eula Mae was currently the only Mirabeau resident with fulfilled literary aspirations, and her collected works sat in a row. I plucked her first novel from the shelf; the copyright was in Eula Mae’s name. I’d thought for a moment that if it was copyrighted under the Jocelyn Lushe pseudonym that Eula Mae would have had an easy out; no one could have necessarily accused her of lying. But it wasn’t so. She’d claimed each book as her own. I replaced The Rose of San Jacinto on the shelf and went back to Candace. “There’s still $25,000 that was in Beta’s savings account that didn’t come from Eula Mae,” I told Candace. “So where the hell did that come from? She embezzle from the Girl Scout cookie fund?” The bells above the front door jangled, and from my office I saw Old Man Renfro and Gaston Leach come into view. I couldn’t have conjured up a more unlikely pair. Old Man Renfro always wore a threadbare suit; he must’ve had a whole armoire of them. Snowy white hair topped his dark, wise face. He was retired from the post office and when he had tired of reading people’s addresses, he’d ended up spending his days at the library. It would not be unreasonable to guess he’d read everything in the library at least once. Even the children’s section, reading them to his several grandchildren.