You Can't Get Blood Out of Shag Carpet by Juliette Harper

Author:Juliette Harper [Harper, Juliette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cozy, Crime, Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Suspense, Women Sleuths
ISBN: 9780986240799
Google: kazqsgEACAAJ
Publisher: Skye House Publishing
Published: 2015-05-18T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Melinda Sue Fairchild’s “git up” did flaunt the usual conventions of appropriate funeral attire. Granted, she was wearing black. At least the top half of her was wearing black. The strapless low-cut bodice of her dress was skin tight, boosted to its full potential by what was, no doubt, a “lift and separate” Playtex bra living up to its promise to make a woman “shapely.”

Every man in the sanctuary that morning offered up silent but reverent prayers, earnestly entreating the Almighty to please make Melinda Sue bend over just enough that they could be treated to the religious experience of her décolletage in all its glory.

Her waist was cinched into a black patent leather belt from which descended a gaudy harlequin check full skirt, resplendent in diamonds of pink, red, black, and green. She was using her impeccable pageant posture to balance on a set of black stiletto heels that looked more like weapons than footwear. And, of course, there was her trademark hair ribbon, scarlet satin today, taking the place of the tiaras she longed to win and could only glimpse from afar.

Yes, Melinda Sue had been Miss Bait and Ammo when she was 16, but there had been no tiara, only a camouflage sash emblazoned with her title and a rhinestone headband. It had been a bitter disappointment for Melinda Sue, but in those days, there were so many pageants ahead of her and she entered them all.

Little could she know that she, like her idol, former Miss Oklahoma 1958 Anita Bryant, would be denied her rightful crown. Anita was robbed of the Miss America title in 1959 by that trashy Mary Ann Mobley from Mississippi, an experience Melinda Sue herself relived on runways all over Texas and the South. It was, of course, jealousy on the part of the judges. As a good Christian, Melinda Sue knew this, and she tried to bear her cross fashionably and without bitterness.

Although Clara Wyler and Sugar Watson were not the only people looking at Melinda Sue askance, she was oblivious to any implied criticism. An audience was, after all, an audience, even with a casket in the room, and all concerned were presented with her carefully crafted smile, perfected by hours of practice in front of the mirror. “Be pleasant, but don’t look too eager,” her pageant coach, Dodie de Bellevue, taught her. “Let your inner light shine, Melinda Sue.” Miss de Bellevue made no allowance for the dimness of the bulb screwed into Melinda Sue’s socket.

No sooner had Melinda Sue settled into her pew than Sugar and Clara fixed their appraising gazes on the town’s token Yankee, Millard Philpott, who entered the church wearing a seersucker suit. To their certain knowledge he was the only man in the county, and perhaps in the state of Texas, who wore seersucker, and that alone was enough to raise suspicions about him.

“Would you just look at Millard,” Clara whispered to Sugar. “He looks like an ice cream man in that silly suit.

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