Mint Juleps, Mayhem, and Murder Read online

  “Well, he is training for a triathlon,” Mitch said mildly.

  Felicity rolled her eyes. “I get that at work all day. Workouts and fitness are the last things I want to talk about at home.”

  A squeaky voice called out, “Felicity! Felicity! Watch me!” Livvy, in her pink ruffled swimsuit, waved frantically at us from the wading pool.

  I said, “Sorry she’s been pestering you so much.” Five-year-old Livvy had taken an instant liking to Felicity. Felicity had hardly stepped through our front door before Livvy was dragging her by the hand down the hall to show off her stuffed animals. She’d practically been Felicity’s shadow all day. I was glad Livvy’s shyness had vanished, but I didn’t want her driving Felicity crazy, either.

  Mitch and his mom continued up the porch steps and into the house while Felicity and I stopped by a group of birch trees to watch Livvy. She dog-paddled around the tiny pool, then checked our reaction. “Great job,” Felicity shouted as she leaned against the tree trunk. One of Livvy’s cousins splashed into the pool and drew her attention away from us. Felicity said, “She’s not pestering me. Actually, it’s given me an excuse to get away from Jenny.”

  I was thankful that only one of Dan’s freshly divorced parents had been able to come to the reunion. His dad was somewhere in Indiana, running a weekend seminar for corporate managers. “If Jenny says the word green one more time, I’m going to scream,” Felicity continued. “Her whole save-the-earth thing is driving me crazy. I can’t believe she gave up a great job to start a ‘lifestyle cleansing’ business.”

  Jenny’s announcement that she’d quit her job as a CPA and started a business that helped companies and individuals become more ecologically friendly had caused a stir this morning. She’d even bypassed wearing the family reunion T-shirt because it wasn’t made with pesticide-free cotton and nontoxic dye. Felicity said, “I’ve always known she was weird. I mean, she actually likes jigsaw puzzles. That told me something right there. Anyway, she was raking in the dough. Why would she quit a job like that? This whole divorce thing has brought out—”

  The crack of a rifle shot split the air again. Felicity and I both flinched. She said, “How can you stand that?”

  That rifle shot had been even closer than the earlier one and it seemed to come from a different direction. The shots were usually far away, but that sound seemed to come from the direction of the neighborhood, not the woods. My heart jumped into high gear. “They’re not usually that close,” I said nervously, but the shot hadn’t seemed to spook anyone else. There were a few curious glances, but most people carried on with their conversations.

  Bill, Mitch’s dad, stood up and shouted for attention. He was the complete antithesis of Mitch’s mom. His family reunion T-shirt was already rumpled and the hem hung crookedly over his faded cutoff denim shorts that trailed a few white strings. Beat-up boat shoes completed the look. His reflective sunglasses flashed in the sun as he rubbed his hands together in exaggerated anticipation and announced, “I think it’s time for the games to begin.” I went to set up the croquet game with Mitch, who had emerged from the house.

  Uncle Kenny jogged up, holding the croquet mallets like a bouquet. “Are you in the game, Ellie? Winner gets another piece of peach pie.”

  “Let us get it set up, first,” I said as I pushed a wicket in the ground.

  “Here,” Uncle Kenny took a few wickets from me, “I’ll help. You’ll be on my volleyball team later, right? Gwen’s still giving me a hard time about losing last year.”

  “Sure, Uncle Kenny. I’m not exactly a stellar player,” I warned. Winning was what it was all about for Uncle Kenny.

  “You can serve it over the net. We lost last year because of Vera’s net balls, but that won’t happen again. You just get it over the net and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  I positioned the last wicket and surveyed the setup. “I hope I don’t crumble under the pressure. Now for the badminton net.”

  Tradition held that games, croquet, badminton, horseshoes, and volleyball, were the order of business until sundown. At least I didn’t have to worry about setting an agenda. The reunion pretty much ran itself. Everyone knew the schedule and I knew better than to try and change things. In fact, changing anything was the last thing I was interested in. Right now I was still so thrown by Abby’s news that I could barely get the net taut. Felicity helped me while she kept an eye on the gate, watching for Dan’s return, which is probably why she was the one who said, “I think that lady’s looking for you, Ellie.”

  I turned and saw my neighbor Dorthea hurrying in my direction, her bad hip frustrating her progress. I’d never seen her move so quickly and rushed to meet her. “Dorthea, what’s wrong? Here, sit down.” Under her floppy walking hat, her lined face was flushed to the color of her new cherry red convertible, and her gray hair was plastered to her forehead. She walked every day at a methodical pace and I’d never seen her this out of breath.

  She gripped my arm and pulled me toward the gate. “No time. You’ve got to come now. You and Mitch. Someone from your family reunion has been shot. I don’t know who, but he’s wearing the shirt you’re all wearing, so I came to get you. I saw it all as I came up that steep hill in the new area. He’d jogged past me just a few minutes before. I still can’t believe it. He was at the top. I heard the shot, he shuddered, then collapsed.”

  Chapter Two

  I heard sirens in the distance and looked at Dorthea with raised eyebrows.

  “Already called nine-nine-one,” she wheezed. “There was a contractor at one of the houses. He had a phone…”

  Mitch ran across the lawn. “The new area, you said?”

  She nodded and I was relieved to see that she didn’t look quite as flushed. “At the top of the rise on the new road, near that two-story house with the veranda.”

  Mitch nodded. “I’ll go check,” he said and sprinted off. The sirens grew louder, then cut off abruptly.

  It had to be Dan. My gaze flew to Felicity. She’d frozen in place, a badminton racket held at an odd angle, her eyebrows squished together. “Shot?” she said impatiently, then rolled her eyes. “He probably pulled a muscle. Serves him right.” She dropped the racket and followed Mitch at a jog.

  I wanted to follow her, but glanced back at the pool where Livvy was still splashing. Aunt Nanette waved me toward the gate. “You go on, Ellie. I’ll watch the kids.” She pulled a chair into the shade by the pool and the Afghan hound flopped down beside her. Aunt Claudine disengaged Dorthea from my arm and said, “Let’s get you inside so you can cool off, dear.”

  Bill and Aunt Gwen were striding purposefully across the grass. He had his keys in his hand. “Ellie, show us where they are. Is it far? We can take my car. I’m parked on the street. Gwen’s coming with us.”

  I swallowed, remembering Mitch had mentioned that Gwen had been a nurse before she and Uncle Kenny started their own business. “Good idea,” I said as we hurried to the front yard.

  The front door burst open and Aunt Jenny hurried down the steps. “Where’s Dan? He’s hurt?”

  “Come with us,” Bill shouted as he unlocked his Saab. Aunt Gwen and Aunt Jenny clambered into the backseat and I hopped in the front. I barely got the door closed before he pulled away from the curb and followed the street around to the pond. “Turn at the end of the street,” I said as he tapped the brakes at the stop sign and accelerated up the road that had once been a gravel path. I glanced back and saw several cars were following us.

  We passed a smattering of houses in various stages of construction. “Take the next left.” I’d walked through this part of the neighborhood so many times that I knew each house, each vacant lot that flew by the windows now as Bill accelerated up the road’s steep incline. I could see Felicity running up the slope and, beyond her at the top of the rise, a cluster of people. A fire truck and an ambulance angled beside each other at the curb.

  We arrived moments after Felicity reached the small crowd. “You’ll have to back up
, ma’am,” a firefighter instructed me as the paramedics raised a gurney and wheeled it to the ambulance. I couldn’t see much because of the group around the gurney, but I caught a glimpse of a tall, dark-headed man on the gurney. The phalanx of cars pulled in behind us and various aunts, uncles, and cousins emerged.

  Felicity stood frozen, a perplexed look on her face. She wasn’t even winded from her sprint. “He’s really hurt?” she whispered.

  Aunt Gwen walked briskly over to the ambulance and spoke to a paramedic. I put my arm around Felicity’s shoulders, while I looked for Mitch. I spotted him and saw his face was flushed from the run, but under that brush of color, his skin was pasty, like Livvy’s complexion when she had the flu. Our gaze connected and I got that weightless feeling in my stomach like I’d just topped the peak in a roller coaster and was careening toward the ground. Aunt Gwen came back. “Come on, honey, we’re going in the ambulance.” She disengaged Felicity from me and steered her toward the ambulance where Aunt Jenny already waited. Everyone scrambled into their cars. The ambulance and fire truck pulled away and, like a receding tide, the rest of the cars followed them down the street, which left me and Mitch standing alone in the street.

  “How bad is it?” I asked Mitch.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t look good. There wasn’t time to ask the paramedics anything.” Mitch rubbed his hand over his mouth.

  It had to be bad, if Mitch was so shaken. Mitch was my rock, hardly anything fazed him, but he looked frightened. I caught his free hand and held on tight. A couple of people who lived farther up the street in the freshly completed houses on this block told us to give them a call if we needed anything. I recognized them from my nightly walks. North Dawkins, Georgia, was the kind of place where people waved and said, “Evening,” when you passed them. It was one of the things I loved about the South. The people were friendly and I could tell they were sincerely concerned for us.

  I looked around the edge of the street where the crowd had been when we first arrived. “Well, maybe it’s not as bad as you think. I don’t see any blood at all.”

  Mitch took his hand away from his mouth and said, “He wasn’t shot. I don’t know what happened, but he wasn’t bleeding.”

  “What? Then why did Dorthea say that?”

  A man stepped into the street beside us and said, “Because that’s what we thought happened.” He was middle aged with a grizzled beard and wore a sweat-stained T-shirt, dirty jeans, and heavy work boots. He adjusted his baseball cap, embroidered with the words “Magnolia Homes,” and held out his hand. “Larry Masters. I’m a contractor.” He shook hands with both of us, then gestured to the unfinished houses behind us. “These two are mine. I was in that one,” he said, pointing to the one farther down the street.

  The house was almost complete, but didn’t have any landscaping or grass. “I was in the garage, checking on a delivery—we’ve had some trouble with people stealing—copper wiring, appliances, stuff like that—when I noticed the guy jogging by. I waved and he raised his hand. He took about ten more steps—he was even with this house here,” Larry said, pointing to the house behind us, “when I heard a shot and the guy just collapsed. It was instantaneous. Both of us, that older lady and I, we both thought he’d been shot. She was still a ways off.” He waved down the road. “I called out and told her I had a phone and I’d call nine-one-one. She didn’t come up the hill, just yelled she’d get the family, then turned around and went back the way she’d come.

  “I grabbed a couple of drop cloths out of my truck—for the bleeding, you know—while I called nine-one-one. It was all I had, but when I got to him, no blood. Not a scratch. He was out cold.”

  “Maybe it’s heat exhaustion,” I said, feeling relieved. “The shot you heard must have been hunters.”

  “I thought so, too, until I saw this.” He turned and led the way through the dirt yard and past a pallet of bricks to the house. He climbed the porch steps and said, “Mind your step. No railing yet.” He walked onto the wide porch and pointed to a hole in the siding. “We put this siding up yesterday. This bullet wasn’t there.”

  Tips for Busy, Budget-Minded Moms

  Morning Rush Hour

  Getting everyone ready and out the door in the morning can be a hectic time. Take five to ten minutes the night before to prep for the next day:

  Choose clothing. Lay out everything that will be needed down to shoes and socks, even jewelry and accessories. Kids, especially toddlers, love to do things themselves and if their outfits are ready to go, they can dress themselves.

  Pack lunches. Cut time in the kitchen in half by putting dry and nonrefrigerated items like juice boxes, chips or crackers, fruit, cookies, and prepackaged pudding in lunch boxes the night before. In the morning, simply make a sandwich and add any refrigerated items like yogurt or cheese sticks.

  Prep for weather. Eliminate hectic searches for rain gear or cold weather gear. Store umbrellas, raincoats, mittens, and hats in a set of plastic storage drawers or plastic bins in your coat closet so you can grab what you need as you leave.

  Don’t lose your keys. Place a basket or row of hooks beside the door. If you always drop your keys off in the same place when you walk in, you won’t be searching countertops and coat pockets when it’s time to head out the door the next morning.

  Keep a chart. If each day of the week brings a different set of activities, make a chart with days of the week across the top and each family member’s name down the side. List which days of the week they need to remember gym clothes, musical instruments, and school library books. Post the chart on the refrigerator or on the door to your garage. A quick check of the chart will let you know if everyone has everything they need. As your children grow, you can shift responsibility to them. Grade school kids can check the chart themselves and be responsible for remembering what they need.

  Chapter Three

  I looked back at the street. Despite the low, black plastic fencing enclosing the yard to prevent runoff, some dirt had escaped and covered the street. I could still see the footprints in it where everyone had gathered around the paramedics as they treated Dan. It was directly in front of us. “But this means the shot came from inside the neighborhood, not the woods,” I said, trying to take it in. “That’s why the last shot was so loud. It was close, much closer than normal.”

  Mitch had been kneeling down, examining the bullet lodged in the siding. He nodded as he stood up. All three of us turned and scanned the neighborhood. Larry said, “He’s one lucky guy. Passing out probably saved his life.” He looked at the opening in the line of trees across the street.

  “There’s a lot of places a rifle could have been fired from.” The lots directly across from this house were empty. The land sloped down from what would eventually become the backyards to the valley where the majority of Magnolia Estates was located. The neighborhood was a mix of finished houses, cleared lots, houses under construction, and thick stands of forest on lots that hadn’t yet been cleared. From our vantage point, I could pick out the pond and the new road that cut through the swath of woods behind our house in the base of the small valley. Originally, that section behind our house was slated for development, but after the discovery of an abandoned graveyard, a small family cemetery, development had shifted to the area where we stood farther up the hill.

  “It could have come from anywhere,” I said, surveying the patchwork of brown and green land spread below us.

  “Probably kids messing around,” Larry surmised.

  Mitch said, “Maybe,” then turned to Larry. “You’ll leave the bullet hole alone? I think we should call the police. Just in case.”

  My thoughts skipped back to Dan and a fresh wave of worry descended. “We should get to the hospital,” I said.

  “You folks go on.” Larry pulled out his cell phone. “Give me your number. I’ll call the sheriff. My nephew’s a deputy. I’ll get in touch with him and give him your number, if he needs it. I’ll be here all day anyway.”

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nbsp; “I’m sure he’ll be okay,” I said as the hospital’s glass doors swished open. I wasn’t sure of anything, but Mitch looked so worried. We’d walked home, checked on the kids, then driven to the hospital.

  “I know,” Mitch said, but there was no conviction in his voice. He scanned the signs. “WAITING ROOM B. This way.”

  I shivered as the chilled air enveloped us. My sweaty T-shirt stuck to me like a second skin. I tried to ignore the stridently clean smell. Hospitals were one of my least favorite places. “He’s young and he’s in great shape,” I said, trying to distract myself as well as Mitch. He’d been silent on the drive over. I knew he was so worried about Dan that he wasn’t paying attention to anything else.

  “Right.” He paced down the hall quickly, his gaze on the floor.

  I pulled him to a stop. “Mitch, you’re always the one saying not to borrow trouble. Don’t assume the worst.”

  He focused on me and I felt like I had his attention for the first time since Dorthea burst into our backyard. The corners of his lips turned up slightly. “So you’re saying I need a dose of my own advice? Don’t worry?”

  “Yes,” I threaded my arm around his. “At least until we know what’s going on.”

  As we walked down the hall, he said, “All right, but I want you to remember this moment the next time you’re about to accuse me of being too laid-back. I can worry with the best of them. That would be you, in case you’re wondering.”

  “Yes, sadly, that’s probably the truth,” I said, but I was smiling because Mitch looked slightly better. The deep line between his eyes was gone and he’d lost that preoccupied air.