Goose in the Pond Read Online Free PDF

returning her call. With everything that had just happened, I suspected it would be a long and detailed conversation. Back in the living room, I picked up the cordless phone and settled down on the brown tweedy sofa, but before I could dial, it rang.
    “Benni, help,” a panicked voice wailed. “She’s back.”
    “No one here by that name,” I said, and hung up.

3

    SECONDS LATER, THE phone shrilled again. I waited three rings before reluctantly picking it up, knowing without a doubt that trouble lurked at the end of this line.
    “Very amusing, young lady,” Dove said. “If you were still living within spittin’ distance of me, I’d be taking you out behind the barn with a hickory switch.”
    “Have to catch me first,” I said smugly.
    “Don’t think I can’t.”
    An arrow of panic shot through me. “She’s not here already?”
    “No, thank the Lord. We pick her up at the airport tomorrow. She says she’s done left W.W. for good.” She paused for emphasis. “Again.”
    “She” was Dove’s only sister and only sibling, Garnet Louann Wilcox. She and Dove, though they loved each other to pieces, got along about as well as two porcupines in a gunnysack. W.W. (pronounced in the way that only Southerners can—Dubya, Dubya) was, or rather is, Garnet’s husband, William Wiley Wilcox. They’d been married fifty-three years, all of which time, Uncle W.W. was the plumbing contractor of choice in the Sugartree, Arkansas, area, about fifty miles north of Little Rock. After fifty-five years, he’d finally retired to live out his dream, designing and building custom-made yard fountains. According to Dove, who, much to her dismay, was getting semiweekly updates, Aunt Garnet and Uncle W.W. were having difficulty getting used to being around each other all day. It sounded like the pressure had finally gotten to both of them and Aunt Garnet decided to take a powder. Except for her only child, Jake, in Pine Bluff, whose wife, Neba Jean, had absolutely forbid Garnet to ever cross the threshold of their mahogany-paneled three-story split-level house again, poor Aunt Garnet had nowhere else to flee. Her only other close relative was her granddaughter and Jake and Neba Jean’s only child, my cousin Rita. Last we all heard, Rita was traveling the rodeo circuit in an old Winnebago with her bull-riding husband, Myron “Skeeter” Gluck.
    “What are you going to do?” I asked.
    “You know, we’re so busy with this remodeling and what with the house all torn up, I was thinking—”
    “Not a chance, Dove,” I interrupted. “Gabe and I are still newlyweds. And I’ve got the storytelling festival this weekend and now there’s this murder that Gabe has to worry about . . . and since when are you all remodeling?”
    “I’ve been considering it,” she said defensively. “Now’s as good a time as any to start. What murder?”
    We temporarily shelved the subject of Aunt Garnet while I told Dove about Nora Cooper and my morning’s gruesome discovery.
    “Her mama made the best apple pan dowdy,” Dove said, tsking under her breath. “This would’ve tore her heart to pieces.”
    “I guess I should go visit Nick. We only see each other occasionally now, but we were good friends in college.”
    “Take some banana bread,” Dove advised. “Or a fruit pie.”
    “Okay, I’ll drop by the bakery.”
    Her pointed silence admonished me. Dove didn’t approve of anything bought in a bakery, especially if you were taking it as a token of sympathy. “Your generation,” she was always harping at me. “Y’all are too lazy to pick your own teeth.”
    I ignored the disapproving vibes floating over the phone lines and asked what Daddy and Uncle Arnie thought about Garnet’s visit.
    “When they heard about it they lit out of here like two fresh-branded calves. Haven’t seen ’em since. And now that we’re back on that subject—”
    “Gotta go,” I said. “I need to buy that pie. Call you later.” I hung up while she