Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction: (New for 2015) For Lovers of Southern Authors and Southern Novels Read Online Free PDF Page B

Temple’s accidental death while choking on one of the Colonel’s chicken bones.
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER FOUR
    Violet
     
    Violet rubs her left shoulder that has ached all morning. The day before her daughter Tia broke her leg in 4th grade, this same shoulder predicted it. It happened before Mister Oscar—Miss Temple’s husband—died, too. Since she was a girl, Violet has known her arm is hooked into a higher level of consciousness. As a result, the minute it begins to ache, she automatically breaks into a sweat.
    A sense of urgency accompanies her drive to the Temple house as she wipes a thin layer of perspiration from her upper lip. She has taken this route through Savannah hundreds of times, yet something about this morning feels different. Nearing the house, a blast of pain radiates up her arm. She rubs it and sighs her anguish.
    “What are you trying to tell me?” she asks.
    Anyone who heard her talking to a body part would assume she was crazy. But I guess I’m only crazy if I hear it talk back .Violet smiles despite the pain, as the throbbing continues. Meanwhile, she catches every traffic light and is still five minutes away from the Temple mansion.
    When Violet pulls her car into the carriage house, the throbbing intensifies and her blouse is soaked straight through. Her deodorant works overtime as she turns off the car and gets out. Even though she grew up in Savannah and has never lived anywhere else, to go from air-conditioning to the sweltering Georgia heat is shocking at first, like stepping into a pre-heated oven.
    After she walks into the kitchen, she stands still and listens, purse still in hand. The house seems quieter than usual. Violet has the family sensitivity , as her grandmother calls it, a sense of invisible things, like the different entities in the Temple house. Now that the Temple Book of Secrets has been in the news, the ghostly presences have seemed especially strong. Violet can usually tell where the spirits are that live in the house, by the energy they give off. It’s like tuning into a distant radio station. Violet turns her head to intuit her next move while the entire house appears to be holding its breath.
    “What’s going on?” she asks any spirits listening. She’s never known them to answer back. But there’s a first time for everything, she tells herself.
    Having read once that so-called sensitives often come from tragic backgrounds, Violet wonders if her psychic ability has anything to do with her being an orphan. She has no memory of her mother, who died in an automobile accident when Violet was a baby, and she never met her father, who left town when he found out her mother was pregnant with Violet. For whatever reason, her grandmother never speaks of either of her parents. And even though her grandmother and her Aunt Queenie raised her, at times Violet feels all alone in the world.
    Now that she thinks about it, her Aunt Queenie seems worked up about that secret book, too. While Violet used to always retrieve the newspaper from the front porch, it is now Queenie who gets it before she even arrives.
    Mysteries are everywhere , she thinks. But this is nothing new.
    Out of habit, she checks the kitchen counter for the note Miss Temple always leaves. In the two decades Violet has worked there, her employer has critiqued every meal, leaving detailed feedback on Temple stationery for Violet every morning. In all that time, she’s never been told she did a good job. If something is prepared well it simply isn’t mentioned. To Violet’s credit, Miss Temple’s communications have become shorter over the years, but she doesn’t know what to think about there not being a note at all. She looks around the floor to see if it might have dropped. Sometimes if the Temple ghosts get rowdy in the middle of the night, things get moved. But nothing is there.
    After retrieving two aspirin from the cabinet, she fills a glass with water, takes the pain reliever and then glances at the