The Good Girl's Guide to Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

driveways.
    It was no wonder HP had been nicknamed “the Bubble.” It sat apart from the real world, from the images of crime and poverty and war on the six o’clock news. Everything was lush and beautiful—property and people—even in the hellish Texas heat. I had yet to see a flower wilt or a Park Cities woman sweat. Maybe part of the reason I’d never truly felt like I’d belonged. I wasn’t near perfect enough, too quirky, too prone to human error.
    I was the deb-to-be who’d worn Army fatigues and pink high-topped sneakers to afternoon tea at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. I was the quietly rebellious child who had preferred to paint rather than attend tennis lessons at the club, who’d left the state to attend art school in Chicago instead of going through rush at a proper Texas college, never to end up with my mother’s treasured Pi Phi arrow pin.
    “I’ll just have to put it away and save it for my granddaughter,” she’d insisted, which didn’t exactly ease my conscience.
    I squirmed in my seat the closer I got to the house on Beverly, and I realized that driving back to Mother’s sometimes felt less like a coming home and more like a return to Cissy’s turf.
    It’s not that I wasn’t welcome—because I was, always—but rather I was a little like Cinderella in reverse. If I didn’t escape back to North Dallas and my cozy condo before midnight, Mother might wield her magic wand and turn my Jeep into a Beamer, my flip-flops into spiky Manolo Blahniks, and my Operation Kindness No Kill Shelter T-shirt into a Carolyne Roehm gown.
    I shuddered at the thought of it.
    There were moments when I couldn’t help but wonder if the hospital hadn’t made a mix-up when I was born, and if a true Highland Park princess hadn’t been raised in a modest home in Grand Prairie, all the while wondering why she dreamed of Gorham silver patterns and cocktail dresses with shoes dyed to match, while I lived in a 1920s-era mansion, dreaming of how to get away from exactly that.
    There’d been no switch, of course, and I’d never really believed it.
    Despite our bipolar existence, I did love my mother, and she loved me. I’d never doubted that for a minute.
    I actually didn’t mind going home once in a while. I likened it to staying in touch with my roots, so I would never forget the girl-trying-to-find-herself I’d once been and the independent woman I’d become. There was something about returning to the old house on Beverly that reminded me how lucky I was, despite the pains of growing up in the shadow of Cissy Kendricks.
    The place had been my refuge back then. Strangely enough, I knew it had been Mother’s as well and still was. A respite from her endless calendar of bridge clubs, Junior League, church, and charities. She and my father had bought the property soon after they’d married, when Cissy was fresh out of SMU with her “MRS” degree and Daddy with his MBA, someday to take over my Paw Paw’s drug company.
    I was raised there, had celebrated eighteen birthdays inside those French-papered walls before I’d moved out after prep school and headed to the Windy City. Four years away from Dallas—with only holiday visits home—had given me much more than I could ever put into words. I’d found a sense of who I was, the kind of person I was meant to be. I’d learned to be comfortable in my own skin without feeling the pressure to follow in my mother’s—or father’s—footsteps.
    When I’d finally returned to Texas for reasons that only partially concerned Cissy, I had lost much of my Southern twang but gained my own identity. No one in Chicago had cared that I was a Blevins Kendricks. No one had known about my trust fund. “Liberating” is the only word to describe it.
    I never wanted to lose that, no matter what.
    Despite the time I’d spent away from Mother’s—both living in Chicago and in North Dallas—nothing much had changed. I’d thought at one point she might sell her place, but