Read Online Murder in the Collective by Barbara Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

chest. Yeah, they’d been alright.
    “How about yours?” I asked, while skimming for form’s sake the menu. I already knew what I was going to have: a Bulldog, hold the onions. “My dad’s into oil and my mother’s into archaeology. She’s in Turkey now, I think, excavating.”
    I tried to conceal my surprise. I wouldn’t have figured Hadley for a wealthy background. As if she read my thoughts Hadley smiled her one-sided smile and said, “Fran’s biggest dream was that the old man could be persuaded to bankroll the lesbian revolution.”
    “Well, couldn’t he?”
    “I’m thirty-six, honey. I’ve been away from home a long time.”
    The waitress, a favorite of mine named Sally, came over. She wore harlequin glasses and a watch pin. “Long time, no see, sugarplum,” she told me, and then to Hadley, “I’ve known Penny and this little gal here since they were knee high to ladybugs.”
    “I think it’s grasshoppers, Sal.”
    “Never you mind those old ugly grasshopping things. Nice young ladybugs is what you and Penny are. Now, what are you and your friend having, Miss Pam?”
    We told her and watched her go back to the kitchen with a swing in her step, a firmly-built woman in her sixties with a wigfull of auburn sausage curls.
    “I’ve been wondering a lot about older women,” said Hadley, watching her. “My hair started going gray all of a sudden last fall. I don’t know what it was, maybe just the hair genes kicking over all at once, but it sure gave me some sense of what it’s all going to be like. Forty years of being called Ma’am and Mrs. Harper started last year.”
    “You look good in gray,” I said, then blushed. But Hadley came back easily, “Thank you, Ma’am.”
    “That’s Miss Pam to you.”
    “You don’t fool me,” she smiled. “You’ve got a little experience under your belt too.”
    I blushed again.
    I was grateful that Sally brought our coffee just then. At some point I would have to explain to Hadley that I was straight, not at all wavering, and that I didn’t feel attracted to her, but just wanted her for a friend, even though I’d never had a lesbian friend before and had no idea if you even could …but fortunately we had other things to talk about now.
    “If you had a list of suspects,” she said, “would they all be from B. Violet?”
    I nodded and tried to defend myself. “Margaret and Anna seemed to hate the idea so much…and if you’d seen Fran drinking and how worried Elena is, after finding the car keys—well you’ve seen Elena. Fran must have been there.”
    Hadley sighed. “And I have a disinclination to trust Ray and Jeremy, just because they said so little at the meeting—and because probably ninety-nine percent of the violence in the world is done by men.”
    Bristling, I said, “Ray would never destroy anything…and Jeremy—he’s just a little wimp, if you knew him.”
    “That’s the thing. I don’t. But he kind of gives me the creeps, the way he hems and haws all the time. It seems forced somehow. Is he really as young as he seems?”
    “He’s twenty-five and wishes he were ten years older like all his heroes. I think he had older brothers and sisters or something who used to lock him out of the garage where they smoked dope and played Jefferson Airplane in the sixties. He’s spent his life trying to get in that garage.”
    Hadley laughed. “There are some of us who’ve spent our lives trying to get out of it.”
    “But he’s harmless, really, and he does care about politics; he’s learning to, anyway. I’ve been noticing that he’s getting involved with June. I think it will be good for him.”
    “Tell me about her, tell me about all of you,” Hadley said, digging into the monstrous Chef’s Salad Sally had just brought.
    “June? She’s always been a little more Penny’s friend than mine. June likes danger, and so does Penny, in her rational way. They’ve done some amazing things—Whitewater rafting, kayaking, they go