Read Online The Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Susan McBride - Free Book Online Page A

liked to paint, my preference was to put color on canvas, not skin. I’d seen enough women who looked like clowns to realize that less was often more, unless you had your eye on a gig under the tent at Barnum & Bailey.
    Actually, I did know a girl who’d gone to Clown College in Sarasota. Last I’d heard, she was wearing a barrel on the rodeo circuit in Lubbock.
    So maybe it did pay to overdo the Mary Kay, if you had that kind of aspiration.
    My only goal was to get myself to Addison, do what I had to do—for both Marilee and my mother—and then scram at the earliest opportunity.
    I teetered out the door of the condo in my high heels, greeting an elderly neighbor who was walking his dog in the still-smothering heat.
    “Hello, Mr. Tompkins.”
    The poor man did a double take. “Andy, that you?”
    “In the flesh.”
    “Flesh is right. Woo-doggy.” He nodded and swiped his brow with a kerchief, though I wasn’t sure if I’d inspired the beads of sweat or if the thermometer was strictly to blame. His pot-bellied beagle seemed more interested in the bushes, sniffing like mad and ignoring me entirely before lifting his leg.
    Oh, well. Can’t win ’em all.
    “You look real spiffy,” he said in his grizzled twang.
    “Thank you, kindly.” I lifted my purse in acknowledgment as I scurried down the sidewalk toward my car. I unlocked the door and jerked it open, metal hinges squealing. I tossed my purse across to the passenger seat and pondered for a moment how I was going to climb in gracefully.
    “Woo-doggy.” Charlie howled again more loudly.
    I tried not to cringe, glad at least that the rest of my neighbors were tucked inside with their conditioned air. Though I caught a glimpse of Penny George in pink sponge rollers peering between her drapes from an upstairs window, the ratfink.
    “You have a good evening, Charlie,” I called out and scrambled into my simmering Jeep, settling myself behind the wheel without ripping a seam or having my dress ride so high that I flashed the old guy. A major feat considering my general lack of coordination, and I felt immensely pleased.
    I glanced out the windshield as I started the car and saw the beagle wrapping the leash around Charlie’s ankles. As I pulled out of the lot, I caught him in my rearview, still staring.
    All that because I’d put on a skirt and lipstick?
    I realized my neighbor was used to seeing me dressed-down, not dolled-up, so I wasn’t surprised that he had trouble believing I was the same person. I liked to tell myself it really didn’t make much difference what I looked like, but maybe I was a fool for assuming other people felt the same.
    Beauty didn’t go much beyond skin-deep in the heart of Texas. It was practically a state law that women look good enough to eat. As mouth-watering as chicken-fried steak smothered in cream gravy. Statuesque, big-haired blondes were as much a part of the landscape as longhorns and bluebonnets. Not surprisingly, pageants—and, consequently, plastic surgery—were a huge industry. If Miss Texas didn’t take the Miss USA crown every year, the whole state was affronted. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m fairly certain that butt and boob tape—particularly important in the bathing suit competition—were homegrown inventions.
    A fair number of the population—the prettiest of the pretty—were groomed to be beauty queens from infancy. Mothers didn’t sing lullabies to lure these wee girls to sleep, they sang, “There she is, Miss America.”
    I remember a classmate by the name of Clancy Lee Carlyle who’d won the title of “Little Miss Lone Star” by the time she was seven. When our second-grade teacher had asked us what we wanted for Christmas, she’d blurted out, “World peace and nuclear disarmament!”
    Okay, she’d actually said, “Whirled peas and new-cooler dismemberment.” But Mrs. Overby had explained what she’d meant, making all the rest of us feel like dolts for wanting simple material