LITMIR.BIZ

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of Fred Willis’s favorite people. Particularly because Johnny got such satisfaction in setting free the poor bumbling criminals Fred and his boss, Sheriff Brady, managed to round up in this relatively crime-free area.

      Give him a real crime or criminal, and he might give a damn about doing his job. But, hell, here in Joyful? The jail cell doors might just as well stand open for all the effort Johnny took to keep their occasional occupants inside them. Course, that was probably more effort than Sheriff Brady made to ensure the innocent folks who had the misfortune of being from the wrong side of town were kept out.

      In Joyful, the justice system was equally balanced. If you were rich and arrogant and committed a crime, the police took care of you. If you were poor and trashy…Johnny Walker did.

      Still holding the twenty, Johnny walked into Lester’s grimy office and left it on the counter near the register. He gingerly picked up a half-squashed plastic water bottle and set it on top of the bill, so it wouldn’t blow away in the warm summer breeze already wafting through the open door.

      Looking around, he grimaced in distaste. Hopefully no one else would come to the station and enter the office looking for Lester. The magazine photos plastered across the back of the door would probably make Virginia Davenport, president of the Daughters of the Confederacy, drop dead of sheer outrage.

      And with his luck, the sheriff would call it murder and want Johnny to prosecute.

      “Hooties over Joyful,” he mused aloud as he again glanced at the billboard and got into his car. “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”

      As he drove out of town, Johnny was struck by the strong feeling that something interesting was about to happen.

      He couldn’t wait to find out what it was.

      CHAPTER ONE

      “EMMA JEAN FRASIER’S coming back to Joyful.”

      Cora Dillon wondered if the years of sleeping beside her husband Bob, who sawed logs louder than any lumberjack, had finally taken their toll. Her hearing, without doubt, had just failed her. She stared at fancy-pants Jimbo Boyd, whose round face was filled with self-importance. She didn’t know why, considering what a rotter he’d been as a boy. And leopards didn’t change their spots. Not in Joyful, Georgia, anyway.

      “Emmajean Frasier,” Cora said, drawing out the name.

      Jimbo nodded, then reached into his desk. He pulled out a bunch of keys stuck on a ring shaped like the hood ornament on the namby-pamby car he was so proud of. “I need you to get the house aired and cleaned today. And I want it done right.”

      Cora straightened and narrowed her eyes. Imagine, snot-nosed, dirty-pants Jimbo Boyd telling her how to clean a house! Hadn’t she worked as a cleaning woman for him and half the town for the past ten years? Something was definitely wrong with him. Maybe the glue he used on his shoeshine-black toupee, which looked about as real as the one worn by that Captain Kirk on the TV, had seeped through his skin and affected his brain.

      “Emmajean Frasier’s coming back to Joyful. Now there’s a trick I’d like to see,” Cora replied with stoic calm, “considering she’s been dead more’n a year.”

      “Dead?” Jimbo began to sputter. “No, no, Cora. I don’t mean Emmajean…I mean Emma Jean…the granddaughter.”

      “Granddaughter?”

      Jimbo shook his head and huffed. “Yes. Her mama’s folks have money and raised the girl overseas. She spent a year here, though, her last year of high school. ’Bout ten years ago.”

      Cora thought on it. “Possible, if it was exactly ten years ago. That’s the year my youngest girl lost her husband and me’n Bob went out to be with her. Always told her the rotten sum-a-gun she married was a brainless fool.”

      Jimbo pasted a look of false sympathy on his face, managing to look more concerned than annoyed, though Cora knew better. “I hadn’t realized your girl had been widowed.”

      Cora snorted. “Widowed? He didn’t die. I just toldja he got lost. Got drunk in the woods and wandered around for days rantin’ about giant beavers. Ended up in the nuthouse in Terre Haute. We stayed a while to take care of Cora Jr. and the kids.”

      Jimbo made a rude sound and Cora’s fingers itched to give his ears a good boxing. She didn’t, though. Jimbo Boyd did own the only real estate office in Joyful, and sent a lot of work her way. Not to mention he was the blasted mayor.

      “She’ll be here late today, so I need this done now.”

      She scowled. “I didn’t see a granddaughter at the funeral.”

      “She wasn’t there. She was sick or busy or something.”

      That made Cora pause. Too busy to come to her grandma’s funeral? Disgraceful. She harrumphed as she took the keys from Jimbo. Then she paused, remembering a wicked old scandal. “Wait, the Frasier girl…is she the one…”

      Jimbo nodded, his own eyes glowing with speculation.

      Cora smirked, no longer surprised Emmajean’s grandchild hadn’t had the nerve to show up in Joyful again. Not given the way she’d left it. “I suppose I can have the house cleaned to Miss High-and-Mighty’s satisfaction.”

      

      THOUGH IT GALLED HER, Cora spent the morning getting Emmajean Frasier’s two-story Victorian-style house sparkling. She was determined no spoiled long-lost grandchild would come to Joyful and turn up her nose at the life her grandma had lived.

      Cora talked to herself while she worked. She talked to Emmajean, too, though they hadn’t been very friendly in life, what with Emmajean holding the title of “Champion Pie Maker” five years running, and Cora feeling more entitled to it.

      Though Cora didn’t really believe in haunts, she figured she’d best be sure Emmajean didn’t take offense to Cora being in her house. Particularly when she started looking through her recipe box.

      “Drat,” she muttered, realizing the other woman must have hidden her best recipes, or memorized then burned them.

      Cora had tried that once, when she was having chest pains and thought she was dying. When the doctor’d said it was just gas, and she realized she’d forgotten to memorize her red slaw recipe before she’d burned it, Cora had fumed. She’d tried for days to re-create it until Bob swore the next time she put a helping of red slaw in front of him, she’d be wearing it atop her head.

      Wanting to take one more peek around for Emmajean’s recipes, Cora opened a drawer in the old-style rolltop desk in Emmajean’s bedroom. Funny, everything in there was all jumbled up, not neat like the rest of the house. Like someone had looked through it.

      Cora shrugged off the thought and began to dig through the drawer, which was full of memories. Photos. Letters. Pictures of a little girl, probably the scandalous brat who hadn’t bothered coming to her grandma’s funeral. There were postcards, newspaper clippings and flyers with Emma Jean Frasier’s name on them. And, near the very bottom, a glossy color brochure.

      Cora Dillon sucked in a shocked breath and stared at the brochure in her hand. “Dirty pictures,” she muttered.

      Emmajean Frasier’s granddaughter had peddled nasty pictures of naked people, and statues of even more naked people, at some New York gallery that pretended the pornography was art.

      “Well, wait until the town of Joyful learns Emmajean Frasier’s granddaughter went off to sell dirty pictures.” Considering the scandal, the details of which she’d finally remembered, they’d likely not be too surprised.

      She wasted no time in spreading the word, and the game of “whisper down the lane” was well underway by lunchtime.

      By 1:00 p.m., the women at Sylvie Stottlemyer’s bridge club were tittering over it. They gleefully repeated the scandal of May 1995 involving Emmajean Frasier’s granddaughter as they trumped and made their rubbers.

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