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SOMEBODY'S DEAD IN SNELLVILLE
—A Southern Mystery
Fourth in the Sheila Travis series
Author: Patricia Sprinkle
2014 Reissue Edition
5.5"x8.5" Trade Paperback
Retail: $14.95US; 242pp
ISBN 978-1-62268-089-4 print
ISBN 978-1-62268-090-0 ebook
LCCN 2014957744

SOMEBODY'S DEAD IN SNELLVILLE
—A Southern Mystery
Fourth in the Sheila Travis series
Author: Patricia Sprinkle

Foreword

Gwinnett County, named for one Georgia signer of the Declaration of Independence, is merely a thin layer of red clay over Stone Mountain's granite roots. For two hundred years Gwinnett dozed, growing cotton, corn, pine trees, and a smattering of towns along the railroad track.
    Then in the 1980s Atlanta crept northeast. The nation followed at a gallop. Almost overnight, obscure Gwinnett became the fastest-growing large county in the nation.
    At a dizzying pace meandering gravel roads sprawled into five-lane highways. Pastures sprouted subdivisions. Fast-food chains competed for cornfields. Country families, beleaguered by developers, found that red clay farms had turned to gold.
    In one family, seeds of murder were planted.

Author's Note: These characters are real only in the sense that any fiction is real. The family is not based on any family I know—yet.

Chapter One
The First Week
Sunday—Mother's Day

"Dudley Tait, you haven't heard a word I've said!"
    Martha Sloan's voice crashed into Dudley's thoughts like a falling bough. She was right of course—he hadn't. Standing by their bedroom window, he had been contemplating the Georgia spring He felt a kinship with the hickory trees.
    In the bright sunlight, dogwoods fluttered new leaves and poplars towered in mature dress. One magnolia dowager stood majestic in her glossy year-round wardrobe. She reminded him of Martha Sloan—large, confident, and careless about the mess she strewed around her. Eye-level with the hickories, however, he could see tentative buds only beginning to dot their stark branches. Dudley, too, had been slow to bud. Now, at fifty-five, he had begun to fear he never would.
    "What on earth are you thinking about?" Seated at the mirror in her slip, Martha Sloan glared at his reflection as she contorted her lips to smooth them with red gloss.
    Dudley rubbed one hand across the top of his head. Each time he did that lately he felt the scalp getting nearer. With a sigh, he dropped his hand to adjust his tie over his large Adam's apple.
    "Sorry, Martha Sloan." He crossed the room and patted her still shapely shoulder. "I was daydreaming, I guess."
    "About what? Lately you're as moony as a coon dog in mating season. What's going on?" She rose from the dressing table and headed for her closet in a cloud of Chanel. "What on earth am I going to wear? It's too hot for my beige suit, and too early for my white dress. What else will match that damn red corsage Aunt Ruby is sure to bring to church?"
    Dudley had been married too long to think she expected an answer—or that he was reprieved. He padded across the floor in bare feet, wishing as he always did that Martha Sloan hadn't covered his mama's heart-pine floors with carpet as soon as Mama was safely in her grave. That wasn't the only change Martha Sloan had made as she modernized the old house he had grown up in, but it was the one Dudley regretted most. He had always loved the hard, cool feel of wood beneath his soles. He pulled on socks and slid his feet into black loafers while he waited for her to continue.
    Sure enough, as soon as she had pulled a pink silk dress over her head (careful not to muss her hair), Martha Sloan returned to the attack. "Tell me, Dudley, what you were thinking about! Oh, Lord, I've got to change lipstick. This is too orange for the dress." She again seated herself before the mirror, began to scrub her lips with a tissue.
    "Tell me," she commanded indistinctly.
    Cornered, he clung to his private thoughts by blurting what he never should have said. "Something happened Friday at the county commission, but I can't really talk about it yet."
    "Come on, Dudley, you can tell me. I'll be silent as the grave. Is it something good?" Teasing him, her large brown eyes glowed.
    For an instant she looked like the girl who had bewitched him into marriage thirty years before. These days, she wore costly frosted curls instead of a bouffant bubble. Her soft pink mouth had become a slick slash above her firmly controlled chin. Rosy nails had been sculpted to talons, and her body had grown thicker in the waist and hips. But her eyes were the same. They had charmed him years ago. This morning they persuaded him to disclose more than he intended.
    "It's Grandma Sims's farm. Developers want to buy it for a mall."
    Martha Sloan's mouth fell slack, lipstick forgotten. "Are they crazy? Who'd go way out there to shop?"
    He shrugged. "Most new construction in the county is east of Lawrenceville. By the time a mall can be built, that part of the county should be ready to support a mall as large as Gwinnett Place up in Duluth."
    Her eyes widened until her artificial lashes almost caught on her bangs. Jumping up, she shook him in playful disbelief. "How much will they pay? How much?"
    He shrugged. "I don't really know, honey. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand an acre—maybe."
    Martha Sloan calculated on her long red nails. "One hundred acres times a hundred thousand dollars . . ." Her jaw dropped in amazement. "Dudley! That's a million dollars!" She hugged herself, jigging in stockinged feet like a child.
    He smiled indulgently. Seldom these days did he give her this much pleasure in anything. "It's ten million, Martha Sloan."
    She stood stock-still, eyes wide, mouth wider. "Really?" she asked in a hushed voice. "Ten million dollars?"
    "It's your grandmother's, not ours," he reminded her. With the caution common to all attorneys, he was compelled to add, "If the deal goes through, of course."
    That moved her. She grabbed his arm, shook it fiercely. "What do you mean 'if? You make it go through—you hear me?"
    "I can't 'make it go through,' Martha Sloan. I can't even vote on the issue, since it's your family's farm. It will be weeks before they are ready to vote, anyway. This is just a preliminary proposal."
    She chewed her lower lip, eyes narrowed in thought. "You've got to get Grandma Sims's power of attorney, Dudley. She's not able to make a decision on anything this big, and heaven help us if Aunt Ruby and Uncle Cline get their fat hands on the deal."
    She returned to her mirror. He said nothing. The only sound in the room was a fly buzzing near the open window.
    He was shaken by that fleeting memory of Martha Sloan as she had once been—a vivacious, pretty girl waiting for the right man to shape her into the twin mysteries of "wife" and "mother." For a brief, humble moment he regretted not having been a better man, one who could have brought out the best in her. When, he wondered, did we get so caught up in getting that we forgot about giving? Her next remark shattered his reverie, made him wince.
    "You've got to get it, Dudley. Her power of attorney, I mean. Tomorrow, if you can." When he did not answer, she coaxed, "You got us Mama's."
    "That was different, honey. Your mother is . . . special. Grandma Sims is perfectly able to transact business. I'm not even the executor of her will. Bubba is."
    "Bubba!" Her voice was rich with disgust. "When is he ever sober enough to execute anything? I'd like to execute him!" With that pronouncement of sisterly love, she slid one more coating of pink across her mouth.
    Dudley's eye fell on the clock Glad to end the conversation, he hurried to pull a gray jacket from its hanger. "We're going to have to hurry if we're going to get to church before the first hymn's over. Cline said they're bringing Grandma Sims, since it's Mother's Day. Remember, now, honey—not a word of this to the family at dinner." He joined her at the mirror to run a brush over what remained of his hair.
    Thin, tall, and faded, he thought with a silent sigh as he considered his own reflection. Behind his round glasses, his eyes were a faded blue. His hair was a faded brown. Even his skin looked too white. "I'm glad we're going to Nassau in June." He needed the sun like a hummingbird needs nectar. His bones longed to feel warm again. His soul yearned for . . . He sighed aloud.
    "Me, too." She absently touched her hair, inspected the chic finished product that was her face. "Next year—who knows? Maybe we can afford the Orient! If we can figure out a way to get a chunk of our inheritance by then."
    "You don't have an inheritance yet," he reminded her.
    She shrugged. Reality never got in the way of Martha Sloan's plans.
    She picked up her purse from the dresser and looked through it. "Comb, Kleenex, wallet, diet pills to keep me from eating too much and Valium for when my headache starts. That ought to get me through church and dinner at Aunt Ruby's. Oh, Dudley!" She jumped up and gave him the biggest hug he'd had in years. "Honey, you can do it. I just know you can!"
    Downstairs he collected his oboe, followed her to the carport, and helped her into the passenger seat of her yellow Cadillac. As he circled to the driver's seat, he noticed her fading bumper sticker: EVERYBODY IS SOMEBODY IN SNELLVILLE.
    Smellville, Snailville—Martha Sloan had not grown up, as Dudley did, with the jokes. He could still remember when Snellville was a crossroads, a few stores, and large tracts of vacant land. Some days he wondered whether it was progress or something else entirely that had dotted the countryside with subdivisions and lined Highway 78 with businesses. He regretted the loss of space to tramp through fields and woods for hours and seldom meet a soul. Martha Sloan, on the other hand, minded most that other Gwinnett towns were centered on charming stores and oak-lined squares, while Snellville did little more than straggle along the Atlanta-Athens highway in an endless chain of national franchises. She often fumed at the post office for zoning the old Tait homestead into Snellville instead of Lawrenceville. But since she was stuck in Snellville, Martha Sloan defended its image with zeal.
    One word stuck in Dudley's mind as he started the engine: Somebody. "Somebody loves me, I wonder who?" "It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it." He was uncertain what "it" was that Martha Sloan thought he could do, but whatever it was, he was the somebody who would probably have to do it.

copyright ©2014 Patricia Houck Sprinkle

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