by F. E. Arliss
Murder in a Tiny Town:
A Lady Zhara Six Mystery
F.E. Arliss
WARNING:
This book deals with the subjects of sexual abuse, bigotry, racism, classism, incest, and many other topics that might be upsetting.
Though not discussed in any explicit way, these topics are discussed for their psychological impacts. If that offends you or may trigger you, please read no further.
Disclaimer: This book is a work of fiction and events and characters are entirely figments of my imagination.
Table of Contents
1.Death of a Do-Gooder
2.Asshole’s Amen
3. Metamorphosis
4.Guilt, Pity and Despair
5.Floating - Thinking about NOT Fond Memories
6.Shake It Off
7.BFE Nowhere
8.Family Meeting Most Foul
9.The Hell of the Familial Forge
10.Idiots All Around
11.Assisted Living Crime Watch
12.Lulu Mae
13.Brittany Barlow
14.Brenda Roberts
15.Betty Jean Franklin
16.Exhausting Mindsets
17.The Point
18.Reception for the Dead...and the Murderer
Chapter One
Death of a Do-Gooder
Lady Zhara Hope Six wasn’t morally superior to your average Joe. No one was really morally superior it turned out. Everyone was self-serving. Some people just had less reprehensible agendas than others.
Lady Zhara Six wasn’t even an actual lady, at least not in the way people are trained to think about the titled gentry. Zhara wasn’t even her real name. Well, come to think of it, none of her current appellation was her real name. She’d been born Gertrude Sue Dubbins, so frankly anything would have been an improvement on that. Lady Zhara Hope Six was entirely her own made-up folly of a name. She liked it. So she became it. Changing one’s legal name was surprisingly easy.
Zhara had never felt ordinary. Being named Gertrude, a gawd-awful handle for someone to be burdened with, was made even more dreadful by the addition of her mother’s name as her own middle moniker. Old-fashioned names had been at the height of fashion the year she was born. Clearly, fashion often left something to be desired. Particularly when viewed with hindsight.
Followed by the drudgingly dreary surname of Dubbins, the entire thing was almost more than she could bear from the very beginning of learning to comprehend her native tongue. The bracingly plebeian label reeked of commonality. Zhara had no intention of ever being anything even close to common.
Today had been a day when she’d woken and had the rare phenomenon of thinking about the past. Zhara detested thinking about the past and could never fathom why hoards of people seemed to wallow in great gaggling troughs of woe over what had happened to them way back when. In her mind, if you didn’t like something, then you ought to get up off your ass and do something about it. Wallowing got no one anywhere.
Zhara was thinking about her family. Since she hadn’t really understood her family, that was quite a chore. They were very hurtful and she was a sensitive soul. When she was younger she’d just assumed that all families were the same - fighting, bickering, hiding secrets, envious and back-stabbing. As she got older and had more experience of the outside world, she began to realize that this type of strangely dysfunctional family dynamic, wasn’t normal. Ok, so all families were weird, but not necessarily to this extent.
In her twenties she’d simply avoided them as much as possible. Most of them were wallowers, always on about how someone else got what they wanted. Well, hell, Suzy Davis had snatched the stuffed bunny out of the crotch of a birch tree just inches away from her outstretched fingers during the elementary school Easter egg hunt when she was five because she was too short to reach it.
Reaching up on tippy-toes hadn’t changed the fact that Suzy Davis was mean and had stolen that toy from a younger child who found it first. Shit happened. Get over it. Zhara, then Gertrude, wasn’t going to let that skank girl get her down. It hurt. She remembered. She moved on. Or so she thought.
Strangely, for someone who didn’t want to dwell on the past, Zhara never forgot anything about how people treated her. Some would point out that was its own form of wallowing. Zhara supposed it was. The point was, she might remember, but she used it as a lesson and got on with changing things. Eventually.
Zhara did have to admit that she had some lessons that had to be learned several times over before she finally “got it”. It wasn’t like her to be so short-sighted, but love - familial or otherwise - was a lesson painfully administered. Usually, over and over and over again. Fucking love.
She had an almost catalog-like command of every encounter she’d ever had with people. Of course, the people had to be memorable in some way. Often she didn’t remember the people, but something about them. She’d remember their outfits, their hair, or their manners. If they were particularly good, or particularly bad, didn’t really seem to matter, as long as they had been memorable.
As a child, Gertrude had loved nothing so much as laying on the cool linoleum tile of the small local library and flipping through the pages of Vogue magazine. Never underestimate the power of your local librarian. No one else read that Vogue magazine much, but Jane, the librarian, just kept ordering it because of how much Gertrude looked forward to the new edition each month. Most issues she read avidly cover to cover several times. Interestingly, though this had changed Gertrude’s life, the librarian when quizzed later, had no memory of this. It had simply been her job.
It was the photos of beautiful places, people, fashions and things that everyone told her she would never see or get that kept her coming back. There were articles about people and topics she’d never heard of. She filed those away too. One never knew when they might come in handy.
Once, as an adult, when Gertrude had been letting life start to get her down, she’d had the fleeting thought that all those photos and people in Vogue were really just idiotically overpriced and overrated. It was then she knew that she had to DO something about her life. Even if that were true, which, of course, it is - if she was having negative thoughts about the one thing that had pulled her out of the quagmire of a perpetually dull childhood and into the far greater adventure of life, something had to be done.
So, she’d done it. More on that later.
Today, she was thinking about how she’d actually gotten the title of “lady”. It wasn’t really very hard. She owed almost all of what she was today to her third husband, a suavely intelligent man named Carlton Terrance. People always wanted to change his name around and call him Terrance Carlton, but that was not how it operated. She’d met him by pure happenstance on a horseback riding trip to Ireland.
Gertrude had a love of horses, and riding had been the one thing that she’d followed up with throughout her life. After hearing for years that people “would love to go with her” on her dreamed of Irish riding tour, but sadly, finally realizing that none of them were ever going to put their money where their mouth was, she’d gone on her own.
While planning it, she’d mentioned it to coworkers, who had all been sure she would be raped, beaten or murdered if she went alone. Frankly, Gertrude thought she was being beaten by the sheer boredom and mindlessness of everyday life. She was beginning to completely understand Mrs. Engel, her high school English teacher, forcing them to read “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, by James Thurber. Gertrude identified heavily with Walter Mitty.
Truly, one could get completely dulled by the drudgeries of life that everyone else seemed to think were completely normal, practical and - amazingly - admirable. None of the drudgeries of life were actually admirable - they were simply ine
scapable for most, and therefore, lauded out of desperation as “good” deeds. It was how human beings justified the cesspool of everyday dullness - attending to those things was “good”. And, of course, everyone was taught that to be “good” was to be loved. That little foible is where all the badness begins.
Gertrude supposed in some ways it was useful to drudge onwards . If you cleaned house you might get sick less. If you cooked, you might be healthier. If you worked consistently, you might be able to pay for better housing and better food. Still, there was a whole load of lazy ass people out there that didn’t clean house, never cooked, didn’t work regularly and still seemed to get along just fine. They weren’t drudging along, but they weren’t happy either - so clearly, happiness was far more nebulous than the righteous, happy-clappy Sunday school teachers at church wanted their students to believe.
As Gertrude prepared to leave for her Irish riding trip she often encountered people who wanted to “one up” her with their travel stories or tell her about some connection they had to Ireland or “the home country” as she often heard it referred to. It was just a fact, folks seemed to want to make sure you knew that you weren’t doing anything better than what they could do, had done, or were connected to.
Gertrude’s family often boasted that they were “Scots-Irish”, which really meant that they were the pillaging invaders that had ransacked Ireland several centuries earlier. They weren’t Irish at all, since history documented that the two populations rarely intermingled, nowadays probably, but not back then.
One of her coworkers smugly announced that she knew a gentleman in the diplomatic corps who was working abroad at the American Embassy in The Hague, The Netherlands. The friend clearly had no remorse in introducing them because it never dawned on her that they’d actually like each other. It turned out the friend thought she had that “long-lost, love-unrequited” thing all tied up. Carlton was supposed to pine for her forever, the way she’d pined for her own lost love who never came back for her.
She’d once told Gertrude that even as she walked down the aisle to marry a man she’d later divorce, that she’d really thought her one true love would come sweeping into the church and stop the marriage. Honestly, what a lame brain! Gertrude had been quietly sympathetic at the time, but had been internally rolling her eyes. Where did women get these bizarre ideas about the “heroism” of men. Men were not heroes. In Gertrude’s experience men were only heroic when they were being completely idiotic and that almost always had to do with battle, death, war, fighting or idealism - which, of course, was what war and battle were all about - the illusion of an ideal.
The co-worker urged Gertrude to take the short jaunt from Ireland to The Netherlands so that her good friend could show Gertrude around. What began as a way for the friend to feel superior, “I’ve got a friend in the diplomatic corps”, turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Gertrude. She did indeed take the forty minute flight from Dublin to The Hague and within four days of meeting Carlton Terrance, she’d agreed to marry him.
Most people thought it was all incredibly romantic, which Gertrude had to admit it had been, and was. Carlton had been short, with brown hair, hazel eyes and irregular features. He was well mannered, intelligent, romantic, supportive and absolutely charming. Their first date was to the French Embassy in The Hague, where a four-piece string quartet serenaded them as they sipped French wine and ate tiny, delectable oeuvres d'offres. Who wouldn’t have agreed to marry Carlton?
They’d been married for over twenty years and they’d been a wonderful, engaging twenty years. They’d traveled all over the world, had many great adventures and then the one thing that should never have happened, did. Gertrude had seen through him. It was that one incident that tore off the rose-colored blinkers on the world that Gertrude had been hiding behind.
It was amazing that it could take twenty years and one fateful incident to take the blinders off, but - there you are - the useless folly of love, the lesson that has to be learned over and over and over, at least in Gertrude’s case. Or perhaps that was the lesson. Love hurts. People are imperfect. You can decide to love them anyway. Or you can remove yourself from the equation. The question is really, “How much pain are you willing to put up with?”
She’d always wanted to see the best in people, but had to wait till she was in later middle age to have the scales fall from her eyes and see the true lousiness of most people. Having to learn that lesson, that people were mostly lousy, had been hard. It had to be hammered home on Gertrude’s naive head repeatedly over and over again.
Carlton was wooed and won over by a girl a third his age on the Dark Continent. Entirely inappropriate of course. Could never have gone on. Unfortunately for Carlton, Gertrude was no fool. She found out. People always had a way of underestimating her. Usually to their detriment. They always just thought she was all looks, no brain. In actuality, she was a whole lot of brain.
According to Carlton’s workplace, the secret government agency that Gertrude simply referred to as “they who shall not be named”, Gertrude tested with a whoppingly enormous IQ of 168. Gertrude never told anyone in her family that little fact. None of them would have believed her. Once you got the pigeonhole in her family - you kept it. She was the pretty one, end of story.
Carlton’s charm and manipulative personality had certainly gone to good use in that workplace. (And no it wasn’t really the diplomatic corps or foreign service or State Department, or any other euphemism they wanted to paint themselves with - - and it wasn’t too hard to figure out.)
Not that Carlton had any intention of throwing “the smarter than she should be” Gertrude over for the younger woman - as she’d just said, entirely inappropriate. So, everything got ironed out, so to speak, and they went along on a happy track once again. Only, the problem was it wasn’t happy, really. Well, it was...and it wasn’t. The real crux of the matter was that now Gertrude could see the true nature of her suave, debonair husband. He’d showed his feet of clay. And with that exposure, the rest of the glamoured illusion of who he was fell away and stirred up all sorts of bad memories from her early childhood about abandonment, cruelty and abuse.
She admitted that the sanctimonious front Carlton put on afterwards was probably what tipped the scale. That and the duration of the affair, which had stretched on for months and months and had eaten up valuable funds that they’d been planning to go towards a much needed debt reduction for his retirement. Even then, if he’d simply apologized in a way that was truly heartfelt, all would have been forgiven. He apologized, but somehow it just didn’t feel genuine.
Then, Gertrude started thinking about it more. Carlton wasn’t used to having to admit anything so normal as a wrong-doing or a mistake. Carlton didn’t make mistakes. He was, after all, perfect - at least in his own eyes.
As long as Gertrude could remember, he’d never really taken any responsibility for any misstep the couple had weathered. He would always be very supportive about things and immediately come up with ways to fix any problems that arose, but he never, ever, admitted that he might have augmented or introduced the problem to the marriage.
As for the latest debacle, the debt reduction wouldn’t matter if Gertrude died on him. But, it would cripple her if Carlton died and left her with all the debts. She’d followed him around the world for Pete’s sake and had no retirement of her own.
When she found out that he’d cancelled his life insurance policy, that was it. An old mentor had once told her that all women were just one man shy of poverty. This stone cold epiphany ripped through her psyche with all the gale force of a hurricane, scattering her calm, loving personality and tendency to forgive, into disarray.
Chapter Two
Asshole’s Amen
After the “transgression”, Carlton decided he needed to get right with his God, the Catholic Church and his conscience. In order to do so he needed her to make it happen.
Gertrude had been married twice before. Once to a complete jer
k that everyone in her little hometown had thought the perfect match for her simply because he was good looking and a hard worker. Gertrude had never been cut out for hard work, and as for the looks, since she had them in spades, they also counted for little - Gertrude knew first hand that looks, while helpful, also had a backlash.
The second husband had been a sweet soul, a Japanese American Buddhest, that over time, had simply bent too easily in the wind of Gertrude’s strong personality. A year after their divorce, he was back to his usual loving, terrific self. Gertrude as “destroyer of men” wasn’t a look she particularly liked.
Unfortunately, what Gertrude didn’t realize until it was much too late, was that in marrying Carlton, she’d married a charmer who could never own any responsibility for any of his actions. Therefore, it was Gertrude who ended up doing all the work in the relationship.
Everyday life with Carlton was lovely, a never-ending whirl of nice food, beautiful events, lovely clothes and anything else that kept her happy and of inconsequential trouble. Anything that kept Carlton from having to invest of himself too heavily, was no problem. Afterall, everything was all about him. It brought the old saying of “happy wife, happy life” to full on truth.