Divas Do Tell Read online

  Lights! Camera! Murder! Trinket and the gang, beware!

  Dead Divas tell no tales.

  Sixty years ago a scandal rocked Holly Springs. Now Diva-sister Dixie Lee Forsythe has written DARK SECRETS UNDER THE HOLLY, a juicy tell-all about a historic Mississippi town very much like Holly Springs, and Hollywood’s in town to film it. A lot of people are none too happy about that.

  For one, Bitty is in a blond lather over a gossipy story line about a philandering Senator who very much resembles Bitty’s late husband. And even Trinket’s a little miffed at Dixie Lee’s oh-so-recognizable Trinket Truevine character, described as, “built like a girls’ basketball coach—not necessarily a female one.”

  Bitty’s neighbor and town matriarch, Ida Tyree, is incensed over Dixie Lee’s portrayal of a torrid romance between Susana Jones, a young black housekeeper, and a seductive white good old boy during the tense times of the nineteen sixties. Ida, who parlayed her years as housekeeper into a lucrative cleaning business, says Dixie Lee played fast and loose with the facts.

  Billy Joe Cramer, the man accused of the seducing, swears he’s innocent. He sure doesn’t want the world to see him as a cradle robber who fathered Susana’s child, igniting a firestorm of prejudice that drove her and her family out of town.

  No surprise! Dixie Lee starts getting mysterious death threats. Billy Joe turns up dead. The actress hired to play Susana brings Difficult Diva-ness to heights even Bitty can’t match. A production assistant is murdered.

  If Trinket, Bitty and the Divas don’t solve this case quick, Oscars season in Tinsel Town will be short a whole bunch of stars.

  Virginia Brown’s Novels from Bell Bridge Books

  The Dixie Divas Mysteries

  Dixie Divas

  Drop Dead Divas

  Dixie Diva Blues

  Divas and Dead Rebels

  Divas Do Tell

  The Blue Suede Memphis Mysteries

  Hound Dog Blues

  Harley Rushes In

  Suspicious Mimes

  Return to Fender (2013)

  General Mystery/Fiction

  Dark River Road

  Historical Romance

  Comanche Moon * Capture the Wind

  Savage Awakening * Defy The Thunder

  Storm of Passion * Wild Heart

  Legacy of Shadows * Moonflower

  Desert Dreams * Heaven Sent

  Wildfire * Renegade Embrace

  Emerald Nights * Hidden Touch

  Wildflower * Wildest Heart

  Jade Moon * Highland Hearts

  Divas Do Tell

  Book 5 of The Dixie Diva Mysteries

  by

  Virginia Brown

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-386-3

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-368-9

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2013 by Virginia Brown

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

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  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo/Art credits:

  Popcorn and film © Loopall | Dreamstime.com

  Clapboards © Jimmyi23 | Dreamstime.com

  :Etdd:01:

  Dedication

  For Laura, Lisa, Gwen, Ginger, TJ, Kathy, Gena, Alexa and Waunell, my real Dixie Divas, with love and appreciation. You ladies rock!

  Warning:

  Diva books are not to be taken too seriously. Some of the events may be slightly exaggerated. Or not. Being Southern, I freely use my prerogative for embellishment. While public events such as Holly Springs’ annual pilgrimage and Kudzu Festival are real, and general locations set in the town and its surrounding areas are also real, I’ve taken great liberty by altering some details to fit the storylines. Any errors and changes are mine alone.

  Chapter 1

  IT WAS A BOOK that started all the trouble. A bestselling book, at that. It stirred up more dust and disaster than an F-5 tornado. Holly Springs, Mississippi hadn’t seen so much excitement and mayhem since The War, when General Van Dorn’s troops burned Yankee supplies piled at the railroad terminal, and a few houses caught fire. The fallout from the book was certainly more entertaining than watching your house burn, but just as deadly.

  Perhaps I should clarify.

  My name is Eureka May Truevine, but I prefer to go by Trinket. I live in a house named Cherryhill that sits just outside the Holly Springs city limits. It’s my ancestral home, and my parents live in the downstairs while I have all the upstairs to myself. They’re in their seventies, so they don’t like climbing the staircase anymore. It works out well for all of us. When I moved back home after my divorce to care for parents I thought were feeble and needed nursing, I discovered they were in great health but had developed a penchant for jetting around the country. I was needed to stay home and take care of their dog and a couple hundred feral cats while they caught up on their youth. The mayhem and mischief caused by the bestselling book took place when they went out of town, and I was stuck with food and doody duty. It was a very inconvenient chapter in my life. Pardon the pun.

  At first we were all thrilled that someone we knew had written a book set in our hometown of Holly Springs. Then we read it. It was a good thing the author had used a pen name. Otherwise, she might have been hung from the clock tower in the court square as soon as it came out.

  Some of us, however, knew her true identity.

  “I can’t believe this,” raged my first cousin and best friend Bitty Hollandale. “How dare this . . . this woman go telling the entire world all about Philip’s flings with that home wrecking little slut?” She paused to suck in a deep breath then added, “Bless their hearts.”

  If she’d been Catholic, Bitty would have crossed herself. Since she’s not, she just added the last three words in a pious tone suitable for a Methodist. Seeing as how Bitty’s ex, Philip Hollandale, is dead, as well as the “home wrecking little slut,” I pretended the blessing was said on that account.

  “Yes,” I said. “Bless their hearts. Don’t you think you’re overreacting a little, Bitty? I mean, it’s just a book, and it’s sold as fiction. That means it’s not real, just fantasy. Made up characters and events.”

  Bitty eyed me rather sourly. “Have you read it yet?”

  “Well . . . no. Not yet. But I intend to as soon as I have a spare minute or two.”

  “Get back to me when you’ve read it. We’ll see how you feel about it then.”

  Bitty was so irate she forgot she had enough hair spray on her head to paralyze a goat and put her hand through the carefully coifed blonde nest. I watched with interest as she tried to get her hand back out without dislodging a diamond ring as big as a butter bean.

  We sat
in her parlor, a small room adjacent to the actual parlor and just off the wide entrance hall. It used to be a butler’s pantry or breakfast room or something like that, but since Bitty doesn’t have any full-time servants she’s put it to better use. It was quite cozy on a cold January day. A small fireplace, shutter-covered window, two big plush chairs that suck you into their depths, a flat screen above the mantel—disguised with an oil painting when not in use—and a couple end tables with lamps furnish it in comfort. Bitty’s house is an antebellum beauty with a sign out front and scrolled lettering that says “Six Chimneys CA 1845.”. In April every year the Holly Springs Garden Club conducts a pilgrimage during which gracious old homes are fancied up and opened to the public for tours. Bitty’s house is one of them.

  When she finally got her hand out of her lacquered hairdo without losing her ring or a finger she said, “Cady Lee just better be careful is all I have to say.”

  I knew that wasn’t all she had to say, and I was right. Bitty still fumed and sputtered.

  “Can you believe her sister has the nerve to show her face in this town after writing that horrible book? She’s just showing off. That’s so tacky.”

  “It’s on all the bestseller lists. They’re making a movie out of it. Why shouldn’t she show off?”

  “Read the book, Trinket. Just read the book.” She got up, left the room, and in a minute came back with a hardcover book covered in a fancy book jacket. She tossed it in my lap, so I picked it up.

  Dark Secrets Under the Holly was printed across the top, and in big letters beneath that title, by Desirée DuBois. The background was pale pink, and a huge magnolia blossom and Spanish moss provided no clue as to the content except that it was set in the South. New York publishers obviously thought Spanish moss grows throughout the entire state of Mississippi. It doesn’t. I shook my head.

  “Well, the hint about Holly Springs is a bit too obvious, and her pseudonym is rather extravagant and clichéd, but other than that it looks okay.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Trinket, you know you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

  “Speaking of clichés . . .”

  “Open it up. Pick any page. Just start reading. Then tell me what you think.”

  I thumbed through the book, pages flipping under my fingers. “I’ll have to have more wine if it’s as bad as you say it is.”

  “That can be arranged.” Bitty got up, once more dislodging her personal gargoyle, a disgruntled fat pug wearing a bib, diamond studded collar, and a sweater that said Mommy Loves Me across the top. The pug’s name is Chen Ling. I call her Chitling, mainly to irritate Bitty. We live to annoy one another.

  While Bitty fetched my wine I scanned a random page. A section immediately caught my eye.

  “Jewel Twining and her twin sister Ruby looked nothing alike. Ruby was petite and blonde while Jewel had the physique of a girls’ basketball coach—not necessarily a female one. Seeing them together always struck me as funny. It was Jewel who played with the sharecropper kids down the road and became best friends with a black child named Birdie. Later in life, Birdie would become a housekeeper just as her mother before her, and her mother’s mother before that. Generations of housekeepers cleaned up after Holly Springs children and their parents. Morning maids, afternoon maids, evening maids toiled in the huge antebellum homes with scant pay and plenty of prejudice. This was the Mississippi of the fifties and sixties when Jim Crow ruled, and the ‘colored’ housekeepers knew their place. Those who forgot were swiftly and sharply reminded.”

  I felt my face get hot. Jewel Twining could only be me, and while my twin sister Emerald is blonde and petite, I do not have the physique of a girls’ basketball coach. I’m tall, yes, and while I could stand to lose fifteen or twenty pounds, I’m hardly gym teacher material. They’re in much better shape.

  By the time Bitty returned with my wine, I’d read enough to know that “Desirée DuBois” had skewered most of the Holly Springs Garden Club as well as half the people she called old friends. Bitty took one look at my face and smiled.

  “See? I told you. Here’s your wine. Sure you don’t want some Jack and Coke instead?”

  “I’m sure. Sufficiently liquored up, I might show up at Cady Lee’s house with a torch and a pitchfork.” I slammed the book closed. “What is Dixie Lee thinking?”

  Dixie Lee is Cady Lee Forsythe’s younger sister. The Forsythe family has been in Holly Springs for generations and done quite well for themselves. Their daughters, Cady Lee, Dixie Lee, Delta Lee, and Mossy Lee had gone to our elementary school while their daddy was the mayor; once he was voted out of office they went to more prestigious schools. All four girls and their two brothers—Jefferson Lee and Robert Lee—had graduated from Ole Miss, their father’s alma mater. Their mother had had the oversight of graduating from Mississippi State, but her family forgave that error when she became Queen of the Tailgating Party at The Grove in Ole Miss. She has crystal chandeliers hung from the top of the tent and serves exquisite finger sandwiches, caviar, and the most expensive champagne at every Ole Miss home game.

  Her Forsythe family tree limb claims a familial relationship to General Robert E. Lee, hence the profusion of Lee forenames in their children. Floy Anne Lee had married into the Forsythe family in the fifties and immediately began producing a flotilla of namesakes.

  Cady Lee Forsythe, now Kincaid, is a member of the Dixie Divas. The Divas are a group of women in the Holly Springs area who get together every month to drink wine or bourbon, eat chocolate and other delicacies, and generally have a good time. There is usually entertainment at these functions. No men are allowed as members or even guests, but have provided hours of excellent amusement on occasion. What happens with the Divas, stays with the Divas, so I shall not divulge any details here. Suffice it to say only a few men have been brave enough for a repeat performance. The Chippendales’ booking agent no longer takes our calls.

  “Mark my words,” said Bitty in a dark tone, “someone’s going to whack Dixie Lee upside her head before this is over with. I’ve thought about it myself.”

  “I can see where this kind of thing would rile up folks,” I agreed. “What about the movie? I heard it’s going to be made mostly in Holly Springs.”

  “If you ask me, that movie is better off not being made anywhere. You know people are going to talk, and I think Dixie Lee has lost her mind writing something like this, much less making a movie out of it. Besides, it’s too much like that book written by the woman down in Jackson. Dixie Lee probably plagiarized it.”

  “Well, her book and movie did well. I read a newspaper review that said even though this novel may sound similar, it focuses more on the personal lives of the white residents instead of the trials of the black domestics.”

  “Tell that to Ida Tyree,” Bitty said dryly. “She was up in arms over it, said it doesn’t tell half the story, and what it does tell is wrong.”

  Mrs. Tyree is Bitty’s next door neighbor, a former housekeeper who became a much-respected local leader during the Civil Rights movement, then built her job into a cleaning empire that she sold for a lot of money about twenty years ago. Mrs. Tyree is a matriarch of both the black and white community in Holly Springs. Not anybody to mess with, either. She has a tongue sharp enough to skin a catfish when she gets indignant.

  “I can see I’m going to have to read the book from the front,” I said after a few sips of wine. “If she says about other people what she’s said about me and Emerald, she’s not going to have any friends left in this town.”

  Bitty sucked down half her Jack and Coke. “She did and she doesn’t,” she said while stroking Chen Ling atop her furry little head. “I can’t imagine what got into her to do that. She may have changed the names around, but it’s obvious who she’s talking about. She has unmitigated gall, doesn’t she?”

  “Well, you and Dixie Lee were never friends,” I
reminded. “You were always rivals.”

  “That’s only because she’s a backstabbing little hussy.”

  I decided to ignore that. “I wonder what Budgie thinks about being referred to as a sharecropper’s child in a long line of housekeepers.”

  “Probably close to the same thing you think about being referred to as a girls’ gym teacher.”

  I ignored that, too. “Since she now owns the café, I’m sure she’s not too thrilled. Budgie worked hard to get where she is and have what she has despite a no-good husband and years of working in someone else’s kitchen.”

  “If I were Dixie Lee, I wouldn’t sashay into the café and order so much as a biscuit. Budgie might just drag it across the floor before she serves it to her.”

  I nodded agreement and then asked, “So what did she have to say about you?”

  “Only that I’m a serial bride whose last husband was murdered and found stuffed in my closet. Then she hinted that his affair with a ‘beautiful blonde high school cheerleader’ caused his murder. In other words, that I killed him. I’m ready to strangle Dixie Lee. I wonder if she still has a peanut allergy.”

  I had to say, “Well, Philip was murdered and stuffed in your closet. She got that part right even if she got everything else wrong. And yes, I’m sure she still has a peanut allergy. I assume you’re going to send her a box of GooGoo Clusters?”

  “No, that’s too obvious. I’m thinking a nice tin of popcorn popped in peanut oil.”

  “Ah, suitably devious. All joking aside, once I—”

  “What makes you think I’m joking?”

  “Because you would hate prison. No hairdressers or manicurists, and Chitling would have to stay with me.”

  When Chitling heard her name she pricked up her ears and gave me a baleful look. Her little black mask hides a dragon cleverly disguised as a pug. She’s what’s called a fawn color, meaning a light shade of brown, and her muzzle is black. She has three fangs left in front but does very well in intimidation and payback. Brownish-black eyes that look too big for her head followed my every movement as I gestured with my wine glass.