A Well Mannered Murder Read online

  A Well-Mannered Murder

  by

  Janis Patterson

  A long-closed charm school.

  A contentious divorce.

  A smothering mother.

  The murder of a mysterious woman.

  The Kennedy assassination.

  Fledgling researcher and newly single Mindy McMann just can’t catch a break. She might not even live.

  Mindy McMann’s life has gone upside down. While divorcing her cheating husband, she has to maintain good relations with her teenaged son, convince her overprotective mother that she is not going to move back in with her, and find a way to support herself. Non-fiction author and decided eccentric Darryl Knedsyn offers Mindy a job as a researcher for a book about the long-defunct Miss McCallum’s College of Charm, which seems absolutely perfect... until the underground vault at prestigious Carlisle College where she is working in the charm school’s archives is broken in to. Perfect until a mysterious unknown woman who bears a strong resemblance to Mindy is brutally attacked in the archive storage area. Perfect until Mindy is accused of her murder.

  Without knowing how it happened, Mindy finds herself the target of mysterious people who for reasons she doesn’t understand mean her harm. Then she discovers the Kennedy connection, and things get really dangerous.

  Copyright © 2020 by Janis Susan May Patterson

  Cover Art by Janis Susan May Patterson

  ISBN - 978-1-941520-26-0

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  http://www.JanisPattersonMysteries.com

  Except for actual figures of history, all the characters and events

  portrayed in this story are fictitious and products

  solely of the author’s imagination.

  This Book is Dedicated to

  LaRee Bryant

  Sandy Steen

  James Gaskin

  Three wonderful writers whom I am blessed to have as friends

  and

  CAPT Hiram M. Patterson, USN/Ret

  the most wonderful man in the world

  Chapter One

  I was going to kill him.

  This time I was really going to kill him!

  I savagely punched in the numbers on my cell phone and waited for the syrupy voice.

  “Mr. Womble’s office.”

  “This is Mindy McMann,” I said crisply, seeing in my mind’s eye the pneumatic blonde’s practiced and superior smile. “Let me speak to Jed.”

  “Mr. Womble is in a meeting,” the blonde replied, either unable or not even trying to keep the smugness out of her tone. “May I take a message?”

  He was probably standing there beside her, his head pressed against hers as they listened to me. I would not give them the satisfaction of enjoying my emotions, I would not!

  “If you would, please tell him I called. He will know why,” I answered in my most businesslike manner. I made a fist, digging my nails into the palm to help keep my voice steady. “Oh, and please tell him I’ve taken care of it,” I added at the last moment before breaking the connection.

  That should give him something to think about!

  I glared at the phone and then made myself take three deep, slow breaths. I couldn’t afford to get sick or high blood pressure or anything like that now that I didn’t have health insurance.

  And if I didn’t get to work I wouldn’t have an income, either. Darryl Knedsyn might be my most lucrative - and at the moment my only - client, but he was also the most impatient. He wasn’t even finished with the first draft of the book on the Commemorative Air Force (previously known as the Confederate Air Force before that accursed PC crowd came a-meddling, as Darryl was always saying) but he was already antsy about getting the facts on Miss McCallum’s College of Charm.

  Facts it was my job to find.

  I locked the car and began the long trudge across the almost picture perfect Carlisle College grounds, so picture perfect that no parking was allowed in the central campus. That made any close-in space the property of teachers and students and put the pathetically small visitors’ lot practically in the next county. Small, academically oriented and very prestigious, Carlisle was the wealthiest college in Dallas, except perhaps for the much larger SMU, so why couldn’t they afford an adequate parking garage?

  The library was a traditional Victorian-style symphony of white stone and red brick that had not changed externally since its erection in the early 1920s. Most of the other buildings looked all the same, all serene, all self-consciously tasteful, which was probably why upon its dissolution Miss McCallum’s College of Charm had donated its records to Carlisle.

  Already the heat was heavy, pushing down on my shoulders like a weight. There were beads of sweat breaking out on my forehead as I climbed the long flight of shallow steps. Generously sized beads which, had I been a student, would probably have gotten me kicked out of Miss McCallum’s College of Charm. Ladies never sweated; they just glowed.

  Another half block and I would have been sweating, pure and simple. Or, as in the old joke, glowing like a horse.

  I shook my head. I mustn’t let my mood affect my work. It got hot in Dallas every summer and Carlisle had appealed to me at first, even if my taste wasn’t really set for 1920s faux Victorian.

  It was all Jed’s fault.

  My jaw tightened. I wasn’t going to let Jed Womble spoil anything else for me!

  “Good morning, Ms. McMann,” chirruped the librarian.

  Sophronsiba Higgins had been a definite shock on my first visit and in the succeeding week my initial reaction hadn’t changed. At least in her middle twenties but looking younger than most of Carlisle’s students, she appeared as if she would be more at home in the bars and coffee shops of trendy Uptown or Deep Ellum, where the population was eclectic to say the least. She had raspberry colored hair that stood up like a brush, piercings in places that I didn’t even want to think of having holes in them, and short tops and low jeans that revealed almost as much as they concealed. How such a creature had ever been given the post of head librarian at such a conservative institution as Carlisle was a mystery, but I was glad that she had. Ms. Higgins was a treasure.

  “How are you this morning?” I signed the archive visitors’ log. Most of the page was nothing but an uninterrupted column of my signatures, complete with sign in and sign out times.

  “Hot. And it’s just June! We’ll cook before fall.”

  Just wait until you start getting hot flashes and it’s full summer, I thought grimly. I had had my first a couple of months ago – an unreasonably early one, I kept reminding myself – and waited for its sporadic fellows with a grim stoicism. At least there hadn’t been many. Yet.

  “Dallas weather. We’ll be complaining about the cold the next time we have an ice storm.”

  “Here’s your keys. Don’t steal anything valuable, huh?”

  I took the ring of keys created especially for me and laughed. In theory Ms. Higgins or one of her minions should be with me the entire time I was in the archive vault, but that had lasted less than a day. One of the benefits of having the round, innocent-looking face of a saintly choirboy, I suppose, however inappropriate it might be on a middle-aged woman. No one ever seemed to believe that I could be anything but open and honest, which was unfortunately quite true.

  On the other hand, perhaps some overseeing might be good, in case anything ever went missing. There were some terrifyingly valuable things down in the vault, I knew; I could see some of them through the chain link walls that created the different storage rooms. Though each room was separately locked I knew that would be small problem to a true thief, or any determined person who possessed a bolt cutter and a flexible conscience. My keys were just for the elevator, the main vault door and the McCallum area, and that was fine with me.

  Somehow I had expected the vault to smell grave-ish and dank like something out of Poe. Instead, on my first day I had been pleasantly surprised to find it was most comfortable. The air conditioning and humidity were perfect and the only drawback was that there were no windows, a fact I had trained myself to ignore. Claustrophobia, I kept telling myself, was all in the mind. On the other hand, if there had been windows, I might have asked to move in, as the vault was so much more comfortable than my tiny efficiency apartment.

  The McCallum section – irreverently known to the library staff as the ‘charm corral’ – was a chain link room at the far end of the vault. About eight feet square, it was stuffed almost to bursting with boxes stacked higgledy-piggledy on ugly industrial shelving. Ms. Higgins and I
had had to do some rearranging even to get in a tiny worktable. In places the dust was so thick a good farmer could have brought in a fair crop if there’d been any sunlight at all.

  I stopped at the switchbox and turned on the hallway lights and the McCallum room lights, leaving the rest of the vast area in shadowy semi-darkness. Light was dangerous to old paper, I knew, and expensive to pay for. At first the gloom had bothered me; now I scarcely noted as long as the lights over my worktable were adequate.

  Opening the chain link door, I carefully locked it open – a suggestion from Ms. Higgins who probably remembered adolescent pranks from her own recent school days – and sat at the worktable. I had left all my current research materials out, though neatly stacked, to avoid having to pull them from the stacks again. Not the best protocol, I knew, but a great timesaver, and as theoretically I was the only person who came to the vault from one week to the next, who was to know?

  Today I was copying the registration rosters for 1955-1956. How much simpler it would have been had I simply been able to scan the endless papers, but that was the one thing on which the estimable Ms. Higgins was adamant; no scanners, no harsh light sources, no photocopying at all. I had tried to take a picture with my telephone, but none of the photographs had been legible, so it was keying in all the way. I was just grateful that she had allowed me to bring in my trusty laptop. Some archival collections didn’t even allow that.

  Luckily the anonymous secretary at Miss McCallum’s had been possessed of an exceptionally clear hand. A former student, fallen on hard times? A contemporary student, working to fund part of her tuition? I pulled up the file and started inputting the names where I had left off yesterday – many of them familiar to anyone who had lived in Dallas for any length of time, or even looked at a city map. An inordinately high percentage of the McCallum girls seemed to come from families who had streets named after them. This was the easy part. Class rosters, curriculum schedules, teacher lists; these were just a pure copy job and I could do them with only half my mind. Later, once I started digging into finances – tuition fees, scholarships, donations, disbursements – would be where it got sticky. Finances always did.

  The cell phone rang demandingly from my pocket, startling me with the strident notes of La Marseillaise. There were only three people who might call at this time and two of them I really didn’t want to talk to. In fact, I had had the vague idea the little phone wouldn’t even work in this cellar.

  “What are you up to, Stub?” Jed’s voice flowed over the wire, the warm depth of it giving me an ambiguous shiver. It had been his voice which had first attracted me and it still could pull strings I didn’t want pulled. I couldn’t prove he had started to take elocution lessons since he had decided to go into politics, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. “You sound like you’re in a well.”

  “I’m at work,” I snapped. However lovely it was, it seemed these days just the sound of Jed’s voice could make me angry. Usually justifiably so. “Jed, what do you mean…”

  The warm caramel tones took on an edge. “Stub, what have you done?” His shout easily overrode mine. “I just talked to Wanda Creighton. What the Hell did you tell her?”

  It helped that he called me Stub. I had always hated that nickname. For someone as tall as I it was a ridiculous name, especially since it had nothing to do with height. Even after I had gotten the nerve to tell him I hated him calling me that, Jed typically thought I was kidding and kept right on using it.

  For one of the few times in my life when confronting Jed I felt in control. “The truth.”

  “You did what?”

  “I told her we were getting divorced. She seemed to think that we were back living together and that I wasn’t coming to her party because I wasn’t feeling well. She called to see how I was doing. What the devil did you mean telling her that?”

  “I’m trying to save your face, Mindy, and it’s not easy! When you give up this stupid idea and come home I don’t want everyone pointing at you.”

  “At you, you mean. You’ve been telling everyone we’ve called the divorce off, haven’t you?” I was still astonished, even though I realized the answer.

  “We should. We still could.”

  “No way, Jed. The papers are being filed. It’ll be public information in just a few days,” I said, not knowing if that were true or not. It sounded good. I hoped it was; that would drive Jed wild!

  Tucking the little phone under my chin – which wasn’t an easy exercise – I closed the completed roster book and reached for the next. They weren’t in order, but it didn’t matter. I created a separate folder for each year and a file within that folder for each subset of information.

  “Mindy, we’ve been married almost twenty-five years. Do you want to throw that away?” Jed’s voice was slick and persuasive, the way it was when he was trying to close a big deal.

  How dare he! My arm jerked of its own accord, longing to make violent contact with his thin, handsome face, but instead only knocked off the next roster book. It fell open on the floor, allowing a scrap of paper to flutter to the floor.

  “You’re the one who threw it away, Jed,” I said in a hard voice, diving for the book. That was all I needed to do, damage irreplaceable archives. And how would I ever find where that scrap of paper had been or what it was supposed to mark?

  “Now, Mindy…” Jed was starting to sound exasperated.

  What I had thought a worthless bookmark had been torn from some expensive stationery. I hadn’t seen heavy deckle-edged paper like that in years. It felt luxurious in my fingers, speaking of a gentler, more mannered time that we would never see again. What a pity people didn’t write letters on this kind of paper any more. Emails were great and fast and easy, but somehow they just weren’t the same.

  “You’re the one who cheated, Jed. You’re the one who’s cheated for years.” My voice faded as I read the two short lines written in fading purple ink.

  They killed Grace Marshall. They’re going to kill me next.

  “Mindy? Aren’t you listening to me?”

  Eyes wide, I read the note again. It was an agitated scrawl, but even that couldn’t hide the beautiful handwriting.

  “Mindy, we’ve got to get this settled.” Jed squawked.

  Tired of his self-serving smarmyness, I snapped the phone shut. It wasn’t the same as slamming down a receiver, and certainly not as satisfying as smashing a baseball bat across Jed’s handsome head. It was, at least, both quiet and legal.

  Who was Grace Marshall? Who had written this note? Had whoever it was really died?

  I drew a deep breath then bent to pick up the roster book and the few other scattered papers. None of them seemed to be damaged, thank goodness.

  Almost instantly the phone rang again, tinkling out the opening notes of La Marseillaise. That was something I would have to change, I thought with annoyance. Another of the problems of divorcing after over half a lifetime married; there were so many little reminders buried deeply in the fabric of my life. I always seemed to find them just when they were least expected.

  I should have changed the ringtone the day I moved out. Our last vacation together had been to France, just me and Jed and Tony. I hadn’t known then that it would be the last trip we’d ever take as a family. I hadn’t known then about Venetia Turnbull. Jed had, of course, and Tony had, but neither of them had been honest enough to tell me.

  I looked at the phone almost as if it were a strange artifact. Thank goodness for Caller ID. It was Jed – surprise! surprise! – calling back.

  After a moment’s thought, I just switched the phone off. He’d leave a voice mail, of course, several of them, ranging from cajolery to threats. It was an old routine of his now. My routine was just to delete them without listening.

  Tonight, I thought with a sudden spurt of vindictiveness, I’ll start calling all our so-called friends and inform them of the impending divorce. That way Jed couldn’t pull this little stunt again!

  Wonder what his political handlers would think of that?

  Wonder what he’d come up with next?

  At the moment I really didn’t care. Whether he believed it or not, Jed was now part of my former life. I felt relieved, almost as if I had had an epiphany.