A Bad Day for Pretty by Sophie Littlefield Page A

subject, it wasn’t forthcoming.
    “Murders?” Stella asked. While her own interest in deadly crime hadn’t really gotten jump-started that far back, she thought she’d remember the violent spilling of blood of one of her fellow citizens.
    “Hmm, not so much,” Irene said. “In 2000, remember that coot fell off his dingy and drowned in the strip pits, and then the next week them kids were ditching for senior week and one a them got fished out—”
    “Tragic,” Stella murmured, because she did remember that one, a skinny kid who’d been something of a local sensation on the track team.
    “Yes, but remember Sheriff Knoll got it in his head it was a serial killer at work. Drowndin folks.” She shook her head incredulously. “I coulda told Burt it wasn’t nothin’ of the sort, but you remember how he got. Them crazy theories of his. Anyway, they sent that bunch down from Fayette back then and they poked around a little and come up with the bodies’ blood alcohol levels and whatnot and finally everyone was satisfied it wasn’t nothing but stupid at work.”
    “Well, what about the other time? Before that one?”
    “You remember that whole Trusty Carmichael thing.…”
    “Oh, that.” Trusty Carmichael went a little nuts one summer after his wife of thirty years left him to go up to Saint Louis and enter a convent. He grew convinced that God was performing blood sacrifices on the picnic table in his backyard, but it turned out that the blood came from his own chickens, which he killed off over the course of a few weeks, chopping one up every time he got too despondent over Mrs. Carmichael’s defection to the holy side. “Least that probably didn’t take them a whole long time to figure out.”
    “Not with the feathers and all, no.”
    “Guess we just don’t have a whole lot of mayhem around here,” Stella mused, reflecting on the locations where she’d done some of her messier work. Generally it took just a bucket of rags and some Windex or Soft Scrub to clean up after even the most spirited discussion with one of her parolees, as she wasn’t spilling murderous amounts of blood—just enough to do the trick, that was the rule.
    Not for the first time, she flashed a quick prayerful thank-you up to the Big Guy for helping keep hid what she’d hid in the first place—the not-so-accidental nature of the string of accidents that had befallen the worst offenders of devil-baiting hatefulness against their women.
    “No, ma’am,” Irene said serenely. “And that’s how we like it.”
    “So what’s Goat got against Simmons?”
    Irene laid down her magazine and beckoned Stella conspiratorially. “Now, you didn’t hear this from me,” she said, “but I believe that woman has designs on him. I heard her asking him to have dinner with her today when she was getting ready to leave last night. Seein’ as how she’d be all by her little lonesome out at the Heritage House Motel and didn’t have any idea where to get a decent meal. It was quite a sight to see, Stella, that woman carrying on. She don’t have, you know, the equipment for it.”
    To Stella’s startled amusement, Irene slipped her hands under her bosom and gave herself a brief little lift-and-display.
    “Irene!” Stella said, blushing. “Not every man’s a tit man, you know.”
    “Well, now, honey—it ain’t just that. She’s got that nasty smoker voice and she bites her nails and she don’t have hardly any tush on her at all. And she’s not particularly friendly … to me, anyway. Called me ‘Miz Percy’ twice, even though I corrected her the first time, and it’s spelt out right here, D-o-r-s-e-y , plain as day.” Irene tapped her engraved gold nameplate for emphasis.
    “Why, that’s terrible,” Stella murmured. She didn’t have any particular ill feelings for Simmons, but it was clear that the woman wasn’t all that smart if she’d missed out on the number one rule of getting on in the workplace: Make friends from