Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery by Patricia Sprinkle Page A

he’s supposed to stay out.”
    I nodded. “I heard about all that.”
    “Then she finds one of her blouses in the laundry hamper when she knows she ironed it the day before. It’s got a stain on the front, too.”
    Edie lifted one hand, but Genna was only to finger four. “She finds her dishwasher full of clean dishes she didn’t put there, and”—her right pointer hovered over her left thumb—“there was something about magazines. What was it?”
    Edie shrugged. “I thought I’d left a bag of magazines on the backseat of my car to take to the nursing home, but I’d left it on the back porch. This is ridiculous. I’m forgetting a few things, that’s all. I’m not forgetting to pay my bills, or go to work, or how to play cards,” she finished on a triumphant note.
    “But you’re wearing yourself out taking care of that big place, trying to oversee the harvest, going to see Granddaddy Jo, playing cards all the time, and working. You can’t do it all, Edie. You can’t!” Genna’s face was flushed and damp, and red curls stuck to her forehead. “If you’d listen to other people for once, you’d put that grove on the market and get—”
    “A nice little town house?” Edie’s face was so pink she looked more likely to die of a stroke than Alzheimer’s.
    For once, I was glad to see Olive heading our way. She must have known what Genna had come out to say, because she demanded before she reached us, “Did you mention the keys? Or the pornography?”
    Genna turned my way. “Talk some sense into her, Mac. She could be living in a lovely, safe, convenient town house if she weren’t so stubborn.” She stomped back to the house.
    Olive watched her go. “I just came out to tell you Martha said dessert is ready.” She also hurried back to the house.
    “Don’t say a word,” Edie warned, “if you plan to ‘talk sense into me.’ ” Her tone mimicked Genna’s exactly.
    “I wouldn’t have the nerve. But have all those other things happened since we last talked?”
    She nodded. Now I understood why she looked so ravaged.
    “What was that about keys?”
    Her hand trembled as she reached out to strip dead leaves from a hydrangea bush near the walk. “I found a set of keys in my purse that don’t belong to me. I cannot for the life of me figure out how they got there. I don’t leave my purse lying around.”
    I mulled that over as we climbed the front porch steps. “Is there any identification on the ring? A car dealer’s name or something like that?”
    “Nothing but a brass tag with one word engraved on it. I looked it up on the Internet . . .”
    “And?” I prodded when it began to look like that word would hang in the air for eternity and we would never get dessert.
    She gave me an embarrassed grimace. “It led to a softporn Web site. Adney thought that was hilarious. But now my e-mail is full of pornographic messages. Filthy, stupid stuff.”
    “Not to mention boring and repetitive,” I added. “I was similarly afflicted after one of our teenage helpers got access to my office computer. You can clean it up, but it will take time.”
    “Adney’s coming over Sunday afternoon to work on it.”
    Olive spoke fiercely through the screened door. “We have a bridge game at your place Sunday afternoon, in case you’ve forgotten that, too. And it’s a waste of time for Adney to clean up the thing. Valerie and Frank will just use it again to look up more porn sites.”
    “You don’t know that!” Edie’s voice was low and trembling.
    Olive gave a little snort. “You know as well as I do you wouldn’t get that much filth from visiting the home page of one Web site. So where else could it come from? Unless Henry’s getting in and using the computer when the house is empty.”
    Edie went rigid, and her voice was like ice. The last time I’d heard her speak like that was when the chair of the county commission suggested we do away with the bookmobile to rural areas. “Stay out of my