Page 11 of The Graveyard Girls (Detective Ellie Reeves #11)

TEN

Briar Ridge Mobile Homes

Ida Bramble Jones stared at the mushy leftovers on the stove in disgust. Normally she didn’t mind cooking but today she’d had a bad headache that was quickly morphing into a migraine.

The scent of burned beans wafted to her and she grabbed the pot and dumped them in the trash.

She hated her life.

After the scandal over Ruth Higgins’ disappearance when her father was accused of killing Ruth, Ida thought the gossip and stares would never die down.

At times she’d wanted to disappear herself and run from Brambletown where every Bramble man she’d ever known was a loser.

No wonder the town treated them like trash.

They were no more than poor dumb hillbillies with a reputation for drinking, fighting, cussing and causing trouble.

Accusations that Earl had killed Ruth had flown from day one.

They’d even locked him up for a few days. But lack of evidence and the fact that Ruth’s body had never been found forced them to release him. Two days later, her daddy had gone missing, which made him look as guilty as sin. As if Earl Bramble had killed Ruth and run off to escape incarceration.

She breathed out a sigh just like the day she had when he’d left. Having him out of their lives had been a relief for her and her cousin Hetty.

Hetty had sometimes helped their father in the graveyard when they were little.

Now she owned her own business, a nursery and gardening center named The Green Thumb.

Barely having graduated high school, Ida had been desperate to get out of her house and away from the cemetery.

Although for some reason she hadn’t been able to leave town.

The graveyard where they’d grown up was all she and Hetty had ever known.

Worse, Ida had stars in her eyes that Joe Jones, a semi-fit guy at the time who worked for their father doing maintenance on the cemetery grounds, would give her a better life. Ha.

He’d crawled in her pants and knocked her up. They’d had to get married.

But he turned out to be a sexist, a slob and a hypochondriac, a mama’s boy who wanted her to practically wipe his fat ass.

At least he had a job. That was more than most Bramble men.

Although he’d worked for Earl at the graveyard in high school, afterward he’d landed a job driving a delivery truck for a national chain of discount stores.

Now he was gone a lot of the time so she and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Kat, had the place to themselves, and on those nights she could sleep without his pig-like snoring rattling the window panes.

She scraped the burned ends of meatloaf Joe had left on his plate into the trash, then lowered her Melmac dishes into the hot soapy dishwater to soak.

Wiping her hands on the kitchen towel, she rubbed at her throbbing leg.

When the rain came, it hurt like a mother, a reminder of the accident that had mangled her leg to the point that she had a bad limp now and had to prop it up on a pillow at night to ease the pain.

Rain hammered the tin roof of her doublewide, mingling with the rumble of her husband’s notorious snoring that sounded like the roar of a tornado.

His old hound dog whined at the door to get in the bedroom, and she called Kat’s name.

Kat was parked in front of the TV glued to some teen show she probably shouldn’t be watching.

But Ida gave all her fighting energy to Joe and lacked the bandwidth to argue with her daughter so she gave in.

“Kat, put Rufus in the room with Daddy.”

Kat huffed and rolled her pale green eyes but dragged herself over to the door, opened it, ushered him inside then made her way back to the TV.

Ida’s phone buzzed, and she checked the number, praying it wasn’t one of the debt collectors or the power company warning that they were about to turn her power off because she was two months late paying.

Joe kept swearing he’d get to it when he got his check, only she had no idea when that would happen.

Not a bill collector. Hetty.

Old familiar anxiety rose like fiery ants in her gut. She and Hetty rarely talked, the distance between them filled with a mountain of secrets, lies and blame.

If Hetty was calling, she had a reason.

The phone trilled a third time. Taking a deep breath, she answered with a mumbled hey.

“It’s Hetty.”

“I know. What do you want?”

“Have you seen the news?”

Ida glanced at the TV. When the hell did she have time to watch television? “No. Why?”

“They found a body near the graveyard. Police and reporters are there now.”

Ida sank into the kitchen chair and wiped at the sweat beading on her forehead with a dishtowel as she stared out at the night sky. For years, she’d been terrified this day might come.

That the nightmare from her teenage years would start all over again. And here it was about to blow up her life again.