Page 33 of The Graveyard Girls (Detective Ellie Reeves #11)

THIRTY-TWO

Briar Ridge Mobile Homes

Kat scrolled through one of her mama’s journal posts, intrigued. All her life she’d thought her mama was just a dumbass country girl who’d married a loser and both of them were boring and lame.

She’d gotten knocked up with her when she was a teenager, barely graduated high school, and they were so broke she never shopped anywhere except Goodwill and garage sales.

At the grocery store, she bought day-old bread, off brands and coupon shopped.

Once she heard Mama telling Daddy they’d make it big time when they could afford real beef hotdogs instead of the mystery meat ones you had to slather with ketchup and mustard just to choke down.

Once a year, Mama and Aunt Hetty ventured to the outlet mall in North Georgia to Christmas shop but that was as far as either one of them had ever traveled. It was as if they had glue on their shoes and rot in their brains.

Kat rolled her eyes and continued to read her mama’s rants:

I hate being a Bramble . Everyone knows Daddy is a mean drunk and now he’s been arrested again. This time for stealing from the dime store to buy moonshine. Apple pie is his favorite.

The. moonshiners are hillbillies you don’t want to mess with. Course if you cross them they can’t go to the police. No… they’ll come after you themselves.

Last week I saw a big scruffy one covered in tats outside my window. I know Daddy owes them money. I’m scared to death they’ll kill me to teach him a lesson.

They’re nasty, foul-mouthed, tobacco chewing, sorry recluses with the mentality of a gnat and the horniness of a dog in heat. Incest is as common as the weeds that choke the vegetable garden, squashing the zucchini that desperately tries to push though the hard Georgia red clay.

The law is no better, as useless as a butter knife trying to saw through a raw potato.

Instead of turning the other cheek as Preacher says on Sundays, they turn a blind eye to whatever happens behind closed doors.

A person’s business is his own, Daddy growled the other night through a mouthful of pinto beans, fat back and cornbread.

Keep your mouth shut or I’ll shut it for you for good, he told Hetty.

Everyone knows me and Hetty live in the slums. That we come from dirt, that Daddy tends the graveyard. Digging graves by night and making pine boxes for the poor by day.

That’s how we got dubbed the Graveyard Girls by that bitch Ruth. That and the things we’ve seen and done this hellish hot summer.

We saw too much.

We said too little.

And we played hide-and-seek with a killer.