Divas Do Tell by Virginia Brown

of assault were ignored. A lot of them were fathers and sympathized with Mr. Forsythe. If it had been their daughter taken off by some boy, they might have done the same thing.
    “Johnny is Jimmy Patterson in the book,” said Bitty. “Dixie Lee wrote that he was devastated over losing the most beautiful girl in all of Mississippi—as if that were true—and despaired of ever finding true love so he cut his wrists and died.”
    “That’s probably what she wished had happened,” Gaynelle observed. “It was a pretty big scandal back then. He’d taken her to some cheap motel up in Memphis, and everyone whispered behind her back that she was ruined. High school girls just weren’t supposed to have that happen. Not back then.”
    “Johnny did three years in prison for his moment of insanity. Now he’s living down in Hickory Flat with his wife, two kids, and three grandkids,” said Rayna.
    “Grandkids,” exclaimed Bitty. “I know Johnny is a year or two ahead of us, but grandkids ?”
    “Your boys are twenty-one,” I said to her, “and you didn’t have them until you were almost thirty. Late in life by most standards. They’re old enough to have kids, just too smart to fall into that trap while they’re still in school.”
    Bitty’s twin boys, Brandon and Clayton, attend Ole Miss and are her greatest accomplishment. She basically raised them alone from the time they were eleven, due to their father’s going to jail for a pyramid scheme that netted him a lot of money and fifteen to twenty years in a Tennessee prison. He’d be out by now if it wasn’t for him figuring out a way to run another financial swindle from behind bars. He is very smart but very dishonest. Thank heavens Bitty’s boys inherited none of Frank Caldwell’s criminal genes.
    Gaynelle pointed to the next name on the list, successfully rerouting Bitty’s attention away from the fact we weren’t getting younger and back to the discussion of death threats. “Maybelle Greer. I hadn’t thought of the possibility it’d be a woman who hated her enough to want to kill her, but present company included, I’m sure there are plenty of women who feel that way.”
    The “present company” lifted her brows, smoothed what was left of her blonde bangs from her forehead, and said, “If it was me I wouldn’t give her any warning. I’d just do it. I wouldn’t run her down with a car, though. Too many possible witnesses.”
    I looked curiously at my homicidal cousin. “How would you kill her, Bitty?”
    “I’d rather shoot her, but it’d have to be under circumstances where I wouldn’t get caught. As you have suggested on numerous occasions, I wouldn’t do well in prison. So I’d probably use poison or some other method where I couldn’t be convicted. Like knock her out and push her car off a cliff. Something that couldn’t be traced or proven in court.”
    We all gazed at Bitty for several moments. She seemed oblivious to our focus and daintily ate another bite of buttermilk pie.
    “Well, we don’t have any cliffs here,” Gaynelle said practically. “Some pretty big hills though. If she’s found at the bottom of one in her car, we’ll all pretend we never heard this.”
    Bitty smiled. “Thank you, Gaynelle.”
    “Okay,” I said, “what’s Maybelle Greer’s grudge against Dixie Lee?”
    “You missed so many good moments in your years traipsing around the country,” said Bitty. “It was right after Dixie Lee’s divorce from her first husband, Nathan Forrest. His daddy claims kinship to General Nathan Bedford Forrest, you know, although I think he just made all that up. Anyway, Dixie Lee and Maybelle had been friends while at that girl’s school down in Blue Mountain, and even after that. So after their divorce, Nathan called Maybelle and asked her out on a date. Well, when Dixie Lee found out about it she had a come-apart like you wouldn’t believe. Maybelle said since they were divorced it should not matter one bit about