Stiffs and Swine

Stiffs and Swine: A Supper Club Mystery
© 2008 by J. B. Stanley

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First e-book edition © 2010

E-book ISBN: 9780738720425

Book design by Donna Burch

Cover design by Ellen Dahl

Cover illustration © 2008 Linda Holt Ayriss / Susan and Co.

Interior illustrations by Llewellyn art department

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For my brothers, Mead and John

(and to Porkfest—may it live on in infamy)

The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.

—Julia Child

James Henry, head
librarian of the Shenandoah County Library system, counted out five quarters. He hoped to use the vacuum at the self-service car wash to rid his aged white Bronco of the sand that had accumulated on the floor mats during his vacation at Virginia Beach. There had been a thunderstorm on the last afternoon of his trip, and the sand that had been dampened and clumped into the mats’ grids had the consistency of a bowl of grits.

As he grumbled over the exorbitant cost of five minutes’ worth of vacuuming time, James removed the snakelike hose from the tin base, slid the quarters into the slot, and expectantly waited for the vacuum to roar to life. When it remained silent, he jammed his index finger on the return change button and was given nothing for his effort. He assaulted the button, pushing vigorously, but the machine refused to relinquish a single quarter.

Now, irritated and sweaty, he draped the vacuum hose in a sloppy coil back onto its steel hook and approached the dollar-bill changer. His wallet, which was stuffed with slips of paper bearing the names of books he wanted to read, only contained a ten and two singles. The first single had a fleabite on its top left-hand corner that was approximately three millimeters in size, and the machine spit it out like a child rejecting a forkful of Brussels sprouts.

The second single must have passed through the hands of an origami artist. It appeared to have been folded horizontally and vertically, balled into a monetary knot, and stained by coin dust and dirty fingers before James received it in change from a gas station outside of Norfolk. In addition to the worn paper, the bill had been decorated with a woman’s name written in bubbly letters, a drawing of cartoon lips, and a series of
x
’s and
o
’s. The bill changer began refusing the dollar the second James placed its edge inside the machine. He tried again. The machine ejected the bill so rapidly that it fluttered to the ground before James could catch it.

“Look here, you!” He pointed a threatening finger at the machine and made one last attempt to straighten out the dollar’s kinks against the lip of the bill changer. Taking a deep breath, he whispered, “Just take it. Take the damn dollar.” He pushed the bill in. The machine pushed it out. In. Out. In. Out.

“Damn it!” James hit the bill changer with the palm of his hand and then stuffed the dollar back inside his wallet.

“You don’t look very relaxed for a man fresh back from a week at the beach,” an amused voice said from the interior of a sheriff’s department cruiser. “Am I going to have to run you in for property damage?”

James smiled, delighted to see the lovely face of his friend, Lucy Hanover. As usual, her beautiful skin radiated good health, and her large, cornflower-blue eyes sparkled with good humor. Her caramel hair was pulled into a tight French twist, and the sophisticated hairstyle allowed James to gape over how thin Lucy’s face had become since the beginning of the summer.

“Have you lost more weight?” he asked her. “Your face . . .”

She nodded. “I’m doing a protein diet right now. It’s really helped me get toned, and I’m not hungry on it. Maybe the rest of the supper club should give it a try.” She examined herself in the rearview mirror. “I think gorging on all that Mexican food over the winter may not have been the best idea for a dieting group. Between the enchiladas and the donuts at the station all spring, this summer has been all about being disciplined.”

“Those enchiladas tasted good going down,” James said as he eyed her uniform, which consisted of beige pants and a chocolate-brown shirt bearing the embroidered shield just below the shoulder. He took a step closer to the brown cruiser, noting how bright the yellow star painted on the driver’s door appeared against the dark background, and peered into the window at the gun belt strapped around Lucy’s waist.

“Wow!” He looked her over, unaware that his blatant observation of her trimmer figure could be perceived as too forward or even downright rude. Luckily for James, Lucy was too flattered by his attention to be offended.

“It’s been awhile since we’ve all been together,” she said, clearly pleased to be the source of James’s admiration. She turned off the car engine and relaxed in her seat. “I’m excited about getting back to our regular dinner meetings tomorrow night.”

“Me too,” James replied. “I can’t believe how busy we’ve all been. I guess we all needed a change of scenery. Every one of us has been out of town—just on different weekends.”

“Speaking of gettin’ out of Dodge, how
was
the beach?” Lucy’s tone was purely conversational, but the brief blaze that entered her eyes warned James that a full interrogation was imminent. When he hesitated, she quickly added, “Did Murphy go with you?”

Here it was: the moment James had dreaded for over five months. He was finally going to have to tell Lucy that Murphy Alistair, editor and reporter of the
Shenandoah Star Ledger
, was officially his girlfriend. The supper club members knew that they had been dating, but James had never made it clear that they were serious enough a couple to take a vacation together.

In truth, James had had a wonderful spring with Murphy. They went to the movies, local plays, music shows, and a slew of events all over the Valley so that Murphy could glean material for her articles. When they weren’t hiding away in a mountain inn or browsing antique shops or farmers’ markets, they were at work. They rarely spoke on the phone during the day, but after James left the library, he often went straight to Murphy’s. In her neat and tasteful apartment, they shared delicious meals and then made love with the windows open. Soft music swirled through her bedroom, and the stars perched so low in the summer sky that James felt as though they were in danger of being blown away by the fan rotating on the sill.

The only odd thing about their time together was that Murphy preferred that James not spend the entire night with her. She was working on a book, she had told him enigmatically, and did her best writing late at night. When he asked what it was about, she told him it was a work of fiction and that she’d tell him all about it once it was finished. James knew that many people had aspirations to write a book but found that their dreams never materialized into reality, so he didn’t take Murphy’s claim about being a novelist too seriously. Still, he respected her desire to give it a shot, and so he sneaked back home before midnight, feeling much younger than his years as he crept up the squeaky stairs to his bedroom.

All in all, James and Murphy had shared five blissful months together. And to James, the best part was that they never, ever argued.

That is, until Murphy arrived at the beach to spend the Fourth of July weekend with him.

James had been alone for the first four days of his vacation week. Because of the multitude of responsibilities required to operate a daily newspaper, Murphy could only take a few days off work. And though James happily anticipated her appearance on Friday, he was utterly content at the beach without company. He slept late, took leisurely strolls, and let the days slip by as he read book after book and drank giant cups of iced coffee.

Though he hadn’t been aware of it until he left Quincy’s Gap behind, James had desperately felt in need of some downtime. After all, he and his supper club friends had become embroiled in yet another murder case over the winter, and his relationship with Lucy Hanover had not taken the romantic turn he had once hoped it would. Instead, Lucy had fallen head over heels for a hunky aspiring sheriff’s deputy and dropped James like a rock. And even though Lucy later regretted her decision to chase after the handsome deputy, James rejected her appeals to give their relationship another try. It was too late anyway, as James was already involved with Murphy.

In addition to hunting down a murderer and coping with romantic upheaval, James’s home had undergone a major kitchen and bathroom makeover. The house and yard had been a mess, and Jackson Henry, James’s father, had hired an assistant. Together, the pair of them had banged and clattered well before six each morning. Exhausted, James was almost grateful that Jackson had reverted to his hermitlike lifestyle in order to produce new paintings to be sold from a famed D.C. gallery. His temperamental parent locked himself in his shed for hours every day, only surfacing for meals or to receive visits from Milla, the owner of Fix ’n Freeze, a company revolving around cooking classes and small-scale catering.

Milla had become such a regular fixture in the Henry home that James often wondered if she would close her business in New Market and conduct her classes from the Henry’s cozy kitchen instead. Not that James was complaining, but after an entire spring of Milla’s fantastic cooking, he had packed on at least ten of the twenty-plus pounds he had lost the year before.

Still, Murphy didn’t seem to mind the expansion of doughy flesh that had appeared around James’s middle, and he was grateful that she didn’t complain about his preference to make love with the lights off. Recently, however, it seemed to be the only thing she didn’t complain about. During their three days together at the beach, Murphy had been bossy and sulky, and had displayed an irrational jealousy every time a pretty girl walked by them on the beach.

“Are you done staring at that girl?” Murphy had barked when an attractive young woman wearing a pink bikini and matching pink headband sauntered past them during the first afternoon of Murphy’s arrival.

“I was just looking at her tattoo,” James had responded honestly. “She just seemed too preppy to have the lyrics of one of those gangster rap songs tattooed across her shoulder blade.”

Murphy had scowled. “You checked her out long enough to see whether the tattoo artist had spelled everything correctly, that’s for sure!”

“Isn’t people-watching part of the beach experience?” James had said, trying to placate his girlfriend. “You know, making comments on people’s suits, their sunburns, tattoos, cute kids?”

Ignoring him, Murphy had strode down to the water and, garnering plenty of stares for her own trim body and sun-streaked hair, dove into the Atlantic and begun to swim away from the shore with such confident strokes that it seemed as though she never planned to return.

After their tiff at the beach, Murphy had nagged James for allowing his hotel room to become untidy and demanded that he reduce the level of air conditioning. Once he had straightened the room and set the temperature gauge to her satisfaction, she insisted on sitting on the balcony and planning every second of their next two days.

“Can’t we just relax and do things as we feel like it?” James didn’t like to follow a schedule when he was on vacation. “If we run around and check off everything you’ve got listed here, we’ll be exhausted!”

“Well, I want to visit the lighthouse
and
rent jet skis.” Murphy had tossed some brochures onto the table. “And I haven’t been to the battleship
Wisconsin
in years. I’m going to write a couple of travel articles on the Norfolk area while I’m here. I’ve been so busy editing my manu—” She had halted abruptly and then pointed at him. “You’re a guy, you should like military history.”

James had bristled. He liked all kinds of history, but would rather read about it on the beach than traipse around a battleship beneath a blazing August sun alongside hundreds of other perspiring tourists. Eventually, Murphy wore him down and he agreed to spend Saturday and Sunday as she saw fit, but he didn’t enjoy himself, and there had been nothing romantic about their time together.

“Guess we’re not quite ready to buy a house with a picket fence and have an army of kids,” Murphy had joked at the end of their weekend, but James saw no humor in their situation. They had bickered and snapped at one another too many times in such a short interval, and James spent the entire drive home wondering whether he and Murphy were as compatible as he had once believed. She had suddenly become jealous, controlling, and insecure, but he had no idea why.