Readers’ Revenge: A Book Group Novel

By Susan Reilly

Sarah and Ellen are best friends and members of the woman’s book group in their remote, Maine coastal town peopled with the elderly and the eccentric. The book group’s members are no exception, but aging doesn’t slow them down and eccentricity helps when they decide to bump off Widower George. His budding romance with their most luckless-in-love member sets the group in action.

Join the book group in their amusing discussions of books, relationships, food, fairy tales, and who knows what else. And share Sarah’s and Ellen’s observations of the expansive natural and much smaller human world in which they live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Reilly
• Release date: Dec 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311294098

Book preview

Readers’ Revenge:

A Book Group Novel

Susan Reilly

Readers’ Revenge: A Book Group Novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright Susan Reilly 2014

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition – 2014

Cover art and design by Susie Westly Wren Copyright 2014

Digital design by A Thirsty Mind Book Design

Dedicated to the memory of my beloved sister Sally

Table of Contents

Woman’s Book Group

Chapter 1 – Parade Grounds

Chapter 2 – Flapping Sole

Chapter 3 – Big Brother

Chapter 4 – The Meeting

Chapter 5 – Starlight

Chapter 6 – August

Chapter 7 – Potluck

Chapter 8 – In the Bog

Chapter 9 – Fall Chores

Chapter 10 – Ghosts

Chapter 11 – Fungi

Chapter 12 – Arts Avoided

Chapter 13 – Woods Work

Chapter 14 – Failed Food

Chapter 15 – Christmas Fair

Chapter 16 – Poetry and Peace

Chapter 17 – Plow Guy—and Gal

Chapter 18 – Bone-chilling

Chapter 19 – Ice Cream and Ice

Chapter 20 – Second Chance Day

Chapter 21 – In the Witch’s Kitchen

Chapter 22 – The Cats of March

Chapter 23 – Lily

About the Author

Woman’s Book Group:

Schedule of Hostessing

July: Dorothy. Head Librarian and a quiet power in the group. Partnered with Gerald, artist non-extraordinaire.

August: Regularly scheduled off-month.

September: Betty. Founder and leader of the group. Best friends with Jeanette. Married to Mark, with whom she runs a local inn.

October: Miranda. Director of a community theatre group. Married to Edward, whom she lets think runs their B&B.

November: Fran. A retired teacher with a sharp mind, and sharper tongue.

December: Clarice. Grows flowers and herbs. A beauty, she finished with boyfriends when they finished work on her house.

January: Audrey. Looks like Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother. Has an avid interest in sex.

February: Sarah. Lives alone with her two cats. Best friends with Ellen.

March: Ellen. Makes sculptures from found objects. Is married to Mike.

April: Peggy. Oldest member of the group and close friends with Sarah. Run a real estate business with her husband James.

May: Lily. A dance teacher. Has had bad luck with men, but remains soft-hearted toward them.

Chapter 1

Parade Grounds

Hell’s bells! The parade’s cancelled! Sarah re-read the e-mail, picked up her mug of herbal tea, and went back into the kitchen, where her cats were eating their breakfast. George says the parade would be ‘inappropriate’! Inappropriate! The cats looked up as Sarah made air quotes around the last word.

Not that it was to have been a big parade. A tiny parade really. To mark Jeanette’s last birthday. She was dying of cancer. The first member of their book group to be leaving their ranks eternally. Later that morning, the book group was going to march past Jeanette’s house. No floats. Silly hats. Balloons. Kazoos. And a banner wishing Jeanette a Happy Birthday. But not now. Her husband George had seen to that.

Sarah looked at the clock. A few minutes to go till 8:00 am, the accepted earliest time for making phone calls in their town, where folks often talked about switching to Atlantic Time. A few miles from Sarah’s house, out next to their quintessentially Maine lighthouse, stood the town’s claim to fame: a granite marker designating the Easternmost point in the continental United States. Farthest east. Farthest reach of the Eastern Time Zone. A few miles in the other direction, across a 200 yard long bridge from the village proper, was Campobello Island, Canada. On Atlantic Time.

Miranda, who ran a B&B with her husband, always joked about the guests who would tell her the B&B’s clocks were on the wrong time. The tourists relying on cell phones for the time didn’t realize, though Miranda did tell them, that their calls got bounced off a Canadian tower and so their cell phone time was Atlantic Time. As Miranda would exclaim at book group Did they really think I went around my house and set all my clocks on the wrong time? Though Sarah never said, she always thought Miranda was capable of doing just that, if she had a mind to.

Sarah took a sip of her tea and lit a cigarette. The tea had come from leaves she’d picked that morning from the lemon balm plant coming up strong now in this stretch of mild, mid-June days. Sarah enjoyed the tea and the cigarette equally, letting what she saw as the benefits of the former assuage her guilt over indulging in the latter. At least, she thought, our nation’s health obsession had turned away from smoking to obesity. Sarah wasn’t fat.

8:00 am. She dialed Betty’s number. Busy. Betty was the founder and leader of their book group and Jeanette’s best friend. Sarah knew Betty had one of those phones that let’s you see who’s called even if you don’t pick up so she waited. She put the cats’ breakfast dishes into the sink and went outside to hang up the birdfeeders, which she brought in every night so the bears and raccoons wouldn’t get them. Feeding the birds was something Sarah had done ever since she’d been on her own. An act which connected her to her Dad, who’d done the same thing for all of his life. Good man, her Dad.

The phone rang. It was Betty. You got the e-mail? she asked.

Yes, but what’s going on? It’s not Jeanette, is it?

No, no, Jeanette’s fine. Well, not fine, but not any worse. I saw her yesterday evening and she was looking forward to the parade. She thought she’d be well enough for me to wheel her out onto the front porch so she could see you all. You know, no one was going to come in or anything. Just march up to the house, stop, sing Happy Birthday, and march off. Only a couple minutes.

So why did George cancel it?

I have no idea really. You’ve heard how he’s been. Threw me out of the house and said I couldn’t come back.

Someone told me that. What on earth happened?

I was getting ready to leave after giving Jeanette breakfast one morning a few weeks ago. I was downstairs waiting for George to come down so I’d know Jeanette wasn’t alone when I left. Andy came up the porch to deliver the mail, and since I was right there, I opened the door, and he handed the mail to me. George came down just then and accused me of going through their mail! He told me not to come back, ever.

What did you do?

I waited a couple days and then called. He answered and acted like nothing had happened. Besides, he needed me to show him how to run the dishwasher. So I went back but I’ve been walking on eggs ever since, trying to stay on his good side, if he has one.

So the parade?

I’m guessing he told some of the ladies at the church about it and they disapproved and George being George didn’t want to do anything that might meet with disapproval from the church ladies. Anyway, he was very clear: no parade.

Poor Jeanette. To have something you’re looking forward to taken away, especially now. Maybe we can think of something else to do.

Maybe, but no parade. We’ll talk later. I gotta go now.

And they hung up.

The cats had moved off into the living room to take their morning snooze in the sun in front of the sliders. Sarah paced the kitchen floor, fuming. Though over what precisely, she wasn’t sure. The cancelled parade yes. But she and Jeanette weren’t close friends; the book group they both belonged to was really made up of small circles of close friends circumscribed by the circle of the larger group. And she knew George only enough to recognize him and say hello when she saw him around town. Husbands got mentioned in their all-women book group only rarely. Though Sarah did recall Jeanette once announcing to the group that George had decided to take up a hobby. He’d decided to become a Boston Patriots’ fan. Jeanette and the entire group had had a good laugh over that. Golf is a hobby. Building boats in bottles is a hobby. Being a Boston Patriots’ fan, not so much. But apparently George had started studying the history of the team and learning statistics and following the trades and the games. All from the comfort of his study. He never went to a game.

None of that was what had Sarah riled up. What angered her was what had been coming out in these past months about the way George had treated Jeanette all these years. Nothing abusive, but plenty that was thoughtless, petty, and domineering. A cowardly meanness. That was it, Sarah thought. A low-level, persistent meanness that wears another person down, and no one ever knows, no one ever does anything about it. Well, that might change. There’d be plenty to talk about when the group met next week.

Chapter 2

Flapping Sole

But the group didn’t meet the next week. Jeanette had taken a turn for the worse, and a week after that she was gone. Now Sarah was standing in front of her closet trying to figure out what to wear to the funeral that was in a few hours.

In Sarah’s memory, it seemed her parents had always had their funeral clothes at the ready. But then they were church-goers so funeral clothes meant Sunday church clothes, and those they did always have cleaned, pressed, and ready. None of the members of the book group were church-goers. Sarah wondered if that was why her generation seemed less adept at funerals. She picked out a non-jeans pair of pants, a long-sleeved, white blouse, and a crocheted vest to wear. Not as formal as what her parents would’ve worn, but acceptable by today’s standards.

Sarah’s best friend Ellen, and her husband Mike, came by to pick Sarah up.

My clothes don’t smell like mold, do they? I pulled them out of the attic and it’s all musty up there, Ellen said. Sarah sniffed. They’re fine. And you look very nice, Mike

I’m worried about these damn shoes. I haven’t worn them in so long I’d forgotten the sole on the right one is flapping loose.

"There’s still time. Why don’t