Death in Mercy: Lily Gayle Lambert Mystery, #0.5

By Susan Boles

I'm Lily Gayle Lambert and I've just come back to my hometown of Mercy, Mississippi. I get re-involved with all of the folks in my life from before including my bestie, Dixie. We're working together to set up the annual St. Patrick's day party when I stumble into my very first crime case. It doesn't look good for Miss Edna....or my old friend Missy Elliott.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Argent Ocean Publishing
• Release date: Apr 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780999386811

Susan Boles

Susan Boles is the USA Today and Wall Street Journal Bestselling author of romance, historical fiction and cozy mysteries. She lives in North Mississippi with her rescue mini dachshund, Lucy.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

I’d only been back in Mercy a few months and in small towns some things never change.

Except my life. I’d come back home, almost kicking and screaming, at the insistence of my best friend, Dixie. She’d come to Nashville when I stopped answering my phone, replying to texts and generally disappeared from contact with anyone. She’d dragged me out of the isolation I’d lived in after my husband died in a traffic accident.

Thank goodness for good friends.

I shook off the memories. I had a mission right now. And it wasn’t one I was looking forward to.

Easing my bicycle to a stop outside Miss Edna’s big Victorian house on the town square, I blew on my chilled hands wishing I’d had the good sense to wear a pair of gloves. True to form, Mother Nature was being coy about the weather in North Mississippi.

Mid-March meant nothing to her.

Yesterday it’d been seventy degrees. Today it was fifty and the wind generated from riding my bicycle two miles from my house outside town had turned my knuckles red and stiffened my hands. I blew on them some more and flexed them carefully trying to get some feeling back in them.

In a weak moment, I’d agreed to chair the annual St. Patrick’s Day Party and now I had to deal with Miss Edna—aka the town busy body. She’d deny it while she had breath in her body, but the rest of us knew it was the truth.

So here I stood in the blustery wind, wasting time and delaying my meeting with the old woman about the Luck of the Irish party next week. Who’d let her on the committee was still a mystery. No one would own up to it. Bunch of cowards. And, in all honesty, I figured she’d intimidated someone into it who was too scared – or embarrassed—to admit it.

I knew Miss Edna would be no help at all in the actual decorating as she’s eighty years old and uses a walker, but she did like to express her opinion about everyone else’s ideas for the party. I needed to go over the final details with her before Dixie and I went up to Memphis to buy anything we didn’t already have in storage from parties in years past.

Dixie was driving us because I hadn’t been able to bring myself to drive since my husband’s accident, and, as the wind gusted again, chilling me even more, I cursed my inability. My counselor had told me it was my mind’s way of dealing with the accident and that I would drive again when I was ready. But, it sure was a big inconvenience in cold weather if I didn’t have a ride in a nice warm car with a friend.

As I was contemplating the mysteries of the human mind, Miss Edna’s front door opened, and a man stepped out. Closely followed by Miss Edna.

Well. Well. Well.

A man coming out of Miss Edna’s house wasn’t totally unheard of – as long as it was the husband of someone she knew, who’d been sent by his wife, usually against his will, on a mission to make sure Miss Edna was taken care of. However, this occasion was unprecedented.

I didn’t recognize the man. And I know everyone in Mercy, Mississippi by sight – and most of the ones in the surrounding county, too. Not much changes over the years in small towns like this one. And there hadn’t been any reports of newcomers to the area. Mostly just the younger generation growing up and moving away to big cities to attend college and find higher paying jobs than they could in Mercy.

A murmur of voices pulled me from my distracting thoughts and directed my attention back to the big front porch. This man dressed like Cary Grant in one of the old black and white movies I love so much. Dark suit, white shirt and even a fedora. But this guy’s hair was white as snow rather than black like Cary’s.

The stranger had all of my instincts pinging. Whether it was in warning or not remained to be seen. Miss Edna’s a spinster in the old-fashioned sense of the word. She never married. And, well, she’s eighty. She couldn’t fend off a small child, much less a grown man. Even if he did have white hair and appeared to be around her same age.

Before my thoughts led me further astray, the man bent low over Miss Edna’s hand and kissed it. My eyes dang near popped out of my head. Before I could wrap my brain around what I’d just witnessed, he’d come down the steps, tipped his hat to me and strode off down the sidewalk.

I cut my eyes hard right to watch him without turning my head. He got into an older model white Cadillac parked in front of the newspaper office a block away and drove off.

Realizing my mouth was hanging open in a most unladylike way, I clamped it closed and looked back to the porch. Miss Edna had disappeared inside the house while I’d been busy watching her departing visitor. Knowing her, she’d locked the door behind her. Even though she couldn’t’ve missed me standing on the curb right