Read You Can't Get Blood Out of Shag Carpet: A Study Club Cozy Murder Mystery (The Study Club Mysteries Book 1) for Free Online Page B

had to put on her sunglasses to cut the glare from those rocks. Where in the Sam Hill is Tinker Temple getting the money to pay for all that stuff? He’s not selling that many toilets.”
    “He might be,” Clara said. “We had to pay him to come out to the ranch and clean out the septic tank a few weeks ago, and Clint almost had a heart attack when he paid the bill. Tinker told him if he didn’t like the prices, he could hire somebody to drive up from Kerrville. It was all I could do to talk Clint out of going back to us having an outhouse.”
    “Nobody is disputing that Tinker’s prices are higher than a cat’s back,” Mae Ella said, “but that tight little peckerwood wouldn’t give two cents to his own mama if he could get out of it. What’s he doing spending all that money?”
    “Well,” Sugar said, “maybe I can get us an answer on that one. Bitsy has an appointment to get a permanent tomorrow. I can get more out of a woman over a bottle of permanent wave solution than a bartender with a fifth of tequila.”
    “Good,” Clara said, “you see what you kind find out from Bitsy. And I think I’ll talk to Mike Thornton about that problem I’m having with my tomatoes.”
    “What problem?” Mae Ella asked. “You brought me two bushels of the dern things on Monday. You could feed Coxey’s Army with this year’s crop.”
    “Sister,” Clara said, “you’re not going to make a very good detective if you can’t come up with stories to hide why you’re asking folks questions. You know I’m raising a bumper crop, but Mike doesn’t know it. I’m sure he’s got some highly scientific theory about blight or wilt or something he’s just dying to share, like organic farming techniques.”
    “What are you gonna do?” Mae Ella asked. “Come right out and ask him what kind of fertilizer he’s using on his marijuana plants?”
    “Well, now,” Clara said. “Don’t put it past me.”
    “You don’t really think that Mike Thornton would have killed Hilton over a few pot plants, do you?” Wilma asked. “I mean seriously, it’s not like that stuff hasn’t been around for years. My granddaddy was addicted to opium; that’s a lot worse than smoking a joint.”
    “It was laudanum with our granddaddy,” Clara said. “Claimed it eased his consumption. I’m not judging what somebody does to get through life, Wilma. And, no, I don’t think Mike is a murderer. But what if he’s selling that stuff to somebody else?”
    “You mean supplying a drug dealer?” Wilma asked. “Out here in the middle of nowhere?”
    “This is 1968,” Clara said. “Drugs are everywhere. Didn’t you see that report on ABC about LSD?”
    “That’s a whole lot different than marijuana, Clara,” Wilma said. “That kind of thing is going on back East with that Timothy Leary guy and out in San Francisco in Haight-Ashbury. Not in the middle of Texas.”
    “What difference does that make?” Mae Ella huffed. “It’s all those hippies and draft dodgers and flower people and such. If it weren’t for those awful beards, you couldn’t tell the boys from the girls. I’m telling you, this world is headed straight to hell in a handbasket.”
    “They’re just young kids who don’t want to go die in a war,” Wilma said. “I understand that, Mae Ella. I don’t agree with how they’re going about it, but this thing over there in Vietnam, it’s not like World War II or Korea.”
    “Wilma Schneider, are you trying to tell me . . .”
    Clara interrupted her sister. “Stop it, Mae Ella. Wilma’s seen things we haven’t. There’s no getting around the fact that Mike Thornton is doing something illegal and Hilton probably knew about it. If pot is all Mike’s got to hide, then he shouldn’t mind answering a few questions.”
     

Chapter 6
     
    Sugar Watson ruled over the Style and Spray with an imperious manner in keeping with the beauty parlor’s status as a local institution. Every morning when she came to work, just