Buried In Buttercream

serious beatin’ doing such a thing to her husband, let alone to an innocent child!”
    “Yes,” Savannah said. “And when she and Reuben called Ethan, who was in Vegas, and told him what little Elizabeth had said, he was livid ... as you can well imagine.”
    Dirk took a swig of his root beer, which he was drinking instead of his regular beer, out of respect for teetotalist Granny. “I have to tell you,” he said. “I’d want to kill somebody over a thing like that, too. I probably wouldn’t have, but I would’ve wanted to.”
    Tammy looked at the grill to see how her lone veggie burger was faring on the fire. “Can you imagine the damage that would have done to that child if she’d taken her mother’s bribe and made that terrible accusation ... before she was even old enough to understand the gravity of it?”
    “But the father of the child, that Ethan fella, he didn’t kill her,” Gran said. “How come it wound up being the grandmother?”
    “Apparently, Ethan told his father that he had set up a false alibi to cover his tracks and was going to fly home, murder her, and fly back to Vegas on the same day, and Reuben talked him out of it. Reuben told Ethan that, as the husband, the cops would automatically suspect him. So he’d do it for him.”
    “But Reuben didn’t do it,” Waycross said as he adjusted the burgers.
    “He was going to,” Savannah said. “He had planned to lure her someplace and kill her. But the morning of the murder, Geraldine overheard Reuben telling Ethan his plan—that he was going to do it that night. She was afraid for Reuben. He has a bad heart, and she was sure that if he went through with it, the act of actually murdering someone would cause him to have another heart attack.”
    “And that’s when she decided to do it herself?” Gran asked.
    Savannah moved to avoid the smoke that was getting into her eyes. “She said she was wrestling with it that morning. She knew Madeline was stuck at the country club with us, because Madeline had called her and asked her to pick up Elizabeth from her girlfriend’s house. Geraldine was wondering how to do it, what sort of weapon she’d use ... and that’s when the package arrived.”
    “That’s right,” Tammy piped up. “You see, she was the one who’d gone into that weird store and bought that trocar thing for her son’s birthday, to add to his collection. She’d used her husband’s credit card, which threw us off and made us think it was him. And since she was driving a bunch of Elizabeth’s friends to a birthday party right afterward, she asked them to send it to her house.”
    “Yes, I guess that’d be hard to explain to the kiddos, if they found something like that in the car,” Dirk said.
    Savannah nodded. “Exactly. And there she was at the house that day, thinking about how to kill her daughter-in-law from hell. And the delivery man drops off that thing.”
    Waycross looked at Tammy, beaming with pride. “And Tammy here was looking over the copy of the receipt that we got from the guy there at The White Rose. She saw that there was a shipping charge on it. So, she got to checking, and she was able to get the tracking information for the package, and she saw that a woman had signed for it, not a man.”
    “And that,” Dirk told Granny, “is what Savannah told the woman that made her confess.”
    “Naw,” Savannah said. “She was going to anyway. She wasn’t going to let her husband go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit.”
    “So, let me get this straight.” Granny waved away some smoke that was drifting toward her. “The son was going to do it. But the father said he’d do it for him. But before he got a chance to, the wife did it for them both.”
    “That’s right,” Savannah said.
    “Well, I admire their devotion to their family,” Granny said. “Can’t say it’s ever right to take a life like that though.”
    “And,” Tammy added, “now little Elizabeth doesn’t have a mother or a grandmother.”
    “Her father’s a decent guy,” Savannah said. “Even if he is a little obsessed with the macabre.”
    Dirk sniffed. “I hope her father’s strange hobby doesn’t influence her too much. She could end up like Jesup.”
    They all turned and looked at the gal under the tree, glued to her magazine, oblivious to the world around her. She was running her fingers through her heavily gelled hair. As they watched, she absentmindedly began to tug on first one tuft and then the