Fit to Die

Fit to Die: A Supper Club Mystery
© 2007 by J. B. Stanley.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

First e-book edition © 2010

E-book ISBN: : 9780738716688

Cover design by Ellen Dahl

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

Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites.

Midnight Ink

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.midnightink.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Anne Cunningham Briggs,

A woman of many talents

“The only way to keep your health
is to eat what you don’t want,
drink what you don’t like,
and do what you’d rather not.”

—Mark Twain

“Would you care for an éclair, sir?”

James Henry stared at the attractive, chocolate-covered delight nestled in its crinkled paper cup. He knew he shouldn’t even think of eating the tantalizing pastry. He was supposed to be on a diet. For the last six months he was supposed to have been on a good-carbohydrate, good-fat diet. And at first he was good—almost a saint—but lately, more and more, his cravings for forbidden foods had overpowered him and he had cheated. Just a little bit at first, but as the months went by, he found himself eating something deliciously fattening every day. What began with a slice of pizza once a week had morphed into a jelly donut on the way to work, a small bag of cheese puffs at lunchtime, a tub of buttered popcorn at the movies, or a candy bar during evening television. It was when he began eating the cheese puffs again that James knew his diet had officially become a failure.

All his life, James Henry had had a love affair with cheese puffs. The crunchy, salty, cheesy ambrosia that seemed to be comprised of baked air and that addictive, electric-orange dust drove James to his knees. During the first two months of the diet, in which he was determined to lose weight alongside his new friends and supper club members, James had resolutely passed by the snack food aisle in the grocery store. If he didn’t go anywhere near a bag of cheese puffs, he could resist buying them. He had been so strong and the pounds had come off. Slowly at first, just a few a week, as he had been told was healthy. In two months, he lost more than twelve of the extra fifty-plus pounds he carried on his tall frame and had felt confident and hopeful for the first time in years.

That was back in autumn, though. Then Thanksgiving had come, and Christmas. It was during the holiday season that he and the other members of the supper club, who had humorously dubbed themselves the Flab Five, could be seen sneaking little sugary treats on the sly. “What’s a piece of sweet potato pie here or a little candy cane there?” they reasoned with one another. At their last supper club dinner, Gillian, the barrel-shaped pet groomer with the nest of wild orange hair and garish clothing sense, admitted that she had already gained back half of the weight she had lost over the fall. Now, in March, James Henry, head librarian of the Shenandoah County Library Branch, also ruefully confessed that he had steadily been gaining weight instead of losing it.

Shrugging his shoulders as if to brush off all thoughts of dieting, James finally accepted the éclair from the woman wearing a green apron and an artificial smile. He popped the soft pastry into his mouth and happily exhaled as warm custard oozed onto his tongue. He licked a centimeter-sized smudge of chocolate from his left knuckle and pushed his cart farther up the frozen food aisle. He really had no reason to be walking down this aisle. If he admitted the truth to himself, which he wouldn’t, James would have to acknowledge that the only reason he came over to this side of the store was that it took him closer to the display of jumbo-sized bags of tortilla chips, potato chips, pretzel rods, and of course, cheese puffs.

As head librarian, James made quarterly runs to the discount warehouse in Harrisonburg, Virginia. His purpose was to restock necessary office supplies such as Scotch tape, staples, printer paper, ink cartridges, and the like. The small town of Quincy’s Gap, where James worked, was nestled in a verdant valley beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains and didn’t support a large enough population to have more than one grocery store, let alone a mammoth warehouse store. James had grown up in Quincy’s Gap, so he was accustomed to driving to larger towns like Harrisonburg or Charlottesville for specialty items. And even though James worked a Monday–Friday schedule at the library, he deliberately came to the warehouse during his time off over the weekend in order to partake of the food samples.

Steering a cart the size of a compact car down the wide yet congested aisles of refrigerated food, James paused in front of a shelf containing tubs of chocolate-chip cookie dough before noticing that another green-aproned woman was serving samples of pizza bagels up ahead. James darted forward and immediately stuffed one into his mouth, ignoring the molten tomato sauce, bubbling mozzarella cheese, and the woman’s sales pitch as he greedily pivoted toward the juice sampler station behind him. Tossing back the doll-sized Dixie cup filled with sugary berry juice as if he were doing a shot at a bar, James blotted his purple-stained lips with a napkin and hustled in the direction of what could only be a cart set up to offer samples of chocolate.

A clot of eager customers surrounded this particular sampling station, which was strategically located at the section of the store displaying a contradictory combination of health foods and candies. James pushed his cart into a side aisle and shoved his bulk in front of a small boy, fearing that all the free samples might be given away before he could get his share. Glancing at the stacks of cartons containing sugar-free gum, honey-roasted peanuts, and protein bars in disdain, James elbowed forward until he could see the surface of the white stand being manned by a hassled-looking elderly lady. The poor woman was cutting up squares of chocolate from a slab the size of a shoebox as fast as she could. Shoppers grabbed a square and rapidly returned to their carts, like snakes seeking some privacy in order to properly swallow their prey.

“Hey! You cut!” the boy behind James whined.

Ignoring him, James stretched a long arm through a narrow gap between the hips of two chatting women and snagged a piece of chocolate. As he attempted to retrieve both his limb and what he now saw was a caramel-filled confection, one of the women abruptly turned. Her purse, acting like a thirty-pound pendulum, smacked James roughly in the arm, which he was holding high in the air in order to avoid having his chocolate touched as he reeled it in toward his salivating mouth. He watched in horror as his caramel-chocolate square flew out of his battered hand and above a tower of granola bars. Taking advantage of James’s dismay, the disgruntled boy lunged forward, seized the last square on the tray and melted away into the crowd.

“Damn!” James muttered. He cast a sidelong glance at the old woman with the green apron. “Are you going to cut another piece?” he asked, hating the pathetic tone of his plea, but unable to stop himself from making it.

The woman fixed a pair of angry, blue eyes on him. “Not only am I not going to open a new bar,” she seethed, “but I am going right home to read the paper.”

James was confused. What did reading have to do with sampling chocolates? “The paper?”

“Yes. The classifieds! I’m going to find another job!” the woman squawked. “I’ve never seen such rudeness or gluttony in my whole entire life. And mine hasn’t been a short one, mind you. For Pete’s sake! It’s just a piece of candy. I’m not handing out hundred-dollar bills here!”

James flushed, wondering why he had been fortunate enough to have been the sole recipient of this woman’s tirade. Seeing the combination of an empty tray and a lack of activity on the sampler’s part, most of the other shoppers had dissipated like mist.

“I’m sorry.” James offered a weak apology to the woman. Then, in a final attempt to coerce her into renewing her sampling, he decided to lie. “I don’t know about the rest of these people but I forgot to have breakfast today. Suddenly, that piece of chocolate looked awfully darned good to me. I guess I forgot any sense of manners in the face of hunger.”

The woman eyed him as she untied her apron. “Sonny,” she said, leaning toward James. “That’s a bunch of horse manure and you know it. You don’t look like you’ve ever missed your breakfast, or any other meal for that matter.” And with that, she stomped away.

Indignantly, James reversed his cart, stormed down the main aisle, and practically skidded to a halt in front of the cheese puff display. Just as he was reaching up to pull a bag down from the shelf, he heard a familiar voice.

“James!”

As James swung around, his elbow grazed the cheese doodles display, knocking four or five bags from the shelf. They dropped into his cart with a crinkly plunk. He tried to block the cart with his body as he gave his friend Lindy a guilty smile.

“Who are those for?” she asked in her familiar teasing manner, her large round eyes twinkling in mischief.

“Uh …” James fumbled for an excuse. “Well, I was going to buy one bag, but those others just fell in, I swear.”

“Tsk, tsk.” Lindy waved a finger at him as she simultaneously tried to block his view of her cart.

Lindy was barely over five feet tall, but her round, curvaceous body was wide enough to prevent James from getting a clear look at what his fellow supper club member was trying to hide. As James noted the blush creeping into Lindy’s nougat-colored cheeks, he suddenly stood on his tiptoes and spied that the high school art teacher was preparing to purchase three five-pound bags of mixed candy.

Pink roses bloomed on Lindy’s full cheeks. “They’re just bribes for my students.” She gestured at the bags defensively, swinging a long lock of glossy, black hair over her shoulder in defiance.

James sighed as he took all the bags of cheese puffs out of his cart and replaced them on the shelf. “Well, you caught me out. Not only have I eaten every sample in this place, but I was going to gorge on cheese puffs all the way home.” He looked at the snack display with longing.

“I’ve eaten everything in sight here, too.” Lindy glumly pointed toward the checkout area. “Let’s get out of this place before we get any fatter.”

“Ha! We’re going to lose five pounds before we ever get out of here,” James said, indicating the long lines. Every shopper’s cart seemed to be exploding with stacks of books, cartons holding three-dozen eggs, ten-gallon Tide bottles, steaks the size of footballs, and sixty-four rolls of toilet paper.

James and Lindy pulled into adjoining lines. The woman in front of Lindy had a similar body type to her own, being short and round with large hips and full, heavy breasts. James couldn’t help but notice that the woman’s cart was stuffed with cookie assortments, two cheesecakes, potato chips, ice cream bars, a giant-sized box of Frosted Flakes, rice pudding, and several varieties of candy bars. As James watched with interest, the woman opened the box of Twix bars, pulled out a single candy, and began to struggle with the foil wrapper. The gold packaging, which seemed to be illuminated with an ethereal glow beneath the fluorescent lights, was successfully preventing her from having a tasty treat while waiting in the endless line.

As James and Lindy stared, the woman tugged at the wrapper, grunting with exertion. She even put it down for a moment, then wiped her hands on her purple floral dress, and tried again. Just as her line moved forward, she was able to rip the stubborn wrapper apart, sending one of the chocolate and caramel-covered Twix bars soaring through the air and into the cart of a stick-thin brunette dressed in workout clothes standing in front of her.

Lindy’s eyes grew large as she, and everyone waiting in line around the Twix Lady, ogled the brunette as she fished the candy bar out of her cart. The brunette’s mouth compressed into a thin-lined smile as she turned around and looked appraisingly at the plump woman behind her.

“I’m so sorry!” Twix Lady gushed, holding out a pudgy hand in order to retrieve the offensive snack. If she was expecting to have her piece of candy returned however, she was to be disappointed.

“I’d rather stab myself in the heart than give you this”—the brunette eyed the candy as if it were a piece of dung—“disgustingly unhealthy, chemical-filled piece of trash! Darlin’,” she cooed as if talking to a baby, “you don’t really want this back.”

Twix Lady put her hand over her heart in shock. James and Lindy looked at one another with wide eyes. As the cashier waved James forward and he scurried around the other side of his cart so that he could unload it, he now found himself standing parallel to the brunette.