Love Can Be Murder

Other facilitators in the organization who worked in tandem were often hundreds of miles apart, communicating in as streamlined a manner as possible. The women she helped she never saw again. It was the perfect pursuit for a loner.
    But lonely.
    Leaving town for a few days might throw Capistrano off her scent for a while. Or maybe it was time she moved again, although she rather liked Biloxi and had even fancied living here for a while. Make friends, look for a permanent job—something more challenging than waitressing or retail or temp work. She'd even painted her bedroom, a first. The thought of moving again put a stone in her stomach she'd never felt before. Loading all her worldly possessions onto a U-Haul trailer and looking for a new place to live had seemed so romantic in her twenties. Now she fretted about finding a new gynecologist and if the neighbors had a noisy pet.
    Wrestling with her decision to take a roadtrip, she stopped at her post office box to retrieve a week's worth of mail. Bills, junk mail, two Notre Dame University alumni newsletters, both dated and forwarded many times, and—she squinted at the thick ivory-colored envelope and held it up to the light. A wedding invitation?
    Very curious, considering most of the women she knew were trying to escape marriage.

Chapter Three

    THE INVITATION ORIGINALLY had been sent to her post office box in Atlanta, then forwarded to the one in Montgomery before being forwarded on to Biloxi. The return address, written in black slanting script by a calligrapher, read "Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Ryder, One Portobello Place, Baton Rouge, Louisiana." Her address, oddly, had been scribbled in blue ink in a different, and less princely, handwriting that seemed vaguely familiar.
    Roxann smirked. Her cousin Angora was finally getting married? It seemed likely since she was the only child of Jackson Ryder and Dixie Beadleman, Roxann's father's sister. Of course when Dixie had caught the eye of the Jackson Ryder, heir to the Ryder Hotel empire, she'd shortened her name to Dee. More fashionable, and more appropriate, considering all the wonderfully wicked D names Roxann had made up for her.
    She slid her nail under the flap of the grubby envelope—a little worse for the rounds—and pulled out the origami-like invitation. Impressive. Extensive. Expensive.
    Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Ryder request the honor of your presence as their daughter, Angora Michele, is united in marriage to Dr. Trenton Robert Coughlin...
    Leave it to Angora to snag a doctor. A little late, considering she was approaching thirty-two, but Roxann assumed the man was just getting his career underway. By now Angora would be the perfectly schooled society wife. She'd been born to it, the upper-class life. Unlike Aunt Dee, who'd had to finesse her way into the Baton Rouge Junior League, Angora was groomed from toddlerhood to look and behave like a white-gloved debutante. When they were in college together, though, even the sweater-wearing tennis players preferred the girls who put out, so Angora and her lily-white virtue had gone ignored. The debs who wised up were engaged by graduation, but Angora had clung to her virginity.
    Roxann shook her head. The girl could never please her parents, no matter how hard she tried. Born pretty, and made beautiful through braces, jaw surgery, and rhinoplasty—all before the age of fourteen—she'd had the self-esteem of a leper. True, Angora wasn't the sharpest pencil in the drawer, but she wasn't a bad person. Infuriatingly feminine and a bit of a fibber, but not a bad person.
    Their parents, Roxann's father and Angora's mother, hated each other. Well, maybe hate was too strong a word for brother and sister, but they certainly maintained a resilient aversion to one another. Walt Beadleman thought his sister had gotten above her raising, and Dee thought her brother was a clodhopper. (During a rare visit when Roxann had overheard her aunt say as much to a neighbor, she'd evened the score by peeing in Dee's bottle of Chanel No. 5.)
    Proximity and class distinction had effectively separated the girls until they were seniors in high school. Roxann had been working part-time in an upscale dress shop, and in marched Dee followed by Angora, shopping for a graduation dress. Dee had proceeded to trot Roxann from rack to dressing room for two hours before buying a dress worth what Roxann earned as a shop girl for an entire year. In between fittings, however, she discovered that she