The Good Girl's Guide to Murder Read Online Free Page B

added.
    Besides, unless I acquiesced, she would continue to torture me with tales of oft’-married, heir-bearing school “chums” with whom I’d purposely lost touch.
    “I’d be pleased as punch.” Her Cheshire-cat grin beamed across the table. She looked so damned self-assured that I knew she’d never doubted for an instant that I’d crumble under pressure. It was how things worked between us, more often than I wanted to admit.
    And so it went.
    That lunch was two weeks ago and as fresh in my mind as this morning’s breakfast. (A wheat bagel and low-fat cream cheese.)
    I scratched an itchy spot on my elbow, thinking maybe, if I did have hives, I could get out of this mess and stay home this evening, curled up with a pizza and Brian Malone.
    Though I sensed that Cissy would drag me to Marilee’s studio covered in calamine if she had to. It was embarrassing how easily Mother could manipulate me when it suited her, despite my best efforts.
    I stared at the invitation to Marilee’s party, stuck with a magnet to my refrigerator door. The elaborate creation of calligraphy, tissue paper, and handmade parchment looked out of place beside my grocery list and menus from Take-Out Taxi.
    “Sucker,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Chicken.”
    Telling my mother, “no,” was a Herculean task. One I seemed to fail at, time and again, no matter what else I accomplished.
    Though I knew I shouldn’t be too hard on myself.
    Cissy Blevins Kendricks wasn’t the queen bee of Dallas society for nothing. The woman could make Ebenezer Scrooge open up his rusty lockbox for one of her many worthy causes. If ever the U.S. government could bottle her powers of persuasion, it would eliminate the need for tanks and bombs and still cause plenty of “shock and awe.”
    “The gal’s got it,” as my father used to say.
    And now she’d “got” me yet again, doing a job that I wasn’t so keen on doing—attending a party I’d rather skip—because I couldn’t turn her down.
    Oh, and I was already suffering the consequences. Painful ones. From the moment I’d taken on Marilee’s web design project, the woman had become a big fat boil on my derriere.
    I’d had to put aside my other jobs in order to cater to Marilee and Marilee alone, as she demanded the upgraded site be ready to launch by the gala. I’d been working on it night and day, and I’d just finished the last of the major tweaks. She’d wanted lots of splashy effects, including flash animation and hues outside the “web safe-color palette” that would make it hard for viewers with older browsers to load or read correctly. She’d insisted on pages so full of data that it would’ve made for slower loading than I would have liked, and it took all of my reserve of tact and patience to work something out with her that seemed do-able to us both. There were times when I wanted to follow in the footsteps of her last six web gurus and quit cold turkey.
    In calmer moments, I imagined killing the woman with my bare hands, though I realized I’d have to take a number. From what I’d seen on my visits to Marilee’s studio the past few weeks, I wasn’t the only one who envisioned her face on the target of a dartboard. She had earned her reputation as a difficult boss, often reaming people out in front of a crowd of others. Though I’d gotten off easy with minor nitpicking, probably because I was the daughter of her only true friend.
    Still, I didn’t want to extend my duties any longer than I had to. I kept reminding her that my work on her site was only temporary, until she could find a permanent webmaster to take over.
    But I had a sinking feeling she wasn’t looking too hard for anyone. Not when she’d had six web designers before me, each only lasting a week.
    Thank goodness I’d gotten most of what she wanted done, though not all of it, by far. Since she’d insisted on web cams at the party tonight for a live stream, I had to go early and make sure everything was