Guaranteed to Bleed Read online

  Praise for The Country Club Murders

  GUARANTEED TO BLEED (#2)

  “Set in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1974, this cozy mystery effectively recreates the era through the details of down-to-earth Ellison’s everyday life.”

  – Booklist

  “Mulhern’s lively, witty sequel to The Deep End finds Kansas City, Mo., socialite Ellison Russell reluctantly attending a high school football game…There she stumbles on a dying teenage boy covered in blood, who asks that she tell his girlfriend that he loves her. Ellison determines to learn the girlfriend’s identity and deliver the message, plus find the boy’s killer…If that’s not enough for one day, an unknown man turns up shot to death in her garden. Cozy fans will eagerly await Ellison’s further adventures.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “In this excellent follow-up to her debut The Deep End, author Mulhern continues to depict the trappings of a privileged community…Readers who enjoy the novels of Susan Isaacs will love this series that blends a strong mystery with the demands of living in an exclusive society. Watching Ellison develop the strength of character to break through both her own and her society’s expectations is a sheer delight.”

  – Kings River Life Magazine

  “Written sincerely, with unforgettable one-liners including: “Kizzi lived behind a curtain sewn from dry martinis.” There are many more to list, but I do not want to spoil the pleasure of unexpectedly encountering such gems tucked throughout the book. Thoroughly enjoyable.”

  – Librarian, Jefferson-Madison Regional Library System

  THE DEEP END (#1)

  “Part mystery, part women’s fiction, part poetry, Mulhern’s debut, The Deep End, will draw you in with the first sentence and entrance you until the last. An engaging whodunit that kept me guessing until the end!”

  – Tracy Weber,

  Author of the Downward Dog Mysteries

  “What truly stands out is the development of Ellison as a very realistic and very likable character…Not to be overlooked is the humor and wit that entertains throughout the novel as readers enjoy following an intelligent heroine completely coming into her own as a compelling, funny, and very intelligent woman.”

  – Kings River Life Magazine

  “What a fun read! Murder in the days before cell phones, the internet, DNA and AFIS.”

  – Books for Avid Readers

  “Intriguing plots, fascinating characters. From the first page to the last, Julie’s mysteries grab the reader and don’t let up. When all is resolved and I read the last page, I wanted to read more.”

  – Sally Berneathy,

  USA Today Bestselling Author

  “Ms. Mulhern weaves a tidy tale of murder, blackmail, and life behind the scenes in the Country Club set of the 70s…an excellent mystery, highly recommended, and I eagerly await the next in the series.”

  – Any Good Book

  Books in the Country Club Murders

  by Julie Mulhern

  THE DEEP END (#1)

  GUARANTEED TO BLEED (#2)

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  Copyright

  GUARANTEED TO BLEED

  The Country Club Murders

  Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection

  First Edition

  Digital epub edition | October 2015

  Henery Press

  www.henerypress.com

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

  Copyright © 2015 by Julie Mulhern

  Cover art by Stephanie Chontos

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-943390-06-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To Matt with love, you know what you did.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my agent, Margaret Bail, for loading me on the plane. Thank you to Sally Berneathy, Madonna Bock and Jan Leyh for taking this journey with me. And, thank you to Anna, Art, Erin, Kendel, Rachel, and Stephanie for picking me up at the airport. I couldn’t do this without you!

  One

  September 1974

  Kansas City, Missouri

  My second mistake was dropping my lipstick.

  It clanged against the metal riser, spun for a tantalizing second just beyond my fingers’ reach, then dropped to the nether regions below.

  My first mistake was buying the damned thing. Purchased from a terrifyingly chic salesgirl at Galérie Lafayette in Paris, it was the perfect shade of red. A hue, she told me, so sublime the French manufacturer declined to sell it in the United States. Then she looked down her slightly hooked, Parisian nose as if she was Marie Antoinette and I was a peasant who dared ask for bread. Who wouldn’t be intimidated by that level of chic? I handed over a ridiculous number of francs and bought the transformative, perfection-filled gold tube.

  What was I thinking? Rouge Chaud had no business on my lips. I wasn’t chic or sophisticated or Continental. I was a mother, an artist, a daughter. I wore soft pinks and delicate corals, not red, not Rouge Chaud. Lesson learned—when making major life changes, don’t start with red lipstick. The stranger in the mirror looks so odd it’s disheartening.

  My third mistake was going after the silly thing.

  “What are you doing?” Libba asked when I stood.

  “I dropped my lipstick.”

  She nodded but I doubt she really heard me. She seemed quite intent on the line of boys in blue jerseys. Libba actually likes football, and her nephew was somewhere on the field. Maybe. Telling the difference between one boy and another was only possible when their numbers were visible.

  Personally, I’d rather be audited by the IRS than sit through a game. If my daughter, Grace, wasn’t cheering, I’d have skipped the whole evening—the stands, the noise, and the sight of boys knocking each other flat while their parents urged them to hit harder.

  Obviously not everyone shared my opinions. The combination of a cool fall evening and a cross-state rival had packed the stands. The Suncrest fans wore phthalo blue—cadmium yellow being nearly unwearable. Across the field sat a healthy contingent of traveling Burroughs fans clad in Brunswick green.

  I eased my way past the first few people seated in the crowded row, murmured apologies, avoided stepping on drinks but not toes or handbags, and blocked the views of eager parents. Something happened on the field. A collective second of held breath, then a collective gasp.

  The man whose view I blocked leaned around me. “Go, baby!” He yelled loud enough to render me deaf in one ear.

  Just a taste of the roar to come. Everyone cheered. They stood and yelled and stomped their feet on the risers until the stands shook.

  I turned and looked. Who wouldn’t?

  A boy in blue with a ball tucked deep in the crook of his elbow ran down the field.

  On the sidelines, Grace and her fellow cheerlea
ders jumped impossibly high, shook their pom-poms and encouraged more yelling.

  He reached the end zone and the stands erupted.

  The crackling PA system announced a defensive touchdown. High fives abounded.

  I pushed my way to the end of the row, descended the stairs, and walked down the sidelines to the exit.

  Space. Air. Not silence—but at least the decibels didn’t threaten permanent hearing loss.

  I circled around to the back of the stands.

  In the stands, with lights and sounds and the distraction of determining who had the ball, I’d failed to notice the purple velvet of night pushing the last rays of sun over the western skyline. I hadn’t counted on dark. Damn.

  Worse, a chain-link fence enclosed the area beneath the stands. How had I never noticed it before? My quick rescue trip was fraught with complications.

  Where was the blasted gate? I walked the length of the fence with my hand plunged into the bottom of my purse. A penlight lived in its depths. I was sure of it. I needed light. I didn’t like my chances of finding my lipstick on the unlit ground.

  I found the gate—unlocked, thank heavens—but the light still eluded me. I opened my purse wider and peered into its depths.

  The gate whooshed open and hit me on the head. Hard. A galaxy’s worth of stars surrounded me. Someone pushed past me, finishing the job the gate started. I fell on my ass. Thudded. The impact shuddered up my spine. Whoever it was didn’t stop, didn’t apologize, nothing. What the hell were they doing under there? An argument with a girl? A rendezvous with a boy? The quick trade of a fistful of crumpled ones for a small bag of pot? Far more important was the likelihood of grass stains on my new skirt.

  I stood, brushed the grass off my backside, and entered the dim world beneath the stands. The beams supporting the stands above left me only one path and what little light there was had to filter past ankles and pants legs and the odd handbag. I dug again for my penlight. I found a travel pack of Kleenex, my wallet, keys, a pack of Doublemint gum, a pencil bag and a small drawing pad. Of course, no flashlight. I’d find it tomorrow when the sun shone brightly.

  At least the narrow spaces between the risers that denied me light kept some of the cigarette butts and empty cups from falling. The ground was cleaner than I expected. I stopped looking where I was walking. Instead I looked up and gauged where I’d been sitting.

  That’s how I tripped over Bobby Lowell. Of course, when I tripped, I didn’t know it was Bobby Lowell. I didn’t even know it was a person. Not until he moaned.

  I heard that moan and my heart tripped along with my feet. It tumbled to my knees, leaving them weak. Then the damned thing raced back to my chest so fast it left me breathless.

  Alone in the uneven darkness, the last thing I’d expected was a person on the ground. I knelt. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  The fickle light showed me a man. No. Too young. A boy. A boy with a stained shirt.

  Someone in the stands shifted and for a half-second, the boy was caught in a shaft of light.

  I saw him clearly.

  Blood.

  Blood had seeped through his t-shirt. Soaked it.

  I gasped. “What happened?”

  He didn’t answer. I didn’t blame him. It was a stupid question and totally irrelevant to the problem at hand—getting him help.

  I yelled but my voice was lost in the cacophony of screaming football fans. What was it Daddy said about whistling in the wind?

  Meanwhile the boy bled into the dirt. How much blood could a person lose?

  My fumbling hands covered the wound, applied pressure. So much blood. It welled between my fingers. Warm. Gut-twisting. Horrifying. Its smell, somehow metallic, made bile rise in my throat.

  “Help!”

  I hardly heard my own voice. There was no way anyone in the stands would hear me. The poor kid would bleed to death listening to people cheer and the ineffectual shouts of a woman in search of a lipstick.

  I yanked off my white cotton button-down, bunched it together, and pressed it against the hole in his chest. Within seconds the shirt was soaked in blood.

  Damn!

  “Hold on. Don’t die.” I struggled to my feet, flattened my hand and slid my fingers through the narrow space in the stands. I closed my hand around the first ankle I found—a narrow one. The owner of the ankle kicked—viciously—and freed herself from my grasp. My wrist scraped against the riser.

  If the woman’s hysterical screams were any indication, I’d ruined football games for her for all eternity.

  It was worth it if she sent help. Surely someone would come investigate the bloody hand from beneath the stands.

  I pulled my hand back through the slat and resumed applying pressure to the boy’s chest. His breath was shallow and, impossibly, seemed louder than the sounds from the stands.

  His fingers scrabbled around my fingers.

  I leaned forward. “Help is on the way.”

  He jerked his chin as if help didn’t matter. “Tell her…”

  The fingers that circled my wrist were clammy.

  My shirt was near useless in staunching his blood. “Hush. Help is coming.” I hoped to God I wasn’t lying.

  His Adam’s apple bobbed and his mouth worked its way around words. “Tell her I love her.”

  “You can tell her. Just stay with me,” I begged.

  The light filtering through the bleachers shifted, revealing his eyes—glazed with pain, pleading.

  “I’ll tell her. Who is she?”

  “Hands in the air!”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Maynard, the security guard who’d been at Suncrest since I attended, pointed a shaky gun at me.

  I gave him the same amount of respect that Grace and her friends did. I ignored him.

  “Hands up!” He cocked his gun.

  “Officer Hodgins, it’s Ellison Russell. This boy has been hurt. Call an ambulance.”

  The fool man didn’t move. Maybe he wasn’t used to school parents covered in blood. Or maybe it was the bra. Purchased in Paris, it was made of silk and lace and seductive promises I had no intention of keeping. Ever. “Ambulance,” I snapped.

  He lowered his gun but didn’t move.

  “Call an ambulance. If you can’t manage that, see if there’s a doctor in the stands.” There were probably twenty—surgeons and cardiologists and neurologists and oncologists. I bet none of them dealt with trauma. None of them knew how to deal with a gaping hole in a teenage boy’s chest. Even so, they had to know more than I did. “Get. Help.”

  A man pushed past the useless guard. He was probably the father of a student. He had the look—a crisp button-down shirt, an I-run-things-get-out-of-my-way attitude, and madras pants in the school colors.

  It was too late in the year for madras. His wife should have made him change. The thought bobbed across the surface of my brain. Just goes to show Mother’s influence can’t be drowned. Not even by a sea of blood.

  His gaze scanned the scene, my scandalous brassiere, then—quickly—the scene again. He dropped to one knee next to Bobby and demanded, “What happened?”

  “No idea. I found him. Are you a doctor?”

  He answered with a quick jerk of his chin. “No. What are you doing down here?” The question sounded like an accusation.

  “I dropped my lipstick.”

  His lips thinned. “Flashlight.” His voice brooked no arguments.

  Maynard, who’d ignored my every request, immediately handed over a striated silver tube. Apparently, the guard preferred taking orders from a man.

  The man shined the light at the boy’s chest, then he lifted my sodden shirt and gingerly poked at the boy’s t-shirt. “You’ve been applying pressure?”

  The boy moaned.

  “Yes.”

  He looked up from the boy’s ch
est and directed his gaze on Maynard’s unfortunate face. “Ambulance. Police. Now.”

  Maynard Hodgins finally moved. In fact, he spun on his heel and rushed through the open gate.

  “Pressure?” I asked. The boy could die while the man directed Maynard.

  I snatched my shirt back and applied it to the wound.

  Sirens.

  Someone smarter than the high school’s cantankerous guard had called for help.

  The boy’s hand tightened on my wrist. I leaned forward, straining to hear his raspy whisper. “Tell her…”

  “I will,” I promised.

  “What did he say?” the man demanded.

  Bossing Maynard was one thing, bossing me another. I ignored him.

  Activity engulfed us—paramedics and a uniformed police officer and two men with a gurney. Each one paused and stared at my lace bra and bloodied hands. I ignored the embarrassed heat prickling my skin. Let them look. The bleeding boy had needed my shirt far more than I had.

  One of the men pried the boy’s fingers loose from my wrist. Another replaced my bloodied shirt with fresh gauze. A hand gripped my elbow and lifted me out of the way.

  “You’re bleeding,” a medic said.

  How could he tell? The boy’s blood covered my arms.

  He pointed at a gash near my wrist. It must have happened when I reached through the slat in the stands. I hadn’t noticed it.

  “Have it looked at,” said the man in the madras pants. “Get in the ambulance.”

  Who the hell did he think he was?

  Really? Who was he?

  He bent, scooped up a gold, square-shaped tube of Guerlain lipstick and held it in front of me. “If you want it back, get in the ambulance.”