Loved By All Who Knew Her: An Odessa Pruitt Mystery

For forty-one years, Miss Odell Tillery sat up nights with the dying of Comfort County, Georgia. Two hundred and eleven people told her their last true thing, and she never repeated one word. Now she is seventy-eight, and she has started saying things out loud. She never means a bit of harm. A secret about a will comes out across the table at the fourth Sunday supper. She tells a young woman in the Kroger something about her daddy, as sweet as you please. The town that loved her for keeping quiet stops calling her. Then, in the cereal aisle, Miss Odell puts her hand on Odessa Pruitt's buggy and says nine words about Odessa's late husband, Julius. Odessa hears every one of them. And she changes the subject on purpose. Nine days later Miss Odell is dead on her kitchen floor, and the certificate says accident. The obituary says she was loved by all who knew her. Odessa wrote it. But a neighbor saw a car in the yard that evening. A woman named Rochelle Glover has come down from Macon for the service, and Odessa knows exactly who she is. And out on the Sweetwater Road sits a piece of heirs' property worth a fortune that nobody can sell. Odessa has spent thirty-two years writing down what the living say about the dead. This time she has to find out what the dead told Miss Odell, and who could not stand to hear it said again. Book four of the Odessa Pruitt Mysteries.