Real Murders
An Aurora Teagarden Mystery
Charlaine Harris
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
REAL MURDERS
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright 1990 by Charlaine Harris Schulz.
Cover art by Lisa Desimini.
Cover design by Judith Lagerman.
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ISBN: 978-1-1012-0654-6
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
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To Mother and Father
Contents
Chapter One
T onight I want to tell you about that most fascinating of murder mysteries, the Wallace case, I told my mirror Enthusiastically.
I tried Sincere after that; then Earnest.
My brush caught in a tangle. Shoot! I said, and tried again.
I think the Wallace case can easily fill our whole program tonight, I said Firmly.
We had twelve regular members, which worked out well with twelve programs a year. Not all cases could fill up a two-hour program, of course. Then the member responsible for presenting the Murder of the Month, as we jokingly called it, would have a guest speakersomeone from the police department in the city, or a psychologist who treated criminals, or the director of the local rape crisis center. Once or twice, wed watched a movie.
But Id come up lucky in the draw. There was more than enough material on the Wallace case, yet not so much that Id be compelled to hurry over it. Wed allocated two meetings for Jack the Ripper. Jane Engle had taken one for the victims and the circumstances surrounding the crimes and Arthur Smith had taken another on the police investigation and the suspects. You cant skimp Jack.
The elements of the Wallace case are these, I continued. A man who called himself Qualtrough, a chess tournament, an apparently inoffensive woman named Julia Wallace, and of course the accused, her husband, William Herbert Wallace himself. I gathered all my hair into a brown switch and debated whether to put it in a roll on the back of my head, braid it, or just fasten a band around it to keep it off my face. The braid. It made me feel artsy and intellectual. As I divided my hair into clumps, my eyes fell on the framed studio portrait of my mother shed given me on my last birthday with an offhand, You said you wanted one. My mother, who looks a lot like Lauren Bacall, is at least five-foot six, elegant to her fingertips, and has built her own small real estate empire. I am four-foot eleven, wear big round tortoise-rimmed glasses, and have fulfilled my childhood dream by becoming a librarian. And she named me Aurora, though to a woman herself baptized Aida, Aurora may not have seemed so outrageous.