by flagamuffin

Sandra Bridewell is now a target of constant gossip. Long lunch conversations at the Dallas Country Club are devoted to her past. A group of women, all wives of prominent businessmen, call themselves the "Snoop Sisters" as they track the latest Sandra story.

vomits

FBI agent Jon Hersley, who is in charge of the case, must be amazed at the attention paid to Sandra. Whenever he shows up at someone’s home for an interview, phone lines begin buzzing all over the Park Cities. In fact, it was Park Cities gossip that drew the authorities to Sandra in the first place, She became a suspect in the death of her third husband when the police got a phone call from an anonymous woman, called "the Highland Park Deep Throat" by one of her friends. The unknown caller spun a tale of mystery that was plausible enough to warrant further scrutiny. As word spread of the investigation, many Park Cities residents began to wonder if the Sandra Bridewell they thought they knew had another, darker side.

Seriously, this is a strange read. And hits close to home. I have a relative -- older, female -- who lives in Highland Park in a townhome situation, knows all the other widowed ladies who live around her, yada yada. I have absolutely no doubt she participated in these conversations back when they were relevant. I remember one year a young woman with a career had the temerity to move in downstairs -- boy they hated her. She kept late hours, because she was a lawyer, but god were these women bitches about it. Men, drugs, all that. Then, incredibly, she turned up dead -- she wasn't actually super young, just comparatively -- and it came out that she was like a single mom with a kid in college and a huge philanthropist and all this. And every time I'd visited my relative over a course of like ten years I heard all this shit about goddamn meth labs and weird noises in the night...

So the moral is that Highland Park is a hilarious/pathetic cesspool and this is the part where I tag minimum_wage so he can agree with me.

"She seemed to be just on a pretty even keel," says Dreith. "And she often seemed a little aloof — and yet there was this one thing that always made you wary. It was sort of like a deception about her. She would always make up stories about things. Now, I know we were all kids, and we all did that sort of thing sometimes, but Sandra was sometimes so ridiculous. One time, we were supposed to go somewhere on a weekend night, and I never heard from her. When I asked her about it, she said she had to leave for Missouri in the middle of the night. Well, of course, I knew that wasn’t true. She was over at her own house."

Alternatively we have an East of Eden situation on our hands