Blanche on the Lam
Barbara Neely
 Blanche on the Lam opens in a court room with Blanche being accused of writing bad checks and being sentenced to thirty days in jail to teach her a lesson. She has a small panic attack at the thought of having to spend thirty days in a small jail cell and asks to use the rest room where she ends up fuming over what has become of her life in Farleigh, North Carolina since moving there from New York city. She gave up better pay for the safety of her children and ended being unable to cover the checks she wrote, being accused of writing more bad checks then she had, and being sentenced to time in jail because of it. There was a disturbance out in the hall and she took her chance to escape by slipping out of the restroom and making her way to the exit and out into the underground parking lot. She walked quickly out of the area and found herself in the neighborhood to a job she had gotten from the Ty-Dee Girls agency she had cancelled for that week. Luckily for her the agency had yet to send her replacement and the woman who came out of the house did not question her about her apparent lateness. She was then brought into the house, instructed to serve lunch, and then be ready to depart the house so they could head to the country. After lunch Blanche and the family of four drove out to the country house by the sea. That day she learned that one of the family members, Aunt Emmeline, was a drunk or at least that was what she assumed, and was a witness to her Will signing that would hand over the control of her nephew, Mumsfield‘s, money to his cousins, Grace and Everett. After the signing she learned from Nate, who worked for the family for many years, that something was not right with the Will signing situation. He would not explain his reasoning but she intended to find out, all while planning her move to New York, later Boston, to escape the Sheriff and the jail sentence she was running from. Later, after returning from running errands with Mumsfield, she found the Sheriff at the country house and thought she had been caught, but it turns out that Sheriff was there to see Everett. After she has calmed herself she wonders why the Sheriff was there if not for her, and is even more curious when she realizes how much time he is spending at the property. Nate refuses to tell her but Blanche is determined to find out. Aside from that mystery she is sure that Grace and Everett are trying to get hold or at least control of Mumsfield’s money because they had gone through all of Grace’s money. Listening to the news one morning on the radio she heard of the Sheriff’s suicide. She was happy that she would not have to worry about him anymore and that she would not have to leave for Boston, but it struck her after she remembered the conversation she had eavesdropped on just the evening before that the Sheriff would not have committed suicide. The man had just been saying that he did not want to leave the place he lived and worked in and had no plans give up his job as the Sheriff of the county. Not only had she heard that declaration, she had also heard Everett threaten the man right after it, and that night she had been woken up by a sound out of place for a country night and witnessed Everett rolling the limousine silently down the drive way. However, Blanche could not assume that she was living with a murderer based on what she head overheard and witnessed. In the same day Nate came and told her that he had seen someone wearing a pink jacket walking the short-cut route to the place where the Sheriff died. It was obvious he thought it was Everett. Later that day Everett confronted Blanche about the whereabouts of Nate, and the next day he ends being dead. Killed in a house fire during the night. Blanche finds clues here and there and eventually learns that the Aunt Emmeline she saw sign the will was an impostor and that the real woman had been killed. After going over the clues she had and looking at what evidence she had already uncovered and seeing Grace again, she realized that she had been suspecting the wrong person of murder all along. Who would have thought sweet, believable, weary, frightened Grace would have been a serial killer?