Happily Ever After the Murders

by Rae Wilde

Genres: Women's Fiction; LGBT Lesbian; Cozy Mystery; Later in Life Romance; Suspense

Synopsis

The Golden Girls meets Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise in this thrilling novel about two elderly women who go on the run to cover up a double murder they committed four decades ago.

Ida and Jean got away with murder. Settling into their golden years in late ’90s Rockaway, New York, Ida and Jean’s biggest problems are HOA squabbles, grown kids who don’t visit enough, and staying in the closet as a lesbian couple for fear of being ostracized. But when the electrical lines in their backyard need replacing, the women know that digging up the ground will unearth their long-held secret: the bodies of their late husbands buried under the rosebushes.

After their attempts to keep the electrical company from digging take a deadly turn, the lovers go on the run, launched into a cross-country adventure—with their cat, Frankie, in tow. To escape the law, they’ll need to outwit quirky midwestern locals, mend frayed relationships with their adult children, and shake off the detective that’s hot on their trail. But if Ida and Jean can pull it off, they’ll find their freedom in the place that has always represented their best shot at coming out and finally living their authentic lives together: San Francisco, California.

Release date: November 3, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 304

Sample

Ida cracked arthritic knuckles, her lower back stiff against the hard plastic of the folding chair. She rolled one fist inside the other in the space between her knees, and the folds of her dress creased in divots where her body had grown soft and spongy. A musty chill lay over the room, but Jean, sitting at Ida’s side, always ran hot. Though Ida’s partner and companion was steadily losing a battle to stay awake, Jean still functioned as a human radiator of sorts, and her warmth landed the HOA meeting on just this side of tolerable.

“New business,” Jim Friedman said. He was a slick thirty-something whose hair gel had hardened into a cap over his head. “The fence on 35th Avenue has three rotted slats on the eastern side. A section is missing from the northeast bend. Per the treasurer’s report, thank you, Emily.” He took a moment to give Emily, the woman seated at the long table’s far end, a nod. “We have thirty-two thousand dollars in the CD. The renovation committee convened last quarter and sought estimates from three contractors, the lowest of which came in at…”

“How’d he get to be president?” Ida asked under her breath.

Jean jolted from her dozing. “What?”

“This Jim. I don’t remember voting for him.”

Jean cleared her throat, a sound somehow both wet and chafing.

Jim paused the recitation of estimates, his shrewd gaze passing over the women, before continuing.

“You didn’t vote last election, remember?” asked Jean.

Ida scoffed. “I always vote,” she said, her voice climbing from a whisper. “Don’t be ridiculous, I always—”

“You threw the ballot down the garbage disposal,” said Jean, her spottily penciled brow quirking into a thin arch. “You said if someone like Rose Garland could run for the compliance committee, the entire organization had lost its way, and you couldn’t be expected to vote for a failing committee.”

Ida crossed her arms, leaning close to Jean. “Rose Garland screwed around with the butcher and half the deli.”

“I know, dear,” said Jean.

“Even the meat slicer, Sam Tinsley.”

“I remember.” Jean tapped three times, slow and steady on Ida’s thigh, as if to quiet her, but Ida was not one to be quieted.

“Have you seen Sam since winter?” Ida asked, undaunted. “Big as a house.”

“Ladies!” Jim Friedman said sharply. Ida shot him a daggered look in reply, and with an apologetic twist of the mouth, Jim said, “We’re nearly through.” Jim unfurled a legal-size piece of paper, pointing at text too small for anyone but Jim to read. “All in favor of Rudy’s Roofing and Maintenance, say aye.”

Ayes washed over the room, most lazy and lacking enthusiasm. The neighborhood had aged in time with Ida and Jean. There had been families back when the women had youngsters of their own, but when the kids grew up and moved away, their parents hunkered down like it was a real estate siege. Home prices weren’t what they once were, and nobody around here liked the idea of having worked all their lives just to go into a home. For Sale signs went up when the last of a couple got put in the ground; in fact, the neighborhood sales were one way to keep tabs on who was still living. So the odd young person would move in every couple of years, but for the most part, Ida and Jean could rely on seeing the same faces up and down the street, day after day, whether they liked those faces or not.

And it was easy for Ida to dislike one face in particular. She picked out the chipper inflection of Rose Garland’s aye, and as quickly as the sound of Rose’s voice died, Ida piped in with a shrill “Opposed!” to counter her enemy’s vote.

Jean chuckled, sitting up straighter and cracking a smile wide enough to reveal the missing molar behind her canine. “You’re really something, Ida Holloway.”

Stirred by Ida’s opposition, Barbara Banks turned around in her seat to glare, but Ida met her glare and doubled it. “Voting is my right as an association member,” Ida said, leaning close enough to Barbara’s face that the coiffed woman with the overprocessed, purple-stained hair turned back around.

Jean leaned close and spoke softly, just for Ida. “My girl,” she said, delivering a quick squeeze to Ida’s thigh.

“Any abstaining?” Jim asked.

A single hand rose; it belonged to Michael Thompson, at the back of the room. He wore a white baseball cap, and the evening sun slanted in through the blinds and cast a shadow down the bridge of his crooked nose. Michael Thompson looked like the sort of man who could build things. He had the sternness of expression, the permanent tan line around his shirt collar, and the slight limp to suggest a life of hard labor. Maybe a railroad man. Maybe a roofer. Either way he was a calm, private man who attended every HOA meeting and always abstained from the vote; Jean and Ida didn’t know for sure about the details of Michael Thompson’s life, but they knew the look and they knew the type.

“Fifteen for, one opposed, one abstaining. The motion passes,” Jim said. “If the renovation committee would please be so kind as to contact Rudy’s Roofing and Maintenance to let them know they won the bid. When might we expect the project to begin?”

Barbara Banks nudged her husband with an elbow.

“Rudy said demo can start before Easter,” Nicolas Banks reported.

“Any more new business?” Jim asked.

There was quiet for a moment, but for the sporadic creaking of chairs. Jim looked to Sonora Bailey, a slim woman seated at the long table in the room’s center.

“Just a moment,” she said, leafing through a stack of papers. Sonora wore a breezy white sundress despite the chilly weather, paired with a wide-brimmed hat better suited for gardening than an indoor HOA meeting. Ida supposed that Sonora was more interested in the fashion of her outfits than their practicality or comfort. It was a privilege of younger women, the ability to ignore a chill here and an ache there, and just go on with their day. In some ways, Ida envied it. But mostly she resented Jim and his wife, Sonora. They had all this energy and all these ideas, eager to change things that had been working just fine for years, and were generally, displeasingly, hot to trot.

Jean yawned, letting the deep groan from her lower throat fill the air over the restless group.

“Here,” Sonora said, yanking a paper from the pile. “After last month’s reports about spotty electrical service, we contacted PSE&G on February the eleventh. They got back to us on the…” She squinted, drawing the paper closer to her face. Jean began to doze as she continued, and Ida focused all her attention on the distasteful Rose Garland, eyes narrowed to pinpricks and dialed in on the woman as Sonora lilted on. “… they’ll be coming out to replace the older lines. They will need access to some of the yards. Property owners will be notified ahead of time with a date and time window in which to expect their visit.” Sonora placed the paper atop her pile, nodding with a smile that said she was pleased with herself, and looked out to the crowd, expecting questions.

When there were none, Jim asked, “Any more new business?”

Quiet.

“Motion to close,” Michael Thompson said from the back of the room, already standing.

This snapped Ida out of her judgy preoccupation. “Second!” she said.

The homeowners responded in unison to the cue. Chairs slid against the laminate flooring, clinking into each other with the sudden flurry of movement toward the door. Michael Thompson batted a chair out of his way with his cane. Barbara Banks shouldered past her slower husband, and the man in the row in front of her became the battering victim of her oversized purse.

“Meeting adjourned,” Jim said over the slow commotion.

Ida and Jean made their way out of the brick building. The twenty-some-odd homeowners and HOA board trickled off in different directions, one by one becoming black outlines backlit by the setting sun. Ida and Jean walked side by side over the pavers that surrounded the old community building and toward a grassy knoll, which led to a path around the lake. The women never showed affection in public. To do so in their heyday would’ve had them labeled as perverts or accused of being communist spies or fired from their jobs or ousted by their families or all of it or worse. Over the years, Jean had noticed the changing of the times, a gentle push toward acceptance in society’s mind. She had brought up the possibility of she and Ida coming out, declaring their love to family and friends, living openly as other couples do. But Ida had never warmed to the idea. Risky, and for what? she would say. While the prospect of kissing Jean’s cheek, of smoothing her hair, of staring into her brown eyes without minding the time or whoever happened to be around made Ida’s heart swell, the fear of reprisal was too great.

So, though Jean didn’t take Ida’s hand, they walked in lockstep, palms dangling close enough to one another that their knuckles often brushed. It was something unspoken, a small habit that carved its way deep through repetition, in the way moving water might, over time, furrow into rock. They took the long way home, the rock-and-sand path that skirted the lakefront property lines and curved around the dark mirror surface of their human-made lake.

Ida stopped at the lip of the Thompson property. Although he no longer cared for the thing, the boughs of the mango tree that had been planted there some decades back twisted over the lakeshore as if the tree might be longing for an early-season swim. She pulled a low-hanging branch toward her face, examining the alien-looking bloom that had begun to flower there.

“They’re so strange, aren’t they?” Ida asked, pinching at one of the nubby yellow fingers of a budding flower. “Strikes me every year.”

“Don’t start this again,” Jean said, turning her back, looking defiantly out at the water.

“We could’ve had fruit,” said Ida, “every summer. I told you back in… When was it?”

“Seventy-six.”

“I told you back in seventy-six, but you—”

“Fruit means rats.”

“And you know how I love mangoes.”

“I won’t have a yard full of rats,” said Jean.

Ida let go of the thin branch, and it snapped back up into position. “The Thompsons don’t have rats. I don’t see any rats over there, do you?”

“Just Mr. Thompson,” said Jean. “Agnes passed last summer.”

“Well, then Mr. Thompson makes it work. Every July we’re paying for mangoes at the supermarket when we could’ve had baskets full for free.”

Jean smirked, and Ida knew she was about to lose the argument. “And then people could come into our yard to help themselves!”

Ida grimaced at the idea.

“Think of the money we saved on exterminators,” Jean said. She glanced from side to side before gazing deeply into Ida’s eyes. “The flowers are strange. Our garden is much more beautiful.”

Ida grinned. The blush in Jean’s cheeks and the breadth of her smile made Ida feel as if it wasn’t the garden Jean was calling beautiful, but her. She forgot all about those hypothetical mangoes, and Jean said, “Let’s get you home.”

She offered a bent arm, and Ida took it. “It was a big day.” The pair walked a step, then another, and although the HOA meeting was all that the women had accomplished outside their usual household routine, it had been a big day. Especially for Jean, who, lately, found her energy waning faster and more easily than she’d like to admit. “Big day,” she said again, a resigned declaration.

The loop around the lake took them through the limits of the Thompson yard, then the Garland property with its overmanicured bougainvillea hedges and limp hydrangeas. A rusty trampoline sagged in the center, a circle of dead grass beneath it.

“Haven’t seen them visit,” Ida said, implying Rose Garland’s grandchildren.

“They’re older now,” said Jean.

“Must know about her… behavior.”

“Got to be fourteen and sixteen, if I have my math right.”

“So they’re old enough to know…” Ida said.

And Jean, talking over her, replied, “Don’t think they’re the age for trampolines.”

“… the truth about their grandmother.”

The pair continued, still arm in arm, slowing where they had to step down onto the lake’s rocky shore to dip around the Bankses’ fence line. Cold water lapped onto the brims of Ida’s shoes, seeped into the cotton fibers of her socks.

When they were back up safely on the grass, Jean asked, “Have you returned Laura’s call?”

Ida stared at the Bankses’ old rope swing. “It’s rotted,” she said.

Jean said nothing.

Ida added, “A hazard. They should take it down.”

“Laura’s call?” Jean tried again.

“I’ll call her back,” Ida said, thinking of how long it had been since her daughter visited, and how much her grandchildren, Chelsea and Jill, must have changed in that time. “I’ll call.”

“It’s no small undertaking, traveling with little ones.”

Resentment flared in Ida’s center as she thought about how quickly Laura and Charlie had grown, how long the days had felt while raising them, and how short the years. It was selfish of Laura to keep Chelsea and Jill away so long, letting the swell of their youth slip away like water through Ida’s fingers. “I don’t think it’s too much to ask to see my grandchildren,” said Ida.

“It’s hard for her, with Harvey always traveling for work. She’s alone out there.”

“I could help!”

“It’s the getting here,” said Jean, with a light touch to the small of Ida’s back. “You know that.”

Ida knew it was true. Even with her poor memory and the decades that had ambled by, she remembered the bitter exhaustion of late nights and early mornings, getting kids bathed and fed and shuffling them into cars for school and appointments and birthday parties. She’d had Jean’s help after Eddie passed, but still, it was difficult. “She should’ve never moved away,” Ida said finally. “And Indiana of all places.”

The rest of the walk was filled with the sound of birds. Those that had flown south for the winter now returned at the promise of warmer weather. Two pairs of Canada geese honked and made uneasy landings onto the lake’s center, sending ripples across its surface. A warbler flew close enough to startle Jean, then settled onto the brim of the Friedman birdbath.

All of winter, it seemed, Rockaway had held its breath. The cold and the stillness of January and the frequent dustings of February snow kept gatherings and visitors at bay. But now began Rockaway’s shallow inhale, the slow waking of wildlife before the big gulp of spring.

When Jean and Ida reached the Foldger property, they cut up through their path, past the 1950s Craftsman, and crossed the sleepy one-lane street. Lamps flickered down Peachtree Way, then illuminated to their fullest brightness. The women trudged on under their fallow glare to the stepping-stones that led up the incline of their lawn, their feet easily finding each irregular slate piece driven flush with the earth over forty years of walking. Up the rain-softened steps to their porch, twin rocking chairs, originally pine but painted white, wobbled in the breeze, as did the indigo and butter-yellow faces of potted pansies that sat on the railing.

Jean’s hand hesitated on the knob.

“I’ll call Laura,” Ida said. “Tonight.”

Jean nodded knowingly and swung wide the unlocked door. The two entered the home Ida’s late husband had purchased in 1955, and that the two women had shared together since 1957—the only place they felt free enough to love one another in a way that felt right and real. Ida shut the door behind them.

Ida sifted two cups of flour into a broad ceramic bowl, glancing down at the recipe book flipped open to the yellowed page with a picture of scones. After all these years, she still hadn’t memorized the measurements of the ingredients. It was a source of embarrassment for her, so she tried her best to get everything measured before Jean could see her cheating off the book. Beside Ida was a double-basin sink of green porcelain, and above that stood a double-paned window with a black metal frame. Cobwebs collected in its top corners, behind doily-white macramé curtains. Through the window’s lower pane and past the dusty screen, Jean could be seen, if Ida were to look, wearing pastel-pink garden gloves and a cotton housedress in faded teal. In one hand she held a pair of shears. Cut daisies and dahlias were collected in the other, a bouquet of white and yellow and white and fuchsia and white and strawberry blond.

As it was, Ida was focused on a stubborn lump of flour rolling around her sieve. So focused, in fact, that her wrist whipped into a waiting colander of blueberries, tipping it into the sink and sending half of the fruits bouncing down the drain.

“Dammit,” Ida rasped, scooping and salvaging what she could. She was rinsing them again when Jean came through the back door.

Hands full of wet blueberries, Ida used her elbow to slap the recipe book closed, then her forearm to slide it deeper onto the counter. She spun around, using her body to block sight of it, and stood in that spot as naturally as she could with two palms dripping with sink water and piled high with salvaged blueberries.

Jean’s hair, though weighted down with beads of sweat, was as jet black as the day they’d met. She’d worn it longer then, but with the passing years the curls crept higher to her chin, dangled at the uppermost point of her jaw, then reached their current and final form in a pixie-length tousle. Her hairdresser, Elouise Carlson, had done an admirable job matching Jean’s natural color when her grays came in; and when Elouise retired, her daughter, Heather Carlson, had done just as well.

Jean was breathing hard from her quick jaunt in the garden, and her hand trembled a bit in retrieving the thin vase from the high cabinet. She slipped the flowers inside the tubular glass, their stems turning from green to brown against the peach-tinted vase.

“I’m making your favorite,” Ida said, giving up her position and dumping the berries back into the colander as Jean ran the vase under the faucet. “Was thinking we’d have scones for lunch.”

Nine in the morning would seem an unusual time, to most, to begin planning for lunch. But Jean had become an early riser in her later years, fleeing bed as the last brushstrokes of darkness faded from the sky, and Ida, unable to sleep without Jean by her side, had followed suit.

“Scones for lunch,” Jean said, placing the vase in the center of the kitchen table. “What would our mothers think?”

Ida croaked a laugh. “Good thing they’re dead. Half the fun of getting old is having nobody alive to tell you not to do what you want.”

“Oh, Ida, please.” Jean placed her soiled gardening gloves on the entryway table, then slumped into an oak kitchen chair. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time you didn’t do what you want.”

Ida thought back to the previous evening, when she’d wanted to take Jean’s hand as they approached the lake but hadn’t, afraid in the moment that Michael Thompson might see. She would have mentioned it, but to do so might bring up the whole back-and-forth about the two of them coming out again, and it was too early for this sticky argument. Instead, Ida took the opportunity to wrap her arms around Jean’s shoulders from behind and plant a kiss on the top of her head. “Well, that’s true,” Ida said, feeling the dampness of Jean’s sweat on her lips but not minding one bit.

Ida returned to her task, whisking together egg and flour, dumping the remaining blueberries into the mix. She added sugar, salt, and cinnamon, cold butter and heavy cream. While she combined the ingredients, Ida thought about their kids. There were the children she’d birthed, Laura and Charlie, and the children she’d raised, Barbara and George. With the boys and girls close in age, the families had blended when Jean moved into the house, and were raised up together as a single, sweeter thing. “Laura said she may visit for Christmas.” Ida sprinkled in a dash of baking powder and a few drops of vanilla extract—then a few more snuck out that she didn’t intend.

“That would be nice,” said Jean, stretching out in her chair. The kitchen table was small enough to allow Jean to lay her head back on the chair’s frame and extend her legs around the table’s base. From here, she could watch Ida bake over her right shoulder, catch sight of the odd bird through the pane in the back door, and look across the house into the carpeted living room. At this time of day, natural light coming in through the windows was enough to keep the house well lit, but Ida insisted on using the kitchen’s overhead fluorescents anyway. Jean hadn’t nagged her about it for years. Savings on the energy bill were negligible, and Jean was happiest when Ida was happy. “George is planning a trip with Lisbeth around that time, and Barbara will be here, of course.”

“Of course,” Ida said mindlessly. Then, dubiously, “George’s wife is planning to come?”

“That’s what I hear.”

“I don’t think she cares for us,” said Ida.

Jean raised her eyebrows, conceding the point. “I don’t think she cares much for George either, to be fair.”

“Do you think she knows? Do you think that’s why?” Ida asked.

“Knows about what? About us?”

Despite preferring to never broach the topic, Ida was driven by her paranoia to bring up her fear that her children—and more broadly, everyone else—had discovered the true nature of her relationship with Jean. And secretly hated them. With a batter-coated whisk, she pointed at herself and then Jean, leaving a splatter across the floor between them. Her anxiety acted like an itch, and she hoped some validation that the two of them had fooled the world would soothe it. “That we’re more than just friends.” She said the final word with a sneer, as if the taste of it were off, then swiped the batter off the floor with her finger and rinsed it under the sink.

“Oh, I doubt it’s that,” Jean said. “We’ve always been careful.”

Ida shook her head, washing and then drying the whisk with a hand towel. “You say that all you want, but there was the time with that valet. Caught your hand on my thigh.”

“That was twenty years ago.”

“And the time with the grocer, when we shopped together and paid with the same card.”

Jean sighed.

“He gave us a funny look!”

Jean’s hands folded atop the kitchen table. “Ida, George?” she said. “Laura or Barbara would have sooner picked up on a thing like that. Even Charlie after having been gone so long. Who are we fooling? I’m sure they have. But George?”

Ida set the whisk into their drawer and paused. She thought about Laura, Barbara, and Charlie knowing with a wince. Then she thought about George, the boy who didn’t even notice the big hailstorm the night of his junior prom because he was trying to get his hair to look like Clint Eastwood’s. “I suppose he’s not the most observant of the bunch.”

“Right,” said Jean. “And if George doesn’t suspect, then Lisbeth doesn’t know.”

“You’re right. Well, maybe Lisbeth just has a certain disposition.” Ida grabbed an electric mixer from the counter, but she couldn’t take her mind off the possibility that the other chi. . .