Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt, an elderly dowager in Holly Springs, Mississippi, lives alone in a large house and is helped out daily by Willis Richland, her African American handyman and closest friend. After acting strangely, she commits suicide with one of her late husband Buck's pistols. Her pretentious niece, Camille, who directs local church theater productions, stops by later that day to borrow a glass fruit bowl, accompanied by her witless and submissive younger sister, Cora, with whom she lives. Camille finds Cookie's body in the bedroom and drops the bowl, shattering it and inadvertently cutting herself. Believing that "suicide is a disgrace", Camille eats Cookie's suicide note and attempts to stage her death to look like a robbery-murder. She removes a prized diamond and ruby necklace from Cookie's neck and throws the pistol in the garden (observed doing so by Ronnie, a young boy who lives next door). Camille coaches Cora to say that Cookie was murdered, and summons Sheriff Lester Boyle to the scene.