Valerie Wright

Valerie Wright, a character in Dirty Little Secrets, was one of your Upstreet neighbors, the president of the neighborhood Homeowners Association and whose murder you're investigating. She makes her only appearance in Chapter 1.

Appearance
Valerie had long brown hair tied into a bun, blue eyes, and light skin. She wore a long blue dress with a golden triangle necklace, and a golden house pin.

Personality
Valerie put up a front of being polite and friendly as a thin veil over her condescending attitude. It can be inferred she was classist given that she seemed to have a poor opinion of the "downstreet" neighbors, who appear to be working class instead of wealthy. She was said to be verbally abusive towards her domestic employees, and didn't seem to believe in properly paying others for their work.

Background
She was the president of the Homeowners Association and wife of Oak Valley's mayor. Through neighborhood gossip, you learn she never paid a contractor who remodeled her kitchen and that she consistently invented reasons not to pay her employees their full wage on time. Despite this, she had become popular enough that some were calling for her to challenge her husband in the next mayoral election.

According to Carpenter, she came from family money.

Dirty Little Secrets

 * Chapter 1: Welcome to Vermillion Lane
 * Chapter 2: Comfort From a Stranger (Off-Screen)
 * Chapter 3: Potluck of Secrets (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 4: A Date with Danger (Mentioned; Determinant)
 * Chapter 5: In The Wake Of (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 6: Sadie's Secrets (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 7: Twin Surprises (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 8: F is for Philanthropy (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 9: War of the Car Washes (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 10: Sweet Sadie-Anne (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 11: On The Outs (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 12: The Mayor's Mistress (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 13: Detective Lawson (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 14: Happy Kitchen, Happy Life (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 15: In Close Quarters (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 17: Fires Are Lit (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 18: Crimes of Passion (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 19: Caught (Mentioned)
 * Chapter 20: The Killer Unmasked (Mentioned)

Your Character
She stops by to welcome you to the neighborhood the day you move in, along with Sadie and the Barney twins. She promptly begins making critical comments about the poor state of your house under the guise of offering helpful suggestions, and then abruptly dies. The on-scene police officers assume she had a heart attack, but you learn in Chapter 3 that the medical examiner determined her cause of death to be poison.

Sadie Hotchmitch
Sadie claims that she and Valerie were friends at one point, but that was no longer the case by the time you met them. Following Valerie's death, Sadie immediately takes advantage of the situation to step into the spotlight and take over as acting head of the HOA, a position she had coveted for some time. She speculates that Valerie's supposed heart attack must have resulted from the stress of worrying that she was too old to win an HOA election against someone younger and more attractive like herself. You later learn that Sadie has been having an affair with Valerie's husband and was apparently bitter he wouldn't leave Valerie to be with her instead.

If you decide to look at Detective Lawson's notes, you'll find out more about their animosity towards each other. For example, Vince used to be Valerie's pool boy before Sadie seduced him. When Valerie found out, she cited HOA infractions on Sadie's property, noting cracks in the pavement. However, Sadie was able to one-up Valerie, using Vince's father's contractor services to repair the pavement for free. When Sadie's driveway was being repaved and she parked her convertible on the curb, Valerie used her HOA influence to change street-cleaning day last minute and had Sadie's car towed.

Trivia

 * Her character model resembles Yvette Mercer from Passport to Romance.
 * She shares the same name as Valerie from The Royal Romance.
 * Wright comes from the Old English word "wryhta"/"wyrhta" meaning worker or shaper of wood.
 * She and her husband share the same last name as Holly Wright from Home for the Holidays, Devin Wright and Dash Wright from The Princess Swap, and Lewis Wright from Foreign Affairs.
 * According to Kelsey, she was healthy and jogged the neighborhood every morning, which led some to doubt whether she truly died from a heart attack as was initially assumed. This was validated in Chapter 3, when you learn that her death was caused by poison.
 * Her crimes include misappropriation of funds.