Fool's Gold (A sexy funny mystery/romance, Cottonmouth Book 2) (3 page)

Ugh.
More barfy rhetoric. Would
nothing offend this man enough to make him go away? Obviously not.
Simone took the direct approach. “I won’t talk to the judge for
you. I don’t want a resort. No one wants it. Now I’d like you to
leave.”

He smiled, and the sallow flesh of his face
stretched over his bones. “Someday soon, you’ll change your mind.
About everything. You have my card for when you do.”

What did that mean? It brought to mind more
yukky images. She’d thrown his card out almost as soon as he’d
given it to her.

“I won’t change my mind.” Neither would the
judge. Della would hold up those permits and licenses until Jason
Lafoote expired. Or drove his shiny convertible sports car, which
probably wasn’t even paid for, out of town for good.

“We’ll see. Till we meet again. Toodle-loo.”
He waggled his fingers as he stepped down onto the gravel path.

She wasn’t sure about the man. There was
something dark and reptilian in his eyes. Was he a fool or a
predator?

Though she couldn’t put her finger on what
had changed, with Jason’s arrival and his hard-sell attitude,
something had started to smell a little off in Goldstone.

This time when she went in for the night,
Simone locked her doors.

Chapter Two

An earthquake shook his shoulder, and a voice
blasted his eardrums. “Wake up, Tyler.”

Only his mother and his sister called him
Tyler. Brax cracked one eyelid open. It wasn’t even light yet, and
he was on vacation. “What do you want?”

Maggie wafted a mug of coffee near his nose.
“Carl left a little while ago. I need you to follow him. Get
up.”

He’d doubted his sister’s sanity from the
moment she’d married Carl, a man she met on a Las Vegas weekend
junket. Living in Goldstone, where everybody was running away from
something, had obviously pushed her round the bend. She wanted him
to follow her husband?

“I’m making you bacon and eggs the way you
like them,” she singsonged, and now he could smell the irresistible
aroma of frying bacon.

Crazy, but cunning. Like most women, she
played on a man’s weaknesses. Breakfast was the only worthwhile
meal of the day. It was one thing when a wife or lover played you,
but being played by your sister? That was downright pathetic.

Still, no sense in wasting a perfectly good
breakfast.

Fifteen minutes later, showered and shaved,
Brax pepper-and-salted his eggs. “How do you expect me to follow
him if he’s already left?”

“You’re a cop, you know what to do. Besides,
I’ve got an idea where he went.”

He stopped, his fork halfway to his mouth.
“Where?”

“The Chicken Coop.”

An immediate surge of relief spread through
his chest. She hadn’t mentioned Simone Chandler. He finished his
forkful of eggs before answering. “So now you’ve started worrying
when your husband goes out to the local farmer to buy fresh eggs or
poultry?”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “It’s the brothel.
Just outside of town. And he sure as hell isn’t buying eggs
there.”

“A whorehouse named The Chicken Coop? You’ve
gotta be kidding.”

She shrugged and tucked into her crispy
bacon. “All the good ranch names were taken.”

For the first time since he’d arrived, Brax
really looked at his sister. He should have done it before, but
sometimes even a sheriff is a coward, and he hadn’t wanted to see
too much. She was older than him by four years, but today, it could
have been eight. The flesh of her once-rounded face had drooped,
thin lines radiating out from her eyes and her lips. Deep grooves
etched her face, following the line of her nose. She’d visited
Cottonmouth a little over a year ago, and those lines hadn’t been
there then. Maggie’s strain was having a physical effect, and it
was dereliction of brotherly duty that he hadn’t paid more
attention to the altered tone of her emails over the last few
months.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on,
Maggie.” Brax steeled himself for another awkward conversation like
the one with Carl.

“He’s having an affair, and I’m sure he’s
going to leave me. He’s been sneaking money out of the bank account
and hiding the statements, and he won’t let me into his office
anymore, and we’re either fighting or not talking at all, and I go
crazy whenever he leaves the house because I’m sure he won’t be
back and he’ll just leave me a note or worse, send me a
sayonara-baby email.” Finally she took a breath and swiped at a
tear that slipped down her cheek.

Oh man.

His ex-wife had been a crier. Brax had never
felt so helpless as when she’d had one of her crying jags, mostly
because he didn’t understand them and he had a gut-gripping sense
that they had more to do with her own past than anything he’d done.
His tactic then had been retreat and regroup. Bad choice, but he
still hadn’t learned a better way. All he could do now for Maggie
was pat her hand.

Which brought on a full-fledged watering
pot.

He patted harder and decided his course of
action. Maggie had invited him here for his detective skills. So
he’d detect. “Buck up, kiddo. I’ll help you figure it out. How much
money are we talking?”

Everything always started and ended with
money, and damn Carl for taking even a micron of the little savings
Brax assumed they had. Carl hadn’t worked in the entire time Brax
had known him, and whenever the subject came up, Maggie always
claimed he did
this and that
, which sure as hell didn’t
sound like much of a profession. But then, in Goldstone, the
prevailing occupation was
none
.

Over the years, he’d gleaned enough through
his sister’s emails and phone calls, not to mention his mother’s
frantic late-night calls after her twice yearly visits to the small
town, to form a less than totally favorable opinion of either
Goldstone or Carl. Still, he’d reserved judgment due to the fact
that he was hearing a one-sided version.

Maggie pressed the heels of her hands to her
eyes. Her lips twisted. “He’s not taking much. But when I asked him
about why he was taking money out at all, he hid the bank
statements in his trailer and took away my key.”

His sympathy for Carl was dying a quick and
painless death. “So you don’t really know for sure?”

She gave him a speaking glare. “Of course I
know. I looked up the accounts online.”

Of course. “So. Is he putting you in the poor
house?” Hell, they were already there. They lived in a trailer.
True, it had three bedrooms, a pushed-out kitchen nook, a Jacuzzi
tub on the screened-in porch out back, and damn near rivaled the
size of Brax’s house in Cottonmouth. But it was still a trailer.
Most of Goldstone’s residents lived in trailers. Which smacked of
impermanence and made the whole town a trailer park.

Maggie drew a pattern on the tablecloth with
her fork. “We’re still okay.”

“What the hell does that mean, Maggie?”

“It means we’re
okay
. He’s been doing
fairly well”—she shrugged—“so there’s a little extra, you
know.”

“Fairly well at what?” He needed a spotlight
in her eyes to get answers out of her.

“Well, he sort of like...uh...well...”

“Spit it out.”

“He started doing really well with this
outhouse excavation thing, and now he’s sort of like doing it
full-time.”

He jiggled his ear because he was sure he
couldn’t have heard correctly. “Outhouse excavation?”

“Yeah. You’d be surprised what they used to
throw down the hole. You know the old saying. One man’s trash is
another man’s treasure.”

He realized his eggs had congealed and the
bacon was cold. “We’re not talking trash, here, Maggie, we’re
talking shit.”

She flapped her hand at him. “That’s all
decomposed by now.”

It would be a really nice thing if he were
the kind of guy who could lay his head on the table and cry. She
must have seen something of that in his face, because she rushed
on. “And sometimes they’d lose stuff. Once he found this big fat
diamond ring someone must have dropped in accidentally.”

Guess the owner hadn’t wanted to go fishing
around for it. Brax drummed his fingers on the table. “You haven’t
told Mom about this, have you?”

“No. And you better not either.”

Mom had broken out in hives when she’d
learned Maggie was marrying a guy she’d known less than three days.
Who the hell knew what would happen to her if she found out Carl
was a professional outhouse excavator?

“So, how many outhouses can there be?” Not
enough for a full-time...job.

“Limitless,” Maggie confided. “In its day,
Goldstone had quite a thriving population. And you know, they
couldn’t keep using the same spot in the backyard for the outhouse.
Had to move it around. But half the town was lost in the great
flood of 1923, and they’d hardly started rebuilding by the time the
great fire hit in 1929. It sort of broke the town’s back. They
never did rebuild.”

Brax had seen the evidence of that. The only
buildings remaining were the crumbling old schoolhouse, the hotel,
the Flood’s End, and the county courthouse and jail facility, which
looked to be the only structure that received regular maintenance.
Hell, no one had even cleared away the rubble. Broken foundations
tripped you up if you shortcut across an empty lot, and holes that
had once been basements still yawned wide in the town’s landscape.
One trip—no pun intended— to the Flood’s End had shown him all
that. Carl had guided him through as though it were a
minefield.

Brax pulled them back on track. “So he’s not
taking
everything
, but he’s salting away
something
.
Or is he spending it?”

“Well, he’s gotten into that splunking stuff,
but he put the equipment on his credit card.”

Carl had a credit card? “How do you
know?”

“I looked that up online, too.”

Boy, Maggie would have made a top-notch
investigator. “What the hell is splunking?”

“You know, exploring caves.”

“You mean spelunking.”

“Whatever. I hate all that bat guano.”

An outhouse excavator would be used to it,
however. “Okay, let’s hit the high points here.” Again. “He’s
taking money, but not too much, and you don’t know what he’s doing
with it, but he doesn’t seem to be spending it.”

“He’s probably got some offshore account, and
he’s planning to run away with another woman.”

Offshore account? Maggie obviously read too
many mystery novels or watched too much TV. Or both. Brax dealt in
facts, not speculation, so he continued as though she hadn’t
spoken. “He won’t let you see the bank statements, and he locked
you out of the trailer he uses as his office.” Not to mention
Carl’s adamant refusal to let Brax use his computer last night.
Which was in his small trailer out back. Carl had told him to use
Maggie’s, but Brax hadn’t wanted to leave an Internet trail when he
checked out Simone Chandler’s website. At least not one that Maggie
could follow. Not until he knew more about Carl’s relationship with
the woman. “When did this behavior start?”

“I don’t know. Maybe three months ago. First
it was the money thing. He got angry when I questioned him, and
that’s when he started locking up the trailer.”

“And you think it’s an affair
be-
cause
?” He let his words fall off in a question.

“He disappears for hours.”

“Maybe he’s spelunking or excavating.”

“Bat guano doesn’t smell like
department-store perfume.”

Oh, so that’s the way the wind blew. “And
this is where The Chicken Coop comes into it?”

“Where else would he meet a woman? It’s not
like he’s going to run off with Mrs. Killian. She’s got seventeen
children.”

Brax almost shuddered. Seventeen children.
The woman must have been changing diapers for almost twenty years.
Twenty
years
of dirty diapers. It boggled the mind.

Of course the obvious woman to bring up was
Simone Chandler. Brax didn’t.

God, he was suddenly tired. The sun had only
just risen from behind the hills visible through Maggie’s kitchen
nook window. Right now, he didn’t want to be a cop. He didn’t want
to feel responsible for solving his sister’s problems. Neither did
he want to think about Cottonmouth or the murder that had occurred
on
his
watch. He’d rather fantasize about Simone. Simone and
him, not Simone and his brother-in-law.

Maggie picked up their plates and crossed to
the sink. Her worries had taken a toll on her—less bounce in her
step, less sparkle in her gaze. She’d aged. Just as a man didn’t
tell a woman her derriere had grown a tad larger, he also didn’t
tell his sister he thought her husband might be doing a gorgeous
blonde more than ten years her junior. Especially since he wanted
to live out the rest of the day.

“So you’ll check out The Chicken Coop for
me?” she asked as she ran water in the sink.

“Yeah.” Maggie needed his help, and he was
duty-bound to give it, no matter the weight of his own problems on
his shoulders. “Where is the place?”

“Just south of town, right on the highway.
You can’t miss it.”

“Good.”

She shut off the tap and stood for a moment.
“Thanks, Tyler.”

“You’re welcome, Maggie.” He’d clear this
whole thing up in an afternoon.

Picking up a towel, she dried her hands, then
turned to lean against the counter.

“Carl said you met Simone Chandler last
night. What’d you think?”

Busted. As if his thoughts comparing Maggie
and Simone had telegraphed themselves even while Maggie busied
herself with dirty dishes. “Pretty” was all he said, remaining as
noncommittal as possible.

“She’s more than pretty, and you know it. I
think you’d like her.”

He cleared his throat. “You know her
well?”