Mother Knows Best (A Margie Peterson Mystery)
Read Mother Knows Best (A Margie Peterson Mystery) Online
Authors: Karen MacInerney
OTHER TITLES BY KAREN MACINERNEY
Margie Peterson Mysteries
Mother’s Day Out
Dewberry Farm Mysteries
Killer Jam
Gray Whale Inn Mysteries
Murder on the Rocks
Dead and Berried
Murder Most Maine
Berried to the Hilt
Blueberry Blues: A Short Story
Brush with Death
Death Runs Adrift
Pumpkin Pied: A Short Story
Tales of an Urban Werewolf
Howling at the Moon
On the Prowl
Leader of the Pack
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Karen MacInerney
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503954830
ISBN-10: 1503954838
Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects
To Jessica Park, for leading the way. Without you, this book never would have been written!
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Y
ou’d be surprised how hard it is to find a parking spot at a strip club on a Sunday afternoon.
My boss, Peaches Barlowe, and I had been following real-estate maven Marty Krumbacher’s red BMW convertible for two hours. Peaches’s Buick Regal was in the shop—a client’s ex-husband had taken both a Louisville Slugger and a chain saw to it earlier that week—so we were driving my slightly dented Grand Caravan. Peaches, in a bright-orange Lycra dress that matched her hair and dipped perilously low in the front, wasn’t in any hurry, but I was starting to fret. Marty needed to wrap up any nefarious activities by three so I’d have time to make it to the new-parent orientation at Holy Oaks Catholic School.
We’d spent the morning sitting outside of Marty’s downtown office, drinking black coffee and eating pork rinds (Peaches was on a low-carb diet again) while we waited for something to happen. When Marty shot out of the parking garage at 1:45, I was worried it was going to be another trip to the Milk and Honey Spa for a manicure, but when the red BMW turned north and then pulled into the Sweet Shop parking lot, I began feeling optimistic.
A few days earlier, a blonde woman in Lululemon yoga pants and about five hundred dollars’ worth of Nordstrom-counter makeup had marched into Peachtree Investigations in a cloud of lily-scented perfume. Which was a nice change, really, from the smell of melted paraffin and nail-polish remover that permeated our new workplace.
Since the office had blown up a few months back, we’d been subleasing space on the east side of Austin in a Brazilian waxing salon called the Pretty Kitten. I still hadn’t adjusted to the near-constant sound of Velcro ripping, punctuated by the occasional scream, and that day was no exception. No sooner had the blonde woman walked through the door than a stifled yelp came from one of the rooms down the hallway.
“What’s that noise, Mommy?” my daughter Elsie asked, opening and closing her beloved French-fry phone as I tried to finish up a worker’s-comp report. I was relieved to see the fry phone in her hands; unfortunately, she had chosen one of the rarest Happy Meal toys on the planet as her love object. I had lost it on a job six months ago, and since then did twice-daily checks to make sure it hadn’t gone missing again.
School hadn’t started yet, and my husband, Blake, had client meetings that afternoon, so I’d had to bring Elsie and her younger brother, Nick, to the office with me for the day. Nick, thankfully, was engrossed in building a Duplo version of the Loch Ness Monster, allowing me to focus on the details of Fred Goertz’s faked ankle injury while Elsie was finishing up a
Frozen
coloring book.
“It’s a kind of beauty treatment,” Peaches told her.
“I don’t think I want to be beautiful,” Elsie said, wrinkling her nose and fingering the rhinestone dog collar she’d taken to wearing a few months back.
“You already are, sweetheart,” my boss told Elsie, and as my daughter picked up the blue crayon again, Peaches turned to the blonde. “What can I do for you?” she asked in her slow southern drawl.
The woman looked around, her nose wrinkling. “I think my husband’s cheating,” she announced as if my children weren’t in the same room with us.
“Uh, could you hold on a minute?” I asked. “I’m just going to relocate the kids.”
She pressed her lips together into a thin line and gave a sharp nod as I fired up my iPhone, found the
Frozen
soundtrack, tucked the earbuds into Elsie’s ears, and ushered both her and her brother into the small back room where we kept the files.
“But I need my blocks!” Nick complained.
“I’ll bring them to you,” I said, gathering handfuls of Duplos and tossing them into the plastic bin. “This should keep you going for a bit,” I told him. “It’ll only be a few minutes.”
The door to the storage room had barely closed before the woman continued. “I need proof,” she said, “but he can’t know a thing about it.” She looked at the cracked plastic visitors’ chair as if it might be contaminated, then perched on the very edge of it, holding her enormous designer bag in her lap. Her words were cold and detached, but I could see that her eyes were red.
“Discretion, then,” Peaches said, leaning back in her creaky Naugahyde office chair. “We can handle that. Are you concerned he’ll take measures if he suspects you’re having him investigated?”
“Damned right I’m concerned. Why else would I come to a place like this?” She swept a manicured hand through the air. Despite the anguish in her blue eyes, which looked like they could have burned holes through concrete, her Botoxed face was as smooth and stiff as a mannequin’s. She leaned forward, and the expensive scent of perfume wafted over to me. “If that bastard knows I’m on to him, he’ll move every dime we have to a Swiss bank account. I’ve given him eight of my prime years, and he’s not getting out of this without giving me a return on my investment.”
“Investment?” I asked.
“Eight of my prime years,” she repeated.
“Have you considered moving funds to a separate account?” Peaches asked.
“Of course,” she sniffed. “But don’t you think that would kind of negate the whole ‘discretion’ thing?”
Peaches pursed her hot-pink lips. “So we’re talking cash.”
“I went to the bank this morning. Just tell me how much you need,” the woman said, fishing a leather wallet from her bag and pulling out a stack of hundreds. Peaches’s purple-lined eyes widened, and by the time Mitzi Krumbacher had pushed through the glass door and marched back out to her cream-colored Porsche Cayenne, Peaches had pocketed a cool thousand bucks and was already running a background check on the woman’s potentially wayward husband.
“He’s loaded,” Peaches said. “Real-estate magnate here in town. Looks like we won’t have to worry about rent for a month or two.”
“Why was that lady so angry?” Elsie asked as I opened the door to the storage room.
“Sometimes, when people are married for a long time, they run into difficulties, darling,” I told her.
“Like you and Daddy?” she asked, making my heart wrench. Peaches raised an eyebrow.
“Not quite the same,” I said. At least, I didn’t think so. Although it could be. For all I knew, Marty Krumbacher was into sequin-clad drag queens, just like my husband. Blake and I were still living together, but things were what my mother-in-law referred to as “strained.” I smiled at my daughter and redirected her attention to the fry phone, then turned back to my report, wondering with a pang of guilt how much psychological trauma my husband and I had inflicted on our children—and whether taking them to a Brazilian waxing salon was compounding the damage.
Since that day, Peaches and I had spent a lot of time tailing Marty Krumbacher around town, but with no success.
Until today, that was. Instead of driving to a steak house, he headed north and pulled in at the Sweet Shop—which sounds like a trendy bakery but evidently specializes in young women who make their living dancing with poles. The sign above the building showed a buxom girl wearing nothing more than a lascivious smile and two strategically placed cupcakes, both of which were topped with enormous strawberries.
“Busy place. Must be the free food,” I said, pointing to the neon sign blinking beneath the cupcake lady and advertising “FREE LUNCH.”
“Nah. It is a good lunch—I swing by sometimes when billing isn’t great—but it’s packed because of Whipped Cream Sunday.” Peaches pointed to the banner hanging over the entrance.
“Do I want to know what that means?” I asked.
“I think you can figure it out. Big waste of good Reddi-wip, if you ask me,” she said as I circled the parking lot looking for a space. “But I’m not their target audience. Hey, there’s a guy backing out over there,” Peaches said, pointing to a Subaru Forester with a “MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT EANES ELEMENTARY” sticker plastered to the back window. It was easing out of a space marked “Compact” and only narrowly missed taking the bumper of the Corolla parked next door with it.
“I don’t know if we’ll be able to get the van door open,” I said.