Popped Off

by Allen, Jeffrey

  “Great. Now let’s talk about doing some work for the community.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I want you to make a donation. Specifically, to something like, say, youth soccer. I’d suggest the Rose Petal Youth Soccer Association,” I said. “Do it publicly and take the credit. I really don’t care. And let me suggest an amount. Maybe half a million dollars? How does that sound?”

  His face reddened. “Like hell I will.”

  “We can say ‘hell’ in a church?”

  “I’m not giving you anything.”

  “Well, that’s certainly your choice,” I said. “Absolutely your choice. But I’m pretty sure your congregation would be frustrated to learn their money had gone anywhere other than the church.”

  He looked away.

  “Message boards can be brutal,” I said. “Who knows what people might start putting out there about you and your church? Because they’ll find out. People always do.”

  He stared at his feet, quiet. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking about, but I didn’t want to interrupt his reverie or prayer or whatever it was.

  “I’ll get the check to the soccer association by Friday,” he said.

  “Excellent!”

  “I want all the photos.”

  I pulled out the flash drive Victor had given me. He had sat outside the farm for an hour two nights earlier and had got the photos we needed. Haygood was very predictable.

  I tossed him the drive, and he caught it, clutching it to his chest.

  “Don’t ever set foot in my church again,” he growled.

  I stood. “That won’t be a problem.”

  “And one day I’ll be coming for you,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “You will pay for this.”

  I smiled at him as I walked to the door. I opened it and turned to him.

  “I thought you’d feel better about this,” I said.

  He looked perplexed. “What?”

  “All this honesty,” I said. “I thought it would make you feel better.”

  59

  I walked outside, and Myrtle Callaghan was standing next to my car.

  I handed her the envelope.

  “That was easy,” she said.

  “If you say so.”

  “Hey, if you ever are looking for another job, I’m always looking for good investigators who can—”

  “Not ever,” I said. “Not ever.”

  60

  I drove home, relieved. It was over.

  I needed to make a few calls to let Victor know it was really done and to figure out what I was gonna have to do to make everything up to him. I needed to call Moises and Elliott to let them know they were in the clear so they could figure out how to start their lives again.

  And I just needed some time at home with my girls.

  I parked the van in the driveway and bounded into the house, ready for a Sunday with nothing but family.

  “Anyone home?” I called to the empty living room.

  “In here, Daddy!” Carly yelled.

  She was parked on the sofa, eyes glued to an oversize picture book.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Upstairs. She was taking a shower.”

  I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek before bounding up the stairs.

  I found Julianne in our bedroom, sitting on our bed, legs crossed Indian style.

  “Are we having a powwow?” I asked, smiling.

  Julianne smiled. “Not quite.”

  “Are you sick?” Julianne never sat still. Ever.

  She shook her head. There were tears in the corners of her eyes, but she was smiling. “No.”

  I was confused. “What? What is it?”

  She held up her hand.

  She was holding up what looked like a small Popsicle stick.

  And there was a bright pink plus sign on it.

  Keep reading for a special sneak peek at

  Father Knows Death,

  the next Stay at Home Dad Mystery

  featuring Deuce Winters. . . .

  1

  George Spellman’s lifeless face gazed at me amid the packages of frozen bratwursts.

  I stared at him for a moment and then closed the freezer door. Not because I was shocked or horrified at finding a dead body. I closed it because I realized I wasn’t fazed by finding a dead man stuffed inside a freezer. I wondered if I should just stop opening things.

  It was late April, and I was working the grill at the Carriveau County Fair. Carly had joined our local 4-H chapter last year, and one of their big fund-raisers was working the food stand during the fair. Nothing quite like working an outdoor grill in a hundred-and-five-degree heat.

  “I think we’re gonna need some more, Deuce,” Harlan Boodle said, wiping his brow with a red bandanna. “Lunch rush is gonna be any minute.”

  The large grill was littered with thin hamburger patties, hot dogs, and a few bratwursts. They were probably seasoned with a bit of Harlan’s sweat.

  “There’s a big freezer in the back,” he said, pointing toward the kitchen. “We use it for extra storage. Should be a bunch in there.”

  “How many should I grab?” I asked.

  “As many as you can carry,” he said, chuckling. “It’s gonna be a madhouse in about five minutes.”

  We’d been working nonstop since our four-hour shift began, and I found it hard to believe it could get any busier. I could think of about fifty other things I would’ve rather been doing on a Saturday afternoon than basting myself over a dirty grill at our county fair. One thing you learn as a parent is that when your kid signs up for something, you’re signing up for something, too.

  “All right,” I told Harlan. “Be back in a minute.”

  “Grab us some drinks, too.” He flipped the already overdone patties again. “So we don’t die out here.”

  I waved at him and stepped into the food stand kitchen, which was nothing more than a sauna-like shack that disguised itself as a fast-food restaurant for one week a year. There was a covered eating area for about a hundred people, front and back counters, a giant indoor grill, some sinks, and a bunch of refrigerators.

  Oh, and about fifty people squeezed into the kitchen, trying to serve the fairgoers.

  Voices screamed and yelled about cheese and drinks and burgers and buns as people who had no business serving and preparing food attempted to do just that.

  A pink-faced Carly squeezed by me, carrying two bottles of water. “Hey, Daddy.”

  “What’s up, kid?”

  “I’m getting water,” she shouted. “For some people!”

  Her oversize green shirt hung nearly to her knees, and her hair was hidden beneath a bright yellow bandanna.

  “Good for you, kiddo.”

  She scurried past me and snaked her way through the group of workers out to the front counter to deliver her water.

  Julianne was perched on a tall stool, her hands submerged in a deep sink, washing trays.

  I walked over and kissed her sweaty cheek. “You should probably be at home.”

  She spun on the stool to look at me. Her green T-shirt was riding up over her enormous stomach.

  “Why?” she asked, setting down a tray. “Because it’s seven hundred degrees in here and I’m, like, fourteen months pregnant?”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “I’m tough.”

  I touched her very round belly. “I know that. I’m just hoping the new kid likes the heat.”

  “They won’t have a choice. We live in Texas, Deuce.”

  “Doesn’t mean you need to boil them in your stomach.”

  “I’m hoping it will encourage it to get the hell out of my body,” she said.

  She was a week past her due date and looked ready to pop. Because I enjoyed my health, I didn’t say that out loud. But she’d been carrying around a baby for ten months now, and she was ready to bond with it in person. We all were.

  “I’m going to get sausages,” I said.

  “Oh, great. I’ll
just stay here and wash trays and be enormous.”

  “And beautiful.”

  “Ha. Good one, sausage boy.”

  I kissed her again. “I love you.”

  “And I want this kid out of me, and I swear to God, I’ll have it right in this disgusting kitchen if I need to,” she said, spinning back on the stool. “Oh, and I love you, too.”

  Pregnant women are funny.

  I wound my way through the back of the kitchen, my thoughts focused on babies instead of sausages. I was excited that the baby was going to be there any day. Carly was, too. We were all ready to meet the newest member of the Winters family. We had no idea whether it was a boy or a girl. Julianne had insisted on not knowing. I had protested greatly. And it didn’t matter even a little.

  “Babies should be a surprise,” she said. “Like presents on Christmas. Plus, it’s in my stomach, so I get to decide.”

  Which was a hard point to argue with.

  I liked seeing her pregnant. Not miserable, though, and with the summer heat, I knew she was pretty uncomfortable. But I did have this fear that her water was going to break right in the middle of the dinner rush, and that would be some sort of health code violation.

  And so I was thinking about babies and rushing to the hospital when I opened the freezer and saw George Spellman’s dead face among the bratwursts.

  And after thinking that I needed to stop opening things, my next thought was that a dead body in the freezer was probably a far worse health code violation than having a baby in the kitchen.

  2

  “Well, this isn’t good,” Matilda Biggs said, shaking her head.

  The technicians were loading the body into the back of the ambulance, and the police had formed a barricade around the back of the food stand. Matilda, a member of the fair board, was concerned.

  “This is really going to reflect poorly on the fair,” she said. “Could drive down revenue.”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, less concerned about revenue than I was for George’s family.

  “I mean, Iron Horse plays tomorrow night,” she said, staring at me. “We’re expecting a big crowd. Huge. It wouldn’t be good if we had to cancel that.”

  I didn’t know Matilda well, but I knew of her. She was hard not to know of because she was hard to miss.

  She was nearly four hundred pounds.

  And that wasn’t one of those exaggerated statements about someone carrying a few extra pounds. She was one of the biggest women I’d ever seen. She was just short of six feet and seemingly almost as wide, with rolls of fat billowing from every part of her body. I’d only ever seen her wearing black sweats and some sort of stretched-out T-shirt, as I assumed she wasn’t able to find anything else to fit her enormous body. Her stringy black hair was thinning on top and stuck to the sides of her head with sweat. She was never more than a few feet away from her golf cart, as that was the only way she was able to make it around the fairgrounds.

  She pulled a walkie-talkie from her hip and punched a button. “Mama, this is Matilda. You copy? Over.”

  Five seconds later, the walkie-talkie crackled.

  “This is Mama. Roger that, I copy. Over.”

  Mama was not code for some motherly figure in Matilda’s life. Mama was Mama. Her mother. Who worked right alongside her on the fair board. I didn’t know the specifics, but I was pretty sure everyone on the entire fair board was somehow related to one another.

  “We’re gonna need a new freezer,” Matilda said. “The police are telling me we can’t use this one, on account of Deuce Winters finding George Spellman in it. Over.”

  The Rose Petal Police had, in fact, cordoned off the large freezer with yellow crime-scene tape.

  “Roger. I’m already on it,” Mama said through the walkie-talkie. “I’ve got another one on the way. Should be there in about fifteen minutes. Over.”

  Matilda nodded. “Ten-four.” She stuck the walkie-talkie back on her hip. “I gotta make some calls. Make sure we got more sausages coming.”

  She waddled over to the golf cart, dropped in behind the steering wheel, and took off, spraying dirt and weeds behind her.

  Carly and Julianne made their way around the food stand building to me. Carly surveyed the scene, trying to take everything in. I resisted the urge to pull the bandanna from her hair to her eyes.

  Julianne just raised her eyebrows. “Well, this is interesting. You already talk to the police?”

  “Yeah. Took all of five minutes. I didn’t do anything other than open the freezer door.”

  “Maybe this time you won’t be a suspect.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Very funny.”

  She shrugged. “You sort of have away of falling into these things.”

  It was hard to deny that, as much as I might’ve liked to. My part-time private-investigating gig existed only because I kept finding myself embroiled in the criminal activity in Rose Petal. Julianne had made several subtle suggestions that, with a new baby on the way, maybe I might want to curtail my activity in that arena. I didn’t disagree.

  But it seemed that trouble was still finding me, no matter how much I tried to avoid it.

  As I contemplated that, Susan Blamunski hustled our way.

  “Oh, good Lord,” Julianne whispered. “Red alert. Crazy woman dead ahead.”

  Susan’s face was a mask of concern.

  And heavy eye make-up.

  “Deuce,” she said, grabbing me by the elbow. “What is going on?”

  I tried to casually shake free from the grasp of our local 4-H leader but failed. “I’m not completely sure.”

  “I heard they found a dead body,” she said. She glanced at Julianne and, for the first time, seemed to notice she was there. “Oh, hello, Julianne. So nice to see you. We rarely get the opportunity to see you at four-H events.”

  The corners of Julianne’s mouth twitched. “Hello, Susan.”

  “So nice that your entire family could work the fair,” she said to me. “Finally.”

  “We worked it last year,” Julianne said through gritted teeth.

  “Did you?” Susan asked, pursing her lips. “I don’t recall. Seems like we see you so . . . infrequently.”

  If Julianne had access to a hammer, I was pretty sure she would’ve used it on Susan’s skull at that moment. The fact that Julianne was in the process of establishing her own law practice after leaving her firm earlier in the year meant she was having to put in some serious hours before the baby was born.

  But Susan’s digs about our family were nothing we hadn’t heard before. Our nontraditional family was still a novelty in Rose Petal. People couldn’t seem to get used to the role reversal we’d chosen in our home. It worked just fine for us, but there was no doubt that we were the topic of much conversation throughout town.

  Julianne took Carly’s hand. “Come on, baby. Let’s go check out the bunnies. Before they have another dead body to deal with.”

  If Susan picked up on the fact that she was the potential other body, she didn’t show it.

  “When is she due?” she asked.

  “Supposed to be a week ago,” I said. “Any day now.”

  “That explains her size,” she murmured. She tugged on her own green shirt, smoothing it over her modest stomach.

  She refocused on the activity around us. “So, I heard they found some man in the freezer?”

  “Yeah, George Spellman.”

  “And you found him?”

  “Yeah.”

  She squeezed my elbow. “How terrible! Why was he in there?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. I just found him.”

  Her concern now outweighed her make-up. “This isn’t going to be good. Did they say anything about the food stand?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We get nearly all of our funding from this week,” she said. “Without it, we won’t have any money for activities. For anything.”

  That was the truth. The food stand was the major fund-raiser each year for our local 4-H. Nothing e
lse brought in money even comparable.

  “I’m sure the police will be done soon.” I wasn’t sure at all, but it seemed like a good way to placate her.

  Susan looked around the area. “And didn’t I see Matilda over here earlier?”

  “Yeah, she was here,” I said. “But I think she went to go find out about the new freezer or something.”

  Susan’s lips tied together. “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “What? That she went to find a new freezer?”

  “No, no,” Susan said, lowering her voice. She looked up at me like she was about to share the most earth-shattering secret in the world with me. “I heard something . . . interesting.”

  “You keep using that word.”

  She glanced around me before settling her eyes on mine. “I heard that she was having an affair with the dead man.”

  3

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.

  “Matilda??”

  Susan nodded her head, her hairspray-drenched curls bobbing obediently. “Yes. She and George. Everyone is talking about it.”

  I was pretty sure the only person talking about it was Susan. And if other people were talking about it, it was because of her.

  “Hmm. That is . . . interesting.”

  She waited for me to ask questions. I didn’t.

  “Don’t you want to know?” she asked. “I thought you were an ‘investigator.’”

  “I am. But I’m not working this case.” Or any case at the moment. Which was pretty much fine with me.

  “You might want to after you hear about Matilda.”

  She wasn’t gonna stop. “Fine. What makes you think they were having an affair?”

  Susan pulled me away from the food stand, toward the arts and crafts building. I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as if people were crowding around, gawking at the crime scene. George’s body had been removed, and the police cars were gone. One car was still parked next to the building, a dark blue, unmarked sedan. The detective working the case.

  She stopped just short of the entrance to the arts and crafts building and pulled me next to the wall.

  “I saw them,” she whispered. “Together.”

  I flinched. I wasn’t so sure I wanted more details about four-hundred-pound Matilda and her supposed lover.