Deadly Summer (Darling Investigations Book 1)

by Denise Grover Swank

  “Who told them that?” I asked in horror.

  Dixie shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  I was still fuming when I pulled up in front of our office a few minutes before eight thirty. Lauren and Karen were waiting for us outside.

  “Don’t get settled,” Lauren said through the truck window. “We’re shooting a bunch of location shots today, so we’re heading out after Chuck mikes you up.”

  “Did you tell Reality Jane about me and my mother?” I demanded.

  Her eyes widened. “What? No. Why?”

  “There’s a post about it on the website!”

  Excitement washed over her face. “Really?”

  “Lauren! Someone who was at the dinner last night leaked my fight with my mother. Aren’t you going to reprimand your crew?”

  “Hell, I wish I’d thought of it, but who says it was the crew? It could have been someone in your family. It could have been Dixie, for all I know.”

  Dixie’s eyes flew wide. “It wasn’t me, Summer. I swear.”

  “I know.” If it was a family member, I knew exactly which one it had been. My mother. She’d do anything for the chance to get publicity for her stupid pageant school.

  “If we could get back to our actual work today,” Lauren said in a dry tone. “We’re staking out the insurance-fraud case. We have another location to catch Nettie’s wayward husband with girlfriend number two, and we’re heading back to the Dollar General to have another go at the old drunks.”

  We got out of the truck so Chuck could put on our mikes, and Karen gave us Tommy Kilpatrick’s address. I entered the address into the map app on my phone, and we headed for the door, but something just felt wrong. Like we were a bunch of frauds.

  I’d realized how next to impossible it would be to solve real cases. Granted, I was new to the whole real sleuthing thing, but it was kind of hard to sneak up on people when you had an entourage, including a camera guy in the back filming your every move.

  We drove in a circle two times with Bill filming before we finally pulled up in front of Tommy Kilpatrick’s house to “stake it out.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said as I shifted the truck into park. “How are we supposed to sneak up on him? And yes, I know you can hear me, Chuck.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror. Chuck was sitting in the front seat of the camera truck, and he lifted his hand in a one-finger salute while a big grin spread across his face.

  Laughing a little, I reached for the messenger bag on the seat between Dixie and me. I’d brought my own laptop today and quickly hooked it up to the hot spot on my phone.

  “I did some research last night before I went to sleep, and it looks like this guy went to Sweet Briar High School,” I said to Dixie. “He graduated in the class ahead of you. Do you remember him?”

  Dixie’s face looked strained. “No.”

  God, I was so stupid. Dixie hadn’t graduated. She’d missed her last two years of high school. “Dixie, I’m so sorry. How thoughtless of me.”

  She shrugged, then changed the subject. “I think you should do the Boll Weevil Parade.”

  I snorted. “And be second choice to Magnolia Steele?”

  Dixie cocked her head. “Magnolia hasn’t said diddly, and besides, the mayor didn’t know you were coming back to town. So, all in all, you better get ready to ride on the big float.”

  “Oh, my Lord. There’s a big float?” I asked in dismay.

  “Well, of course there’s a big float. It’s a parade, ain’t it?”

  I grimaced. “I thought maybe it was the Sweet Briar High School marching band and Doug Frasier leading his miniature goats down Main Street.”

  “We’ll have those too, but there will be plenty of floats. There’s contests too.”

  “How many contests are there?”

  “That’s a good question . . .” Dixie leaned forward and squinted her eyes. “Hey. I think Tommy’s comin’ out of his house.” Then she added, “Oh, by the way, I told Mayor Sterling you’d do it.”

  I started to protest, but sure enough, the front door opened and a guy walked out. “Is it him?” I asked. “He’s in the shadows, so I can’t tell.”

  Dixie picked up the camera and peered through the viewfinder. “I can’t see his face. It looks like his body build . . . scrawny.”

  She was right, but if I remembered correctly, that description fit about one-third of the Sweet Briar population. “Where’s he goin’?” I asked. “There’s no car in the driveway.”

  “Good question,” Dixie said.

  The guy walked down his driveway, heading toward the street. As he entered the sunlight, I could see that it was Tommy Kilpatrick looking like he was coming down off a heck of a bender. He stopped in front of his mailbox and pulled out a stack of mail, then turned toward us and waved.

  Dixie and I waved back. Some super sleuths we were.

  He walked into the road, moving closer to us. “Are y’all lost?”

  “No,” I said, sneaking a glance at Dixie before shifting my gaze to Tommy. “We’re just hanging out on your street, enjoying the fine morning.”

  He glanced back at the truck behind us. “Hey, I think I saw all y’all in Dr. Livingston’s parking lot yesterday.”

  I considered denying it, but honestly, how could I hope to deny my entourage? “Yeah. We were there.”

  “Cool.” Then he grinned, his face lighting up. “Oh! Hey! You’re Summer Butler!” He smacked the side of his head, then winced. “You’re doin’ that show . . . Hey! Can I be on it?”

  Little did he know . . . “We got some footage of the parking lot yesterday, so I bet you turned up on the screen.”

  “Awesome . . . Can I get an autograph? My sister loved your show.”

  “Yeah . . .” I glanced around the truck cab, but Dixie was already handing me a receipt from Maybelline’s Café along with a pen. “This is all I have,” I said. “I hope it’s okay. Who do I make it out to?”

  “Deidre.” He put the heels of his hands on his temples. “Her birthday’s next week. She’s going to shit her pants when I give her this!”

  “Make sure she has a change of clothes,” Dixie said in a sweet voice.

  “I will,” he said as he took the receipt from me. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Hey, will you do that thing?”

  “What thing?” I asked, playing dumb.

  “You know, that gotcha thing.” As he said the word, he winked and pointed his finger, thrusting his hip to the side.

  I cocked my head and gave him a wry grin. “I can’t compete with that. You do it for her instead. I’ll even take the video.” I grabbed the phone from him and held it up. “Do it again.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if you did it?” he asked.

  “No way . . . ,” I said. “You do it so much better than me. Come on . . . Let me see it.”

  He repeated the move, and I got him to do it several more times before he decided he’d had enough.

  “Well, we need to get goin’,” I said. “But you have a nice day, Tommy.”

  “How’d you know my name?”

  “Uh . . .” I cringed. “Everyone knows you, Tommy Kilpatrick. You’re like a Sweet Briar baseball legend.”

  “Summer Butler knows who I am?” he asked, jerking his head back. “This day is totally awesome!”

  “Say,” I said as I opened my door, “since you’re already out here, and you’re being so sweet and all, I just thought of something else we could do for Deidre.”

  “Really? What?”

  I’d looked over Tommy’s file again last night. He’d claimed he couldn’t lift more than fifty pounds, so if we could prove otherwise, I might have a hope in hell of solving this case. “I was thinking you could pick me up and hold me. Dixie here can take a picture, and you can give it to your sister.”

  His smile fell, and he rubbed his stubble-covered cheek. “I dunno.”

  “Your sister would totally love it.” I slid out of the car and stepped onto the s
idewalk next to him.

  “It’s just that I hurt my back at work a few weeks ago. That was why I was at the doctor’s office yesterday. Gettin’ a steroid shot.”

  I grabbed his scrawny bicep and squeezed. “What? A beefcake like you has a back problem? No way.” I wrapped my hand around his neck and turned to face Dixie. “Can you snap the photo?”

  “You betcha.” She slid across the vinyl seat and hopped out of the still-open door.

  Tommy made a face that suggested he wasn’t so sure this was a good idea, but the glazed look in his eyes and the strong stench of pot on his clothes made me believe I could convince him.

  “I bet Summer would print it up and sign it too,” Dixie said. “You could show all your friends.”

  “Okay . . .” But he didn’t sound convinced. Still, he bent his knees to pick me up. I expected him to scoop me up—one arm beneath my knees and one behind my back, like he was carrying me over the threshold—but instead he threw me over his shoulder, my hand dangling down to his legs and butt.

  Tommy’s feet faltered, and he was still bent at the knees. I could tell he was about to fall, so I scrambled for something to hold onto and found the closest thing—his butt.

  “Summer Butler’s holdin’ my ass!” Tommy shouted in triumph right before he toppled over . . . thankfully onto the side I wasn’t hanging over.

  I scrambled up as Tommy started moaning in pain. “I can’t move! My back!”

  Oh, shit.

  “I guess he wasn’t pretendin’,” Dixie stage-whispered to me behind her hand.

  I grimaced. “I guess not.”

  “What do we do?” Dixie asked.

  “I don’t know.” I shot a glance back to Lauren in the car behind the truck, but her face was expressionless. The guys, however, were all laughing, and Chuck looked like he was actually crying through his laughter. My only comfort was that Bill was shaking so hard the footage might be shit, but then again, that wasn’t really good either. “We can’t just leave him here.”

  “Can we help you into the house, Tommy?”

  “Just help me up.”

  Dixie and I got on either side of him and helped hoist him to his feet. When we dropped our hold, he put his hand to his right lower back—the side I’d been on.

  “Did you get the shot?” Tommy asked.

  Dixie opened her photo app and scrolled through the few photos she’d snapped. “None of them show Summer’s face.”

  No. They were all of my butt, and the angle made my ass look huge.

  “They’re perfect,” Tommy said. He pointed to the screen. “Look, that one shows her coppin’ a feel of my buns of steel.”

  I choked on a snort. More like doughy buns.

  Dixie tried not to laugh. “Give me your number and I’ll text it to you.”

  “No, you won’t!” I protested.

  Dixie turned to me with an innocent look. “You have to give him his photos, Summer.”

  Dammit. I’d injured the guy, so it was the least I could do. “Fine.”

  My own phone rang, and I wasn’t surprised to see Lauren’s number.

  “If you’re done playing carnival freak show up there,” she sniped, “then how about we head across town to catch Earl Peabody with his newest lover?”

  I turned away from Tommy. “I can’t just leave him here in the street.”

  “Yes. You can. Let’s go.”

  I hung up, stuffed the phone into my pocket, and turned back to Tommy. “You gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Should we call your doctor or somethin’?” Dixie asked.

  “Nah. I’ll just take some hydrocodone I got from a friend.” He started ambling across the street, then glanced back at me and grimaced. “Thanks for the autograph.”

  “Yeah, anytime.” Now I felt a little guilty for not doing the Gotcha! move for him.

  “Well,” Dixie said in a long drawl, “I guess we solved our first real case.”

  “Yeah. He wasn’t faking.”

  “But at least they know the truth.”

  “I guess.”

  A car horn blared out. Tommy tripped over something in his yard and landed flat on his back, his arms and legs flailing around like a turtle turned topsy-turvy. A murder of crows flew out of a large oak tree, screaming in protest.

  Tony walked up behind us, still laughing as he watched Tommy struggle to get up. “We’re gonna have to haul his ass inside, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  He shot me a grin. “Taken down by Summer Butler. That’ll make for great ratings.”

  “Can you keep that off the show?” I begged.

  He chuckled as he started across the street, then glanced back at me. “Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We spent another hour staking out Earl at his next honey’s house. This one was less eventful, which I wasn’t sure was such a good thing given Lauren’s push for drama, and afterward we headed back to the Dollar General in the hopes of catching Otto’s cronies off guard.

  I wondered if they would even be there at eleven in the morning, but sure enough, they were lounging at the table, looking less clean-cut than the day before and already three sheets to the wind. Since Karen and Lauren weren’t surprised to see them, and each of the guys had a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam, it wasn’t hard to deduce what Karen had been up to when she’d disappeared for a while an hour earlier.

  Chuck didn’t want to risk hooking microphones up on two drunk guys, so he pulled out the overhead mike, and Dixie and I started questioning Al and Fred.

  I held out my hand. “Hi, I’m Summer, and I want to ask you a few questions about your friend.”

  Fred shook my hand with a wicked glint in his eyes. “Tiny?”

  “No,” I said, squinting in confusion. “Otto.”

  “Too bad,” Fred said with a leer. He reached for his crotch. “Tiny wanted an introduction.”

  “Eww!” I said, taking several steps backward. What man would willingly name his pecker Tiny?

  “What?” Fred asked. “I may be old, but I ain’t blind, and you’re one foxy lay-dee.”

  “Did you eat some of Big Dave’s jambalaya again?” Dixie asked him like he was a naughty five-year-old.

  “Maybe . . . ,” he said in a pout.

  “I keep telling you to leave that shit alone, Fred. It’s gonna ruin you for life.”

  “Whiskey done ruined me for life.”

  “Nevertheless,” she said, “that jambalaya’s gonna get you arrested for indecent exposure, and then you’ll have to dry out in jail.”

  I had so many questions for Dixie when we were done.

  “We wanna ask you a few things about Otto, but you be sure and leave Tiny where he is,” Dixie said, putting her hand on her hip. She gave Fred a death stare, and he finally put his hands on the table. “When was the last time you saw him?” she continued.

  “I don’t need to see ’im,” Fred said with a leer. “But he’d like to see you, Dixie.”

  “I’ve seen enough of Tiny to last a lifetime,” Dixie said.

  “I think we’re gettin’ off track here,” I said.

  “So when did you last see Otto?” Dixie prompted again.

  “Sunday morning,” Al said. “He was in a bad way.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “He don’t usually come around on Sundays,” Al said. “He tends to go to church, but when I asked him why he wasn’t at church, he said he’d seen something bad, and he was a bad person for not tellin’ Luke what it was.”

  Dixie shot me a worried look.

  “Did you ask him what he saw?” I asked.

  “Of course we did,” Fred grunted. “I wanted to be the first to tell Maybelline so she could put it on her Facebook page. But he was buttoned up tighter than a nun’s habit.”

  I was tempted to point out the shortfalls of his analogy, but I didn’t want to digress down another raunchy path.

  “Did you notice a
nything else about him?” Dixie asked. “What was he wearin’?”

  “His church clothes,” Al said. “He said he’d planned to go but chickened out at the last minute. Falene stopped by to pick him up, but he hid in his house.” When he saw my confusion, he said, “Falene’s picked him up every Sunday morning for the last six months. She takes him to church on account of him losin’ his driver’s license, and his car, years ago.”

  “So Falene came by to pick him up, but he changed his mind and came here still in his church clothes?” I asked.

  “Yeah. But he was already well on his way to bein’ drunk by the time I saw him. Then something spooked him, and he took off back home.”

  “What spooked him?” Dixie asked.

  “No idea,” Al said. “But he beat it outta here.”

  “And you haven’t seen him since?” Dixie asked.

  “Nope,” Fred said, “but tell him he still owes me five bucks.”

  “Yeah, we’ll be sure to tell him when we see him,” Dixie mumbled, walking over to me.

  I clasped my hands in front of me. “Thank you, gentlemen, but we’ve gotta be goin’. We may be back to ask more questions.”

  “You know where to find us,” Al said.

  Fred just snickered.

  Lauren called “Cut,” then told the crew to pack up and head toward the First Baptist Church downtown so we could interview the minister about Otto.

  I told Lauren I needed to go to the bathroom and then slipped inside the Dollar General. Dixie came with me, and we asked the employees if they had seen Otto since Sunday. No one had information for us, and they couldn’t remember anything remarkable.

  Lauren and the crew had left by the time we went outside, but I wasn’t worried since they had to set up at the church.

  When we got into the truck, I looked at Dixie. She’d been a little quiet and subdued since our interview outside. “Do you think Otto was really scared, or do you think his pervy friends were making it up to be on TV?”

  “Call me crazy, but I think he saw something. He always goes to church. Something must have happened to make him skip it.”

  “What do you think Otto saw?”