Mother Knows Best (A Margie Peterson Mystery) Read online

  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

  www.apub.com

  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

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SNEAK PEEK: Killer Jam

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  You’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 t
o 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.

  “He got into his station wagon, didn’t he? Besides,” she added, pointing up, “you have a sunroof.”

  I sighed and squeezed into the open space, putting the van into park. There were about six millimeters between my side mirrors and the cars on either side of me. “I’ll wait here for you.”

  Peaches turned to me and blinked. “What do you mean, wait here?”

  “I thought you just needed me for the car.”

  “You always bring backup when you have it,” she said. “Besides, I’m going to let you take charge today. It’s good training.”

  I pointed to my faded Green Meadows Day School T-shirt and my khaki shorts, which sported an enormous hole in the left leg where Rufus, my temperamental Siamese cat, had slashed them. “I can’t go in. I’m way underdressed!”

  “Underdressed? Margie, you’re going into a strip club.” Peaches winked, making her heavily mascaraed eyelashes stick together. “Less is more, you know?”

  And with a brief prayer that my children would never find out that their mother had taken to hanging out in a strip club, I followed Peaches inside.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I groaned. “Do we really have to go in? I mean, he’s at a strip club. What else do we need to know?”

  “If your husband were playing hide-the-tamale with a young woman covered in whipped cream, wouldn’t you want to know about it?”

  Sadly, I knew the answer to that question. I’d found out just a few months back that my own husband had been having an affair with a young man who favored false eyelashes and sequins.

  “Oops. My bad,” Peaches said, realizing her mistake. “How’s that going, by the way?”

  “He keeps telling me it was just a phase.”

  “A phase?” Peaches asked.

  “I know,” I said. “But what else can I do?”

  “Filing for divorce comes to mind,” she suggested.

  “He doesn’t want to. And I’m not going to bring it up now; it’s bad enough that my mother’s coming for a two-week visit.” My mother was lovely, but she also believed she’d been Cleopatra in a former life and had recently converted to an all-raw vegan diet. Now that I thought about it, maybe spending the afternoon in a strip club wasn’t so bad. “Is the liquor free, too?” I asked.

  “Nope. Ten dollars for a margarita.”

  “That’s too bad.” Though since I was due at the parent orientation at Holy Oaks in two hours, it was probably for the best.

  I gestured toward the entrance. “Do they really do . . . well, you-know-what in there?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Sometimes,” she shrugged. “I never pay that much attention—I’m usually only here for the steak. But there’s only one way to find out.” She tucked the pork-rind bag between the seats and opened the van door, smacking it into the side of the Corolla. “Oops.” She glanced up at the sunroof. “We might need to go to Plan B.”

  “I do have sliding doors,” I reminded her. We crawled to the back and sidled out of the van, squeezing between the cars.

  “You might want to get this thing washed,” Peaches said, brushing off her spandex minidress and pointing to the giant clean spots we’d made on the side of the Caravan.

  My T-shirt now had a big brown splotch in the middle of it, and I was afraid to look at the back of my shorts. “I hope I have time to change before the parent orientation,” I grumbled as Peaches adjusted her cleavage and tottered toward the entrance in her cork platform wedges. I followed in my sensible Nike sneakers and battered shorts. Next to Peaches, I was feeling a little like Cinderella in her pre-fairy-godmother phase.

  All too soon, we had stepped out of the hot August sun and were facing an enormous, shaved-head bouncer wearing a very tight pair of jeans and full sleeves of the ink variety.

  “Hey there, Peaches,” he said. “Come for the New York strip?”

  “You bet,” she said. “They got chocolate mousse today?”

  “Nah. Strawberry shortcake,” he said, nodding toward the banner. “Theme day, you know?” He squinted at me. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Business partner,” she said, and I gave a feeble wave. “Chewy, this is Margie. Margie, Chewy.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, not quite sure of the etiquette.

  “First time in a strip club?” he asked, grinning.

  “Oh, no,” I said airily. “I do this all the time.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and waved us on through. “Have fun! And I recommend the Caesar salad.”

  I had never been in a strip club before, so I didn’t know what to expect when we walked around the partition into the main room.
/>   It took a moment for my eyes to adjust; the lighting was low, except for spotlights directed at the stages. There were three of them—a big one down the center of the room, with two smaller stages flanking it. The center stage was currently occupied by a young woman wearing a hot-pink bob, green-and-white-striped stockings, and a very, very small apron.

  “Strawberry Shortcake,” Peaches said as the woman wrapped herself around the candy-striped pole and then did a series of contortions that would have made the US Olympic gymnastics team jealous.

  “Wow,” I said involuntarily. “I had no idea pole dancing could be so . . . athletic.”

  “And lucrative,” Peaches said, pointing to the men crowding around waving money. “But someday she’s going to need the cash for bunion surgery. Look at those heels,” she said, pointing to Ms. Shortcake’s six-inch stilettos.

  “Ouch.”

  A few feet in front of Ms. Shortcake and her pole, a gigantic inflatable pool had been set up, and a waitress wearing pink hot pants and a bra with very small cupcakes for cups was selling cans of whipped cream to a line of men.

  “You see him?” Peaches murmured.

  “No,” I said, although, to be honest, I’d almost forgotten I was supposed to be looking.

  “Over there,” Peaches said, nodding toward the tables close to the main stage. Krumbacher had sat down with two men in white shirts and jeans. “We’ll sit a few tables back.”

  I followed her across the dark club to a table that was painted to look like a peppermint candy, then sat down on the disturbingly sticky chair. It’s just beer, I told myself, trying not to let my skin make more contact than necessary with the vinyl seat, and attempted a casual pose.

  “You look like you’re in church,” Peaches said, leafing through the menu. “Loosen up a bit.”

  “Right,” I said, slouching a little.

  “I said loosen up, not pass out.” She handed me a menu. “Here.”

  “It’s hard to relax when we’re the only women in here,” I muttered.