Chapter 6
Chapter Six
“ W hen is that infernal racket gonna stop?” Meemaw groaned, tossing a metal pot in her porcelain kitchen sink with a loud clang.
“The contractor says it’s not for much longer,” I said, peering out the back door. My cousin Teddy was working on his truck in front of the barn, but the racket she was referring to was coming from a house about a quarter mile away, deeper into the fields of our Alabama farm. “They should be done in a week or so.”
“I don’t see why you’re movin’ out to that overseer’s house,” she snapped, “when there’s a perfectly good bedroom for you just down the hall.”
“This house is too small for four grown adults,” I said. “We’ve been on each other’s nerves for months.”
That was an understatement.
Against my better judgment, I’d first come back to Sweet Briar, Alabama, in April when I’d accepted a role on Darling Investigations , a reality TV show that featured me as a private investigator.
Had I been a private investigator prior to the show?
Nope.
I’d been a washed-up former teen star on a kids’ sitcom titled Gotcha! , in which I’d played Isabella Holmes, a teenager who solved mysteries around her high school. But like a lot of teen actors, I hadn’t had a decent gig in years, despite the fact that Gotcha! had been wildly popular and made me a small fortune.
A fortune my mother-slash-manager had squandered, then stolen, fleeing LA and running back to Sweet Briar, when I was nineteen, leaving my reputation in tatters, not only in Hollywood, but also with my family.
While my mother had always assured me she had my best interests in mind, turned out she really had her own. Once I started to stand up to her and demand more control over my career, she took off. With my money.
That was when I’d discovered the damage she’d done. Her unrealistic demands had painted me as a diva and first-class bitch, and no one wanted to work with me. While I’d still managed to land a few small roles and product endorsements, it hadn’t been enough to pay the bills. I’d even gotten regular jobs, but none had ever panned out, mostly because my face was too well known, and people hounded me for autographs. Employers don’t care much for divas…even when you’re not trying to be one.
So, at the ripe age of twenty-nine, I’d been on the brink of bankruptcy when Lauren Chapman had shown up at my door, offering me the show—to play on my earlier fame and let cameras follow me around as I solved real mysteries in my Alabama hometown. Only it turned out the show was heavily scripted…until I’d found a few mysteries of my own.
But none of that would have even happened if I hadn’t been forced to accept Lauren’s offer. I’d rather have filed for bankruptcy than sign that contract if not for one thing—my grandfather’s balloon mortgage on the farm.
A decade prior, my grandfather had come to me, telling me he was about to lose our farm, which had been in our family for nearly two centuries. At the time, I had the money to bail out the farm, but he was a proud man, and he wouldn’t take a handout. Instead, he’d asked me to cosign a balloon mortgage. I was in the height of my career and I loved Pawpaw more than any other person on Earth, so I’d instantly said yes. But then shortly after, he’d died in a fire that had also killed my aunt and uncle, and while he’d sworn me to secrecy, apparently he hadn’t told anyone else in the family about the balloon mortgage. And then my career tanked.
Fate must have been laughing, because Lauren showed up as I was not only about to be foreclose on my house, but the due date of the balloon payment was closing in on me. I was a desperate woman and my options had been to either pose nude or take the reality TV show gig.
It wasn’t an easy choice.
So I’d come back home in April, found my own murder mystery to solve (which my cousin Dixie and my cameraman Bill had secretly recorded) and Darling Investigations became an overnight hit.
I’d made up with my family—well, everyone except for my mother—and had permanently moved to Sweet Briar back in June, just in time to film a quick turnaround for season two.
I’d also officially moved back to my grandmother’s small farmhouse. While I was grateful to have my grandmother and two cousins back in my life after a decade-long estrangement, it was a little too much forced togetherness. So back in July, I’d hired a contractor to renovate the previous overseer’s house. It had been built in the late 1800s and then renovated several decades later. It had started as a one-bedroom house with a small living room, bath, and a pathetic excuse for a kitchen. With my renovation, I added a second bedroom and bath, and had the kitchen extended and the original bath remodeled. But one of my favorite additions was the covered front porch—complete with ceiling fans—that had a view of the cotton fields.
My boyfriend Luke had told me there was no way the contractor would meet the promised end-of-October deadline, and while I was pretty worried Buddy Bolton wasn’t going to make it, he’d picked up the pace after I’d promised him a cameo in the third season of Darling Investigations …but only if he finished in time. Now, not only was he working double time to meet the deadline, but he was also working out at the downtown gym so he’d look buff by the time season three started filming in November. Given that Buddy was fifty-two years old and likely fifty pounds overweight, that seemed like an unrealistic goal.
Just like getting the house done in time.
But now my grandmother was glowering at me, demanding a response.
“I’ll still be on the land, Meemaw,” I said, for what had to be the hundredth time. “Just like Aunt Merilee and Uncle Stanley when they lived here.”
“Yeah,” she snapped. “And look what happened to them.”
This was an old story it seemed my grandmother was bringing up as some sort of cautionary tale. But the deaths of my grandfather and my aunt and uncle in the barn fire a decade ago, while tragic, had little to do with my living in the overseer’s house, and discussing it could only stir up bad feelings now. Because Meemaw and everyone else had mistakenly blamed my cousin Dixie—who had been high on drugs and couldn’t remember a thing—until the truth had come out in June. Dixie had been set up and convicted of a crime she hadn’t committed. After Dixie had been exonerated, Meemaw had sidestepped the issue, so it surprised me she was bringing it up now, yet the look on her face suggested that there would be no discussing this either.
I sighed. There was no winning the house argument this morning, or likely ever. She considered it an extravagant waste of money to fix up the overseer’s house, let alone to make it “so fancy.” Meemaw was a frugal woman who made coupon clippers look like they were tossing money out of moving cars.
“I have to go into the office today, and I’m seein’ Luke tonight, so I don’t know when I’ll be home.” Which was my delicate way of telling her I was spending the night at his place.
Her upper lip curled. “Livin’ in sin.”
I gave her a sassy grin. “And lovin’ every minute of it.”
She scowled in return, but the corners of her lips tipped up slightly. She had to protest me flaunting sleeping with him, like any good Southern Baptist would, but she was not-so-secretly thrilled I had rekindled my teen romance with the Sweet Briar chief of police.
“I think Dixie will be home later today.”
“Another one of ya livin’ in sin,” she said, shaking her head.
“Dixie’s got herself a good man,” I said, pouring coffee into two travel mugs. “And after the last ten years, she deserves every bit of it, so don’t you begrudge her one moment of happiness.”
Her lips pressed together so tight I worried she’d split her lip, but I knew better than to comment. My grandmother wasn’t an easy woman to live with—hence me redoing the overseer’s house—and she was definitely a choose-your-battle kind of opponent, otherwise I’d spend every moment of the day in conflict with her.
“Have a good day, Meemaw,” I said as I snatched up my purse and headed out the back door with both coffees.
She grunted something behind me, which I took as a good sign. If she were truly pissed, she would have given me the silent treatment.
Teddy was leaning over his open engine, cursing a blue streak as I walked over to him.
“Why don’t you use your royalties from Darling Investigations to buy a new truck?” I asked as I approached him.
My twenty-eight-year-old cousin had turned out to be quite popular on the series, despite his obvious disdain for the show, and Lauren had been forced to cough up more money to keep him.
“Just because something needs fixin’ doesn’t mean you toss it out, Summy,” he grunted as he pushed all his weight into the wrench that was attached to some part of the truck engine.
“Still,” I said casually, “sometimes you need to know when to let something go.”
He stopped what he was doing and looked up at me, his eyes piercing mine. “Are you seriously startin’ that shit this early in the mornin’?”
I held out the coffee mug. “I’m only out here to bring you coffee.”
He snatched the mug and returned his attention to the exposed engine as he took a big gulp, then cursed when it burned his throat. “I’ve spread enough bullshit to know it when I smell it.”
I chuckled. “Maybe so, but Trini’s a nice woman.”
He balanced the mug on a flat part of the engine. “Nope.”
“Come on, Teddy,” I pleaded. “Don’t you want to find someone too?”
“I had someone, and she shit where she ate, so no. Thank. You. ”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew it was in reference to Lorraine, the mysterious girlfriend he’d broken up with a few months before I’d come back home last April. He rarely talked about her, but Dixie said he’d gotten serious, and then she’d up and called it off and moved to Dothan, about forty-five minutes away, which wasn’t far in the scheme of things in a rural area like Bixley County, but apparently far enough away for Teddy to call the broken relationship irreparable.
But now that Dixie had started a relationship with our cameraman Bill, and was gone more and more frequently—especially since he lived in Atlanta—and I spent so much time with Luke, that left Teddy alone with Meemaw on the farm. And while Teddy loved the farm with every fiber of his being, he and Meemaw were like gasoline and a lit match. Who held which title depended not on the day, but the minute.
“I love you, Teddy,” I said, leaning my arm on the side of the truck and looking up at him. “I just want you to be happy.”
“Being happy doesn’t mean being in love, Summy. Sometimes you can be happy on your own.”
He held my gaze long enough with such sincerity that I finally conceded. “Okay. I’ll back off. But you have to know this is comin’ from a place of love.”
“I know, and I appreciate it.” An ornery grin lit up his face. “But if and when I decide to start seein’ someone, I can assure you I won’t need any help.”
Rolling my eyes, I gave him a sassy look. “Someone’s full of himself.”
But I actually suspected he was right. Teddy was not only a good-looking man who stayed fit, he was also a genuinely good man who was loyal and loved selflessly. Yet I could also see that he might be intense in his relationships—his protectiveness over me and Dixie was exhibit A—and some women might not appreciate it.
He shrugged and returned to putting his weight into the wrench.
“I’ve got to go,” I said in a smug tone. “I’ve got a potential client.”
His gaze instantly lifted to mine. “Does Dix know?”
“No,” I said. “Our last potential client proved to be someone who’d made up something to get on the show. When she found out that wasn’t happening, she stomped out of the office calling me every name in the book. I didn’t see any reason to call Dixie back from Atlanta if this one turns out to be the same. Besides, she’s comin’ home this afternoon. If it turns out to be something, she’ll get here just in time to help me investigate.”
“Good point,” he said in a grunt, battling with the wrench. “Just don’t exclude her.”
“Trust me. The next case we get, she’ll be one hundred percent included.” But first we needed to get a case. While I’d only become a PI for my reality show, it turned out I was pretty darn good at solving mysteries. However, because I’d become a PI to be on a reality show, potential clients often thought I was a joke or might only want to hire me to be on the show. I hadn’t had a single client in three weeks. Sure, I had enough royalties from the show to tide me over, but I wanted a job that kept me busy every day. I was tired of people treating me like a joke. “Which means I’ve got to go. See ya, Teddy.”
“Be safe, Summy.”
I grinned. “I’m always safe.”
It was his turn to roll his eyes.
“I am always safe,” I said, walking backward toward my car, which was parked behind the house. “I can’t help it if trouble seems to find me.”
Talk about another understatement.
His brow rose as though he was calling me out. Then his mouth stretched into a wide grin. “Try not to find any trouble today.”
I gave him a wave as I got into my five-year-old sedan and headed to my downtown office.
I really hoped this client turned out to be the real deal.