A Body in the Bargain: A Kate & Kylie Mystery Read online

  A BODY IN THE BARGAIN

  A Kate and Kylie Mystery

  Charlotte Moore

  Copyright © 2016 by Charlotte Moore. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the author.

  eBook designed by MC Writing

  A BODY

  IN THE

  BARGAIN

  A Kate and Kylie Mystery

  CHARLOTTE MOORE

  Chapter 1

  Here’s the worst thing about the day I moved back to River Valley.

  I walked into the little white frame house my grandmother had left me in her will and saw that my step-cousins had taken all of the furniture out of the house. I knew it was them because all the framed family photographs of me and my mother and father were still on the mantel. I was tired anyway, and it looked so empty and desolate. There was nothing to sit on, nothing to lie down on. I just bawled.

  The best thing about that day was that Kylie came right over when I called her.

  I was still bawling when she came tearing through the front door. She hugged me and said, “Oh, Kate, I’m so sorry!”

  Then she ranted about how horrible and tacky and trashy and hateful they were to do that. She put her hands on her hips and asked me if I wanted her to get Buddy and Jackson to go over to Lulaville and get it all back.

  Buddy is Kylie’s husband. He and his brother Jackson work at their daddy’s farm supply and tractor place. They are big men who drive big trucks and shoot whatever is in season. I have seen Buddy Carson with a 200-pound wild hog tied to the top of his truck.

  I said, “No, please don’t.”

  All the same, it made me feel better to have somebody one hundred percent on my side. Kylie’s the best at that.

  She said I should take them to court. She said she’d call the new police chief to come over so I could report it as a crime.

  I thought about that and said, “Kylie, I just don’t want to deal with that awful Melvalene Bodrey and those sons of hers. They’ll start arguing that it was their granddaddy’s stuff, even though he was only married to her three years and died two years before she did. You remember how they acted up when he died and left everything to Grandma. I’m just glad they left the stove and refrigerator and the air conditioning units.”

  “And the curtains,” Kylie said matter-of-factly. “They were probably planning to come back for everything else this weekend. You’d better get the locks changed tomorrow.”

  She glanced out at my car with the little U-Haul hitched to it, and asked, “When are the movers coming with the rest of your stuff?”

  I said, “That’s all my stuff right there. I thought everything was going to be here, and I didn’t have anything worth moving except my computer and my art studio stuff, and books, and some framed pictures and kitchen things. I had sold all the furniture to the couple who were moving into my apartment.”

  I looked around at the bare rooms.

  “I was hoping to live on my savings for at least a year and just paint and maybe do some writing,” I told her, “But it looks like I’m going to have to buy some furniture.”

  I should explain that I’d just left a job in marketing, and I’ve done a little freelance magazine writing. I’d love to write a novel, but I’m an artist, too—watercolors mostly. I just hadn’t had the time to give to either one, and inheriting my grandmother’s house in peaceful River Valley had seemed like a chance to put my creativity to the test.

  I was beginning to feel sorry for myself again when I noticed that Kylie as looking as if she’d just won the lottery.

  “So, why don’t you come stay with us for now?” she said, beaming at me. “We’ll see about getting the locks changed and taking the U-Haul back tomorrow, and we can start hitting the yard sales and second-hand places Saturday. This is going to be the best bargain hunt ever!”

  Kylie King Carson has been my best friend from third grade on, and she was one of the reasons I decided to leave Atlanta and move into the house instead of selling it.

  The way our friendship started was that Kylie’s mother had just moved back to River Valley with her (we don’t talk about Kylie’s father), and she was a little shy and a little chubby.

  Mary Beth Holloway, who was in fourth grade, teased Kylie about being fat, and I told Mary Beth “You’re acting like one of Cinderella’s stepsisters.”

  I loved that Disney movie, and that was the worst thing I could think of to say.

  Kylie said, “Yeah” and all the fourth graders laughed at Mary Beth.

  Of course, Kylie lost the baby fat and turned out to be something like Cinderella. She was homecoming queen at River Valley High School the same year I was editor of the school paper.

  She’s a couple of inches taller than I am, and curvier. A lot curvier. I’m blonde and blue-eyed. She’s dark-haired with big brown eyes. She’s married with kids. I’m not.

  She reads those bodice-ripper paperback romances that she buys second hand and sells back to the same store. I read Jane Austen and murder mysteries on my Kindle.

  I can tear through the grocery store in ten minutes, hitting the deli and picking up some fresh fruit and ice cream. Kylie clips coupons, and will drive twenty miles to get a good deal on chicken legs.

  Almost every piece of furniture in her house except their sofa and Buddy’s recliner is something she bought second hand and fixed up, and it could still be in a magazine. She even has a website where she sells things she sews.

  She can be bossy at times, but I’m used to that, and on that particular afternoon, I really needed the kind of best friend who takes charge.

  Chapter 2

  I locked up, and we headed over to Kylie’s house, leaving a couple of lights on and my car and the U-Haul in the driveway so the Bodrey brothers would stay away.

  Kylie and her family live in the house Buddy grew up in. It used to belong to her in-laws until they got richer and built a fancy brick place near the country club. It’s a big place out near the city limits.

  They have identical twin boys—Mark and William. Neither one of them was named Theron Lanier “Buddy” Carson, Jr. because Buddy wouldn’t hear of giving one of them his name, and not the other.

  They are eight now, and I can finally tell them apart because Mark’s got a little white scar near his left eyebrow where his brother– completely accidentally, Kylie says—-stuck him with a sharpened pencil . It went in at a slant and a little bit of the lead broke off , but you don’t really want to know about this.

  The thing is that it’s not a bad scar. I think William’s a little jealous of it because now he’s “the one without the scar.”

  They have stopped running to hug me, but they were really fascinated with their mother’s story of the awful step-cousins stealing all the furniture in the house Auntie Kate’s grandmother gave her.

  “If I had been there, William said, “I would have thrown them on the floor and cuffed them.”

  “I would have said ‘Make my day!’,” Mark (the one with the scar) said, squinting his eyes and pointing an imaginary gun.

  “Thanks, guys!” I said.

  Kylie’s mother, Darlene King, listened sympathetically and gave me a hug.

 
Darlene raised Kylie pretty much on her own, and when the boys came home from the hospital weighing less than five pounds each, she came to help and never left.

  This is a very good thing because Kylie is a wonderful mother, but she’ll tell you herself that there are times when she gets so focused on her sewing projects, her monogramming, her crafts, her coupon clipping and her bargain hunting that the boys could be climbing on the roof, and she wouldn’t notice.

  In fact, they did that once when Darlene went off for a two-day church retreat. Kylie says that she watched them every minute the first day, but the second day she woke up with an idea for sewing pockets onto beach towels. (Very handy. I have one.)

  Also, it’s a good thing Darlene’s there because Darlene is a wonderful cook, quite willing to deal with Kylie’s bargain-based bulk buying and Buddy’s freezer full of venison.

  Cooking is not Kylie’s strong suit.

  Darlene had just taken a huge lasagna from the oven when we got there and was buttering thick slices of Italian bread to run under the broiler. I realized I was practically faint from hunger. It was all I could do to keep from snatching a slice of bread from her hands.

  Kylie beamed at her mother and said, “Now aren’t you glad I bought all that shredded mozzarella on sale?”

  “Only fourteen more packages to go!” Darlene said, winking at me. “Here, Kate! You look hungry!”

  She handed me a slice of buttered bread, and I wolfed it down.

  Darlene asked about my parents, and I told her they were fine. My parents have been living happily in St. Augustine since I was a junior in high school, and my dad got a good job offer there. I spent my senior year living with my grandmother so I didn’t have to change schools. I was telling Darlene about my dad’s retiring and their plan to buy one of those fancy motorhomes when Buddy came home.

  Kylie always says she married the best looking man in Georgia, and she might be right. All the Carson men are big and tall with sandy hair that bleaches out in the summer sun, and year-round tans and hazel eyes, but Buddy probably has the best smile, and he’s a good guy.

  If your best friend is going to get married when she’s 19, Buddy Carson is the man you want her to marry.

  He hugged me and listened to Kylie’s and the boys’ version of my house being emptied.

  “She was robbed blind!” Mark said.

  “They took everything!” William said, “But Mom knows where they live.”

  Kylie explained that I just wanted to let them have the old stuff and that we were going to start hunting for second-hand furniture, but I needed a locksmith fast.

  “Her car’s in the driveway, and we left the lights on inside,” she told Buddy. “We’re going to unpack and take the U-Haul back tomorrow, and start hitting the second-hand places and then the yard sales on Saturday. She needs a bed first.”

  “Ferguson’s has a sale on mattresses,” Darlene broke in. “I saw it in the paper. Kate, you don’t want a second-hand mattress. They can have fleas or bedbugs and who knows what.”

  “You’re right,” I said before Kylie could get her mouth open. “I was going to buy a new mattress and box springs anyway because neither of grandma’s beds had a good mattress. I wonder if they’d deliver it tomorrow.”

  “They will if you tell them that’s the only way you’ll buy it,” Buddy said as he punched some numbers into his cell phone.

  A minute later, I heard him talking to somebody named Daniel about keeping an eye on 123 Charter Lane for a couple of days, and how it was okay if it was a cute blonde moving something in, but not okay if it was anybody big ugly guys from Lulaville taking things out.

  I liked being called a cute blonde, and was about to ask who Daniel was, when Buddy called somebody else about meeting us at 123 Charter Lane at 8:30 a.m. to change the locks.

  Then he asked, “When are we going to eat?”

  I called my Aunt Verily to tell her I had arrived safely and was staying with the Carsons for the night before getting everything moved in. I didn’t want to tell her about the Lulaville step-cousins and have her call my parents in St. Augustine.

  “Well, come by to see me on Monday,” she said, “John Robert’s driving me up to Macon in the morning to spend the weekend with Billy and Rebecca and go to my new great-grandbaby’s christening.”

  Verily Pickens is another reason I moved back. She runs the River Valley Library. Her mother and my mother’s mother were sisters, which means she’s my great-aunt. She lives in an old house with her youngest son, John Robert, who is single.

  She and I talked about family until Kylie came to tell me supper was on the table.

  We had a great supper and then Kylie could see that I was so tired I was about to fall flat on my face, so she took me upstairs to the guest room.

  “These sheets are 100 percent cotton,” she said, turning back the quilt on the bed. “I got four of them for ten dollars at an estate sale, and I found those cute embroidered pillow cases at a yard sale.

  The last thing I heard before I fell asleep was, “Now don’t worry about anything. We’re going to get your house all fixed up, and you’re not going to believe how much money you’re about to save.”

  I’m sure that what she probably told Buddy later that night was something like this:

  “I told her they’d do that. I told her right after her grandmother’s funeral that she ought to padlock that house, because Melvalene probably still had a key from when her daddy was living, and she’d send those sons of hers back to take things, and but you know Kate. She said, ‘Oh, Kylie. They wouldn’t do that.’”

  I know she said something like that to him, but the thing is, she didn’t say it to me. And that is a true friend.

  The next morning was Friday. It was a good thing I fell asleep early and woke up in time for a long hot shower because there’s no such as sleeping late at the Carsons’ house on a weekday. Buddy was yelling at the twins that they’d be walking to school if they weren’t dressed and downstairs for breakfast in five minutes, and Kylie was yelling to Buddy that she’d take them since we had to meet the locksmith anyway.

  Then she knocked on my door.

  “I’m up,” I said. “I’m getting dressed and packed.”

  “Don’t pack yet,” she said, opening the door a crack. “You can stay here until you get your furniture.”

  “I know,” I said, “And I love you all for that, but if I can buy a mattress today, and get my things moved in, I’d really love to stay at Grandma’s house, I mean my house. I’ve got my computer chair and desk in the U-Haul, and I can eat off that. I do that a lot of the time already.”

  The rest of the day went like a blur. The locksmith tried to sell me a security system. I told him it was a sort of family feud thing, and that I didn’t expect to be robbed again—that it had always been a safe neighborhood. He shrugged and said, “Well, you call me if you change your mind. Having that window in the back door isn’t the safest thing, you know. Somebody could break the pane and reach right in.”

  I really wasn’t worried about that.

  We got my stuff moved in, and we headed off to return the U-Haul and go by Ferguson’s Furniture Store in downtown River Valley.

  “She’s not buying it here unless you can deliver it to her house today and take her grandmother’s old mattress away,” Kylie told Mr. Ferguson.

  He hadn’t changed a bit since I left. He still has hair in his ears and none on his head.

  “My truck driver isn’t doing a thing right now,” Mr. Ferguson said. “Let’s find you a mattress and box springs, Miss Katie.”

  I hate being called Katie, but I wasn’t going to argue with Mr. Ferguson.

  After I picked a set and decided I had to get the metal bed frame, too, I paid him, and we went back to the house to wait for the delivery.

  By that time, the neighbors had decided it was time to drop by.


  Wanda Faye Patterson came from next door with a platter of pimiento cheese sandwiches.

  Mrs. Patterson, who is probably 80, said she had seen my step-cousins coming back and forth, but she thought it must be all right if they had a key. She’s one of those people who just thinks the best of everybody, and she makes wonderful pimiento cheese. The sandwiches were on white bread with the crusts cut off, and I ate one straight from the platter.

  Then Sally Stevens Turbo came across the street, but she wasn’t bearing food.

  Sally was one year behind Kylie and me in school. She was a skinny brunette then. She’s a skinny blonde now.

  “I saw those Bodreys coming back and forth and taking things,” she said. “I wasn’t so sure they were supposed to be doing that, but I didn’t want to stick my nose into it and call the police and have it turn out to be okay. I didn’t know how to reach you, Katie.”

  “It’s Kate,” I said.

  Kylie looked her straight in the eye and said, “You could have called me,” and Sally shrugged and said, “Well, how was I to know you two were still close?”

  Sally Stevens Turbo is the only woman I have ever heard Kylie refer to as “that heifer,” so I was glad that the mattress and box springs arrived right then.

  Once that was in place in the main bedroom, Kylie said she had a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for chicken sandwiches at the Chicken Coop, so we locked up and took a lunch break.

  “Kylie,” I said while we were eating, “I’ll be fine for the rest of today. I’ve just got to go see about getting cable and internet started, and then I’m going to buy some groceries.”

  “Come out to my place first and let’s see what coupons I have,” she said. “Do you have a list.”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “I honestly just want to buy a few things that won’t be too much trouble to fix.”

  She gave me a doubtful look, and then she smiled.

  “Okay, Kate,” she said, “But if you want to make your savings last, we’re going to have to work on bargain hunting. First thing tomorrow, we’re going yardsaling, because I happen to know that the Cadburys over on Taylor Street have bookcases for sale.