There's Something About Marty (A Working Stiffs Mystery Book 3) by Wendy Delaney Read Free Book Online Page B

you.”
    “Just tell me what comes to mind. For example, did everyone there seem to be acting pretty normally?”
    “I’d just met Cameron, one of the guys from the shop, but yeah.” Staring down at the scuffed linoleum under his feet, Austin pressed his lips together as if he were replaying an unpleasant memory. “Pretty damn normal.”
    “Everyone getting along okay?”
    He smirked. “Sure.”
    I didn’t need to be able to read his body language to see he was lying.
    “So, no family drama.”
    He folded his arms, resting them on his belly. “No more than usual.”
    “Like what?”
    He exhaled, blasting me with his stale breath. “Nic getting pissy about me helping myself to her dad’s scotch. It wasn’t like he didn’t offer it to me.”
    I didn’t care what she thought about her husband’s drinking as much as I did about what he had actually consumed. “So you drank some of the scotch your father-in-law received as a present?”
    “Yeah.”
    “How was it?”
    A corner of his mouth lifted. “Smooth.”
    And obviously poison-free since Austin had suffered no ill-effects aside from a possible hangover.
    “Excuse me, honey,” an older woman said as she reached for a pair of the wrist weights I was standing in front of.
    I stepped aside. “Sorry.” At least she’d given me a legitimate excuse to escape Austin’s wine breath blast zone.
    Wrinkling her nose, she sniffed the air and shot me an accusatory glance.
    It’s not me. You’re in the zone.
    I motioned to Austin to join me in front of a pink bicycle with training wheels at the end of an adjacent aisle. “I heard your father-in-law also received a bottle of salsa for his birthday. Did you try any of that?”
    Austin shook his head as he straightened the display. “Not a fan of green stuff.”
    Since he was packing around an extra fifty pounds I assumed “green stuff” included lettuce.
    “Hey, if a list of what I ate and drank is all you need from me—”
    “It isn’t.” I smiled politely. “Austin, a minute ago you gave me the impression that there may have been some underlying tension at the dinner table.”
    Staring at the bike, he shrugged while I waited with my pen poised over my notepad.
    He knew something; he just wasn’t biting.
    “That’s the one,” a little blonde girl said, running down the aisle with her mother trailing behind her, a toddler in tow. “That’s the one I want!”
    The girl hit the brakes and frowned up at me. “Hey, that’s my bike!”
    Trust me kid, I don’t want your bike. I just needed a couple more minutes in private to wrap up this interview, preferably without becoming asphyxiated.
    “Cassidy, don’t be rude,” the kid’s mother said.
    Too late. “Not a problem. I was just looking.”
    “Do you have any questions about the bike?” Austin asked the mother.
    Oh, no, you don’t. “He’ll be back to answer your questions in just a minute.” I pulled him into the next aisle, backing him up to a stack of soccer balls.
    Since I was running out of time and unoccupied aisles in the sporting goods section, I opted for the direct approach. “Any issues that you were aware of between Nicole and any other family members?”
    “Yeah, I suppose you could call it an issue.”
    Okay, now we were getting somewhere.
    “Nic can’t stand to watch Victoria wrap her brother and father around her little finger.”
    Since I had nothing but disdain for one of my former step-fathers, I couldn’t blame Nicole for feeling the way she did. “When you say Victoria wraps them around her finger, what does she do exactly?”
    He screwed up his face. “Hell, I don’t know. She just has a way of getting guys to do things for her. It’s like one minute I’m making myself a drink, and the next I’m helping her make a salad, and it feels like it was my idea. It’s like a Jedi mind trick kind of thing.”
    It must have been if Victoria had him in close proximity of vegetables.
    “So I stay away from her,”