Caught in the Crotchfire (A Trailer Park Princess Cozy Mystery Book 3) Read online

  The Trailer Park Princess

  is

  Caught in the Crotchfire

  Kim Hunt Harris

  Copyright © 2016 Kim Hunt Harris

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9977734-0-8

  For years (and years!) I dreamed of the day when people would actually want to read my books. I can’t put into words how much it thrills me to hear from a reader asking when they can get the next book in the Trailer Park Princess series. “A dream come true” comes to mind, and is certainly fitting, but as with all clichés, it doesn’t carry the full weight of what’s in my heart. I am hesitant to encroach on anyone’s privacy by naming names, but know that if you’ve contacted me via Facebook, Goodreads, or email and asked about the next book, I know your name, and I’m deeply grateful for you. This book is dedicated to you.

  A few disclaimers from the author:

  1. Personally, I really like Amarillo. I think it’s a charming little city and I know lots of very nice people there. Sometimes characters say things that the author doesn’t necessarily agree with, but we don’t have any choice. We must tell the story as it wants to be told.

  2. I know nothing about how cell phones and cell phone apps work. As long as you’re willingly suspending your disbelief anyway, just go with that part. It’s funny.

  3. I must credit my preteen son for the title. He said it because he thought it was funny, having the typical 12-year-old boy sense of humor. I thought it was funny, too, and I’m not a 12-year-old boy. I’m just very immature sometimes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My heartfelt gratitude for the people who helped me edit this book: Tisa Lovett White, Shirley Webb, Beni Hemmiline, Trina Meadows and McKenna Harris. You not only made outstanding suggestions and raised excellent questions, you kept me from writing “To darned much!” Although that does bring to mind a fun hybrid Monty Python/Narnia theme, it would have been an embarrassing mistake. Whew, that was close!

  Many thanks to the women of Let’s Read and Wine About It, the world’s best book club. My life is richer since knowing you and being a part of this group, and I hope this road goes on forever and our party never ends.

  My thanks also to Chasen Harris, whose 12-year-old-boy sense of humor conceived the title. I thought it was funny, too, and I’m not a 12-year-old boy. I’m just very immature sometimes.

  And lastly, my never-ending gratitude to my two sounding boards, brainstorming partners, and biggest encouragers – Darryl Harris and Kelly Hunt. When this book makes a boatload of money, I’m definitely taking you both to Europe with me.

  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 One

  Smart Enuff

  I looked carefully around the hotel room. I took in the flowers, candles, and the drapes pulled back to reveal the magnificent West Texas sunset.

  A big ol’ inviting bed.

  Tony would be there any second. Actually, he was already supposed to be there. I checked my watch. Yes, he was late.

  The realization made my stomach clench. Tony was punctual. Tony was earnest and diligent in everything he did.

  Quite inappropriately, I snort-laughed. To be crass about it, I was very much hoping that Tony was on his way here to do me tonight. That’s why I had set this whole thing up, why I’d shelled out hard-earned money on a swanky hotel room, flowers, and a fancy meal to be delivered. I was doing my best to seduce my own husband.

  There was a knock at the door, and I leapt and ran across the room to open it.

  Tony stood here, stone-faced. “What did you need?”

  “Well, I just – I was – come in.” I smiled my brightest smile and stepped back, waving a hand into the room.

  He stepped into the center of the room and gave it a once-over. Then he turned back to me and waited for me to explain. He looked bored and annoyed.

  My heart stuck in my throat and I couldn’t get words out. I had planned to get Tony here, assuming he would take one look at the room and my sexy negligee, and get the general idea. I hadn’t prepared for the need to explain myself.

  I swallowed hard, and decided to go the “show, don’t tell” route. I stepped close and put my hands on his solid chest. The moment I touched him, desire shot through me and I caught my breath, looking up into Tony’s deep brown eyes in what I hoped was a very sexy way.

  Still with the stone face.

  “Tony, you know,” I said, the awkwardness making me sound desperate. “You know we are man and wife. And God intended for man and wife to…… enjoy each other.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Frustration and desire fought for the upper hand.

  “Tony, don’t you – don’t you want to?”

  “Want to what?”

  I gestured toward the bed with a tilt of my head. “You know.”

  He looked at the bed and then back at me, his face a perfect blank. “Salem, it’s just past 7:30. It’s way too early for bed.” Then he narrowed his eyes at me. “Good grief, Salem, do you go to bed at 7:30? That’s not exactly an efficient use of your time. Personally, I’m able to get a good deal of work done in the evenings. Probably as much as most people do in a full working day.”

  “No, I just thought, since we were here and there was a bed and everything…” I shrugged.

  Another knock sounded at the door, and we looked over to see the bellboy pushing a cart full of food into the room. I had ordered steaks, salad and chocolate soufflé, but instead the cart was stacked artfully high with cheeseburgers. It was kind of like a big wedding cake. A giant silver bowl held a few thousand french fries.

  “Here’s all your food that you wanted to eat,” the busboy said.

  “No,” I said, although I wanted to dive headfirst into that bowl of fries. “I ordered steaks. And salads.”

  “Nope. This is what it says on the order form.” He held it up but didn’t let me look at it.

  “Salem, were you going to eat all this junk food?” Tony asked, his gaze shifting between me and the tray with disgust.

  “Of course not,” I stammered, guilty with just how much I did want to eat all that junk food.

  “There are probably one hundred thousand units on that tray.”

  “I know.” My voice sounded miserable to my own ears.

  “Your next weigh-in is going to be a nightmare,” Tony said, his mouth grim.

  “I know,” I said again.

  “You’ll probably gain back the thirteen pounds you lost, plus another twenty-five on top of that.”

  “No!” I gasped. I turned to the bellboy. “Get it out of here!”

  But even as I was saying it, I grabbed a handful of fries and stuffed them in my mouth. They were hot and crispy and salty – pure heaven. I grabbed another handful and two burgers. “Take it out, now! Hurry!”

  The bellboy smiled stupidly at me.

  “Salem.” Tony’s voice was solemn with disapproval.

  I was halfway through the tray by now, out of control, terrified and frantic. The food was disappearing so fast.

  “Get it out of here!” I shouted through a mouthful of food. “I c
an’t do this! I came here to seduce my husband.”

  “Seriously?” Tony and the bellhop said at exactly the same time and with the exact same tone of disbelief. “You?”

  I looked at the mirror and saw myself with half-eaten fries hanging out of my mouth. Instead of the pretty negligee, I was wearing ancient sweatpants with bagged-out knees and a dingy t-shirt.

  I froze, horrified at the sight. I met Tony’s eyes in the mirror. One side of his mouth curled up in a sneer. Then as I watched, he opened his mouth and made a sound like a ringing phone.

  “What?” I asked.

  He made the ringing sound again.

  I began to cry. This was so not the way I had planned it. The more I looked at the horrifying scene in the mirror, the more pockets and bulges of fat I noticed. They rolled along my arms and around my hips, making the t-shirt swell in mound after mound.

  “This can’t be happening,” I said.

  “It’s not,” the bellboy replied, a serious frown on his face.

  Then I woke up.

  My phone vibrated and rang on the nightstand. With a groan, I flipped it open. “H’lo.”

  “They’re coming! The robbers are coming and they’re about to take everything I own!”

  “G-Ma?” I sat up and scrubbed my face with my hand. “What’s going on?”

  “They keep driving by. They’re casing the joint, that’s what they’re doing. Casing. The. Joint. Oh! They just pulled into the parking lot. I knew it!”

  She sounded like she was on the edge of a stroke.

  “G-Ma, calm down. It might not be the Bandits.”

  The High Point Bandits, as the people on the news had taken to calling them. Or the Knife Point Bandits, as everyone else said. The High Point neighborhood, where G-Ma’s motel, The Executive Inn, was located on the Clovis Highway, had earned the perhaps unfair nickname years ago and was still called that any time a crime happened there. A string of armed robberies played right into its bad reputation.

  “It’s them!” G-Ma shouted. “I’m going to fight them off, but I think you should come over just in case. Bring your gun.”

  “G-Ma, please. I don’t have a gun, that’s Viv. What do you see?” I stood and reached for my jeans, unsure of what to do. The Executive Inn was a good five miles away. There wasn’t anything I could do from my trailer, and I certainly wasn’t going to get there in time to help her. Or, God help them, the people she’d decided to “fight off.”

  “I see a white four-door sedan, just like they said on the news, and I see four people in it, just like on the news.”

  I heard something that sounded awfully like a gun being cocked.

  “G-Ma, please do not shoot anyone!” I shouted. I shoved my feet into my shoes.

  “I have a right to stand my ground!” she roared.

  The sound of wind whooshed over the line. She had opened the office door.

  “You lowlife scum can just go back to hell where you came from!” G-Ma roared. “You’re not getting — oh. Okay, sorry. Go ahead.”

  I heard the slam of a door and the wind sound stopped abruptly.

  “It was just some people turning around.”

  I dropped onto the bed. “Seriously?”

  “Yep. Just using the parking lot to turn around. Whew. That was a close one.” I heard the rattle of the shade being lifted. “You know, I think that was Claudia Comer, from bingo night.” She gave a light laugh. “Whew,” she said again. Then she giggled. “You should have seen the way they peeled out of here.”

  I flung myself back onto the bed and covered my eyes, my heart still thudding painfully in my chest. This woman was going to be the death of me.

  “I’ll bet Claudia Comer is saying ‘whew,’ too. G-Ma,” I said, fighting for calm. “I know you’re nervous about all these robberies — ”

  “Of course I’m nervous! Those thugs are stealing from everyone around here! And I’m not going to let it happen to me.”

  “I understand you want to protect your property. But maybe you should just…you know, wait a second or two before you assume every white car is the Bandits. You’re going to ruin your own business because people are going to be afraid to even slow down when they drive past the motel.”

  “Goes to show what you know. My business has, in fact, never been better.”

  “I can’t imagine why. Listen — ”

  “Sorry, Salem, I have to go,” G-Ma said. “I’ll call you later.”

  She clicked off, and I snapped my phone shut.

  I turned my head and looked at Stump, the precious doggie who shares my life and trailer in Trailertopia. “She’s going to give me a heart attack,” I said.

  Stump jumped up and bounced her own considerable weight off my stomach. Then she launched off the bed with a thud and trotted down the hallway.

  I stumbled behind her to let her out the front door. Early morning sunlight shot into the room. I drew the door almost closed, then leaned my arm against the wall and rested my forehead on it.

  Between G-Ma and that awful dream, my mind was mush, and the day hadn’t even really started.

  As I slowly came more awake, I mentally cataloged all the ways that horrible dream was not real. I had not rented a hotel room. I had not tried to seduce Tony. I had not dived headfirst into a tray of burgers and fries. I had not instantly gained thirty pounds.

  I reached a tentative hand down and patted at my stomach and thighs. Thank you, God. Still the same level of fatness as when I’d gone to bed.

  I was starving. And if I didn’t get a move on, I was going to be late for work.

  As soon as Stump came in and I’d filled her breakfast bowl, I went back to the second bedroom of my trailer and knelt on the floor pillows I’d placed there for my prayer time. I lit the new three-wick candle I’d bought at Hobby Lobby (pear scented, which smelled delicious but also made me feel a little guilty because I was supposed to be focusing on the things of God and I wasn’t sure if it was okay to like that scent so much when I was supposed to be praying. But then again, God did make pears, so…) and first focused on my breathing. I needed to take a break from G-Ma, the High Point Bandits, and that dream. I needed to spend time in prayer and let God fill me up and prepare me for the day.

  I had had this routine for a while now, over a year. During that year I had come to count on the fact that I would be filled. I would be better prepared for the day ahead. Something in the devotional I read, or something that came to me during my prayer, would speak directly to whatever was weighing most on my heart at the moment. Sometimes it was an encouraging word, and of course I liked that. Sometimes it was more a word of what Les, my mentor, called “conviction” which was a nice way of saying that God showed me exactly what I was doing wrong and exactly what I needed to do to fix it. I didn’t particularly like those days, but I did feel guided by them.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect today. Maybe that dream meant that I needed to give up on throwing myself at Tony and also quit throwing myself at cheeseburgers. Maybe God was going to tell me something to reinforce that.

  Once I felt like I was prepared to handle whatever God was giving me today, I opened the devotional.

  “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Be sober minded. I Peter 5b - 8a. (ESV)

  Well, God should be pouring a ton of grace on me, then, because I felt very humble — if “humble” meant something kind of like humiliation.

  I didn’t particularly care about being exalted at the proper time, though. That brought to mind standing in front of adoring crowds while I gave a beauty queen parade wave. So not me. A little bit exalted, though — up from having Tony and the room service guy look at me with horrified disgust — I wouldn’t mind that.

  Be sober-minded. I had the sober. I had 378 days of sober, in fact. So…check. Sober-minded, perhaps not so much. Circumsta
nces did have a worrying tendency to blindside me.

  I read through the verses a second time, then a third. Each time the “casting all your anxieties bit resonated stronger and stronger.

  I felt off-kilter because I’d had a bad dream. I’d had a bad dream because I was increasingly more worried that Tony was getting ready to reject me outright.

  The realization made my stomach drop. I was worried that Tony was going to reject me outright.

  And what could I do about that? Not a thing that I was aware of. So what did I do?

  I cast my anxieties.

  “I don’t really know how this works,” I said softly, bowing my head and closing my eyes. “But I want to cast my anxieties on you. I’m worried about Tony and me. I know he wants to do your will. And so do I, so…so…I’ll just leave it to you two to work out between you.”

  It was one of those things that was so much easier said than done. Every time my mind went to worrying about me and Tony, I would have to do the same thing I did when I thought about drinking: I would have to think of something else.

  Unfortunately, lately when I wanted to drink, I’d made my mind switch to thinking of Tony. So I would need to think of something else.

  Food! was my immediate thought.

  Something else that wasn’t food, I thought. Although I didn’t hold out a lot of hope.

  I did feel a bit better, though. Not that everything was going to work out the way I wanted it to, (and how did I want it to? I still wasn’t exactly sure, but the clench in my stomach could be a clue) but that God was aware of what was going on, and he was on top of it. That was a comfort.

  Then I remembered there was something of a “Special Event” at work that day. The new cell phone store, Llano Cellular, that had gone into business beside Flo’s Bow Wow Barbers (where I was gunning for the position of Head Groomer) was having their grand opening. The owners were two guys named Montana and Dakota from one of the small towns in the area, and they’d stopped by the grooming shop the day before to make sure we would be there.