Domestic Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mystery) Read Online Free Page A

at the bottom of the bed when my ringing cell phone woke all three of us up.   It was Tara.
    “Paul’s stepfather passed away.”  
    “I didn’t know he had a stepfather.”
    “Neither did I. They haven’t been close since his mother passed a few years ago.   Anyway, the viewing is tomorrow night. Can we stop by the funeral home before dinner? I know it would mean a lot to Paul.”   She wasn’t violating our ‘no phone calls while my husband is in town’ rule. It was strictly a personal matter.
    “Sure.” Then I realized I might have been a little hasty.   “Just a sec.”
    I rolled over to nudge Jack, but he was wide awake and watching me. Our eyes met and I giggled, then reminded myself what I was supposed to ask him.   “He’s fine with it.” He’s Southern himself and knows how Southern women are about our dead people.   “Have fun today with Julio.”
    “Uh, Leigh…. There’s something else.   It’s about your mother. She’s sent Victoria two more text messages.”
    “What’d they say?”
    “We have no idea. After the first one, which just said what each of them would be doing today in case they were needed.   By the way, your mother will be walking with her friends from the Senior Strider Gals, then she has her appointment at the beauty parlor, as she refers to it.   Anyway, Victoria responded TTFN.”
    “Ta-ta for now.”
    “Yeah. Now they think you can make up your own acronyms. You don’t know what AYHTDIA means, do you?”
    I sat up and reached for the pen and notepad I keep by my bed.   “Say it again.”
    I wrote it down and ….   “All you have to do is ask.”  
    ***
    Jack, Abby and I were going to be spending the day on the Chattahoochee River in, I almost said, my canoe.   In our canoe. The first year after I left my husband and then the first year Tiara Investigations was in business all you heard from me was my house, my dog, my boat, and on and on. We were separated not even a month before he followed me to Georgia. Our marriage was better than before, but it took longer for me to heal.   I had to gather up all the pieces of my personality I had let slip from my grasp during my years as a military wife.   You can’t replace something with nothing. Tiara Investigations made me whole again. It had the same effect on Victoria and Tara.   And that’s why we haven’t told our husbands, in Tara’s case––boyfriend, about our secret lives as private investigators.   If this is our room of one’s own , what would happen if our high-profile, very accomplished partners saw it? Offered opinions on it?   Offered advice?   We were not ready to take that chance.  
    The night before, we’d settled that we’d take the canoe rather than the two seater kayak. The yellow kayak was twelve feet in length and the green canoe was sixteen so we would have been comfortable in either.   Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about cooler weather that says canoe.  
    Jack drove the Jeep and I drove the Toyota Highlander Hybrid, with the canoe strapped up top, to our take-out point on the river. Dog was my co-pilot for the thirteen-mile drive. We took Peachtree Industrial Boulevard to Abbott Bridge Road.   Less than a mile up, we turned left towards the river, then ran out of road.   The parking lot is about a quarter mile up the gravel drive.  
    While the Chattahoochee River runs from the north Georgia mountains to the Apalachicola Bay in Florida, the fun stuff happens in the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.   The 48 miles of the CRNRA starts at Buford Dam and ends at Peachtree Creek, near downtown Atlanta. About three million people a year canoe, kayak, tube, raft, and picnic there. I only know that from my former park ranger days and my Miss Georgia reign. Some are there to be seen; some are there to be a family. It’s good to live in Atlanta.  
    Jack paid the nominal fee while I locked up the Jeep.   Then we joined Abby in the Toyota for the