Fool's Gold (A sexy funny mystery/romance, Cottonmouth Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

her twice yearly visits to the small
town, to form a less than totally favorable opinion of either
Goldstone or Carl. Still, he’d reserved judgment due to the fact
that he was hearing a one-sided version.
    Maggie pressed the heels of her hands to her
eyes. Her lips twisted. “He’s not taking much. But when I asked him
about why he was taking money out at all, he hid the bank
statements in his trailer and took away my key.”
    His sympathy for Carl was dying a quick and
painless death. “So you don’t really know for sure?”
    She gave him a speaking glare. “Of course I
know. I looked up the accounts online.”
    Of course. “So. Is he putting you in the poor
house?” Hell, they were already there. They lived in a trailer.
True, it had three bedrooms, a pushed-out kitchen nook, a Jacuzzi
tub on the screened-in porch out back, and damn near rivaled the
size of Brax’s house in Cottonmouth. But it was still a trailer.
Most of Goldstone’s residents lived in trailers. Which smacked of
impermanence and made the whole town a trailer park.
    Maggie drew a pattern on the tablecloth with
her fork. “We’re still okay.”
    “What the hell does that mean, Maggie?”
    “It means we’re okay . He’s been doing
fairly well”—she shrugged—“so there’s a little extra, you
know.”
    “Fairly well at what?” He needed a spotlight
in her eyes to get answers out of her.
    “Well, he sort of like...uh...well...”
    “Spit it out.”
    “He started doing really well with this
outhouse excavation thing, and now he’s sort of like doing it
full-time.”
    He jiggled his ear because he was sure he
couldn’t have heard correctly. “Outhouse excavation?”
    “Yeah. You’d be surprised what they used to
throw down the hole. You know the old saying. One man’s trash is
another man’s treasure.”
    He realized his eggs had congealed and the
bacon was cold. “We’re not talking trash, here, Maggie, we’re
talking shit.”
    She flapped her hand at him. “That’s all
decomposed by now.”
    It would be a really nice thing if he were
the kind of guy who could lay his head on the table and cry. She
must have seen something of that in his face, because she rushed
on. “And sometimes they’d lose stuff. Once he found this big fat
diamond ring someone must have dropped in accidentally.”
    Guess the owner hadn’t wanted to go fishing
around for it. Brax drummed his fingers on the table. “You haven’t
told Mom about this, have you?”
    “No. And you better not either.”
    Mom had broken out in hives when she’d
learned Maggie was marrying a guy she’d known less than three days.
Who the hell knew what would happen to her if she found out Carl
was a professional outhouse excavator?
    “So, how many outhouses can there be?” Not
enough for a full-time...job.
    “Limitless,” Maggie confided. “In its day,
Goldstone had quite a thriving population. And you know, they
couldn’t keep using the same spot in the backyard for the outhouse.
Had to move it around. But half the town was lost in the great
flood of 1923, and they’d hardly started rebuilding by the time the
great fire hit in 1929. It sort of broke the town’s back. They
never did rebuild.”
    Brax had seen the evidence of that. The only
buildings remaining were the crumbling old schoolhouse, the hotel,
the Flood’s End, and the county courthouse and jail facility, which
looked to be the only structure that received regular maintenance.
Hell, no one had even cleared away the rubble. Broken foundations
tripped you up if you shortcut across an empty lot, and holes that
had once been basements still yawned wide in the town’s landscape.
One trip—no pun intended— to the Flood’s End had shown him all
that. Carl had guided him through as though it were a
minefield.
    Brax pulled them back on track. “So he’s not
taking everything , but he’s salting away something .
Or is he spending it?”
    “Well, he’s gotten into that splunking stuff,
but he put the