Death of the Couch Potato's Wife: Cozy Christian Mysteries (Women Sleuth, Female Detective Suspense) Read Free Page B

since moving to suburbia, I’d quickly learned that driving everywhere packed on the pounds. My hips proved it.
    I’d walked everywhere in Chicago, and I liked it that way.
    I sighed and clicked the TV off. Yes, Jerry preferred to be known around town as the Couch King, but everyone really called him the Couch Potato King. His contribution to his fledgling business was spending the entire budget on low-grade commercials. The rest of his time he stayed in his office and watched TV. Believe me, Candace had told me all about it— numerous times.
    If Jerry was the Couch Potato King, his wife then became known as the Couch Potato’s Wife. Of course, no one said that to her face. But believe me, things got around here in Boring, Indiana.
    Poor Candace.
    I couldn’t stop thinking about her, about the way she’d been left dead.
    Three days had passed since I found her. For as long as I could remember, I haven’t even been able to look at bodies at funerals or viewings. The thought of stumbling upon a freshly- dead one still caused me to go cold. And the thought never strayed far from my mind. It always popped up at the worst times—actually, all the time.
    Candace had been a force to be reckoned with. I hadn’t completely figured her out, but there was something about her I liked. Once I got past her constant complaining, her negative demeanor, and overly-assertive personality, I saw Candace as someone who’d resigned herself to a life she didn’t want. I’d been rooting for her to find a slice of happiness again. Maybe if she could, I could too.
    I guess that wouldn’t be happening. Maybe on either count?
    Something banged in the distance. Someone was at the door. I left the living room window and pulled open the front door. There was Babe, wearing a Kiss Me, I’m Irish T-shirt that showed off the fat rolls at her stomach. A wide grin stretched across her glossy, pink lips.
    “Hey, chickaroonie.” She barged inside my house, and I could smell Philosophy, her favorite perfume. Hers and millions of twenty-somethings. “What’s up with you? Haven’t talked to you in a few days, so I wanted to get the nine-one-one. You know, gab, shoot the breeze, catch up a bit.”
    Four-one-one. It’s four-one-one, Babe.
    I followed her with my gaze, wondering how she managed to get inside so effortlessly like that. I gave up and closed the door behind me. “Nothing new here. And you?”
    She shrugged. “I’m knitting.”
    “Knitting? That doesn’t sound like you.” It actually sounded like an activity someone her age would participate in. She always stayed far away from those things.
    “What’s old is new.” She stopped at the doorway to my living room, placed a fist at her hips, and did a little shimmy that made me realize she’d been watching Shakira videos again. “Did you hear the latest?”
    “The latest?”
    “On Candace.”
    “No, I sure haven’t.” My pulse pounded at my ears. Boy, did I want to hear the latest. And Babe was just the person to tell me. She never disappointed.
    “She was poisoned.”
    I touched my throat, feeling as if I’d just swallowed arsenic. “Poisoned? Are you sure?”
    “That’s what Romeo told Annie, who told Emma Jean, who told me. Annie and Romeo used to date, you see. He would like to date her again, so he tells her things he’s mum about to other people in an effort to win her over. It’ll never happen.”
    I leaned against the wall by my front door, unsure if I could move at the moment. “Tell me more.”
    “Annie just doesn’t think that Romeo’s her type—”
    “About the murder, Babe.”
    “Oh. Well, they tested the pork rinds. Apparently, someone put ground up sleeping pills on them. Then they smothered Candace with something. She died peacefully, they said.”
    “So it was murder.”
    “Of course.”
    Of course. What else could it be here in the most peaceful little town in the Midwest? I swallowed the sarcasm. “Do they have suspects?”
    “The husband is