Free In-Laws & Outlaws by Ally Gray

enough to peek into the cab through the windshield.
    Still relying on her phone and hoping against hope that no one called and gave her away, Stacy shone the tiny light around the interior of the truck. When it turned up empty, she blew out a breath and climbed back down to the safety of the ground. She was careful not to let her phone illuminate the massacre that must have taken place to her shoes.
    She repeated the climbing process on the second truck and the third, but finally hit pay dirt with the fourth truck. Just as she squinted at her phone to try to call Detective Sims again, a flashlight beam lit up around her, causing her to squint into the light. The surprise of it threw her off balance and she lost her footing, only to slide down the sloped of the truck’s hood and land on her rear end. The absence of any pain at falling only confirmed what she already suspected even before she smelled it… she’d landed in manure.
    “What the hell are you doin’ climbin’ on my truck?” the old man with the flashlight demanded, shining the light directly in Stacy’s face. She held up a hand to shield her eyes, but the stench was unbearable. She was prevented from answering the question by the sound of approaching sirens.

Chapter 12
    “ I don’t know how you did it, but you came through like a champ once again,” Rod told Stacy over the phone around nine the next morning. “Turns out, Great Granny’s son—the grandfather of the bride—has some serious gambling debts through several online poker sites. He’s always had a gambling problem, according to his daughter—sorry, aunt of the bride—and he thought taking it to the world wide web would help keep him safe from bookies showing up at his house and demanding payment. When they tracked him down and paid him a visit, he panicked. Helping Great Granny into the ground would give him the money he needed to pay them off. He cracked like a rotten egg the moment we put some pressure on him. But how did you know it was him?”
    “Remember how he looked, with his hair all wild and standing on end?” she asked, jarring Rod’s memory. “He never looked that way whenever there was wedding prep taking place. He always looked neat, with his hair slicked back. At the time I thought he was just trying to put on airs and show up the Lancasters, but it was really peanut oil in his hair. I think he was trying to trigger an attack in Great Granny all along.
    “The day he sent over the manure, I smelled it and even got some oil on my hands from the steering wheel when I climbed in the truck to honk the horn. The smell of peanuts somehow managed to overpower the perfume of fresh poop, but only in the truck. I guess that’s why I forgot about it as soon as I got back out.”
    “That’s some pretty savvy thinking there,” Rod hinted. “Don’t go getting any ideas about taking my job now.”
    “Don’t worry, I’m more than fed up with crime fighting! But what I don’t get is all the pranks. They were just secondary to the real crime? Because if that’s true, somebody owes me a pound of flesh for all the property damage and stress they’ve caused,” she complained. And a new pair of shoes , she thought angrily.
    “No, that was still him. He ramped up all the bad blood between the families to cover his tracks, thinking he’d make it all look like part of the plan to break these two kids up. It backfired big time, since the groom’s mother is a registered nurse. She knows you never, ever play around with food allergies, especially not peanut allergies, no matter how bad you want to get back at the other guy. It’s not like putting laxatives in the chocolate icing on the cake, I mean. Anyway, we couldn’t get her to crack in the least. No matter how hard we pressed, she insisted she oversaw every bit of the rehearsal dinner food herself. Once she learned the bride had a family member with allergies, she didn’t even have peanut products in her house while she and