It was the 1950s detective book, and the page was open to “Chapter Nine: The Art of Surveillance.”
Thirty minutes later I had an idea that was nuts but also sort of exciting. As an only child, I had watched a lot of syndicated television shows growing up. My mother had tried like heck to get me overinvolved in ballet, piano, violin, and watercolors, but I had balked around middle school. Thankfully, my father had finally told Marguerite to leave me the hell alone. They’d been in the process of marriage counseling, so she’d shifted her focus to that, letting me quit swim team and getting the deposit back from ballet camp. I sat on the couch and watched I Dream of Jeannie, Full House, and tons of other shows, including my favorite kind—detective shows. Maybe growing up in the nineties—a time of grunge and angst—but watching all those seventies and eighties shows had injected me with just enough zaniness and optimism that I was fairly certain my idea would work. No one was more motivated than a soon-to-be single mother with little savings.
Ruby was sitting in the kitchen on her lunch break, eating a cinnamon roll and riffling through a list of mechanics. Or that’s what it looked to be as I snuck a peek over her shoulder.
“Car trouble?” I asked her.
She jumped. “Oh, I didn’t know you were there.”
See? I was good at detective stuff. As long as there were no little fluffballs nipping my ankles or fancy cameras to work. “Wait. Doesn’t your cousin own a garage?”
“Yeah, one of them does. But if you’re talking about Griff, that’s a towing service.”
I slapped the detective book on the kitchen table. “I need your help.”
“What’s this?” she asked, gazing at the cover with the blonde wearing a cocktail dress and heels beneath her trench coat.
“The answer to my problems,” I said, tapping the cover for extra emphasis.
“A book?”
“Not just a book, but a book about how to be a private investigator. Like on your own,” I said, crossing my arms and giving her a confident smile.
“Oh no. That’s a bad idea,” Ruby said, sucking at the cinnamon roll or whatever was in her teeth. Which was sort of gross, but not grosser than gummy flour stuck in one’s teeth. “You need to let an expert do this.”
“Have you ever watched Remington Steele?”
She wrinkled her adorable little nose. “Is that, like, a new streaming series or something?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, it was an eighties show starring Pierce Brosnan. I was a little young for it, but since I was an only child who refused to go to ballet camp, I watched reruns of it one summer. But I digress. The premise of the show was that this woman inherited a detective agency, but no one would hire her because she was a woman—”
“You’re joking,” she interrupted.
“I know. It was the eighties. But anyway, she assumed this identity of Remington Steele, because the name sounded tough and all, but then this sexy guy—Pierce Brosnan—who is like a former thief becomes ‘Remington Steele,’ and they solve cases together and fall in love. It was a really good show. Oh, so was Moonlighting. That one had Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis. I really loved that one.”
I stopped talking and tilted my head, waiting for her to connect the dots. Finally, Ruby made a little noise that told me she was having trouble understanding what I wanted to do. “Um, so . . . you want to open your own—”
“No.” I waved a hand. How could she not see what was so obvious to me? “Of course not. I just want to Remington Steele these pictures. And maybe in the process figure out how to stop my stain of a husband from stealing every dime we’ve saved together and then marrying Two Serve Sally.”
“By . . . ?”
“We’re going to get the goods on Scott and give them to Juke, and because he now owes me one, he’ll present them to my attorney like he took the pictures. So they’re legit. And will stand up in court.” I smiled like a cat with a goldfish under its paw. Because I was brilliant. I should have thought of this in the first place.
“Cricket, that’s crazy. You can’t do that. Call another PI.”
“I’m running out of time, and when I went to see your cousin this morning, he was drunk. And he has bupkis on Scott.”
Ruby ripped off the top of her notepad and crumpled the paper. “You’re joking. He said—”
“But that’s what I’m saying. We can’t depend on these men anymore. And I don’t have time to fill out more paperwork and go through this a third time. I can get the pictures. I’m certain. All I have to do is maybe disguise myself a little. You know, a hat and sunglasses. Maybe I can borrow your car? Then Juke can pass my photos off as his photos. Simple.”
Ruby’s phone buzzed on the table. I saw the caller. It said Griff. She ignored it and looked up at me. “I don’t know, Cricket, this sounds risky. What if Scott or Stephanie catches you? You’re not exactly easy to overlook.”
“What do you mean by that?”
She gestured to me. “You’re pretty, blonde, and curvy. You’re exactly the kind of woman men look at. Women, too.”
Well, that compliment made me feel better, even though it shouldn’t have because for this specific instance I needed to be not pretty, blonde, or curvy. “I can wear a disguise. Don’t they have temporary hair color? Oh, a wig! I can wear one of those. That will totally work. I snapped a picture of Scott’s calendar. He has a lunch today at Rendezvous in Bossier with someone. And what banker drives all the way almost to Haughton to eat? I’ll tell you—the kind who doesn’t want to be seen by people he knows because he’s with his sidepiece. I think some”—I tapped the open chapter that I had bookmarked—“surveillance is in order. All I have to do is get a table close enough to get a few shots of them together.”
“And not get recognized by your husband.” Ruby looked down at the book. Her phone rang again.
“Answer your phone. I’m going to the beauty-supply store to get a wig.” I grabbed my purse before she could protest. She reluctantly answered her phone as I slipped out the door. Thirty minutes later, I was talking to an experienced saleslady who had sold me on how great I would look in a short, sassy brown wig—it would be just the thing for the role-playing I was doing to spice up my marriage.
As if.
I purchased all the things that went with a wig, along with some burgundy lipstick and fake eyelashes that she swore were easy to put on, feeling a little guilty about lying to her. She seemed so excited for me. When I got back into the van, I called Ruby and asked her if she knew what I should wear to look not so suburban mom–like. She said she would cover it, so I went back to Printemps, sent Jade home so I wouldn’t have to answer questions about disguising myself as Maddie Holt, the alter ego I had carved from my two favorite fictional investigators from the eighties, and prepared myself for my biggest role—the woman who nails her cheating husband.